Kenny Rogers has a line in one of his songs that goes,”If you’re going to play the game, you’ve got to learn to play it right.”

Learning the rules of weight loss, or of life for that matter, will help you keep your sense of humor.  And the first rule is: Life and everything in it is a game.  Of course, it upsets most people to hear that losing weight is a game.  It didn’t seem like a game when they got up this morning and tried to squeeze into their clothes.  But the fact is, this is a game we’re playing.

In order for an activity to be a game, it has to involve a notion of value, of relative importance.  In our case, for example, being thin is more important than being fat.  But why?  Why is anything more important than anything else?  The true answer is that nothing is more important  than anything else except by agreement.  And who has to agree to make something important to you?  You do, of course.  It doesn’t make any difference what anyone else considers important unless you agree.

Why is it that certain activities in life don’t look like games?  The answer here is that games have different degrees of consequences.  Wars, for example, are games that have very serious consequences.  When you’ve told the world that you’re going to be thin, thrown away all your fat clothes, and bought all new thin clothes, you’ve upped the consequences.  The problem with a game that has serious consequences is that we start to forget that it’s a game and we were the ones who made it important in the first place.  If the consequences get to serious, we stop playing to win and begin playing to avoid losing.  Even worse, we may begin playing as if we have to win, and that’s no fun.  At that point we become grim, lose our sense of humor, and become our own worst enemy.

When we forget that this is a game we’ve created, we forget the purpose of playing the game.  The purpose of playing the game and the goal of the game must never be confused.  You see, the goal of a game is to win, but the purpose of playing a game is to be happy, to experience feelings of aliveness, and to express ourselves fully.  If we forget our purpose for starting this game in the first place, we may wind up winning the game at the expense of sacrificing our happiness, aliveness, and self-expression.  You invented the goal.  If you lose your health or happiness in the process, what have you gained?

The purpose for everything you do is to be happy, isn’t it?  So lighten up! Play all out, have fun, and remember your purpose.

DONOTCHANGE