Willpower Always Loses
And your pleasure/desire center always wins.
You can’t fight your cravings and urges to eat. They have been built up as an adaptive response in you for years and have become quite powerful. Some would even call the entity that they are, a MONSTER.
Sooner or later the monster becomes too hungry and when he is, he will get his way.
WEAKNESS
When the monster does win we tend to loathe ourselves for not being able to follow through with our plan, and tell ourselves that we are weak and have, “no willpower.” This does three things, all of which are negative:
1- It makes us feel worse than we already do.
2- It is counter productive to our goals
3- It tends to make success harder the next time around and make us more likely to quit the effort altogether.
RE-FRAMING
A better way to conceptualize this is to re-frame what’s going on. Re-framing is not a trick (although it can be used that way) to make you feel better. For our purposes we are going to re-frame the event so that we incorporate the TRUTH about what’s going on and, after having done that, we can attack the problem from another angle.
The truth is not that you don’t have any (or sufficient) willpower, the truth is that your monster (craving) is simply stronger.
So what then? If your cravings are stronger and you don’t necessarily have full control over them then how can anyone succeed?
APPEASE THE MONSTER
You succeed by pleasing the monster, AND, at the same time pleasing your new diet God; the diet goal you’ve adopted. That means finding a way to:
1- Enjoy your food. Make the food healthy enough to appease the diet God, and tasty and filling enough to appease the monster.
2- Variety. Getting used to the same foods over and over again is a sure way to slowly lesson the pleasure you receive from them. The monster gets angry when that happens and when he does, he wins.
3- The right equipment. Putting a bit of effort into your new diet plan initially pays off big time in the long run. By taking the time to have the right equipment you can EASILY make more of the foods you enjoy, plus you satisfy #2 above because you now have more options to cook with.
All of this requires a bit of time and effort at first but setting yourself up right to make sure your monster is appeased will be worth it. Your cooking and food preparation has to be EASY, FAST and TASTY because junk food is all of those things and more. It takes almost no effort, time or money to grab a chocolate cookie and so you better be ready to fight fire with fire.
Other useful ideas and practices people have adopted are:
- Eating dessert everyday.
- Having a cheat meal once in awhile.
- Eating less carbs and higher fat foods like the Keto diet.
- Eat a lot, of the right foods.
Craving and caving-in isn’t weakness. Understand yourself better and you’ll be able to manipulate yourself better.
– Eating Love
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THE EATING LOVE GUIDE (FREE)
The Eating Love Guide has helped many people regain control of their eating patterns, resulting not only in weight loss but also better health and improved self-esteem. To read it online, click here.
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