4 Mindset tools to get you fit and lose weight
Most people continuously look for the silver bullet when getting fit and losing weight. They follow ridiculous diets, spend fortunes on ultra-sonic fat burning laser machines, and even go as far as highly invasive surgery like gastric bands, tummy tucks and liposuction. Instead of being stupid and/or spending fortunes, if you practice using these 4 mindset tools, you will lose weight and get into the shape of your life faster than you can imagine. Here's how:
- Get Clarity – Examine EXACTLY what you want to achieve, be clear on WHY you are doing it, and what it means to you!
- Understand the process – Think about what you have to do. Remove any ambiguity and ensure you know precisely what is required to achieve your goals.
- Focus – Concentrate intensely on the critical things you need to do. Half-arsed attempts will result in half-arsed results.
- Journaling – Monitoring your actions, behaviours, and outcomes is the only scientific way to know how things work.
A few years ago, I was a Personal Trainer in Liverpool City Centre. My private studio was set up inside the basement of a cosmetic clinic. I witnessed many women visit the clinic for years to spend thousands of pounds on weight loss surgical interventions. The cheapest procedures cost circa £3000, and the more invasive surgical procedures cost well over £10,000.
Unfortunately, most non-surgical interventions such as ultrasonic laser therapy do not work unless the person is reducing their calorific intake and doing exercise. So people paying the 5 figure sums and going under the knife end up regaining weight over time. If you wish to see the scientific data, click this link to read the research.
I worked with the head surgeon at the clinic to help these women continue a journey of good health and fitness after their interventions. It was this partnership that delivered the best results. If you believe these crazy procedures will change your body in the long term, then you're delusional. This is a short-term fix (if it works); the long-term outcome is that you're highly likely to regain the weight.
Why weight loss surgery doesn't work
It's simple, the reason why you're unfit and overweight is because of your thinking and actions over the years. So the only way to achieve lifelong fitness and weight loss is to unwind those behaviours and change how you think. Following this 4-step mindset formula is the best way to achieve fundamental transformation and keep it for life!
The Weight Loss and Fitness Mindset Tools – These tools and strategies need to be implemented into your thinking to achieve significant fat loss and fitness results.
Get Clarity
I want you to first write down precisely what it is that you want to accomplish. As a Liverpool and Wirral Personal Trainer, I've asked literally thousands of women who want to lose weight what their goals are. Their reply, 'I want to lose weight'. This is a terrible answer; there's no specificity and no vision of how they want to look; they just pull out a number on the scales.
How are you supposed to get excited when using the scales as your reference for success?
How about reframing your goal like this, 'I want to lose body fat around my stomach, legs and backs of my arms. 'I want my stomach to be completely flat, and I want to see a smaller waist, so I look great in a dress'. I want to be firmer and shape my shoulders, buttocks, and legs to wear a bikini with confidence. 'I want to be fit and healthy, so I have more energy, and I feel great and confident in myself again. 
Can you see the difference? Get clear on the vision of what you want, and this will provide you with a clear psychological reference in your mind and a direction to keep on moving towards.
I now want you to understand why you want to do this. But, first, you need to attach all the essential things in your life, both positive and negative, to your weight loss and fitness goal. These are what I call emotional anchors.
Connecting all the things that spark potent emotions within you, keeping you motivated along your transformational journey.
Write down a list of why this body transformation matters to you. Here's a couple of examples to provoke some thoughts for you:
- My confidence is low, and I don't feel attractive.
- I want to be a great example to my kids.
- I want to be the best I can be for myself and my partner.
- If I don't change my body, I will live the rest of my life struggling with self-confidence.
- Being fitter will give me more energy and confidence in my career.
These are just a couple of examples of the deeper meaning behind your goals. So be clear on these emotional anchor points; keep reading these points and feeling the positive and negative emotions every day to help push you into action!
