Article Body:
This year many people will embark upon a diet and most will fail to reduce . the standard response to the present failure by the people marketing the diet is responsible the individual for the failure. This leaves the person feeling defeated and guilty due to their lack of "will-power"
Blaming the individual also preserves the illusion that diets are an efficient thanks to reduce . i feel it's time to maneuver the discussion beyond this "blaming" level and explore the important reasons diets fail.
I will use an example to elucidate my position.
When most of the people are presented with something sort of a chocolate (candy) bar it's shortly before they feel a desire to eat the thing. Most will simply blame the chocolate for causing the will . they're going to then attempt to battle the craving with "will-power". Usually they lose this battle and sooner or later concede and eat the chocolate candy . This "giving-in" often marks the top of the diet.
Now lets check out why this "giving-in" occurred. we all know that the process that caused the craving to eat the chocolate candy went something like this; sensory input was received through the acceptable receptors [mainly eyes during this case] and therefore the mind formed some sort of neural or sensory representation of the thing which will be defined as a chocolate candy . we will regard this process as inescapable. If the sensory receptors are in working order, the mind must form a representation or neural image of the thing .
When a neural image has been formed we've been taught to assign meanings, from memory, to those images as they occur within the mind. The assignment of meaning is followed by an emotional response appropriate to the meaning assigned. within the case of the chocolate candy the meaning assigned included past memories of pleasant experiences assosciated with eating chocolate bars, hence the craving to eat this chocolate candy . So really it had been not the presence of the thing which will be defined as a chocolate candy that caused the craving, but the process outlined.
Specifically it had been the assignment of meaning that caused the craving. and since this assignment of meaning has become totally automatic in most of the people , the chocolate candy gets the blame for the craving when actually it only had the facility to cause the mind to make a meaningless image. For most, the meaning and image became "fused", with the meaning now seen as an inherent a part of the neural image itself instead of something assigned from within the mind. This in fact gives the stimulus the facility to be the explanation for the response.
Just brooding about or reflecting upon a chocolate candy has an equivalent effect. A neural image is made from that reflection and when it's been formed the process of automatically assigning aiming to it's precisely the same like images caused by an external stimulii. We feel a robust desire to eat the chocolate candy .
This all means in fact that each time we are presented with a chocolate candy or another desirable food, the mind automatically performs the process outlined and creates a desire to eat the delicacy. These continual emotional responses build up and eventually wear us down. this is often the rationale we "give-in" and therefore the diet goes out the window.
My point is then, the sole thanks to reduce our food intake and still feel comfortable is to switch this process of automatically assigning aiming to the pictures that inherit our heads. this manner we will reduce the will to eat unnecessarily and thereby modify our eating behaviour in order that we reduce and keep it off.
Diets don't supply these techniques and in actual fact they fail the individual not the opposite way round as their providers would have you ever believe. If changing our behaviour was easy as making a choice to travel on a diet, most folks would have changed many things about ourselves way back . the reality is we'd like techniques which will help us to bring that change about or we are setting ourselves up to fail.
R.J.
2006