Losing weight isn’t actually hard. I know that’s difficult to imagine, after all, you’ve been playing tonsil tennis with diets since you had braces on your teeth – but I promise you, it’s not hard. Who am I to say that? Someone who’s cracked the code.
See, losing weight isn’t about weight, it’s about thought. Your eating habits are thought habits that result in eating. Wanting to eat that extra hamburger is the effect of the problem, not the cause of the problem. The cause of the problem is holding the thought to eat the extra hamburger in high regard.
You think that this hamburger-scented thought, along with the feeling of desire it’s dragged in behind, MATTERS. You think it’s meaningful. It’s not. It doesn’t matter a jot – it has about as much value and level of insight as the thought “I wonder if steel capped Crocs could be a thing?”. And you can fanny about with diets and weight machines as much as you like, but until you squeeze out the little hard bit that lurks underneath the puss, the zit is going to keep coming back (ps. sorry for that visual).
So how do you squeeze that nasty bit out? How do you stop your cravings in their tracks?
You learn how to laugh at your own thought AKA the feeling of compulsive desire AKA the cravings. I say learn, but what I really mean is you recognise you can laugh at these thoughts . My 3-pronged approach to doing that is as follows:
1 I recognise I’m in the grip of a craving / pining / yearning to eat the extra hamburger and I remember, “hey, this thought is unrelated to the burger, it’s coming from inside me, it’s being generated by my brain. It’s got nothing to do with that food or my genuine desire”, and that has the effect of unhooking me from the burger.
2 Next, I see myself as a holographic vessel through which this thought, like any other thought, is passing. This has the effect of removing the blockage that is preventing this thought from passing through me, so that it does pass through me without digging in, without me getting taken off by it and without me feeling compelled to eat that blasted burger.
3 Then, as the cherry on the top and because I really want to kick some ass here, I take a moment to connect with the feeling of my inner body. I feel my fingers and toes, I become aware of my ears or nose or some other part of my body I don’t normally think about, and I remember that NOTHING from the outside world can come and get me from in here. Nothing can slip through my defence without my say so – not burgers, not rude comments, nothing.
Then I sit with that glorious feeling for as long as I can, feeling powerful and grateful and like I’m master of my behaviour and destiny – which of course I am.
You know what else? This is the only way you can kick a craving into touch because as I stated earlier, the problem is not with your behaviour or with your diet or with food itself, it’s with thought – specifically clinging onto and valuing meaningless thoughts that materialise in your brain.
Because the truth is you are perfect, it’s your habitual thought patterns that are the bellends, and the sooner you realise that?
Is the sooner you’ll be free.
Photo by Masha Rostovskaya on Unsplash