Friday, October 22, 2010

How to do the harder parts of fat loss and more easily....

Today's Post: Friday, 10-22-2010


To do the key but challenging parts of managing the lifestyle upgrade actions to lose fat and keep it off:

1. Do something first that you choose to do that you really like to do or think of as fun.

Recent research shows that your ability to do challenging things right after doing so goes way up. Further, doing the challenging things then not only gets done better, it apparently takes less effort and psychic energy to do it!

What apparently happens is that at some basic level you feel rewarded and in control.

That boosts your psychic energy and ability to do things -- even challenging ones. And, you approach doing the things from your own choices rather than as something imposed on you. You take action on the challenging things then in a self-directed way.

Even better, you still have the energy and psychic energy to do more. Somehow you don’t run down your energy reserves or psychic battery.

This can be a simple as just remembering something funny that happened recently to taking 20 minutes to watch a DVD of your favorite comic or reading an exciting novel for 15 minutes – or even thinking about how much you’ll enjoy doing that when you get home from work for 30 seconds.

2. Think of something you like, control, direct, chose, or want to do about the lifestyle upgrade action.

This piggy-backs on the extra energy from the first step and also helps you feel in control which helps you do the challenging thing, do it well, and do it without using loads of extra mental energy to do it.

3. If the challenging action is only moderately difficult, just do it.

It will be easier still the next time.

One of the wisest men of many years ago was a man called Millard Bennett. He said in the context of learning new things that feel challenging at the start, “Remember, what you persist in doing becomes easier to do. Not that the nature of the thing becomes easier. But your power to do it increases.”

4. But if it’s more challenging than that, remember WHY you want to be fat free and WHY you want to stop being fat. Remember why you chose this action to help you do that. Then think about the parts of the action you control and what your goal is to get done by doing it. If there is any part of doing it you are skilled in already or even like to do, remember that.

5. If you feel at that point it will still take some extra will power to do, other recent research found that if you purposely clench or tighten a muscle just before you begin, your ability to do it goes WAY up.

Tony Robbins uses this in what he calls a physical anchor for desirable feelings. He teaches to use a specific action to focus your mind on a feeling you want to generate on command.

This is a perfect application of that. I’m right handed. So, I’ll likely use clenching my right fist. But if I clenched or tightened my right calf instead – something not visible if I was in public – the research recently done shows that would also work to boost my will power.

Use the clench your fist -- or other body part -- anchor and GO! Begin your lifestyle upgrade action.

This last one seems a bit simple minded. But it apparently has very real effects. It connects doing the challenging action to your very real ability to make things happen physically it seems.

Here’s a quote from the TIME article today from the researcher who did the research on doing something fun first.:
"When people perceived the initial task to be fun, they just kept going," Laran says. "For someone who makes hard choices for the day and sees these as fun, at the end of the day, instead of being depleted and not going to the gym, they would actually go and workout even more than they would otherwise.”
He also said the self-directed aspect he found suggests that for weight and fat loss programs having people choose the style and actions that they found to the best fit would enable success much more than a mandatory choice someone else decided they should use.
To be fair, the underlying realities such as NOT eating or drinking things containing high fructose corn syrup that we posted on yesterday – or getting regular exercise each week -- do not change for people wanting to lose fat.

But if you choose your own preferred method of dealing with them and use the strategies in this post, you CAN succeed a dealing with them and doing them consistently.

And THAT leads to fat loss and permanent fat loss.

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