A Painful Way To Motivate Yourself To Eat Better

Painful way to motivate yourself to eat better. This is one of my favorite techniques that I know of to get myself and my clients to make better food choices. And it's all focused on the pain of the consequence of the wrong choice. So, in order to really understand this, we need to recognize there's 3 phases of eating: anticipation, consumption, and consequence. And the culture we live in has us focused and fixated on anticipation and consumption. Every single food ad you've ever seen in your life is about the food coming to you or opening the food, getting ready to eat it, the anticipation, and then the consumption of actually eating it. And then the commercial ends. And in our mind, that's usually where the story ends when we think about eating. We think about getting the food, eating the food. But the real motivation lies in the final phase of consequence. Now, people say, well, of course, Jim, I know the consequence. I tell myself, don't eat the ice cream because I don't want to gain weight. Wrong consequence. We can't use consequences that are in the future because they're just not motivating now. It's too easy to say I shouldn't eat this ice cream because I don't want to gain weight. It's too easy for your brain to say, well, you know what, we'll just start our diet plan tomorrow. And then we'll never gain weight in the future, so we'll just avoid it. So that doesn't work when we try and motivate ourselves by some consequence in the future. It's going to be hard to stack that against the pleasure in the moment. So what we need to do is focus on the consequence that happens 5 seconds after the last bite you take. That one is still in the short term, and so it's gonna be a lot more motivating. And now we can put the pleasure of the moment Versus the pain that is a moment after that. Okay. So when you are thinking about— now, again, you can put whatever food it is for you, and there is no one food, right? It depends. If you're struggling with your weight, there's probably certain foods that you struggle with. So you pick those foods, and what you do is you think about eating that food, and the second you take the last bite, 5 seconds after you take the last bite, What are the consequences of it? This is what you start focusing on. And of course, this works on the positive too, right? When you make good food choices, you can focus on the positive consequences you get 5 seconds after last bite. But right now, we're just going to focus on the pain because pain is a very powerful motivator. And to really drive this point home before we go deeper into it, if I magically— every time you made a poor food choice, I popped out of nowhere and whacked your thumb with a hammer. How many times would it take before you started to say, oh, I want to have some ice cream? Maybe not, right? How many times would it take for me to pop out of nowhere and whack your thumb with a hammer before the next time you thought about eating that food, you would say, actually, I don't want that. So it's very effective. Now, this is an example, but the truth's not far off of this if you pay attention. So what do you want to pay attention to when it comes to consequences? Well, the big things are your mindset, what you're saying to yourself, what you're feeling, emotions, and then physically what you're feeling. Now, what most people do is they finish eating and they might say, okay, how do I feel physically? Oh, you feel fine physically, or at least you think you do because you've normalized to overeating and that's normal to you now. So a A lot of times when people try and focus in on the consequence, the physical consequences, it doesn't really move them much. When you start focusing in on the mental and the emotional pieces, though, it's going to move you. So, when we talk about mental mindset pieces, we're really talking about what you're thinking, right? So, the emotional piece is actually easier because you're much more aware of what the emotions you're experiencing are. But what's leading to the emotions is what you're thinking. So it's a bit more subtle. You have to pay attention a little bit more. But what I want you to pay attention to is this week when you make the wrong food choice, whatever that may be. And again, wrong in this case is only whatever you intended to do, whether you stuck with that or not. So we're gonna keep a very general definition of what, what wrong is here. But anytime you're eating a food, if you want to lose weight, And you go and overeat a high-calorie food, that would be a wrong choice in this case. Okay. So anytime you do that, I want you to pay attention 5 seconds after you take the last bite. What are you saying to yourself? What words are you saying to yourself? Are you saying things like, great job, nice, this is why we're so happy with our results and happy with who we are. This is why we feel so good. Great job making that choice. You're not saying that, okay? What you're saying, you're saying mean things to yourself. Ah, look, that you did it again. No wonder you're always screwing up. No wonder you can't get the results. You don't even deserve it. You can't even stick to this. You can't even do this. You're saying things like that, okay? So I want you first off is to notice the consequences mentally, mindset. What are you thinking? What are you saying to yourself after you make the wrong choice? So after the enjoyment of eating it is finished, 5 seconds later, what do you start saying to yourself? And what you're going to notice is that it's extremely negative, extremely pessimistic. Usually it's making you feel bad. It's punitive. It's mean. It's cruel. And so every time you make an unhealthy