Willpower Makes You Fat!

If you are like most people, you have probably had several short-term successes in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Most adults find they can stick to a diet or exercise regimen for a few months, but have difficulty maintaining a lasting commitment to healthy living. We are facing a worldwide obesity crisis and while people spend billions of dollars on fad diet and exercise programs, the problem of obesity continues to wreak havoc on the health and well-being of hundreds of millions of people all over the world. It is common knowledge that being overweight causes a wide array of health problems, but what most people don’t realize is that the problem is less about what diet you are on and more about how you are deciding to live your life.  Furthermore, willpower (that thing we blame for our weight gain) has nothing to do with the problem either!

The fact is, most diets work as long as you are on them, and exercise works as long as you continue to challenge yourself physically, but thinness and fitness are not finite. If you lose 20 lbs, you have to work to keep it off. If you exercise and gain muscle, you have to keep exercising in order to stay firm. Most people simply are not willing to embrace a healthy lifestyle for their entire lives, but this is what needs to happen in order to conquer your weight and fitness challenges forever. 

People engage in battling their will, and then give up trying, but they've got it all wrong. Willpower is not the problem!

There is a widespread belief that a healthy diet and regular exercise are all you need to be healthy, but this is like putting a Band-Aid on a shark bite, and I’ll tell you why. There is a third essential component that no gadget or pill can fix, and doesn't require an ounce of willpower. In fact, it negates the need to have willpower entirely. 

There needs to be a three-pronged approach to health and wellness if it is going to last. The secret to being able to find the discipline to embrace a lifetime of healthy living involves changing three critical relationships. Change your relationship with food, change your relationship with exercise, and change your relationship with yourself and you will have no problem keeping your weight and fitness at an optimal level. It is the relationship with yourself that is the most critical element. Caring about your health, caring about the way you look, caring about the way you feel, and caring about how your mental and physical state affects your loved ones is the only thing that will get you to on the health and fitness bandwagon forever. 

Most people trying to lose weight or get fit are doing it for the wrong reasons. They tend to think in terms of short-term effort. Often it is because they want to look good for an occasion, they want to be more attractive, or their doctor told them to lose some weight to avoid health problems. Intellectually, we all know that we put our health at risk when we allow ourselves to become overweight, but we do it anyway. Here’s the reality. When we know something is bad for us, but we do it anyway, it is because we don’t really care about ourselves. The problem isn’t just that we are eating too much or that we are not exercising. The real problem is that we have lost that connection with our inner-self and we stopped caring about the consequences of our decisions.

Let’s face it. Most of us become overweight or unfit because we have given ourselves permission to be that way. At some point, you looked at your situation and said, “I don’t care.” That’s a sad place to be because when you stop caring about yourself, you are on some level, lost and unwilling to be truly kind to yourself. I know how that feels, because I’ve done it myself. I got tired of yo-yo dieting and always having to watch what I eat, but then I hit a point where I was afraid of where I might end up, so I changed my thinking. At first, I just changed my relationship with food. Then I recognized that I needed to change my relationship with myself in order to take control of my life, so I worked on that for a while. Eventually, I made my way to the gym and bit by bit, I got myself to a place where I was doing more, getting fitter and stronger and taking control of other areas of my life too! I am living a joyful, healthy life, now and I help others do the same.

The obesity crisis in the town where I live is especially alarming. It prompted me to make the decision to do something to help others change the way they feel about themselves so they can be healthy in every way. I became a success coach and then came up with the idea of starting a group coaching program called Belly Busters™ as a way to help people take control of their lives. Each of us is responsible for our own mental health and physical health and as long as we are alive, we need to think differently about how we choose to live. We need to make better choices and repair our relationship with food, exercise and, above all, ourselves. In Belly Busters™, members change their mindset and build better habits as they receive education, set goals, discuss challenges, support each other, and build accountability so that the habit of healthy living continues for a lifetime, rather than a few months.

In Belly Busters, I teach people how to feel good about themselves and how to repair that broken relationship with their inner-self so they can adopt a lifestyle of healthy living that will stay with them for as long as they live.

If you would like to join or start a program at your location, message me or contact me through my website at www.reneecormier.com

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