Welcome back to the 12 Keys to a Healthy Weight. We’re almost to the end of our series! Last week we looked at the role of grief in weight management and recovery from eating disorders. Today we’ll look at how gratitude can help you keep a positive mindset as you work towards a healthy weight and lifestyle.
Key #11: Appreciate all you have to be grateful for
Achieving a healthy weight, like any other goal, depends on keeping a positive mindset. Negative thinking can discourage our efforts and lead us to give up whatever we’d been working towards.
Expressing gratitude can be a huge contributor to a positive attitude. What is even more important is to find and acknowledge things to be grateful for.
What sometimes stops people from focusing on or expressing their gratitude is concern for others. Perhaps someone else in your life might be going through a difficult time, has less material possessions than you, or is at a different point in their career or family life.
Minimizing your gifts and blessings and sacrificing the joy of being thankful won’t help. If people see you shrugging off your achievement – whether that’s your spiritual growth, recovery, or financial and material success, it may feel jarring, inauthentic and uncomfortable.
You can help the most by showing people, with your example, how to find things in their own lives to be grateful for.
Gratitude exercise
To bring more attention to gratitude, write 10 things you are grateful for every morning as you start your day. These can be big things or little things, something unique to that day or something you may take for granted every day.
You can use a paper journal, an online journal, a document on your computer, or a smartphone app. Whatever tool you choose, make sure it works for you, otherwise you’ll be less likely to keep it up.
Once you’ve been keeping your gratitude journal consistently, you may want to pare it down to a maintenance level of writing just 3-5 things (or you may want to keep reaping the benefits of acknowledging 10 things).
What you’re likely to notice when you get into this practice is that focusing on gratitude helps you steer clear of self-pity and towards happiness. You will start to realize all of the things in life there are to be grateful for.
Use these affirmations to fortify your gratitude practice:
I am already becoming the person I am meant to be
I have an abundance of things for which to be grateful
In the final article of the series next week, we’ll look at ways to stay confident and prevent relapse.