Weight Watchers is going to keep you battling against food your entire life. At best, and this is a BEST case scenario, it’s going to see you into maintenance mode where you have to count and restrict and measure your food FOREVER, while making endless deals with yourself over whether you can eat this bit of mash, seeing as earlier you had some wine.
Um, hello, ladies? Does this sound empowering or fun? Does this sound like the behaviour of badass bitches out to take on the world. I think not. It sounds like the ethos of a church mouse destined for elasticated trousers.
Listen up… food never had and never will have any power over you AT ALL.
Yes, yes, I know that you can’t leave a single french fry on your plate, I know you get all hot and sweaty at the bread baskets in Lidl – but that is not the food you are battling against, it’s your neural pathways you have wired up to send that thinking to you where you’re standing within smelling distance of a freshly baked baguette.
You don’t experience food directly, you experience your thinking that sits between you and the warm baguette, or the mouthful of macaroni. You chew on your thinking, you taste your thinking, you smell your thinking. Thought is the creative agent that allows you experience all of the physical world, including food. Freshly baked baguettes would be nothing without your thought. And it’s in this understanding that lies your full and total release from food’s bondage. Now THAT’S empowerment – and it also happens to be the truth.
But Weight Watchers, well, they are founded on the idea that nope, food is your master, you have a problem controlling yourself around it, there’s NOTHING that can be done about this, so here is a way to try and manage the situation, so at least you can try and mitigate the inevitable disastrous consequences of such an affliction – a body with lots of wobbly bits. If food’s going to be your boss, you may as well go into damage control, is basically their MO.
If anything it’s taking you further away from the solution because it’s cementing in your brain the belief that food is and always will be more powerful that you.
Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. BOLLOCKS. BOLLOCKS. BOLLOCKS.
When you turn down a cookie, you’re not declining a cookie, you’re declining to value a thought – the thought is meaningless, because, duh, it’s only a thought (one of tens of thousands that flow through you each day), so it’s an easy thing to do. That makes declining to value a thought AKA declining a cookie the easiest thing in the world. And that’s true even when the thought I want to eat that cookie comes with an accompanying craving and longing and yearning and pining and the inability to concentrate on anything else besides that damn cookie.
But Weight Watchers would say the opposite. They say the desire is extremely meaningful and so to mitigate disaster, have half the cookie, log it in your book and then walk up some steps instead of taking the lift as recompense. And it makes me want to flick them in the face for treating us like such idiots. Although I do recognise it’s not really their fault, they are the symptom not the cause of the problem – the misunderstanding that that our experience in the moment is coming from somewhere other than our thinking in the moment.
Listen up bitches. When you feel that urge for the cookie, you are pushing up against thought. You’re experiencing a thought to eat the cookie and the thought is creating the desire to do so. The thought is creating the yearning and pining and longing and what not, but that thought is in no way related to the cookie. It’s just a bubble of energy coming up from inside you. Thought can’t make you do anything. You control thought, thought does not control you.
Capisce?
Meaning, you are in full control of that decision of whether or not to eat that cookie and always have been.
Now if you’re saying yes you get all that but you’re still struggling? It’s because you haven’t yet gotten it. You haven’t yet recognised that feeling of desire for a cookie is thought, and is in no way related to the physical object of the cookie. If you struggle, it’s because you haven’t fully grasped the magnitude of having this knowledge. I promise you the second you do grasp it? Cookies (and all food) will completely lose their grip on you, I mean totally.
It’s impossible to allow a cookie to exert power and influence on you when you realise it has none. Because it is NEVER the cookie you’re experiencing, it’s thinking that lies between you and the cookie, and it’s THIS understanding that will free you – and the power of this understanding will bleed into other areas of your life too and free you from another bunch of crap that you believed was forcing you to feel a certain way.
Believe it or not, you’ll be better off than had this crazy food situation never reared it’s ugly, fat head in the first place. So you simply have to listen to me and (temporarily) make me the boss of you, not food. You have to because ironically you know what will end up happening if you do? You’ll end up becoming – permanently – the boss of yourself.
Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash