How many times have you tried to lose weight? How many times have you hoped “this time will be the time?” How many times has your “different” turned out just like the many times you’ve tried to lose weight before? You want to lose weight, you plan to lose weight, and you try hard to lose weight and it doesn’t happen.
It’s discouraging and worse, it sets a pattern that’s hard to break. The pattern becomes ingrained with your belief system. The beliefs are undermining They affect your actions and those actions halt your success. You believe your actions are out of your control. You know you need to change them but you tell yourself you are unable to do so.
If that’s true, then how can you really make this weight loss attempt different? What can change the beliefs that drive your actions? Having a role model is effective. Finding a person who shares the challenges that stand in your way and has overcome them is the perfect role model. You relate to that person and you know if he or she can be successful, then it’s possible for you to be successful too.
Your most effective role model can be you. There is nobody who knows your challenges more than you do. While it’s motivating to say, “if she can do it, then so can I,” but it’s even more motivating to say, “I have seen myself do it, and that’s the proof I need.”
“Role models are only of limited use. For no-one is as important, potentially powerful and as key in your life and world as you.”
― Rasheed Ogunlaru
You can be your own role model. All it takes is a smart phone and a friend to operate it for you. You decide what are the actions you want to see yourself taking to reach your weight goal. It might be one of the following:
- Eating smaller portions
- Packing fruit and vegetables for snacks and enjoying them
- Engaging in physical activity
- Making a grocery list and sticking to it at the supermarket
- Keeping a food diary
- All of the above
If you don’t have a video camera, a phone capable of shooting video will do. If you don’t have a friend to do the videoing, use a selfie stick.
Once you know what behaviors you want to reinforce you actually do them while your friend videos it on your phone. It may take several tries to get good videos. Think of yourself as an actor.
Your character is you doing things that feel good, make you happy and will get you to goal. It may feel silly at first. That’s okay, work through the silliness until you can give a convincing performance.
Those clips make you a role model for yourself. Watching them often helps reinforce those actions. You can be what you need to finally get to goal and reinforce the actions that will keep you there.
