Real talk: there are probably large portions of the day when you want to eat. Like the time after supper but before bed, anyone? Don’t tell me you’re not hot-footing it into the kitchen to grab some cornflakes. That’s right, buster, I know your dirty little secret.
And I know you hate yourself for it. I know you don’t want to be tucking in to low fat chips at 5pm either, just to tide you over until your evening meal. All that MSG sluicing through your system? You don’t feel good about that and you want it to stop.
But here’s the thing, you can’t say no. You can’t resist. You can’t stop yourself from plunging your hand into the cupboard and pulling out a packet of baked corn snacks.
You tell yourself, “no, don’t do it, you’ve been doing so well”. Then you follow it up with a, “if only I could just NOT do this, I’d have the body I want, that I’ve been striving for my whole life”. And then you go ahead and do it anyway – you rip into the packet and snaffle down the contents. Well, actually, you don’t snaffle, you eat them incredibly (annoyingly) slowly to try and only have half. Which never works.
Then you beat yourself up and vow to do better tomorrow. Well, here’s the thing, you won’t do better tomorrow because you’re trying to resist. You’re in RESISTANCE MODE, in fact.
The fact is you want to eat, habitually, a packet of low fat chips (crisps for the Brits). It’s a habit, meaning if you cut the top of your skull off and peeled it back to access the brain (very much in the manner of a hard-boiled egg), you’d see a neurological pathway in there delivering the message, EAT CHIPS NOW, and you’d see it lighting up and firing it at the same time each day – the time when you typically go for the snack.
The only way you’re going to be override its message is by responding to it with the internal attitude of “so what, who cares, you’re not me, now piss off”.
In other words you disregard the message, and it goes away. You laugh at it. You notice it and you roll your eyes. And what happens is, because the desire to eat the chips is a thought (and thought can’t make you do anything), it can only pack up its shit, and leave. Eventually it won’t even bother to come around again. The neural pathway that delivers the thought literally shrivels up and dies when you treat the thought with derision.
While you might be jumping up and down right now shouting “I’ve tried that and it doesn’t work”, you’re wrong. You haven’t tried it. Because if you had you would have fixed yourself by now. You’ve never mocked or ridiculed your desires to eat. You’ve only ever taken them seriously, as though they are an important part of your identity.
The most you’ve tried to do is ignore your cravings for snacks and crisps, or talk yourself out of them. But you can’t talk yourself out of a craving, or think your way out. You can de-value them by laughing at the thinking that’s delivering them however, that you CAN do. And that’s what you must do if you want them to go away.
“So what, who cares, you’re not me, now piss off”. This is what you front up to your cravings with. Forget saying “om”, this is your new mantra. Then you laugh MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Because otherwise, I promise you, your cravings will NEVER leave you alone and you’ll be stuck with a flabby haunches forever (ugh), and the truth is cravings can’t make you do anything, they have no power, but it’s not until you see this? That you’re free.
Photo by Leio McLaren (@leiomclaren) on Unsplash