Persist – Extend yourself a little
Every day opportunities will crop up which will help us develop more persistence.
Persistence is like a muscle in the brain. The more we exercise it, the stronger it becomes. And little successes overtime will grow into bigger successes.
But there’s no need to go at it like a bull at a gate. There’s plenty of time to become stronger ‘up top’ and have more perseverance to overcome obstacles along the way of recovering from obesity. In addition to taking little steps, here we are talking about extending those little steps a touch, and endeavouring to do this every day.
A good thing to do is seek out opportunities that extend ourselves a little, which could mean in our activity, in our dealing with everyday frustrating situations, or in our delay of gratification, particularly around consuming food.
Take activity:
If we are in the habit of doing some simple stretches in the morning, add an extra one or go for a few minutes more in order to extend ourselves a little. If we haven’t developed a morning stretching routine yet, start with one small stretching exercise.
What about dealing with frustrating situations:
When frustrations occur try not reacting with anger, but view the situation as an opportunity to grow the persistence “muscle”. Step back, take a deep breath and exercise patience and rationality to solving the issue. Growing persistence involves both increasing patience and not ‘losing our rag’. Every frustrating situation is an opportunity of extending ourselves a little by becoming more patient and responding with our frontal lobes rather than our lower instinctual reactions.
Extending ourselves around food is the best one of all. By training ourselves to delay eating a little. For instance, if we normally have lunch at 12.30 and it is 12.25 and we’re feeling famished, we could try waiting until 12.35 before beginning to eat. Hungry in the morning? Then a good thing is to delay eating breakfast for five minutes by doing something else first, like making our lunch, before tucking in.
Extending ourselves a little, using everyday issues as practice events and our persistence muscle will start bulging.
Eat Well – Limit recreational food to improve your life expectancy Enjoy Life – Right now
Comments are currently closed.