choice, it's followed up by this very negative internal dialogue of what you're saying to yourself. That's thing number one. Number two is what emotions does that create after you've made an unhealthy food choice? Do you feel motivated and excited, ambitious, confident, or do you feel frustrated, disappointed, depressed, angry, overwhelmed, sad? And I'll let you answer that question for yourself, but as you start paying attention. To what the consequences are every time you make an unhealthy food choice when you want to lose weight, you're going to quickly notice that every unhealthy choice has a bunch of pain waiting right on the other side of that consumption. Every time. Every time. So I want you to notice this. And then finally, you can notice how it feels physically. This shows up a little bit longer, maybe a half hour to an hour. You'll start to notice when you make unhealthy food choices or eat too much that you feel heavy, you feel lethargic, you feel tired, you feel exhausted. And that can be helpful to notice too. But the big 2 are what you're saying to yourself and thinking and what you're feeling emotionally. And what you'll quickly start to notice is that when I make the wrong food choice, when I eat too much, it's extremely negative. It's extremely painful. Right on the other side of that, 5 seconds after the last bite, here comes the pain. And the more you pay attention to it and the more you kind of connect to it, the more intense you're going to realize that pain is in your life. And you're going to start to reframe what eating these foods means. So the whole time, let's just use ice cream as an example. The way you've tried to stop yourself from eating ice cream is you're like, it's so good, but I can't eat it because I want to lose weight. Yeah. It's really, really good, but I got to stop myself. So subconsciously, the way you think about ice cream is it's pleasurable and you need to use your willpower to stop yourself from getting that pleasure. This is why it doesn't last. What we're talking about here is a way to reframe it so that you associate pleasure to ice cream in some situations, but also pain to it, so that when you think about the ice cream, you can say, yeah, it tastes good, but. I want to lose weight and I want to feel better. If I eat that ice cream, I know the second I finish it, I'm going to get real negative with myself. I'm going to feel real bad. And I don't want that. And so this starts to happen very naturally because it's always the case that when you choose the wrong food, when you eat too much of it, you always feel bad. So start paying attention to that because what most people do After they finish eating the wrong food too much, they distract themselves. They disassociate through a screen. Typically, it could be a book, it could be any number of things, but you disassociate by watching something and disassociating from what's going on in your body and mind. Reading, going and doing something. Either way, you disconnect from the reality of the consequence of what you just did. And if you can sit with that and connect to it, What it starts to do is it starts to make you more aware of what the actual consequences every single time you do it. There's no avoiding it. Literally no avoiding it. You can try and ignore it, but you cannot avoid the negative consequences that come from negative decisions. And I'm talking about the consequences that happen in the short term. That's the key. This is not the same thing as saying, well, I shouldn't eat ice cream because I don't want to gain weight. This is not that. Because gaining the weight's too far in the future for it to matter to your nervous system. This needs to be about instantaneous, practically. And 5 seconds after you take that last bite is when the consequences start rolling in. And once you start paying attention to them, it can be transformative because now all of a sudden, while ice cream may be good, you don't want to experience that pain. And this is how you change your behavior in a very fundamental way. So take a moment right now. Relax your body, connect to your mind and your body. Feel yourself relax. Feel your mind quiet down. Take a breath and connect to it and center and ground yourself and how you like to feel. Because if you can remember and you can feel this way before you even eat, it'll be even more impactful. But even afterwards, I want you to ground yourself and connect to this feeling. It's going to be harder after you eat too much or make the wrong food choices. But I want you to attempt to do it anyways because it'll make this process so much more powerful. Now again, you're going to want to run away from this feeling because we want to run away from pain, but running into pain in this case is actually very beneficial. So imagine yourself being grounded, being calm, making the wrong food choice, and then sitting in that consequence directly. You can imagine it now before it even happens, so you're somewhat prepared, so you're somewhat familiar with it. It can be uncomfortable. I understand that. I want you to ground yourself in the discomfort. I want you to ground yourself in the pain. It's not a bad thing when you're using it for good, and that's what this does. It lets you see and feel things more accurately because, yeah, the food is enjoyable in one sense, but it's also painful in another. It's both. Food is pleasure and pain, and it's up to you to see this more accurately. And for most people, more accurately means actually experiencing the pain of the consequence that always follows. And the more you start to do that, the more you start to define the food this way as well. And that's what leads you to make better food choices. So if you want to go deeper in this way of going about it, click the link in my bio or go to programyourselfthin.com and go get the free hypnosis session I made for you. If you're in Facebook, you can type mind into the comments. M I N D. Put that into the comments and you will automatically get sent the link to go get the session. But go check that out because not only do I give the session, but I also made a free training for you called Reprogrammed. I think it's the best training I've ever made. Twenty minutes. I explain the entire system to you. Even show you the reader rehearsal technique. So go check that out. