It is a realisation that you need to come to if your goal is losing weight, or more accurately becoming a thin person and staying that way.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a new behaviour that you need, nor a fancy diet. Sure exercise helps you shed the pounds – try and stop me swimming, running up and down steps, doing yoga and trying to do the splits – and of course a diet that is more boiled veg than fried mars bars is important, but they aren’t the determining factors as to whether you’ll lose weight, become thin and stay there. You can do all the exercise in the world but if you can’t stop yourself gorging on food that would feed a family for a week, you’re still going to come unstuck.
The determining factor as to whether you’ll shortly be eating much less than you do now, thereby finally being able to lose the extra weight (and keep it off), is a realisation dawning on the mind. It’s this:
Your experience of food is coming from inside you.
The experience of every bite you munch on is coming from inside you. The experience of those physical yearnings you get all the time that make you stop the car to buy a secret sandwich, are coming from inside you. The taste of food is created inside of you. The feeling as you swallow it and how you feel whilst you’re eating it, are created inside of you. The pull to eat your kids’ leftovers at tea time is coming from inside of you.
You have not, because you cannot, ever experienced any aspect of food directly. And because your whole experience of food is created inside of you, it means you have total authority over it.
Meaning any time you feel that self-created urge to eat something you know you don’t really need? You can laugh at the urge. You can laugh at all the unpleasant, uptight, hangry feelings you sometimes experience. You can laugh at that feeling that comes on while you’re eating supper that makes you lust after more. You can choose to recognise the only difference between a salad and a plate of chips is arbitrary, therefore illusory, so you may as well just choose the salad.
This is your right and your responsibility as the authority in town.
You must realise that food is nothing without you. It can’t be experienced without a person’s ability to think and have an experience of that thinking immediately created.
So take control, assume responsibility for your thinking. Start ignoring all the unhelpful thinking that is leading you to stuff your face, and before long, it won’t just be just your eating habits that start to sparkle, it will be everything.