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Alternative Health & Healing: Lose Weight Permanently: Stop the Endless Cycle of Dieting
Using the Pleasure-Pain Principle for Your Benefit
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by Rena Greenberg |
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Whatever your subconscious associations of pleasure and pain, you can learn to change them. With your new perceptions, you’ll automatically engage in behaviors that will move you toward the outcome you desire instead of away from it, dramatically transforming your life. This is because our brain is naturally wired to move away from pain and toward pleasure. Why not work with this inclination instead of against it?
One of the main obstacles to achieving and maintaining your ideal weight is your pleasurable associations with the “wrong” food. Somewhere in your mind, you have many associations between food and pleasure, reward, satisfaction, and being sociable. For instance, if you associate pleasure with foods that are oily, greasy, and salty, you can use your willpower to stay away from these harmful foods for a period of time, but sooner or later, usually under stress, you will go towards your source of pleasure. Similarly, if you associate pain with working out, yet you have chosen joining a fitness center as your way of doing exercise, then even though you can use willpower and drag yourself to the gym for a while, at some point you will declare that it’s just too difficult, and you will move away from this source of pain.
To maximize your potential for change, you’ll need to really feel the pain associated with your current weight condition and eating habits so that you feel compelled to move away from it. Where are you going to be in five years if you continue with your lifestyle the way it is? How about ten years? Take a moment and experience how your body feels. Are you constantly tired? Lethargic? Sick? Do you need stimulants such as sugar, white flour, caffeine, prescription drugs, or alcohol to get you through the day? Is this the way you want to keep living, destroying your health?
Feel the pain that you are already in, and let it motivate you to say, “I have had enough.” Those four magic words will change your life, especially when you have strong emotions behind them. Aren’t you tired of feeling fatigued and being on the roller coaster of mood swings, and then needing to self-medicate with food? How long are you going to be embarrassed by your weight, or simply avoid social situations?
If you feel that your life is going pretty well, except for this issue of food addiction and/or being overweight, and you really don’t relate to the concept of being in severe pain, think about all the time you log between your food obsessions, dieting intermittently, your health concerns, and generally worrying or thinking about your weight and/or health. Even if you are not in actual physical or emotional pain, wouldn’t it be nice to free up this huge chunk of your life so that you can have other priorities? Wouldn’t it be nice to focus instead on living your life’s purpose? Can you imagine what it would be like to have a deeper connection with your own heart and soul and live from this place? What would your life be like if you were no longer addicted to particular foods and were in control of your life and eating habits?
Now, start focusing on pleasure. You are much more likely to achieve your goal when you start to move towards the pleasure of living life slender, healthy, and fit, at your ideal weight, in control of your life and your eating habits. You need to imagine yourself achieving slenderness and maintaining it.
It’s imperative that you feel the pleasure of living life at your ideal weight, before you get there, as if you were already there. When you clearly imagine what you do want, you are on your way to creating that in your outer reality. Your brain receives its orders from the imagination, not from your conscious wishes. The subconscious mind does not differentiate between what is real and what is imagined. Imagination creates reality. Because 95 percent of the time you are simply running on autopilot, if you do something and it feels good, you will end up repeating it. If it feels bad, you’ll naturally avoid it.
Whether you are addicted to eating a bag of chips every day after work or running two miles, either way your brain is running on a program that was installed at some point—a program that you can choose to overwrite with a new program. When you do that, your habits will change. If you start scripting and directing a movie of just how fatigued you’ll feel after work tomorrow and how exhausting it will be to drag yourself to the gym, this powerful, emotional image you’ve created for yourself will manifest. On the other hand, if you imagine that tomorrow after work, you’ll put on your headset and CD player and feel energized to take a run outside, smelling the fresh, clean air, feeling your limbs pumping to the beat of the music, that’s the image that you will recreate instead. It’s not your wishes that come true, necessarily, but your predominant thoughts. Your mind can create your reality. So if you constantly tell yourself, “I am so fat, I have no willpower. Nothing works for me!” you’re inadvertently making it impossible for those conditions to change. For instance, at first it may seem unnatural for you to reach for water instead of diet soda pop when you are thirsty. When you make the choice to read about the chemicals in sugar-free beverages and realize the possible harm of these products, it becomes easier to make a decision to break that habit. When you learn that there are many studies to show that chemicals such as aspartame, although they contain fewer calories, may actually stimulate hunger or cravings for sugar, you can intellectually decide to make a new choice. But what about your repeated associations with pleasure while drinking diet soda?
Step back and realize that your attachment to certain foods and beverages is simply a result of the current programming in your brain. If, on the other hand, you made the conscious decision to drink water throughout the day and walk two miles after lunch, all you would need to do is install that program and these activities would begin to feel pleasurable and natural. At first, of course, the new behavior will probably seem awkward, just as it might feel strange to sit in front of a piano for the first time. But if you run mental movies of drinking pure, clean water, and feeling refreshed, and of yourself really enjoying that two-mile walk and all the benefits of it, you will reprogram your subconscious to experience these activities as pleasurable.
So picture yourself walking as you listen to your favorite music or recite positive affirmations as you enjoy the fresh air and scenery. Imagine that you now love walking so much--that it is such a positive habit or addiction for you--that you walk rain or shine, simply adjusting your clothing depending on the weather. Consciously choose the program that you want to run, because the dominant program in your brain is determining your behavior.
In other words, start imagining what you truly want in your life rather than focusing on what you don’t want. As soon as you realize that you are focusing on a negative image of yourself as overweight and out of control, change that image to what you truly do want to create—a new life, with you enjoying a healthy, fit body, happy and in control of your life and your eating habits. Remember that it is your dominant, consistent thoughts that create your reality--particularly when these thoughts are fueled by strong emotion. |
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Rena Greenberg,
Author, Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, & Hypnotherapist
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Rena Greenberg is the Founder and Director of Wellness Seminars, Inc, which provides weight loss programs for over100 major corporations and city governments, including over 75 Florida and Michigan hospitals.
She is a graduate of City University of New York at Brooklyn College. Rena Greenberg’s wellness programs have been featured in many television and radio news features.
Ms. Greenberg holds two certifications in hypnosis from The Eastern NLP Institute and the National Guild of Hypnotists, as well as national biofeedback certification from the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America. She is also a certified Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming and an ordained Minister.
Rena Greenberg is the author of The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss used by over 100,000 People (Hay House, January 2006).
Email:
wellnessseminars@aol.
com
Web:
www.easywillpower.com
Read an excerpt
of Rena's new book:
The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss
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You'll find it in
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