Calling out the REAL problem (and no, it’s not what you think) …

 

I don’t care if you’re a marshmallow with eyes, literally one of those blobs you sometimes see on chat show that have been delivered there by freighter so the audience can cluck and coo and pretend to care; fatness is not your problem.  Being fat is the effect of your problem.  Your problem is you want to (and do) eat more than your body needs.

 

Now this might not seem an important distinction to make, but it is, because if we don’t call out the problem correctly, we haven’t a fart’s chance of fixing it.

 

Sure we can go on special diets, take up running, mess about with protein shakes and eat only during the first phase of the moon, and sure, the weight might come off.  But what are we supposed to do once we’ve reached our target?  Keep restricting our food intake?  Keep running our knees ragged?  Continue bargaining with ourselves over whether a second sausage is permissible given that we’ve done an oopsies and had an extra glass of wine?

 

It’s such a funny thing.  We’re glorious human beings yet we act like Mother Nature didn’t equip us suitably to maintain our composure around a bowl of mashed potatoes.  So we step in and take over the reigns and cut mash from our diet entirely.  Spuds are off the menu because we are not built to eat them in moderation.  We don’t call our permanent diet, “a diet” though, we call it a “lifestyle”, that way we can kid ourselves we’re exercising free will.

 

Yeah right. Free will leads to freedom, not sugar-free cupcakes.

 

If we could stop eating at the point of enough, none of us would get porky, but we do, myself included.  Yet instead of looking at why this happens we join a gym and cut swathe of food groups from our diet.  Like overeating is part and parcel of being us, being human.  Oh well, I eat too much, I’d better try and minimise the damage.

 

Or we go the opposite way and panic, thinking it a deep-seated psychological problem, a result of something so heinous we’ve blanked it out (or we stitch together a couple of faded memories from the playground and point at that) whereupon we march over to the nearest head doctor and plead with them to fix us.

 

The dieting industry doesn’t help.  It’s not in their profit making interests to simply show you how to stop wanting to eat so much.  They need you to keep bouncing around that scale – your self-esteem totally dependent on the position on the needle – otherwise who’s going to buy their e-courses and home dance workouts?

 

Well I’m here to tell you, anyone can stop wanting to eat so much, just like that.  No cutting out entire food groups, no punishing ourselves and our knees, running on tarmac.  I know because I have.  I was a marshmallow with eyes, an now I’m not.

 

Let me tell you, it all comes to that feeling that comes over you when you’ve had a portion of pasta, let’s say, but you want more.  Or you’ve had most of a (huge) pizza and you’re full but you really want to carry on.  Maybe you’ve tucked the last bit away in the fridge because you’re stuffed, only to fish it out again half an hour later because you reckon there’s space in your belly for some more.  I call it … dun dun dun

 

The Nudge.

 

The feeling, The Nudge, comes from the lower brain. I don’t think neuroscientists tend to call it that, but I don’t think introducing striatums and basal ganglias is going to help here.  Anyway, that feeling is a little wink, a suggestion to engage in a particular activity that is likely to bring you enjoyment.  Why?  Because it has before.  Over and over again.

 

So many times have you participated in this activity, in fact, that your lower brain, the part of your head machinery that notices such things, has assumed it crucial to your survival and all round well-being.  Otherwise, so goes its logic, why would you bother?  It seems that even if you don’t consider yourself to be a glorious human being your lower brain sure does and assumes then any activity you’re repeatedly engaging in then must be of note and distinction,

 

So basically it steps in to help.  It greases the wheels so you can carry out the activity without too much effort on your part.  Which is mostly helpful, like when you start learning to drive you can’t do anything, even speak because you’re concentrating so hard, but after a few months you’re virtually on autopilot cruising down the motorway, radio blasting, gassing away to your friend in the passenger seat.

 

That’s because your lower brain is basically running the show now.  It’s turned your repeated activity of driving into an automatic process because you’re too busy and important to be live with a permanently furrowed brow.  You might be pressing the pedals, but it’s your lower brain calling the shots running the show now.

 

Very useful, yes?  The problem comes when the lower brain picks up on a pattern of behaviour that leaves behind a pair of haunches.  Instead of oiling your passage towards driving without thinking, it’s oiling your passage towards eating without thinking.  The more you follow its orders and reach for the peanut butter, the more oily and slippery your becomes for next time.  In other words, the harder it becomes for you to say no.

 

It doesn’t take liberties you see.  It doesn’t notice you’ve done something a couple of times and then chime in with the propulsion of a jet engine and throw you against the jar of peanut butter screaming EAT!!!!!  It goes, poli poli as they say in Swahili.  Slowly slowly.  It tests the waters.

 

At first the nudges towards your habit are quiet.  There’s nothing more than a hint of a thought impulse, really.  A slice of carrot cake sounds good.  But as you stand to attention, start nodding along like a bobblehead and go to indulge said thought impulse, the lower brain, encouraged, ramps up the volume of its nudges.  Cut a long story short, 15 years later you’re eating carrot cake out of the bin with one hand, while buttering a slice of toast with the other.

