Why Patience Can Make You Lose Weight Faster

You’ve heard it before, patience is a virtue -  but did you know that it can also help make your weight loss faster and easier?

Here’s how:

Reduced Stress

First, by trying to hurry your weight loss, you will inevitably stress yourself out. And you know what happens when you’re stressed out, right? You hinder your body’s fat burning processes. The more stressed out and impatient you get, the slower your progress is going to be.

See: Make Weight Loss Easier by Creating Daily Patterns

Impatience Breeds Cravings

When you’re stressed out and impatient and making slow progress, you’re going to experience more cravings for fattening foods.  It’s an emotional thing - almost all overweight people eat in response to emotional cues.  By trying to rush your weight loss, you immediately start triggering unpleasant feelings that will in turn breed cravings for the very foods you know you should be avoiding.

Time Flies While You’re Having Fun

On the other hand, have you ever noticed how fast time goes by when you’re feeling good?  If you stop trying to race to the finish line and instead just take your time and focus on having fun with your weight loss, it’s going to go by much more quickly and easily.

Will you ACTUALLY be losing weight faster, or will it just seem like you are?  Who cares!  (Okay, yes, it’s very possible that you will lose weight more quickly, just because you’re more relaxed and focused, rather than stressed out and irritable.)

If you are typically an impatient person, you may be rolling your eyes and shaking your head right now - but developing patience is easier than you probably think.

Start by focusing more on the positive.  Think about how wonderful it will be when you reach your weight loss goal - but don’t focus on the fact that you’re not there yet.  Just immerse yourself in pleasant thoughts about the end result, and if you do it often enough it will feel as if you ARE there.

You can also focus on how proud you are of yourself for doing this well so far.  Pat yourself on the back for every small victory, and don’t worry about the little slip ups if they happen.  Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start again.

Finally, keep looking back to see how far you’ve come.  Every time you do, you take your attention off of the distance you still have left to travel, and it shrinks a little bit more each time.

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