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INTRODUCTION

Many people want to lose weight. What’s the first step? I guess you’d expect to hear something about reducing calories and getting down the gym, however, my experience with the thousands of people I’ve helped over the years suggests that the first step should have nothing to do with diet or exercise – instead it should involve sorting out your state of mind. Getting in the right ‘head space’ – being mentally ready – is something you’ll need to master for successful long-term weight management. Why? I see many clients with the keenness to achieve their weight loss goals, but they set off with false ideas – about how much they need to lose, how quickly it can be lost and how easy it will be. Attempting to achieve unrealistic goals means you are more likely to fail – either by not getting the result you wanted or by finding the plan too difficult to stick to and giving up. Either way, setting yourself up for failure in this way is bad for your self-esteem and confidence.

In contrast to those who are very keen, are the clients who have been through the weight loss mill so many times that despite saying, ‘I really want to lose weight this time’, at the back of their mind they are in fact saying ‘here we go again – don’t expect this will work but I’m desperate, so I’ll give it a go’. In effect, they are setting themselves up to fail. The subconscious mind is a very subtle but persuasive thing and you only need to suggest failure for it to become a likely part of reality.

Many individuals report feelings of great self-esteem once they have lost weight. Why is that? Does being thinner make you a better person? Or is it more to do with the good feelings associated with achieving what you set out to do? Obviously losing weight doesn’t make you a better person but whatever you think, I believe that building self-esteem initially is pivotal to successful weight loss. Self-esteem is not a product of weight loss but the foundation for it. After all, you have to believe you are worth the time, effort and work involved in achieving and then maintaining your goal size and weight.

Take your clothes off – go on, take them off right now. I’m absolutely serious! Go and take them off and stand in front of a full length mirror completely naked. Take a good look. Look at yourself from the front and then from the side and back. What do you see?

The chances are, what you see and the body you have are two completely different things. How you see yourself is described as your ‘body image’. This isn’t something fixed in concrete and it isn’t necessarily grounded in reality. In fact, body image can be affected by all kinds of things. For example, in one interesting study, subjects who were made to consume a bowl of ice cream before having to choose a body silhouette most like their own opted for a larger outline than the women who ate nothing. It’s as if those women felt they’d done something wrong by eating the ice cream and therefore judged themselves more negatively.

If you’re anything like the average woman, you aren’t at all happy with what you see in the mirror. A recent survey showed 95 per cent of women are unhappy with their body shape. What’s more, we think that our inability to look as slim and fit as we want to is down to our own failures. Most disturbingly, ‘failing’ in one area of life (i.e. not having the ‘perfect’ body) has a knock-on effect on confidence and self-esteem in other areas of life. A negative body image is closely linked to poor self-esteem. The point here is that deciding to accept your body, right here, right now, how it is, is crucial to your success. Okay, so you might want to make some changes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t think positive about some aspects of yourself.

See if you can guess which of these percentages goes with which question.

Such widespread dissatisfaction with our bodies makes shocking reading, doesn’t it? You are more than what you see in the mirror and to move beyond the crash diet–weight gain cycle, you need to accept yourself and value yourself enough to instigate some positive changes. Making an enemy of your body is a losing battle, as you will only be fighting yourself.

So, before we even begin to look at diet and exercise, we’re going to work on getting you into the right mental space to drop a size for life. This section is literally about stripping things back to the bare bones and then building back your self-esteem, layer by layer, in order to give you the appropriate foundation for dropping a size. And the great thing is, layering these simple skills and techniques will not only get you dropping a size, it will also have a knock-on effect in other aspects of your life, too.

60% 5% 90% 56% 0% 48%

1 A survey asked, ‘would you change anything about your body if you had the chance?’ What percentage said ‘I’m happy as I am, thanks.’

2 What percentage of women overestimate their size?

3 What percentage of normal weight women report themselves overweight?

4 What percentage of British women are dieting at any one time?

5 What percentage of the female population can achieve the current media ‘ideal’ of thinness?

6 What percentage of survey respondents when asked, ‘would you rather be thinner or smarter’ said they’d prefer to drop pounds?

The answers are

1 (0%),

2 (90%),

3 (56%),

4 (60%),

5 (5%),

6 (48%)

HOW TO USE SECTION ONE

This section takes you through seven strategies that will help you understand the importance of engaging your mind – and not just your body – in your weight loss efforts. Each strategy builds upon the next, making each new one easier to understand and implement. Layer by layer the strategies build up, leading you towards your goal of creating the sort of mindset needed to drop a size for life.

Because each strategy builds the foundation for the next, you will need to go through each one methodically, and feel happy with it, before you can successfully tackle the next. You may find some of the steps easier to master than others, but do not be tempted to skip any – each one is an important aspect of your journey to drop a size and keep it off.

This section isn’t something you’ll go through once and then forget about. As you go through life there will be times when your weight fluctuates – when events in your life may knock your confidence, affecting your mindset – and you need to get back on track. At such times, you may find you need to revisit this section, because what was originally an easy strategy to master, could, at a different point in your life, become more significant and challenging.