Bad Language A Major Cause of Weight Loss Failure
We just surveyed 500 of our subscribers about weight loss topics. Their replies were very revealing.
As you know 95% of dieters manage to lose weight only to put it all on again within a year.
Our survey shows is that 68% of dieters fail because they just gradually slip back into their old eating habits.
This isn’t really so surprising when you think about popular diets which recommend that you drink only grapefruit juice, or tomato juice or cabbage soup or eat only cheese. Can you really imagine anyone eating only cheese for the rest of their life? Or drinking only cabbage soup for the rest of their life?
Of course they backslide!
“I am a Stress Eater”
What really interested me, and what every dieter should be aware of, is the way that people start backsliding.
The language that people seeking to lose weight use when they talk to themselves would appear to be a major cause of their undoing.
A Respondent told us: “I am a stress eater.”
Now who do you think hears when they say this? They do, of course. So every time they say, “I am a stress eater,” it serves to reinforce their own belief that they are indeed a stress eater.
The statement is either a justification for a bad habit or a cry for sympathy.
But, does anyone else care about why they over-eat? No.
This is what I call Bad Language. An example of someone using language that only serves to reinforce their bad habit.
This person needs to start telling themselves and everyone else: “I used to be a stress eater, but now I have healthy eating habits.”
A positive statement like this will earn them a lot more respect from others and create a much more positive attitude towards food.
“It’s Easy To Go To McDonalds Because It Is Fast”
In the time it takes to stand in line to be served with a burger, fries and a cola I could whip up a tasty salad and peel a banana.
This is yet another example of someone justifying a bad eating habit by suggesting that they’re too busy to do anything other than visit McDonalds.
This form of laziness is a disaster for your waistline. The calories and trans fats in those burgers take hours to burn off. I recently made a calculation that you would need to walk over 10 miles to burn off the calories in a burger lunch.
The statement above is a more subtle form of bad language, because it seeks to justify a bad eating habit by saying, “it’s not my fault that I eat the wrong stuff, I’m too stressed out and busy doing good work to have the time to prepare a healthy meal.”
That is seriously bad language. Read between the lines. What it is suggesting is, “I don’t care enough about my body to be bothered with healthy food. I’m just too busy.”
It’s an excuse which says: “My body doesn’t matter to me.”
Where does this person think they’re going to get another body when they’ve clogged this one up with trans fats?
“A Way To Stop Me Bingeing and Purging”
Are you seeing a pattern here?
They are all telling themselves what they do. This one is saying, “I binge and purge.” So of course they do just that. This is yet another example of bad language.
I could give you a load more examples, but I hope you’ve got the message by now.
Whatever you say, no matter who you say it to, one of the people who hears you, is you. And what you hear about yourself serves to reinforce you habits and self image.
Will Good Language Help You?
Yes, good language will help, of course it will.
The major benefits of changing your language to good language are:
You will have to start listening more closely to the language you use so that you can spot the bad language and change it.
You will have to think of positive things to say.
You will have to think about what you’re saying.
Gradually your habit of using bad language will change as you develop a new habit of using more positive, good language.
What Else Can You Do To Help You Lose Weight?
The three keys to successful weight loss are:
Eating healthy foods
Exercising regularly
Good mental and emotional discipline
The trick is to find ways to change your eating and exercise habits that are interesting and stimulating and that fit in with your daily routines.
If you’re going to change your eating and exercising habits you sure don’t need to be changing a whole lot of other routines as well.
We’re all creatures of habit. We do a lot of the things we do in our daily lives on auto-pilot. One of the major tricks to losing weight is to change as few of these auto-pilot habits as possible.
The fewer changes you make the more comfortable you are likely to feel with what you are doing.
It’s all very well to start out on a new diet with a noble feeling that you are helping yourself, but how long can you sustain that noble feeling for before you become bored?
Reshaping your body has to become a part of a new healthier lifestyle that interferes with the lifestyle you have carefully built up to the absolute minimum amount.
Using good, positive language will help you make the changes with the minimum of fuss and bother.
David Ferrers M.NLP is has been a professional Personal Development Coach for 21 years. With his Nutritionist Partner Susanne Floe he developed http://www.GoneForeverWeightLoss.com to enable people to discover how to use self-hypnosis to lose weight permanently and painlessly. Both David and Susanne have personally used the techniques they recommend to successfully lose weight and maintain the weight loss.