Down... Down.... Down..... Down......

Good Morning My Confidants!

I hope this is a great morning and great day for you! As I type this, it is a Saturday morning here in Kansas City, MO, and my husbear Noah and I are doing our normal tradition...having coffee at a coffee shop.

I love that! Because he had to work last Saturday and like our Maltese dogs, we don't like our routines being messed with. And it is such a nice way to start the day and end the week. With the weather getting so nice—it is 45° with a high of 71° "promised"—I am thinking it might be nice to do a morning or two together on the front porch. And if not? Well, I can do that myself. I love my porch so much. If one of you wins the lottery and decides that getting Ben a more physically accessible home is in you desires—LOL!—I still want the equivalent of a front porch. It is fabulous!

I want to share right off that it is a GREAT morning for me and I am so excited and so proud.

My weight decrease continues!

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I didn't weigh in last week with Noah having to work and I don't want to know my actual weight right now because that really discouraged me last time and was part of my food relapse, so we do my weigh in every Saturday and close to the same time with me wearing the same thing every time—my birthday suit—and I have really straddled my Points the last two weeks so I was trying not to worry.

But you know, besides my daily allowed Points, we also get Weekly Points that we can use as needed (especially if there is a special event coming that we know we will probably go over our daily Points) and somehow I just wasn't thinking of them, and the truth is that with those Points included, I never went over my weekly total Weekly Points since this weight management adventure began. Not once.

And so.....

The loss for the last two weeks was 3.4 pounds with the total weight drop of 29.2 pounds!

WOW!

That means next Saturday I will be able to report a weight drop of 30+ pounds!

(watch for it!)

Do you know how much that is? Well, the next time you go to the grocery story, pick up a bag of 30 pounds worth of pet food!

That means I am no longer carrying that weight around ever day, every hour, every minute, every step!

I walked the dogs the other day! It was only a half block and back but that is a great start! And hey! Why am I saying "only" for goodness' sake?

Because there is something I talk about over and over here at this blog...and that is the Power of Words.

People simply don't understand how powerful they are.

They can not only have a huge effect on the people we come into contact with—we can raise them up, send them crashing, make them smile, cause them to cry, encourage them, discourage them—but they affect us. Our self-talk affects us in huge, huge ways!

"Your brain responds to words in ways that affect your experience of the world. Taking care to use words that don’t cause harm to others can help protect them from trauma... Brain imaging studies support the theory that words affect how people experience pain. Using behavioral and fMRI data on 17 people who participated in the study, researchers in a 2019 ... found that pain-related and negative words made the intensity of pain worse than neutral language. In the study, the pain-related words created a stronger response in many areas of the brain, including the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There’s also evidence to show that words affect perceptions of circumstances. A 2016 ... found that the context of words matters. ... Words can be so powerful, in fact, that they may affect how well someone heals from an injury." In another study showed ... "the effects of a sports teacher’s encouraging words to teen players during small games. The games played with encouragement from the teacher resulted in increased physical intensity, greater enjoyment, and a more positive mood state among the players." *

There was tons more, and I give you my source below, but Google it a bit and you will be amazed. This is science talking.

And then of course I very much believe in the "energy" and "vibrational" explanations as well. People may scoff. They made call it pseudo-science or fringe-science or even poppycock, but I know what I know what I know. I have experienced over and over first hand.

It must go gene-deep. DNA-deep. I really believe that. Not only do I believe that our words affect us psychologically and even chemically, but there is something mysterious as well, all connected I am sure to the Law of Attraction. Yeah, that witchy-woo-woo stuff!

When you lose something, what do you want to do? You want to find it. I won't allow myself to say "weight loss." Somewhere in my "lizard" brain is the need to find something I lose. And I don't want to find the weight I've gotten rid of. And when I say that I walked the dogs "only a half block and back," I am feeding that "I'm not good enough" paradigm. I'm joining that host of people who have told me that I haven't done enough, that I should have done, that I need to do better.

That talk doesn't encourage people! Whipping a dog doesn't train him/her.

No one truly improves by being told what they didn't do right. At least not unless it is bookended with what was don't right.

"You did this soooo well and you were great at this. You could try to do this differently and more efficiently. Because I know that you can because how good you are all so many things. You will soon be my best employee/student/teammate."

The person leaves the talk with their head held high and a desire to please. Being bombarded with what we did "wrong" leaves us feeling like shit, and who can do better when they've been told all their wrongs?

The thing is, so many of us do that to ourselves!

So, my advice to myself and others?

STOP IT!

The Fourth Agreement tells us to "Always do your best." But not to compare our best to yesterday's best. Do the best you can today. Did I do the best that I could today? With all the other good and bad things happening that day, did I do the best that I could? If yes, then yes! It isn't, "Well I could have done better." NO! I did the best that I could today. Because saying "Well I could have done better" goes right back to the Power of Words! It isn't encouraging. It is discouraging!

I can say that I did the best that I could today. And looking over what I did, I can have a plan of attack for tomorrow.

And tomorrow, I will do the best that I can tomorrow.

So therefore....

I have gotten rid of nearly thirty pounds! And the other day I walked the dogs all the way to the end of the block and back again! Yes! I haven't done that in so long!

Go, Ben! Go, Ben! Go, Ben! Go, Ben!

The only way is up! And as far as weight is concerned....down!

An I claim that today!

What are you going to claim?

Claim it! And tell me tomorrow how you did!

Namasté,

BG "Gentle Ben" Thomas

* Do Words Have the Power to Change Your Brain?: https://psychcentral.com/blog/words-can-change-your-brain#power-of-words