The Thought Diet

In every moment when we identify what we don’t like we generate a preference, even a desire, for something new–an improvement–something we do want. You can’t help but to do this. Life helps you determine your specific preferences, which is what makes your life individualistic and unlike anyone elses. Your exerperiences in life are unique to you and what you want is specific to you as well as your spesific life experiences has helped you to determine what you don’t want and what you do want. And every time you determine what you don’t want you have the opportunity to become present with what you do want. Unfortunately, most people continue to use the thing that caused them to want more (the thing they don’t want) as the excuse to continue feeling bad. Most people get a preference but they continue to talk and think about the thing that helped launch the preference, which tends to keep the thing they don’t want right in their experience. You can’t look at what you don’t want and get what you do want.

One thing I help individuals do is get a better understanding as to what it is they DO want. Most people start with what they don’t want, which is a good place to start. If you know where you don’t want to be you should have an understand of what the opposite would be, which is what you most likely do want. If you know you don’t want to be fat then you can probably assume you want to be lean. Once you can get an idea of what it is you DO want, expand on it and try to create what it is that the end result would look like and feel like. What has your negative experience helped you to determine is important for you to experience in a new and different way?

Once you know what it is you want as the end-result, take a moment to ask yourself WHY you want it. What would having this thing provide for you in your life that you don’t already have? Once you have that asnwer, ask the question again. What would having that last thing provide for you that you don’t have already. Continue asking this question until you are moved and inspired by your answer. Hint: you want what you want for the feeling you think it will provide for you and that feeling is usually one of love, passion, joy, knowledge, freedom, connection and appreciation.

Now that you know WHY you want what you want you should take some time to think about all the things in your body, as well as in your life (past and present), that show you evidence that this is possible. If you have already had something like this as your experience make note of that. If you already have something in (or on) your body that you currently feel the same way about (this is the WHY feeling) then make note of that. At this point, you are trying to create a list of things that you can recall and associate with your new found vision. The more you can think about and talk about what you want and use the evidence of things in your life as your model of success the more you will put yourself in the state of being where success is imminent.

Practice these thoughts as often as possible. This is like visualizing. The more you practice this feeling, the more your brain will become encoded to look for this success. Where your mind goes, your body follows.

In recent posts I’ve talked about how it is what we are thinking that causes us emotion, not the thing we are given our attention to. One way to change this is to understand WHY you feel the way you do about your subject – to understand what you are making your subject (your body) mean.

When I coach people I will ask them what how they feel about their body and they usually respond with an emotion. From there I ask them WHY they feel that way and the answer is often something to do with their action or something outside of their body. For example, someone tells me they are discouraged about their body and I ask them why they are discouraged and they often tell me something like they are discouraged because they have been working out for so long and haven’t seen any results. I can understand their being discouraged for all that time they dedicated to exercise and eating well with little or no results but I didn’t ask about how they felt about their workouts. I asked about how they felt about their body.

At this point I will rephrase the question by asking them how they feel about their body when they look at it in the mirror or how they feel about their body naked. With that I usually get something more personal like: “I am discouraged because I have been overweight for so long.” This is a great start in that they are relating how they feel to how they look at themselves. To take this one step further, to understand what their story is (the story having three components – what they are focused on, how they feel about that and why they feel the way they do), I ask them what they are making their situation mean about them. To continue with the same example, I ask them what they are making the fact that they have been overweight for so long mean? Or better, what does it mean about who they are (or say about them)?

What I usually get in return from a question like that is something like: “it means that I have failed for so long and that means that I am not worth the success.” Point is, from this understanding the client now has a better understanding as to what story they have been telling themselves. This story is potentially what is keeping them right where they are. You can’t look at your body and think thoughts like that and not expect your body to respond negatively – chemically and energetically. With that, once the client understands it is just a story they have been telling they have the freedom to change the story.

To help you change your own story, look back at recent posts written about making peace with where you are.

Most people who come into my facility are looking to change their body because, in one way or another, they don’t like where they are. They are hoping that by taking action they will change how they look and, ultimately, change how they feel about their body.

One reason why this approach rarely returns maximum results is because you can’t get rid of something you don’t own. By the fact that someone doesn’t want to be where they are means they don’t accept where they are. If you don’t accept (or are at peace with) where you are, you are going to have a hard time getting rid of what you don’t want by the fact that most of your effort is trying to push away from what you don’t want and you can’t look and focus on what you don’t want and get something you do want.

