You know in a cartoon how a character will have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other shoulder?  Have you had a similar experience, where maybe you want both to pay off debt AND to buy some cute shoes, or you want both to lose weight AND to eat a sleeve of Thin Mints?  Well, today I’m going to tell you why this happens and what to do about it.

We tend to think of our mind as one voice, that is “me”.  But in fact, science has now shown that often different areas of the brain have their own consciousness, all of which speak in that same internal voice.

So your neocortex, the newest, most evolved part of the brain, sets an intention to lose weight.  That involves short term pain in exchange for the long term pleasure of being at your goal weight.

At the same time, your primitive brain may see the cue of the pantry and think “I want a cookie”.  Or it might have the cue of finishing dinner, and send the message of “I’d like just a little something sweet.”  Because your primitive brain wants short term pleasure at the expense of the log term pleasure.

So the good news is, it’s not you, you aren’t broken – it’s just the way your brain is wired.

So what do we do about it?  We have to allow the urge to weaken the primitive brain’s urge-reward pathway by allowing, rather than fighting, the urge.

If you’ve been trying to lose weight, you are probably trying to eat less, but you are probably also finding you have some really intense urges to eat.  Why is that?

Mainstream society tells us that it’s because you are bad or weak, and that you just need to use willpower to control yourself.  But that’s not the reason and not the solution.  The real reason is that our food today is specifically engineered to hit the pleasure centers in our brain in a super intense way that we are not equipped to deal with.

This engineered food creates overpleasure, which creates overdesire. 

Over time your brain learns to turn down the dopamine to a level you are more designed for, but you still want that same pleasure.  So you eat more and more of these factory foods that contain sugar and flour.  It’s the same process as what happens to a drug addict, just in a legal package.

So, if you want to reduce these urges, you have to learn how to allow them.

 Ready to reach your weight loss goals?  Email me at lisa@lisaduke.net to learn more about how I can support you.

The key to stopping your brain from going down and down the neural pathway of overeating is to remove the reward, but NOT by resisting the urge and pushing it down.  When we do that, the urge just gets stronger.

So the way to stop overeating is to start to pay attention – to notice the urge – and then to allow the urge rather than resisting it.

Resisting is what we are usually told do to, but it doesn’t work, as the urge just gets stronger.  Plus it requires willpower, and research shows we only have a limited amount of willpower.

What you have to do instead is ALLOW the urge.

An urge is just a thought/feeling combination.  A thought can’t hurt you, and you can feel any feeling without permanent damage.  So the next time you feel an urge, instead of reinforcing it with a reward or pushing it away, get curious and really mentally move toward it.  Open up to it.  Close your eyes and feel the feeling in your body.  Is it hard or soft?  Fast or slow?  When you visualize it in your mind’s eye, what color is it?

When you observe the feeling, you instantly get a bit of relief – a bit of detachment from the feeling.  And if you can just allow the urge and feel the feeling, you’ll feel it will pass within just a few seconds to minutes. 

Allowing the urge without answering it actually causes the neural pathway to become “grown over”.  If you allow enough urges, they will stop coming altogether.