Groundhog Day Lesson: Don't Repeat Weight Loss Failures

Do you remember the movie Groundhog Day? It was a funny, thought-provoking movie from 1993 starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. In the movie, Bill Murray's character, "Phil", has to relive the same day (Groundhog Day) over and over and over and over. How often do we do that, reliving our weight loss failures over and over and over?

Fortunately he is given the opportunity to revise his day: Phil is not doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

This is the most important lesson we can learn from the movie. Even though we won't live Feb. 2, 2011 (or thankfully 1993 either) over again, we can choose to live essentially the same days repeatedly. Or, we can choose to change our lives and get out of our ruts and live the lives we want.

In order to have weight loss success rather than failure we must decide to take control of our lives and steer our days in a different direction.

What we have right now...our current weight for example...are results of our decisions in the past. We will continue to wake to the same result until we choose to take different actions.

Fortunately we don't have to make huge changes. Nor do we have to make all the changes in one day, or even one year.

We didn't become overweight because we ate too much food one time. We became overweight because of the accumulation of lots of small actions--eating instead of expressing our feelings, eating without thinking about it, not making healthy food choices, eating too much sugar, not moving our bodies--over a period of years. For some of us this period has been our entire lives.

We can become weight loss success stories! By making small changes consistently we will improve our health. It MUST improve, it cannot NOT improve!

The only way we are failures is to give up. We give up when we try to do too much all at once and we get overwhelmed or frustrated because we are not seeing immediate results.

Do yourself a favor and start now...start small, but start. Then just keep putting one foot in front of the other on the path of your choosing. You'll get out of the rut and find yourself with a whole new script for a healthy, happy life!