How to turn negative thoughts into positive progress
Each and every one of us hears those annoying little voices in the back of our heads, the ones that urge us to indulge despite our every best intention. When these voices insist that just one piece won’t hurt or might as well eat another, they threaten to ruin your Crawfordsville weight loss program—but you don’t have to let them. These voices come from within you, and so only you have the power to quash them.
But to stay motivated and resistant in the most dangerous moment of temptation, you’ll need to come up with a plan. If you figure out how you’ll deal with discipline-destroying thoughts now, it will make them much less threatening later, giving you an immediate escape route when your diet is in trouble. Here are two of the most common self-sabotaging thoughts and how to get the better of them.
“I’ve already wrecked my diet today—I might as well keep going.”
If you slip and indulge in one tempting treat, don’t let it have a snowball effect. Though the temptation might be strong to give up on a day’s dieting once you feel you’ve already sunk the ship, remember that it’s never too late to bail yourself out with a healthy decision. After all, you may have spent years making unhealthy choices only to turn your life in a healthy new direction with your medical weight loss program—why ruin your progress by reverting to old habits?
Everyone on a diet program makes mistakes, but you may find that you learn more from your mistakes than your victories. When you have a slip-up, don’t give in to self-deprecation—think about the best way to move forward. Call one unhealthy treat what it is: an indulgence that (though certainly not positive) will never completely derail your diet. Remind yourself that one treat at a time is more than enough and think about how that indulgence might be avoided in the future. Approach your failures with more curiosity than condemnation and you’ll often find a valuable stepping stone to success.
“I’ll just have this one cookie.”
Though one unhealthy indulgence probably won’t ruin your progress, there’s a big difference between telling yourself you’ll only have one and actually having just one. Despite our optimism and resolve upon opening the cookie jar, the crumbly sweetness may weaken our ability to resist another, and another, until our day’s healthy diet is suddenly buried under the weight of 1,000 empty calories.
If you’re the type who can handle eating just one chip or one cookie, then resisting numbers two through 20 won’t be difficult, but most of us have at least one food that frequently prompts bouts of overindulgence. Think back about how you’ve reacted to favorite foods in past times of temptation and rid your kitchen of anything that might be too tempting.
You need to serve as a nutritional gatekeeper in your home, blocking the bad stuff out while keeping in the good. If you can’t stop at one chocolate chip cookie, it probably isn’t a good idea to have any around. Find another treat that can satisfy your sweet tooth without breaking your diet plan—like a piece of fruit or one of your OPTIFAST bars—and keep that around instead.
Remember: the biggest threats to your weight loss program are the ones that come from within. Just as only you could make the decision to pursue medical weight loss, only you can make the decision to break your diet. By having a plan now, you’ll make it much easier to tackle threats later, so think about how you can push those negative thoughts back to where they belong: out of your head.
How else can we squash negative thoughts before they ruin our resolve? Share your experiences, tips and questions with us in the comments below!