I’m glad you’re here – I’ve been raring to go on this week’s post! It’s time to get on to week two of Permanent Weight Loss. Last week we talked about the major block that prevents permanent weight loss and how to overcome it by becoming the hero of your weight loss journey. You learned that you get to become the hero of your weight loss journey and we talked about some well-known heroes to inspire you to get going! If you missed it, you can read it here.

But no hero goes on a journey without tools, and you shouldn’t either. But what do you really need? There are so many suggestions and recommendations out there, it can be hard to sort out what’s essential and what’s unnecessary. I want to help you with that! This week we’re going to talk about crafting your own weight loss plan in a way that’s simple, approachable, and uncomplicated. Let’s get to it!

 

But first, I want to encourage some of you who still doubt that permanent weight loss is actually possible for you. The mental shackles preventing you from trying to believe that you can lose weight are the greatest obstacle to you ever actually doing it. You’re afraid you’ll fail, you don’t want to feel disappointed if you don’t get to your goal, and because feeling disappointed and like a failure are so painful, you choose not to believe at all. Your brain is creating an entire story of how painful your prior weight loss failures were to remind you not to try again. And those failures were painful, so your brain is trying to protect you from feeling that pain again. But not trying again makes it absolutely sure that you’ll never lose weight. And that IS what you want. So now what?

Let me mention a hero that I left out last week. So many of us relate to her because not only was she in a terribly abusive situation, but her mental shackles were also holding her back. Remember Celie from The Color Purple? Girl. Watching her grow out of the mental limitations she’d learned over her life was nothing short of pure inspiration.

You get to be like Celie and grow past your belief that weight loss isn’t for you. You get to become the conquering hero just like Celie – you just have to start seeing more than your past and its failures and disappointments. Let’s look ahead at what’s possible!

 

 

So what tool do you absolutely need for your weight loss journey?

You need a plan.

 

It’s not as hard as you think. We think we need the entire plan laid out and completely crafted from start to finish before we’ll be equipped for success. That’s why we like to buy diet plans and premade food programs – it seems like they’re well thought out and if we just follow them, we’ll succeed. Neither of those thoughts is true. First, these plans haven’t told you what to do after you finish the diet. What do you do once you’ve lost all your weight? Second, what do you do when your life conflicts with the diet? See, not completely thought out at all.

 

But you don’t even need a complete plan to get moving. Let’s talk about one of my favorite heroes who didn’t have a complete plan: Moana. This girl was bold! She knew she was called to the journey, and she knew she had a legacy of voyagers in her family to follow. But she didn’t even know how to work the sails on the boat. She’d never been past the reef. She didn’t even have an exact location of where she was going.

Sound familiar?

You don’t know all the obstacles ahead on your weight loss journey. You don’t have all the skills you need to succeed at weight loss (yet!). But you absolutely have a legacy to leave from your life and you are absolutely called to the journey to lose this weight.

But here’s what Moana did have: She had a plan for where she was going and what she was going to do. She was going to sail across the ocean to find the demi-god Maui, recover the heart of Tefiti, and then make him restore the stolen heart to Tefiti and save her island. Sounds like a plan with a lot of holes in it to me. But that didn’t stop her from going forward!

It’s the same for you. You need a basic structure for your eating to go forward, but you don’t need every detail. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know I teach that weight loss is impossible without respecting the boundaries of hunger and fullness. That’s the start of your plan: You’ll only eat when you are physically hungry and stop when you are politely full. You might decide that you will use an intermittent fasting style of eating since you’re not hungry in the mornings. Then you’ll eat lunch and dinner. You might want to plan for exceptions for cake on birthdays or wine on date night. You might not have a lot of time to cook, so you will create a list of acceptable foods and meals that you can pick up when you’re hungry.

These are just suggestions. You get to craft YOUR plan. But you don’t need to figure out every single detail to move ahead.

Make your plan, get in your boat, and start sailing toward your goal!

 

Do you want more help crafting your plan and getting weight loss journey ready? Sign up for my free webinar, Weight Loss Without Willpower – it’s coming up on March 23rd at 7 pm. Sign up here!

It’s that time again – registration for my weight loss course is coming up and you get a chance to get into class with me! If you were one of the folks who were kicking yourself for not getting into the January class before it closed, you get another shot. Registration opens March 23rd with the webinar, so if you want to make sure you get a spot, sign up for the webinar on March 23rd!

 

Here’s your video help for the week – let’s get your hero mindset flowing!