Anna Scheucher
Are you trying to lose weight?
It’s not always easy, especially with society telling you all kinds of different half-truths.
Now, I wanted to lose weight for a long time, but it only started working about a year ago when I found a way to manifest that for myself.
And the best part? After years of struggling, it suddenly felt effortless! I’ll let you in on that secret today:
1) Have a good reason to lose weight
Having a really great reason to lose weight will help propel you through the obstacles you might encounter along the way.
Why do you want to lose weight? Do you have a specific event coming up that you want to look your best for?
Maybe you want to boost your confidence and make yourself more attractive to the people around you.
Having a reason will also help you stay focused. If you’re trying to lose weight without really being clear about why you want that, you’ll likely slip up sooner or later.
When you have a specific reason for doing something, it’s a lot easier to stay consistent.
But remember, your reason for wanting to lose weight has to be genuine and authentic.
It’s not enough to just say, “I want to lose weight.” You need to identify why you want to lose weight.
What difference will it make in your life? What will you be able to do or experience once you’ve lost the weight?
You can write these goals down and keep them where you can see them.
They’ll serve as a helpful reminder to stay focused on making those changes a reality for yourself.
Now, I’m gonna be honest with myself, I didn’t think about it at first, but I REALLY struggled with this step.
When I sat down a year ago and tried to think about why I truly wanted to lose weight, at first, the only thing that popped into my head was “so that I look like everyone on Instagram.”
And it’s not like that was a bad reason, but I knew deep down that it wasn’t the right one for me.
It wasn’t something I truly cared about and it didn’t resonate with me.
You see, just because society has certain beauty standards doesn’t mean that you need to conform to them, and I knew that deep down, which is why this wasn’t a good reason for me at all.
So I kept thinking about why I wanted to lose weight. And after a while, it hit me: “I want to be healthy and feel good.”
I realized that when I got older, I wanted kids, and I wanted to be healthy in order to play with them.
But not just that, I wanted to stay healthy and active enough to also play with my grandkids once they grow up.
I know this is ages away, but I also realized that when it comes to my long-term health, the time to start worrying about it is now.
So that’s my reason for losing weight.
And when I keep that in mind while making decisions, it makes it a lot easier.
That was the thing that really made me care! That’s what stuck with me and helped keep my focus on manifesting my goal.
2) Identify why you haven’t lost weight, yet
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably tried losing weight a few times in your life.
But every time, you end up getting frustrated and giving up. It’s always a cycle of restrict-binge-cry-repeat.
So why does this keep happening? Well, for starters, you might be punishing yourself for not being where you want to be.
You might be focusing on how much you’ve failed and how terrible you feel about yourself.
This is the wrong way to go about things. Instead, try to focus on the challenges you’ve faced and how you’ve overcome them.
Did you have a particularly busy period at work? Did you have a loved one pass away? Did you have an injury keep you from moving as normal?
Were you in a particularly difficult financial situation? Did you move to a new place and have a hard time adjusting?
All these things can stop you from reaching your ideal weight.
Identifying what’s been holding you back will help you move forward and avoid making the same mistakes.
Plus, it’ll help you be kinder towards yourself for the effort you’ve already put in.
Now, there are tons of outer circumstances that can make losing weight even harder, but what really flipped the switch for me, personally, was looking at my internal factors.
I was prone to overeating, and I knew that. I never had an issue with working out, I really liked moving my body, but I would binge at the end of every single night.
Restricting myself heavily would work for a day or two, and then I was back in that binge cycle, eating until it physically hurt.
Now, why was I doing that to myself?
Once I asked myself that question, a lot of stuff came up.
I started to become aware of the urge to binge and I would start to write down my feelings at that moment.
It was so interesting to see how every single time I wanted to binge, I also had a very strong underlying feeling of loneliness and emptiness.
But instead of focusing on those emotions and coping with them, my body had learned to turn to food as an escape.
So much so, that I didn’t even consciously realize it anymore, all I felt was this overpowering hunger that I interpreted as a need to eat.
I realized that if I wanted to stop binge eating, I had to start dealing with my emotions in a different way.
And there were two ways of doing so: 1) coping with them, and 2) distracting myself from them.
I tried both of them, and they both worked for me.
Coping with my emotions was not easy at first, I was used to literally trying to eat them away.
I would journal about what made me feel sad or lonely or angry or whatever emotion it was that made me want to binge eat.
In addition, I started going out more often and spending time with friends instead of sitting home alone.
All these little actions made me realize that food does bring a little bit of comfort, but eating excessively doesn’t do me any good.
