Photo by Rosie Kerr on Unsplash
The simple practice of cultivating more gratitude can transform your health and help you to effectively lose weight.
If you’re struggling to commit to a weight loss routine, or you’re finding it difficult to find the motivation to be consistent, I have two reasons why gratitude might be just the thing that can help you move forward and achieve your weight loss goals with ease!
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#Twosday Tips are here! Your weekly dose of two tips to help you create a healthier lifestyle. This month is all about cultivating gratitude (which can ultimately help you achieve your weight loss goals more effectively! Yup, yup it can!)
Today I’m slightly deviating from my two tips and instead giving you two reasons why being more grateful and present in your life will motivate you to pursue your goals with a deeper sense of connection and meaning.
Reason #1: Focusing on the good in turn makes you feel good!
And that’s when you can alter your resistance to eat better, and exercise more by dreading it less!
There’s talk out there in the land of Google that 80% of our thoughts in one day focus on the negative. No matter how many thoughts we as humans have in a day (the numbers range from 12,000 to 80,000 thoughts per day!), it seems we’re intrinsically geared toward focusing on the negative, which has us fighting an uphill battle all day long. Why bother pushing the boulder uphill when it will simply fall down the next day. Groundhog day IRL.
Having this information is power for us though. If we know we’re naturally going to sway toward the negative literally thousands of times per day, we can better prepare ourselves with a goal (to think less negative thoughts), and an action plan we can implement to help get us back to neutral when we’ve waded too far into the negativity pool.
The 2-Minute Fix
If we take two minutes to focus on something good that happened in our lives, we can pull ourselves out of our negativity routine (because when you do something that many times a day I think we can safely call it a routine, albeit unconscious).
When I feel myself in the throes of a negativity loop, I imagine a huge stop sign surrounded by big flashing red lights and two red and white crossing gates lowering down like at a railroad crossing. This is my cue to get a grip and check myself before I wreck myself with the oncoming onslaught of negativity. For the next two minutes I spend focusing on one good thing that recently happened in my life. I close my eyes, take a few deep breaths and put myself back into that good moment. I pick one detail from that moment and I really dive deep into it.
When you allow yourself to detach from the negativity loop running in your head and instead focus on the bright and shiny moment, you can actually feel that mental shift, (even physically)—it’s crazy how your body can respond.
When I allow myself the full two minutes to do this, I become so grateful for that moment that when I open my eyes, I’m refocused. How can you not be? I just got back from a trip to Montauk where my feet were buried under the warm sand under the clear blue sky, feeling the warmth of the sun on my skin. I could even feel the sand between my toes, the rough and scratchy texture of the sand with every toe wiggle.
Boom, mood altered, funk averted.
For the moment at least. This is a practice but getting into the habit will make it easier and easier to be grateful for the wonderful moments in our lives and help us to refocus on the good, so we can feel good no matter what challenges pop up.
Don’t get washed away in the moment, instead realize your current mood, and do something new to alter it in a positive way. When you feel good on the inside, it creates lightness and ease, which make putting in the effort to take a step toward achieving your goals all the more probable.
Next time you’re more than willing to skip a workout because you’re stressed, overwhelmed, depressed or rolling around in the funk, realize what’s going on and take two minutes to close your eyes, breathe and focus on the good. Really focus on the good. Once you do that, open your eyes and see how easier it will be to get that workout in after all. Trust me, this works! I’ve used it thousands of times when I’d rather sleep in, or plop on the sofa and binge-watch.
Well that reason was a long one, so let me keep reason #2 relatively short…
Reason #2: Life is friggin’ short, stop wasting time!
We’ve all said at one time or another “Man time flies!” or “Where did the time go, I can’t believe my baby is starting kindergarten!” (I find myself saying that one a lot lately!)
Those comments are reminders for us to slow down and pay attention. There is no time like the present to appreciate where you are in life, the season you may be in, the hurdles you have to overcome, the goals you want to accomplish, and the future you want to create for you and your family. Now is the time to make a commitment to yourself to start now, no matter how small your “start” may look. One little step after another will carry you through the journey, but you have to start now.
Time isn’t going to wait for you, it’s gonna keep on ticking away, stealing precious moments from you if you choose to do nothing to stop it. And since there is no way to stop it, you’re just going to have to jump in and begin.
Go for that walk, stop eating that 9 pm dish of ice cream if you want to lose weight, make that call, have the tough conversation, take the stairs instead of the elevator, whatever it is you’re resisting to do, be grateful for this moment and then choose to do something with it.
Cultivating gratitude can open up your closed-up and internalized world so you can see the beauty that’s all around you and provide you the boost you may need to get moving on accomplishing great things for yourself.
At the very least, being grateful can’t hurt you or set you back… it’s staying stuck in the moment that can do that.
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My goal is to help you to define your goals, create a deep connection to them and create the process to get you achieving them effectively as possible. My hope is that my #Twosday Tips can get you where you want to be, so if you’re enjoying these and find them useful, let me know in the comments below, I would love to hear from you!
