How To Lose Weight & Keep It Off: Do What Makes You Feel Alive

Here’s something that’s true for everybody no matter who you are: there’s something in this world that makes you feel alive like nothing else does. When you do what makes you feel alive, you lose time doing it. You can’t wait to get back to it when you’re not doing it. You wake up excited about it. Just the thought of it makes you feel happy to be alive. For me it’s writing fiction and riding horses and photography.

Here’s something else that’s true: it’s the desire to do what you love versus the act of stopping yourself from doing it that is at the heart of the problem. From my experience, it’s a major reason that people abuse substances/behaviors, including food.

I know because I stopped myself for years. I let all kinds of fear stop me from creating the life I wanted for myself. I was wrapped up in fear. Fear of failure. Fear of success. Fear of what others thought. Fear of not enough money, talent, tenacity, and on the list goes.

I also let my beliefs stop me, especially what I believed about myself. I believed that I wasn’t enough and didn’t deserve to be happy and wasn’t worth following my own goals, passions, and dreams. I also believed that life was hard and full of suffering and because of that, I didn’t believe that creating a life around doing what made me feel alive was even possible.

Do what makes you feel alive no matter what

Here’s the thing though: you won’t ever stop abusing substances/behaviors, not entirely and for good, until you find out what makes you feel alive and then you go do it no matter what. You’ve got to do what makes you feel alive it even if it doesn’t make you money, doesn’t give you status or power or prestige, even if it doesn’t give you anything other than your own personal satisfaction and fulfillment.

You’ve also got to do it no matter what anyone else says, does, thinks of it, wishes you would do, wants for your life, and on the list goes. Look, this is your life and yours alone. It doesn’t belong to your parents or your grandparents or your best friend or your significant other. When all is said and done, you’re the only one responsible for your own happiness. So remember that every time you make a choice.

You have to do what makes you feel alive because not doing it causes a rift inside of you.

• On one side is who you most want to be and what you most want to be doing.
• On the other is who you find yourself being now and what you’re doing with your life now.

When those two things don’t line up, you’ve got an interior war going on. And you’ll never find inner peace by fighting a war inside yourself. And that rift, whether you realize it or not, is what you’re trying to fill when you abuse substances/behaviors, including food.

So give yourself permission to find out what makes you feel alive and then go do it.

Do what makes you feel alive to ease anxiety and fear

Once you start finding what you love and doing it, you’ll calm down and relax. Biochemicals like dopamine and serotonin will flood your system, which will make you feel good about yourself and about life too. Taking action to do what makes you feel alive will also get you out of your emotional, panicked, fear-driven brain and into your logical, clear-headed, thinking brain. That’s a great thing, especially when there’s all kinds of uncertainty happening around you.

Finding what makes you feel alive then doing it will also give you a sense of normalcy, especially when everything keeps changing. It’ll give you a sense of control over your life because the only thing you really have total control over is your own actions/reactions. You exchange your life for what you choose to do with your time. And what you choose to do with your time is entirely under your control.

What will you choose

So now you’ve got two choices:

• You can choose to spend your time doing things you love and that make you feel empowered and fully alive.
• Or you can choose to keep refusing to do what makes you feel alive or making excuses as to why you can’t or letting fear or beliefs stop you that will ultimately end up with you feeling powerless and stuck.

That’s a choice that’s entirely up to you, so do yourself a kindness and choose wisely.

Do what makes you feel alive to give yourself direction

Doing whatever makes you feel alive will give you direction so you’ll know which way you need to be headed. It’ll also give you guidance so you know when choices come up, which way you need to decide.

• Yes to what you love
• No to what you don’t.

Once you start taking steps to find out what makes you feel alive, the wanting to abuse substances/behaviors will ease. Once you start actually doing what you love and make it a priority in your life, I’d argue that the urge to abuse substances/behaviors will leave you entirely, at least that’s been my experience.

So you take excellent care of yourself by prioritizing what makes you feel alive, and then you go do it no matter what. And you remember too that the only permission you need to do that is your own.

Get off the diet-go-round. Get on with your life.^®

Stop wishing, start doing.
Create your own weight loss before and after success story.

My weight loss transformation & how it can help you do what makes you feel alive

You absolutely can break the diet cycle. I got free. Your life can be that way too.

I made my own path because I needed to get myself out of the crazy-making behavior I was having around food. I needed:

• no more dieting.
• no more restrictive eating.
• no weighing and measuring food.
• no off-limit foods.
• no more judgment around food.
• no more trying to figure out healthy eating or just what healthy foods to eat.
• no more judging my self-worth based on the scale.
• no more you’re-not-doing-it-perfectly diet rules that were only fueling my constant thinking about and obsession with food.

I needed to stop: searching for weight loss tips, wondering how to lose belly fat fast or how to lose weight fast, worrying about how to eat healthy or finding healthy snacks for weight loss, coming up with yet another healthy eating plan, trying to have quick weight loss, or forcing myself onto yet another weight loss diet. What I needed instead was to find, out of all the weight loss programs out there, the best weight loss program for me. Turns out, the best way to lose weight was to find out what works for me and do that.

• I’ve lost 160+ pounds naturally by simply trusting myself and listening to my intuition (mindful eating and eating intuitively).
• I have maintained that weight loss for 9 years and counting by trusting myself and listening to my intuition (mindful eating and intuitive eating).
• I no longer have any eating disorders, including bulimia (bulimia nervosa) and binge eating disorder (compulsive overeating).
• I no longer have a fear of food.

Just imagine what you could be doing with your life if you’d just commit to having your own before and after weight loss success story. You could be: following your own dreams and reaching your own goals, cultivating your own passions, and making both your inner and outer worlds a more blissful and peaceful place.

I got that for my life. I want it for yours. I will teach you how.

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Let today be the day you make peace with your body and with food.

For more information, check out the Start Where You Are Weight Loss^® page.