What do you want your body to look like by the end of 2012?

Now is a great time to decide what you want to achieve in your physical health for 2012.

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to lose weight and get in better shape?  If you did, you are not alone. Losing weight and getting in better shape are the most popular New Year’s resolutions.

Making a resolution is great.  Keeping it is the challenge.  According to Resolution statistics, 25% of people have already dropped their resolutions after  just the first week.  By the end of January, 36% of people will have totally dropped their resolutions.  WHY?

It gets worse for those without a goal or resolution….According to the American Psychological Association people who have made a goal like losing weight are 10 times more likely to succeed if they made a New Year’s resolution.  You can only imagine how highly unlikely it would be for someone to lose weight without a goal or resolution.

Here’s what you need to know:

There is an emotional component that must be addressed if weight loss is to be made permanent.  It is not enough to intellectually understand what you should do.

Here are the facts; Americans spend $40 billion a year on weight loss programs and products. Diet’s simply don’t work, or they work only for a limited time.  People try diet after diet with a varying degree of success.  If you wait, there will be a new diet fad coming in the next few months, and forever after because the core problem is not being addressed.

Exercise and eating nutrient rich foods definitely works, but people don’t stay with the exercise and healthy diet even though they know they should.   WHY not?

Because there is an emotional component that needs to be addressed if weight loss is to be made permanent.

Here’s how you can get the results you want:

Step 1 – Control Your Focus

What is your day to day emotional focus?  It is specific, compelling and within your control?  Are you crystal clear on what you want to experience every day, or are you fixated on fears and uncertainties?  Is your orientation health or is it filling some emotional void?  We all have emotional needs and triggers.  What is the emotional pattern that restricts your life and prevents you from getting the results you want?  Is it anger, self pity, guilt, loneliness, self sabotage, etc…?  As you begin to shift your emotional focus, everything can change.

Step 2 – Use Tools and Strategies that Work.

What are your tools and strategies for losing weight?  Are they effective? If you want to be successful at losing weight, you have to know what tools and strategies actually work, and which ones do not.  As a contrast, you could probably tell me what to do if I wanted to gain weight and get out of shape.

Many strategies are built upon an emotional foundation, which must be disrupted and replaced by something that feels better, and is better for you.  Simply getting rid of a weak strategy usually becomes an opportunity for a different weak strategy to take its place when the emotional connection is not broken.  Strategies are only as good as the emotional charge that drives them.

Step 3 – Resolve Inner Conflicts

You can have a powerful focus to create change, and the right tools and strategies, and yet if you have an inner conflict, the real change you want will never happen.  This is usually the challenge for people who say that they have tried everything, but nothing seems to work.

Is food being used to meet some emotional need, or as a substitute for other things in life?

Does food bring a feeling of certainty and comfort to dull pain or ease fear?

Are you using food to manage things that food can’t fix?  For example if a relationship is not fulfilling, food might meet your emotional needs at a very low level, but even when your needs are met at a low level, it can become a habitual pattern.

When something in your life upsets you, do you solve the problem or use food to manage your emotions?

Are you willing to make a commitment to yourself to understand why you might be overweight or out of shape in order to get the results you want?  Can you tell yourself the truth, and not make it worse than it really is?

Remember, you are more than anything that could have ever happened to you in your life, or ever will. Can you see things better than they are right now, and feel it?  This is simply an emotional muscle that you can easily make strong when you resolve inner conflict.

Are you undervaluing yourself?  Are you in a reactive pattern where instead of creating your life, you are reacting to others limitations?

Whenever you choose to change something, you must draw a clear line between the emotional states and habits that are good for you, and the emotional states and habits that will cause you pain.  Now, draw the line, and never go back.

This requires a commitment.  A commitment to feed the courageous part of you that yearns to step up and allows you to lead the life you truly deserve.  The weight loss and fitness happen as a result of honoring the true nature of who you really are.

And the real you is more than enough.  The illusion is that you had to change.  The truth is that you just have to remember who you are.

These 3 steps will free you enough for the weight loss to simply happen naturally, because when you know who you are and honor yourself, you know what to do.