The quickest way to start losing weight is to start believing that you can. It takes mental discipline as well as a healthy diet and exercise to lose weight and keep it off. Achieving mental discipline is not as hard as one might think and you can start right away. Discipline is defined as “the ability to do the right thing even when no one is watching”. Mental discipline could then be defined as “the ability to control your thoughts when you’re not thinking”. Using mental discipline to lose weight is the ability to stay strong in a moment of weakness. Unfortunately, moments of weakness occur rather frequently when dieting. Imagine that your diet has been quite successful and your target weight is seemingly reachable in less time than previously imagined. Suddenly, just when success is in sight, a weekend from hell occurs and before you know it, you’ve skipped two workouts and consumed every Little Debbie and Pringle in sight, and when no one was watching, you secretly ordered take-out.
I need to lose weight
Having a strong sense of mental discipline may prevent that disaster from ever occurring. Occasionally we will give ourselves the green light to be bad. Then we make promises to ourselves such as working out harder during the next workout or skipping lunch or dinner, which is extremely unhealthy. Having mental discipline keeps your mind strong and your willpower in tact when you are consistently challenged during the course of a day. By properly programming your mind, you become able to override and overcome ingrained eating habits, and your energy level will naturally increase because you’ve stuck to a healthier diet. Skipping workouts is less likely to occur as well; in fact you’re likely to start looking forward to them.
I am finally reaching my weight goal
Create a vision of yourself having already lost the weight you feel you need to lose. Think about what you are wearing. Think about how you would feel. Confident? Ready for anything? Train yourself to think of this vision when you wake up, then keep the vision on your mind when you are in the shower, as you get ready for work. Think about this vision on your bus ride or drive into the office. After a couple of days, it becomes natural and easy. Remember, a belief is nothing more than a series of thoughts. It won’t be long before you start believing this vision is an attainable version of you! Suddenly, eating healthy is easy and working out is no longer the chore it once seemed. Achieving mental discipline will stop the sabotage from occurring and losing weight will no longer be the proposed chance of failure it once was. If you have decided that losing weight is your goal, and you want it bad enough, you must first believe that you can lose weight. Most people program themselves for failure not even realizing it. With mental discipline, and a strong desire to succeed, anyone can lose weight, and keep it off.
Addictions manifest in many ways. Some turn a fun hobby like shopping into a financial nightmare. Other times, addictions pose health risks, especially when the addiction is drug or alcohol related. It really does not matter what you are addicted to. The only thing that matters is that you realize that you have a problem and are ready to take the steps needed to take your life back. In this fight, your mind is your biggest ally. It has all the power you need to get back on a healthy track.
You need to get to the root of your problem. Your problem is not with any substance or activity. Your problem is with what drove you to seek refuge in an addiction. Maybe it is to fight boredom. Maybe it is to get a rush. Whatever it is, you need to figure out what drives you to put your life on hold for an addiction. When you have it singled out, find healthy alternatives to receive the feelings that you crave.
Notice what is going on around you when you get an urge to partake in you addiction. If you figure out your trigger, you can plan to avoid any situation that will make you weak. In the beginning of the fight with addiction, you will need to stay away from obvious stressors and triggers in your life. Eventually, you can work up the strength to stare down the habit and walk away clean.
I am addicted to Smoking
The next step in this basic method comes in week two. Make a note every time you want to indulge in your addiction, and also make a note of what’s going on around you at the time. For example:
Cigarette craving 1:00
Just ate lunch
Smoked 1 cigarette
By keeping track of what happens when you have a craving or a need to do something, you can find your triggers, and make yourself realize what causes the urge – and then find a way around it. If you always have a cigarette after lunch, try something new in your routine for at least three weeks. For example, instead of going to a café where smoking is allowed, eat lunch at a different restaurant. Don’t give yourself time to smoke after you finish eating, either. Go right back to work. We are creatures of habit, and addictions are all about breaking these habits. Did you know that you can form a new habit in as little as 27 days? Don’t use chemical dependency as an excuse. Once the withdrawal phase is over, your road blocks are purely in your mind.
Addictive Gambling
Your new daily routines and habits should reflect your new life. Do not stay in the same patterns that you did while you were in full throws of addiction. This trap sets you up to fall back in to repeated patterns, including the ones that drove you to addiction. Vary what you do day to day. This will keep you open to better and more healthy life choices.
As you face your addiction, remember this fight will be for your life. You need to stay strong and take back control of your life. You can and will do it if you put your mind to it.
