In this post we’ll discuss two ways to lose weight. One method requires a lot of effort and willpower. The other is much easier. Pay close attention and let this be the few minutes of your life that makes all the difference to your health.
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We don’t publish a lot of videos on this, but as hypnotists, we often think about the difference between things that are conscious versus things that are unconscious, and weight loss has both aspects.
Weight loss is also something people tend to struggle with. But it can be really simple.
We’re going to use Newton’s First Law of motion as a metaphor here. This law says that an object at rest stays at rest unless a force acts upon it. And an object in motion stays in motion just the same way.
To change something … you have to apply some kind of “force”, or outside of physics … back to everyday life … if you don’t change, things just stay the same.
So with weight loss, you have to change something about what you’re doing, or you won’t get a result.
And whatever you do change … you have to maintain the change! If you go back to what you were doing before, your body will go back to the way it was before. You’ll gain the weight back.
And so there are two main approaches to weight loss. They both involve conscious changes, and unconscious changes.
Our preference is to do the conscious changes that are EASY, such that our unconscious minds take care of the harder part for us, on autopilot.
Let’s dive in.
Weight Loss With Calorie Counting - Hard Work!
We used to follow the method mostly known as calorie counting. It's a conscious intervention without necessarily thinking about the quality of what you eat. This seems intuitive because we’ve all grown up hearing that you have to burn more calories than you eat in order to drop unwanted body fat.
Technically, this is true because we can’t violate the first law of thermodynamics. That law is all about energy balance. If we remove energy from a system (like the energy stored in body fat), that energy has to go somewhere. And if we add energy (food), that energy must be used or stored.
Unfortunately this model does absolutely nothing useful to help people lose weight. All it does is describe the movement of energy. Think about these statements and tell me if they’re useful.
- The movie theater is filling up with people because more people are entering than exiting.
- My bank account is shrinking because I am withdrawing more money than I deposit.
- My bicycle tires are deflating because I’m losing more air than I pump into them.
Each of these statements is perfectly accurate … and yet useless to describe the reason for what’s happening. Why are people entering the movie theater? What’s the draw? Why am I spending more than I earn, deflating my bank account? Why are my bicycle tires losing air?
The reality is that hunger is controlled by hormones. So if we’re eating more than we burn (and gaining weight), the thermodynamic model does nothing to explain why.
Besides, it is very difficult to accurately track calories consumed, and compare them to calories burned. If you’re off by just one daily bite of a bagel, it results in obesity over a couple of decades. Nobody is that accurate.
And even if you were a masterful calorie counter, you need the bulletproof willpower to stop eating when your body is hungry and wants you to eat.
The Easier Way To Lose Weight and Keep It Off
We thought calorie counting was the only way to lose weight too. But thankfully, we discovered another approach. This method is easier, works better, and is simple to maintain for life.
We say “discovered” because we did not come up with this. It’s based on the work of many incredible scientists, researchers and medical doctors who realized that the old method just isn’t reliable, and the real reason for excessive weight gain (in today’s society) is what most people consider to be “food”
The easy approach is to change two things:
- Change what you eat
- Change when you eat
What do we eat? Simply put, just eat real food. Get rid of the refined flours which mostly come from wheat and corn. Get rid of concentrated sugars, which includes soda, desserts, most snack foods, and even fruit juice. Remember that your blood only wants to carry about 1 teaspoon of glucose at any point in time. And your blood doesn’t care (or know) whether the glucose came from a muffin, orange juice, or a candy bar.
We also get rid of “vegetable oil”. We put that in quotes because these oils don’t come from vegetables at all. Usually such veggie oils are seed oils. They come from seeds like corn, soy and rapeseed.
(Notice that “rapeseed” isn’t very appealing as far as names go, so this oil was renamed “canola” … because that sounds healthier, right?)
In reality, most of these processed oils are mixed with processed carbohydrates to form uber-cheap, but ultra-desirable fake foods. Think donuts, cakes, crackers, pastries, cookies, chips, and other snack foods. Combining refined carbs with disgusting solvent-extracted “vegetable” oils is a recipe for obesity.
So when you eliminate these things, you’re left with a lot of real food.
- Meat and fish
- Fresh vegetables and low-sugar fruits (not juice)
- Nuts and cheese (in limited quantities)
- Eggs
- Other plant foods that someone from last century would recognize
When we feed ourselves real food something amazing happens. Our hunger is automatically controlled. We tend to fill up on fewer calories without having to think about it at all.
And there is less willpower needed to control what we eat versus how much we eat.
There is one more important trick you can use, and that trick is called “intermittent fasting”. That’s just a fancy way of saying we eat in a narrower time window. Usually we’ll choose to eat between noon and 8pm, for example.
When you adapt to real foods, you’ll be less hungry. It will be easy to postpone your first meal for a few hours. When you’re not struggling to find the willpower, the calorie reduction isn’t something you have to think about any more.
So it’s your choice.
You can count calories for the rest of your life. Or you can make better food choices. Both decisions need to be maintained forever, or you’ll just go back to where you were. But one choice seems very easy compared to the other.
To learn more - our Personal Growth Membership includes an entire program called The Wellness Academy. This is what we actually do, and the Wellness Academy is a full online coaching program to make this easy.