Understand the Process
You don't need to know the intricacies of exercise and nutrition, but you need to know how to implement them within your lifestyle. If you decide to exercise regularly combined with a good diet, investigate how this approach will work for you and the sensible timeframes to see the results you want, given your existing ability and body shape.
Let's say a friend of yours has exercised regularly over the years, and they decide to make a considerable effort to lose weight over 6 weeks. Don't assume you'll get the same results following precisely what she did, especially if you haven't exercised as much as before.
Your metabolic rate and existing condition will determine how quickly or slowly your results will happen, so make sure you understand this. Any exercise and diet-based approach will work; your ability to implement it successfully in your lifestyle with adjustments along the way is what matters if you want to achieve your goal.
Focus
This follows on from the last point nicely. At times you'll need to have the ability to concentrate on some of the things required to achieve your goals.
An example of this could be the details of your diet. Let's say you've been given a diet plan, but you find that you're starving just an hour after the meal. If this is the case, then the meal simply isn't satiating enough, and you either need to increase the portion size or change the type of food for something more satiating.
To help you with this very issue, I've got a Fast Weight Loss Guidebook which gives you step by step instructions on how to deal with this diet problem many people face.
Concentrating on those things that produce the results is critical! These are the essential components that will deliver the body you want, so pay close attention and become the master of executing those things.
Did you know that how you do exercise can produce completely different results? Your exercise selection is relevant for shaping the muscle tissue around the body you wish to pay attention to, but how you perform the exercise will produce varying results.
The number of repetitions you complete, the weight involved, the speed at which you do each repetition, how many set's or circuits you complete in a session and, many more variables that will produce different results.
Being an online personal trainer, I must coach my clients to get these details exactly right. With not being physically next to them to dictate the pace and tempo of the workout, my clients must understand how to get the results from their exercise efforts.
I want you to look at what you're now doing in your exercise and diet regime and start concentrating on what you need to do to get the very best out of your programme components.
If you want some workouts to follow that give you the approximate amount of calories you'll burn and how long it takes, click here to go to the workout page on my website.
Journaling
I've mentioned this before in previous blogs, and I drum this into all Home Personal Training clients in Liverpool and my Online clients. You've got to start a journal. If you do not monitor your thinking, behaviours, and outcomes, you'll never know if what you're doing is working or not.
Just imagine for a second that you are looking to lose weight, and so you start an exercise and diet regime. After a couple of weeks, you don't see any weight loss, so you think the process isn't working. This would seem like a rational conclusion but, you've probably missed a great deal of truth.
Let's use the same example only this time; we decide to journal each day on our progress. After a couple of weeks, you note that your body is becoming stronger because you can now do more repetitions in your exercise routine. In addition, you discover your fitness level is improving because you no longer feel like you're dying when exercising. This would clearly indicate the exercise is working for you because you are getting better.
You then look at the scales, but your weight has remained the same. You then look through your dietary notes and see that you've had several days when your calorie intake was very high after a binge you had on a weekend. You also notice your carbohydrate consumption is also very high, and with each gram of carbohydrate comes 3-4grams of water.
This level of information based upon your journal entries allows you to realise that exercise is working and that you need to make a tweak to your diet. So you decide to decrease your carbohydrate intake and increase protein whilst also ditching the weekend binge for a month to see what happens.
This is how it's done! First, you must monitor your actions each day to know the possible problems and components that work well. Without this, you'll be quickly swallowed up into the typical mindset of 'I'm trying, but it's just not working. Sorry, my friend, it's not the approach that's failing; it's you!
Apps like Myfitnesspal are handy for this; however, putting pen to paper in a dedicated journal is far more powerful.
Start using tools like Myfitnesspal to get you started on your journey and purchase a dedicated journal (a blank notebook will do) and start writing down what you're doing. This process will stop your mind from wandering off track and keep you focused in the right direction.
These 4 mindset practices together will serve you well, so grab yourself a notebook and start getting clarity, understand the process, get focused on what you need to do, and then journal your progress. The body will follow where your mind goes, so get your mind in the right space!
Until next time
Keep Healthy!