The Psychology of Weight Loss
A very, very different perspective ...
The following abstract (from an ongoing rewrite of my weight loss book previously published by McGraw-Hill) is my attempt at making obvious the fact that conditioned thoughts, feelings and behaviours, that are outside conscious control, drive maladaptive eating and subsequent accumulation of body fat. This “outside of conscious control” explains the 98% failure rate of ALL current programs (as described in the Australian Government Health Department report “Towards Australia’s Weight”).
I recognise that so far I’ve tended to focus fairly exclusively on benign pain without sufficient explanatory pathology (the majority of chronic pain presentations) but overweight/obesity is also one of the biggest issues we face, and may be driven by precisely similar mechanisms, so let’s take a look.
Book Extract (currently working on)
Chapter Header: Our Lousy Programming
The answer to weight problems is not going on a diet or suffering through arduous or boring exercise, or relying on medication to temporarily affect eating behaviour. Rather, the answer is in identifying and modifying or extinguishing the unconscious programming which automatically controls our diet and exercise preferences. Here are just some of the programming “glitches” (ie; conditioned thoughts, feelings and behaviours) which we can now treat easily, rapidly, and permanently.
There is a complex “ecology” of “programming” (ie, conditioned responses) which controls our individual likes and dislikes and ultimately controls our behaviour
Thanks to SDR Therapy, that whole ecology is readily amenable to permanent change
The WeightChoicetm approach to weight problems works because it fully appreciates and addresses the complexity of issues which underpin weight disorders, whether that is overweight or underweight. These issues include many which are common with people generally, and many which are quite unique to the individual and must be discovered and treated. This is not a “by the numbers” or “recipe” style of approach – it is highly personal to each one of us.
That’s why my main focus has to be training psychologists and counsellors around the world to deliver the WeightChoice program. No other professional could possibly understand the unique psychological dynamics at play in you as an individual.
When you see just some of the issues that impact on body weight, you will begin to understand not only the complexity of the problem, but also why the results that you can now achieve can be so easy and so dramatic.
Keep in mind as you review the list below, that until now most of these issues were either untreatable, or would take many years of intensive therapy until they were resolved. Clinical research done right here in Australia proves the rapid effectiveness of my methods in eliminating every single block to choosing your best weight.
Examples of Issues Affecting Weight Gain (mostly conditioned)
Knowledge about health issues
Nutrition behaviour
Lifestyle behaviour
Eating strategies
Family history, beliefs, values
Addictive/compulsive component
Habitual or situational components
Appetite
The individual’s meaning ascribed to food and movement
The individual’s meaning of “slim”
The individual’s meaning of “fat”
Feelings about food & weight
Feelings about sexuality/gender
Feelings about relationships
Advantages of excess weight
Disadvantages of excess weight
Disadvantages of losing weight
Advantages of losing weight
Fantastical thinking
Identity issues
Esteem/confidence issues
Unconscious programming around weight itself – including our internal “setting”!
No wonder traditional diets don’t work! How could they when they don’t even begin to attend to the real causes of weight disturbance?! How could they when the diet consultants have no or little knowledge of the way unconscious programming works, nor of how that programming may be very quickly, easily, authentically, and permanently altered, often in just minutes.
What We Learned Growing Up
So how did we get “programmed”? How did we develop the conditioning that has made it possible for us to accumulate so much unwanted body fat? Does this sound familiar?
“Finish what’s on your plate or you won’t get your pudding!” “You can’t leave the table till you finish your plate!” “Finish your plate – there are children starving in Africa!” “Your mother cooked that and you’ll eat it!”
Maybe 20 years ago you would’ve heard those kinds of words a zillion times! No wonder it’s almost impossible for many grown adults to push away a plate with food on it, without guilt.
And if you were one of several children, do you remember what meal times were like? Did you have to get in quickly before the others got everything? Was there food insecurity in your household? Or did everyone overeat and you learned to do that too as a habit?
Did your parents use food to reward you, to quieten you, to console you or to shut you up? Guess what, you learned the “meaning” of food and chances are you’re still living that out today.
There are thousands and thousands of these pieces of programming inside our heads and these run automatically. Collectively, this is the auto pilot that runs our lives when we’re not looking. Like any auto pilot, it follows a set of rules, or programming, that respond to feedback in order to stay on its designated track. If the programming contains an error, the auto pilot won’t recognise that, it will just keep right on flying, right into a mountain or into a storm – because it doesn’t think for itself. It is not smart – it just follows “the rules”.
So this is how our conditioned responses rule our lives, totally regardless of how much self discipline we posses.
Our Lifestyle Choices – Are They Really Choices?
What is it that causes us to make the same unhealthy choices about food and about physical exercise, over and over again? Are we actually making such decisions from our own free will? Do we sabotage ourselves deliberately? What is going on!?
All of us engage in repetitive habits that have built up over a lifetime, and anyone who’s ever tried to deliberately change a habit will know what a hard job that is to try to do it by willpower. Talk about frustrating!
However when we understand some simple facts of neurology, we can breathe a sigh of relief to know that it was never about willpower – it was about unconscious conditioning!
What do I mean by “unconscious conditioning”? Have you heard of Pavlov and his dogs?
