Are You Mentally Prepared For Weight Loss?

5 Steps To Mentally Prepare You For Transformation Success.

- Laetitia Dee

Although weight loss is something that happens on a physical level, it is very important to remember that to maintain your new weight there needs to also be a concerted effort to change your mindset.

I can personally attest to this because 10 years ago I lost 30kg. One of the lessons I learnt the hard way during that process was that reshaping your mindset usually lags behind any physical changes you make during a transformation.

If you’re not mentally ready for weight loss, you might succeed at achieving your goal weight, but it is highly likely that you’ll experience some degree of cognitive dissonance – the mental stress or discomfort experienced when you hold two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas or values. In this instance, it is the stress created when trying to reconcile your mindset, shifting from the thoughts and beliefs you held about yourself when you were overweight, with the ones you have about your new slimmer self.

This effectively means that you might have lost the weight, but in your mind you still have the same thoughts, mental processes and possibly even the same old self-image you had before your transformation. As a result, you’ll most probably still ‘see’ yourself as fat. No matter how prepared you think you are, it is likely that you’ll need to play mental catch-up in some way after going through a transformation process.

When you consider that it probably took years of poor eating habits, bad thoughts and negative emotions to reach the point you found yourself at, overweight and unhappy, then it makes sense that it isn’t something that can be fixed overnight.