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask them. I hope, um, you are all having a nice day. The hell day is it? Tuesday. It's gorge, gorge, gorge here in Massachusetts, man. This weather is perfect. Maybe even a little cold, which I like. I like warm too though, man. I was cold driving my Jeep, I'll tell you that. Got the Jeep and I was out there feeling cold, but I love it. The, the fall is coming and it's such a nice time. Um, and I find for a lot of people, I say this all the time, I think the, you know, you think like New Year's resolutions and that kind of motivation to start the new year off, you know, right, um, it's so strong in January just because we've been trained to think of it that way. And certainly there's some momentum with a new year and what that brings. But I hope you can think of September as another counterpoint. I know it's not, you know, equidistant time-wise, but, um, if you can think of September as almost a counterpoint to January. And what I mean by that is that I find, and I've been doing this for over 20 years professionally, that if you can— we want to have more resolutions, more times a year when we get focused and motivated and take things on. And I find the fall is one of the best times a year to take on new things because for most of us, we have kind of our school programming where we, you know, we associate the fall with starting something new, focusing in, you You know, starting something, and it's usually just the time of year where we're kind of most settled, most grounded, most kind of supported to take new things on. Now, not always, you know I mean? Not always, but for a lot of people, I've found that fall is really probably one of the best times of year to get get started with things. And so, if that's the case for you, again, it doesn't have to be everything being perfect, but let it be now that you start to focus on improving things. And honestly, if you can't give it 100%, I think that's even better, you know, because, uh, I would rather see you improve 20%, 30%, 40% a comfortable, sustainable way than change everything, um, 100% for a little bit of time. All right, uh, so yes, uh, Shanna says how to lose the last 10 pounds. Okay, well, okay, let's talk about that because I love that question so much because I think it gives me an opportunity to kind of highlight what I'm talking about here compared to what dieting talks about, and it's embedded right in your question. Okay, and so your question is how to lose the last 10 pounds, and that question is framed in the context of wanting to lose weight. So dieting is all about losing weight and getting to your goal weight. The problem is that that's not really your goal. Your real goal is to live at your goal weight, to live there. This is why I wrote this book, The Tao of Living at Your Goal Weight. So, and I'm going to answer the question. This is important to talk about first. So the reframe here is that it's not about getting to your goal weight. It's not about how do I lose the last 10 pounds? It's about how do I get to my goal weight and then live there for the rest of my life? And what most people are going to experience with their weight loss journey is that the first 5, 10 pounds— again, it always depends on where you're starting from, okay? But typically the first 5, 10 pounds are going to be the easiest 5, 10 pounds to come off. Then you got the middle ones, and then we get to the final 5, 10 pounds. The mistake I think a lot of people make with that context is they think of it all the same. They think about starting, the middle, and the end— it's all the same. So when the end feels like it's slower than the beginning, they say, well, I don't understand this, it should be the same. I look at this very differently. I look at it much more like any kind of skill you get. Well, I'm going to put it in the context of like a musical instrument or art or a sport you're good at. Anything that you start taking on when you first— let's say you've never played golf before. Well, when you first start practicing and learning and, you know, kind of teaching yourself it, you're going to have a rapid improvement, right? Because you're going from not knowing anything to kind of the easy wins. Okay, then the returns are going to start slowing up, right? So if you keep playing golf, right, the first month, huge improvement. The next 6 months, A lot slower improvement than the first month, right? And now we start getting into years, let's say. Now I'm talking in the context of golf. Um, the first year of golf, a lot of improvement. The next 5 years of golf, slower improvement. The next 5 years, even less improvement. And this is a really important concept to internalize because this is how it goes for virtually anything. When you first interface with something, you get the fastest results. Then those results kind of slow down. And as you get to the mastery phases of virtually anything, your improvements get even smaller. And so when I think about the last 5, 10 pounds of living at your goal weight, I consider and expect that those are going to be the slowest ones because you're