Everyone’s told a lie– you, your friends, your boss, even your perfect “role model” mother. But the only reason you’ve ever told a lie was to help someone else, or yourself for that matter, out of a very sticky situation…right? Or are you just lying to yourself now? Either way, considering the fact that almost everyone on the face of the earth has lied at one point or another, we sure are lousy at picking out the most malicious liars among us. You might think you have a good sense of when someone is telling a tall tale, but you’ll find that when you know how to read the signs, spotting the falsities in your perpetually late co-worker’s excuses or even the faults in your spouse’s multiple cover-ups can really save you some strife in the long run. So, without further ado, here are 10 habits shared by Lying Larry’s and Fibbing Franny’s around the world.
1. Averted gaze: It’s not normal to expect someone to maintain full eye contact for the entirety of a conversation…unless they have some sort of disorder, and that’s another story in and of itself. However, if you notice any difference in the amount of eye contact the suspected liar is making, that could be a clue that they’re not telling the truth. In fact, even the direction of the gaze makes a difference when trying to figure out someone’s intentions. It has been noted that when trying to recall a fact, most people with avert their eyes upwards and to the right. A person who is trying to come up with a lie, however, will usually look down.
2. Too much eye contact: Just as a liar may avert his or her gaze to keep someone from looking into their eyes (it’s been long said that you can see the truth in someone’s eyes, therefore liars may try to avoid this result by looking away altogether), someone trying to cover up a lie may also make too much eye contact. This comes as a result of a reverse train of thought by the person in question. More experienced frauds may know that people are expecting them not to make eye contact and therefore counteract this by making prolonged eye contact, to the point of abnormality.
3. Stuttering: Telling a lie, especially a more in-depth one, takes a lot of effort on the fibber’s part. So much effort, in fact, that in the process of telling it, people tend to get tripped up. Think about it– if there’s something big at stake, it takes enough effort to remember and relay an actual string of events. Liars charge themselves with the duty of not only coming up with a fake string of events, but also coming up with it on the spot as well as double-checking every word they say seconds before they say it, meanwhile paying strict attention to every word they say for fear that they’ll be asked to repeat the same story later. Makes you almost feel sorry for them doesn’t it? Nah.
She tells nothing but lies
4. Sweating: It’s a natural nervous reaction. Most people sweat or get sticky palms when speaking in public, making an important decision, waiting on significant results, etc. But if someone is sweating during an everyday situation, that could be a tip-off that they fear getting caught in their lie.
5. Abnormal expressions: As in the case of liars making too much eye contact, they may also go too far when it comes to showing they are at ease to throw you off. If someone holds a facial expression for too long, such as a smile, or other expressions/gestures, take that into consideration.
6. Fidgeting: This may be a person’s way of diverting your attention, therefore breaking your concentration on the facts of the story they’re telling you. It may also be an uncontrollable nervous habit. Whether someone fidgets with an outside object or takes up a nervous habit such as tapping their feet or twirling their hair, these are all signs that your culprit may not be fully at ease and in the midst of spinning a tall tale.
7. Changes in pace: Beyond the obvious stuttering through sentences, more experienced liars might try to disguise this dead giveaway by pausing excessively. You can watch for this by noticing where in the sentence or story the person pauses. If it’s right before an important detail, or maybe before a detail they have relayed to you previously, this could be a sign that they are trying to straighten up their story in their head before it comes out of their mouth. Also, if the person pauses at irregular times such as the middle of a sentence (in the absence of a transition), they could be trying to let their voice catch up with their mind.
This girl can't keep a secret
8. Changes in tone of voice: When someone is spinning a story, they are usually concentrating too hard on coming up with the details for their body to focus on what it is normally able to focus on. This may cause a person’s voice to crack, which is almost a dead giveaway of a lie being told.
9. Any other changes in bodily functions: As noted above, people actively engaged in making up a story that isn’t true, while also trying to double-check the details of this story in their mind, while also trying to remember the details in case they have to recall them later…don’t usually have time for much else. As a result, functions such as blinking, swallowing and breathing may become abnormal. For the most part these changes will manifest themselves in the form of increased levels of all of the above (all going back to “fight or flight” reactions—also known as modern day nervous reactions).
10. Being overly vague: To lighten the load on themselves, fibbers will often not tell too many details of any story they’re asked to recall. And wouldn’t you do the same? Given the difficulty of telling a solid lie (noted several times thus far), it is much easier to keep it simple until further request. So give these people a run for their money—if they’re too simple, ask for further explanation, and then look for the signs noted above.
For the most part, pegging the aforementioned signs as a tip-off of a lie comes down to knowing the person in question. On any given day, any given person could show any of these signs, while also remaining perfectly innocent. But if you know someone’s normal tendencies, it becomes that much easier to peg these signals for what they really are, therefore catching their insincere act and taking proper actions. Ready to try it out but have no one to try it on? First, thank whatever higher power you might believe in…or your mom and dad for teaching you not to hang around liars. Then, go record the daytime court TV sensation of your choice and have at it.
