Love is the greatest healing force on the planet. It is the most powerful emotion you can feel, pure love and joy being the highest you can go on the emotional/vibrational scale.

Be clear however, that there is a difference between pure love, the love that comes from Source Energy, the Universe, God, whatever you choose to call it, and the “love” of fairy tales. You do not need anyone outside of yourself to experience the feeling of pure love and joy. In fact, to truly have a healthy, loving relationship with another human being, you need to be “in love” with yourself first! When two whole, loving people come together no one is seeking a “better half”.

Love begins with you, just like everything begins with you, and when you choose to love yourself today exactly as you are, the love and the joy you feel for yourself and for your life can actually help you lose weight.

5 Ways Love Can Help You Lose Weight

This may have been better titled as 5 ways self-love can help you lose weight but you already understand this from reading my intro. 

There are many more ways than 5 that love can help you lose weight however we’ll look at the top 5 today:

1. Love = Forgiveness: When you truly love yourself you forgive yourself for any missteps you may take in your journey of losing weight and getting fit. You forgive yourself for skipping that work out and then you do it now. You forgive yourself for not making the best choices for you and then you make the best choice now. You choose to let go of the past and forgive yourself for any imagined “wrong doings” and realize that now is your present moment. You love yourself enough to forgive yourself and move on instead of beating yourself up and punishing yourself with food!
2. Love = Self-Worth: When you love yourself you have the self-worth that allows you to put yourself first and take care of you. If you do not put yourself first and take care of you, who will? If you don’t put yourself first and make the time to prepare your healthy meals and make the time to go for your daily walk, who will do it for you? When you love yourself you have the self-worth to treat yourself with dignity and respect to take action to get what you want.
3. Love = Value: When you love yourself you value yourself. You place a high value on your health and fitness, on how you feel, on what you expect from yourself and your life. You value your life experience and you value the foods that give you most energy and enthusiasm for life. When you love yourself you place such a high value on yourself that you don’t feel “guilty” about taking time to care for yourself. You are aware that when you value yourself that others will too, and conversely you can see that when you did not value yourself, no one else did!
4. Love = Praise: When you love you today, you no longer indulge in self-criticism. Instead of criticizing yourself and beating yourself up for not being perfect, you praise yourself for everything you’ve done right! When you love yourself and praise what you are doing to help yourself lose weight, you lose more weight because you aren’t overeating out of a need to feel better because you felt so bad after beating yourself up! Praising yourself for what you did right comes easily when you love yourself today and in that state of being it’s much easier to allow yourself to lose weight.
5. Love = Connection to Source: When you live in Love with yourself you feel Joy and when you feel Joy you are living at the highest level of vibration, which is what it feels like to be consciously connected to Source - feels great!! In actuality, you are never disconnected from Source, however when you love yourself and live in joy now, you then allow all of the good stuff to flow into your life. When you consciously allow yourself to live in Joy by expressing love for yourself, love will help you lose weight. And really, why wouldn’t you want to love yourself so that your love for YOU will help you lose weight?

There are many more ways that love can help you lose weight. You can check out my 31 Days of Loving Yourself Thin series for more on this topic.

Love can help you lose weight if you allow yourself to love YOU and then take physical action to lose weight and get fit. It’s all quite fun and it’s a wonderful way to lose weight and get fit. And why wouldn’t you want to have fun and love yourself now so that  you allow your love to help you lose weight?

Shine ON with your conscious fitness!

Photo by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

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Yes, it’s true…anger can help you lose weight, however read this entire article in order to get the full gist of what I am suggesting here.

Anger is An Emotion Like Any Other

Anger is an often misunderstood emotion. Many are brought up to believe that they should never feel angry or even worse, to never feel emotion. How sad is that? Human beings are made up of emotion and if you don’t allow yourself to feel, then you’re not fully living.

While Anger is not the highest vibing emotion you can express and feel about yourself (yes, about yourself, it’s always about you), it’s sure a whole lot better than depression, which is an even lower vibrating emotion than anger.

Anger is a better emotion to feel if you have been living in the immobilization of depression, and as long as you choose to continue to move up the vibrational scale (instead of staying stuck in the anger) and feel better step by step, then anger can be useful.

