Mental toughness: You need it most when you feel the least tough

Mental toughness is absolutely something you need to both get and keep the weight off, but let me clear up what I mean by “mental toughness.” 

When I say mental toughness, I’m not talking about being cold, heartless, and stoic.

I’m talking about being the resilient person you probably are and just don’t realize it…and bringing that part of you up when you need it so you don’t sabotage your weight loss…or if you do, you get right back on track and keep going.

Seriously, you’ve been through some rough stuff in your life. Even if you and I have never met, I know you have, and it’s for one simple reason:

If you live long enough, tough things happen in your life.

The loss of a child. Divorce. Death. Abuse. Disease. Pain. Trauma. Injury. Betrayal. Failure. Guilt. Shame.

Life has a lot of beauty, but it has a lot of hard.

When life gets hard in ways we’re not prepared for, most people fall down to this low point where they’re just trying to get through it.

And things like weight loss – or keeping off the weight you lost – don’t seem that important.

At least, not until the dust settles, you realize how bad you let things get, and you wish you’d done a better job of managing your weight and health.

In this context, mental toughness is just about staying as on point as you can even during the tough stuff, so that when the dust settles, you don’t have to do a bunch of damage control just to get back to where you were.

“Staying on point” may mean just staying where you are. Maybe you don’t try to lose anymore weight for now. You just maintain for a while. That’s DEFINITELY preferable to gaining a bunch back.

If you’ve already gained a bunch back, learn from it and do NOT let it happen again.

Bottom line: You’re probably tougher than you think. But you may be under the illusion that being mentally tough means you always FEEL mentally tough.

Nope. Mental toughness is doing the tough thing ESPECIALLY when you don’t feel like it.

In an ideal world, sure, you’d feel so tough that nothing would bother you.

But most of us don’t live in an ideal world. We live in the REAL world.

And in the REAL world, when you do the tough thing even if you don’t feel tough, and guess what? You ARE mentally tough. You do hard things, and you can do this!

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