by Rita Black
Vision Shift Exercise
This exercise requires writing down your three visions, so please grab your journal, and on a new piece of paper, leaving plenty of space beneath each vision name, write Short-Term Vision, Ideal-Weight Vision, and Long-Term Weight Mastery Vision.
NOTE: You will also be guided by me in the Start the Journey Hypnosis Session to imagine these three visions. Writing them down now will help you use them later in that hypnosis session.
Important Tips for Creating Your Visions
See it. Be patient with your imagination. Sometimes you can see certain things more clearly than others.
Feel it. Sometimes you cannot see your vision as well as you can feel it. If this is true for you, pay attention to the feeling part of the vision. For instance, ask yourself, “What will it feel like to slip easily into a pair of pants I couldn’t get into last year? What would it feel like to have my daughter put her arms all the way around me?”
Hear it. You may be able to engage other senses like hearing. For instance, “What will it feel like to hear how proud my husband is that I am finally healthy?”
Create Your Short-Term Vision
Imagine a specific place and time 30 days from now. You have completed the Shift Weight Mastery Process. Close your eyes and imagine it fully, as if you are really in that place and time. What are you wearing? Where are you? Who are you with? Or, are you alone? What are you doing in the scenario? How much weight have you released? How do you feel? How does your body feel? Open your eyes.
Write what you see in your vision. Do not worry about spelling or how it sounds. Write from your heart.
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Take a deep Shift Breath and bring your 30-Day Short-Term Vision deep within you. Allow it to be the new map that guides your unconscious mind.
Create Your Ideal Weight Vision
Imagine a specific place and time in the future when you have achieved your ideal weight. Imagine it fully as if you are really in the place and time right now. What are you wearing? Where are you? Who are you with? Are you alone? What are you doing? How much weight have you released? How do you feel? How does your body feel? What is your life like now that you have achieved your ideal weight? What dreams are you living? How have your relationships with yourself, your family, friends, and others improved? How has your health improved? How has your self-confidence improved? How have your finances improved?
Open your eyes. Write what you see in your vision. Do not worry about spelling or how it sounds. Write from your heart.
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Take a deep Shift Breath and bring your Ideal Weight Vision deep within you. Allow it to be the map that guides your unconscious mind.
Your Long-Term Weight Mastery Vision
Imagine yourself in a specific place five years from now. You have maintained your ideal weight. What are you wearing? Where are you? Who are you with? Are you alone? What are you doing in the scenario? How do you feel emotionally? How does your body feel? How is life different after maintaining your ideal weight for five years? How has that affected your health? Your confidence? Your self-esteem? Your feelings of peace and self-mastery? How has your long-term release affected others in your life? How do they view you differently? Has your mastery affected them in a powerful and positive way? How has your weight mastery affected your community? How are you a leader for health in your own life?
Open your eyes. Write what you see in your vision. Do not worry about spelling or how it sounds. Write from your heart.
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Take a deep Shift Breath and bring your Lifelong Weight Mastery Vision deep within you. Allow it to be the map to guide your unconscious mind.
Good work. With your powerful mastery visions lighting the way, you can see clearly for miles! Take those first steps out onto the path. The path is solid and strong. Now let’s move on to Shift 4—100 PERCENT BELIEF.
CHAPTER 18
100 PERCENT BELIEF
Move Forward With Confidence
Once upon a time, you did not know how to walk. Walking upright is a complicated system of strength, balance, coordination, and skill. Today you walk without thinking too much about the mechanics of each step.
Watching a toddler learn to walk is fascinating. They are fearless in how they get up, fall down, and get up to try again. What keeps them going? Belief. They see other people walking, and their little brains say, I can do that, too.”
The toddler doesn’t say, “I have failed 20 times to stay on my feet today, which means I am never going to walk!” No, he keeps on believing he will walk no matter what with 100 percent conviction. And guess what? The toddler learns to walk!
How many diets have you started with the 100 percent belief that you were going to be successful at taking the weight off and keeping it off for the rest of your life? Does that number begin with a zero? Does it end with a zero as well? I thought so.
Okay, Apprentice, take a breath and reflect. So far you have forgiven yourself for struggling, decided to embark on the journey to weight mastery, and imagined your visions. You need one more thing—fuel to get there and build your thin thinking home of weight mastery. That fuel is belief.
Current Weight Success Belief Exercise
Let’s hop right into this exercise. You’re going to read the question below and produce a number in response. It’s crucial that you take the number that first pops into your mind. The number will be your UNCONSCIOUS answer, your immediate gut response to the question. (If you think too much about it, your answer is conscious and will not serve its purpose.) Ready?
Current Weight Success Belief Exercise
On a scale of 0 percent (no belief in success) to 100 percent (no doubt that you will be successful), what percentage represents your belief in your Weight Mastery success at this moment? Enter your belief percentage here: percent
Good! If you said, for example 63 percent, that would mean that 63 percent of you believes in your ability to succeed with weight mastery and 37 percent has no belief that you will succeed. I call this 37 percent Limiting Beliefs.