It’s when you project your anger onto others that it becomes destructive, but if you are living consciously then you already know that the anger is all about you and you can either consciously choose to use it or you can also choose to deny it, project it, or stuff it. The latter 3 choices will not help you lose weight, though.

3 Ways Anger Can Help You Lose Weight

Here are 3 ways that your anger can help you lose weight. Again remember though, that the goal is to use your anger that you feel about yourself and your life to learn something about yourself and take action. If you stay stuck in your anger and don’t process it out, then it becomes destructive.

1. Take Action - Anger can help you take action to lose weight when you get to the point that you are so gosh darned sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. Of course you will need some kind of clear and concise, healthy action plan to follow that will help you not only lose the weight but also do the necessary inner work so that you keep it off. The point though, is that if you get fed up enough with yourself and this propels you to act then your anger can help you to do the work to lose weight and get fit.
2. Get Real - All anger is about you, in fact everything is about you. In order for you to make changes in your life by leaps and bounds you’ve got to be able to be gut level real with yourself, completely 100% honest. If you don’t do this then it will be difficult to make lasting changes because you won’t allow others to help you, much less will you be able to help yourself. When you get angry enough with yourself for creating the body and the situation that you have, it can help you dig deep and get real about what you’ve done so that you can move on, lose weight, and become what you really want to become.
3. Get Moving - This is a little different than #1, which is about taking overall action. Anger can also help you get your body moving and exercising because it feels so good to move your body and process that anger out. When you feel anger your body naturally wants to move, to walk, to run, to jump up and down, whatever, as opposed to being immobilzed by the lower vibrating emotion of depression. When you do get moving you will be able to move beyond the anger as well into the higher vibrating states since physical exercise naturally helps you feel good. All of that physical movement can help you lose weight, also, especially if done productively with both goals in mind, those goals being to process out your anger and also to burn fat so that you lose weight.

Your emotions make up your vibration and the vibration of anger isn’t anywhere near the highest vibration of joy but if you are tuned in to how you are feeling you can harness that anger and use it productively. You won’t stay it in anyway, if you know how to move up the emotional scale and feel better now, but it’s cool that you can put it to use while you’re feeling it.

If however, you are so shut down that don’t even know how you feel because you’ve been avoiding and stuffing your emotions for so long, then you will be in for a surprise if you ever choose to clean up your issues around food and your weight because food is used by many overweight individuals to stuff their emotions. It can be overwhelming when you stop using food as a crutch to try to make yourself feel better and you may find a great deal of hidden anger within you.

Put your anger to good use and it can help you lose weight. Then when you choose to move beyond it, everything just gets better and better.

Photo by macwagen

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Have you ever considered that you could lose weight and get fit by mastering your emotions?

Did you ever think you’d hear someome suggest that you “get emotional” to lose weight and get fit? Well read on dear friend and you’ll get the meaning of what I’m sayin’…

Lose Weight & Get Fit by Mastering Your Emotions

This week at The Fit Shack it’s all about your emotions. Let’s face it - your emotions are, bottom-line, where it’s all at, and I don’t mean only when it comes to the topic of emotional eating.

What you ARE is your emotions. You ARE your emotional state. If you are at all familiar with spiritual teachings, metaphysics, the law of attraction, anything along those lines, then you are aware that the largest part of you is a vibrational energy being… which just so happens to be walking around in a physical body…and the level of your vibration = your emotions. And I would daresay that you must have some inkling of this, otherwise why would you be attracted to The Fit Shack, which is about Conscious Fitness? You wouldn’t.

Now if you’ve been around The Fit Shack for awhile, you’ve seen me write quite a bit about the mind, thoughts, emotions, and the connection between body, mind, and spirit. I’ve often said that your thoughts are the most important factor when it comes taking the necessary action to create a healthy, fit, strong sexy body, and now I’m stating that your emotions are. Confused? There’s no need to be, because it’s all the same topic.

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Body

Change your thoughts and you change your emotions. Change your emotions by changing your thoughts and you can change your body by taking effortless, fun, action to lose weight and get fit. 

Change your thoughts and you change your vibe, which is your emotional state. Your thoughts lead to your emotions. Think crappy thoughts about yourself and your life and how do you feel? Criticize yourself all day long by thinking thoughts of self-criticizm and how do you feel? Are you at all inclined, or “motivated” to lose weight and get fit when you feel like mud??

