Can You Kickstart Weight Loss Using Your Mind? | Ronan Oliveira

Welcome to this week's edition of who wants to lose Weight? This week we are here with Hector from Colombia, works at mindvalley as a learning, experiencing designer. Say hi, Hector. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much. And this week's question is, can you improve weight loss with the powers of your mind? Let me know in the comments below. Yes. No. And why do you think that is? The reason why I ask you this question comes from a story that I was talking to a client of mine a couple of weeks ago, and it was someone who we just started working with. She's a lady, and I'll call her Ellen. And Ellen was overweight and about 200 pounds, and she was in a state that she was almost giving up. When we had our first call, she said, you know, Rona, I am about to give this up because I'm doing everything right and I just cannot lose weight. You know, I'm already hungry. I eat two times a day only, and one of them is a soup. So I'm already feeling hungry all the time. My food is already tasteless, and I'm exercising as much as I can. Even when I'm super tired and I don't want, I stick to push myself and I do it. And then it gets hard, you know, after a couple of weeks, maybe two weeks, every two weekends, I just feel too overwhelmed and I need to give myself some rest. And then I go to McDonald's, and then McDonald's leads into KFC, and then KFC leads to ice cream, and ice cream leads to cookies, and cookies leads to cake. And then I need to restart the process all over again. I'm not burning any fat. I'm not losing any weight. What should I do? What should I cut? What should I remove? What should I do at this moment to lose weight? So, Hector, this is the question that I have to you. Imagine that you are now working with Ellen and you have in your hands the future of this woman. What would you recommend her to do? You have three options. Option A, cut carbohydrates. Option B, do more cardio. Option C, sit and reflect on her life. What would you recommend her to do? I would go for option A, cut carbs. Cut carbs. Very common option. Very common answer for someone who wants to lose weight. But let's imagine that Ellen cut carbs at this moment. She's already depleted. She's already having only soup and eating very little carbohydrates. And then we remove the remaining bits that she has. This may increase even more her levels of cortisol the hormone of stress. And with that comes a higher levels of hunger. And this just ends up increasing her likelihood for this binge eating behavior maybe twice as much. Probably not a good idea. Hector, you have two remaining options. Option B, increase cardio. Option C, sit and reflect on her life. What do you go for? Option B, increased cardio. Increased cardio. Very common answer for someone who wants to lose weight at the same time. But let's imagine that Ellen, already depleted in nutrients, now runs herself to exhaustion. She's already exercising when she doesn't want to. This is one more reason to increase hunger even more. But now, at the same time, she starts to lose muscle because very little nutrients, a lot of cardios. And now her only way of giving herself some rest or giving herself some break from all this amount of stress and is binge eating probably three times as much right now. Maybe not a good idea. Actually have one remaining option. What would you do? So, final option, let's just sit and reflect about life. How would this option help someone lose weight? So I'll tell you what happened. In the call that we had. In the call that we had, I just asked, hey, for now, if this is what is happening, let's take two weeks and let's change our intentions. I don't want you to think about losing weight. I don't want you to feel hungry or to exercise when you don't want to. For just these two weeks, let's frame our minds into recovery. Do all the things that you can to recover your body. And then after two weeks, we talk about weight loss and these kind of things. Here is how we can do this. Instead of thinking what you eat and what you don't eat, just change when you eat. We're gonna have a fasting window of 16 hours and a eating window of eight hours. During those eight hours, you can eat anything that contributes to the recovery of the body and foods that you like, foods that make you feel looking forward to nurturing your body with them. And if you don't feel like exercising, don't go for it. Let's do everything that we can with a mindset with an intention of recovery. For two weeks. That's what we did. And then we had a following call after that. And Ellen came to me, and I could hear from her voice that smiled from ear to ear. She said, I can't believe what happened. I was not hungry. I didn't exercise as much. I ate food that I like, and I lost four kilos, about eight to nine pounds in those two weeks. How Come that happened. So, first of all, Hector, congratulations for your participation and for finally finding the right answer. Here's your prize. A whole box of creatine so you can boost your workouts, and a glass of almond milk, because our bar business is doing super well. Thank you so much, Ronan. My pleasure. Now, let's see what is behind this whole phenomena. She lost four kilos of about nine pounds with the mindset of recovery, not trying to lose weight. But you see, in the first time that we had a call, when I heard her saying that she was already