Lose weight

Have you been unsuccessful with every slimming technique?

Have you had enough of diets? Have you had too much of: I will start my diet on Monday? Have you lost your willpower? Are you burdened with measuring tapes, scales, calorie-counting and new eating plans on a daily basis? Are you feeling bloated and heavy after every meal? In short – have you had more than enough of struggling with your weight?

Think slim, get slim – the Mindful Way

I have developed The think slim, get slim – the Mindful Way in 2011 as an alternative to diets that have only a two to five percent chance of success. This way is a journey of decadence and excitement. It is a journey to open your mind, to think differently and to break free from your old beliefs about slimming. This is a revolutionary journey since you do not need any diet, exercise or any kind of willpower technique to get slim. You will become slim whilst enjoying life and food in a decadent way and stop worrying about your weight.

Your weight has nothing to do with what you eat, when you eat or how much you eat. It also has nothing to do with exercise (or the lack of it), genes or physical predispositions. Anything that enters your mouth must exit your body in all forms of excretion. We should rather ask why your body is holding on to food and why it is hoarding it in your body’s pantries in the form of fat.

Cause of weight

There is only one single cause for weight gain and the cause is not food! 

I’m sure you’ve seen slim people eating just what they like and still stay slim.  It’s not because they’re just lucky.  They may have a faster metabolism, but their metabolism is faster for a reason I will discuss later.

Diets almost never work. After or even during a diet you will most probably pick up all the weight again or gain even more. You already have a slim (no pun intended) chance of success according to statistics, a success rate of between two and five percent. As a result, you will be told that there is nothing wrong with the diet program. You have cheated, had not enough willpower, determination and gave up too quickly.

Research also proves that bodily exercise has minimal effect on your weight.  People in general, need only moderate exercise of approximately 20 minutes per day.  This is exercise you are getting anyway when you walk to your car, get up the stairs at work, doing your daily chores, etc.

Research shows that there is one very important reason for weight gain and that reason is anxiety.  You will lose weight when you conquer your anxiety. I will refer back to this.  Anxiety is a condition in which you are easily tensed up and by doing so, you tend to worry and you normally worry about things you do not even need to worry about. To read more about anxiety, please see my article on General anxiety disorder on my website. 

Before we move on, we should first have a quick look at the functioning of your physical brain.

How your brain works

In short, your brain consists of three parts.

• Your new brain (neo-cortex)

Your neo-cortex is the part of your brain that is responsible for logical thinking, reasoning and problem solving.  This is also the part of your brain that you use for observation and forming perceptions. Thus, the neo-cortex is the abstract thinking part of your brain.

• Your emotional brain (limbic system)

This part of your brain is responsible for memory and emotions (feelings).

• Your reptilian brain (cerebellum, lower brain and brain stem)

Your reptilian brain has physical survival as its’ primary concern. It controls your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, etc. This is also the part of your brain that prepares you instinctively to fight or flee any danger.

In contrast with your neo-cortex, the language of your reptilian brain is seated in feelings and emotions.  The reptilian part of your brain is primitive and does not understand language and logic as your neo-cortex (logical thinking brain) understands it.

You may develop so-called irrational thoughts in your thinking brain. Although you logically know these fears are irrational and unlikely to occur, you still find it difficult to overcome them. This is why I am calling it the what if disease. Anxiety is merely the result of these irrational thoughts and your fears about something which may happen that will be catastrophic should it happen.

This message of danger flows from your neo-cortex to your reptilian brain.  As you already know, your reptilian brain doesn’t understand language and logic.  It registers these thoughts literally as physical danger, such as that your life is threatened, even when your neo-cortex knows it is just your imagination. However, your primitive thinking, the survival instinct, is activated and this part of your brain immediately secretes adrenaline and cortisol for the so-called fight-or-flight response. You may experience anxiety and panic because this part of you believes there’s a real threat to your survival. 

Your reptilian brain in now undergoing the following three processes:

• your body is entering a state for survival. The most basic resources we need for survival are food, shelter and safety.  In order to survive, you will tend to eat more than you need.  Your body encodes hunger as a signal to store enough (and more than enough) food for energy to fight or flee;
• secondly, adrenaline is produced by your brain for the fight or flight response. For the production of adrenalins, you especially need starch and sweet to enable the production of adrenalin. You will continue to crave these foods regardless of your diet in order to survive. Even though you understand in your neo-cortex part of your brain that you should not eat these foods, you will eat it by default.

Though the reptilian brain is the most primitive and stupid part of your brain, it is also the most powerful.  When the fight-or-flight response intercedes, it neutralises logical thinking of your neo-cortex.

