Is the Diet Industry Making People Fat?

When the human mind decides to lose weight, it will naturally pass through a maze of issues beyond just simple will power. The decision to lose weight can often result in your scale moving upward instead of downward.

If our focus is on weight and behavioral change we may provoke a number of internal responses and never realize we have provoked some powerful unconscious processes that work against us instead of for us.

If the diet industry focuses on weight and their particular version of behavioral change, then the industry that purports to help you lose weight, may actually be contributing to your weight gain. 

Many people have gained weight because of a network of beliefs, emotional states and cognitive processes. The attempt to lose this weight by purely physical choices alone is a set up for resistance, yo-yo dieting and eventually something called Learned Helplessness. 

Resistance is when your unconscious mind sets up barriers against the desires or intentions of the conscious mind. The unconscious mind is a powerful force and usually overpowers the conscious mind. The unconscious mind yields this power for several reasons.

It is powerful because it is unexpected, because it taps into the power of emotional drives, and because it runs the autonomic nervous system. 

The primary power of the unconscious mind is that it is unseen and therefore unexpected. Until people learn to pay attention to unconscious patterns, they assume that they can easily make a decision and make changes.

The unconscious mind is effective in the same way a sniper is effective. It is unseen and can easily overpower a given moment. 

Most people understand that “emotional eating” is when we have an emotional appetite, but we feed it with physical food. The less familiar people are with their emotional states and needs, the more prone they are too emotional eating. The unconscious mind is the puppet master behind these drives and will usually sabotage a conscious decision to diet. 

As noted, the unconscious mind runs the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is the part of your nervous system that makes your heartbeat and your breathing continue. The key is that the autonomic nervous system does not ask for your cooperation. It just does it’s job.

When you realize halfway through a piece of bread that you actually picked it up and buttered it, you are experiencing this unconscious, autonomic drive. 

If you have allowed your unconscious mind to run your eating habits, and you try to change with only the power of your conscious mind, you are likely to make temporary progress and then even larger steps backwards. You lose fifteen pounds and gain twenty. You lose those twenty and you gain twenty-five.

Over the years the yo-yo effect of this becomes a pattern. Yo-yo dieting is what keeps the diet industry in business, and it is also what keeps you trying one diet after another over years of time. 

You can already see that a diet industry that offers physical solutions only may actually provoke the very unconscious mechanisms that keep people in a cycle of loss and gain. The bait in the diet industry is the offer of rapid weight loss, by offering their new amazing physical solution and making sure you never question if there might be other forces at work in your habits. 

Once you have lived a few years of the cycle, many people settle into something called “Learned Helplessness” Learned helplessness is a psychological term derived from an experiment in which rats in cages were provided food, but the dish was on an electrified grid.

After several attempts to eat, the rats stopped trying. Even when the grid was turned off, the rats actually starved to death just inches from food that was readily available.

Learned helplessness is what we experience when we become convinced that what we want is actually not possible to attain. We stop trying and actually actively fight against any effort.

Years of yo-yo dieting leaves people in a state of “why try?” convinced that the healthy body they desire is not ever going to be possible for them to attain. 

What is the answer? It is important to remember this well-known quote form Albert Einstein. You cannot solve a problem at the same level of thinking that caused the problem in the first place. 

The thought process fostered by the diet industry is that if you tried their (physical) program, you would finally have the body of your dreams. As you have seen, this can actually contribute to weight gain! But what if we could find a completely different level of thought about losing weight? What if we targeted the internal dynamics that lead to weight gain and inhibit weight loss. 

Consider examining the belief systems and drives that have led to unhealthy beliefs and eating habits. Consider reconfiguring the circuits in your unconscious mind before you jump on another program. 

The diet industry may actually contribute to weight gain, but taking matters into your own hands helps you shift your unconscious drivers and then much more easily, lost the weight that your beliefs systems built!

Comment on how you find yourself trapped by the diet industry.

If you want to go further in learning who you are check out TDAH! (Think Differently About Health) and get started on your journey of lasting health! TDAHYOU.com