It will take too long....

The last couple days, as I have been going about my regular business, in the back of my brain, thoughts from the Excuses Begone are still percolating around. What came to the fore today is the thought that Mindful Eating, as a weight loss tool, will take too long.

The other day, I wrote a post about Magic Beans -- those quick fixes -- emphasis on the quick -- we all want to be the weight we want to be and we want to get there yesterday!

Last week, I had a conversation with a client, who had decided he couldn't put the energy into learning to eat mindfully while he was overweight. He decided he wanted to lose the weight in the fashion he was successful in the past. Once the weight was off, he would learn the mindful skills to keep it off.

But what about those of us who don't start to get the weight off because it is going to take too long??

I liked Wayne Dyer's answer to that statement:

An entertaining psychiatrist named Dr. Murray Banks does just that with the following little exchange between himself and a woman who has decided not to return to school because she’d be too old when she finished.

“How old would you be in five years if you got that degree by starting now?” he asks her.
“Forty-nine,” she replies.
“And how old will you be in five years if you don’t go back to school?”
“Forty-nine,” she answers, with the bewildered confusion of becoming conscious of making an excuse for not elevating her life.

However long it took you to create any self-defeating habit, you did it all one day, one moment at a time. There’s absolutely no proof that anything will take a long time, since even the idea of “a long time” is an illusion—there is only now.

Make this awareness a part of your consciousness. The Tao Te Ching reinforces this in perhaps the most famous line in that masterful work:

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Elevate or move on in your life, not by thinking big and in long time periods, but with consciousness focused on the present moment.