Weight Loss and the Law of Threes
Recall your last attempt at weight loss and I’ll bet that even if you made it through the first three days of your new diet or exercise regimen, your initial enthusiasm evaporated within the first three weeks. Sadly, you probably added this to a long list of failures with respect to your weight, leaving you even more disheartened and desperate. Desperation that makes you even more susceptible to the next big diet or exercise craze that comes along, setting you up to repeat this cycle again and again.
So before you head down that path again, consider that there are principles at work when you’re trying to lose weight – common hurdles with common timeframes that everyone experiences. In coaching my clients, I’ve learned just how predictable these top three hurdles are and why it’s important to heed them if you want to get past your weight loss barriers.
The 3-Day Detox
Constantly indulging your system creates dependencies around foods, where going even a single day without them may be difficult. A 3-day hiatus, where you stem all indulgences, is your best way of resetting your system for weight loss. The short-term nature of the detox, coupled with the powerful “I did it” messages it generates, make for an excellent jumpstart to your efforts. For many people, this is the toughest hurdle so don’t attempt this alone! Line up someone to share your “I did it” with at the end of each day and celebrate this early success together.
The 3-Week Panic
If your past attempts involved redirecting all of your energy to change your outward behaviours, like dieting and exercising, even your most Herculean efforts would have waned once life started happening again. Not surprisingly, this 3-week mark is the typical drop off point for most people. It takes a deeper reservoir of strength to create sustainable change, strength that only comes from doing the inner work of transforming your beliefs on weight loss. Ironically, this often brings a panic response with it, as people start to realize change is inevitable! Recognizing our natural resistance to change – which is simply our fear of the unknown – will help you work through this hurdle.
The 3-Month Wall
If you’re investing equal energy into transforming your beliefs, you will have made it this far. In fact, you’ll start to realize you’re not going to be the same after this 3-month period. Again, you may resist only because you’re not sure who you’re going to be! But what’s waiting for you are some profound shifts in your core beliefs and when your beliefs shift, your behaviours naturally start to realign, making them much easier to sustain while leading you to a significant change in your quality of life.
Hurdles are the benchmarks of our growth. Each one brings a level of discomfort and even some messiness to work through in order to get past it. But hurdles also bring reward. Getting past one alters you and moves you toward a better version of yourself, finally releasing you from that cycle of failed attempts. The one thing to remember is that no matter how much effort it takes to work through a hurdle, it will always be eclipsed by the deep satisfaction you’ll experience on the other side of it. And that’s the kind of predictability we can all enjoy.
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Hurdles present us with important choice points as we work through them. A choice point is a moment of truth – a gift of discomfort – where we choose between the congruent (inner strength) or incongruent (survivor strength) path, depending on our capacity at that time.
Since our capacity (our best) is different on different days, the key is not to force yourself to take the congruent path nor judge yourself for taking the incongruent path. Simply consider the principle at work that says if you take the incongruent path, you are agreeing to return to this moment – this discomfort - to retrieve the truth you don’t want to be with right now. So think carefully and ask yourself the following questions:
- Do I wish to go through this discomfort all over again in the near future?
- Or am I willing to create a different experience and claim an increment of progress for myself?
Even if you have faced this discomfort a thousand times before and always chosen the incongruent path, choosing differently just one time means you will have taken one step toward a better version of yourself, which means the power of this discomfort has now lessened for you.
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