Think Healthy – Why Your Self Image Is Important In Your Health Journey
Our behaviours are intricately tied to how we feel. How we feel is tied to how we think. How we think is tied to the beliefs that we have. And our beliefs are tied to the view we have of ourselves.
How do you view yourself in terms of your health? Do you think you are good at managing your health? Or do you think you always struggle to control your weight, have poor eating habits and that’s just “who I am”?
Who You Think You Are Is How You Act
Here is a different point of view – whatever you think of yourself is true. You will naturally take on the behaviours and habits of the person you think you are. It is why its so difficult to decide to do something different like go to the gym regularly and not have it be a struggle – because you still see yourself as someone who isn’t a fit person/gym goer, you don’t see it as natural for you.
Here is a shortcut to life– you can “hack” your habits, emotions, bad behaviours and not stuggle with working out regularly and eating healthily by deciding to become someone who has it easily.
Yes, you can simply decide to change your view of yourself. And the results will follow. Eventually.
You essentially have to fool yourself into seeing yourself as the person who has no problem working out or making healthy choices the majority of the time. You need to be a little delusional; you need to see it in your mind before anything else.
It requires a change in who you think you are. Think to yourself: if I was the healthy fit version of me – what would I eat? What would I do in the morning? When would I work out?
This requires a level of self-introspection, self-awareness and discipline because when you’re faced with that situation where you have to wonder you might be choosing between taking 15minutes to make a simple healthy meal vs grabbing a frozen dinner from the freezer right when you get home
How Would You Deal With Stress?
Would you decide to indulge in comforting activities such as having a six pack of beer/ bottle of wine and eating up some super greasy steak and burgers – vs taking a night to destress in other ways eg calling a close friend, spending time in nature, taking a nap etc. I.e. partake in activities that won’t necessarily move you backwards on your progress.
Once in a while, letting go might not derail you but a couple times a week/month – and you’re likely to be sliding towards the negative.
Why It’s So Hard To Change
The reason is because you see yourself as you’ve “always been like this, so it must be set in stone”. It’s too much energy to fix and it probably wont work.
The combination of comfort in your lifestyle, anticipated distress cause it means giving up delicious foods and “punishing” yourself with exercise – coz working out sucks.
Self-doubt due to prior unsuccessful attempts and a sunken cost fallacy-esque way of seeing things (I’m too old/there’s no point in changing now, it’s too late!).
These all put in barriers to discourage majority of us from even trying, or trying with the expectation of failure.
Well guess what, you WILL have setbacks. You will have episodes of derailment. However the key to remember is that failure doesn’t actually exist – it only does because we give up too soon and don’t stick to it long enough.
Persist In Your New Self Image To Succeed
If you decide to act as if you were the healthier version of you – and wake up early to go to the gym – or try to sleep earlier every night or swap out the cool drink for the sugar free version, it’s not so difficult to do for a week, or 2 weeks or even a month.
But what happens in majority of cases? What do they say that 85% of diets fail? They don’t fail because they don’t work, the fail because people give up.
And people give up because it is so uncomfortable and unnatural for them, and they cannot stand to be uncomfortable for a long period of time. What NOT giving up does, what deciding to continue to act as if does is, it actually makes ehat felt uncomfortable more natural instead. It’s essentially settting in new behaviours to become your new habits.
You get used to it and it becomes your “normal” thing. It’s no longer so mentally taxing to choose the grilled option when going out and when you go food shopping you buy less packaged stuff and more natural foods.
It might take weeks or month to get to this state though and it’s why people get stuck and give up. We say “it’s too hard”.
Decide to be a healthier version of you, take up the behaviours and act as if you are already the fit version of you.
And you have to stop coddling yourself to always want to be comfortable if you are trying to get somewhere. Unless you’re where you want to be then yes, by all means, live life in comfort.
However if you have a goal, you probably will be in growth/discomfort mode quite often.
So if you can learn who you’d want o be and how you want to see yourself, ask yourself “what would healthy version of myself do in this situation” majority of the day, keep doing that for weeks on end until it’s natural for you, you will succeed.
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