Why Diets Don’t Work.

Most diets don’t work because they fail to address the power of the past. Humans are born pretty dumb and then grow to be the most intelligent beings on the planet. Most of what we do is effortless and is done without thought. Whether it is walking, driving a car, the pro golfer hitting the ball, or the television shows we choose to watch. Our brains accumulate knowledge from our experiences and if those experiences are something we have done often the brains goal is to automate the decisions associated with that action for us, it happens subconsciously without us thinking about it. Our brains are programmed to make life easy for us, this along with past experiences form automatic habits that are hard to break.

Most Boomers have been on this planet for over 50 years, this means we have eaten more than 54,000 meals and our brains have learned a lot from that, and to make life easy for us the brain takes charge, and overrides free will. We (soul, spirit or ego, whatever you like to call it) have to compete with the brains experience, and all to often our brain wins and diets eventually fail.

The average Aussie Boomer wakes up in the morning and is reminded it is breakfast time. We may also be offered choices because our brain knows we don’t always eat the same food for breakfast. So what comes to mind might be cereal, toast with a favourite topping, eggs and bacon and so on. Then we make a choice. But if we lived in Japan the choice offered by the brain might be Miso soup and rice; it’s all about past experiences forming the automation of the subconscious brains effort to make life easy for us.

To make new eating habits easy and automatic we need to “untrain” our brain, or provide our brain a new goal (that overrides past experience), so that it will automatically and subconsciously work towards achieving what we want.

The power of our subconscious is clearly demonstrated by this article (see HERE). A company has developed an implant that interrupts “hunger” nervous signals to the brain. The company had to do a clinical trial to prove the safety and efficacy of the device to obtain permission for its sale. One group of people had the device implanted and another group had a “fake” device that did not work. The company initially had difficulty getting the device approved even though the device worked very well. In the group with the real device over half the patients lost 20% of their excess body fat in twelve months, and a third lost more than 25%; this was a great result.

The problem for the company getting approval was that the persons with the fake device had nearly the same results; thus demonstrating the subconscious power of the brain.

The first step to take when changing eating habits with the goal of either losing weight and or to thrive longer instead of just surviving, is to deal with the brain first and the food later.  Dealing with the brain so that it helps instead of hindering will take most people about a month to achieve. When the new eating habits are started they then should be easy and more “automatic”; and we begin to fall off the wagon we know why, and what to do about it.

Dieting should not be an onerous pain in the proverbial, it needs to come naturally.

How to get our brains working for us instead of against us will be published in the Boomers Health members only section in the very near future. Boomers Club Members will get a message as soon as it has been completed. Sign up so you don’t miss out.

Cheers Glenn.