DAY 24 DIARY - It's All In The Mind

What I have realised more than ever over the course of the last few weeks is that everyone has a unique relationship with food. That may sound like ‘stating the bleeding obvious’ and in some ways it is but interestingly we still try and solve our perceived food issues by resorting to ‘one size fits all’ solutions – like diets. Why?

As humans we are strongly influenced by anecdotal evidence and the persuasive power of other people’s experiences, indeed what I am sharing with you here on this blog is largely based on my own experience! There’s something in all of us that wants to find ‘the solution’, so we are excited by stories of others successes – they’ve ‘turned their life around’ – and want we want a bit of the action too.

But the solution isn’t to be found externally, the answer lies in understanding ourselves. We each have our own story, weight losses and gains, health kicks and relapses, times when we’ve felt good about ourselves and times when we haven’t, so to make real, lasting progress towards a better relationship with food we need to sort out our food mindset first.

Look at this scale, where would you put yourself ?:

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I want to eat I want to

with no hang ups be thinner

What about this one:

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I want to be I want to

healthier be thinner

Try and be as honest as you can.

Simply wanting to be thinner in and of itself is much less attainable than wanting to be healthier or to simply have a more positive attitude around food. What do I mean by this? Well, if you want to be thin that might involve losing a significant amount of weight. Realistically you are not going to achieve your goal, if at all, for many, many months, usually long enough to give up on the idea! If, on the other hand, your aim is to be healthier and to break your negative thought patterns around food you can achieve this far more quickly, in fact you can feel you’ve made progress after a single day. Just by getting up, having a good breakfast and choosing to eat well and with more awareness throughout the day you have already achieved something.

Now I’m not naïve enough to think weight loss isn’t desirable for many of us, of course it is, in fact I’m trying to drop a few kilos at the moment, but I am not fixated on that as the end point and I haven’t put a timeframe on it. By focusing on healthy habits (the StealthHealth Key Concepts) as I have been for the last 24 days, the weight loss is a byproduct of a more positive relationship with food. One begets the other.

So my message for today is, in order to make real change focus on adopting a positive mindset first. Don’t embark on a punishing regime with a lofty weight loss objective in mind, it’s almost setting yourself up for failure. Relax, focus on eating well one day at a time, you don’t have to cut things from your diet as long as it is balanced and healthy overall and you will have a much better chance of getting to where you want to be in the long run.

Sam xx