 

Basically the lower brain works like a slip ‘n slide with “habit” plonked at the end. The more often you throw yourself down the slide (engage in a behaviour) the slippier the slide gets for next time (the harder it is to say no).  Very useful when we’re talking about driving a car – who wants to keep remembering how to parallel park?  Not useful when we’re talking about a couple of squares of chocolate after every meal.

 

Don’t feel bad about it.  You didn’t really stand a chance.  Sugar (and all the other classics we tend to get hooked on) deliver a neurochemical punch in the nuts like no other.  I’m not just talking about the sugar that’s up front and in your face, like the kind in a chocolate fondant, slightly warm, oozing from the centre and swimming in cream.  I’m talking about the starchy food that dissolves instantly into sugar for absorption into the bloodstream.  So bread then, well, wheat based products.

 

Where there’s sugar, there’s dopamine, the neurochemical that not only makes us feel good but makes us actively want to repeat the behaviour again.  Salt, sugar, wheat, fats … all the beasties that you hear so much about trigger dopamine in our brains like it’s going out of fashion and food manufacturer’s know this so they put all that junk in their food.

 

We consume it and develop quite a taste for it, not realising that’s due a neurochemical assault on the brain and not necessarily a result of genuine preference.  They could serve us up a battered dead fly and so long as they hadn’t left out the salt we’d be happy.  Plus we don’t make the connection between bread and sugar, so we tuck into that like we’re being healthy, responsible adults (and it’s pushed on us at every turn too, that doesn’t help either).

 

Anyway, for one reason or another we’ve ended up bathing in food that’s messing with our brain chemistry, delivering over the top feel good vibes followed by the desire to do it again.  So we do.  Again and again.  All eating produces a small dopamine response to reinforce the behaviour but most of us aren’t nibbling on carrots and broccoli.  We’re going the whole hog with rice, noodles, pasta, bread, wraps, all washed down with vats of sugary booze so the dopamine response is more extreme. 

 

Naturally we keep going back for more, And More, AND MORE.  We keep throwing ourselves down the slip ‘n slide, basically.  The lower brain, alerted to this behaviour pattern, now does its bit to ensure this particular behaviour pattern never, ever dies working off the assumption that the sky would cave in and the earth would surely crumble if we did not have our morning toast with marmite.  Cut to the end, the thought of having the healthier choice of oats this morning for your breakfast, or shock horror, perhaps even skipping it all together in the manner of a barefoot running, spear throwing, paleolithic gangsta, makes you want to weep.

 

Your brain has wired itself up to deliver you the intense desire for toast and marmite because that’s what you’ve been eating over and over. Give me toast and marmite. I SAID, GIVE ME TOAST AND MARMITE NOW, BITCH, OR ELSE. 

 

Except the crucial point of this is, no matter how strong the nudge or the yearning or the craving is for the toast and marmite, or the extra slice of pizza, it’s still only a thought you’re experiencing.  Your lower brain can’t send you a nudge in any other format.  It’s a brain, brains don’t send faxes, they send thoughts.  Do you see?  The urge might come clothed in palpitations and edginess, but underneath all that pomp, is a thought.

 

You think you’ve a huge habit, maybe even something you’d label an addiction that you’re up against, like a permanent roadblock plonked in the middle of your life (which is ruined, obviously, until you’ve found a way to get rid of it), but actually, all you’re ever up against and the most you’re ever up against, is one single thought.

 

The Nudge towards your habit is thought. Your habit is made of thought.

 

Can you see now why your habit isn’t constant?  Why eaters aren’t always eating, why smokers can get on aeroplanes, even, and not smoke for 12 hours as they dance across the sky (because when you know you can’t smoke, there’s no point entertaining thoughts about it).  You can be someone who pulls their hair, but find yourself reading a book or watching television and neither be tugging on it nor wanting to even.

 

No habit is permanently present, and that’s because it doesn’t exist outside of the thought that delivers The Nudge.  When the thought is not there to engage, no habit.  So really it’s a stupid name even, habit, because it implies permanency to a temporary feeling.  It points the finger at the behaviour being the problem, whereas in fact it’s the thought that causes the behaviour that brings the heartache.

 

Addiction is an even more absurd name when viewed in this light.  How can we label someone with the permanent moniker “addict” when the feeling of addiction, The Nudge, is nothing but thought, that ebbs and flows, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, sometimes not there at all.

 

Anyway, the point is if you didn’t experience the thought that carries in the feeling of The Nudge, you wouldn’t have a habit.  That’s where I’m going to get you to.  Don’t care how severe your perceived eating problems are, don’t care how broad your beam, I am going to get you to the point where you no longer have the thoughts that carry in The Nudge.

 

You’ll be cured even before that though.  You’re cured when you can experience The Nudge but not give in to it.  That cure is instant.  For it’s not a new way of doing that will get you there, it’s a new way of seeing, and I have the glasses for you right here.

 

Ready for the next part?  Let’s roll ——->