getting more and more refined, if that makes sense. So my first thing is to reframe it— how to lose the last 10 pounds. I would be saying, how can I— I'm really mastering how to learn the last 10 pounds to my goal weight. Do you see what I mean? We don't want it to just be about getting to your goal weight, because if it's just about getting to your goal weight, well, just stop eating. Just stop eating and you'll get to your goal weight quickly. But that's not sustainable, you see. So again, I don't know how much weight you've lost to get to the last 10 pounds, and that's very important, right? But If you've lost 50 pounds, let's say someone's lost 50 pounds and now they got 10 pounds more they want to go. I'm looking at— I'm sitting at a 50-pound weight loss and I'm living at this new weight comfortably, and now I want to get myself to this lower weight where I can live comfortably. And so how do you do that though? I'll get into the specifics. I, I will answer this question. I mean, certainly you need to reduce calories, most likely. Although when we start getting into those more granular pounds, which are the last 5-10 pounds, are more granular, meaning there's more at play than just calories, in my opinion. So in Program Yourself, then we break— we follow the goal weight pyramid: mindset, lifestyle, and eating, right? These are the 3 categories that we're mastering in order to live at our goal weight, and we break it down into, you know, other categories as well. I find the last 5-10 pounds You really need to dial all these things in. Back to golfing. Okay, so let's just say, if you don't know anything about golf, let's say it's a par 4 hole. So that means you've got 4 shots, you get to do 4 strokes to get in the hole to make par. So let's say when you first start golfing, you're— it takes you 10 strokes. And so the first year you play, you get down to usually 4 or 5 strokes it takes you. It's going to take you another 5 years to get consistently under par. I mean, I'm making up numbers, but the theory still remains that the beginning's easier, the middle's medium-hard, and then the end is harder because we're getting more and more expert level, more and more mastery. And so in my opinion, the last 5, 10 pounds are really about optimizing your mindset, your lifestyle, and your eating, getting better and better and better at it. Just like if you're playing golf and you want to get better, you're optimizing your driving, your short game, your putting. You know what I mean? And you're breaking those down and working on those 3 things and getting better and better and better at all of them. Because with golf, you can't just work on driving, you can't just work on your mid-game, you can't just work on putting. You need to work on all of them in order to become someone who can consistently shoot par or below. That makes sense. And, um, it's the same with weight, in my opinion, that it's not just about calories. It's not just about calories, especially when we're talking about getting to your actual goal weight. It's not just calories because your calories sit on top of your lifestyle and your mindset. And on top of that, I think lifestyle is one of the most important pieces when we start getting into the mastery phases of weight because this functions— your lifestyle has a huge impact on the amount of calories you consume, but your lifestyle also has a huge impact on how your body is working as a system. And so when we talk about lifestyle and program yourself, then we're talking about sleeping, hydration, relaxation, breathing, nourishment, movement, meditation, gratitude. So all of these things, as you start weaving them into your life, literally start to transform your metabolism, your biochemistry, your hormones, um, your emotions, all, all kinds of things— your energy levels, your stamina, um, your blood sugar. Your sleep affects your blood sugar. So there are so many little subtle granular pieces of the puzzle that I think most people never look at because dieting just tells you calories. You got 10 more pounds to lose, cut calories more. And yes, obviously there's— we probably need to cut the calories, probably. But when we start getting that close to our goal, within 5 pounds, it becomes a game of inches and everything starts to matter. Your mindset starts to matter. Your relaxation and calm, how motivated you are, how comfortable you are being at your new weight. All of these things start to become more important the more mastery you gain. Lifestyle, same thing, and then eating the same thing. So it becomes not just calories, but it becomes the quality of the calories you're consuming. So as we get closer and closer to our goal weight, as we get more and more mastery, we start to get more granular. With what we're influencing in order to get to our goals. I hope that makes sense, because what I'm really talking about is developing the skills for you to live at your goal weight, which is 10 pounds away right now. Notice that it's a total reframe from just, how do I lose the last 10 pounds? Well, how do I lose the last 10 pounds? Just, just stop eating. That's the answer to that question. How do you live at that weight that you want to get to and stay at that's 10 pounds lighter? That's a bigger question, and it's built for the long term. Whereas, how do I lose the last 10 pounds is built for the short term. Does that make sense? Hope it does, because that's a big question. And I think if anything I said makes any sense, it can really reframe how you're approaching it, because a lot of people get stuck at the very end because the end's not the same as the beginning for a number of reasons. And unfortunately, dieting doesn't set you up for the end anyways. Dieting