This coming year many people will embark upon dieting and many will fail to lose weight. The normal response to this failure with the people promoting the diet plan is to fault the individual for the failure. This results in the individual being beaten and responsible because of the absence of “will-power”
Accusing the person also preserves the false impression that diet plans are an easy way to burn fat. It is my opinion it’s time to shift the dialogue past this “blaming” level and look into the true reasons diet programs fall short.
I will work with an example to explain my position.
Any time the majority of people are given a product like a chocolate (candy) bar it’s not a long time before they sense a need to consume the thing. Nearly all will merely fault the chocolate for resulting in the desire. They will then try and challenge the craving with “will-power”. Typically they lose this fight and eventually surrender and eat the candy bar. This “giving-in” often signifies the end of the diet program.
Now lets look at the key reason why this “giving-in” occured. We know that this cognitive process that brought on the yearning to have the candy bar went something like this; sensory input was obtained from the appropriate receptors and the brain formed some form of neural or sensory representation with the thing that will be defined as a candy bar. You can consider this technique as inescapable. If your sensory receptors are in operating order, the brain must form a representation or neural image of the item.
Any time a neural picture has been produced we’ve been taught to assign meanings, from memory, to these kinds of images as they occur in the mind. The assignment of meaning is accompanied by an emotional reply suitable towards the meaning given. In the case of the chocolate bar the meaning assigned integrated previous memories of pleasant experiences assosciated with eating candy bars, therefore the craving to have the candy bar. So actually it was not really the presence of the object that will be explained as a candy bar that triggered the craving, but the cognitive process outlined.
Particularly it absolutely was the assignment of meaning which induced the craving. And since this assignment of meaning happens to be entirely automatic in many individuals, the candy bar gets the blame for your craving when in fact it simply had the ability to result in the brain to form a meaningless image. For some, the meaning and picture have grown to be “fused”, with the meaning now seen as an natural part of the neural image itself rather than something assigned from within the brain. This of course gives the stimulus the ability to be the cause of the response.
Merely thinking about or reflecting upon a candy bar gets the same effect. A neural image is made from that reflection so when it is created the cognitive procedure for immediately assigning meaning to it is exactly the same as with pictures due to an external stimulii. We feel a substantial wish to consume the chocolate bar.
This all signifies obviously that each time were presented with a candy bar or some other sort of desired food, the mind routinely performs the cognitive process outlined and generates a need to eat the delicacy. These kinds of continual emotional reactions increase and at last wear us down. This is the reason we “give-in” plus the diet goes out the window.
My point is then, the only way to lessen our food intake and still feel comfortable is to alter this method of automatically assigning meaning towards the images that come into our brain. By doing this we can lower the desire to eat unnecessarily and thereby adjust our eating behavior to ensure we shed weight and ensure that it stays off.
Diet plans do not provide these kinds of methods and in actual fact they fail the person not the other way round as their providers maybe have you think. If modifying our behavior was simple as making a decision to be on a diet, the majority of us could have improved several things about ourselves sometime ago. The truth is we need techniques that will assist us to bring that change about or we are setting ourselves up to fail.
If you enjoyed this article, read other Elderly Care Articles written by David Fisher. We have free articles in over 300 categories.