3) Identify any limiting beliefs
Limiting beliefs are like little voices inside your head that keep you from moving forward.
They’re sneaky, but once you learn to identify them, they’re pretty easy to put behind you.
These are things like, “I can’t do this,” “I don’t deserve this,” “I don’t have enough time,” “I don’t have enough money,” and so on.
They’re false beliefs that we often take as truth.
We’ve allowed society, our past experiences, and even our own thoughts to convince us of these false beliefs.
As a result, we’re left feeling stuck, confused, and sometimes even hopeless.
You might not even realize you have these beliefs until you start digging around.
But you can always find ways to combat them.
You can start by asking yourself questions like, “What do I believe about myself?” and “What do I believe about the world around me?”
Then, you can start to figure out if those beliefs are actually true or if they’re false limits holding you back.
Personally, I had a deep limiting belief of “I’m not worthy of being taken care of”.
This was a really hard pill to swallow, not gonna lie.
I realized that deep down, a part of me was very hurt by things from my past.
As a result, I spent my entire life thinking that I wasn’t worthy of anything.
This was a huge problem for me because it manifested itself in all areas of my life.
I didn’t believe I was worthy of good things, so I kept attracting negative experiences.
Now: once I identified that limiting belief, I realized that it was time to finally challenge it.
Once I did that, things just started falling into place effortlessly.
4) Move your body and be mindful of what you’re eating
I’ve learned that you’re never going to lose weight until you learn to be mindful of what you eat.
It’s great to want to drop a few pounds, but if you keep eating the same way you have in the past, you won’t get very far.
Now: the crazy thing about this is that you don’t even have to limit what you eat – you don’t need to cut out every food you love.
It’s all about being mindful while you eat.
100% of my overeating happened in states of complete unawareness. I’d eat mindlessly while watching TV, stuffing more and more chips into myself.
The funny thing is, once you really take your time to eat mindfully, and you sit down and truly taste your food, you will make some strange discoveries.
I realized that some of the foods I thought I loved were actually not that great at all.
They were extremely salty or sweet to the point of having almost no taste anymore.
And some of my favorite foods I loved even more.
But when you eat mindfully and slowly, you learn to stop when you’re full.
There is so much more to this topic, like giving yourself unconditional permission to eat without guilt, etc, but I can get more into that in a future article.
After you’ve learned the art of mindful eating, the next step is to get active.
You’ve got to make time for exercise if you truly want to see results when it comes to your health.
You don’t have to do a crazy workout every day, especially if you’re just getting back into exercising.
If you’re having trouble finding the motivation to exercise, try doing something you enjoy.
You can also try doing something that challenges you, even if it seems a bit out of your comfort zone.
Just remember to be patient with yourself. You’ll get there, you just need to keep pressing forward.
As a very sustainable exercise, I love walking while listening to a podcast or my friend’s voice messages, for example.
Find something you love doing.
5) Think about what your ideal self would do
It can be tough to visualize yourself actually losing weight.
But it’s important to know what you’re aiming for.
So I encourage you to close your eyes and think about what your ideal self would do.
How would they eat? What types of exercises would they do? When would they exercise? How would they deal with stress and emotions?
Get as detailed as you can with these questions. The more real these scenarios feel, the easier it will be for you to manifest them in your life.
Keep in mind that these scenarios are just examples. Your ideal self won’t follow a strict schedule and do the same exact thing every day.
They won’t keep a strict diet and beat themselves up when they can’t follow the rigid rules all the time.
Your ideal self is the person you aspire to be. It’s the person you want to become.
Your ideal self is someone who has the confidence and courage to go after what they want.
They have a positive outlook and are focused on their long-term goals.
They know what they’re worth and aren’t afraid to speak up for themselves.
They’re kind, generous, and compassionate. They take care of their health and are passionate about living a fulfilling life.
Now: when you feel the urge to overeat on something or skip a workout even though you know it would really help your mental state, think about your ideal self.
Would they try to cope with their emotions in a different way, first?
Would they want to work out because they know it will put them in a better headspace?
Picturing your ideal self will help you to manifest weight-loss effortlessly.
6) Find healthy ways to cope with your emotions
Whether you’re trying to lose weight or not, emotions like fear, anxiety, and grief are inevitable in life.
No one is ever completely immune to negative emotions.
But finding healthy ways to cope with them will make it a lot easier to deal with them.
You can start by journaling your emotions whenever they come up.
You can also try meditating, even if you’ve never done it before.