really usually for most people is about, you know, going 100 miles an hour out the gate for as long as you can. And so the truth is that most people kind of burn out long before they ever even get close to get to that final 5, 10 pounds a lot of times, right? So I think reframing it is really, really important and recognizing that ultimately, I believe your weight is a reflection of— your weight is a reflection of your skill set. And as you develop all the different skills that impact your weight, again, back to the goal weight pyramid we're talking about. As you develop all these different skills, right, these in general terms and these are more specific over here and these sides. But as you develop these skills, right, again, it's kind of like we bring it back to golf. We can say, okay, here's the drive, the driving game, right? We could break it down into, you know, whether you're driving at a par 5 or a par 3, whether you're driving in the wind or in the rain or in the nice Sunny weather, whether you're using, you know, this type of tee or that type of tee. So there's a lot of things that you can break down your driving in. Mid-game, you know, we tell you all different types of irons you can work on if you're in the sand or if you're in the rough or in your wet grass, dry grass. There's all sorts of little things. And then putting, we can break that down. So it's like, that's the same for mastery in any area, is taking something big and breaking it down into chunks. And then breaking those chunks into smaller chunks so it can work on them predictably, reliably, consistently. And I think if we approach our goal weight, living at our goal weight, with that mindset of developing skills, developing all of these skills, all of a sudden it's just like golf. Like, how do you get to be a good golfer? Well, you practice. Okay, well, that's a big vague concept. You need to practice over time to get good at it. And it's the same thing with weight, in my opinion, because if you practice these things, Like, if you get really good at motivating yourself, of having the self-image of a thin, healthy person, of being able to influence your habits effectively, of being able to deal with your emotions genuinely without needing food, with being able to think like a thin, healthy, happy person, with being able to maintain— if you can do all those things, you're— you've got way more advantage to live at your goal weight than someone who doesn't have those abilities. And then we just move on with the lifestyle. If you know how to get proper sleep, if you know how to hydrate yourself properly, if you know how to relax and breathe more effectively, if you know how to nourish yourself, if you have good strategies for moving your body more, for meditating, for expressing gratitude, if you can do all those things, you've got an advantage. And then obviously with eating, if you have awareness of your eating patterns and how to influence them, if you know how to structure your eating so it supports you, so it's easy to eat. At your goal weight, and then you've optimized it so that it's really easy and effective to live at your goal weight the way you eat. If you do all those things, you're sitting on top of a bunch of skills. And I think a lot of times when it comes to weight, we don't think of weight loss in terms of skill sets. We think of it as a willpower exercise of how much willpower do I have to fight against myself and force myself to do the right things? But that diet mindset's always assuming that there's going to be this battle and this fight. And I think that's the mistake, because if you train yourself to have all those skill sets and you train yourself to do those things automatically, all of a sudden living at your goal weight becomes something you just do. It becomes something that you just are, not something you're trying to fight and force yourself to do. That's the big difference. And dieting is always sitting on top of the idea that you're fighting yourself, that you need to fight against yourself. You, you want to eat all the wrong stuff. You want to do all the wrong things. And your job is to stop yourself, to fight against yourself and to win. That's how really, you know, you're internalized dieting. And it's very difficult to fight against ourselves for any long period of time and win. Our brain's really not built for that. We're not built to override all of our default thinking with willpower. And once you look into it, I mean, it's black and white, cut and dry. Your brain is not built to be run with willpower. Willpower is a finite muscle that you can only use for so long, and eventually it gets depleted. And you've all experienced that. You know, that's the experience of following your plan perfectly and then not being able to stick to it at all. All right, so be careful of that. But all right, I got to get out of here today. I got a late start. I got to get going. But if you're not in my world again, click the link in my bio or go to programyourselfthin.com. Go get the free hypnosis session I made for you. I also made a training that's really good for you called Reprogrammed. Completely free. All that stuff's free. And if you are on Facebook, you can just write mind, M-I-N-D, in the comments section. It'll just show up automatically to you. I'll send you— it'll automatically send you the link and get you started. If you like this, I'm here every Monday through Friday at noon Eastern, except for Tuesdays. I'm here usually at 1. And if you can't make the live, it's also a podcast. So you can search Program Yourself on any podcast platform. It'll show up and you can listen anytime you want. So, all right everyone, have a super duper day and we'll talk soon. Bye.