How to Create a Healthy Mindset in 3 Simple Steps

Most of us know what to do to lose weight, yet we still don’t do it. It seems so simple, just eat healthy food and get regular physical activity, but our weight loss goals get further and further away, making it almost impossible to think we’ll ever reach them. What gives?

Although it is definitely your consistent outward actions and behaviors that will determine your level of health, true change starts on the inside. Specifically, you need the right mindset to help you gain and maintain a superior level of health that allows you to live a long and active life.

How do you get this mindset? Easy. Just follow these three simple steps:

Step #1: Let Go of Short Term Solutions

One of the most damaging things you can do to your mindset is to try to convince yourself that your healthy changes need only be short term. For example, if you believe that you only have to watch your portion sizes or control your food intake during the weight loss phase, your changes aren’t the only things that are going to be short lived – your results will be too.

Having a healthy mindset requires that you realize that your changes need to be permanent. Therefore, you’re going to have to commit to doing things that you are okay with for the rest of your life; not just the next month, six months or a year.

Step #2: Think Health Versus Weight

It is extremely easy to make your weight loss a battle of you versus the scale. However, a scale doesn’t provide the whole picture because it doesn’t differentiate between fat, muscle, and water. So, you’re going to get further ahead in developing a healthy mindset if you aim to achieve better health instead of a lower weight.

If you’re like most people, your weight fluctuates as much as five pounds a day, if not more. Therefore, it is easy to become discouraged when you did “all of the right things” yesterday, such as using your portion control plates and getting a little bit of exercise, just to step on the scale today and find out that you gained. Talk about deflating!

Although your primary goal may be to drop your weight, it should be focused more on health. This makes every positive decision you take a step in the right direction. And then you’re not focused on trying to make some square box that sits on the floor in the corner of your bathroom happy. You’re just helping yourself feel better and live longer, which is more satisfying of a goal anyway.

Step #3: Have What You Want – Within Reason

You’re probably creating a healthy mindset because you have too many not-so-healthy habits, so why would one of the steps be to give in and have what you want? Let me explain with a little experiment.

For the next week, you can have anything you want, but you cannot under any circumstances have chocolate cake. You can have candy, pie, or any other sweet dessert but a piece of sweet and creamy chocolate cake is out of the picture. Now, what just happened?

Did you find that you suddenly craved a piece of chocolate cake even though you weren’t thinking about it until I mentioned it? If so, you aren’t alone. The basis behind a diet is restriction. It is deprivation. And it is also what often leads to weight loss failure.

A healthy mindset doesn’t revolve around any of these things. Instead, it focuses on eating healthily most of the time, but also giving yourself a treat every now and again too. The key to doing this successfully is portion control.

If there is something that you want to eat and cannot seem to get your mind off it, commit to eating it with a SlimPlate portion control plate or bowl so that you get just enough. Being a healthy person shouldn’t mean never enjoying the foods you love – even when it comes to chocolate cake.

Take these three steps and you’ll be well on your way to having a healthy, weight-loss inducing mindset. Share them with a friend and take the steps together to ensure that you meet and even exceed your health and fitness goals.

What types of positive things do you say to yourself when it comes to get healthy? How do you avoid the pitfalls of diet-related thinking?