It is easy to think that the process of losing weight is a purely physical process. In other words, it is easy to think that for a person to lose weight, all you need to do is eat less and move around more. While technically correct, there is actually a lot more to it. Sure, when you eat less, there is less calories coming into your system, and when you move around more, you burn more calories. The net negative calorie intake that is produced by this process pushes your body to burn your body’s stored form of energy, which is your fat reserves. The more negative calorie intake days you have, the more weight you lose. This is pretty straightforward. However, it is not all physical. It seems misleadingly easy, it is not. A key part of this whole process is your mental state. You have to understand, this does not operate automatically. There is a lot of choice in this process. People with the wrong mental state, people with the wrong attitude, wrong expectations, end up making the wrong choices and they do not lose weight. Weight loss is not automatic, there is a lot of control in the process, and central to all of these is your state of mind.
There Is No Such Thing As A Neutral Sensation
If you are serious about taking active mental control over your body’s weight loss process, you have to understand that there is no such thing as a neutral sensation. Your body is a data collection device and your mind always makes judgment calls as to what that stimuli and data mean. That is why your brain is your most important organ, and your mind is your most important asset. Your mind is constantly reading value into the stimuli you sense. It is very crucial to understand this and appreciate this, because if you do not get this, weight loss will basically be a random exercise. In other words, you are just hoping to get lucky that you lose weight and you lose weight sustainably. If you want to get the body that you feel that you deserve, you need to be clear as to the role your mind plays in the total weight loss process. A key aspect of this is to fully understand and appreciate the concept that there is no such thing as a neutral sensation.
Your Mind Tends To Automatically Judge Certain Sensations
As mentioned above, your mind is always filtering data. The act of filtering is an act of judging. When you filter, you let certain things in and you block certain things, that requires judging. Unfortunately, most people filter stimuli in a very subconscious way. In other words, the filtering is happening but they are not really conscious of the criteria that they use to judge this external stimuli. If you want to lose weight, you have to be clear about the biases your mind has regarding the stimuli. Why? This directly impacts your activities, this directly impacts the amount of calories you eat, and how much you move around each day. In other words, it directly impacts the key drivers of weight loss. By being clear as to how your mind plays into this process, you can take more control over your weight loss success.
Running Away From Pain
One of the most obvious biases the human mind has, is to run away from pain. This is actually pretty straightforward. In fact, it is common sense. It is part of human nature to run away from pain. Few people like pain, most people hate pain. Understand this bias. This might seem like a no-brainer. This might seem so common that it seems stupid thinking about it. Well, you can not take anything for granted. Understand how this bias works.
Running To Pleasure
On the other end of the equation, another common human bias is to run towards pleasurable things. As much as we hate pain and inconvenience, we run towards pleasurable things. This means a great tasting food, this means not having to work, this means putting things off, this means eating dessert now instead of later, so on and so forth. Understand and think of examples of how your internal decision making processes reflect this common human bias.
Higher Priority On Pleasurable And Easy Things
When our minds are geared towards placing higher priority on running towards pleasure, we run into all sorts of problems. You have to understand that if people just follow what is pleasurable, society will explode. Seriously. People would be killing each other in the streets, adultery would be rampant, stealing, you name it. Why? Because people are just looking for stuff and doing things that pleasure themselves. Living in a society involves self denial. Sure, it is pleasurable to take stuff that you do not own, and fool around with somebody else’ spouse, but that would lead to breakdown of society. These are extreme examples, but they all feed into weight loss issues because when you are clear as to how your personal biases work, you can then map out how you focus on less physical exertion and higher calorie intake. The first step into controlling your mind, so you can control your weight, is to understand how this bias plays out. Understand how the pleasure seeking process plays out in the mental messages you send to your body, so you can get on the road to sustainable weight loss. This means, understand how you prize lower physical exertion and higher calorie intake. Be clear about that. That is the first step, just be clear how the bias works out.
Effective Weight Loss Involves Rewiring The Mind Towards The Right Priorities
Once you are clear as to how your mind reads judgment into the data it collects, the next step is to short circuit those biases. This might sound hard. However, if you are really clear as to how you automatically seem to make decisions, it may be easier than you think. You have to understand that the mind is actually fairly straightforward. A leads to B which leads to C. By understanding the process and understanding this chain reaction, you can then make changes at certain stages of the process so you can short circuit your tendencies. This involves maybe associating certain physical sensations to activities that maximize calorie burn. This may mean rewiring certain associations to increase your activity level. Regardless of what you need to do, always be conscious that you can short circuit your mental biases for them to lead to physical activities that produce weight loss. Make no mistake about it. Your mind controls your body’s priorities. If your priority is weight loss, you can take conscious control of how your mind works, so you can increase your likelihood of weight loss success.
I would love to know more about how the mind judges the data it collects and understand the process better. The idea of using the information to change your tendencies sounds fascinating! I hope to learn more about it from a future post.
This is really interesting. I would like learning more about the mind’s data I think it would be really great.
I agree with what you are saying. Just like in any other goals in life, one has to have the proper mental state, together with good judgement and expectations before battling out to somethings that will be long term and will be both mind and body taxing like weight loss. I too understand this because I have experienced this and still experiencing up to now.
It would really help that someone will guide you through the process of weight loss, not just someone to say what to eat or not eat, but someone who can prepare you emotionally and mentally through the pains of changes that you will be going through the process.
I hope more people would consider this before going into weight loss and just bouncing back the pounds again because they preferred the “easy” way.
I am currently loosing weight. One of my motivations is that I want to look better in new, smaller clothes that fit well. I fill my mind with data everyday by weight myself twice a day, look at body in the mirror in the morning, before bed and after meals and workouts. This might sound vain, but it is this constant feedback that keeps me motivated in working towards my goals.