Mental Commitment and Weight Loss. How to Reach Weight Loss Goals.

Mental Commitment to Weight Loss

Putting the Odds in Your Favor

Mental commitments are sequences of decisions. In these first sections, learn how to put the odds in your favor for fat loss.

Commitments are sequences of decisions, and important decisions are always difficult. Let's look at how you can put the odds in your favor. Regardless of our good intentions, there is no way to know the future.

Since our actions have consequences, since those consequences are relevant to the moral evaluation of our actions, and since all the consequences of our actions are unknowable, there is no way to be sure whether or not a particular decision is right or wrong.

If you want more on this topic of our inability to know which decisions are right and which aren't, we recommend Panayot Butchvarov's SKEPTICISM IN ETHICS.

Notice, too, how this idea fits well with the idea of continuing to examine our lives. See our web page on positive attitude and weight loss:

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So it's with good reason that we hesitate to make commitments. We fear committing to something that will turn out wrong. We hesitate and remain ready to draw back. As adults, we've been burned before.

On the other hand, there's no mastery without commitment. When a child commits to walking, it commits wholeheartedly. It falls and falls and falls again, but it keeps going until mastery.

Falling is the result of practicing poorly, and practicing poorly precedes practicing well. Without the kind of commitment that results in falling, none of us would ever have walked�or survived. Success and achievement requires mental commitment.

"When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."

This saying about the importance of readiness is thousands of years old, and it's as true today as it was then.

sidebar quotation from Goethe: "There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas & splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves on too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred."

Nobody knows why this is true. Our suspicion is that it's because commitment frees the brain to work its automatic magic. It gets the "I" out of the way and lets the "me" do its work without internal conflict (see T. Norretranders's THE USER ILLUSION). What matters is that it is true.

If you have been burned by weight loss programs, if you have tried them and they haven't resulted in permanent weight loss, you may well be physically and psychologically worse off than you were before trying them.

You may fear another failure. As long as you don't try again and fail, there's hope that some weight loss program will work for you sometime in the future.

Hope of that kind is a distraction, a delusion about the future. Delusions and distractions are signs of living poorly. Please teach yourself how to dissolve them.

It's normal to have fears, and it's common to lie to ourselves about them. What do you fear? Never being trim again? Pain? Death? Looking foolish in front of others? Poverty? Disease? Confusion? Loneliness? Mutilation? Old age? Success? Small animals? Insecurity? Being confined? Meeting new people? Public speaking?

It's normal to have fears like these that block achievements. If you are normal in this respect, admit to yourself that, at least in this respect, being normal is not good.

Because such fears can block important achievements such as lasting weight loss, it's important to master them. (Some fears should not be mastered but obeyed.

If you are camping in the bush, smell smoke, and hear crackling, we hope that your fear impels you to move quickly away from the forest fire!)

Until you master those fears that block achievements, they will continue to enslave you. It is possible to liberate yourself from all such fears. Decide whether you want you or your fear to be in control. Let's suppose you'd prefer to be free.

Be grateful for being afraid! Accept the fear; it's part of your life. For more about this see the Meditation section of our website:

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Doing what it takes to overcome fear teaches an important lesson about living well, and, it's a lesson that will give your self-esteem a boost.

How may fear be mastered? To master fear, simply do what you most fear doing, and keep doing it until the fear dissolves.

Working on fear should become part of your morning ritual. We suggest that part of your morning ritual be spend in meditation or doing "Morning Pages," or both.

To learn more about the Morning Pages technique see this section of our website:

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Before beginning to meditate, however, we find it helpful simply to take five minutes or so to use some of the other psychological tools discussed in this the psychology section of our website.

This is the time to adjust your attitude, get your thoughts in perspective with morning remembrances, review your commitments, work on your fears, and visualize success.

Perhaps what we do will also work well for you. Revise it as you like in order to develop a morning ritual that works well for you.

Try asking yourself the following

What am I grateful for?
What am I wholeheartedly committed to?
Who do I love?
How could I love them better?
What in my life do I really feel good about?
What practices are required today to promote my goals?

Try reminding yourself of the following five truths about life; these morning remembrances will help you to keep events in a more balanced perspective:

I am aging, and there is no way to escape growing old.
I am subject to ill-health, and there is no way to escape getting sick.
I am mortal, and there is no way to escape death.
All that I value and everyone I love are impermanent, and there is no way to escape separation from them.
My actions, my only true belongings, are what make my life, and I can neither escape their consequences nor apprehend in advance what those consequences will be.

Until you successfully dissolve whatever important fears are obstructing your way, we also suggest that you repeat the following (which we took from Tom Hopkins) during your morning ritual and repeat it throughout the day as often as necessary:

"I am not judged by the number of times I fail but by the number of times I succeed, and the number of times I succeed is in direct proportion to the number of times I can fail and keep on trying."

The neuro-linguistic programmers teach us to "reframe" events, and this can be a useful skill. Lack of success in overcoming a fear is not a failure but a lesson in how to succeed.

In other words, it's the negative feedback that we need to improve what we are doing. It gives us another opportunity to practice our techniques and perfect our performance. This is just a game we must play to win.

In other words, instead of seeing something as a defeat or failure, practice seeing it as an opportunity for mastery, a lesson.

In addition to developing an effective morning routine for yourself, it's also important to think through your values to ensure that they are congruent.

For example, a married woman who is too heavy may want to achieve lasting weight loss, but, on the other hand, she may also think that success will lead to more men hitting on her and she's insecure about how she'd handle that, which could threaten her marriage. Incongruent values prevent mastery.

Please avoid expecting yourself to improve everything simultaneously.

This strategy is usually effective: pick your worst fear and dissolve it, letting the pieces fall where they may.

Then pick the next most important problem and get that solved, and so on. By working every day to "chunk" larger issues into bite-sized pieces, you are going in the right direction.

Since living is a process, living well is also a process. So it's foolish to expect the work you are doing to result in some blissful, utterly passive state. The flux is incessant. The work continues.

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