Get to know a little bit about the gap between your Limiting Belief percentage and 100 percent belief. The limiting beliefs holding you back are roadblocks to your future success. You are now going to shift right over all of those barriers.
Excuses, Reasons, and Stories, Oh My!
Before the printing press existed and before movies were made, ancient tribal people sat around campfires and told stories passed down to them from one generation to another. Stories still help us understand history, how things happen, and the rules of the culture we live in.
Chances are you have in your mind a story of all the reasons you struggle with weight: The who, where, when, and why of it. Your weight tale helps you process and make sense of your struggle. You become attached to it, as painful as it may be. Your story probably has some elements common to other Weight Strugglers’ stories. For example, here is my story.
RITA’S WEIGHT STRUGGLE STORY
The beginning of my story. In second grade, at the age of 7, I realized I had a weight issue when I noticed my thighs were bigger than those of the other children in my class.
The first diet or attempt to stop the weight struggle. My first diet was the 1970s Scarsdale Diet of toast, grapefruit, and all the meat I could eat!
The biggest humiliations. I couldn’t fit into my prom dress. My roommates almost didn’t recognize me after the rapid weight gain of my freshman summer.
How the weight struggle made me feel like a failure. I felt weak. I was a failure. I thought I must be crazy because I knew what to do to lose weight, but I didn’t do it. My mind and body seemed to be broken, since I always failed!
Limiting beliefs of why I will never succeed. My limiting beliefs were: I like food too much. I don’t have time to exercise. I hate sweating. I need lots of food to feel full. I can never be thin when I am like this.
You can see my Weight Struggl
e Story was quite a page-turner! Even though there was a lot of pain in my story, I was very comfortable and familiar with the reasons I would not succeed. More importantly, there was absolutely no room for any belief! I couldn’t succeed with this struggle story hogging up all the space in my head.
My Weight Struggle Story was not only about my past. It was about creating my future, too, because my beliefs and assumptions were what I brought with me on any weight loss attempt.
It’s time to explore your own Weight Struggle Story. Dig down deep and discover what weighty tales you have spun and what power they currently have over your future success.
Weight struggle Story Exercise
Answer the questions below quickly. Try not to edit yourself, and let your responses flow.
MY WEIGHT STRUGGLE STORY
Take a piece of loose paper or a new page in your journal and write on the top: “My Weight Struggle Story.” Take all the space you need to write your answers to each of the questions below.
The beginning. How old were you when your Weight Struggle Story began?
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How did you first know you were overweight? How did you feel about being overweight?
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What were the many ways in which you tried to solve your weight struggle? List the diets, fasts, cleanses, and any exercise programs you did to release weight and the results.
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What was the biggest humiliation associated with your Weight Struggle Story?
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In what ways has your Weight Struggle Story made you feel like a failure?
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What limiting beliefs do you have about your ability to release weight successfully?
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Are you beginning to see the way our Weight Struggle Story holds power over us? Weight Strugglers carry that heavy history with them wherever they go. Every weight loss attempt becomes another chapter in our story with failure the predictable ending.
Evidence for Failure or Fodder for Success
Did you know that Abraham Lincoln lost races for the Illinois State Legislature, Illinois House Speaker, US Congress, US Senate, Vice President, and US Senate before running for and winning the office of President of the United States? Do you think Lincoln let losing all those races define him as a failure, or did he use those races to build his belief in his ultimate success?
In the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR) study, 91 percent of Weight Masters failed many times, losing and gaining an average of 270 pounds, before finally becoming successful. Instead of using past failures of their struggle story as proof that they would never be successful, they shifted how they saw their past. They reframed their histories of weight struggle as a part of their journeys to weight mastery.
The term reframing means reimagining how you interpret an action or thought so that it can empower you instead of taking your power away. By reframing your Weight Struggle Story, you can shift your belief in your long-term weight release success skyrocketing to 100 percent.
Case Study: Dana’s Doubt Kept Her Down
Dana is a pretty brunette and a successful person. She’s a mother of two children, has a wonderful marriage, and enjoys a thriving career. But when I asked Dana what was her percentage of belief for Weight Mastery success, her number was 27 percent.
“I will never believe I’ll be a success at Weight Mastery because I have failed so many times. There is a big part of me that knows I am going to be a failure again,” she told me.
I asked Dana, “Are there other times in your life when things didn’t go the way you wanted, but the setback ultimately created a breakthrough of some sort?”
Dana said, “My husband and I went through a very rough patch in our marriage after the birth of our second child. Our son was born with special medical needs. I spent most of my time caring for and paying attention to him. It wasn’t intentional, but my husband and I grew apart and often argued. My husband seemed jealous of the attention I was giving my son. It was a very dark time in which we both were struggling with whether we wanted to stay married.”
