Are You a Victim of Weight Loss Self-Sabotage? What You Must Understand About Temptation

Weight loss self-sabotage looks something like this. You reach a point where you decide you HAVE to lose weight. You begin a diet feeling strong and everything is going great, then as soon as you think you've got your weight problem under control - BAM - you find yourself raiding the cupboard desperate for anything labelled "junk food".

Weight loss self-sabotage seems to strike out of thin air but actually there is a four stage process that everyone moves through from the moment temptation hits to the moment you act. By understanding these stages you can cut them off before you sabotage your hard earned weight loss.

Here are the 4 stages of temptation that lead you to eat when you don't want to.

1. The thought pops in your head. I will tell you that there is not much you can do to prevent a thought from popping into your head but that's okay because simply having the thought is not a problem it only becomes a problem when it moves into stage 2. An example would be, "dieting is too hard."

2. You start to entertain the thought. This is when you allow the thought to spin around in your head and it grows in strength. Following our example you would start to mentally go through all of the reasons you think dieting is too hard.

3. You start to believe the thought is valid. This is when you start to believe the thought has a "good point". For our example you would start to tell yourself little lies like, "you know what, I wasn't that unhappy being overweight."

4. You act. The diet is over and you have once again sabotaged your plan.

By understanding that there are predictable stages that your thoughts progress through before you are driven to act you can see that you DO have the ability to prevent sabotage. The key is to get good at hearing the destructive thoughts and then cancelling them before you let them build strength.

Successful weight loss is not simply having a good diet and exercise plan to follow, you must work as much on changing your "bad thinking" as your actual habits, once you do this weight loss self-sabotage becomes a thing of the past.