I’ve talked about how important it is to make peace with where you are in regard to your body so you can stop sending the signals that tell your body that it is starving (http://www.thethoughtdiet.com/layout3/newsarticles/august26yourbodyasfeedback). It seems that simply making peace with where you are one time may not be enough for you to fully leave that point of view behind. Since our body goes with us everywhere we tend to keep an eye on it constantly. Because of that, if we don’t like our body it is easy to chronically think negatively about our body. This chronic observation and negative thinking sometimes isn’t so easily turned off or flipped around by a one-time shift of perspective. It might take a bit more consistency of self-coaching to change the hard-wiring (see http://www.thethoughtdiet.com/layout3/newsarticles/july9abetterunderstanding) that occurs from this chronic thinking. There might be several aspects to how you feel about your body—like how you look in the mirror, how you look in clothes, how others see you, how you feel energetically, how you feel in regard to your strength and stamina, and so on. The point is, you might have more thoughts about your body than the first one you worked on in your attempt to make peace with your body. Or you might have just one perspective to work on but because you have been so chronic in thinking this thought, you continue to fall back into the habit of it. Perhaps whatever new thoughts and perspectives you came up with when you did your self-coaching were not enough to trump the old thought or all the different aspects tied to it. Since our old thoughts are hard-wired into our brain, it may take some effort to change over to these new thoughts and perspectives.

One way to determine if you need to do some more coaching on where you currently are is to simply pay attention to two things: how often you think about your body and how you are thinking about it. If you followed the previous newsletters or read my book then you should know that once you make peace with where you are, you get clear on your goals. What you want to pay attention to is how often you think about where you are and whether those thoughts are negative or not in comparison to where you want to be (what you decided as your end-result goal). If you think more about where you are than where you want to be, then it should be no accident that your body hasn’t changed as much as you would like. Your body is a perfect indicator of your point of focus.

Even if you are thinking about where you want to go more often than where you are, there is a chance that you could still be working against yourself. If when you do think about your current situation you have pretty strong negative emotions, you might be trumping the positive emotions you feel when you focus on your goals if they are not strong ones. Remember that when you feel emotions you are creating chemical changes in your body that help tell the cells how to behave. The strongest emotions send the strongest signals. So if you do find that you are thinking about what you want more often than where you are and what you don’t like about your body and you haven’t seen change, then you are experiencing an emotion in regard to where you are that is winning the battle of communication. Essentially, that negative emotion is the one doing the programming since it is the dominant signal. This is why it is good to check in every now and again to see how you feel about your body. You can do this simply by paying attention to how you think and feel, or you can sit down with your eyes closed and do this more deliberately. Either way, let your emotions be your guide. If you need help making a shift you can read my article on that subject (http://www.thethoughtdiet.com/layout3/newsarticles/april09howtomake).