Your LighterLife Tools for weight loss and your new lighter life.
More than a diet, LighterLife gives you the tools to help you change the way you think and live your life – for the better.
“If hunger is not the problem, then eating is not the solution.”
The key to managing your weight is learning to think differently, because it’s by changing your mindset that you’ll be able to change your behaviour. And not only how you eat and drink, but also how you manage your relationships with others, manage your relationship with yourself, and how you use your power to manage your life in general.
How Can I Achieve My Goal Weight?
Our fully nutritious Foodpacks and your determination play a huge role in helping you achieve and maintain a healthier weight, but they’re unlikely to work on their own in the long run. Lasting change is far more possible when you identify the reasons why you overeat.
“Successful weight loss and management starts in your head.”
Once you develop this awareness, you’ll have a unique opportunity to change and improve your relationship with food and with yourself, and to develop real resilience so you can meet life’s challenges in a healthy way.
That’s why we’ve created our LighterLife tools for weight loss, to help you think better, feel better and act better. Your toolkit coping skills are all based around tried, tested and highly respected techniques for change. And your group meetings are where you’ll acquire and practise these skills, which is why it’s so important to attend each week.
Overeating often happens without you being aware of it; you automatically act on an impulse to eat or drink. Before you know it, your hand is in the fridge and the food or drink is in your mouth. The technical term for this is ‘impulse-action collapse’ – there’s no breathing space between the impulse to do something and actually doing it.
On TotalFast, being in ketosis and not being hungry, together with the work you do in your Mentor-guided group sessions, enables you to create a ‘reflective’ space between the impulse and the action. So, you have a chance to think about the likely results of your actions, and whether they’re going to move you closer to your weight loss goals or further away from them.
Our subconscious minds are hugely powerful. What we think affects how we feel, which in turn affects how we behave. When you start building your toolkit of coping skills, you’ll be able to tap into the power of your mind, and take back control in your relationship with food.
What’s in My LighterLife Skills Toolkit? How Do These Tools for Weight Loss Work?
“If you think you can, or you think you can’t you’re right. You choose!”
Your LighterLife toolkit includes many coping skills – here are three of the most important ones you’ll learn, practice, and develop for greater understanding of your behaviour around food, and for your weight loss success:
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
Developed in the 1960s, CBT is a tried and tested method of identifying and shifting the thought patterns holding you back. Recommended by NICE and widely used in the NHS, with CBT, you treat your thoughts as hunches, then test them out to discover the truth about them, rather than just taking them at face value and living with the consequences – such as weight gain.
It’s an effective way of identifying, understanding, and sorting out common problems, giving you the practical skills to think, feel, and act differently – a key set of tools for weight loss and weight management success.
Food is almost always there, ready to console, soothe, or reward. And it’s a very effective way of not dealing with perceived problems. Instead, you’re literally swallowing those things down with food.
Yet, when you take a breath and stop to think about what’s happening, you can often find more helpful ways of dealing with the situation.
This enables you to create a reflective breathing space in which to catch unhelpful thoughts that can lead to eating and drinking too much. This in turn gives you the opportunity to challenge those thoughts and come up with more helpful ones.
Once you’ve done that, it’s easier to start moving towards healthier eating patterns, enabling you to create a healthier lifestyle, and successfully manage your weight in the long term.
“Feeling better and acting better are all about thinking better.”
Transactional Analysis (TA)
TA is a highly effective way of improving how you communicate with other people, and with yourself, which can lead to more effective lifestyle choices, including how you manage your weight.
Your TA tools help you become aware of how messages and rules from your past might be influencing how you behave now, including towards food and drink.
You unconsciously make thousands of decisions every day about how to be and act. Your first decision, made as a small child when you could only assess what was happening in basic ways, would probably have been made with the intention of fitting in with what you thought the adults in your life wanted.
Some of these decisions remain in place and don’t get updated. So, you end up carrying these decisions into adulthood, following the same patterns of behaviour, even though this behaviour may be uncomfortable, painful, or not helpful for your current life.
Using your TA tools, you can create a reflective space to bring these old decisions into your conscious awareness, understand why you originally made them, and then ‘redecide’ them – making new, more appropriate decisions and choices based on your current reality. This can help you understand why you’ve been overeating and maintaining a larger body size than is healthy.
Acquiring that knowledge is half the battle on your transformation journey.
“We are made wise, not by our recollections of the past, but the responsibility for our future.”
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is about paying full attention to the present moment, noticing your thoughts, feelings and surroundings without judgement. It’s about being aware and grounded, rather than lost in worries or distractions.
Mindfulness is about being curious – actively noticing new things about the things you know, letting go of preconceived mindsets, and acting on new information. It’s about being aware that the mind and body are a unified whole – the mindbody – that’s continuously communicating with itself.
Mindbody unity suggests we don’t have to be slaves to our passions, victims of addictions, or controlled by our environments. In other words, we’re in control of our health.
We humans have limited attention capabilities. Our brains can process 11 million bits of information every second, but our conscious minds can handle only about 45 bits of information a second. So, the vast majority of what’s happening around us and within us never actually reaches our consciousness.
One of the most important things to realise is that you don’t know everything. When you begin to listen and become more aware, that’s when your relationships, both with yourself and with others, change.
We impose artificial limits on ourselves. Mindlessly, we get stuck in the world as it’s ‘given’ – as we immediately perceive it. Most people just go along with it, assuming, ‘it is what it is.’ But ‘it’ can be changed. You can change it by changing what you see.
“There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Your LighterLife Mentor – the Key to your LighterLife Toolkit
Our LighterLife Mentors are specialists, trained to work with the complex issues associated with weight gain and weight loss. They’ve helped over a million people manage a distorted and difficult relationship with food, and live lighter for years, even decades.
“This is the first time anyone has asked me to explore why I’d eaten all that rubbish, rather than just telling me to eat less.”
Your Mentor is there to guide your weekly group sessions, provide information for your weight loss journey, help you manage your boundaries, and support the development of your self-awareness, your tools for weight loss, and your weight management skills.
All the important questions are asked in your group sessions and your Mentor will guide you through your change process, helping you begin to identify and master the skills to nurture your long-term weight management.
To lose weight and keep it off, you need to go beyond food. You need to find and change the ‘why’ of why you’ve gained weight. And you’ll learn to quieten the voice in your head that tries to tempt you into having ‘just one more.’
“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”
Are you ready to build your LighterLife tools for weight loss and craft your weight management for life skills? We’d love to help you get started!
