Session 12: New Beginnings
WOW! You are truly amazing! Look how far you’ve come!
You have achieved extraordinary success!
Know that the process of self improvement does not end here! This is merely a time to review and find some new areas where you can focus your attention and continue to achieve.
Reassessment Exercise:
Achieving your Short-Term Goal: Review your Goal Setting sheet, Session 6 Reassessment and Weekly Reflection activities. How well have you done in tackling your goal. How have the new and revised strategies you laid out to overcome these obstacles, worked for you? Have you mastered the initial areas of development? If your answer is yes, it's time to move on and create some new goals.
If your answer is no, read on….If you're still having a tough time tackling your initial short-term goals, it's time again to take a look at the strategies you've laid out to accomplish these goals. Once again, you can use the Solution Discovery Worksheet in your Fitness Toolbox to assist you in assessing areas of development.
Be honest as you ask yourself if you've done well in making progress towards your goal. Have the strategies you laid out to overcome obstacles worked well for you?
What are you doing that works?
What is NOT working? What strategies are working against you?
What are you doing that you should stop? Identify at least 2-3 areas of development with a brief strategy to master each one.
1. Exercise obstacle(s):
Plan of Action:
2. Nutrition obstacle(s):
Plan of Action:
3. Attitude obstacle(s):
Plan of Action:
Choose 2-3 NEW areas of development to begin focusing on
1. Exercise problem(s):
Short-term goals:
2. Nutrition problem(s):
Short-term goals:
3. Attitude problem(s):
Short-term goals:
The Basic Plan: Persistence
All successful weight controllers persist. They exercise despite the usual excuses of time, effort money and aches and pains. They persist even though they live in the age of fast food and….they persist after a vacation full of deviations or a holiday full of unresisted temptations.
The Choice of Acceptance
Have you reached this stage? In the acceptance stage, people settle in for the long haul. They experience a peaceful sense of resolve about the composition of their body. They feel comfortable and have a clear direction for handling their challenging biology’s. They also refine their knowledge of nutrition in this stage. Their understanding of factors that affect fat loss and metabolism becomes clear as well. They recognize and even expect that their will at times struggle with their ability to focus or stay committed. This most likely happens when they go on vacations or when their schedules are disrupted by illness or travel. You will know you are in this stage when you can view exercise as either enjoyable or at least acceptable. You exercise on a consistent basis. You consistently monitor your intake of supportive foods. You actually prefer to eat supportively and you are willing to exert yourself effectively in restaurants and other social situations to ensure that your food works for you. You are unwilling to put yourself in a position where you would be mindless again about your eating, exercise and body composition. You have made a very active choice to pursue the life of a lean, fit, healthy person.
What is your plan to continue your progress or to maintain your new body?
What would you do if you found yourself 8 pounds heavier than usual?
Maintaining lost weight can often be exciting and challenging. It is important look at lifestyle changes as permanent, not temporary actions. You must continue to apply these healthy habits even after you lose the body fat.
Focus on the importance of continuing with the same principles you've learned and lived in the past 11 sessions -- for life. You've acquired time-tested strategies people have successfully used to lose weight permanently. You've also learned effective tactics for coping with weight loss plateaus and those times when you have difficulty meeting your goals.
Tips to help you stay motivated on your journey towards permanent weight loss:
- Practice continuous self-monitoring with your Fitness Journal.
- Make regular and frequent contacts with an outside source of support.
- Include daily physical activity (resistance training and cardio) for at least 30-45 minutes, three to five days a week.
- Make regular exercise a PRIORITY, a scheduled appointment, NOT an option.
- Stay focused on improving health and energy, with fat loss being a nice accompaniment.
- Set small daily/weekly goals
- Replace fatty and sugary foods with more healthy substitutions like fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, and other high-fiber foods.
- Frequently monitor portion sizes and hunger -- this is important in today's world of "super-size" restaurant portions.
- Find ways to make fitness fun. For example, join a walking or hiking group, a soccer league, or take dance classes. Don't fear trying new activities.
- Eat at least 4-6 meals a day and do not skip meals.
- Use Solution Discovery strategies when old behaviors return to haunt you. Make an effort to succeed at creating and re-assessing goals.
- Recognize that it is a continuous, life-long journey to pursue better health, not a temporary “diet”.
- Never give up! Do not allow occasional slip-ups to end your progress.
- Accept that the time-tested principles of weight loss, while not always exciting, are the only ones that work permanently.
- Separate your body size from your self-worth. Recognize that your value is about a lot more than a number. When your attitude shifts to self-acceptance at any size, weight loss and maintaining it becomes more natural, and much easier.
- Develop passions, interests, and hobbies to help you focus on things other than food.
- Find and develop creative ways to manage stress effectively.
- Ban the words "never" and "always" from your health vocabulary. That is, everything in moderation. It's not realistic to say you'll never eat ice cream again or that you will always exercise every day. In short, you must give up perfection, but remain focused without it.
- Reflect daily. Learn and relearn these tools and strategies and continually reinforce them. It takes many years to learn behaviors that lead to weight gain, yet it usually takes only a short time to lose weight. Therefore, you can expect that from time to time, destructive eating patterns will resurface. Seeking outside sources of support, developing interests, forgiving yourself, and reassessing goals greatly helps to conquer these times.
The overwhelming majority of successful weight maintainers don't report highly restrictive diets and fad diets as factors they used to achieve permanent weight loss. Despite the fact that dietary change is the most commonly reported method to lose weight, the greatest predictors of permanent weight loss have more to do with regular exercise, changing behaviors, positive mindset, continuous self-assessment, and seeking outside support.
The take home message is that the majority of successful weight maintainers have been highly creative and persistent about finding and applying what works for them. You must learn constantly about what works for you and develop your own personal tricks and put them into action.
Commitment is the ultimate decider of permanent physical change. It takes commitment to stick to your new, healthy lifestyle. When you are committed, you will do anything to reach your goal, no matter how hard, tedious, boring, scary...you will do whatever it takes to get where you want to go.
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James Cipriani
Cutting Edge Personal Training
