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Path to Health - Day 1: The Missing Ingredient
So here we go! This DietBet doesn't officially start until tomorrow, but since they have you submit your weigh-in photographs and data 1-2 days before the official start, I see no reason why I can't just go ahead and get started today with blogging my thoughts and approach to weight loss.
My goal is to chronicle every single day an aspect of this approach I'm taking to improve my health and lose excess weight, and on this first day, I want to talk about the one key ingredient that's missing from just about every single diet and exercise regime you've ever seen. You may hear it talked about here and there in different forms, but it's rarely ever given the primary focus that it needs, and understanding this missing ingredient will also help you understand why the vast majority of dieters and exercisers looking to shred fat will fail time and time again.
THE NUMBER ONE THING MISSING FROM WEIGHT LOSS IS: Love.
Yes, you read that right. If you've been punishing yourself through vigorous diet, cutting out things you love, counting calories, straining with more exercise than you can bear, and you either don't see any results at all or else end up eventually gaining back whatever you lose, it's because of this one fundamental principle:
YOU CANNOT HATE YOURSELF TO HEALTH. You cannot punish yourself to health. You can only LOVE yourself to health.
So much of the weight loss industry is based around making you feel inferior for how you currently are. We are taught to hate our bodies, our lives, and our very selves. We're taught to feel inadequate, to constantly be chasing the next shiny thing that will promise to bring us happiness, but until we start learning how to manifest our own happiness and sense of self-esteem from within ourselves, we will continue to struggle as we delude ourselves into thinking that as long as we punish ourselves hard enough, we'll eventually get what we want (or at least, what we think we want).
If your body is unhealthy and there's nothing seriously wrong with you (like cancer), then your body is merely a projection of all the sickness elsewhere in your life. And let's face it: our society has a lot of potential to make us feel sick, inadequate, and downright miserable with ourselves. While we criticize ourselves for not being fit enough, for not eating healthily enough, for not exercising enough, for not looking like what the media has convinced us we should look like, all this self-hate is just piled on top of all sorts of other criticisms we give ourselves. “I spend too much time at work.” “I don't get paid enough.” "I hate my job." "I hate my boss." "People don't like me." “I'm not good enough.”
If you want to start really getting healthy--and staying healthy for good--then you need to start loving yourself. Start accepting yourself. I know this is counter-intuitive if you want to have less fat and better muscle tone on your body, but loving and accepting yourself as you are right now is key to getting yourself on the right track. You have to, have to, have to accept yourself 100% as you are today if you want to be even better tomorrow, next month, or next year.
I'll write more on how to accomplish just this later on in this series, but for now, I will direct you to Jon Gabriel's book The Gabriel Method, which goes into great detail the importance of fixing our psychological and emotional selves to end up fixing our physical selves: http://www.thegabrielmethod.com/
Best of luck.