You literally have to overcome your EVOLUTION, your PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITIONING, and your CULTURAL and SOCIAL programming.
WHEW! That’s intense. It’s so intense, I have to break this into 2 posts just to summarize the main concepts.
So many people judge others or themselves for struggling with weight gain, obesity, and having diabetes. Like it’s some kind of moral defect!
I want to show you how this is not your fault and why these problems are overtaking many modern societies globally. (Yeah, it’s not just you.)
You have to go against how your body was evolved to survive. Your body is the product of thousands of years of fine tuning and natural selection. It is poorly matched to our modern environment, and this is literally killing us.
Our brains automatically prioritize the following three goals in any given decision:
- Seek pleasure
- Avoid pain
- Conserve energy
Notice how your brain favors this kind of situation:
Now, notice how these priorities are no longer serving us as humans. In our current environment, survival is usually not our immediate threat. We need to be thinking long-term and using our human brain, or our prefrontal cortex. But many of us go around unknowingly seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy in the moment.
Is it so hard to understand why we are in such dire straits in our modern environment? You can rarely break a sweat, consume huge amounts of food with little effort, and experience concentrated pleasure with our concentrated foods as often as you desire.
Nothing is wrong with you: Your body is simply doing quite well exactly what it was designed to do.
Now, let’s layer on top of that what I will refer to as OVERDESIRE. This is a process that you create with the pleasure you get from unnaturally concentrated foods that are engineered by food industry. (Cue Lays slogan: “betcha can’t eat just one”)
Concentrated foods are mostly refined carbohydrates. Basically, this is flour and sugar. These foods do not occur naturally in our environment. We have to take the raw ingredient (wheat, sugar cane or beats), process it (grind it down), and refine and concentrate it.
When your brain experiences the intense reward from these foods, the brain learns these foods are very important for our survival and it creates a strong DESIRE for them.
When we practice the desire, response, and reward over and over, the repeated flooding of your brain with dopamine will cause a down-regulation of your dopamine receptors. This PERPETUATES the desire because you need more to get the same effect.
And now you have OVERDESIRE.
Repeating this desire, response, and reward process over and over builds strong neural pathways that make our behavior automatic, even unconscious.
This is often why we feel out of control with food. We learn our desire, but we can unlearn desire as well.
Once you can see how your body has been engineered to eat as much food as it can and store it on your body for long-term survival, you can see that it is functioning exactly how it is supposed to.
Take a moment to appreciate its masterful design.
In my next post, I will get into how we use food to avoid feeling emotions that are uncomfortable, how cultural and social programming need to be questioned when they are sabotaging our progress, and how we create OVERHUNGER.
Do you want to unlearn your desire for food? Do you want to learn how to be in control of your food instead of letting it run your life? I help people do this and then take it to the next level and reverse their Type 2 Diabetes. Find me at www.AFutureByDesign.com.
