Are You Engaged In An Ongoing Battle To Lose Weight?
Have you made a lot of promises to yourself to lose weight, change what you eat and exercise more? Are you discouraged by how few promises you’ve been able to keep? Does it feel like – no matter how good your intentions are – you continue to fall back into old habits? Are you tired of feeling a sinking sense of hopelessness due to a string of failed promises to yourself? Maybe it seems like every time you try to make a real change, you end up failing – two steps forward, two steps back. Do you desperately want to find a way to set, achieve and maintain your weight loss goals? What would you give to improve your health, have more energy and look at yourself in the mirror with a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment?
While it can feel inspiring and exhilarating to jump in for the short term and try a new cleanse or a new diet, too often these paths aren’t sustainable. And, good intentions can turn into another opportunity to beat yourself up. It can become exhausting to keep trying. You may be feeling hopeless, wanting to give up and starting to believe that you’ll always feel down, depleted and stuck when it comes to losing weight. And, although you may feel like you are the only person in the world struggling with your weight, you are far from alone.
Millions of Americans Battle Weight Issues
More than two-thirds of Americans today struggle with their weight, making weight loss a huge industry. Why? Weight loss can be really, really hard. In the short term, it’s hard enough to lose weight. Making sustainable lifestyle changes that last over the long-term is even harder. Life has a habit of getting in the way. Even when you manage to commit yourself to change, life can throw the most ridiculous challenges your way just when new habits are at their most vulnerable. Thankfully, however, there is hope. While it is hard to make real changes, a mindfulness-based therapist can help you break through obstacles and achieve the lasting results you are seeking. Weight loss counseling with mindfulness training can give you the tools you need to succeed.
Weight Loss Counseling With A Mindfulness Approach Can Help You Set And Maintain Your Weight Loss Goals
While weight loss can be challenging, it’s far from impossible. With the help of your healthcare provider and an experienced therapist, you can set up behavior plans for yourself and work through roadblocks as they come up. You will learn to use mindfulness skills to become more aware of the habitual thought patterns and self-limiting behaviors that get in the way of progress.
Mindfulness meditation is the practice of nonjudgmentally focusing your attention on what you are experiencing in the present moment. It allows you to disengage from habitual thought patterns as they come up. Most of the time, the human mind is engaged in jumping from thought to thought, running a constant commentary about our actions. Negative thoughts can have an enormous impact on our moods and our behaviors. It is those thought patterns that often become one of your biggest enemies in weight loss. In our weight loss counseling sessions, we’ll work on together to change your relationship with your thoughts so you can shift the chatter in the back of your head to support you instead of constantly beat you down.
Our work together isn’t limited to our in-person meetings. We’ll set goals for you to work on between sessions and develop plans to help set you up for success. Willpower is overrated. I want to help you tip the scales in your favor by proactively planning ahead to make it easier for your future self to make the right choice in the moments when it counts. We’ll collaboratively come up with practical solutions designed to help you through your trouble spots, exploring the use of technology like text messaging, reminders and automated goal tracking systems to support you as you make progress toward your goals.
Experimentation is at the root of successful sustainable behavior change. You have to try things to find out what does and doesn’t work. But if you start beating yourself up over what happened, you’ve changed from learning into punishing. And research shows us that punishment is not the most effective way to create behavior changes. The power lies in taking an “experimenter’s stance” when looking back at your “failures.” If you can learn from what happened, you can’t call it a failure.
With the right approach, mindset and support, you CAN meet your weight loss goals! It is possible to lose weight in a sustainable, healthy way without feeling deprived.
Even if you think you could benefit from weight loss counseling, you might still have questions or concerns about getting help.
I’ve heard that weight loss counseling can be really expensive.
That really depends on you. The success of our work together is contingent on the work that you do between our sessions. While I will be helping you set up goals and actions for you to follow through on in between sessions, what you do with that time is up to you. If you really commit to putting the plans in place, as well as talking about it when the plans don’t go as well as hoped, then things can move along quickly.
I have enough people in my life telling me what to do. I don’t want to add somebody else to that list.
My role as your psychologist isn’t to tell you how to lose weight. My role is to help you take action on the goals you set for yourself and manage any emotional triggers or land mines that get triggered along the way.
Will you give me health advice?
I am not a medical doctor or registered dietician so I can’t make health recommendations. However, I collaborate with the other healthcare providers in your life and help support you in making their recommendations become a reality.
Will you support my following _______(fill in the blank) diet?
I will support you in whatever weight loss goals you have provided you have a healthcare practitioner recommending the diet and sign a release so I can talk with him or her. Some diets are more helpful than others, and the safety of some is questionable. Knowing what kind of diet is safe for you to try is not within my role. But I am happy to support a goal that your health care practitioner is aware of and supportive of you trying.
You Can Make Sustainable Change
Contact me today for a free consultation about working together on your weight loss goals. I’m happy to discuss your specific situation and to answer any questions you have about weight loss counseling, mindfulness and my practice.