Mindfulness: The Pathway to Weight Loss Success
Mindfulness: The Pathway to Weight Loss Success
How to be mindful on your weight loss journey: ORIENT on your Vision. FOCUS on the step in front of you. CELEBRATE the action you just took.
Part of the success of my now 112-pound weight journey has been shifting the focus of my efforts from something in the distant future to focusing on the current moment.
I had to learn to practice mindfulness by keeping my weight loss journey centered on the steps before me.
I’ve learned to take things One Day at a Time - One Night at a Time.
In the past, my focus was entirely on the future. I would daydream about looking good on the beach while simultaneously being disconnected from my actions in the present moment. My mind was clinging to the outcome I desired in the future - this created suffering for me in the current moment.
The source of this suffering was twofold.
One - What I needed to be happy was somewhere else. It was in the future!
Two - What I was doing in the present moment was not connected to my why. What I was doing wasn’t cultivating the feelings that bring me joy!
I was suffering because my action in the present moment was not filling my bucket.
This suffering made all my past weight loss efforts miserable — I would inevitably fail, and a cycle of shame would kick off.
I would numb the shame with food and TV — My shame-induced binge would blow away all my gains and dig me deeper into despair.
The answer to suffering is mindfulness.
In my weight loss journey, I have learned to practice mindfulness by seeing the future as just an aiming point. The purpose of my vision is to serve as my compass that keeps me on the right path; that’s it.
If I find myself ruminating on something superficial, for example, looking good at the beach, I know I am temporarily off course and not present with my current state of being.
My bigger vision is to be the healthiest version of myself and live the longest possible life. I want to be there long into the lives of my wife and my kids so they don’t go through the pain I went through of losing a parent at 25 years old.
I only have two simple near-term goals that align with this vision.
#1: Run a 10K by the end of June.
AND
#2: Hike the continental divide on the 4th of July with my family.
My vision and these goals align with my values and serve as my compass. Together they inform the actions I’m taking at the present moment.
The present moment is where my focus is. The run I’m going on tomorrow and the fast I’m completing today.
Another critical aspect of my weight loss journey is that I’m not delaying the celebration of the journey until the completion of my goals. I’m celebrating my wins daily.
Celebration connects me to the feelings that are in alignment with my vision.
As my weight loss journey has progressed, I have begun implementing the following mindfulness strategy to ensure I align my efforts with my values and stay present with my feelings in the current moment.
#1 - ORIENT on your vision:
As I shared in my article, “Mindset, The Foundation to Excellence,” mindset is the foundation for achieving personal excellence. Our mindset sets the intention behind every action we take.
Your mindset and vision give the actions you take in your day-to-day life direction and meaning.
Before you can orient your vision, you must understand your intention. You can do this by taking the following actions.
1. Create a Strong Foundation - Find Your Why:
Ask yourself, “What moves me?” When you do this, connect with and write down the feelings that come up.
Write down a vision statement of why and what you want to accomplish that aligns with your response to “what moves me” and the feelings that came up.
2. Set Goals and Take Actions that are Alignment With Your Values:
Using the feelings and vision statement from step one as a guide, set some meaningful Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound (SMART) goals.
Instead of I want to weigh 150 pounds - Try something like “I want to hike the continental divide with my family by the 4th of July” — Remember meaningful equals in alignment with your values.
3. Shift from Making Decisions to Choices:
I’ve realized on my healing journey that the difference between making a decision and a choice comes down to how I’m left feeling afterward.
It’s all about intention.
A decision is about logically picking something to accomplish an objective - its agenda based.
A choice is about taking your time to analyze the choice before you, setting that logic aside, and then picking what FEELS right based on values.
When you focus on making choices instead of decisions, you shift your efforts from Have-Tos to Get-Tos.
4. Cultivate Rituals, not Routines.
Just like choices and decisions, rituals and routines are all about intentions.
Routines are something you do to accomplish an agenda, like making your bed every day so that your room is clean. Routines are a means to an end; the only meaning behind them is the agenda itself.
Rituals are similar to routines, with a big exception. They are something you do to cultivate a feeling. Rituals are less about the outcome and more about the meaning you put into them.
5. Acceptance of The Current Moment
If your intention is going to align with your values and bigger why you have to be willing to take one critical action - accept what is true right now in the current moment.
When we are attached to an outcome, for example, losing weight, we have outsourced our happiness to that result. We are left feeling anxious in the current moment. We suffer.
The key to acceptance is viewing what is true in the current moment as just what is and not adding meaning to it.
