Earlier today, I did a Facebook Live video talking about how intention setting has made my life seem like it runs on magic. I talked about how I have manifested exact sums of money that I needed. I’ve launched a new business in the past 3 weeks. I’ve upleveled a relationship with a new business partner. I have lost 37 pounds.

That’s right. I lost 37 pounds doing the same thing that I had always been doing. And it had never really worked before. About five years ago, I watched what I ate and worked out SEVEN days a week. Even then I only lost about 10-15 pounds and didn’t keep it off.

But that sounds kind of skeptical… Like, how on earth can that be? I’m still the same person doing the same things and eating the same amount of calories that I always eat when I’m trying to lose weight. PLUS, I’m not even really working out right now.

Is It Really Magic?

I think a lot of it has to do with intention setting, actually.

For as long as I can remember, one of my deepest desires has been to lose weight. There’s more that goes into it—of course I want to feel good and not have stomachaches and have the energy to live my busy life. I tried to not care what the scale said, but when it came down to it, I did care.

And when I did add practices like regular workouts and cleaner eating to my life, even though I did feel better, I was still pissed that I couldn’t lose the actual pounds.

But there was a lot of other stuff I wasn’t doing either. I wasn’t really great at setting intentions. I read a lot about them, but I didn’t practice them. About two and a half years ago, I was entrenched in trying to start this business, Make Your Perfect, after closing a local business that I owned.

There was a lot that I learned about goal setting, scheduling and planning, and while that helped me organize my life, it didn’t make magic happen.

Even before that, I had implemented some other practices into my life, like creative expression, meditation, self-care, and gratitude practices, but the intention-setting stuff had always seemed kind of confusing, especially since I was already doing vision work and goal-setting practices.

How I Got Started With Intention Setting

Intention setting wasn’t really on my radar, to be honest. I kind of felt like I was doing enough, and things were working out pretty well for me already. I had grown so much on my journey out of the bubble of survival-of-the-fittest motherhood that things were pretty smooth.

But this past year, smoothness transformed into actual magic. Like mind-blowing, energetic, synchronicitous, harmonious alignment.

It started out back in the spring when I realized that I was tapping into some unexplained energy and took a course on developing my psychic and spiritual abilities. Yep, total woo-woo stuff.

As I worked through the course, I realized that I felt really different during the different moon cycles. So I started doing some celebrations around each new and full moon. These rituals all involved some sort of intention setting.

In the week or so after I did each celebration, certain things would seem so aligned. I seriously started having some psychic communication with the people I did the rituals with. Certain themes that came up during the rituals would present themselves to me again in my real life. I even started making art again after years of ditching my former artist’s identity, and my pictures seemed to be drawing themselves.

I felt like a path had been laid out in front of me, and it took no effort to follow it.

How Following A Diet Regimen Finally Made The Magic Happen

During that time, I started to notice that the magic seemed to happen even more often when I was going through my kind of strict regimen of clean eating. What you put in your body can have a huge impact on your physical and mental state. Certain types of diets have even been linked with depression.

But let’s be honest… I was still smoking cigarettes fairly frequently and drinking alcohol on the weekends. I wasn’t being a saint, and my body was still filled with some toxins.

Still, I noticed that when I said I would stick with my “diet plan,” I really would. I wanted to lose weight so bad that when I got to that point where I had been eating like crap for months and felt fat and bloated, I would do a complete overhaul and pick up where I had left off on my eating regimen.

And when I would do that, the magic would happen everywhere else in my life.

I realized that what I was doing while following my eating plan was setting intentions and sticking to them. I had trained my body, mind and spirit to be more successful at intention setting during the moon rituals I was doing, and every time I went back on my “diet,” I was proving to myself that I really could materialize the bigger intentions that I had.

When I was on my eating regimen, I basically set an intention every time I went to eat a meal, every time I stopped myself from eating junk food, every time I said no to having a beer at night. I was setting intentions consistently throughout the day, and the rest of my life was lining up!

The Key To Intention Setting

I had done the diet plan in the past, but I wasn’t doing all of the other intention setting work with it. And—this is key—when you’re not setting intentions intentionally (see how I did that?) you’re actually setting a lot of subconscious intentions and breaking them without even knowing it.

So I don’t think that my subconscious really believed that I could manifest the intention and lose the weight. And so it stuck.

So the key to intention setting is setting intentions. Ha. How cyclical and simple is that?

When you set intentions and meet them consistently, you’re telling your subconscious that you’re open to hearing your deepest desires and you trust yourself to follow them.

That’s when I really buckled down and focused on intention setting.

And that’s when I started to realize that the process of intention setting totally confused and overwhelmed me.

Come back to the blog in the next few days to read what happened next! Like Make Your Perfect on Facebook so you don’t miss a thing.