Tired of making resolutions to change your behavior and then reverting back to your old ways? Focusing on changing our behavior can be like taking an aspirin for a headache. It may temporarily address the symptom but does not get to the cause. We rarely take the time to ask why we have a headache in the first place!

When it comes to life situations, our behaviors are the symptoms, our beliefs are the cause. Change your beliefs and the behavior will naturally change.

When I focus on diet and exercise (ie: behaviors), I expect to lose weight and keep it off. Yet like most of us, it’s only a temporary change that we can sometimes stick with long enough to see results. Statistics show that 80% of us don’t stick with these temporary behaviors, and many of us gain back that weight, plus some. Why is that? It's not the behavior that makes the real change happen—it’s our beliefs and expectations about food and our bodies that are the root cause.

When I expect caffeine and alcohol to make me gain weight, they do. These are two things that I love and that make me feel good...yet I expect them to do me harm (weight gain). I resent the idea of giving them up (ie: giving up the behavior), and those feelings of resentment and longing to feel good are stronger that my willpower to stop the behavior of consuming them.

My job was to find my way toward new beliefs about caffeine and alcohol that felt good to me. Once my desire (enjoying caffeine and alcohol) and my new beliefs lined up (there is nothing and no one to resent or long since I am always at choice), my experiences of resentment and longing were released, and my behaviors started to naturally change. When I let go of the situations in my life that left me feeling resentful or longing for something I couldn’t have, the extra weight I was holding went with it. I have not given up coffee or alcohol and the weight has not come back. I feel confident my body will naturally support me as long as I continue to focus on feeling good.   

A wonderful book for deeper exploration on this topic is Sondra Ray’s The Only Diet There Is.

What are the beliefs that are driving your behavior today?

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