Ninety Percent is Half-Mental

Yogi Berra supposedly once said about baseball, “Ninety percent of this game is half-mental.”  No one knows if he really said it; heck, even Yogi himself probably isn’t sure, as he also supposedly said, “I really didn’t say everything I said. … Then again, I might have said ‘em, but you never know.”  But whether he said it in a funny way or not, the point remains that there’s a whole lot to the game of baseball that has nothing to do with the physical gifts and talents of the participants.  I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a disagreement there.

As I’ve talked with people lately about my Health Journey™, I’ve come to appreciate how much Yogi’s truism applies to my situation.  Sure, I talk about the nuts and bolts of what I’m doing, the physical changes I’ve made to my diet and exercise, etc.  But more often than not, we end up talking about the mental part: the psychology of cheat day and why it works for me, the mental and emotional improvements I’ve seen along with the physical changes, etc.

I’ve realized one simple thing: every time I’ve tried to lose weight by making physical changes, I have failed.  The reason this one has worked, and the reason I am 100% confident it will continue to work long-term, is that this is not a physical effort.  There are physical aspects to it, but they are byproducts of the mental changes, and not vice versa.

As I’ve mentioned before, the past 11 months are the first time in my life I’ve ever had a healthy relationship with food.  I’ve had many kinds of relationships with food, but they all combined to make me 400 pounds.  But now, my relationship with food is healthy and easy to summarize:

I like food, and that’s okay.  Food is not bad, even “bad” food.  I have a healthy plan, and that plan includes allowing me to eat the “bad” foods I like once a week.  That gives me two huge benefits: 1) I can easily make good choices the rest of the week, and 2) I can enjoy the “bad” foods when I do eat them.

Positive mental changes build on themselves like a snowball rolling down a hill.  Coming up with a plan you can stick with forever is a mental change.  Recognizing the improvements you make in following that plan is a mental change.  Developing the confidence to challenge yourself physically with more demanding exercise is a mental change.  Sharing your success with others is a mental change.

If you are trying to get healthy via physical changes, I think your chances are slim.  (Pun not intended, but I’m not going to use a different word that doesn’t work as well just to avoid it. :-))  Most of the mental changes bring physical changes with them, but it is absolutely essential that you start with the mental.  No weight-loss pill or magazine article is going to do this for you.  Even reading “The Four-Hour Body,” the book that got me started, won’t do a thing for you.  It’s not until you make that first mental change — “I have a plan that I really believe I can stick with long-term” — that things will start to change for you.