The psychological reasons for you failing on your diet!

Perhaps you are wondering just why it is that when you decide to diet you can’t think of anything but food? Even when you aren't hungry you are thinking about it all the time. You become hyper aware of it. Watching the clock ’till you can have your next meal. It actually has very little to do with hunger it’s self. When we are otherwise occupied it is possible to become quite hungry without realising it.  And even then we sometimes end up completing our task before we stop to eat. The problem with diets is they mean denial! You will no doubt be eating less and possibly denying yourself your usual treats completely. Because of this you will try not to think about the things that you can’t eat. You will try not to think about having to wait for another two hours before you can have your diet meal, because before this diet you would just munch on a chocolate bar whenever you wanted. This is why as a long term solution, diets don’t work. Unless you have the grit of a top athlete it is impossible to override thoughts about food forever. If you are having to consciously think about what you are and are not allowed to eat on a diet then that food is more prominent in your mind and it is only a matter of time before your resolve weakens.

Don’t think about pizza!

Unfortunately your mind can’t process a negative thought. In order to not think about it, it has to think about it first and then you just can’t help but think about it! Your conscious will says that you want to lose weight but all you can do is think about all those things that you can’t eat.

Fact!When there is conflict between the imagination and the conscious will, then the imagination will always win the day. Here is an example. Nothing to do with losing weight but it serves to illustrate just how our imagination can ruin our best intentions.

Example: Most people could walk along a foot wide plank suspended securely a foot from the ground without too much difficulty. It doesn't create any stress or anxiety to do so. If that same plank were thirty foot up in the air most people would fall off. But why? Because when you start to walk along the plank your conscious mind says “I can do this, I’ve just done it with the plank was a foot above the floor.” However your imagination says “yes but if you did fall you would really hurt yourself. If you start to wobble you might fall and if you fell you would really hurt yourself. 


Whatever you do don’t fall! By this point there is a huge conflict between the conscious mind and the imagination and the person starts to wobble. It’s only a matter of time before they fall…Which confirms what they knew, i.e. that they just knew it would happen, that sooner or later they would fall. What is happening here is that our imagination is giving us powerful suggestions. Suggestions that if we fall we will really hurt ourselves. We become focussed on that suggestion vividly imagining what it would be like to fall.  So when your conscious mind wants to lose weight your imagination is busy filling your head with thoughts of all those foods you are not allowed to eat and how good they will taste.

How to use suggestions to help you achieve your weight loss goals.
Now it’s time to do something about those things by changing our suggestions to ourselves. As a hypnotherapist I use suggestions to influence how people behave. In order foe the suggestions to be effective I have do deliver them in a certain way. The combination of the word, the context and the tonality of voice are what make these suggestions effective. But you can give yourself very powerful suggestions or affirmations that will help not only your weight loss but any other area of your life. Firstly, lets look at how we use language and how it affects us when we are giving ourself a message or suggestion. We give ourselves suggestions all the time without really being aware of it.


Why it’s hard to diet, language and the suggestions we give ourselves without realising!
The way we convey a message is important. My head is killing me is much more powerful than saying I have a headache. I am starving or I could eat a horse is much more powerful than saying I could eat now. This chocolate cake tastes amazing is more powerful than this chocolate cake is nice.


When we say we are starving we are giving ourselves a very powerful suggestion that we should eat a lot. When we say the cake is amazing we will want more of it than if it were just nice. Sigmund Freud first formulated the pleasure principal idea back in the early 1900’s. Quite simply it states that humans try to move away from pain and towards pleasure. It is easy to see how this would be a helpful behaviour in most cases.


Unfortunately many foods will move us towards pleasure because we enjoy them so much and towards pain because we feel guilty after we have eaten them, at the same time. If we tell ourselves we LOVE chocolate but on the other hand we HATE it, or hate the way we feel because of eating it, this is very confusing for your subconscious mind. Again it all comes down to the suggestions we have given ourselves. A dysfunctional cycle of behaviour results from the eating activity that triggers both responses. One state, guilt/pain, makes us feel bad and increases the desire for the other state, pleasure which then triggers guilt again.

Negative suggestions.

We often and without realising, give ourself negative suggestions:

 It won’t work for me.
I just know there’s no point even trying to lose weight.
I know its not going to happen.
Things never go right for me.
I will never find the right partner.
Men/women always treat me bad.
I’ve tried everything, I just can’t lose any weight.
I never have any time to exercise.

The main thing to notice with these examples is that they are very general. They are all encompassing in their negativity. They are very polarised.

Words such as never, always, can’t, won’t etc when applied in a negative connotation magnify it’s negative effect.

