Saturday, March 26, 2016

The Secrets of Weight Loss

The big secrets of weight loss is to bring our will into alignment with small meals and some exercise. Just how do we do this? That is the question that we must answer, once we understand that we must want, desire, only small meals three time each day. It is our will that must change. Staying distracted from food, eating, the remainder of the time is necessary. It is about change of our will to induce change in our behavior. Behavior change alone is some help, but long term, our will must change.

Those of us that are never satiated, that implies that we have a physical hunger continually have a special challenge. The answer is still the same, we need to bring our will into line, aka, three small meals each day, and nothing but water in between, hot or cold. We need to overcome a natural physically driven need, and that is an added challenge. 

This program is tough. It is for those who need it, yes, but those who want it, and you must really want it to make the changes necessary. Without wanting to change and wanting to become willing to change our own will, success will be difficult. Those who do not want to change their will are beyond our concern. We wish them well.

Now comes maintenance. We must maintain our will in line with three small meals each day, and a clean busy living between those meals. Learning to direct our will is not straight forward. We use the term "our will" here in the Stoic understanding of will, not the modern connotation of emotions. It is the directing part of our mind, compatible with logic, but not totally controlled by logic. It lies in the region that is partly controlled by passions, partly by logic. It is some of the time beyond our control, and sometimes within our control. It switches sides of the line, and that is the frustrating part of all this.   

There are those things that drive appetite, which we need to identify and remove. We need to understand appetite, the desire to eat, to some extent. We need to understand all the psychological, physiological and beliefs that can drive us to eat, and methods to overcome them. We may need to change from a negative person to a positive person, and learn to deal with the negative people around us. Ignoring the issues is not a solution, we may need to make others unhappy, or cause them stress, or express our outrage. We may need to clean our minds or wrong concepts and learn to use logic to direct our lives. When we start, we do not know what we need, and this may be different for each. The only thing we can do is try each thing and test it. Keep what works and abandon that which does not work for now. We can adopt a totally new "operating system" and not try to fix the old.

It has taken me sixty years to get to this point, while it comes to other people automatically. I do not understand this, but some small percent of the population are this way. The course is not yet clear, but change is required is clear. When my will is in alignment with the plan, it works. When it is not, it does not. It is that simple, and that difficult. I do not have consistent control of my will, that is the ultimate problem. To bring about sufficient change to end this problem is the ultimate objective of this program.

Typical diet plans are aimed at changing behavior, and these work short term. We also need to want to stay on the plan to maintain the loss. Once our will is changed, aka our directing part of our mind, then it is natural to maintain the behavior. Some part of that behavior is life between the meals, and that is where the problems really lie. This is where changing our directing part of our mind is maintained through positive psychology and philosophy of life concepts, where our beliefs are known to us, clean, consistent and well defined.    

 How do we get our will readjusted to wanting only three small meals each day? That is what this is all about.

 Do we have control over our will or is it the part of the brain we cannot access?  If we cannot control it, can we influence it? 

But what do I know?

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