Lose Weight with Behavior Overrides
Make no mistake about it. You are a pleasure seeking organism. Let me repeat that again, you are an organism that seeks pleasure. That is what human beings are. It is hard wired into our human nature that we tend to focus and are attracted to things and activities that give pleasure. Similarly, we tend to run away from things that provide pain or discomfort. If you think about it, this makes all the sense in the world. After all, five cave men walking through some grasslands thousands of years ago, you would notice that they would look for things that are sweet or have a lot of fat. Also, they would run away from things that are scary or that looks scary.
The reality is that, if you were a cave man that stuck around when something scary showed up, like let us say a lion, chances are your genes would probably not make it to the gene pool. Eventually, your genes will be wiped out. This is why we are hard wired this way. We gravitate towards things that are pleasurable, and we tend to run away from things that are scary. While this may have helped our ancestors thousands of years ago, it does not really help us now. In this day and age, it is the people who are able to deal with unpleasant tasks day in day out, in exchange for a great reward in the future, who make it. Those who tend to shy away from inconvenience or hard work tend to settle for whatever is left. Make no mistake about it. In life, the eighty-twenty rule applies. Over eighty percent of all wealth is owned by the twenty percent, eighty percent of all good results are monopolized by the twenty percent.
This means, eighty percent that is left of the population will have to settle for the remaining twenty percent. If you are tired of failing to meet your weight loss goals, if you are tired of feeling crappy because you can not seem to lose weight, you need to understand how this principle works. You have to wrap your mind around the concept of the pleasure pain-principle and make it work to your advantage. The good news is that, you can override the tendency to avoid unpleasant activities. By doing so, you will be able to eat less and move around more. When you do this, you can lose weight. It really is that simple. However, just like with anything else that is simply said or can be simply written on paper, it is one thing to understand it as a simple process, it is another to actually follow through with it.
The Pleasure-Pain Principle
The pleasure-pain principle is very straightforward. In fact, animals have the pleasure-pain principle. This is why they can be trained in one of two ways. You can either train them with pain and punishment, or you can train them with little rewards of food. It all works the same way. Unfortunately, people are not really that far removed from animals, we operate on the same pleasure-pain principle. We run from pain, we run to pleasure. If you look at any type of human incentive program, it always involves pleasure and pain. Of course, it does not have to involve actual physical pain, but it can involve financial pain, inconvenience or some other form of penalty. Similarly with the rewards, it may not be a bowl of food or some fruit, or a slab of meat, but it can mean money, prestige, position and other types of incentives that appeal to the human psyche.
We Associate Working Out and Exercise with Pain
If you are having a tough time losing weight, it is because your mind automatically associates working out, running, jogging, whatever you want to do for exercise, with pain. There are different kinds of pain. Maybe your body does not really think exercising is physically painful, however, it equates working out in the morning with inconvenience. Maybe you mind would rather have your body do something else. Also, most human beings are impatient. In the United States, we have grown accustomed to getting our rewards quickly. This is a big problem. It rewards impatience. So, when you are confronted with a situation where you will have to wait for you to get a reward, which is the case with working out and daily exercise, you become impatient and you lose interest. You associate working out with hassle, which is a type of pain.
We Avoid Working Out Due To Avoid Negative Associations
As spelled out above, we avoid working out because somewhere down the line our mind made the negative association. The good news about all this is that, you have a lot more control than you give yourself credit for. You have to understand that your mind will not continue to follow a certain pattern unless you let it. Of course, breaking any mental pattern, specially the ones that seem automatic, can take quite a bit of time and effort. Still, there is a lot of things that you can do to create positive association, so you can achieve your weight loss goals. One thing is sure, if you let your mind continue in its current pattern, you are never going to lose weight. You are never going to get that perfect body that you have always been dreaming of.
Decide To Break the Linkage
As mentioned above, deciding to stick with something that is inconvenient or even painful so you can get big rewards in the future, is easy on an intellectual level, it is not so easy on a purely emotional level. The good news is that, you can make that a reality by deciding. The human mind is very powerful. If the human mind decides, great things can happen. The key is to first decide, and then let your mind take over. When you decide, you change the reality in your mind and you set your focus on something else. This applies to making money, this applies to relationships an it definitely applies to losing weight.
Work Out Only Once Per Week
The great thing about working out is that, you do not have to hit the gym full blast and force yourself to do thousands of repetitions every single day. You do not have to start out this way. You can take baby steps. You can start with low impact exercises. The key here is to start slow and then ramp it up with time. The key here is not to shock your system. You have to understand, your body sends feedback to your brain, and if you shock your body it will push back against your brain. When you decide, quickly follow it up with low level exercise. It does not have to be big, it does not have to be dramatic, but the key is to get started.
Reprogram Association of Pain and Convenience
Now that you have started to work out, it is very important that you start reprogramming your mind. You have to start breaking the association between working out and something negative. The good news is that, if you start with low level exercises, this can produce enough good feeling and enough feelings of self satisfaction that it can start the process of breaking that negative association.
Slowly Ramp Up and Make New Associations
Once you have gotten into the middle of working out and it has taken a momentum of its own, you need to start making new associations. These new associations are focused on helping you keep working out. In other words, they prevent you from stopping. The way you do this is you associate stopping working out with guilt. You associate quitting with a feeling of shame or a feeling of failure. You might think that you are playing mind games with yourself, but guess what, you are already playing mind games with yourself, except in your current case it is not doing you any favors. If you are going to play mind games with yourself, at least come out of it looking better and feeling better about yourself.
B.B.
I like the idea of starting out with low level exercises. I think my problem is that I work out too hard at the start and then end up burning out after a few weeks, either from an injury or lack of incentive. I’m going to try starting out slower. I hope it works.