You may have come across what is commonly referred to as the Law of Attraction which has been popularized by more than one book in recent years. What’s it go to weight loss? Well you’ll find out below that it can have as much or little to do with it as you want.
What is the Law of Attraction?
Like attracts like – that’s basically what the the Law of Attraction (LoA) is all about. It’s the idea that positive thinking brings positive results and similarly negativity will see negative results. This all a bit wish washy and without some further explanation and consideration is a pretty useless idea.
You may have come across a book/DVD/audio called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne which has brought the LoA into the mainstream and garnered quite a cult following.
However LoA is nothing new, it’s been the basis of many a self help book and the bestselling of all is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Published in 1937 this book has sold over 60 million copies to date (2012) and is still recommended a whole lot.
We are more interested in how you can actually apply this concept.
How To Use LoA For Weight Loss
The principles of LoA can be applied to your aim of losing weight, in this case the positive mentality will be focused on a slimmer you.
Here are the three steps you need to take:
Visualization
This isn’t simply daydreaming about having a fabulous, slim, attractive body it’s about being objective. Visualizing your end goal involves not just a mental picture of what you’ll look like but also how you will feel, what lifestyle changes will happen, how your fitness will be, etc.
The easiest way to be objective is to answer some simple questions:
- What is you weight loss goal? – This is about how much weight you will lose, think about your current weight and the weight you want to be. Important: You want to lose fat not just any weight. Gaining weight as muscle is great for strength and burning more fat.
- What clothes do you want to wear? – A smart designer suit that fit perfectly or regular sized jeans, your visualization includes how you want to look.
- How fit will you be and what activities will you be doing? – This is all about your abilities or the increase of them. Will you be mountain climbing, running marathons or going on cycling treks?
- Do you want to be really fit? – Lean muscled body will allow you to do a lot more interesting/competitive activities.
- How do you want to feel? – This addresses your emotional side, think about how you want to feel about yourself. Happiness with you body, released from self consciousness and self confident?
- A better social life? – Often improving yourself will also improve your social life because you will likely release yourself on a lack of confidence and self consciousness.
- How does a healthy, fit, slim person live their life? – This is possibly the most powerful question of all, because it cements into your thoughts what your overall lifestyle should be.
It will be helpful in this stage to commit to pen and paper to help you keep track of your visualization. Alternatively you can record yourself speaking if you find writing distracts your thoughts.
Path Planning
Once you’ve visualized your weight loss goal and the benefits it will bring it’s time to form a path towards that goal. Because imagination and answering question alone aren’t going to get you closer to those goals – that would just be dreaming.
By having the answers to the above question (and more if you thought of more) you have concrete goals to work towards.
To lose the amount of weight you’ve set you need a suitable diet and exercise plan. Constructing this from scratch by yourself is going to take a long time, but luckily the weight loss industry is huge and has a lot to offer.
Start researching healthy diet plans, a suitable exercise plan, places to do activities, etc.
Warning: Don’t fall for over-hyped marketing of fad diets, crash diets, gimmicks and other things of dubious intent. Don’t use pills or injections and anything which is not supposed to be for the long term. Don’t go on a low fat/calorie/carb diet, they are not good for you overall and certainly not in the long run.
A good rule to follow: Forget about looking for weight loss diets directly, instead look for healthy diets and weight loss will happen as a result.
If you don’t know where to start I recommend you check out Fat Burning Furnace (FBF), The Truth About Abs (TBA) or Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle (BFFM). The most popular of the three is BFFM having been around since 2003 and has been used by millions. All of them are written by experts and are all specifically geared toward burning fat (not losing any old weight).
Live The Goal
Start living the life you’ve planned. This is easy to say but it’s not that hard to do either. Although you won’t be able to wear the clothes you want quite yet you can start doing most of the other stuff.
Go do the activities you wanted at a less intense level, go cycling, hiking, travelling or whatever it is you want to do.
You visualized how a healthy person would live so try to live like that:
- Eat the healthy portions and of the right foods -use smaller plates and stick to your healthy diet plan.
- Stop drinking unhealthy things – soda pops, alcohol, too much caffeine.
- No more unhealthy snacks – if you need to snack eat natural foods like fruit and nuts.
- Being sociable – talk to your friends more, invite them to participate in the activities you want to do or join them in theirs. The effect of this is extremely powerful, make you much happier and motivate you in all other aspects of your plan.
- Being active – a healthy person doesn’t sit around all day, they are moving around, doing exercise frequently. Opt out of watching loads of TV and go for a walk, travel, visit friends.
- Start (and complete) projects – I’m sure there are things you’ve always wanted to work on or have started but stalled – it could be doing up a vintage car, working on a blog, crafting your own beer, etc. Start those projects and do them, better than watching mindless TV or playing addictive video games. You never know it might even lead to a new avenue in your career.
Will It Actually Work?
There is certainly some merit in the method in the sense that thinking positively will generally mean you take positive actions. If you’re always focused on the opposite to success – failure – then it can prevent you from taking the actions that you know and need to make things better.
In terms of trying to lose weight focusing on your end goal is more likely to keep you motivated in the long run, whilst purging your thoughts of lack of progress and the like will help beat procrastination and “falling off the wagon” (too often at least).
I can certainly see some kind of placebo-like effect at work here – your belief makes you better or gets you what you want, and that doesn’t mean it’s not effective. In medical science there are countless examples of placebo pills working just as well as real pills.
When might this not work?
It’ll likely work less well if you don’t believe in the techniques and concept. You doubt in the idea and process will cause you to be lose motivation when there are setbacks or when you’re not seeing results as quickly as you wanted.
Having doubts is a good thing overall because it protects you from risks, however having complete confidence in something will see you through it will full focus. If that thing works then you certainly won’t regret it, but if it’s a dud then you won’t have lost much either.
As an individual it’s better to believe than over-think and pick at it’s potential points of failure because focus is far more powerful for getting results than risk evasion.
Even if it fails you will have learnt something about the method and yourself which is more valuable than your imagined risk assessment (which ultimately is a waste of time and effort – an opportunity cost to taking any action).
Final Thoughts
Give the technique a go as I don’t see any harm in doing so, but keep in mind that the Law of Attraction is pseudoscience with no quantifiable data or justification. However gut instinct will tell most of us that it’s worth a look into.
There are various books (including the secret) and DVDs available to help you lose weight weight using the Law of Attraction, this particular DVD set has overall decent reviews – it might be worth checking out.
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