To those of you that haven’t read any previous articles, I was very over-weight as a child and in my late teens and early twenties.
When I left the university I was 16st 10lbs and very unhappy with my appearance.
When I got into professional wrestling and personal training I completely changed my body-shape, but more importantly, my outlook.
One of the biggest things for me enabling me to change my life was developing new mindsets – changing the way I think about certain things.
So, rather than I had been doing before – trying harder and harder, and putting more and more effort into things to less and less results, I, over time, developed ways to work smarter.
These techniques enabled me to achieve the results I wanted to, and I began to implement them with my clients as a personal trainer to help them achieve results.
So, rather than just trying harder and harder we would work on changing their mindsets, looking at things in a different perspective, taking paradigm shifts (see article on Paradigm Shifts here), in order that the things they needed to do were no longer an effort or difficulty but just something that happened because of the way they thought about things.
One of the techniques I started using on myself and with my clients was: “Pretend it doesn’t exist”.
With the “Pretend it doesn’t exist” technique I started making myself think that certain things that were unhealthy, that I might like to eat, that would hinder my weight-loss, toning, and fitness goals just simply didn’t exist.
When I started to think this way I knew perfectly well that if certain food stuffs had never been invented I wouldn’t have starved to death.
I would have found plenty of other natural, healthy foods to eat.
If someone hadn’t invented bread, pizza, pasta, ice-cream, cake, etc. then I wouldn’t have even missed them in the slightest.
I’ve done this now for so long that I changed how my mind works.
I don’t really get these things on my radar.
I’m not having to deprive myself and think “I’d like them but I’m going to have to stop myself having them”.
In my mind they pretty much don’t exist, they’ve never been invented.
When I go to the supermarket there are whole aisles that I haven’t been down in over 10 years now.
I would generally go down the fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh meat, and then there’s this separate aisle for nuts, and nothing else.
So, try this technique.
Next time you’re tempted by something that you know will take you away from your weight-loss and health goals, just pretend it doesn’t exist.
It won’t happen straight away, but the more in your head you imagine that food stuff had never been invented; the less you’ll miss it, and the easier that change will become.
