Excuse #4: "I'm just naturally filling in"

About five to seven years ago, I seem to recall this notion circulating about society that we each had a natural weight. I recall it, because for some time I believed it.

We don't think about it on a daily basis, but we each have a set of mental models, or frameworks, that help us understand the world around us. Many of those models were handed down to us in school and by our parents or picked up from our friends. Language is one such model. Has a common word ever caught your eye funny? You look at it, you know you have read the word thousands of times before, but all of sudden something looks strange about it.

That's your mind testing your mental framework. Language is something we learn at a very early age. Spelling comes shortly after. As adults, speech and reading comes to us so naturally that we don't even have to think about it. But, occassionally or brains tend to poke holes in those frameworks and when that happens things we've taken for granted without question for a long time suddenly seem strange.

Religious and political beliefs are other examples of mental frameworks. You hold certain beliefs on how the government should be involved in our lives and that helps you decide who to support by voting for the people you think are going to best put your beliefs into practice.

I'm sure that it's no surprise to you that we each have a mental framework about how weight loss works. The natural weight framework was alive and well in my head at one point. I had resigned myself to a life with a chubby belly, love handles and puffy cheeks.

Thankfully, I'm not the kind of person that sticks with a mental framework that doesn't produce the results I'm after. In other words, I may be stubborn in the short term, but not in the long term.

Eventually, that old framework collapsed and I replaced it a new framework under which I lost 35 pounds, gained 5 back to get to a more optimuum weight and have held it to within 4 pounds of that weight for over three years now. I detail this new framework in my book.

If you've been having a tough time with your weight loss, perhaps its time to knock down your weight loss mental framework, or belief system.