Who has experienced a time where you overindulged and end up eating more than what you expected? The next day, you’re beating yourself up for eating too much and not following your diet. You tell yourself this is the last time and promise to restart your plan on Monday.
The next week, you’re white-knuckling trying to follow your plan until the weekend where you reward yourself with food but end up overindulging again and the cycle repeats. We restart the plan next week or next month, promising to do better.
We keep repeating this cycle and the result is weight gain and not feeling good about ourselves because we aren’t following our plans. I was doing this for so many years! The worse I felt about myself, the more I wanted to eat.
I kept asking, “Why can’t I follow my diet? “
The thing is, when you ask yourself negative questions, your brain will find negative answers.
I found so many reasons why I couldn’t follow my diet plan.
Instead of using those for motivation, it just made me feel worse about myself.
To really get momentum and change, you want to ask useful questions instead. Asking useful questions will train your brain to seek solutions.
Instead of asking why can’t I follow my plan? A better question would be, what’s stopping me from following my plan?
By finding the obstacles, you can find solutions.
If you don’t have time to make lunch in the morning and you’re stopping at fast food, then can you plan time the night before or earlier in the week to make your lunch?
Maybe it’s the extra glass of wine you’re having when you get home from work because of a stressful day. Can you find another way to relax that doesn’t involve alcohol? Maybe it’s going for a walk or calling a friend.
The point is, if you ask crappy questions your brain will find crappy answers. You have the knowledge in you! It’s about accessing it by asking useful questions. Your brain will automatically ask crappy questions, but it’s about recognizing it and changing it to a useful question to find the solution.
Try it out: when you find yourself asking a negative dead-end question, try changing it to an open-ended useful question. You’ll often find that you have solutions to the problems!