Reprogramming the brain

I love my DVR. I don't want to spend time scheduling TV viewing around somebody else's schedule. If I want to watch my Craig Ferguson in the morning while I'm doing the breakfast dishes, I can do it. If I want to save up several episodes of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency so I can curl up on a sofa and suffer through my womanly cramps for several hours, it's there for me.

If I want to watch the specials on PBS that run during their pledge drives, and I can skip the endless guilt-till-you-give commentary, I can do that without remorse. (I already gave and I'm waiting on my Pilates DVD and book by Karena Thek Lineback.) So yesterday, while I was killing time until I needed to pick up the boys from school, I watched a really long presentation by Dr. Wayne Dyer. It was titled Excuses Begone. Of course that piqued my interest, so I settled in to watch it with a Medifast Pomegranate Cherry Antioxidant shake (my favorite flavor).

Dr. Dyer is a big, handsome older gentleman with lots of wisdom and life experiences to share...three hours of it...I skipped through a lot. But one comment stayed with me, the idea that we are what we believe about ourselves. And in order to change that, we had to start thinking about ourselves in a new way. He mentioned that many years ago, at the end of the day, he started spending the minutes before drifting off to sleep thinking about how great the next day was going to be, everything he was going to do, and how it was all going to turn out. Because he recognized how what we all normally do is lay in bed and think about how everything went terribly wrong that day, who wronged us, and why we didn't have such a great day.

So last night, just after I went to bed, I remembered that I was going to try this one thing, the one thing that I took away from the three hours I spent watching the show. And I thought about my to-do list for the next day, and how I was going to get everything done, what it was going to feel like when I accomplished everything, and how much joy I was going to experience from it. I thought about how I was going to be eating on plan and how I was going to have a lot of energy throughout the day, how I was going to be very focused.

It's nearly 10 a.m. now, and I have to say, I've already gotten a lot done today! And I feel very focused in what I want to accomplish. I'm noticing that when I think about going off-task (something I always do), I'm very much uncomfortable with it and I want to get back to what I intended to accomplish.

This is a very curious thing! How well is this going to work for me? How much am I going to change? How much am I going to accomplish? What can I imagine for myself?

Right now, I'm imagining myself just losing the next 5.5 lbs. I'll break 305, which will be a new low for me. I can imagine that my knees will feel just a little bit better as I'm on the elliptical cross trainer, that I will be able to increase my time on that thing to 15 minutes. Because if I can do that, I can watch TV and exercise more at the same time!