Transformation Weight Control
www.transformationweightcontrol.com
I’ve been an athlete all my life. Baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, 100-mile bike rides, marathons, mountain climbing, All-American collegiate fencer, and more. I got to thinking about losing weight and preventing regain as an athletic event decades ago. Here’s why. I’m climbing a mountain in knee-deep, wet and heavy snow, hauling a 65-pound backpack up a 75-degree vertical angle, in wind gusts up to 50- or 60-mph, in blinding, white-out snowstorms. It could take an hour or more to climb just 100-feet under conditions such as these. And if I slip, I could slide down those same 100-feet in a matter of seconds. When I finally stop, under my own power or the slope of the mountain flattens, I look back up the mountain and think, OMG, I’ve got to go through that climb all over again. So, I either pull myself together, dig deep down in my guts to stay focused, stay positive, not let it get me down, and start again with a single step, or I turn around and go home. I don’t see this experience psychologically as any different than losing weight and preventing regain. I know you know how hard it is to lose weight and how easy it can be to gain it back. That’s where it’s the same.
There’s been a lot of research on what it takes to be a champion or Olympic athlete. In fact, excelling at any endeavor, from concert pianist to chess Grandmaster, takes the same or similar psychological characteristics as it does to be an Olympic champion. Like I said, Olympic athletes have been well studied. Here’s what champion, elite athletes, all consistently have in common:
• The Ability to Focus
• Mental Toughness
• Hope/Goal Setting Ability
• Sport Intelligence
• Ability to Cope
• Competitiveness
• Confidence
• Coachability
• Intrinsic Motivation
• High Drive
• High Optimism
• Adaptive Perfectionism
• Automaticity: The Ability to “Click into Automatic Performance”
• In control but not “forcing it” attitude
• Emotional Control: Ability to Relax and Activate
Source: Daniel Gould and Kristen Dieffenbach, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, January 2002.
I’m not saying you need to be an athlete, Olympic or otherwise, or good at all at any type of sport, to relate to this. Study that list, and think about how those characteristics are any different than the psychic energy, and yes, sometimes physical energy, it takes to lose weight and prevent regaining it. When I think about what it’s like to lose weight and prevent regaining it, and I apply it to my own experience, I always think about the mountain climbing scenario and how psychologically tough and challenging it is to trudge through knee-deep, wet and heavy snow, carrying extra weight, in extraordinarily difficult conditions, to climb just 100-feet, and how easy it is to slip and slide down that same 100-feet in a matter of seconds. Forget about the physical effort for a moment. I don’t think anything I’ve ever done is as close psychologically to losing weight and preventing regain as climbing an inhospitable mountain. How many times have you given it all you’ve got to lose a pound, and then just like that, in what can seem like an instant, you gain two back?
Experiencing the same thing over and over, maybe all of your life, or all of your adult life, requires thinking just like an Olympic athlete to succeed. You’ve all had those slips, but you can do it, the proof is that you’ve done it before, just like so many others. I assure you, you are not alone. It’s called “common humanity”. I’ve seen it happen all 43 years of my career.
This is why I think losing weight and preventing regain is just like an athletic event.
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