Mind, Body, and Spirit: What Your Weight-Loss Plan Needs

Mind, Body, and Spirit: What Your Weight-Loss Plan Needs

June 6, 2019

To become lighter in body, first become lighter in mind and spirit.

Human beings consist of three major dimensions: your mind, body, and spirit. When it comes to long-term weight-loss, the body tends to be the only focus of a weight-loss program. And although weight loss needs to address the body, the mind and spirit are interconnected as well and tend to be ignored in traditional weight-loss programs. Living with heavy thoughts and a heavy heart make achieving and maintaining a lighter body a more challenging and more discouraging undertaking. Here, we’ll address how you can focus on these three different dimensions to better tackle your weight loss.

To become lighter, live lighter.

We lose weight when we eat less, eat better, and move more. However, that only addresses the body while ignoring the mind and spirit. As a farmer prepares his field before planting, we also improve our results by preparing our mind and spirit. We want to create an environment where all of our dimensions are aligned toward this goal of living lighter.

To do so, we need to identify three basic phases:

  1. Preparing
  2. Acting
  3. Maintaining

Of these, preparation is likely the most important for those who have had difficulty losing or maintaining weight loss in the past. It is possible to begin preparing and acting — or even preparing, acting, and maintaining — at once, but again, this may not be the best strategy for those who haven’t had success.

The steps for preparing involve improving our relationship with ourselves, identifying our motives and resistances, and beginning to learn strategies designed to reach our goals. These goals need to address all three dimensions: mind, body, and spirit. To make it easier to address all three, we focus on mood — which is the intersection of mind and spirit — and food.  We also lay out a plan of action to actually begin eating, moving, thinking, and living differently. Finally, we maintain our new lifestyle by simply adjusting our new habits to a level of intake, thought, and action that keeps us set in our new body and lifestyle.

It helps to break these general steps into a more specific set of actions.

Preparing

  1. Begin building an improved level of self-awareness and self-acceptance
  2. Begin building an improved awareness of personal motivations and resistances
  3. Design a set of goals for both outcomes and behaviors that are consistent with motivations and resistances. Include goals for all three dimensions: mind, body, and spirit
  4. Determine how you want to monitor progress with both mood and food
  5. Begin learning basic food and mood facts
  6. Decide on a strategy for losing weight by designing or choosing a diet and exercise program
  7. Decide on a strategy for improving mood

Acting

  1. Implement the plans
  2. Monitor, evaluate, and update the goals and the methods as you increase self-awareness and self-mastery

Maintaining

  1. Begin to determine your maintenance plan
  2. Implement the maintenance plan
  3. Monitor, evaluate, and update the maintenance plan

Of course, each of these steps become highly individualized. We may have more steps or fewer, and each might look different for different people. But the outcome remains the same for all: live lighter in body, mind, and spirit.