Are You Ready to Lose Weight For Good? Five (5) Questions to Ask Yourself.

You may be ready for the best year of your life.

Photo by Simone Secci on Unsplash

1) Can you accept the reality that you will need to make permanent changes in your habits? (Dieting does not solve the problem.) If you can, you may be on your way to success.

• You don’t have to like this idea. You just have to accept it. You must be willing to change.
• It won’t be as bad as you might imagine it will be. In fact, you’ll probably like the new habits better. You’ll find them more rewarding.
• You don’t have to give up good food and enjoying it, having drinks, or going to restaurants and parties.
• You don’t have to eat food you don’t like, use diets you don’t like, or join a gym and exercise a lot.
• But you will have to change. But it’s not just a matter of deciding to change. It’s not just a matter of making up your mind. That’s the start. You need learn how to change.

2) Are you willing to do the work to learn and use technique you are not familiar with?

• Personal change is rarely accomplished by sheer force of will. Application of psychological techniques, skills like self-programming, self-hypnosis, cognitive behavior therapy, and behavior therapy are what makes you have real will power.
• Learning these skills takes some work, like learning a sport or a musical instrument. No one can do it for you. But anyone can master these skills. However, just learning about them does not make change happen.
• Knowing what these skills are is not what makes you succeed. Using them does. Knowing about the skills to ride a bike does not give you the ability to ride a bike. You actually have to apply the knowledge and then practice the skills. After a while it comes naturally, automatically, “like riding a bike”. It’s the same with the skills for self-change. Reading about them and knowing about them intellectually does not get you anywhere. Practicing them does.

3) Are you willing to march to a different drummer, swim against the stream?

• In America, you will be out of step with the crowd if you want to lose weight and keep it off. You will probably be out of step with friends, family and people at work.
• 70% of Americans are overweight. 40% are obese. Americans eat way too much food, and unhealthy food at that. As I said, you can eat the food you like and enjoy it, but you can’t be careless and eat like the rest of the crowd who are constantly overeating. You’ll have to be the “odd man out” and take pride in it to be successful.

4) Are you willing to become more of a “foodie” than you are now?

• I’ve always liked eating more than the average person, and for a while I thought I needed to be less food oriented than I was. Wrong. I needed to become more of a foodie, an expert, an artist, a virtuoso.
• Becoming more of a foodie does not involve giving up enjoyment or a focus on food. It involves the way you enjoy and focus on food. And it’s better.

5) Are you willing to give up some of the things you’ve believed, to consider they were mistaken and to consider some truths that you thought were unbelievable and untrue?

• Before we can even remember, we have developed our beliefs and our worldview in a way we were not aware of, programmed by a hypnosis we did not understand.
• Dare to consider that what you have come to believe may be an illusion. Dare to study the way your mind works and discover a new healthier reality.

If you can answer these 5 questions with a “yes”, you may be ready to solve your weight problem for good, to lose your excess weight permanently. If you follow me, you’ll do that and more.

William Anderson before and after his 140 pound permanent weight loss.

William Anderson is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, the author of “The Anderson Method of Permanent Weight Loss” (paperback and Kindle at Amazon, audiobook at Audible). He was obese until his early thirties when he lost 140 pounds and has kept it off for 35 years. Since then he has made it his life’s work teaching thousands how to successfully manage their weight.