We have been set up. I'm not sure if it's deliberate or not but we've been set up to plunk our hard earned money down for a product that has never delivered!

Today I was reading a blog. A woman had gained a little bit of weight, I'm going to say 1 pound. A small amount. She was so negative towards herself it hurt me. She had failed. She was miserable. I was devastated for her. Not because she had gained a pound but because she measured her worth on her ability to gain or lose that bit of weight.

Here is the set up. We've been told for a long time now that gaining weight is bad. It's a meme that has been planted in our mind, something that isn't necessarily true, but we've been told again and again, so many times about the epidemic of obesity and trained with the language of negativity that being overweight even the slightest is a failure. That was part one of the set up.

Part two was when they said they could help you take it off. You just had to send them billions of dollars and you'd be perfect. Wrong again. They haven't taken anything off you except some temporary pounds and a whole lot of cash.

And the third part of the set up was when they convinced you that you couldn't do it yourself. Yes you can. In fact who else is going to do it for you?

We have not failed, we've been failed!

I have a friend who has lost a whole pile of weight and guess what, no diet industry. She does belong to a non-profit support group but she's worked her behind off(literally she'd say) to lose the weight and she's fit and healthy and doing well. A complete success. But the diet industry did nothing, she did the legwork all herself. She decided. She did the work. She succeeded.

I'm also pretty sure she didn't lose it by having a failure mindset. I'm sure she also has worked a lot on her relationship with food, It's likely she will be maintaining the lifestyle she's adopted that has led to her success for good. I think she's one of the 5%.

Long term I feel the best bet to losing weight is by gaining a healthy food relationship. The key to being in optimal health is to avoid the diet industry, exercise, eat right, address your disordered eating honestly and be patient with yourself.

Set a goal but don't let it be a number on the scale. I've set my goal, it's to have a healthy fit body and even more importantly eat for the right reasons. I haven't placed a time line on my goal. I just know it's there and moment by moment I'm addressing the issues that placed me here in the first place.

I won't be set up again.
Affirmation: I feel the delight that will come when I have a healthy fit body and a healthy fit mind. I see evidence daily that I can do it by reprogramming the memes that have infiltrated my belief system but that bear no truth under further investigation.

Namaste