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PART OF ME WANTS TO BE SLIM BUT PART OF ME THINKS YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, SO EAT AND BE HAPPY

Consider the separate parts of yourself.

The grown-up you doesn’t want to eat more energy than you can use.

Perhaps, though, there is a Child within you who isn’t getting enough attention or love from you and is trying to stuff their feelings down with food.

The Child within you probably doesn’t see why you should spend time preparing to lose weight and anyway, believes there is no point because you will only fail.

Psychologists call this process where two parts of us conflict, Cognitive Dissonance. The normal human response is to construct reasons why we have feelings which so completely conflict. You begin to make excuses for a behaviour which you don’t really want in your life, but don’t feel in control of. So you kid yourself that having an extra biscuit isn’t that bad.

It is because of cognitive dissonance that we are so good at convincing ourselves of something because we want to believe it, and the more evidence that builds up to contradict us, the more we believe it.

Dissonance is when we believe something about ourselves and then do something against that belief. If I believe I am fine but I still overeat, then the confusion I feel as a result is cognitive dissonance.

Dissonance is a very powerful motivator which will often lead us to change one or other of the conflicting belief or action. The discomfort often feels like a tension between the two opposing thoughts. To release the tension we can take one of three actions:

• Change our behavior.
• Justify our behavior by changing the opposing thoughts.
• Justify our behavior by adding new ideas and actions.

For instance, I told myself “ When I was slim, I was happy that I wasn’t heavy, but my life wasn’t any different ”.

Once you have overeaten, it cannot be undone, so after-the-fact dissonance is what makes you look towards group support to change your unconscious behaviour. If then you still overeat, you begin to explain yourself by saying “Well I’m not really eating very much, I’m just big boned.”

It doesn’t really matter whether you believe that you will always be overweight on one level, as long as on the level of your ACTION you believe that all you do which takes you towards weight loss, is a bonus.

Keep ending your self talk with “I want to be slim and I can, starting on ......”