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"Weight Loss, Compensatory Eating,
and The Myth Of "Will Power"
ALL food intake beyond what is needed for optimum health is motivated
by something unhealthy. It is eating we do to "compensate" for some perceived
problem in our lives. This is called compensatory eating [CE].
It is an attempt to use food to compensate for something that we think
or feel is missing from our life. OR to compensate for something we believe
is in our lives and shouldn't be. Examples: not enough love, not enough
money, not enough peace, not enough companionship.
What we most need to understand is that we are doing our compensatory
eating because we BELIEVE or PERCIEVE that something is missing from our
lives. Whether our beliefs or perceptions are in fact true is entirely
irrelevant. It is irrelevant for two reasons. First, it is our perceptions
that determine our realities, not the "facts" or our lives. Second, nobody
else's opinion actually matters.
What Re Must
Understand Is That The Problem-
Our Excess Weight-Is The Product, Not Of
"Reality," But Of Our Own Perceptions!
Before we can hope to get control of
our excessive / compensatory eating, we must understand that it is
100% the product of our own, unique perceptions of our lives and the
world we live in and how our own beliefs turn our perceptions into
our personal experience of life-including the unwanted pounds our
bodies have to haul around everywhere we go.
It would also be accurate to say that your failure to get adequate
and appropriate exercise is a product of the same kinds of beliefs
and perceptions. When we eat more than we should and exercise less
than we should, it is clear that our priorities have become
unhealthy.
If we could eliminate our compensatory eating, and only eat what is
necessary to maintain optimal health, our weight problems would very
quickly disappear WITHOUT dieting, drugs, metabolizer pills, stress,
struggle, WITHOUT any sense of self-denial, self-sacrifice, or
self-deprivation, and WITHOUT the need for "will power."
Which brings us to an
interesting question:
What is will power, really?
Will power is nothing more than an attempt to overpower our own
unconscious programming and motivations with our conscious desires
or intentions.
How well does that work? And why?
The problem is that relying on will
power puts us at war with ourselves. And unfortunately, it's a war
we can't win. That's because it's not at fair fight. What's
happening is that our conscious intention - no matter how healthy it
may be - is doing battle with our unconscious motivations.
There are three major reasons why our unconscious motivations are
more powerful than our conscious intentions. First, unconscious
motivations can't be seen, so we don't even know what we're up
against. Second, they are more powerful, so right that alone makes
it not a fair fight. But to top it all off, the minute we run out of
steam with our will power, the unconscious programming just takes
over again.
It's like trying to hold an empty plastic gallon jug under water.
You can do it for a while, but the minute you get tired, guess what
happens. It's like in Jaws. Remember how they finally made the shark
surface? Right, all those empty canisters.
Bottom Line: Will
Power Is Really No Power At All!
In fact, the research shows that people who relied on will power
actually ended up gaining weight? Why? Hey, all that fighting makes
a person hungry!
Anyway, the key to weight loss success really is just as simple as
eliminating CE. The problem, of course, is that CE can have many
root causes, all of which can be hard to identify and harder to
remove and replace. So, while it's easy to understand the concept of
CE, and to understand that ending CE would automatically end our
weight problems, it is not so easy to ID the source of our CE.
But it's definitely possible, and it's being done every day,
especially by my clients. We know that CE and other eating disorders
are the some of the most popular manifestations of self-sabotaging
B&A, and we know that the root causes of CE and other eating
disorders will invariably involve one or more of the Four Success
Factors.
The good news is that you can create new beliefs and perceptions
that will consistently and powerfully motivate you to do what is
healthy instead of doing what you've always done.
Once you understand
this, your job becomes clear
To succeed at lifetime weight
management, you simply need to create sufficiently compelling
reasons to make the health of your body, mind, and spirit more
important than whatever perceptions and beliefs have been at the
root of your compensatory eating and lack of adequate physical
activity.
It is about reprogramming yourself. The challenge is that you will
not be able to do this if:
1. you do not believe you can succeed
2. your body image / self-image is not sufficiently positive
3. your self-esteem is sufficiently flawed
4. you see yourself as the victim of outside influences
For better or worse, you have been programmed to believe what you
believe, which makes you perceive things the way you do, which in
turn makes you behave the way you do-which makes you weigh what you
do.
Bottom line: What you need are sufficiently compelling reasons to make healthy behavior changes.
If you don't have any, well...now
would be a good time.
To learn more Dr. Frank Smoots Christian based Weight Loss Program please visit
Yours in total health,
Dr. Frank
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