You Can Transform!: 63 Days | Weight Loss is Not The End-Goal

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

63 Days | Weight Loss is Not The End-Goal

The science behind weight loss is not a secret.

You increase activity to a healthy level and lower caloric intake to a healthy level, reaching a point where you burn more energy than you consume. To compensate, your body burns fat to release stored energy.

At its core, losing weight is not complicated, but just because it’s simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy.

Many plans view weight loss as an end in itself. Through any number of methods—low-carb or low-fat diets, medication, colonics, exercise boot camps—they get you to your destination (sometimes), at which point they basically drop you off. The problem with plans like these is that even if you do get through the deprivation involved and manage to lose weight, you almost immediately start meandering back to your old ways.

Creating health does not end at weight loss. When you treat weight loss as the end goal, as the final conclusion, your journey ends there.

Instead, I encourage my clients to think about their health differently. Your question should not be “What is the most effective way to reach a healthy weight?” You should be asking “How can I go beyond weight loss to achieve optimal health and stay healthy for the rest of my life?”

In the first question, the focus is on solving a problem or ridding yourself of an unwanted situation. In the second question, the focus is on a desired outcome. When you shift your focus to creating health rather than losing weight, you establish a narrative for a journey that is ongoing, where every choice that you make is another step forward.

Changing our emphasis from what we’re against to what we’re for has a dramatic impact, even if they seem similar first. You could try to adopt the healthiest diet that ever existed, but if your motivation is to fix a health problem you have or might have in the future, you’ll slip back into Habits of Disease.

When you start to talk about health in terms of creation or in terms of being for health, the dialogue that you have with yourself will shift. You will begin to think of health as a lifestyle rather than a solution to a short-term problem. To put it differently, world-class violinists didn’t start playing the violin because they wanted to stop being bad at music. Someone showed them the rewards of music and they fell in love. Every practice session was another step on their journey toward being better musicians.