The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies - Meri Raffetto [40]
The chapters in this part help you formulate specific behavior-change goals to help you meet your individual weight-loss goals and understand the process of successfully developing new habits. They also explain behaviors and strategies designed to increase your metabolic rate. Finally, to help you implement a lower-glycemic style of eating, this part provides you with healthy-eating strategies as well as smart grocery-shopping strategies so you can stand a better chance of purchasing healthy, low-calorie, low-glycemic foods your entire family will enjoy.
Chapter 6: Preparing Yourself for a Successful Weight-Loss Program
In This Chapter
Recognizing the power of positive, reason-driven thinking
Discovering how to set realistic and practical goals
Keeping a food journal to better understand your eating habits
Knowing what you're in for with a low-glycemic weight-loss plan
So, you're ready to get started with your new low-glycemic plan for weight loss. Congratulations! Before you jump in, though, you need to take some time to prepare yourself mentally, set some realistic goals, and make sure you know what you're in for. That's precisely what this chapter helps you do.
You may be tempted to skip this chapter. After all, you're excited and want to get started on this diet right away, right? Please resist that temptation! The strategies in this chapter can significantly increase your weight-loss success and keep you motivated for the long haul. Without them, you may find yourself floundering down the road.
Getting and Staying in the Right Mindset
People who lose weight and keep it off have one important thing in common: They have a positive mindset. They love the way they feel, enjoy food more, possess new stress-management tools, and have activities that make them feel great.
Although you may be starting this new journey excited and motivated, if you're honest with yourself, you'll probably realize that you're still thinking some negative thoughts like
I'm going to have to give up foods I love.
I'll try it, but I don't know if it'll work.
I'm going to have to exercise — and I hate exercising.
If you don't get these negative thoughts in check, self-sabotage can rear its ugly head. It turns obstacles and challenges into reasons to give up. These saboteurs show up as
Decreased focus on absorbing new information
Feeling defeated with normal challenges
Letting other areas of your life always take priority
Having no time for finding out about and trying new changes
Okay, so you get that you need a positive mindset to stay on track, but how exactly do you do that? Follow these three simple steps:
1. Create a vision.
2. Turn that vision into an affirmation.
3. Focus on using positive language in all situations.
The following sections cover each of these steps in more detail to help you put them together to create your own positive mindset about your new low-glycemic lifestyle.
Creating your vision
The first step to creating a positive mindset is to come up with your long-term goal, which I like to call your vision. Your vision is how you see the big picture, your plan that always serves to motivate you. Visions motivate because they're your ultimate desires of how you want to see your life play out. After all, you have to know where you're going before you can take the first steps to get there.
To create your vision, first think of some internal reasons why you want to lose weight and why you want to follow a low-glycemic diet in particular. Internal reasons are things that