Weight Loss - How Is It Achieved?

I find there are three primary components that lead to successful weight loss:

• Exercising
• Eating Healthy
• Eliminating Stress

Let's take a look at each of these.

Exercise

EXERCISING is NOT for:

• Beating your body up for a previous lifestyle or current lifestyle you are living
• Trying to burn off calories from yesterday’s meals
• Competing what society’s latest fad you need to mold into
• Punishing yourself for “not being good enough”

EXERCISING should make you feel good and improve your well being by developing:

• More mobile and flexible joints
• Stronger muscles and bones
• A lower heart rate
• the ability to breathe deeper
• Improved energy, mood and hormone balance
• Less risk of disease and injury
• Increased confidence, body image and self esteem
• An outlet for stress relief and an opportunity for “you time”

How to exercise:

Yes this is necessary to touch on, because there’s a lot of people out there exercising in a way that is hindering them from achieving their goals.

When someone decides it is time to lose weight, running is one of the most common forms of movement they try. Running works for some but for others did you know it can actually make them gain weight? Running is acid forming, can create shallow breathing and can increase appetite, all hindering weight loss.

Let’s clear this up, I am not saying everyone should stop running or never try running. I am a runner going on 10 + years and absolutely love it. What I am saying is that you should do your own research on a form of movement, try it out if you feel interested and listen to what your body thinks about it. If you are experiencing injuries and not noticing positive changes towards your goal, then it isn’t the right form of movement for you.

Eating

EATING Healthy is NOT:

• Trying all the latest fad diets
• Attempting an extreme diet change you can not comfortably maintain for more than 3 months
• Counting calories (it takes the beauty out of your food)

EATING Healthy should be:

• Enjoyable in all its stages - shopping, preparing and eating your meals
• Energy lifting
• Fueling you for your day

Exercising is usually the first step in a weight loss journey because it is the easy change to make. Eating healthier is a tougher change. Create your healthy meals one change at a time. Do not throw everything in your kitchen out and spend tons of money to re-stock your kitchen at your natural food store. You will feel frustrated with the time, energy, and money when it doesn’t work.

Start by learning about food and make one swap at a time to create a healing kitchen. Example - swap out the table salt for Himalayan Pink Salt.
 

Stress Management

ELIMINATING stress: This is often the most challenging and the most personal step on your weight loss journey.

By reducing stress, you learn how to:

• Let go of past events, suffering and “baggage”
• Let go of fear of the future
• Evaluate daily stress
• Create a stress outlet

Try out this experiment for one day: keep track of how often you let a past event bother you. On a piece of paper or a note on your phone document every time the past event bothered you.

At the end of the day reflect on how often you were bothered. Do you want to let that much of your day go towards the past?

With the same technique you can document how many times you felt angry, fearful or stressed.

Create  an outlet that allows you to let go of past suffering, fear of the future and daily stressors. I highly recommend a restorative yoga practice, journaling or meditation.

Right now before you go start with repeating these two sentences to yourself until you believe them.

I accept my body where it is right now.

I will put myself first.