You’ll hear therapists talking about your conscious mind and your subconscious mind.
Your conscious mind is your objective or thinking mind. Its job is to identify, compare and analyse everything going on in the present moment.
The basic function of your subconscious mind is storage and retrieval of data. Its job is to ensure that you respond exactly the way you are programmed. Your subconscious mind tries to make everything you say and do fit into a consistent pattern.
Your subconscious ‘inner’ mind’s job is to keep you alive, keep you safe, to move you away from pain and towards pleasure. This part of your mind’s job is to protect you at all costs. This backfires in some cases because the subconscious cannot determine which behaviours are ‘actually’ good for your and which ones just ‘feel’ good to you.
If you’re stuck in a cycle of destructive behaviour, let’s say comfort-eating, and you believe this behaviour is actually helping you to cope or make you feel better, your subconscious will endlessly repeat this behaviour.
So what can I do?
Here’s the good news… You have a choice. You can choose what to link pain and pleasure to and this means that you CAN change the pattern itself.
The first thing you’re going to have to do is to change your belief to ‘Nothing tastes as good as being slim feels’. Or more accurately that being slimmer gives you ‘pleasure’ and is worth the effort and hard work to achieve and that any form of destructive eating is a ‘pain’ and should be avoided at all costs.
Give it a go…
Can you link ‘pleasure’ to being slimmer and feeling healthier?
By repetitively giving the chocolates, crisps and other vices a miss and instructing yourself that eating healthier is a reward for your body you will start to create change within the subconscious ‘storage’ of that belief.
Making the right choices, even in small steps at first, is going to make permanent weight loss instantly more achievable.