Diet, it is not equivalent to being unhappy, going hungry

Years ago, I decided that I had to diet. Without waiting, this vital experience took me to a discovery trip in which I understood, which Diet is not based on hungry, And I'm going to reveal all the secrets I discovered here.

Content

• The dreaded diet
• The 3 great enemies to eat healthy
  • The first villain: our cerebral reward system
  • The second villain: the obesogenic atmosphere
  • The third villain: our learning system
• The stigma of weight loss
• The superheroes of this story: the psychology of nutrition
• Overestrial shift is
• The moment of change and reflection

The dreaded diet

I remember perfectly the first day I put on a diet. It was that insult diet of those that prohibits you from eating everything and that makes you go hungry. I had the kitchen full with all kinds of vegetables not appetizing and I thought: really?... This will be my life from now?

And, really, I have no evidence, but you don't doubt that Make diet fattening!

Certainly, over time and not little sacrifice, I managed to lose the weight I wanted, but that was unbearable. I was not happy and I just wanted to eat again as before.

So I started looking for alternatives, I tried all kinds of absurd diets that yes, they reduced my weight, but that made me tremendously unhappy, and I discovered for the bad, that learning to eat healthy was unsustainable for me and that caused me a great frustration.

I was about to accept that this would be my life from now on: diet and lose weight, leave the diet and gain weight, ... will it always be so?, Luckily, I am not a conformist person and I was convinced that there had to be a solution for this ... and I found it!

And I realized that eating healthy was not enough, because my health was not alone in my body, but also in my mind. The healthiest diet in the world is not healthy if you do not commit to it being happy on the road.

That was the key! Change inside to change on the outside. And I wondered: if when we want to lose weight we go to the nutritionist or the endocrine, ... will it be crazy to go to the psychologist to lose weight?

Then I began to investigate and discovered that there were scientific studies that showed evidence that the brain plays a very important role in losing weight, and now I will explain everything I discovered along the way, a real history of superheroes and villains in which the brain plays against us.

The 3 great enemies to eat healthy

There are three supervillains in this story, they are the three enemies of healthy eating:

The first villain: our cerebral reward system

Certainly, if the human being had not shown interest in eating, we would have become extinguished millions of years ago. In order for this not to happen, our physiology has been in charge of creating a system that rewards us through food what it against, provokes some other bad other.

Obesity as a path

The first task that our reward system makes us is that it is hyperactive against highly caloric foods, rich in fats and sugars.

The second bad pass of the reward system is that this pleasure not only occurs when we eat such food, but also when we think of them.

Despite its inconveniences, The brain reward system has been vital for our survival, Because, if we are already difficult to get up from the couch when we do not reach the remote control, or to go buy the super, I do not want to think that it would have been of us without this anticipatory reward system to go hunting or collecting.

The second villain: the obesogenic atmosphere

The second villain of this story is the obesogenic atmosphere in which we live. And it is that the marketing industry knows perfectly this anticipatory pleasure system and takes advantage of it by constantly bombing with hamburgers, pizzas, pastries, etc. That they arrive continuously everywhere, by TV, internet, at the bus stop, in our house mailbox ..

We eat a lot, much more than we need; And it is so easy ... just three clicks: Toc, Toc, you already have 1.000 calories knocking on your door.

But not all the fault is of industry and marketing, the problem is also in environment, in our people, our environment and it is really difficult to eat healthy when everything revolves around celebrating eating eating.

The third villain: our learning system

And we arrive at the last of our enemies to beat, our learning system. And this is not new, there are 1995 studies that already told us that We have learned to eat to manage our emotions and not to nurture us.

And it is that the most common to see parents, with all their good intention, rewarding or punishing their children with food: if you behave well you will have a chocolate dessert ... If you behave badly, you run out of ice cream ... and This simple way is how we polarize food in whites and blacks.

Now that we have all this information, and we know the three villains of this story, Maybe it's no longer so strange about going to the psychologist to lose weight, No?

The stigma of weight loss

Certainly, this weight can sound somewhat hypocritical or superficial, a simply aesthetic topic. And it is not that aesthetics is not important, but this is not about that.

WHO already warns 1.2 million people die every year for reasons related to overweight and obesity And that's what I think we need to take reins because our health is at stake.

