Whether weight is or isn’t an issue in your life, these principles will apply to your life. This coaching session is not solely about becoming the weight that you want to be, it’s also about your overall health and your families health as well. The more that I have worked with people and their issues with weight, the more passionate I become that your mind plays a critical if not the most important role in finally becoming the weight that you want to be.
Physiological Weight Control Fundamentals
There are basically two reasons that you possess the weight that you possess, one is physiological (physical) and the other is psychological (mind). There are numerous physiological reasons that some are thin and others are overweight. We have a part of our brain called the hypothalamus (weight regulating mechanism), and even though the hypothalamus is in your brain, it addresses the physiological aspects of weight control. This part of the brain signals you that you are physically full, but not psychologically full, and there’s a big difference.
This part of the brain determines physically what your proper healthy weight should be based upon physiological input. This input is called your set-point, defined as a predetermined weight that you hypothalamus considers to be safe, effective, normal and healthy for you. This is the part of the brain that controls metabolism, which is the optimal amount of calories that your body burns per day based on many contributing factors. Last, it’s believed that this part of your brain is responsible for perceiving feast or famine, whether to try to conserve energy or to burn it.
Psychological Weight control fundamentals
The psychological program in your subconscious mind relating to weight is your inner homing device or default program that controls your eating and exercise/activity behaviors. As they are repeated over and over, for the most part oblivious to the person struggling with weight, they keep your inner orientation on overeating, eating unhealthy foods, cleaning the plate, reward for overeating, overeating when worried, overeating when happy, associating junk food with happiness, associating food with having friends, associating food with romance, and on and on. Just like a compass needle always points north, you will always be pointed in the direction of the program that’s in your subconscious mind.
All your thoughts, decisions and actions related to weight control are so powerfully imbedded in your subconscious mind that it becomes difficult to tune in to the self-talk, and will move you towards your likely environmentally programmed destructive attitudes towards food, exercise and activity. If you choose not to focus on reprogramming this destructive damaging behavior, your actions will further become haphazard. You will function with your inner guidance system focused on the same unhealthy destructive behaviors, rendering you powerless to control your weight no matter what diet you’re on.
Weight control adds a complexity to what you discovered thus far about behavior and how to change it. For example, you don’t have to have a bad attitude in order to live, however you do have to eat to sustain life. You don’t have to be happy in order to live, however food is a requirement. In other words, if you change your bad attitude into a good attitude, or unhappiness into happiness, you will continue to live and of course a much more fruitful life. If you change from eating to not eating, temporarily you likely will be healthier, but of course eventually you will die. This adds to the complexity of psychological weight control.
The good news is that just as your gyroscope points you in the direction of weight gain, you can get your gyroscope to be your greatest weapon in the assault on finally becoming fat-free and fabulously fit forever. Just like you were programmed with a very powerful destructive operating system that guides your life regarding weight, that operating system can be reset, reprogrammed, readjusted and your inner homing device or default program that guides your thinking and your behavior to have the operating system of a thin and fit high-energy person.
In other words, if you are highly susceptible to the destructive programs (that cause weight gain, overeating, cravings), you are just as highly susceptible to the constructive programs. It won’t simply just happen, however it will happen justly.
It seems with most things we do, that we have this desire to find the one thing that will solve all our problems, when more accurately it’s likely a number of things that we require. For example, we solve our transportation needs by getting a car, however a car in the middle of the Yukon with no roads or no gas stations will not solve the problem of transportation. The problem is solved by a collective effort such as roads, gas stations, GPS, as is the case with most things in life.
When it comes to weight, most people go on some sort of “program”, whether it’s a diet and exercise plan, a way of eating, low-fat, low-carb, low glycemic index, a liquid diet, Hollywood diet, diet pill, meal plan, etc. Every one of these is physiological, in other words it deals with the physical problems/issues relating to weight. They’re all good and they’re all bad for various reasons, but they all address only the physical and completely ignore the psychological. Yet ultimately it’s your brain that tells you to eat or to exercise or to be more active.
When you consider all the other attitudinal concepts through reasoning, we instinctually know when we have a bad attitude (unless it’s so bad that we become blind to it, and only those around us know), and that we need to correct it. Also, when we are negative through reasoning, we instinctually recognize that we need to correct it, and that holds true with most of the ways of being that we’ve discussed thus far. However with weight, our reasoning ability on this concept is not instinctual like it is on all others. For various reasons the first one we discussed is, because we have to eat to survive. However with other beliefs, we don’t have to have them to survive, such as we don’t have to be negative to survive.
The concept of eating less to the subconscious mind is either difficult or impossible to understand unless you can clearly define what that is. So in other words, a WINstruction related to eating less is useless, for example: I eat less food. The concept of less food is understood by the reasoning conscious mind but not by the subconscious mind. However, the subconscious mind can understand being full when there’s no more food left on the plate, or being full when your stomach hurts, or being full when you clothing becomes tight, or being full when your body has nutritionally satisfied its needs for life, although the latter is a bit more complex.
The only way to achieve lifelong success with weight is an all-encompassing approach dealing with both the physiological and psychological. That means whatever you are physically doing for your weight, currently continue to use it as a tool for the physiological aspect of weight control until your program is so strong and powerful and your gyroscope or inner compass is so perfectly pointed and aligned in the direction of being fat-free and fabulously fit forever that the tool is rendered useless. Up until that point, I want you to work with that tool as you discover new psychological weapons.
You will also discover how to use additional physiological weapons to reprogram your hypothalamus to be a high-energy fat burning furnace. However, let’s start by more carefully examining the harmful destructive damaging existing programs that are psychologically negatively impacting your objectives.
Article by Alex Goen inventor of WINosp™, Institute of Hypnosis Research
Session 28