Visualise a thinner future!



Check out the non-believer on the left!



I’ve often thought that it’s a rather wild claim to say – “just imagine it, and it will happen”. We have all heard of “The Secret”, and the laws of attraction, and many of us have squeezed our eyes tightly shut and wished really, really hard for something, or wished on a star, or bargained with God.  Doesn’t always happen, sometimes it does.  A fluke, karma, the David Jones’ Santa heard the kiddies’ wishes and told the parents to buy their offspring an X-Box, or a “magic happens” kind of thing.  When it comes to weight loss, I just don’t think one can “wish” to be thin - and viola! – you’re on the cover of Vogue and Hello! with Katie chainsmoking Moss et al. I think there’s more to to it than that.



In my quest to learn more about the power of  imagining, focusing, visualising, dreaming and hoping to get what we want, I stumbled across the  Capital T, Capital S “The Secret”, and I have just read some cracking good stories about weight loss on the Secret Website (if it is secret, how is it so easy to find?).  How’s this one from “Dee B’ in Florida:

Miss Dee is the one in the pink shoes

“I told myself that I could eat whatever I wanted and lose two pounds (that's a kilo folks!!) every night in my sleep, and even wrote it for every day on my calendar. This happened for a week, and I began to get discouraged when I didn’t feel results, but I believed so what did I do… I took out all the clothes that I had in storage containers for when I would be “skinny”, and hung them in my drawers. I put the other clothes in a bag on my closet floor. I hung up all the clothes that I BELIEVED I would wear shortly. After that I released it into the universe and just let it go without doubt. I honestly believed I had done my part of the process, and ate whatever I wanted with the internal belief that it would help me lose weight.  What can I tell you except that at my cousin's wedding four weeks later I was utterly in my perfect form, with a beautiful short hairdo wearing my beautiful size 3 dress”

What’s missing for me in Miss Dee B’s “I do believe in the Secret, I do believe in the Secret, I do believe in the Secret” excerpt (the original was way too long to put in here – but hey check it out yourself) is that Miss Dee B apparently took no action to be thin, as in changing her behaviours in any way that may have caused the weight loss.  She just hung skinny clothes in her drawers (drawers with hanging space? Big drawers Dee B) and “ate whatever she wanted”.  The implication being that WHATEVER she wanted meant she didn’t follow a diet, an exercise plan, or a good eating program, -  but maybe she wanted sprouts and chicken, maybe she did follow a good eating plan but just omitted to tell us that.  The Secret stories (there’s thousands of ‘em) all imply they all did nothing to achieve their hearts desires but release their wish to the universe and “believe” in “the power”. Call me a sceptic but as Oprah said:

“Hope is not a plan, honey".

So maybe just imagining and wishing for things might not work (for me anyway, I’m not Dee B), but we do have at our disposal a very marvellous tool that can help us reach our long hoped for goals. 
So what am I talking about here?  I am talking visualisation, baby. Using visualisations as a way of helping us achieve our goals is probably a more helpful way of going about losing weight than merely wishing for it to happen. There’s even science associated with visualisation for achieving goals.
Take sport as  an example – sports psychologists have been helping athletes for years to visualise their performance, perfectly and in minute detail.  There is much research to support the efficacy of visualisation in sport.   Think back to the last Olympics – right before the start of a race or event – the athletes are not waving to the crowd or chatting idly to each other. Instead their gaze is set firmly on the finish line and they are visualising their event or race as they want it to go – perfect and error free, perfect in motion and execution.  They have rehearsed and practiced their event until they know exactly how it will all pan out, exactly where to place their feet, their arms, their torso, their head.

An effective way of visualising the future is to think about the processes that are involved in reaching a goal, rather than just the end-state of achieving it. 

Visualisation is also used in psychological therapies to help people change their behaviour. There are a couple of reasons why visualising goal achievement works:

• helps focus our attention on the steps needed to reach the goal; and
• leads to reduced anxiety.