On the flip side, how do you feel when you think loving thoughts, when you think thoughts filled with gratitude and wonder for everything that is working for you in your life today? When you think thoughts of self-praise and self-love, how do you feel?

When you Feel Good NOW how inclined are you to get up off the couch, cook yourself a meal filled with whole foods, those foods that vibrate a hundred times higher on the vibrational scale than their lifeless counterparts - those processed, dead foods that becon to you from the store shelves when you’re looking for comfort. And why do you look for comfort? Do you look for comfort in food when you feel fabulous, fit, and electrified with life?

Master Your Emotions and You’ll Master Your World

Your emotions are the key to your world, and when you learn how to master your thoughts you master your emotional state. Become a master in this areas of your world and you literally change your own reality. Take it a step further and become a deliberate creator of your reality and you can be, do, and have anything in your lifetime, which includes having/living in a healthy, fit, strong, sexy body, if that is something that you desire for yourself. 

When you have the tools to change your emotions and you choose to take deliberate action and use those tools, the world is your oyster. This goes far beyond the topic of losing weight and getting fit, but if you’ve been reading here for any length of time you are already aware of the fact that overweight is only a symptom of a much larger problem.

The way to lose weight and get fit is not by attacking the symptom and forcing yourself to diet, it’s by addressing the problem and the problem all begins with your thoughts, which lead to your emotions, which is your vibrational state. And when you feel bad, how easy is it for you to take action to lose weight and get fit?

How long do you stick with any program when you are focused on the negatives and feeling so poorly about yourself? How often do you want to eat those healthy, whole foods when you’re feeling bad? What do you reach for instead? How strong is your desire to exercise when you’re wallowing in your self-criticizm, blame, and your focus on how hard it is, how it never works for you, etc. etc.?

Stay tuned for some enlightening thoughts this week to help you lose weight and get fit by mastering your emotions. My wish for you is that you choose to become a deliberate creator of your reality in your world by mastering your thoughts and therefore mastering your emotions so that you take action - not only to lose weight and get fit, but to create anything else you truly desire in your life.

This whole food and weight topic is sooooo only a mask for bigger issues - it’s never about the food or the weight; it’s about your life.

Photo by n0r

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I recently returned from a week’s vacation in Florida with my family and it was quite interesting because…I didn’t bring vacation weight gain home with me!

You MUST Gain Weight on Vacation?

Do you believe that you must gain weight on vacation? Are you someone who forces yourself to diet (no fun!) so that you can lose weight before vacation to “let it all go” while on vacation and gain 10 pounds? Have you ever heard anyone say that if you take a cruise you always gain weight?

These are all thoughts and if you believe them for yourself, you’re right! You will gain weight on vacation because that is your belief. It is your expectation and you will always prove yourself right.

On the other hand if you live a healthy lifestyle not only in your physical actions but also in your mind, your consciousness, your spirit, then going on vacation is simply another part of your life. You will take yourself with you on vacation and if you are a fun, healthy, “focused on Feeling Good NOW” kinda person then you wouldn’t be thinking of a vacation as an opportunity to stuff yourself.

Dieting for a Vacation…Fun??

If you buy into the thought that you’ve gotta force yourself to diet in order to look great on vacation, how are you going to maintain your weight loss? How does the diet fit into your normal, everyday routine? What happens after your vacation? How do you feel on the inside?

Vacations can be great fun, especially if you love to travel like I do, and they can be a wonderful opportunity for a change of scenery. That’s all really good stuff, however the way that you treat yourself today is what you will carry with you wherever you go. If you enjoy a healthy, fit lifestyle at home you will carry that same vibe with you on vacation and you won’t be in “danger” of a vacation weight gain.

It all starts now and you can always choose to treat yourself with healthy actions today so when your next vacation comes around there will be no need to force a drag of a diet on yourself only to return home 10 pounds heavier.

It all begins now, it all begins at home.  Shine ON!

Photo by Joe Penniston

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One issue that is rampant among those who use food in an attempt to feel better, to procrastinate, out of boredom, or for any other reason than physical hunger is the issue of Excuses.

Excuses will keep you fat and excuses will keep you stuck. Excuses will also help you to continue to create more of what you already have - negative emotions and an unhealthy, fat, feel-bad body.

