4. Fortune-Telling

"Like an internal psychic, your self-talk makes predictions about your performance, and when negative, this prediction tends to be a doom and gloom type prophecy. your internal fortune-telling might run the gamut from "This won't work; I'll never lose wieght; I will fail; I've got too much to lose" to "I'll never drop those last five or ten pounds" When this type of internal dialouge is really active, rationally confident thoughts get shunted out of your mind because they aren't as dominant or demanding. In essence, this negative internal dialogue can become a vicious cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy, controlling your thinking and predicting the outcome you will have. The smashing of the four-minute mile barrier in 1954 is a classic example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People all over the world believed that running this distance in under four minutes was physiologically impossible for any human being, and so it never happened, until a young physician named Roger Bannister believed he could do it. and he did. in his legendary, record-breaking race, Bannister sprinted across the finish line in a time of three minutes and fifty-nine point four seconds. But what is truly instructive about this story is that in the very next year, twelve more runners broke this previously unsurpassable mark, and today athletes do it all the time. If you're working at managing your weight, tune in to whether you are making predictions about your performance. If you are, you could be setting yourself up for an outcome you don't want."