Every week you find a new article, or scientific study proclaiming to have discovered THE reasons why overweight people find it so difficult to lose weight.
It is because your hormones are deficient. No, it is because you’re eating McDonalds. No, it is because you’re eating too many carbohydrates. No, it isn’t carbohydrates, it is sugar. No, it isn’t sugar per se; it is high fructose corn syrup. No, it is aspartame in the diet drinks. No, it is because you’re not exercising enough. No, it is actually your bad genes. And if it is your genes, what can you do about it?
Nothing, right?
On top of that, you’re bombarded with this miraculous “new” diet, which now promises quick results, or that pill that makes you lose weight overnight and you don’t have to change anything in your diet or life habits. Diet after diet, pill after pill, and that fat seems to stubbornly hang onto you like burdocks on a sheep’s wool.
But if the history of dieting and losing weight has taught us anything, it that the only thing that’s certain is that the weight seems to be either not going away or it’s coming back “with a vengeance”.
And you have tried all of these things, and just when you thought that this time you got it under control, you end up frustrated and to the point of giving up. And this is where the real problem is.
Rats Are Smarter Than People
Think of it. Before 40-50 years ago, people have not struggled with obesity. Italians still ate a lot of pasta, sugar and honey was still consumed, fruits and juices were still used in our normal eating habits. And moreover, people did not exercise every day in the gym to the point of exhaustion.
According to the statistics in the policy research study: Pub. 757, Public Policy in Global Health and Medical Practice obesity actually began to be a problem in the 1960’s. What happened? We have all of a sudden become obese by a miraculous although unfortunate chance?
Definitely not!
But what we have experienced since are major societal, cultural, dietary and technological changes. We now live in a society that supports wholeheartedly excessive food intake, fast-food (which cannot even be considered food), and no physical exercise.
There is not much we can do about deciding what foods are on the market unless you campaign against agricultural antibiotics and synthetic hormones (namely estrogens) out of control usage on cattle. There is not much we can do about the proliferation of fast food chains unless we make a conscious decision to not eat there.
But if you make such a decision you have to deal with the myth that “real food” is more expensive than its junk food counterparts?
In a telling opinion piece in the New York Times, columnist Mark Bittman disputes the myth that home cooked healthy means are more expensive than fast food. In fact he demonstrated that most people can afford “real” food. Which means, of course, that financially based decisions are nothing to do with what you eat.
But there is some truth to the cheap meals attitude since many families are juggling tight budgets and even tighter time availability.
By eating a two dollar meal from a fast food store now, high in grains, sugars and factory farmed meats combined with silicone and other synthetic ingredients, you are sowing the seeds of a guaranteed future health problem which will become a substantial financial burden on the individual as well as on his/her family.
In our NLPCoaching Trainings we talk about a little metaphor. Rats are smarter than people. If you train a rat to run a maze, so to go to the food place, the rat learns that relatively easy. Supposedly you block the tunnel at some point. Now the rat goes down that tunnel, finds it blocked, turns around and finds another way around the maze, and gets to the food. No better teacher than hunger, huh?
But people, keep going down their habitual, convenient “tunnel” in life, and when they find blocked, they sit down and complain. Why didn’t they open the tunnel for me? Maybe if I run faster I’ll break through the blockage… Booom!
Ouch! Still blocked!
Maybe if I sit down and do affirmations, maybe then the tunnel will unblock itself! Maybe if I use the Law Of Attraction, I will attract an open tunnel….
So, we would submit that the complacency and convenience in a habitual mode of thinking and behaving is more important than everything else. It is not difficult to plan our meals in advance, avoid food waste and learn how to cook simple but nourishing foods. But the bother to get there is more of a problem than anything else. Which leads us to the main point:
Are You REALLY Determined To Lose Weight?
Or do you say you want to, and complain about it hiding behind it as one of your major excuses in life? Are you waiting for “them” to produce the magic pill for you?
We talked once to a woman who wanted to lose weight. And in the discussion she said to us: “Once thing I will NEVER give up. These are my bikkies”…(Yes, she as Australian; for Americans, these are cookies).
So, in not so many words she told us directly that she was not prepared to do whatever it takes to lose weight.
