7 Crucial Points to Jump-start Your Weight Loss
This article first appeared on drcarp.com.
In the last 10 years, I have seen how the diet I put my patients with autoimmune disease on helped them achieve their ideal body weight. Seeing this pleasant side effect of the diet, I then designed a weight loss course that would help anyone improve their health and shed off unwanted pounds as an added benefit.
The Weight Loss Awakening System is not a quick weight loss scheme, but a course that requires you to look into these four pillars of health: Nutrition, Environmental Influences, Mental State, and Physical Movement and Activity. This course enables you to become your own authority when it comes to your health, so you can heal your body, feel better, and look your best as you reach your ideal weight.
Here are the important points that you will learn from the course to get you started on your journey to better health and weight loss:
- Four pillars of health
There are four aspects to your health, four aspects to learning how to lose weight, and four aspects to gaining health. Everything about health fits into nutrition, environmental influences, mental state, and physical movement and activity aspects of your life. We need to look at each and every one of these four pillars because they all interact in various ways. For example, toxins in your food relate to nutrition and environment. Your mental state influences your food and activity choices. All of these factors interact with each other.
- Four levels of being
There are four levels of being and that means we exist on four major levels: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. We need to be aware that in the decisions we make, sometimes we're not taking into account some of these levels of being. Notice how you reach for certain foods based on emotional or physical influences. A lot of people eat more chocolates and pastries for example when they’re tired or are having a bad day.
For a lot of people, it's emotionally-based thinking that overpowers everything else. But what if you could take a step back, look at things, exercise your power to choose and say, Okay, how is this affecting me on a physical level? Do I understand the emotional impact of making this health choice? How is it affecting my body from an intellectual perspective? Is it furthering my spiritual growth or is it somehow hindering it? It's an important aspect to pay attention to the four levels of being.
- Finding a mentor
When we're on the path to better health, we need a mentor. Even I, a trained doctor, still need a mentor when it comes to health because when I talk to my teachers, they see things in me that I'm doing wrong that are not furthering my health. There's a saying from a book called Ethics of the Fathers, which is an ancient Jewish book, that says, "Make for yourself a teacher. Acquire for yourself a friend, and judge every person on the positive side."
Find someone in your life who can be your mentor or teacher. This person doesn't have to be an expert, as long as he or she can observe and pinpoint things that you're possibly doing wrong but are not aware of.
- Building friendships
Find like-minded friends who will support you and believe in what you are doing. Have friends whom you can be comfortable with so you can stay true to yourself. This is also one of the reasons why I formed the Weight Loss Awakening Friendship Facebook Group, so the members can support and encourage each other. It gives me a lot of satisfaction and happiness to see the amount of growth and the fellowship that is forming through the group.
- Favorable judging
We should judge every person positively. Remember the saying, "Don't judge a man unless you've walked a mile in his moccasins." The reason this is important is because it softens our approach to ourselves. When we are compassionate to others, we are also compassionate to ourselves. That means we also judge ourselves less and forgive ourselves more. This practice of self-compassion helps prevent anxiety and depression and promotes general well-being, according to Harvard Health.
- Dropping expectations
Drop your expectations because when you always have an expectation of something, it means that you've already solidified the outcome. We always need to be open to possibility. It fills your life a little bit more with wonder when you drop expectations and you're open to whatever happens in your life. When we constrict the outcome of everything we do to something that we are expecting, then we are pushing away all kinds of different things that could enter our lives.
Try to drop expectations. Be open to whom you might meet and to what might happen. Doing so keeps things interesting, fresh, and alive.
- Focusing on aims instead of goals
Having an aim is better than having a goal. A goal is a fixed outcome and only God knows what the outcome will be. An aim is a direction to go. Imagine a ship moving forward. Sometimes, the waters are rough, but the ship stays on course because it is focused on the direction it needs to go. Pick your direction and decide where you want to go. Drop your expectations, leave them to God, and just move in that direction that you want to go. You want to focus on getting healthier, which is achieving the ideal body weight that is going to be optimal for your health.
Want to learn more about the Weight Loss Awakening System? Join our Facebook group and watch my weekly video lessons. Be part of a growing community of people who will support you on your journey to better health and weight loss.