Excuses Excuses Excuses

There are so many excuses you can always come up with that will keep you fat, stuck, and unhappy and I’ve selected the top 5 today. Oh, and how do I know that excuses are so prevelant among food abusers? Because I’ve been there and I know this to be true!

Not only do I know this to be true because I’ve been there myself, but also because of all of the people I have spoken with, met, interacted with, guided, inspired, or assisted to move beyond their excuses. The thing is though that the only way you will move beyond your own excuses is if you are willing to do so. If you are more invested in staying stuck in your excuses than you are in releasing them and allowing yourself to get fit, get healthy, and get happy, then you will continue to use your excuses that will keep you fat.

5 Excuses That Will Keep You Fat

1. I’ll Do It Tomorrow - This is the #1 Excuse that will keep you fat and not only will it keep you fat, it will keep you spinning your wheels in Stuckville. The plain and simple truth is…Tomorrow Never Comes. Today is the Tomorrow that you told yourself would be the Tomorrow when you would change. Today is Always Tomorrow and as long as you continue to use the excuse that you’ll do it tomorrow, you are forever putting off your life and forever living in Stuckville. 
2. I Don’t Have Time - Everyone on this beautiful planet Earth has the same amount of hours in their day. What does the excuse you use of telling yourself you don’t have time do for you? When will you ever have the time to get fit and lose the fat? When will you ever have the time to lose the excuse? Using the excuse that you don’t have time is an excuse and it is also a value. You Always have enough time for that which you value in your life.
3. It’s Too Hard - If you believe “it’s too hard”, you’re totally right. You are always right when you tell yourself whatever you tell yourself because that’s what you believe! If you continue to choose to use the excuse that it’s too hard then “it” will be too hard. This is the most interesting of the top 5 excuses that will keep you fat because the easiest thing to do is to lose weight. Simply stick with whole foods, eat more often, use portion control, and move your body. 30 minutes a day of walking in your target heart rate zone works wonders to drop the fat. Simple as that, along with drinking 100 oz of water a day. However what makes losing the fat hard is that you use the excuse that it’s hard and then never take the action that will get you what you want. Therefore, the excuses continue to pay your rent in Stuckville.
4. She/He Can Do It But I Can’t - This is yet another excuse that will keep you fat, and stuck. While there are different body types, the main thing that will prove you right in this excuse is again your thoughts. If you choose to use this excuse you will keep yourself stuck as it is and won’t take the actions that would prove you “wrong”, so really all of these excuses will always prove you right. Why? Because the excuses are your way of keeping yourself where you are in the space of inaction. Since you aren’t taking the healthy actions that would melt the fat from your body, then you have proven that your excuses are “true”. It’s really a lose-lose proposition for yourself, however the best thing you can do is become aware of the fact that you are using excuses so that you can choose to opt out at any time.  You can always choose to drop your excuses if you want to because they are your thoughts and you are the thinker in your world.
5. I Can’t Afford It - What is it that you cannot afford? You cannot not afford to invest in yourself to create peace of mind around food and your body, if your quality of life, your serenity, your self-love and relationship with yourself is of value to you. If you do not value these qualities of life then you will use the excuse that you “can’t afford it”, which is the most dangerous excuse of all. When you resist investing in your own health in body, mind, and spirit whether that is investing in healthy food, creating a peaceful environment, a coach to guide and assist you out of your own blind spots, or a quality pair of walking shoes, what you resist is allowing in the healthy life that a part of you tells yourself you desire. This all comes down to what you value though, and if you place a higher value on sticking with the excuses then you will continue to stay where you are.

Thoughts are things and what you think is what you get. Excuses are thoughts you think, thoughts that you believe are “reasons” for not getting what you want, however you are the one in control of your choices and you choose what you think and create in your life. As long as you choose the excuses though, you will stay in the land of inaction and Stuckville.

Excuses Keep You In Stuckville

Choosing excuses will keep you in Stuckville, and having been there myself in the past I can tell you that it’s No Fun and I always say that “If It’s Not Fun, Why Do It?”. It’s not fun to live in Stuckville and it’s also not fun to choose excuses - not only because they will keep you fat but also because they are limiting. And do you really want to live a limited life? Is THAT fun?

My wish for you is that you consciously choose to eliminate all excuses and that you choose to think only those thoughts that will move you forward into the healthy lifestyle you could be living Right Now if you were to choose to do so.

Shine ON with your conscious fitness!

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