Weight Stability is Achieved Through Short-Term Discomfort

Feelings are why we do or don’t do anything in our lives.

We’re either chasing a feeling, or we’re running away from a feeling.

Feelings drive our actions.

Feelings are created by our thinking—they start in our brain.

Many believe they are created by circumstances in the world or by other people, but they are always created by a thought we are thinking.

For example, you win the lottery, but it takes 3 hours for the news to reach you.

During that 3 hours after your winning numbers are drawn, and before the news gets to you, are you feeling elated, thrilled, or ecstatic?

Probably not.

Instead you might have felt angry because your dog threw up on your new carpet during that time.

It isn’t until you hear the news that you won the lottery.

At that moment, you have a thought like, “Holy sh*t, I just won $1,000,000!!”

That thought causes you to feel elated, thrilled, or ecstatic.

Physical sensations, on the other hand, are involuntary and start in the body and travel to the brain.

Physical sensations include hot, cold, thirst, hunger, and pain.

For example, you touch a hot cooktop, and pain information travels from your hand to your brain to cause you to quickly remove your hand from the hot surface.

Understanding that your thoughts create your feelings is key.

If everything we do and don’t do in life is because of either needing to avoid pain or negative emotion, or desiring to gain pleasure or positive emotion, then we can control this with our thinking.

Why do you keep putting off planning your meals 24 hours in advance?

Why do you keep skipping going to the gym?

Why do you put off creating new habits that serve your weight management goals?

Tony Robbins explains, “Even though you know that all these actions would benefit you—that they could definitely bring pleasure into your life—you fail to act simply because in that moment you associate more pain to doing what’s necessary than missing the opportunity.”

Most of the time, fear of experiencing negative emotion wins out over the desire for positive emotion.

We don’t like the way negative emotions feel, like overwhelm, anxiety, fear, humiliation, sadness, and shame, to name a few, so we turn to food to dull the negative emotion and experience temporary pleasure from the dopamine hit in the brain.

Often, it’s not actual pain that directs us, but the fear that an action will cause pain.

This applies to pleasure too—it’s not actual pleasure that guides us, but our sense of certainty that our actions will cause pleasure.

Many of my weight loss clients will overeat in the evening even though this causes them a lot of pain (disappointment in themselves) because they didn’t honor their food plan for the day.

Why?

For one, Tony describes, “Most people focus on how to avoid pain and gain pleasure in the short-term, and thereby create long-term pain for themselves.”

Secondly, they haven’t experienced a level of pain they weren’t willing to tolerate anymore.

It isn’t until your reach your personal tipping point that you will make permanent change.

This tipping point is different for all of us.

I have seen a few clients decide they must change after they are diagnosed with diabetes and now have to inject themselves with insulin.

Seeing the needles in their pantry stored by the bag of Oreo cookies is enough to prevent them from eating the cookies ever again.

They linked pain to the processed, sugary foods that brought on the disease, and they stopped eating them totally bypassing any need for willpower or feeling of deprivation.

Another client, Sharon, was studying nutrition and human anatomy in college, and when she learned how amazing the body is at regulating hunger and satiety, she decided then to stop her overeating and restricting cycle that consumed her life since early high school.

Sharon’s appreciation for how miraculous her body is, and gratitude for the gift of life was her tipping point that she must change.

Sharon now takes pleasure in taking care of her body.

Have you ever eaten too much of a certain food to the point it made you sick and throw up?

After the miserable experience of a sick stomach and throwing up, you never wanted to eat that particular food item again?

It was the pain this experience caused that you linked to that particular food item causing you to never touch it again!

Tony shares, “In order for a change to last, we must link pain to our old behavior and pleasure to our new behavior, and condition it until it’s consistent.”

For long-term weight management success, this means connecting pain to eating foods that sabotage our efforts, and pleasure to the foods that nourish us and behaviors that align with our goals.

Can you identify the thoughts of pain and/or pleasure that are keeping you stuck in the cycle of gaining and losing weight?

What are you putting off because in the moment (short-term) the pain of honoring your deepest desires is too much to handle causing you to turn to instant gratification (pleasure) despite the long-term damage it causes afterwards in the form of shame, distrust in yourself, and beating yourself up?

How do we take control of this innate force that runs quietly in the background guiding all of our decisions?

Here are some steps you can take to gain control and make deliberate decisions.

It is crucial that you become aware of the associations you have made of pain and pleasure to:

1. The foods you choose to eat or not eat like vegetables and whole foods versus desserts and snack foods.

2. The actions you take like creating food plans, exercise, fasting.

3. The sensations you experience like hunger and satiation.

Complete the following exercise (adapted from Tony Robbins’ book, Awaken the Giant Within):

1. Write down a goal you’ve wanted to achieve.

• Example: Plan all of my meals 24 hours in advance.

2. Ask yourself, “Why am I resisting creating my food plan?”

• Possible “painful” reasons:

  • “It’s too much work.”

  • “I don’t want to restrict what I eat.“

3. Ask yourself:

• “What pleasure am I getting by not planning my meals 24 hours in advance?”

• Possible “pleasurable” reasons:

  • “I get to eat potato chips, my favorite snack, and feel pleasure from it.”

  • “I can pick up and enjoy my favorite Frappuccino drink from Starbucks.”

4. Ask yourself:

• “What will happen if I don’t stop eating so much sugar?”

• “What will it cost me if I don’t stop overeating?”

• “How will this adversely affect my health in one year, three years, or five years?”

• “How will this affect my relationship with myself?”

• “What might it cost me financially?”

5. Ask yourself:

• “How do each of my answers to the questions in #4 make me feel?

• Understanding our feelings is super-important as they are the fuel for our action or inaction.

6. Write down all of the pleasure you will feel by planning your meals 24 hours in advance.

• Examples:

  • “I’ll gain the feeling of being in control of my life.”

  • “I’ll gain a new level of self-confidence.”

  • “I’ll make huge improvements in my health.”

  • “I’ll be free from thinking about food all of the time because what I will eat will be decided ahead of time.”