Psychological weight related issues
It’s important to understand the psychological or subconscious programming issue related to weight for a number reasons. First and most important, it helps you recognize damaging patterns, programs, self-talk, and way of thinking. Second, this will give you an insight and understanding when you go into the reprogramming phase, and third so you don’t continue the pattern with your children, family and loved ones.
Also keep in mind that likely much of the reason that there is an obesity epidemic in this country and across the world is that in a relatively short period of time 50 years or so, we have gone away from being a very active society, where the necessity of expending high amounts of calories on a daily basis was required for survival. In addition, we did not have the vast availability of calorie rich, heavily processed, sweet, high fructose corn syrup, high-fat foods that we have today. The meat that we eat today has much more fat than the wild game we ate in past generations.
Many of the damaging programs in the subconscious mind were grounded in healthy beneficial programs of the previous generation that led to survival, health and longevity, likely passed down from generation to generation, and very possibly even passed down instinctively.
It very well may mean that you have within you the power to positively impact not only your life but the life of many generations to come, and you very possibly can dramatically improve the quality of life for your children and your grandchildren and many generations after that. When you think about it that way, the gravitas of impacting many generations of life and the quality of life very well may begin with some insignificant thoughts and turn into what likely will have significance in not just your life but many generations to come.
What is psychological weight control?
If you haven’t already noticed, the terminology used is a little different than in some of the previous coaching sessions. For example, instead of suggesting that psychological fullness is a result of a belief, it’s referred to it as psychological fullness.
I have done extensive work in the area of psychological and physiological weight control, starting well over 30 years ago working one on one, and then in small groups in the health club arena. Then in a private practice that led to A. Goen Seminars Institute becoming the largest weight loss seminar company in the country of its kind, which primarily focused on the psychological challenges with weight loss. As I worked with larger and larger groups, I realized that I needed some additional tools to deal with the physiological challenges with weight control as well. That’s what gave birth to a company called NUTRAMERICA, and then to a brand called TRIMSPA that eventually became the number one selling diet pill the country, outselling number two through five combined. This is not pointed out to brag, but to impress upon you the work I’ve done in this field.
One of the problems with weight control from the psychological/subconscious mind viewpoint was addressed earlier; you have to eat to sustain life. You wouldn’t want to create a program to get you to stop eating altogether, but for example, if you were a smoker you would want you to stop smoking altogether.
The other complexity with weight control is that the programming is so deeply embedded into the operating system of your life. This is important to explore with you so you have a deep understanding of the real root of the issue, and then you can address it and in turn have great success. In order to address the issue, keep in mind everything that you learned thus far about the subconscious mind. And now we are going to probe even deeper.
So far you remember that your subconscious mind dominates your behavior. That’s according to Sigmund Freud, who first made the reference to the subconscious mind, and that it’s 90% of your mind. The subconscious mind also is programmed through repetition, and its mission in life is to take you towards pleasure and to stay away from pain.
The subconscious mind also regulates many bodily functions, including heartbeat, breathing, digestion, and many others. When the subconscious mind regulates your heartbeat for example, can you get in on the conversation? In other words, when was the last time you listened to heartbeat self-talk or even instructed your heart to beat? Is there any self-talk at all taking place? Or is it all completely automatic? When a behavior or a bodily function is repeated over and over and over again enough times, the self-talk is more difficult to tune into or sometimes altogether disappears, however you can get it to reappear.
You can control your heartbeat if you train yourself properly. Let me give you another example. How often do you think about your breathing? Most of the time it’s automatic like your heartbeat, you don’t think about it, it just happens; you are not involved in the self-talk, in the reasoning, in the discussion. However you can join in any time you choose, for example you can say to yourself, take a deep breath, hold it for a moment, and exhale slowly, and now you have total control, you have joined the conversation, (you likely took a breath just reading this) you are now participating in the self-talk, you are now in control at least for a temporary period of time before it goes right back to automatic and the subconscious mind dominates once again.
If every day you spend some time controlling your breathing for a period of time, and understanding that pattern, after that you take some time and work on controlling your heartbeat, and in a relatively short period of time if not capable already, you will be able to control your heartbeat and join in on that conversation, becoming part of that self-talk. This logic can in turn be followed for many bodily functions and even behaviors that seem to be completely controlled by the subconscious mind and can’t be controlled or influenced by the conscious mind.