Permarexia: The dangerous obsession with diets

The superheroes of this story: the psychology of nutrition

And now it finally comes the turn of the heroes of our history, and of the psychology of food or psychonutrition that comes to the rescue. And we need to reprogram our brain to win the battle of food from within, to persuade ourselves, and for that we need super powers that psychology can provide us.

Every superhero needs a super -trace and this is none other than that of our self -esteem, Because when you love and respect yourself, you take care of yourself for love, not for obligation. You do it to be able to travel and walk, to play with your children, to squeeze life to the fullest, because in reality, self -esteem is based on feeling capable and valuable.

And to be able to do what we sometimes do not feel able to achieve, we need discipline.

This discipline, unfortunately, is understood very badly, we interpret it as a punishment and in reality discipline is the greatest sample of self -esteem that a person can have, It is the ability to do what we do not want to do but that we know that we deserve, such as: doing enough sports, talking with respect, and of course, eating healthy.

Now that we have the suit, as if we were part of the Avengers, We need to surround ourselves with an adequate team of people who accompany us in our mission. We need to learn to manage our environment, we need to learn assertiveness to separate ourselves from toxic environments, to break social fears and know how not when it is not, so that we do not care so much the opinion of others. We need to learn social skills to approach people who make us better and who enhance us.

Overestrial shift is

Now that we have the suit and we have the team, the super powers arrive.

The first superpower we have, which is quite mull by the way, is the super-elasticity. And the first thing we need to understand is that we have been more flexible, we cannot be radical, we cannot suddenly go from everything, from white to black.

There are nutrition currents that speak that you have to eat 80% healthy and 20% unhealthy ... Is that's fine? Well, it depends, because it remembers that health is global, and that includes mental health; We need to find our balance point and improve a little every day.

The second great superpoder is that of metamorphosis. We need to manage our emotions. And, I tell you a secret, most of the time we are hungry, it is not hungry, it is anxiety. And we have learned through a condition to associate those physical sensations with that emotional hunger.

Surely these stories sound to you: we are going to buy a bread and on the way home we have to eat a piece because we cannot wait, or when we are cooking and pecking because we starve to each other ... they are examples of emotional hunger.

There are certain guidelines that allow us to know when it comes to emotional hunger: when we cannot wait and we have the need to eat!, When I need to eat a specific food, if after eating emotions such as guilt or discomfort arise ... all this is not hungry, it is anxiety.

And the last superpower, everyone's craziest, is what we need to learn to read our own mind, And you, you are not your thoughts.

It is true that most of the time we think in a rational, objective, logical, congruent way with our values, but other times it takes the reins what I call a monkey behind the wheel, as if suddenly, the most emotional part of our brain , will start launching automated boycothing thoughts, because that monkey does not understand the industry, marketing, emotional hunger. He just thinks you are hungry and tells you things like: nothing happens through a little piece; I can't stand it; I do not have any will power; is that why everyone can do it and I do not; It will only be a bite and that's it, ... and we go and we believe it.

We need to learn to manage this monkey, to manage our thoughts

The moment of change and reflection

At this time, we already have all the tools; We have the suit, we have the team, we have the super powers, ... so we can change.

But then I consider; This change, healthy eating, for what? To be better and be happy, no?

Actually, This is happy has a lot to do with the ability and feeling of feeling free, to feel that we can choose the life we ​​want to take, and I wonder:

Who is freer, the one who eats what he wants when he feels like it, or the one who chooses what he wants to eat, although sometimes he goes against his impulses?

Am I free when I want to eat a cake and how? Or when I don't feel like doing sports and I don't do it? We are not free! And we are slaves of ourselves.

And that was exactly my mistake that first day of diet, because it is true that I lacked the suit, I lacked the team, and also the super powers, but the real mistake was not to know an truth that is behind every change of habit; And is that desire and happiness are usually incompatible, Because desire is the short term, hedonism, here and now, pleasure; On the other hand, happiness is related to your life purpose, with the person you want to be and who you want to become.

So, in my case, that first day of diet I needed to understand what I could say: I want to eat this way, but I do not want to eat this way, and smile and be happy on the road and now that we know all this, no longer Nothing crazy looks like to go to the psychologist to lose weight, right?

They say there is no more blind than the one who opened his eyes and decides to close them again. My advice is that you have your eyes wide open because we need to take the reins of our life, We deserve to be happy and happiness looks much more like a calm sea, than to a roller coaster.

Thank you very much and happy life.