When you get to goal weight if you try and keep the weight off, it means you are focussing on what you don't want to be. You are focussing still on the big person you were and hence you are always 'fighting' to not be that person again.

Therefore when people say they are 'keeping it off' then they are always focussing on a negative.

Some people don't agree with me on this but the simple question I ask is 'Keeping what off?' , the answer always has to be 'the weight'...and therefore it is about the weight!!

It is also the same principle with people who carry round photo's of the big person that they were, they show the photo to remind themselves of what they don't want to be.

I do a lot of work with people when they get to goal weight as too many people succeed on diets but then regain the weight. For me, there is very little guidance from anyone on how to 'not diet' after you get to goal.

Now diets are great to get you to goal weight as they offer a structure that people can buy into and work with. Any diet will be a control mechanism for calories into the body, different diets will offer different levels of weight loss each week but ultimately all diets offer a system to the dieter that if they follow they will get slim.

But then what...

If you then try and keep it off you end up obssessed with what you can and can't eat. You are diving on the scales every day, doing a diet for 24 hours because you had a meal out and end up living the diet lifestyle.

For the first six months after I got to goal weight I was literally living in fear of being big again. I thought about it so much that I might as well have been big again as I felt the same feelings. I became so anal about what I ate, it would take 2 hours to do the Tesco shop as I checked the amount of fat per 100g on every product that went in the trolley. I became a calorie counting freak and I was more depressed than I was when I was big as at least then I could eat to cheer up!

But then over that next six months I started to model excellence. I researched what slim people did, I chatted to loads of people who have always been slim and copied what they did both in terms of what they ate and how they thought. I asked them 'do they keep the weight off?' and they look at me confused, and then I realised that they are just happy being slim and value being slim enough that they make sensible food choices.

So turning this to you?

Do you talk about keeping it off?

Or, if you are still big, do you talk about 'losing weight' ? Remember if you lose your car keys then you'll go looking for them so don't lose weight either! Banish, burn, destroy fat but never lose it.

Remember to listen to how you speak and what you do. When you talk about yourself are you talking positively and about the future? Or are you putting yourself down and talking about the past?

I used to be desperate to tell people how big I used to be but now I never mention it to people who don't know already, but the key thing is I don't now 'feel the need' to tell them as it doesn't even occur to me.

Next week's article is going to be called the 4 stages of dieting which I hope will follow on from this in explaining how by making concious changes now you can suddenly be doing things without even realising it.

Have an amazing week as always and smile ;-)

Mike