Visualisation helps us deliberately change the way we feel, our level of autonomic arousal, our behaviour, and it helps us improve performance, reduce fears and phobias, and can also improve the functioning of the immune system. Creative visualisation help us relaxxxxxxxx.....

So how do we do it? Creative visualisation is a practice that uses the mind to focus on  visual stimuli that is pleasing or empowering - and done so in a state of calm. As our mind is guided to focus on this imagery, a feeling of already being in that place, or that state, is encouraged and stimulated. The idea is to vividly picture our goals and actions as if they already exist, as if already happening.  And here is the BEST thing: the subconscious mind does not know the difference between what is imagined and what is real - this remarkable fact is what makes regular creative visualisation so powerful.  That our mind belives it is real then helps us to take the steps needed to reach our goals.  Pretty good huh?

Try it and see what happens – I might even tell Dee B about it!

 

"I wish I may, I wish I might..."

 

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To sleep, perchance to be thin (apologies to W. Shakespeare)

So, it’s 3.45am on this wintry night and here I am surfing the net and looking for inspiration.  I thought it was better to get up than stay in bed tossing and turning worrying about producing stress hormones because I was worried about not sleeping because I was worried that not sleeping and stressing would send a signal to my body to turn on my stress response program as if there was a freakin’ famine about to start and telling my fat cells to hang on in there, we still need you in this time of need…

Okay, okay this all sounds like the rant of an insomniac, who doesn't use any punctuation whatsover, and well…I suppose it is.  But I do know sleep is important in relation to weight loss, so here are some sleep-deprived musings…

I just read about this diet that two guys in the UK published – it’s called the “Hibernation Diet”, and basically they extol the virtues of a spoonful of honey before bed to get your metabolism firing while you sleep, which turns off your stress hormones and allows your blood sugars to level and provides fuel while you sleep. It's a dream come true! (hahahaha – a bit of late night/early morning humour) .  Now, this  really is the stuff of weight-loss wishes— shedding kilos while tucked up in bed and waking up refreshed, thin  and ready for the day ahead.  And it’s all down to a spoonful of honey.  

But hold it right there – please read the fine print before you rush off to your local 24 hour Woollies in your PJs for your jar of manuka honey– our British duo then go on to say that a healthy diet that excludes white bread, chips, pizzas and sweets, and exercise that includes resistance training, pilates and yoga 5 times a week will also assist with weight loss. Well der…

Okay here’s the thing…when we are tired, sleep-deprived insomniacs the last thing we want to do when our bleary eyes greet the dawn is reach enthusiastically for our gym clothes and head on out to Fitness First for an early morning workout.  No…what we do is make a coffee and slump on the couch with eyes half shut against the brightness of day and bitch and moan about how tired we are while criticizing what stupid Mel and even-stupider Kochie are saying on "sunrise", or "good morning blah blah".  Then what we do is crave carbohydrates because our brains our saying “hey you, get your bum off the couch and feed me – NOW!!”. So we grab toast, or a pastry, or a muffin on the way to work in the vain hope that this and a few more espressos will keep us going for the day until we can once more go to bed...and try to sleep.

But seriously those two UK diet dudes are right about our hormones and they are right about sleep. Good, adequate sleep aids weight loss. (Forget the honey and the hibernation though). Why do we need sleep? It’s not only a necessary part of rejuvenating the body; but is also highly important to the metabolism.  We eat because our bodies are given signals to eat.  Those signals come from hormones called  ghrelin and leptin  and they are directly affected by sleep; and directly affect our eating patterns.  Ghrelin is a hormone that tells the body “Hey you!  You’re hungry! You need to eat!”  Leptin, our true hormonal friend, tells the body when to stop eating.  When we are sleep deprived, our bodies increase production of ghrelin and there is a decrease in the amount of leptin in action.  What does all this mean? What it means is when we don’t get enough sleep we have a higher craving for food and a lowered resistance to overeating.  Double that with the body’s need for energy and those of us trying to control our weight have a recipe for disaster! (more late night puns…sorry).

So gang, if you need to lose some kilos, get some sleep!