Insight Dieting

I lost another three pounds last week, which means that I am now under my goal weight of 180 pounds, having lost more than 25 pounds in the last couple of months.

So, what is the dieting secret that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago? My secret is simply that instead of giving up foods I gave up hunger. If you stop feeling hungry dieting is much easier (perhaps not for absolutely everyone but surely for most people).

Graham Lester So, how do you give up hunger? By means of a simple insight: you have to realize that you aren’t really hungry. What we interpret as hunger is simply having an empty belly. Probably because we are saturated with advertising and because food is almost always close at hand we have developed a very bad habit of assuming that we need to eat whenever our belly sends an empty signal to our brain.

Next time your belly sends the empty signal you just need to have this simple dialogue:

BELLY: I am hungry. Feed me NOW! BRAIN: I hear you loud and clear, belly. Are you in any pain? BELLY: No, just very hungry. BRAIN: Well, get back to me when you are in actual pain and I will be happy to feed you.

You just repeat this dialogue as often as necessary. You treat the belly as if it is a troublesome child. In behavioral terms, you put the behavior on extinction. Eventually the belly gives up!

If you do this right it requires no will power whatsoever. It is what you might call insight dieting. Once you deeply realize that you are not really hungry the belly has to give up because you have seen through its tricks and you continue to see through them every time it complains.

Then you just follow a low-calorie diet or whatever other diet you choose (any doctor-recommended diet will do, it doesn’t really matter which one). There are no foods to be avoided; you just eat less and refuse to be hungry. And you don’t have to know a single thing about science or nutrition. You don’t have to buy a single book or listen to a single pep talk.

The key is to be absolutely convinced that you are not hungry. You can try this out by going to bed with an empty stomach one night. Just listen to your belly complain and ask it if it is in pain at all. Pretty soon you should realize that having an empty belly isn’t in fact uncomfortable in the slightest. The so-called hunger is all in your imagination. It’s actually a fact that you are not hungry and because it is a fact you will have to accept it sooner or later.

Try it and let me know.

Graham Lester