CHANGE THROUGH LOVE, NOT HATE

Hi all-

I notice a continuing trend in a lot of people who struggle to lose weight where what triggers us to lose weight in the first place is something negative like hating how we look or how we feel. We use terms like loathing and frustration and disgust and a million other words that fill our thoughts.

These thoughts, I think, serve a purpose in what they do: they're the fire they gets us started.

For permanent change, however, I think these negative thoughts burn us out.

I look at people who have lost a lot of weight and kept it off. They do this now with a positive mindset. They keep going with this positivity. If they fall off the wagon, they get right back on within a day or 2 or 3. It doesn't matter how long, but they do it.

They might even re-use the negativity as a trigger, but the negativity doesn't define their weight loss journey itself.

Personally, like many others here, I've lost so much weight in my life, that it'd be combined into twice what I weight now. I often gained it back, and I'm pretty usre that the reason I gained it back was having the wrong mindset. If our journey is plagued with self-hate, self-doubt, with daggers shooting out of our eyes at the mirror, with a fierce battle against the scale, then the journey's exhausting and not feeling positive enough to have that daily inspiration.

I want to encourage all of us to work toward this positivity. I want to lose my excess weight one last time and never need to lose it again. And I want to be smiling as I do it.

Someone once told me, "treat yourself as you would treat a small child, with love."

Only love has the power of positive change.