Because if you do, then you first need to take responsibility for yourself and stop blaming “them” for making you overweight. This issue of responsibility seems to be the most difficult to overcome. In order to make it to the gym, you need to first get out of bed yourself. In order to cook healthy meals, you need to go shopping for healthy foods and maybe even learn how to cook.
In order to get plenty of sleep, you need to get to bed early which means to give up your night watching television. In order to feel not good enough in comparison with that slim woman you saw on the street today, or your slim co-worker in the office, you need to stop beating yourself up, and do everything you can to become like her. In order to manage your stress you need to learn how to do Time Line Therapy® and let go of your negative emotions and limiting decision or do some Hypnosis. Both are proven to be extremely results producing in this respect. But all of these are easy to overcome once you make a decision and stick with it.
But how do you stick with it? You’ve been motivated to lose weight before, only to fail again and again because you lost motivation?
What’s Important to You?
What’s not immediately obvious is that your motivation (or lack thereof) is dictated by your most unconscious values. And we’re not talking about the conscious things you say you value.
No…
We’re talking here about your deepest unconscious values. These are directly responsible for everything you do or don’t do, everything you appreciate or not, everything you approve of or not, and even more, this is also how you judge if your own actions are appropriate or not.
Aside from that, you need to discover how you make decisions. Are you a fast decision maker and thenyou stick with your decision? Or do you decide on the spur of the moment (like the New Year resolution) only to rescind your decision for “all the good reasons”?
You also need to be willing to change your lifestyle. Losing weight and staying slim is not a matter of diet, alone. It is not a matter of exercising, alone. It is not a matter of giving up drinking beer every day, alone. It is not about getting plenty of restful sleep, alone.It is neither of these ALONE, but it is a change in the way YOU control your life and your life patterns. This is not as difficult to do as it may seem. There are many people trying to give you their values under the guise of being the “right” values. There are many Critical and Ineffective Attempts to ‘Restore’ The “Right” Values – It Does NOT Work
It does not work because your values are unconscious and because you weren’t taught in school how to change and modify those values so that you automatically and without effort act in a different way. It does not work because you weren’t taught in school an NLP description of how to be in charge of your motivation and decision making strategies. It does not work because you have not been taught in school how to do Time Line Therapy® techniques and how to let go of your frustration and feeling of unworthiness, how to let go of your lack of hope and helplessness and regain hope and control over your weight.
All Right, Now What?
Quite frankly, all of the above can be overcome. You don’t know something – well, learn it! You’re smart, you’re capable. Then what’s the problem?
The problem is that you’ve given up. And this is a problem. Many of you have resigned yourselves into the idea that there is nothing you can do. And you have all the good reasons for which that is the case.
People often ask me why do we do NLP trainings and seminars, why have we chosen to do this line of work in relation to weight loss? And are we not like all the other people promising you the “magic” something?
Well the answer is quite simply that we’re not! Nobody else asks you to do the very unpopular behavior of taking responsibility for your overweight. Nobody else is telling you that you have to do something to change your whole life in order to succeed. This mode of thinking and acting are very unpopular! They are not as easy as “Do it to me!” attitude so prevalent in our society. It is painful to think that your weight is of your own doing, simply by not knowing what to do or not paying attention to it until it became a problem.
We’ve seen far too much needless struggling throughout our trainings and travels around the world, absolutely needless struggling with weight and not only-in fact if you can nameit, we’ve probably seen it -because people were carefully manipulated and deceived in believing that somebody or something else will appear to save them out of their misery.
The real tragedy is that they never explored the simple options that could relatively easily reverse theirhardships. The culture around us is “everything easy”, “don’t make me do anything”and “give me the easy pill.”
The paradox is that what we’re teaching is not difficult. In fact it is easy because it is “normal.” Once you know how, changing your motivation and decisions will cost you nothing. But the rewards can be priceless.
Just remember one very well-known quote, in fact so well known it has become a cliché, (and I paraphrase here from Schopenhauer):
All real factsgo through three stages:First they are ridiculed, then they’re vehemently opposed and finally they become widely accepted as being self-evident.
We believe information and knowledge about your body and mind is more powerful than any magic “something” when it comes to being in charge of your weight.
So stay informed, learn it yourself and join us in spread it around as widely as you can.