In a study by a knee surgeon wishing to figure out the best surgical procedure, he performed knee surgeries on three groups. With the first group the surgeon made two small incisions and simply cleaned out the debris in the knee. With the second group, the patients received the addition of some of the knee cartilage shaping. And with the third group (the placebo group), the surgeon made two small incisions and nothing else was done.
All three groups were awake during the procedure and were able to watch the procedure being done on a video above them. There was a blanket draped below their neck preventing them from looking directly at their knee. The first two groups watched their actual video of the procedure, however the third group that didn’t have a procedure other than two small cuts, watched a procedure from one of the first two groups.
Afterwards, incredibly all three groups experienced the same post surgery benefits. Of course the third group experienced only the placebo effect. Was that the conscious reasoning mind that created this or was it the subconscious mind? Did the conscious mind join the conversation? May the conversation have sounded something like this? “Wow, look at that video screen, that’s my knee that the doctor is cleaning out and fixing, I’ll be walking and running better than I have in a long time, I’m so excited about this, I can’t wait to be mobile again, hooray I can’t wait!”
What would you have said to yourself if you were lying there watching? Self-talk grounded in emotion and belief is profound and incredibly powerful and would you ever think that your self-talk could affect the way your knee functions or heals?
The reverse is true as well, and the reverse logic is especially helpful in developing highly tuned athletic abilities, and more about that later. For example, have you ever been driving a car using only your subconscious mind, when your conscious mind is basically asleep? Let’s explore this. Can you ever remember a time when you got into your car and time just about disappeared, and you got to a destination, but you didn’t really have much conscious recall of the trip?
You were driving on automatic, it was your subconscious mind doing the driving. Well how did it do? Likely very well, anything that you do with your subconscious mind typically is much better than with your conscious mind, providing there is a good set of instructions or as we call it WINstructions. What would you rather use, 10% of your mind to do something, or 90% of your mind to do something?
Think for a moment about driving again. As you drive down the road, how often do you join the conversation, participating in the self-talk, making sure that you stay between the white dotted lines? If you have only been driving for only a few months, you likely join the conversation often. In the beginning you are nonstop telling yourself to stay between those white lines, but as time goes on you hardly ever join the conversation, and your subconscious mind takes over and you’re perfectly happy and confident that you’re in good hands, that your subconscious mind is in control.
You may even get into deep thought about something completely different, or get into a deep conversation with someone, or listen to the tunes on your radio, or look at the beautiful scenery around you, and you don’t think for a moment about those white lines that your car has to stay between. At the same time, any time you so choose, you can interrupt what your subconscious mind is doing, and join the conversation, becoming part of the self-talk.
I would venture to say that your subconscious mind will drive your car much better alone than when you and your conscious mind join the conversation. For example, you’re driving down the road and in front of you is a construction site and in a moment you are going to have to drive between two concrete dividers for an extended period of time. Now your conscious mind takes over and tries real hard to stay between those dividers on both sides without hitting them. You are constantly nonstop correcting the steering wheel, you get nervous and you maybe even start to sweat a bit, and you’re not nearly as comfortable as you were only a few minutes earlier when your subconscious mind was in charge. Can you at least somewhat relate to or at least get the point?
What does all this have to do with weight, you may be asking? Or you may have already figured it out. Now, two primary considerations, first, the understanding of how to join the conversation, to participate in the self-talk and second, behaviors grounded with massive amount of repetition become so embedded into the subconscious mind that eventually it seems that you can lose control. The truth of the matter is that even with a bodily function such as heartbeat, with just a little bit of work you can intervene, you can participate, and you can take control and reprogram or instruct your subconscious.
I also want you to understand that ideally you want your subconscious mind to be in control, providing that you’ve programmed it according to the way that you want to be, and not engineered by your environment and making you powerless. Wouldn’t it be great if your subconscious mind was in alignment with your conscious mind’s desire to be fat-free and fabulously fit forever?
Wouldn’t you be excited if you were becoming full twice as fast on half the food? Would you enjoy life more if you were on a mission to find your normal body weight (the weight that you want to be), and your subconscious mind was in complete and total alignment with your conscious mind? Of course, the answer always is life is better when your conscious and subconscious minds are in alignment.
Article by Alex Goen inventor of WINosp™, Institute of Hypnosis Research
Session 29