giving up and looking at her body and seeing overweight, what I realized is that she was coming from a place of looking at herself and concluding that this was the result of something wrong that she did over the course of the years. And for her to solve all these mistakes now, she needed to use force. She needed to be aggressive to her body, to eat things that she didn't want to, eat bland and tasteless food, to do exercise whenever she didn't want to. And if you are trying to transform your body and when you look at it you see as something that is wrong and needs to be fixed, then all these strategies that you apply, they turn into punishment. And not nurturing. All the nutritional strategies, all the recovery and all the workouts and exercise that should be nurturing your body, become something aggressive to the body. And so you cannot keep up with it for too long. You cannot transform your lifestyle into a lifestyle of punishment. Eventually, you need to recharge your batteries. And then recharging your batteries means going back to that behavior that you used to have that you that you liked a bit better, which means KFC, that goes to McDonald's, that goes to cake, that goes to ice cream, that turns into something that you don't want to do. So the main point here, how you use your mind to improve either weight loss or weight gain or whatever transformation, body transformation that you're looking for. It's not the X Men type of mind power that you imagine this, and even the fat starts to melt down. It's more on how you use your mind to design your intentions. When you're trying to transform your body, you want this journey to add to the quality of life. The strategies that you apply and the routine that you change should add to the alignment with your own values instead of adding to the misery that you experience in your life. So if you are trying whether to lose weight or to build muscle mass or to change anything in your body, the first question that I have to you is, what is Driving that change. Think about what is behind the intention. What is the intention of, of the intention? And you may find a couple of things. There is someone else that also says, but what if, you know, I am trying to lose weight because I look at my body and I don't like it, should I just avoid this thought altogether? This is something that is very common, the insecurities around the body image. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not something that you should avoid thinking, but it should go deeper. So instead of saying, I want to lose weight because I don't like my body goes into, why is that important? So if I don't like my body, what happens then? I don't like my body because I know maybe my belly is too big. And then what happens because of that? Maybe because I have, you know, the belly that doesn't look the way that I want. And I'm already making so much effort in the gym and nutrition, and then people will notice that and make comments, and that makes me feel a little bit more insecure, not as confident about myself. And so now you go a little bit more to the bottom of the question. You're not trying to find ways to change your nutrition, to lose, to change the body to a way that you like. You're actually going for self confidence. So if you're going for self confidence, your strategies should reflect you knowing more how to do those things. It's more about increasing your education, maybe getting a coach, maybe learning a bit more so you feel more confident about how to nurture your body, how to exercise with your body in a way that takes you in the direction that you want to go. You want to be a little bit more in control instead of just going with the intention of changing your body because you cannot accept the way that it looks like that turns off your strategies into punishment. But then there was someone else that also wanted to lose weight, and it was coming more from a place of, you know, it's difficult for me to move around and it's time for me just to feel more light and free. And you see that the main value of this whole journey is not to lose weight, is to feel light and free. And if someone wants to feel light and free and they go with a nutrition plan that has all set meals and they need to cut carbs and increase carbs and do this and that, they are trying to see, to become light and free by attaching, by increasing the, by decreasing their possibilities. So there is a mismatch of strategies and values and intention and that is something that doesn't work. So a question that I have for you today that I would love to to see your comments in the comment section is if you are in a journey of body transformation, if you want to, you know, lose weight or gain muscle mass or you know, become faster or stronger, why that is and what is the intention that is driving this from the, you know, from the bottom, from the core why of the why of the why? And what are these strategies that you are using for this direction? Are they aligned with this value or are they not? Aligning your strategies with the drive, with the core values is what will guarantee that everything that you do contributes to you nurturing a body that brings the life that you want to experience. If you have any questions or any comments or other thoughts about this, please let me know in the comments below because then we can keep keep this conversation until next week when I'll see you in the next video.