Are limiting beliefs blocking your weight loss?
Hey, gorgeous.
Have you tried everything but still find it VERY hard to lose weight?
You really, really want it, but it’s just like something is blocking you. You sabotage yourself every time…
If that is the case you most surely have faulty mental programming aka limiting beliefs.
The thing is that you may desire something consciously, but there is something in the subconscious mind that’s stopping you from having what you want.
And until you’re going to clear the block in your subconscious mind (limiting belief), weight loss just won’t happen.
There are actually five main blocks that are blocking your weight loss success and causing you to emotionally eat and binge eat. I describe all of them in great detail in my webinar that you can access here but today I will focus on the biggest one which is faulty mental programming (limiting beliefs).
This one is hidden deep in our subconscious mind. And you know, unlike your conscious mind, your subconscious mind never sleeps.
Whatever you’re doing during the waking hours, you brain cells store those experiences and your reactions to them.
This part of the brain acts like a computer that stores everything that you’ve learned or experienced since your birth.
Actually, the first six years of our lives are crucial. This is the most important period of our lives. The first six years of a child’s life are spent in a hypnotic state. Everything that happens, everything that is seen during that time, all learned behaviors, everything is downloaded straight into our subconscious mind.
This subconscious programming is downloaded from observing other people’s behavior. Whenever somebody said you’re not good enough, or not lovable, or not smart enough, or that you don’t deserve something. All of that becomes part of our subconscious mind programming.
So you are basically operating on a faulty mental programming most of the time!
And not only that. Limiting beliefs are also created when we repeat a thought over and over again. So, if you’re constantly thinking: “It’s really hard to lose weight. It’s really hard. It’s too hard…”
… this will become a belief that will block you from the inside out.
We have all these limiting beliefs that are just assumptions about reality that are not true.
It’s suuuuper important to be very mindful of the things you say to yourself over and over again.
Before we go into the exercises that will help you uncover your limiting beliefs, I want to share a quote by Louise Hay from her book You Can Heal Your Life:
“No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts.” – Louise Hay
What this means is that what we experience in life, is just a reflection of our beliefs. We are programming our computer, our subconscious mind with every thought we have.
That’s why I always say that our thoughts create our reality.
SO… WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?
Let’s do an exercise to see which limiting beliefs you might have.
You might discover that you have a lot of these… So be gentle with yourself, okay darling? Awareness is key because when you become aware of them you can finally clear them.
In order to find your limiting beliefs, you will need about 15-30 minutes of uninterrupted time. Just take out your journal and finish the following sentences:
I can’t lose weight because ____________.
I want to lose weight but ___________.
(Write at least 5 answers for each sentence.)
- Then for each answer ask yourself WHY again. For example:
- I can’t lose weight because it’s hard.
- Why is it hard? Because I would have to starve.
- Why would I have to starve? Because I can only lose weight by starving myself.
Here are some common underlying beliefs that I often hear from my clients:
“I’ve never been slim. It’s just not possible for me.”
“I will be deprived of my favorite foods.”
“Everyone in my family is big. It’s in my genes.”
“If I’m thin, my sister may feel sad because she isn’t.”
“I want to lose weight but I just don’t believe I can be successful at this or anything.”
“I’m afraid to lose weight and become thin because men will find me attractive and take advantage of me.”
“I have a slow metabolism.”
“Even if I do lose weight, I can’t keep it off.”
The problem is that usually, we are simply not aware of all the limiting beliefs that we have.
But this negative self-talk of limiting beliefs about ourselves, our diet, our body, and our own inability to lose weight, this is what forms the basis of our self-sabotaging behavior. Writing down those beliefs and shining a light on them is the first step in taking away their power.
Jess, one of my clients, told me during our first coaching session that “I really want to lose weight and become fit, but I don’t want to torture myself. It is just not worth it.”
Like for many people, for Jess, losing weight meant deprivation and torture, and loooots of hard work. After weeks or months of sticking to a diet, and working out like crazy, the weight would come off. But even when she reached her goal weight, she just didn’t feel happy about it. She was still obsessing about calories, and macronutrients, and exercise because she was so worried that the weight would return. And of course, with time, it did. But she just couldn’t force herself to go through that struggle again. Nothing about it has been enjoyable for her.
Can you relate? Well, the truth is that most people believe that weight loss is about depriving yourself and hard work. And if you have that belief that weight loss is going to be a struggle for you… guess what? It is going to be a struggle… If you believe that you will suffer, you will either fail to lose it or you will drop a few pounds only to gain it back soon afterward.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
In fact, my clients are always amazed to see how effortless it is. “I am losing weight and I’m not even trying!” is what I usually hear after my girls do the work and eliminate all the blocks. (It does take time and patience, but it works!)
Why is it so effortless? Because when you rely on diet and exercise alone, you are forced to use willpower as your only source of motivation, but when we work with the subconscious mind and clear all those underlying beliefs and emotions, things suddenly become easy.
NEUTRALIZING & RELEASING THE LIMITING BELIEFS
So now that you know what limiting beliefs you have, you can neutralize and release them.
One of my favorite ways to do that is with this process:
1. SEEK OUT EVIDENCE THAT UNDERMINES THE VALIDITY OF YOUR LIMITING BELIEF
The first step is to seek out alternative evidence and alternative explanations which undermine the validity of your detrimental belief. You need to replace the evidence you’ve been using to back up and support your detrimental belief with evidence that undermines it!
For example: If you believe that you are not good enough, this belief may be backed up by this kind of evidence: my grades in school were never enough for my father. He constantly made me know that I was not being good enough.
Now try to come up with an alternate explanation for why this may happened. Maybe my father was the one who felt as he wasn’t good enough. Maybe he was embarrassed by my own mistakes because he was the one who felt as he wasn’t good enough and I simply adopted this belief from him.
2. FIND EVIDENCE TO BACK UP THE BENEFICIAL BELIEF THAT YOU’D RATHER BELIEVE
Now the second step is to find evidence and proof to back up the beneficial belief that you’d rather believe.
If we continue with this example. You can ask yourself “How am I already good enough?”
Then list your successes and really dig deep for proof and evidence.
I also LOVE using visualization, NLP, and EFT for clearing limiting beliefs. These are powerful tools that help you create and “install” beneficial beliefs to support you in reaching your weight loss goals.
xoxo
Tiasha
P.S. Interested in finding what are the other 4 weight loss blocks? Click here to watch my webinar replay.