“So, what happened?” I asked.
She said, “We decided to get some help, and things really changed. Today our marriage is better than it ever was. We learned how to work together as a team. We also learned to have more empathy for each other and recognize how hard it is to parent a child with special needs. Our family life is so much happier because we went through that challenging time and were forced to shift our thinking.”
“Dana, can you see how that dark time was really a part of your successful marriage story?” I asked.
Dana paused for a moment. You could read on her face the new perspective of her weight story that was forming in her mind. “So, you are saying that everything, all of my failures with my weight so far, are ultimately a part of my long-term Weight Mastery success story?”
I nodded. “At any time we want, we have the power to reframe the dark times that we have gone through during our weight struggle and reframe them from a different perspective as building blocks for our weight success story, allowing ourselves to believe with 100 percent that we can achieve weight mastery. So can you reframe your struggle and see it as part of your own successful Weight Mastery Journey, Dana?”
“Yes, I am now seeing that all of the diets I went on and all of the times I broke the diet and gained back the weight and all of the frustration I have felt with myself over the years has been preparing me to be finally figure things out for myself and release the weight once and for all.” Dana smiled, “I feel like I have just released a 100-pound weight from my heart!”
“I am so relieved that no matter what happens on my journey, I will never fail again. I believe that 100 percent! ‘Failure’ is a word I have wiped from my mind for good.” Dana C. (Released 70 pounds, maintaining for more than 2 years.)
Weight Mastery Story exercise
Are you ready? Now it is your turn to SHIFT your perceived failures of the past and use them to write your story of 100 percent belief. With the following exercise, we are going to use your past as building blocks for future success. How? By reinterpreting your Weight Struggle Story and reframing your conscious and unconscious beliefs.
I will show you how I shifted my Weight Struggle Story into my Weight Mastery Story as an example.
RITA’S WEIGHT MASTERY STORY
When did your Weight Mastery Story begin—how old were you? I was seven and in the second grade. I looked at my thighs hanging over the chair and noticed that no one else’s thighs did that. It was the beginning of my journey around weight that brought mastery into my life.
(See how I shifted the beginning of my Weight Struggle Story to the beginning of my Weight Mastery Story?)
When you focused on weight loss in the past, what worked for you?
Eating protein for breakfast keeps me feeling satisfied for many hours.
I need a treat after dinner. If I give myself one, I won’t overeat later at night.
When I exercise four times a week, I want to eat healthfully.
When I eat less than three servings of bread or starch I feel better, and I am less hungry.
Eating salads and veggies are the best way for me to feel full for fewer calories.
Support from friends and family helps me stay accountable and feel a part of something bigger than myself.
There are many things I found out from dieting and multiple weight loss attempts that I used as I began shifting from fat to thin thinking. I bet you, too, know many things that work for you from your past experiences. You can look upon these discoveries as part of your ladder to success.
What internal or external roadblocks in life have kept you from long-term success?
Not planning ahead for the weekend.
Thinking I was cured once I had lost weight.
&n
bsp; Celebrating weight-loss successes with food.
Allowing myself cheat days.
Emotional eating when on the phone with my parents.
Coming home from work hungry.
Recognizing the habits and beliefs that held you back in the past will allow you to solve them in the future. This also makes them a part of your success story.
How was your weight struggle a journey of self-discovery and fodder for your weight mastery? My weight struggle taught me that my health and my ability to show up for myself and be my own best friend are more important to me than overeating and eating decadent foods.
MY WEIGHT MASTERY STORY
Take another piece of loose paper or use a fresh page in your journal and write on the top: “My Weight Mastery Story.” Take all the space you need to write your answers to each of questions below.
During this process, please work with an open mind and push past the resistance to fall back into limiting beliefs like “this won’t work.” I will be prompting you with questions to help your mind “see” yourself and your Weight Mastery Story differently than your Weight Struggle Story.
When did your Weight Mastery Story begin—how old were you? (This answer would be the same time as your Weight Struggle Story that you wrote down earlier.) It was the beginning of a powerful learning process of what works and doesn’t work for you and weight mastery.
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When you released weight in the past, what worked for you? (List things you learned that you could apply now.)
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What internal or external roadblocks in life kept you from long-term success?
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How has your weight struggle been a journey of self-discovery and fodder for your weight mastery?
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Are you feeling lighter now that the struggles of the past are gone and that you are now aligned with your success story? Let’s now officially turn up that dial to 100 percent!
Read the directions and close your eyes: Take a moment and imagine a dial with all the numbers on it from 0 percent to 100 percent. Imagine the dial arrow is pointed at the percent number that you began with at the beginning of this chapter. Now I would like you to imagine that you are turning up the dial from that number to 100 percent belief. Now, take a nice deep Shift Breath and lock that 100 percent belief in your mind!
