Weight Loss

Weight Loss.

What makes people who are generally successful , who manage their business and personal lives with aplomb, who happily navigate the complexities of the world we live in which would have thrown our grandparents… what makes them make bad decisions about food?  Why can’t they loose weight when they can do so many other things effectively. Strategies can be one of the answers.

I was recently asked to go canyoning. ‘It will be fantastic’ my friends said. ‘you have to something exciting at least once a year’ they said. Now a few years ago, I would have said yes with no hesitation. Try everything at least once was my motto. So what was going on in my unconscious mind then for that to happen? Well, I would visualise the smiling faces of my friends, then I would have a feeling of excitement and camaraderie. Then I would talk to myself and say ‘ it will be such a laugh, lets do it!’ and I would sign up there and then.

We have five senses : visual, auditory, kinaesthetic ( or feeling ) , gustatory (taste) and  olfactory (smell) or V,A,K,G,O. In the above example my strategy was V followed by K followed by A.

This time round I said no to the canyoning. So what happened there? Well I saw a picture of us diving into freezing cold water, followed by a kinaesthetic feeling of ‘Noooooo!’ followed by a voice saying ‘why would you want to put yourself through that? Followed by another feeling of ‘No’.

Can you see the difference between those two strategies? The young person in the first example didn’t run the visual movie of the consequences whereas the older person in the second example did.

Now in my experience, people who eat too much, who are not loosing weight,  are running the first strategy or something similar. Whatever strategy they are running, its different from the strategy they run to make ‘good decisions’ in their lives. So one example would be someone who is normally very visual; when making decisions they run the movie in their minds eye and can see the consequences of the decision.They will then have a feeling of whether it’s a good decision or a bad one. When they analyse the bad decisions about eating cake they find that they had a feeling that they wanted it, but didn’t run the movie or the visuals of the consequences. Its like the picture was static, they could only see the cake and have the feeling of wanting to eat it.

People who make good decisions about food and who don’t experience weight gain get to feel bad, before they eat. People who make bad decisions about food  and don’t experience weight loss feel bad after they’ve eaten and that’s the difference.

So a suggestion would be if you want to loose weight, don’t have a static picture. Run the movie of the consequences of eating the cake and exaggerate it. Up the calories by 1000%. See a picture of your waistline growing by 10 inches. Make whatever pictures you need to in your mind that will help you to make the right choice.

So look at the good decisions you make in the parts of your life which are successful, discover your strategy and map it across to your eating life.  Rather than take a diet pill, change your strategy.

This may be the only thing you need to do or it may be part of the answer. There are a number of techniques NLP can use to help you loose weight now.

Minds Change provides one-to-one coaching and training and is based in Glasgow Scotland

Dorothy C. Le Grove is a Master practitioner of NLP

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