Unleash the Secret Powers of Rituals for Effective Weight Loss

As I’ve mentioned earlier, rituals are easier to work with because they are not as deep-seated and seemingly automatic as habits. When you’re dealing with a habit, you are basically dealing with huge complex that isn’t just limited to physical actions. A habit has emotional trigger, emotional payoffs and involves mental pictures. It is a very complicated jigsaw puzzle and it’s not a surprise why many people have a tough time overcoming habits.

The good news is that you can use rituals as a work around to getting your body to do what it needs to do. As you probably already aware, you don’t lose weight when you just say it to yourself, “yes, I’m going to lose weight.” You don’t lose weight when you imagine yourself to be a thin person but don’t lift a finger. Make no mistake about it, the world only rewards actions. The world only rewards results. This is why it’s really important to use all the techniques under your disposal to construct a system that will allow you to take the physical actions that you need to undertake for you to lose weight. Rituals can help you do that. Rituals are easier to control. They are easier to isolate, and they are easier to engineer. The secret to making rituals help you achieve your weight-loss goals is to turn them into a habit. This will take little bit of doing. This will take a little bit of focus. However, it can be done.

If you think about it, all your habits are actually initially chosen behavior. That’s right. Even a seemingly negative habit like drug addiction, sex addiction, negative thinking addiction, you name it, initially started as a choice. The great thing about rituals is that they are easier to choose, they are easier to control, and you can use them as the cornerstone or bedrock of healthier physical habits later on. Here are some of the secrets of rituals.

Secret 1: You Already Have Rituals

One of the main reasons why many people don’t like to use rituals to achieve a healthier lifestyle is because they think it takes a lot of effort. They think it’s something that comes out of nowhere, and that they have to adopt. In other words, they look at it from a purely external perspective. This is not true. Everybody has rituals. They’re not habits, they’re rituals. These are ways of doing things. If you’re honest enough with yourself, and you look deep enough, you will realize that you have at least five rituals every single day everything from the way you tie your shoelaces, to how you brush your teeth, how you select which food to eat, so on and so forth. Everybody has rituals. In many cases, people have dozens of rituals that are triggered and applied to certain situations.

Secret 2: You Choose Your Rituals

The great thing about rituals is that you can choose them. They’re kind of like products on a shelf. If you have a certain problem, you go to a certain aisle, and then you look at the different products on the shelf, and you pick one. That’s the great thing about rituals. They are very easy to control. They are transparent, and they are very easy to isolate. Compared to habits, they are easier to work with. With habits, because of the ingrained emotional component, it would almost feel like you’re trying to ride a wild bull. It’s very scary. It’s very intimidating, and in many cases, it’s very easy to lose hope trying to change your habits. With rituals, it’s more like going to the grocery store and picking out a product.

Secret 3: Rituals Also Have An Emotional Payoff

Just like habits, rituals do have an emotional payoff. You feel great when you brush your teeth. Of course, the feeling is not as intense as when you smoke a cigarette, have sex, make a lot of money, eat a lot of food, but there’s still an emotional payoff. This is an important fact to realize especially if you’re going to use rituals to help you achieve weight lose. Make no mistake about it, losing weight can be a very daunting project. It is not easy. By being clear as to the emotional payoffs that certain rituals provide, you have information that you need so you can use and tweak rituals to help you lose weight.

Secret 4: Rituals Start Out Slow But Develop Momentum

Just like with habits, rituals start out slow. When you first started brushing your teeth, you probably had a tough time just getting started but the more you stick to it, the better you get at it. The more you do it, the more sustainable your rituals.

Secret 5: Rituals Lead To Outcomes

It’s very easy to think that rituals are basically just free floating sets of actions that we do every single day. It’s easy to think that they don’t really lead to anything substantial in our lives. This is completely false. If you fail to brush your teeth in the morning, chances are, you would probably not make a very professional impression on people you interact with at work. If you fail to tie your shoelaces a certain way, chances are, you might trip. Make no mistake about it, rituals have a distinct impact in our daily existence. They matter, or else, we wouldn’t be doing them. The key takeaway concept here is to understand that rituals lead to outcomes. Since we exercise a higher degree of control over our rituals, we can effect and produce certain outcomes as long as we have the right level of awareness. Also, as long as we’re willing to modify our rituals, we can produce certain outcomes.

Secret 6: Rituals Can Upset Habits

This is where things get really interesting. If you adapt certain rituals, you can upset your habits. You’re probably thinking, “well, my habits are pretty much set in stone. My habits pretty much define me as a person.” You are absolutely wrong. You chose your habits and you can unchoose them. You learned your habits, you can choose to unlearn them. It really is that simple. You have a lot more control than you give yourself credit for.

The good news is that you can use rituals to offset habits. In other words, you can adopt rituals that prevent those mental pictures that trigger your habitual response. For example, a smoker eats food at lunch and gets the mental picture that he or she is bored or something is missing after eating. This triggers emotions of wanting comfort or wanting closure and completion and this triggers the physical reaction of whipping out a cigarette and lighting it. And then the emotional payoff is you get that sense of comfort and completion and closure which then later on when another trigger happens you engage in the same habitual behavior. You can use rituals to offset this. You can use rituals to prevent those mental pictures from forming a certain way so you don’t end up engaging in your habitual response. If you are trying to lose weight, this is crucial. Choose and use your habits wisely today.