M FREAKY
Super Moderator
The Mental Side of Dieting – Part 2
By S.L. Gillespie.
In the first part of this article series I covered the simple basics on the inner workings of the conscious and subconscious mind so you could understand how you ‘program’ yourself for either dieting success or failure. How you talk to yourself and how you represent the dreaded ‘D’ word to yourself sets up your experience of the dieting game.
Of course if it were just a matter of talking nicely to ourselves everyone would weigh what they wanted to right? There are additional aspects that must be addressed if one is to overcome any or all of the challenges losing extra bodyfat brings.
Although the subconscious records and stores every word you think, say, or hear, the emotion that accompanies the thoughts, words, and actions determine how deeply the thought is embedded in the mind. I will go back here a bit so I can go forward with this concept.
Every ‘thought’ creates a neural pathway in the brain. The more you think one specific thought, the stronger the neural pathway becomes. An easy way to picture this is to consider a path that is worn in the grass in your backyard e.g. from your dog running back and forth chasing that damn squirrel he is NEVER going to catch. The path becomes ‘permanent’ in your back yard and remains for years unless specific action is taken. In your brain you actually benefit (in some cases) from the neural pathway becoming strong and ‘permanent’ (and I’m using the word permanent here for just a moment to explain this concept as a neural pathway can and will weaken once it is no longer used), as this allows us to do things automatically and without really thinking about them – like driving for example.
Once you have mastered the techniques then you can drive literally on ‘auto pilot’ since the neural pathways that are used while learning to drive have been used enough that they have now become deeply ingrained in your subconscious mind. Have you ever had the experience of leaving work and then suddenly you’re at home with little recollection of the drive? That is a result of your subconscious programming operating from its well-worn neural pathways. The bad news is that these well-worn neural pathways can also show up as ‘habits’ – like the one you have that every time you come home from a workout you decide to treat yourself to some food that has been off limits while dieting because you are sure you’ve burned up so many calories at the gym that you can afford to indulge a bit. Yeah right.
So here is the point I’ve made so far – think, say or do something enough times and it becomes ingrained in your brain as either an automatic action or a habit.
This is why making behavioral changes can be such a challenge – the brain also acts much like a binary computer so it is always looking for a ‘match’. When it receives input from outside stimulus it ‘hijacks’ your thoughts to a well worn neural pathway. For example, you go to pass through the kitchen on your way to the laundry room and all you can think about is food and/or eating. It is simply your brain’s response to seeing/being in the kitchen. Add to that the biochemical response (neurotransmitters and hormones) in your brain and you can understand why ‘dieting’ can pose so many challenges
Now I can bring you to the topic I was wanting to cover here and opened with earlier…in addition to repetitious thoughts, words and actions becoming well worn neural pathways, the greater the emotion felt at the time of incoming data, the more deeply it is stored neurologically in your brain. As input is received in the brain, the amygdala adds an emotion, (so to speak) to it as it is recorded and stored - by the way, if any neuroscientists are reading this please refrain from emailing me nasty comments about my absurdly simple explanation on the basic functioning of the mammalian brain. So, an event occurs, a lot of emotion is added and it is vividly stored in your memory. Typically, fear and/or anger-based events are the easiest to recall because of the huge amount of emotion that is felt when they occur and due also to the ‘fight or flight’ response we are hardwired with. For example, do you remember what you were doing when you first saw or heard about the airplanes flying into the Twin Towers? How about when the space shuttle ‘The Challenger’ blew up in 1986? And what the heck does this have to do with dieting? Stay with me as I’m actually leading you towards an amazing discovery here.
Because emotions have such a huge impact on neural pathways (which lead to habits and behaviors that are programmed in the subconscious mind and covered in Part 1) we have found that if you can alter or disengage the emotion attached to a thought/neural pathway, then the thought itself can be altered and even ERASED! Now before you start thinking I smoked some crack before I wrote this perhaps more background is needed for me to tie this all to dieting.
Feelings are the response part to an emotion. Consider this – do you feel angry when you’re dieting because you can’t have your favorite food? Do you feel like a loser because the guys you workout with all have single digit bodyfat and you’ve barely cracked the teens? Do you stuff yourself with food because you feel bored? Do you finish the half-gallon of ice cream because you feel depressed? Do you feel full of anxiety while waiting for a good news/bad news phone call and only a bag of potato chips will fix it? Anyone that eats for any other reason than the fact they are experiencing true hunger knows that for the most part, food gets used as a tool to change the way we feel. It’s damn hard to stay upset at your co-worker when you’ve just eaten three-quarters of a Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza (with all your favorite toppings) because suddenly, everything just feels right with the world.
Of course the neurotransmitters that are released during the pizza frenzy are what produces the calming effect and yet it is still the ‘food’ we associate to our peaceful state of mind. Again, this is how we have trained ourselves to respond to a particular stress as I explained above – by repeating the thought, word or action enough times that it has created a well-developed neural pathway and ‘habit’. And you thought Pavlov’s dog was just stupid for salivating when someone rang a bell.