There are apps and websites that can help. Just remember that you don’t have to go through these emotions by yourself.
There are tons of healthy strategies you can use to cope with negative emotions.
One of the best ways to do this is to identify the emotion you’re having and then find a healthy way to deal with it.
If you’re feeling sad, cry it out. If you’re feeling anxious, take a few deep breaths, or try tapping.
If you’re feeling anger, try to channel it into something productive. And if you’re feeling fear, remind yourself that it’s normal, especially when you’re taking risks.
Now: the reason that this is such an important step is what I mentioned before: many people who want to lose weight have used food as a coping mechanism for years.
If you continue to eat just because you’re sad, anxious, angry, or afraid, then you’ll never be able to lose weight.
You have to find healthy ways to cope with your emotions that don’t involve eating.
It’s such a vicious cycle: you feel bad – you eat – you feel guilty and bad – you eat more.
The only way to break out of that is to use food as fuel for your body (and as a source of pleasure, of course), and find other ways to deal with emotions.
For that, you’ll also need to identify emotional hunger from physical hunger, because they’re two very different things.
7) Don’t weigh yourself!
The best way to sabotage your efforts to lose weight is to weigh yourself on a very regular basis.
There are so many things that can throw off your body’s normal weight, including what you eat, how much water you take in, your bowel movements, etc.
If you really want to lose weight, you should be tracking your progress using your general body measurements, and frankly, just how you look and feel.
This will give you a better idea of how your efforts are progressing.
When you weigh yourself, it can be a very discouraging experience. It may make you feel like you’re getting nowhere, even though you’re doing the work.
Focus on how you’re feeling, your energy levels, and how your clothes fit instead.
If you weigh yourself and it goes up, don’t freak out.
Weight can fluctuate throughout the month due to water retention, hormones, and diet.
Now: When I seriously started losing weight, I stopped weighing myself completely.
At this point, I’m definitely at the lowest I’ve ever been, feeling amazing about myself, but I still don’t step on a scale.
The thing is, when you start exercising, even though you’re losing body fat and getting that really toned look, your weight might still increase because of your muscles.
You see, muscles weigh a lot more than fat, so even though you take up much less space physically and are smaller and leaner, you might still weigh the same as before!
That’s why I would just drop the scale, or if anything, just weigh yourself in very big intervals.
8) Don’t just visualize your ideal body, but more importantly your ideal feeling
I know, I know. This sounds like a lot of extra work.
But visualization has been proven to help people succeed at anything they put their minds to.
It’s even been proven to help people heal faster from injuries and diseases. This is because it allows you to focus all your attention on your desired outcome.
Now: it’s important that when you’re trying to manifest weightloss, you don’t just visualize your ideal body – think about your ideal feeling, too.
You see, your body might not look 100% like what you would love (because everyone’s body is different), but what you can achieve 100% is feeling confident, healthy, and happy with yourself.
9) Don’t compare yourself to others
This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make if you’re trying to lose weight: comparing yourself to others.
It’s important that you understand that everyone is different, so what works for someone else might not work for you.
Now: If you’re trying to lose weight, and your friend or family member is also on a diet and losing weight much faster than you are, it might be easy for you to feel discouraged and give up altogether.
But what I’m telling you is that in order to succeed at anything in life, we must do it in our own way and at our own pace!
It’s not a race! And no one wants to win a race when they have no idea how they got there or what they had to do along the way.
10) Skip the diet
Last but not least, unless it’s for medical reasons, skip the diet.
Don’t hop on a crazy low-carb, low-fat, or Keto diet just for the time of losing weight.
These diets won’t make you happy in the long run, and they will only promote this restrict – binge – repeat cycle.
Go back to the point about mindful eating and try that, instead.
The thing is, once you heal your relationship with food, you will learn to trust yourself more.
That will allow you to eat anything you want for the rest of your life without gaining a ton of weight!
A diet will never have to be the center of attention for you again.
Doesn’t that sound good?
The thing is when you try to manifest weightloss while being on a crazy restrictive diet, then as soon as you go off that diet, your subconscious might believe “now we’ll gain the weight again”, and guess what?
That’s what you’ll attract!
So instead, make this a mental change, learn to trust yourself around food and you will never be in this yo-yo cycle again!
You are worthy just as you are
One last thing I want you to remember is that you are worthy just as you are!
We all deserve to be happy and healthy, and that includes you!
Don’t allow anyone to make you believe that you’re not good enough or worthy of being loved!
I hope this article helped you find your way back to a healthy relationship with food and how you can manifest weightloss for yourself.
You got this!