Pavlov was a behavioural scientist very interested in how animals (including humans) learned to behave in automatic ways. In Pavlov’s laboratory he was measuring the salivation rate of dogs, and every time the dogs were about to be fed, a tuning tine would be rung. He quite soon discovered that if the tuning tine were rung, even with no food, the dogs would increase their salivation rates. They had learned to associate the sound with food, and their brains had linked a stimulus (the sound) with the response (salivation).
Note: the dogs didn’t decide to respond in this way. Their brains did this work for them.
We humans have many, many stimulus-response associations. When we hear a special song, we feel a special way. When we see someone’s hand reaching toward us in handshake, we find our own hand rising by itself. When we smell onions sizzling on a barbecue, our mouths water even though we’re not hungry. When we sit down in front of the tele at night we might think “chocolate”. When we attempt to leave a half-full plate on the table, we get the same guilty feeling we got as a kid with the old “kids starving in Africa” routine from Mum or Dad. Certain experiences, sights, sounds, touches, smells and tastes, cause us to feel or behave in very predictable ways.
Now you might be thinking, “Great! I can be aware of that and stop it.” The trouble with that theory is that there’s way too much to be aware of. It’s widely accepted by neurologists that the unconscious mind typically processes information somewhere between 2 and 11 million pieces per second. Your conscious mind, on the other hand, can only track maybe a measely 7 pieces of information over the same period.
That’s a pretty big gap!
And what this means is that we can never even be aware of even a tiny fraction of what’s happening in terms of our brain processing stuff. We can have little or no clue what’s really going on.
So that’s a size gap between conscious and unconscious functioning. But it gets worse, because there’s a time gap too.
The Time Gap Between Our Unconscious Processing and Our Conscious Will
The neurologist Libet was the first to actually measure the time differences between our unconscious mind processing something, and our conscious mind catching up. He showed that our brain has executed a response massively earlier than we become aware that the response is active. It looks like this:
Note: See the “Reconsolidation” phase marked out on the diagram above? This reconsolidation phase, well beneath conscious awareness, is specifically what we must address and extinguish if we ever hope to get permanent progress in our work to reduce overweight and obesity (or to successfully deal with ANY conditioned thought, feeling or behaviour). CBT doesn’t do this, mindfulness doesn’t do this, and diets, pills and injections certainly don’t do this. More on this later!
This giant gap between the thought, feeling, or action means that we always consciously experience it AFTER it’s already happened. There is no “gap between stimulus and response wherein a choice can be made” a myth repeated unfortunately even by some health professionals.
So the upshot of all this is that the unconscious mind has responded way before we even consciously become aware a decision has been made. How do we “stop” something that’s already happened!?
When you realise how the mind and body work together this strange problem becomes quite easy to understand, and we can stop wasting time and effort on willpower and self discipline, because simply put, it is not our conscious mind which runs our life at all. We are operating under a total misconception if we think that we are "in control". We are not. Our unconscious mind makes decisions even before the conscious mind realises that a decision can be made.
Our unconscious mind responds automatically and rapidly (less than 0.02 seconds) to stimuli related to food. Our unconscious mind presents us with all our attitudes and feelings about food and about exercise and our conscious mind is merely the recipient!
This is exactly why it is not your fault if you are overweight. There is literally nothing you can consciously do about it, not for any reasonable length of time anyway. You are like the "ex" smoker who becomes aware that she is standing at the smokes counter taking change from the packet of cigarettes she doesn't even remember asking for. Sooner or later the unconscious mind will have its way! That’s why for some 98% of people the weight always goes back on.
This Is Exciting, Not Depressing!
Now that might sound pretty depressing, but in fact it’s quite the opposite! Now that we properly appreciate and understand the true nature of the problem, we can stop wasting our time trying to apply willpower and actually do something different. “If you want a different result, use a different strategy!”
Fortunately there is now something that can be done about this serious problem. Using the effective, modern SDR Therapy approach, we are now able to extinguish (eliminate) all conditioned responses around food and exercise so that we revert to our original, healthy programming that we were born with.
This is the key to permanent, authentic change.
If you’d like to read some of the comments of people who’ve been through the program, and hear for yourself how easy and how permanent their own changes have been, have a look at the front of this book. If you’d like to check out the short videos of people before and after treatment to extinguish old unwanted food responses, those are in a later chapter.
Previously I’ve described how almost everything which troubles us (including issues severe enough or complex enough to warrant psychological support/therapy) is comprised of conditioned thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. The struggle of dealing with unhelpful accumulation of body fat is no different.
End of chapter.
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Is it by now making sense to you that our attitudes, our perceptions, our perspective on life, our beliefs, our thoughts, our feelings, and our behaviours are ALL driven by conditioned responses?
Can you see that trying to deal with these responses after the fact, is like trying to train a horse that bolted out of the stable hours ago and is now nowhere to be seen? Why progress we see in the therapy room disappear so fast once therapy has concluded?
How much easier could personal change, including relief from things that greatly distress us, be if instead of arguing against or reasoning with, distracting, substituting, endlessly practicing, if only we could simply “erase” them through rapid extinction?
How much more clarity we might have (or our clients might have) if we now viewed the world without the hazy lens of conditioned reflexes? If we actually did have choice instead of compulsions? And how much more enjoyable and transformative the therapeutic journey could be?
As always, love to hear your thoughts below.