
INTRODUCTION
Are you stuck in a downwards spiral of self-sabotage, starting off well only to undo all your hard work when you get tired and stressed?
This is very normal, but won’t get you very far when it comes to losing weight and toning up!
In this episode of The Motivation Method Podcast, TRINITY co-founders Rob Birkhead and Ben Hughes unveil how they’ve helped over 3000 women to overcome self-sabotage and finally get the results they want.
KEY LESSONS
1. Tire Yourself Out And You Have No Choice But To Self-Sabotage
A lot of us take on too much – work, kids, activities, a busy social life… The result?
We run ourselves into the ground.
When we exhaust ourselves, we seek out something… anything to make ourselves feel better.
The quickest and easiest way we all know is to take comfort in food or drink.
However, these don’t help with losing weight!
So one very important thing is to take time out for yourself.
Clear some of your schedule, be more selective with your activities and MAKE some time for you!
After all, no one else is going to do that for you.
2. Putting Everyone Else First Can Mean You Destroy Yourself
A lot of people (especially mums) are natural carers.
They love to help people out and help other people to feel good and supported.
However, this is a double-edged sword. Whilst the other person may benefit, it’s often at the expense of your energy and ultimately you getting what you want!
You see, if you take on too much yourself and dedicate every minute to helping others, you’ll have no time or energy to help yourself.
Eating well and taking care of yourself requires you to MAKE time for yourself and to do that you need to start saying “no” to more things.
A lot of people feel guilty about this, so they don’t do it, but this then leaves them out of shape and unhappy.
So the solution is to start putting yourself first every once in a while.
After all, if your tired, miserable and depressed inside, other people will realise that whether you say so or not and they will not get the “full you” – they will get a snappy, tired and dulled-down version of the real you!
3. We Mask The Real Problem With Little Problems
For a lot of people, self-sabotage is actually just the symptom of a bigger problem.
Whilst for some people it’s as simple as taking too much on and needing to say “no” to a few more things, for many of us self-sabotage occurs because we’re not dealing with our deeper problems.
Deeper problems are kind of like trying to hold a beach ball under water.
You can do it for a while (e.g. the first half of the day, or week) but when you get worn down, the problem will burst to the surface, just like a beach ball held underwater.
This can often manifest itself as self-sabotage – comfort eating to make yourself feel better.
If you don’t deal with your deeper problems and continue to mask them they’ll take their toll on your body, your health and your happiness.
We make a start on this process with our Unstoppable breakthrough event, although there are many good books that can help too such as “Why Good People Do Bad Things” by Debbie Ford.
4. Strict Approaches Can Lead To Lack Of Self-Belief
A lot of people self-sabotage because they don’t believe in themselves.
They’ve tried diet after diet, and whilst they may have lost a few pounds on each one, long-term their weight has creeped up and up and they blame themselves.
The real reason is they’ve often followed overly strict and complex diets.
These leave little room for error and don’t teach you how to fit healthy eating and exercising around your life (they tend to take it over instead), so if you do slip up you feel like a failure.
So the solution to this is two-fold:
- Get a more flexible approach that fits around your life rather than taking it over
- Realise that failure isn’t the opposite to success and in fact, it’s a stepping stone to success
Whatever approach you follow, you will fall off the wagon from time to time.
The key is learning what didn’t work and working on fixing that in the future so the same mistake doesn’t happen again.
5. Build Habits To Break Free Of The Downwards Spiral
If you keep getting stuck in a downwards spiral of self-sabotaging, feeling worse about yourself and then self-sabotaging more, what you are doing right now is clearly not working.
Your current habits are keeping you stuck.
You need to break your current bad habits and replace them with better ones. Then over time these habits will become embedded in your subconscious and become easier and easier to stick to.
In order to break your habits and replace them with better ones you’ll need three things:
- An Action Plan – You need a simple structured plan to follow every day so you can be confident you’re doing the right things every day to get what you want
- Accountability – You need to be accountable to someone so that you can hold yourself to a higher standard and they can help you when you fall off the wagon
- Association – You need to be surrounded by like-minded people who are travelling the same path so that you feel supported and understood, and you can lean on them in times of need and they can do the same with you
Then all you need to do is keep going, and over a period of 3-6 months you’ll start to dramatically shift your habits and it will all become much easier!
Still struggling to get motivated to
lose weight and tone up?
To help you out we’ll need a little more information from you… click below to complete our 5-Minute Motivation Assessment and we’ll see if we can give you a solution that works for you 🙂