Categories
health self-help weight control

Weight Loss Is Not About Fighting Hunger

 

Feeling hungry isn’t really the issue with weight loss. By that I mean that people who are overweight eat regardless of whether or not they are hungry. Sometimes the problem is simply that they are so out of touch with the sensations their body produces that they just respond to external stimuli as the trigger for eating. But most of the time it’s about the tricks other people play with our minds.

It’s really difficult to watch an evening of tv with all of those food & snack adverts and not, at some point, decide you need something to eat. This is the subtle hypnosis of tv. It puts ideas in your mind purely because of the associations it creates. When was the last time you saw any food advert with fat people in it? When was the last time you saw any food advert with unattractive people in it? When was the last time you saw a food advert with miserable people in it? Unless, that is, they were miserable because they were not getting the food that was being advertised.

I especially remember a series of food adverts that M&S ran. It stuck in my mind because of two things – the stunning quality of the photography, and Dervla Kirwan’s sexy, seductive voiceover. No people appeared in these ads just the food. But there was a hidden promise if you buy this stuff.

It doesn’t mean that you are weak-willed if you are influenced by this stuff. It’s designed to do that. It’s designed by experts to make you want to eat, and to become familiar with the brand so that you automatically pick it up on your next trip to the supermarket. That way, when you next see the advert there will be some of that in the cupboard. The subliminal message is that you too will have the lifestyle and body shape of the people who eat this stuff on tv.  

What you actually get is fatter.

Feeling negative emotion is another eat trigger. Anything from boredom to despair can trigger a trip to the kitchen for something to eat. It passes the time, it reminds you of getting treats as a child and knowing you were loved. Watching an evening of tv is quite likely to fill you with negative emotion even if you didn’t have any to start off with. That’s why the food manufacturers’ advertising is so effective. The soaps are dreary, the news is never good, and reality tv is nothing like reality. It is hardly surprising that we seek a distraction and food is the easiest and quickest solution.

It would be great if it actually worked though. If food truly made us feel better then we’d all be happy fatties and the world would be a better place. But we’re still miserable fatties the next evening and the next and the next and we never stop to question whether or not the feel bad-eat, or feel bored-eat strategy changes anything except our weight.

If you want to change this then next time you realise you are heading to the kitchen in a commercial break go to the staircase instead and walk up and down ten times, then return to watch tv.

Don’t forget to check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

Categories
Uncategorized

I’ve Eaten Too Much – So I’d Better Eat Some More

I’ve been promoting the idea of no-diet weight loss for some years now, so I’m always pleased when a bit of research comes my way that supports my ideas. It’s been obvious to me for a long time that diets don’t work, you’ve only got to listen to dieters talking about weight loss to realise that. In fact whenever I need to lose weight I never diet – and I always lose weight. But for most people, when they feel bad about their body shape, they want to do something about it and the world mind-set (encouraged massively by the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry) is that you diet when you want to lose weight.

So that’s what you do.

I mean the whole world, and all those celebrities can’t be wrong – can they?

Yes they can.

And yes they are.

One crucial piece of research is about the way people on diets think about over-eating. When people are attempting to lose weight by restricting certain types of foods or limiting themselves to a certain number of calories – everything is fine until something causes them to go over the limit. They may be offered some cake and feel it impolite to refuse; there may be a packet of biscuits being handed around the office and they don’t want to stand out by being the only one to refuse; it may have been a tough week emotionally – it doesn’t matter what the reason is, but they pass the limit for the day.

What the dieter typically does then is think that they’ve failed for the day so they might as well just forget about the diet and start afresh in the morning – and then they binge.

The reason is all about how self-control and willpower work.

Restricting food intake, whether you are counting calories or following some other method, requires monitoring what you eat. Dieters tend to be very good at this. They know exactly what is left out of the daily allowance and what they can have and what they can’t have. This feedback mechanism is essential to the success of this process.

But what happens, once the daily allowance is exceeded, is that dieters stop monitoring their food intake. They stop keeping track of what they eat and they forget about how much they’ve eaten. Once that decision is made to get back on the diet tomorrow – the body has been starved and so, like a thirsty camel in the dessert… the empty hump is filled to overflowing so that when she starts to starve me again I’ll have a little in reserve… until the next hiccup.

The body has its own intelligence and it is an intelligence based around survival. When you threaten it by severely restricting food intake it retaliates. It retaliates by pushing the possibilityof death by starvation as far away as possible. This is one of the reasons your body even has the ability to store excess fat. Back in the early days of mankind, you ate well when you killed something big. You needed to store the excess in your body because you probably wouldn’t manage to catch another one tomorrow and supermarkets wouldn’t be invented for another 100,000 years.

You can exercise your will power for only so long and then the body wins. And once the body gets control, you can’t stop eating even when you are full.

This is one of the many reasons why dieting is such a struggle.

One of the many reasons why diets don’t work – long-term.

There is an easy way out. Just read my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

 

Michael