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mind is a very subtle but persuasive thing and you only need to suggest failure for it to become a likely part of reality.

      Many individuals report feelings of great self-esteem once they have lost weight. Why is that? Does being thinner make you a better person? Or is it more to do with the good feelings associated with achieving what you set out to do? Obviously losing weight doesn’t make you a better person but whatever you think, I believe that building self-esteem initially is pivotal to successful weight loss. Self-esteem is not a product of weight loss but the foundation for it. After all, you have to believe you are worth the time, effort and work involved in achieving and then maintaining your goal size and weight.

      Take your clothes off – go on, take them off right now. I’m absolutely serious! Go and take them off and stand in front of a full length mirror completely naked. Take a good look. Look at yourself from the front and then from the side and back. What do you see?

      The chances are, what you see and the body you have are two completely different things. How you see yourself is described as your ‘body image’. This isn’t something fixed in concrete and it isn’t necessarily grounded in reality. In fact, body image can be affected by all kinds of things. For example, in one interesting study, subjects who were made to consume a bowl of ice cream before having to choose a body silhouette most like their own opted for a larger outline than the women who ate nothing. It’s as if those women felt they’d done something wrong by eating the ice cream and therefore judged themselves more negatively.

      If you’re anything like the average woman, you aren’t at all happy with what you see in the mirror. A recent survey showed 95 per cent of women are unhappy with their body shape. What’s more, we think that our inability to look as slim and fit as we want to is down to our own failures. Most disturbingly, ‘failing’ in one area of life (i.e. not having the ‘perfect’ body) has a knock-on effect on confidence and self-esteem in other areas of life. A negative body image is closely linked to poor self-esteem. The point here is that deciding to accept your body, right here, right now, how it is, is crucial to your success. Okay, so you might want to make some changes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think positive about some aspects of yourself.

      See if you can guess which of these percentages goes with which question.

      Such widespread dissatisfaction with our bodies makes shocking reading, doesn’t it? You are more than what you see in the mirror and to move beyond the crash diet–weight gain cycle, you need to accept yourself and value yourself enough to instigate some positive changes. Making an enemy of your body is a losing battle, as you will only be fighting yourself.

      So, before we even begin to look at diet and exercise, we’re going to work on getting you into the right mental space to drop a size for life. This section is literally about stripping things back to the bare bones and then building back your self-esteem, layer by layer, in order to give you the appropriate foundation for dropping a size. And the great thing is, layering these simple skills and techniques will not only get you dropping a size, it will also have a knock-on effect in other aspects of your life, too.

       60% 5% 90% 56% 0% 48%

      1 A survey asked, ‘would you change anything about your body if you had the chance?’ What percentage said ‘I’m happy as I am, thanks.’

      2 What percentage of women overestimate their size?

      3 What percentage of normal weight women report themselves overweight?

      4 What percentage of British women are dieting at any one time?

      5 What percentage of the female population can achieve the current media ‘ideal’ of thinness?

      6 What percentage of survey respondents when asked, ‘would you rather be thinner or smarter’ said they’d prefer to drop pounds?

       The answers are

       1 (0%),

       2 (90%),

       3 (56%),

       4 (60%),

       5 (5%),

       6 (48%)

      HOW TO USE SECTION ONE

      This section takes you through seven strategies that will help you understand the importance of engaging your mind – and not just your body – in your weight loss efforts. Each strategy builds upon the next, making each new one easier to understand and implement. Layer by layer the strategies build up, leading you towards your goal of creating the sort of mindset needed to drop a size for life.

      Because each strategy builds the foundation for the next, you will need to go through each one methodically, and feel happy with it, before you can successfully tackle the next. You may find some of the steps easier to master than others, but do not be tempted to skip any – each one is an important aspect of your journey to drop a size and keep it off.

      This section isn’t something you’ll go through once and then forget about. As you go through life there will be times when your weight fluctuates – when events in your life may knock your confidence, affecting your mindset – and you need to get back on track. At such times, you may find you need to revisit this section, because what was originally an easy strategy to master, could, at a different point in your life, become more significant and challenging.

       STEP ONE:

       TRAIN YOUR BRAIN

      The point of training your brain is to increase mind-body synergy – which basically means that your brain and body should be singing from the same hymn sheet! If you are trying to force your body to do something without your brain’s support, you are much more likely to fail.

      We are all aware that in order to lose weight we need to make some big changes to our energy intake and expenditure. But for us to see a change in our bodies and to actually drop that size we need to work on the relationship between brain and body. For our bodies to lose weight, yes, we have to eat less and exercise more, but for the mind’s eye image in the mirror to change, we need to get our brain on the winning side, too.

      The mind is a crucial factor in weight loss success because what we think about ourselves can give significant momentum to our efforts and hence directly affect the result of those efforts. If your brain is not on the same wavelength as your body then your weight loss efforts will flounder. I have seen it time and time again with my clients – however, once they have mastered these seven simple steps they achieve greater success and it lasts longer too!

      Not getting your mind sorted out before you embark on your weight loss plan is a bit like setting off on holiday without any preparation – you can’t wait to get there and you’re so excited about arriving quickly you don’t bother to check the oil, water and petrol gauge before you set off and end up breaking down. You might have been raring to go, but the car wasn’t and the upshot is you end up stuck on the hard shoulder for 2 hours waiting to be rescued. If you’d taken a little time to ensure the car was as ready for the journey as you were, you’d be well on your way. Instead, the journey that you were so excited about has become tediously long, disappointing and irritating. Of course, in reality, few of us would set out on a long and important journey without checking the basics, yet many of us embark on our weight loss journey without seeing to the fundamentals first!

      The action points for step one are all about getting your brain to register what you are feeling within your body, thus forging a closer link between mind and body.

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