As a side note to illustrate the power of your reptilian brain: did you know that it’s impossible to commit suicide by pulling a plastic bag over your head?  Even though you really want to die with all the reason in the world, it is impossible to commit suicide with a plastic bag.  The moment you become distressed, your reptilian brain will take over in a quest for survival, and you’ll tear off the plastic bag despite your neo-cortex’s intentions to die.

• and thirdly, your brain along with adrenaline, also produces cortisol to counteract any form of stress.

Your body is supposed to return to normal functioning after a crisis. When we have successfully dealt with a crisis the production of adrenal and cortisol should decrease.

Cortisol is a hormone that helps you survive a crisis.  Unlike adrenaline that increases your body’s heightened response for survival, cortisol helps your body by shutting down bodily functions you don’t need at that moment for survival. Your immune system is compromised and especially your digestion shuts down.

You eat food.  Food goes into your stomach after which it spreads to all the organs that need nutrition.  The remaining food is supposed to go in one of two directions:

–   it ends up in your digestive system, (specifically your excretory system) or

–   it gets stored in your body in the form of fat cells. 

The purpose of cortisol is to help us survive. However, we are surviving too much at the expense of our healing. The above mentioned is the result of survival as a normal human’s reaction to uncertainty or stress.  This phenomenon can be observed in what happened during the Covid-19 pandemic, or during the first democratic election in South Africa in 1994. Those were times of uncertainty and anxiety took over. People went into survival mode and as a result they started to pile up food to prepare for food shortages which was about to come.  Your reptilian brain stores those foods in the form of fat cells in your body, almost as emergency stock such as canned food and provisions in the pantries of your fat cells for the next crisis, even if it is all just in your mind.

To illustrate the survival power of the subconscious mind: I had clients who wanted to put on weight.  It didn’t matter how much they have been overeating or being force-fed with fast-food, they never picked up a single gram.  On the other hand, I had clients who limited their diet to salad only to discover that they have continued to pick up weight.

All of the above is proof that your weight has got nothing to do with food, but everything with the survival instinct and response of your reptilian brain to the irrational thoughts from your neo-cortex in order to survive.

Why our established ideas about slimming are not effective

You might just begin to form an idea why our current way of thinking about weight-loss is not working as discussed below:

• Diets

Failure is guaranteed when going on a diet.  Your reptilian brain will develop a feeling of deprivation during the process of dieting.  Your body will begin to feel as if it is not surviving.  Your reptilian brain registers diets as famine, drought, hunger, and anxiety and consequently releases adrenaline and cortisol.  Imagine being in a desert for days without food or water, and then finally reaching an oasis. You will over-indulge to compensate for the feelings of deprivation for too long.

This is why most people will cheat during their diet, eating more as ever before.

• Exercise

The Reptilian brain registers exercise as danger.  The only reason people and animals are running is when they’re chasing or when being chased.

 Your reptilian brain interprets an overactive activity of the body as danger and will cause you to eat even more to generate food to be stored in pantries for energy to fight or to get away from danger.

I have a friend who is serious about losing weight. He goes to the gym religiously and exercises really hard.  After such a work-out session, he’ll eat a whole packet of chips.  His body is just replacing the energy it has used. He is not addressing stress in his life and therefore not getting slimmer.

• Scales

When you step on the scale and notice that you haven’t lost weight or have gained some, it can trigger feelings of anxiety, stress and panic about your weight.  Your reptilian brain perceives this panic as a sign of danger. The rest is history. So, you might turn to food to soothe the discomfort and pain of your gain.

I like to refer to this as slimming instead of weight-loss.  The Reptilian brain does not like to lose anyway.  As you begin to slim down, fat may be reverted to muscles, which is denser and weighs more than fat.  You might see an increase in weight on the scale but notice a reduction in measurements. In his haydays, Sylvester Stallone would have measured on the BMI (Body Mass Index) as obese, because of the weight of his muscles. 

What you will discover with this approach

Psychotherapy, especially hypnosis along with The Mindful Way, will help you enjoy your food even more and at the same time, effortlessly and easily get rid of that excess fat.

The Mindful Way works best with people who are desperate to slim down – especially those who are desperate where nothing ever worked for them to become slim. This approach enables you to adopt a total mind change regarding your ideas around slimming.

This mindshift may appear to be somehow radical. You may only accept this approach once you realise that diets are not working.  You adopt the idea that it should be a natural process in which you can eat what you want, when you want, as much as you want and believe that your subconscious will do the slimming for you, while you don’t have to do anything about it consciously, but to enjoy life.