Lose Weight, Live Better with a New Way of Thinking

If you’re struggling to lose weight as part of your quest for healthy living, equipping yourself with a diet plan and a tape measurer isn’t necessarily the only route to go. While adhering to a balanced diet and an exercise regimen are certainly important to remain healthy and physically fit, putting these actions into practice may require a total lifestyle change. Perhaps the most important tool you may have at your disposal to effect this change is actually your brain.

Some people find change to be something to dread. We often fear career changes, for instance, or relocating to another city. Why? Maybe it’s a fear of the unknown, or we simply don’t like upheaval from our regular routines. After all, taking the path most traveled is safe and secure, right? However, we cannot expect to gain real results if we don’t take the risk on the path toward change. And change cannot happen on the tangible level if we don’t change our way of thinking too.

But, let’s back up a minute…even well worn paths were once new. That is, they too were tried and tested, revisited, and developed over time and remain supported by current thought. Consider the words of Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century essayist who wrote, “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in your mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kinds of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”

Those words are just as fitting today as they were in Henry’s day. Real change won’t happen if you simply wish for it, but can if you believe that it will. In short, be—or think--what you want to become. When you practice life-changing thoughts that support your goals and that validate their becoming a reality, then you’ve effected change. This is a process, mind you, that must take place on an ongoing basis until such thoughts become the natural way of thinking for you.

Your mission today is to keep in mind at least one positive thought about how you see your life beginning to change and the benefit that comes with it. Then repeat this step tomorrow, and the day after that, and for as many days as it takes to make positive change a reality for you.

And here’s something else to ponder while on the path to positive change that Mr. Thoreau also penned for us: “If one advances confidently in the direction of one's dreams, and endeavors to live the life which one has imagined, one will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”