We must drop our story and focus only on the facts to do this. This requires objectively looking at the story you are telling yourself about where you are at and seeing it for what it is - a story.
6. Choose Your Tools Without Attachment
The truth is Mindset alone is not going to accomplish your health and fitness goals. You will have to take action to get where you want to go.
The key is how you view those actions. Are they a fix, or are they just the tool you are using?
When you align your mindset and vision with your values, you can ORIENT your efforts on your vision.
#2 - FOCUS on the step in front of you:
Now that you have oriented on your vision, the next step is to focus on the action in front of you.
This is the workout today. The food you are eating today. The things you are doing today.
OR
You are setting your intention for things you will do tomorrow — For example, setting your gym clothes out before you go to bed so that you are ready to go in the morning.
The critical thing to do here is to keep your current actions aligned with your vision and connect with how they make you feel in the present moment…
And know that your ego WILL try to pull you off track.
My ego has a remarkable doing this.
It has a way of hijacking my efforts to be healthy and taking them too far.
It can be subtle but starts with a feeling of shame that I quickly skip, followed by thoughts of fixing...
For example, if I eat poorly the following day, when I wake up, there will be a moment of shame followed by a stream of thoughts of wanting to go on a long fast or be super strict with my diet to fix...
Or I might think of a vacation we plan to take this summer, and pretty soon, I’m thinking about how I will look in July.
I've learned to become aware of this tendency very fast.
When I become aware that I’m doing this, my next step is to look up and determine if my thinking and actions are taking me in the right direction. Are they cultivating the desired feeling or creating tension and suffering?
Am I facing west towards the mountain I want to climb in July? Am I taking the actions that will get me there and filling my bucket right now? — Or Am I facing south toward the beach, imagining having a body that will get me validation? Are my actions leaving me feeling empty?
#3 - CELEBRATE the step you just took!
The best way to keep the action you are about to take aligned with your vision is to celebrate the step you just took!
Success IS a constant feedback loop of wins and challenges that reenergizes and informs your mindset along the way.
Celebrating my success and challenges has been critical to sustaining my momentum throughout my weight loss journey.
Each time I celebrated a small win, I connected to the feelings I wanted to cultivate in the current moment.
When discussing celebrating success, it’s easy to focus on the wins. In my view, it’s just as important to talk about our failures and challenges because that is where growth happens.
When we have an opened-minded Mindset, our failures and challenges are no longer presented as obstacles to accomplishing our dreams. They become the Sensei of life, teaching us the lesson we need to learn to grow.
Our failures and challenges point us to the Emotional Work we must do as we become more integrated human beings.
As I reflect on my weight loss journey, I can see that the most meaningful times were found in failure and challenge — The moment I accepted that failure or challenge and surrendered to the lesson it was trying to teach me.
Every time I accepted my failure and challenge and surrendered to life’s lesson, I was unburdened by the weight of a wound from the past.
Closing Thoughts
I’ll close today with a post I shared with the Men of the Man Talks Alliance. It was the moment I first discovered the source of my suffering around my weight loss and health. This moment of awareness set off eighteen months of emotional work that led to my current weight loss journey.
Discovering the Source of My Suffering
December 16, 2020
I recently discovered my "addictive" pattern of using "discipline" to fix myself. It happened for me for years with diets, but it took me becoming obsessed with my morning routine of breath work, journaling, walking, etc., to see it. When I finally had a break in the pattern, a vacation, I completely fell off the wagon and went to my other addictive habit of numbing out to social media, news, eating, and thinking. I turned something good for me into this ugly "have to" to fix myself.
For the past few months, I've been playing with just doing small things, with some success and some failure. I recently committed to one small round of breath work and a short mediation every day (transparency, I'm about 50% on this).
This morning I did my round of breath work and then mediated, and I got present with a feeling in my legs. It was tension. As I sat with it, I became aware of fear. I am afraid of discipline because of the addictive pattern it brings out in me. I'm also scared of the inevitable failure that follows.
The pattern's origin became crystal clear as I looked back at my childhood. I would overachieve somehow because I wanted my Dad to take me with him, away from my mom's alcoholism. When I would fail and be stuck with her, I would numb out to protect myself.
I discovered dieting as I grew older and put on weight from the numbing. Around the 8th grade, during wrestling season, I lost 30 pounds and, for the first time, was a "skinny" kid. All of a sudden, I got attention from everyone but especially girls. I went from trying to win my Dad's love to winning everyone else's.
I'm sitting here trying to sort out what to do with this. I can see how my fear has me stuck. For now, I'll keep taking baby steps and taking on small things, but I know this is an area for me to work on.