Do you really know that you can’t lose weight? If you were marooned on a desert island with nothing but a few coconuts and sand crabs to eat do you think you would still be overweight then? So it isn’t hard to see how negative thoughts could be very powerful suggestions to the subconscious mind and help us to self sabotage.

Find out more about self sabotage and how to overcome it in the very first chapter of Weight Loss Made Easy. Why risk undoing all your hard work losing weight? Knowing how to tackle self sabotage behaviour is the key to undoing unhelpful food related behaviours such as binging or making bad food choices.

Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work.

Welcome to my weight loss blog. I'm Cathy Blackburn, weight loss consultant and author of Weight Loss Made Easy.

If like many, you have spent years of sticking to a low fat diet only to find that your weight is creeping up the scales rather than down you might be wondering why that is. The answer is that dietary fat is important and many of us do not eat enough of it. Yes you did read that right! So let's look at why eating enough dietary fat is important in our quest to maintain a healthy body weight.

Firstly fat is a powerful appetite suppressant. If you don't believe my then think about this. A 500 calorie low fat meal could consist of a reasonable sized jacket potato filled with baked beans. However, you could get that same 500 calories (actually just under 500 calories) from 100 millilitres of double cream, that's about an inch in the bottom of a standard measuring jug. However, if you were to drink the cream then you wouldn't want anymore food for a significant amount of time afterwards. So despite this small amount of cream not taking up a lot of volume in your stomach and hence not making you feel "full" in the usual sense of the word, you wouldn't want any more food for quite some time afterwards.

The truth is that there is a big difference between feeling full and feeling satisfied. If we eat low fat (which usually means high carbohydrate) foods then we tend to eat 'till we are full and when we eat high fat foods we will stop eating before we are physically full. We tend to stop when we feel satisfied which is an entirely different feeling. This difference in physical fullness and feeling satisfied means that not only are we likely to consume too much food when following a low fat lifestyle but the calories consumed are the wrong kind of calories, i.e. the calories that are more likely to be converted to body fat and I will explain why this is later.
The second reason that it is important to eat enough fat in the diet is because if you don't eat fat then your body doesn't know how to burn fat! This ties in quite nicely with what I was saying just now about calories from some foods (namely carbohydrates) being the wrong kind of calories that are most likely to be turned to body fat. Let's look at how this works.

Carbohydrates break down in the intestine into simple sugars (glucose) which are then transported into the bloodstream. If this were to happen unchecked then your blood sugar levels could rise to a level which would cause harm to your body and even kill you. This is typically what happens in uncontrolled or badly controlled diabetes. Your body has to produce insulin to transport the glucose out of the bloodstream thus lowering blood sugar levels and into the muscles and other tissues where it will be used as energy. The big problem is that most carbohydrate foods such as bread, pasta, rice and sugary foods such as cakes and biscuits are so highly refined that they break down in the stomach and enter the bloodstream too quickly and therefore create a glut of energy that the body simply can't use all at once. Millions of years of evolution have ensured that your body doesn't waste a thing and so your body's reaction to this glut of calories is to store them as body fat in case of times of hardship. The key to this storage is insulin. Without it our bodies simply can't store body fat. Getting back to what I said earlier which is that we need to eat fat in order for our bodies to know how to burn fat as a fuel, many people wrongly believe that eating fat means that they will get fat. If eating fat made you fat then the Atkins diet simply wouldn't work! The truth is that when we eat fat it triggers the body to burn fat including body fat. When we eat carbohydrate it triggers the body to store fat.
Many traditional low calorie diets encourage carbohydrate consumption and a restriction in the amount of dietary fat thereby telling your body to store fat. However, because of the restriction in calories then your body has to strip calories from somewhere but because it is actively trying to store fat, many of these calories will be released by the body breaking down muscle tissue which is just what you don't want!

The key to becoming slim and then maintaining a stable bodyweight is giving your body the correct fuel, in other words reducing the consumption of highly refined carbohydrates along with increasing the amount of fresh vegetables, good quality protein and healthy fats such as those found in nuts, olive oil and eggs. Weight Loss Made Easy not only shows you how to lose weight easily without any cravings for unhelpful foods, it explores the many food and weight loss myths that have kept us hooked on dieting for decades! If you are fed up with dieting and want to lose weight then keep it off without having to calorie count, eliminate whole food groups or go without the foods you love then this book is for you. It is a little known fact that there are two really simple adjustments that you can do to your diet that will mean that you lose weight easily and you can learn all about them in my book. You can get on top of comfort eating so you no longer feel that food is controlling you and therefore you will never need to diet ever again!