A lot of people like to make fun of new age gurus and pop psychologists who talk about visualization. Sure, a lot of these new age shows end to be quite boring and in many cases cheesy and sickening in their commercialism. However, many of them do speak the truth. There is power to visualization. How powerful is visualization? Let us put it this way, you are already visualizing. In fact, when you are reading this, if you are honest enough with yourself, there are certain picture that come to mind. Guess what, those pictures are not emotionally neutral. Worst of all, those emotions that those pictures trigger can lead to action, can lead to conclusions. That is how powerful visualization is. The key to effective and sustainable weight loss is to use the emotional feedback of emotional weight loss visualization to your advantage. Keep reading below to find out how to do that.
Images Are Everywhere
Just by living your life you pick up all sorts of signals from the outside world. These outside signals trigger mental pictures. They have to. This is how the human brain processes the external world. We have this built-in narratives, we have this built-in story telling device that plugs in and rearranges all these data points to create a narrative. That is how the human mind works. Of course, there are many different stories. One story we call our identity, another story we call our life story, another story we call our political ideologies, so on and so forth, but that is all they are, they are stories. There is a big difference between facts and truth. Your body is a fact detection device, it picks up facts. However, you are also a truth manufacturing facility. You take all these facts, you plug them together and you create a personal truth. Facts are not disputed. Red is always going to be red, or an orange is always going to be orange. The problem is when truths collide, and it all boils down to the mental images that come to our mind and the emotional triggers. There are many issues there, and when it comes to weight loss, we need to focus on the fact that images are everywhere. Be aware of this.
The Meaning Of These Images Are Mentally Constructed
As mentioned above, your sense of meaning, your sense of personhood, all boils down to story telling. Your mind is a very powerful story teller. It takes facts and assembles them together to fit a story. If it does not fit a story, it creates an anti-story, so that the bigger story makes a lot more sense. That is how powerful your mind is. Your mind is working overtime all the time. You would start meeting your weight loss goals when you realize that the meaning of your mental images are mentally constructed. There is no such thing as picking up a fact and then it only has one truth. It does not work that way. You have to read-in meaning to it.
Reread Emotions Into Meanings
Just as your mind is always constructing stories, you also add emotions to the mix. Once your mind assembles facts into a story, your emotions then kick-in. The simple story that your mind has put together is not just a simple story anymore, it has an emotional component, it has an emotional meaning. The good news is that, you read emotions into meanings. This is a choice. This is learned behavior. This is not compelled, this is not mandatory or instinctive, it does not have to happen as this way. Why? Because there are many different emotions you can read in. If you need proof, you can look at your past memories. There are memories that you have now that used to make you laugh, but now probably other kinds of emotions come into play. Similarly, if you were angry at a person before and when the mental image of that person comes to mind you get angry, but now, you might probably even laugh, because you have changed, you matured. Where is the maturity? Where is the change? Simple. The change is when you started reading different emotions into these mental pictures. The good news is you can use this process to work to your advantage. You can use visualization to lose weight.
We Develop Automatic Physical Responses
Once we read emotional meaning into these mental images that our mind is constantly building, there are physical responses. A physical response can be as simple as you blurting out something. For example, if an image of an ex-girl friend who broke your hear and really destroyed you in the past, a lot of pain, anger, guilt, shame come to mind, and the first thing that you probably want to say are some very unkind words. Maybe you would say I got hurt, somebody ripped out my heart, somebody treated me badly, somebody killed my heart. There is a physical reaction. You have to understand, emotional signals are not floating out there somewhere, they are real because they have a physical response, they have a physical consequence. You ever notice that unhappy people tend to develop illnesses because they bottle-in all that negative emotions. When we read emotions into these visual images that come to our mind, there is a physical response that kicks-in, either we talk about stuff or we actually do stuff. These have very negative consequences if you are trying to lose weight. Why? Somebody might have told you something very depressing, and to feel calm, reassured and comforted, you go straight to the fridge, whip out that big box of chocolates and start plowing in. This is comfort eating. Many Americans suffer from this. This is a key example of what automatic physical response is to emotions that we read-in to mental images. You see the sequence here? Te key to effective and sustainable weight loss is to break the sequence and take control over the sequence. The sequence will always exist, that is how the human mind is configured. However, you can take control of what elements are at play in this sequence.
Take Control Of The Emotional Feedback Mechanism By Choosing The Right Vision
By focusing on the right mental image, you trigger different emotions. When you trigger different emotions, you trigger different physical patterns. It really is that simple. So, instead of you hearing the word fat and then a mental picture of shows of you nasty and gross, and incapable of nothing more than just eating, and there is something fundamentally wrong with you, and you do not deserve to live. When somebody says fat, focus instead on a more reaffirming picture. A more reaffirming picture would be, if somebody calls you fat, you see yourself as this slim person that overcame the odds and went from a very obese person to somebody who is physically fit. In other words, you can choose to either be a victim or a victor. The good news here is the word choose. It is a choice. There is nobody pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to be miserable. There is nobody physically shoving Twinkies down your throat. Nobody is forcing you to look at a mental picture and conclude a certain way. You might think that this is “reality”, but the truth is, we all chose our reality. In many cases, we invent our own reality. Why? If you are able to fix that chain of events, starting with a mental picture, you can start doing different physical things. When you start doing different physical things, you change your physical reality. That is the bottom line.
Ellie
This is an interesting topic, using visualization to lose weight. Of course I’m aware of comfort eating and there are times that I’m sure that is why I eat more than I should. I think the idea of taking control and focusing on a more reaffirming picture can be a very effective way to lose weight. I hope you post more on this topic.