This short coaching monologue (YouTube) explains why people who are committed to losing weight continue making ‘bad’ food choices: a conflict between the conscious mind (logical intentions) and the subconscious mind (emotional associations). The speaker argues that lasting change requires reprogramming subconscious associations to make tempting foods feel indifferent or painful at an automatic level, since conscious effort alone won’t reliably override subconscious drives.
Chapters
One of the biggest questions I get asked for my weight loss clients is, how can I be so obsessed with food and my weight and yet still keep making bad food choices? And to understand why this happens, you need to understand that you have two minds. You have a conscious mind and a subconscious mind. The conscious part of your mind is the part of you that knows you shouldn't eat cookies and ice cream when you want to lose weight. Makes logical sense, and you're down. And in that situation, you logically know you shouldn't do it because you want to lose weight, but emotionally, you want that pleasure, you want that boost that that food can give you, that it's associated to subconsciously. So if you're going to change your weight, what you need to do is you need to change the associations you have to that food. Because, yes, the food is pleasurable on one hand, but the food is also painful. And so the secret is to program into your subconscious mind to feel indifferent to those foods, to feel pain with those foods, but you want to feel it subconsciously so that it runs automatically, because your conscious awareness is not going to fix the problem.