“There’s a 30 percent chance that it’s already raining,” proclaimed Karen Smith immediately preceding her professing her abilities for harnessing her ESP…N. Might I add that she was standing in the rain as she made her miraculous prediction? Ok, so maybe the movie ‘Mean Girls’ isn’t the best example of legitimate displays of psychic abilities. Heck, maybe the vast majority of people who claim to have psychic abilities don’t actually have them; but if some semblance of psychic powers didn’t exist at all, it would be awfully hard to justify all the hype surrounding them throughout several decades, and even centuries. In fact, even though it is unarguably difficult (if not impossible) to scientifically prove the existence of ESP, it has been said that the main reason it cannot be disproven, in the absence of overwhelming evidence for either argument, is simply because of the widespread belief in their existence.
Beyond simple claims and speculations, there are a few standout cases that seem just a little too real for the majority of people to argue against. Scientists and researchers have tried to prove and disprove these cases, but as it stands, there has been no concrete prognosis either way. Like a 7-year-old’s belief in Santa, sometimes it’s better to just leave it up to the imagination. So, without further ado, here are 3 psychic cases science just can’t explain.
1. Animal Psychic Abilities
What? No, your dog probably can’t tell you what your next big career move will be (if he does, send Rover my way). But some dogs might be able to tell you when the grim reaper has come knocking on a loved one’s door. Think that’s just as creepy? Yeah, you have a point. But in the true spirit of the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction,” there have been several reported cases of dogs hysterically barking and howling at the exact moment of death of a loved one. And they don’t have to be in the same room either. As Ann Lidel, owner of an intuitive Newfoundland, explains, her mother was in the hospital ill when her dog, at home with her at the time, started to howl in a tone she had never heard before.
Ann must’ve been as intuitive as her clairvoyant companion, because she immediately understood that her dog was howling to signal the death of her mother. She called the hospital, which confirmed her suspicions. Her mother had died the exact minute her dog began to howl.
This is just one of many cases in which a dog has gotten its non-existent panties in a wad over the death of a human. Even stranger are the animals who seem to seek out death like a 15 year old football player seeks out a freshman cheerleader before the homecoming dance.
The most solid example of this a seemingly morbid (emo, if you will) cat named Oscar. This particular pet psychic lives in a nursing home and has a sick sense for when residents are nearing their final hour. Just before the death of any given person, Oscar hops up on their bed for one last cuddle. So considerate of him to keep them warm in their last minutes on earth. Oscar’s sense has proven to be so accurate, that the employees of the nursing home have given up on questioning it and learned to trust it, even going so far as to call for the family members of any patient who receives this notorious visit from Oscar. While some have argued that it could be possible for cats’ fine-tuned sense of smell to allow them to identify a very subtle change in metabolism right before a human’s death, this has yet to be proven. This leaves the psychic abilities of emo cat and distressed dogs’ holding strong at their status of “unexplainable by science.”
2. Telepathy
Used by superheroes and desired by desperate college exam-takers, telepathy (or “biocommunication,” as the Russians like to call it) is another subject of much scientific research. Dating back to the 19th century, it still has yet to be disproven, or even clearly defined; making it strikingly similar to the mystery surrounding disappearing socks in the wash cycle. Many attempts to explain this phenomenon have claimed that it is simply a way of combining multiple sensory clues to form a vision or thought. Ah, but it couldn’t be this easy. Several cases have put this theory to rest by displaying a transfer of thoughts across long distances (which more appropriately fit the word “telepathic,” as it literally means “affected by distance).
3. Psychic Twins
No, they have not been featured in a Budweiser ad yet…at least we don’t think so. Of all psychic phenomena, it would be safe to say that individual accounts of psychic abilities between twins are among the most highly documented. Beyond the recently famous psychic twins Terry and Linda Jamison (they were on the Tyra show, they have to be legit!), records of uncanny connections of twins have become so common, they’ve almost crossed the line from supernatural, to just-plain-natural. From stories of twins being adopted at birth by different parents, living completely separate lives, and later reconnecting to discover that they had the same hobbies, same career, and both married men with the same name; to stories of one twin experiencing severe cramping at the very moment the other twin went into labor (sounds like an unfortunate twist on sympathy pains).
With all of the documented cases out there, this phenomenon might be closest to being scientifically proven, as there have been a few studies in which twins were separated and one was exposed to different distressing stimuli, resulting in a definite reaction of distress to the isolated twin who wasn’t exposed. That being said, there have not been results statistically significant enough to prove these theories for sure. And so the story goes, psychic abilities of twins are placed back on the “unproven” list. But really, is there any other place to be?
So now it seems that we’ve talked about a lot and proven nothing…wait, is this a political debate? But really, what is life without the great sport of debate, and emo cats, telepathics and psychics?