By S.L. Gillespie.
In the first part of this article series I covered the simple basics on the inner workings of the conscious and subconscious mind so you could understand how you ‘program’ yourself for either dieting success or failure. How you talk to yourself and how you represent the dreaded ‘D’ word to yourself sets up your experience of the dieting game.
Of course if it were just a matter of talking nicely to ourselves everyone would weigh what they wanted to right? There are additional aspects that must be addressed if one is to overcome any or all of the challenges losing extra bodyfat brings.
Although the subconscious records and stores every word you think, say, or hear, the emotion that accompanies the thoughts, words, and actions determine how deeply the thought is embedded in the mind. I will go back here a bit so I can go forward with this concept.
Every ‘thought’ creates a neural pathway in the brain. The more you think one specific thought, the stronger the neural pathway becomes. An easy way to picture this is to consider a path that is worn in the grass in your backyard e.g. from your dog running back and forth chasing that damn squirrel he is NEVER going to catch. The path becomes ‘permanent’ in your back yard and remains for years unless specific action is taken. In your brain you actually benefit (in some cases) from the neural pathway becoming strong and ‘permanent’ (and I’m using the word permanent here for just a moment to explain this concept as a neural pathway can and will weaken once it is no longer used), as this allows us to do things automatically and without really thinking about them – like driving for example.
Once you have mastered the techniques then you can drive literally on ‘auto pilot’ since the neural pathways that are used while learning to drive have been used enough that they have now become deeply ingrained in your subconscious mind. Have you ever had the experience of leaving work and then suddenly you’re at home with little recollection of the drive? That is a result of your subconscious programming operating from its well-worn neural pathways. The bad news is that these well-worn neural pathways can also show up as ‘habits’ – like the one you have that every time you come home from a workout you decide to treat yourself to some food that has been off limits while dieting because you are sure you’ve burned up so many calories at the gym that you can afford to indulge a bit. Yeah right.
So here is the point I’ve made so far – think, say or do something enough times and it becomes ingrained in your brain as either an automatic action or a habit.
This is why making behavioral changes can be such a challenge – the brain also acts much like a binary computer so it is always looking for a ‘match’. When it receives input from outside stimulus it ‘hijacks’ your thoughts to a well worn neural pathway. For example, you go to pass through the kitchen on your way to the laundry room and all you can think about is food and/or eating. It is simply your brain’s response to seeing/being in the kitchen. Add to that the biochemical response (neurotransmitters and hormones) in your brain and you can understand why ‘dieting’ can pose so many challenges
Now I can bring you to the topic I was wanting to cover here and opened with earlier…in addition to repetitious thoughts, words and actions becoming well worn neural pathways, the greater the emotion felt at the time of incoming data, the more deeply it is stored neurologically in your brain. As input is received in the brain, the amygdala adds an emotion, (so to speak) to it as it is recorded and stored - by the way, if any neuroscientists are reading this please refrain from emailing me nasty comments about my absurdly simple explanation on the basic functioning of the mammalian brain. So, an event occurs, a lot of emotion is added and it is vividly stored in your memory. Typically, fear and/or anger-based events are the easiest to recall because of the huge amount of emotion that is felt when they occur and due also to the ‘fight or flight’ response we are hardwired with. For example, do you remember what you were doing when you first saw or heard about the airplanes flying into the Twin Towers? How about when the space shuttle ‘The Challenger’ blew up in 1986? And what the heck does this have to do with dieting? Stay with me as I’m actually leading you towards an amazing discovery here.
Because emotions have such a huge impact on neural pathways (which lead to habits and behaviors that are programmed in the subconscious mind and covered in Part 1) we have found that if you can alter or disengage the emotion attached to a thought/neural pathway, then the thought itself can be altered and even ERASED! Now before you start thinking I smoked some crack before I wrote this perhaps more background is needed for me to tie this all to dieting.
Feelings are the response part to an emotion. Consider this – do you feel angry when you’re dieting because you can’t have your favorite food? Do you feel like a loser because the guys you workout with all have single digit bodyfat and you’ve barely cracked the teens? Do you stuff yourself with food because you feel bored? Do you finish the half-gallon of ice cream because you feel depressed? Do you feel full of anxiety while waiting for a good news/bad news phone call and only a bag of potato chips will fix it? Anyone that eats for any other reason than the fact they are experiencing true hunger knows that for the most part, food gets used as a tool to change the way we feel. It’s damn hard to stay upset at your co-worker when you’ve just eaten three-quarters of a Pizza Hut stuffed crust pizza (with all your favorite toppings) because suddenly, everything just feels right with the world.
Of course the neurotransmitters that are released during the pizza frenzy are what produces the calming effect and yet it is still the ‘food’ we associate to our peaceful state of mind. Again, this is how we have trained ourselves to respond to a particular stress as I explained above – by repeating the thought, word or action enough times that it has created a well-developed neural pathway and ‘habit’. And you thought Pavlov’s dog was just stupid for salivating when someone rang a bell.