When you make peace with where you are you accept where you are and when you do that, you can act powerfully to move toward what you now do want, which was originally determined from knowing what you didn’t want. From a place of peace you will be able to look forward and move toward what you do want as opposed to taking action to get rid of what you don’t want. When you own where you are, you are no longer approaching your body as a problem. It will be “just what it is.”

It’s also not to say that in making peace you will lose your desire for an improved body or health, as most people first think. When you are at peace with where you are your vision of what you determined you wanted (back when you knew what you didn’t want) will be more clear and more believable – thus more achievable. You will be moving toward what you want rather away from what you don’t want.

One way to accept where you are is to acknowledge that your thoughts do affect your body. Negative thinking creates negative chemical reactions in the body that can result in putting on weight. For example, every time you are stressed, whether that is being stressed because of your body or about something else entirely, you release chemicals like Cortisol, which mobilize blood sugar from your liver and muscles. This is great if you are under great physical stress as you will use this extra energy in your blood stream but if you are emotionally stressed you don’t need the extra blood sugar (energy) so this extra energy gets stored as fat. Every time you get stressed is like eating a piece of pizza. If you spend an entire day being stressed it is like eating an entire pizza. Imagine if you spent an entire week being stressed.

So, if you can acknowledge that you didn’t know that your thoughts caused a negative effect in the past and you can now acknowledge that you have been thinking negative thoughts in the past, it would be pretty easy to let yourself off the hook for being where you currently are (thus making peace with where you are). You didn’t know any better. It’s not hard to see how you got where you are based on the way you have been thinking. But the reality is, you didn’t know any better or any different. Now that you do, you can let yourself off the hook for where you are.

Note: there is one reason why people may lose weight when they are stressed out and that is because sometimes when we take our attention off of our bodies (and how much of a problem they are) we allow the natural process of weight loss to happen. When you focus on what you don’t like you ask for a change but by the fact you keep your focus on it keeps it present in your life. When you remove your focus from it (because of some other problem) you allow what you had originally asked for (when you knew what you didn’t like your higher center took only what would have been the solution or improvement from your current situation and started working on that) and allows that to come through. If you could distract yourself from thinking about your body at all your body would naturally change to what you asked for. Again, remember that every time you see something you don’t want you are in the process of ASKING for a solution. The key to allowing the solution to present itself is to stop asking – meaning, stop looking at the problem. Or better, make peace with where you are so you are no longer making where you are a problem.

I often do this exercise where I have clients close their eyes and think about something that makes them happy, brings them joy, something they love or something that makes their heart smile. The interesting thing is at least 50% of the people who try this don’t really feel the physical indicators of emotion. I do this exercise in combination with some other points of focus to help clients not only understand that their thoughts do create emotions but also to help them re-tune back into their emotional indicators. I think most people have become desensitized to the emotional indicators that were set in place to help them guide their thoughts towards power, creativity, solutions, and ultimately, success and evolvement from “what is.”

What has me curious is if people can’t physically feel the feeling of joy or love or appreciation (or at least fully) why would anyone move towards it. I mean, if you didn’t really get the reward that you once thought you would (you had to have had the feeling of love or joy, etc. at some point so you must cognitively know that what you would should bring you those feelings) why would you really take any real effort (mentally or physically) to see yourself to the end of a desire? The attraction to moving toward your desire should be the feelings you had when you were young and you keep reaching for it but since you are so detensitized to feeling those sensations now, when you get what you want, you don’t feel what you thought you were going to feel (or unconsciously thought you were going to feel) and you reach for something else to do that. But once again, you get there and you still don’t have the reward. If this happened enough would you really put forth the passion to move yourself towards things that you desire?

I don’t know the answer to this. This is just my pondering whehter or not if we could really get a sense of the joy that lies in front of us, if we could really feel it the way we did when we were younger, would we not live more inspired and passionate lives?

On the other side of this coin is the negative feelings we no longer feel. We have gotten so used to feeling bad that we don’t notice the uncomfortable sensations that accompany negative emotions. If you don’t notice it, why would you do anything about it outside until it got bad enough that you actually finally felt something. Then at this point, things feel so far lost that success seems unlikely.

So, take the time to retune yourself into feeling your emotions. Both good and bad. They serve you greatly. And when you notice them, you can use them to guide you and live an inspired and passion filled life once again – like you did when you were little.