Overcoming All-Or-Nothing Thinking to Achieve Your Weight Loss Goals
If you feel stuck achieving your weight loss goals, you may be experiencing a thinking error known as all-or-nothing thinking.
In this article you'll learn about how this type of thinking interferes with your goals and gain specific strategies to counteract this thinking.
While you may have the perfect plan for how to reach your ideal weight, what really makes the difference between success and failure in weight loss is how you respond when you steer off the plan.
Maybe you overate, maybe you skipped a day of exercise, maybe you indulged in a little late night snack.
Whatever the case, these are the critical moments when you will decide whether to get back on track, or throw in the towel and give up hope.
It's amazing how quickly hope turns to despair and all your plans, no matter how much progress you've made, become like distant dreams.
You may have lost many pounds or gone down several sizes, but even so, it's a single slip up that seems to contradict all your past successes.
When you take a single piece of negative evidence and judge yourself on it, you are experiencing all-or-nothing thinking.
No matter how much success you've had in the past, a single failure weighs more heavily on your internal scales of justice.
As a result, you see yourself as a failure and your plans impossible to achieve.
You find yourself with negative thoughts such as the following: "I'll never lose weight.
" "I'll always be overweight.
" "There's no hope for losing weight.
" "If I don't lose weight I will never be happy.
" Once you notice that you are thinking in this way, what can you do to counteract this kind of thinking? One of the most straight-forward ways is to examine the evidence that supports your negative thinking.
Fold a piece of paper in half.
In one column, list the evidence in favor of your negative thought.
In the other column, list evidence that does not support your negative thought.
Once you've done so, decide whether your negative thought is completely true.
Another strategy to help counteract all-or-nothing thinking is to imagine what you would say to a friend who made a similar action.
What would you say to him or her? Would you condemn him or her, or would you offer kind words of support? A third strategy for overcoming all-or-nothing thinking is to imagine you are in a court of law, presenting evidence to a judge.
Once you've presented all of the evidence (it's helpful to make a list of positive and negative evidence), what do you think a judge would say? Would the judge tell you that you will NEVER lose weight? Or would you receive a more balanced judgment? All-or-nothing thinking can prove a major obstacle to weight loss.
Overcoming it just may be the key to your staying firmly in control of your plan and not losing sight of the overall goal.
In this article you'll learn about how this type of thinking interferes with your goals and gain specific strategies to counteract this thinking.
While you may have the perfect plan for how to reach your ideal weight, what really makes the difference between success and failure in weight loss is how you respond when you steer off the plan.
Maybe you overate, maybe you skipped a day of exercise, maybe you indulged in a little late night snack.
Whatever the case, these are the critical moments when you will decide whether to get back on track, or throw in the towel and give up hope.
It's amazing how quickly hope turns to despair and all your plans, no matter how much progress you've made, become like distant dreams.
You may have lost many pounds or gone down several sizes, but even so, it's a single slip up that seems to contradict all your past successes.
When you take a single piece of negative evidence and judge yourself on it, you are experiencing all-or-nothing thinking.
No matter how much success you've had in the past, a single failure weighs more heavily on your internal scales of justice.
As a result, you see yourself as a failure and your plans impossible to achieve.
You find yourself with negative thoughts such as the following: "I'll never lose weight.
" "I'll always be overweight.
" "There's no hope for losing weight.
" "If I don't lose weight I will never be happy.
" Once you notice that you are thinking in this way, what can you do to counteract this kind of thinking? One of the most straight-forward ways is to examine the evidence that supports your negative thinking.
Fold a piece of paper in half.
In one column, list the evidence in favor of your negative thought.
In the other column, list evidence that does not support your negative thought.
Once you've done so, decide whether your negative thought is completely true.
Another strategy to help counteract all-or-nothing thinking is to imagine what you would say to a friend who made a similar action.
What would you say to him or her? Would you condemn him or her, or would you offer kind words of support? A third strategy for overcoming all-or-nothing thinking is to imagine you are in a court of law, presenting evidence to a judge.
Once you've presented all of the evidence (it's helpful to make a list of positive and negative evidence), what do you think a judge would say? Would the judge tell you that you will NEVER lose weight? Or would you receive a more balanced judgment? All-or-nothing thinking can prove a major obstacle to weight loss.
Overcoming it just may be the key to your staying firmly in control of your plan and not losing sight of the overall goal.