In the book “How to Lose Weight By Exercising the Power of Your Mind” I go through a number of reasons why we sometimes don’t reach our weight loss goals. Quite often the problem starts because although we might be keen on getting a new body and do many things in order for that to happen it’s rare for most people to actually make the mental changes that they need to in order to guarantee the physical success.

Strange as it may seem although we might try to blame our genes, our parents, our grandparents or whoever it is that we try and throw our responsibility on to the shoulders of, the simple fact is success or failure is quite often determined by a muscle that most of us forget to use when we’re trying to do anything life changing like losing a huge amount of weight.

The muscle I’m talking about is of course the mental muscle, the one between our ears. The first thing that we need is a good enough reason WHY. In fact, the more powerful the reason why we have that we want to get fit and get our physical selves in order, the greater the likelihood of success we will have.

Part of that is not being able to picture ourselves the way we want to be. We might have a mental idea of being 50 lbs lighter but the image that we imagine is still the person that we see in the mirror today.

One thing that can help is getting out some old pictures of yourself when you were hopefully that little bit thinner as well as being that little bit younger. Now I appreciate for some people that might mean having to go back a long way but although the person you are looking at may not seem to be  the real you, there’s enough of the real you within those old photographs for  the present, current you to latch on to and say “Yes I can get back there. I can get back to that place where I once was.” and the more pictures that you can find of yourself the way you want to be, the greater reminders and incentive that you’ll give your mind and it’s perfectly true the more we think about something, the more likely we are to achieve it.

Some people use what’s called a picture board where they gather together not just pictures of themselves but also pictures of other people who are the way they want to be, doing the things that they want to do so if your idea is to be able to put on the latest fashion in swim wear and go to the beach, well why not put pictures of that on your image board.

Another thing that often hinders people from achieving their weight loss goals is the unconscious practice of self depreciation or to put it more blankly, putting yourself down. As health psychologist Kelly McGonigal PhD explains “If you focus on self-criticism, you’ll be like a lace on it” so simply put, instead of focusing on negative thoughts, instead of focusing on putting yourself down, treat yourself with kindness and start concentrating on positive things that you’re doing each moment each day to achieve your weight loss and fitness goals.

The last thing that often discourages many people from continuing their weight loss journey is that seems that the weight is not coming off quick enough.  As I have said on numerous occasions, if you’re dieting properly, if you’re moving away from the foods that are high in carbohydrates that are blankly detrimental to your health and at the same time you have increased the amount of exercise that you’re doing, well then quite often you will be losing fat but at the same time also possibly putting on a little bit of a muscle.

The fact that the scales aren’t going down as quickly as you might want them to but you feel like you’ve got  that little bit more energy, you notice your clothes are fitting better, and you just feel that little bit better within yourself – those are signs that what you’re doing is actually working. Just because the scales aren’t cooperating at the moment is neither here nor there, physically you’re improving and once the realization of that becomes firm within your mind, that positive attitude will keep reinforcing itself driving you on to success.