Mindset reset

Is your dieting mindset keeping the weight on? Perhaps it’s time to question your thoughts and forgo telling yourself certain foods are “bad”.

The human brain likes to organise thoughts, circumstances and people into meaningful, easily retrievable information. That’s part of why we make generalisations and use mental labels to categorise, store and retrieve. This can be a good thing to keep ourselves organised, but it’s a double-edged sword. Labelling forces us to make assumptions about others and ourselves as well as about food. Most food is not all good or all bad, just like most people are not all good or all bad.

Questioning our thoughts

As much as our brain likes to categorise everything and everyone, we must learn to train it to think otherwise. To examine what we’re thinking about is indeed a gift God gave us. We can learn to become aware of our thoughts and observe them intentionally. We can know to ask ourselves why we are thinking in a certain way. We can question our own thoughts and their validity. Just as we can’t believe everything someone else says to us, we must learn not to believe every thought that crosses our minds. After all, they’re just thoughts, many of which are based on past experiences that make us prone to think in a certain way. Seeking the truth about something takes intentionality and a little investment of our time. 

We may think we don’t have time or energy in our busy schedules, but even that thought is not true. We make time for things we value and care about. Investing in our own well-being only materialises when we truly value it enough to put it at the top of our priority list. Let’s promise ourselves that we will carve out time every day to become self-aware and to observe our thoughts and the labels we attach to everything.

Being present

We will never regret this simple act of being present to our true selves instead of going about life mindlessly. We cannot afford to stay on autopilot and expect good results, because life’s terrain is ever fluctuating and we must learn to readjust to those changes as they come. Take, for example, trying to lose weight when you’re in your 20s and 30s compared to when you’re in your 50s, 60s and 70s. The journey through those different ages is very different based on biological, hormonal and metabolic changes that are a normal cycle of our life.

God created us with intelligent brains to continually examine and evolve, seeking better solutions. To fully reach our potential in any area in life, we must look at where we are to know where we’re headed. When using GPS, you always have to put your current location to be successfully guided to your destination. The same is true in our quest to get to a healthier place when it comes to our bodies, what we feed them and how we move them. 

Here’s to winning the battle and turning our labels into something that can work for us instead of the other way around. Let’s seek progress, not perfection!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine