Reasons or
Results!
Fitness Nutrition Training
Sovereign Michael Valentine
SPN, CFT, Eft, Yft, Cft, SSc, SSF, GFI, CMCht, CERT, Reiki Master
206.225.9647
email: sovereignmv@gmail.com
web: bnbbs.myshaklee.com
Special Report #51
Part of the
“I see you to succeeding"
series.
What Did You Learn That You Didn't Know You learned?
Ever hear the cliche, "Too close to the forest to see the trees"?
In the world of personal training, coaching, counseling, etc. we get requests to help people. That's what we do in the helping profession, isn't it! We help people achieve new levels of performance & success.
One of the things that we never know to consider if we aren't where we would rather be, is how we knew to get where we are. How did we know to have the thoughts and do the things which got us to a place where we would rather be someplace else?
Now, if we were raised in a test tube where there were no other people around, we might go around doing our best to behave like a test tube...just kidding.
The point being that we don't know what we don't know and often we don't know how we know what we do know. If we look at or presuppose that the way we think and behave are strategies (behaviors we learned before we even knew we were learning them), or in other words, ways of being in the world, we could also consider that we had to learn how to do life the way we do life. In other words, at least part of how we think and behave are things we learned from those who were most influential to us before we even knew that we were learning these ways.
Sometimes, when people are living the way they learned to live but they want to get different results from the way they are living will produce, they take a look at the idea of, "How did I learn this?" "What came before this?"
Another way of looking at it would be to ask, if we were going to train someone to get the same results you have gotten in your life, what would we have to teach them? What strategies, skills, thoughts, behaviors, viewpoints, etc., would we have to teach them in order for them to get to the same place in life as you have?
Now, of course this is all theoretical, because why would we do that? But seriously, we know that if we want success in an area of life, say education or career, we can find out what another person did to get where they are and then its reasonable to say that if we copy the majority of the things the successful person did, its likely we'll get similar results, e.g. want to be a doctor?, go to medical school...it doesn't matter which medical school, pick one!
Reasonably enough, the same situation applies with fitness, wellness and losing weight (the science of burning fat). IF we wanted to train a person to gain weight, first we would have to get them to eat more nutritionally-empty foods so the more they ate the more they crave (SADCRAP), do less activity and repeat the process enough that they started gaining about a half pound of fat per month.
The earlier we could get them to start this, the more likely we would be successful at making them live a fat lifestyle.
If we really wanted to help ensure this kind of success, we would make sure that either their peers demonstrated the fat lifestyle or withheld emotional nurturing or instill the idea that eating SADCRAP makes you feel happy on the inside, especially when the world on the outside doesn't seem like such a happy place.
Are you getting the idea?
If we wanted to compound the effect on this imaginary person, you could have people be in the vicinity of the child, who are emotionally absent, neglectful or even outright abusive...in either case, just when the child feels the least self worth and self esteem, give them some SADCRAP and then give them emotional reassurance that they are now good or OK...we have now reenforced the idea that when things are not fun and happy, we can at least feel full and content on the inside (an emotional crutch, a.k.a. food s my friend).
Can you see what is happening here? Kind of sinister, huh!
What I'm talking about is layers upon layers of conditioning, (some coincidental and some unintentional), which regardless has the same affects on the physiology of the body.
Now, if you really wanted to mess this imaginary person up, you know mess with their sense of security, trust, hope, faith, etc. (their sense that things are going to be OK), we would give them a sense that everything is OK and then when they have settled into a routine, upset the apple cart, so to speak...take away or disrupt the thing that represented safety & security to them, whether a parent leaving, loss of a pet, loss of a friend or even a personal belonging or favorite item.
Then , to "cheer them up", just when the feeling bad is at a peak, offer SADCRAP as a substitution for the emotional loss.
Sound familiar at all? What we're talking about is how people get to a place in life where they need to lose weight, even their life may depend on it, yet they can't seem to simply do the program that has been designed for them.
Even worse? Well, if our imaginary parent of the child is kind of checked out, you know not very present, but then gives positive attention once the child accepts the SADCRAP...guess what, the food has just become a surrogate for the parent's love, attention and approval.
Crazy right? The parent doesn't know how or isn't comfortable giving affection, but gives attention through SADCRAP.
This story is a group of experiences many weight loss clients have shared. Not all people have all of these and some people have even more scenarios happen which have compounded and confounded some of the most seasoned personal trainers.
The point being that its common for the drivers of a fat lifestyle happen outside conscious awareness. That's where cognitive counseling, talk therapy, hypnosis and modalities of that nature can help a person a lot. Its not always necessary to sort through the past and analyze every detail of your life to simply get on the fast track to fat loss success, but sometimes it is helpful to figure out what is driving behavior that seems to have a mind of its own.
Its not uncommon for behaviors we're doing to seem so common place that we wouldn't otherwise consider habits we have been doing as long as we can remember to be sabotaging our efforts in a particular area of focus. For me, I had suffered with what I would consider sever sore throats all through childhood. It wasn't until I was in junior high that I realized that excessive sugar (M&Ms for breakfast) was causing my sore throats...the more I ate the more sore my throat got.
If we wanted to yet compound the emotional eating habits another level, we would expose the child to stress, trauma or abuse...you know to the point that they either felt shame or were hurt by a peer and then shamed for it...then offered SADCRAP as a consolation...the meaning of the nutrient-poor food would now take on the role of shame suppressor.
I know, crazy, right? To stop the SADCRAP and get active one would have to give up their emotional surrogate support system, give up their "friend" as well as the substance which has enabled the shame to remain suppressed. I know, not everyone has shame related to being fat, but it is common and replace any emotion for the "shame" spot and you get the idea....a multi-layered puzzle / maze or perceptions, sensations mis-communications and mis-understandings which enable the fat-lifestyle.
The whole point of this demonstration of the imaginary child we are training to be fat is that sometimes the habits which we defend as "our way of being in the world" were not necessarily our fully chosen way of being...we didn't know what we had learned...we learned it before we knew what we were learning....we didn't provide full consent.
The net result is that once offered what seems to be such a clear way of finally losing the weight and keeping it off (hiring a personal trainer, a diet, a weight loss program, etc.) the old programming blocks our ability to see what s right in front of us. We can't stop doing the fat lifestyle for a moment long enough to let the health building program kick in. We can't see outside of the way we learned to be since we're filtering any new, more healthful way to the old surrogate ways we were taught to cope with the world...its a big part of our identity.
So, the simplistic take-away here, is if you find yourself struggling to establish a new, fit healthy lifestyle (new habits take about 21 days of correct action to establish, feel more "normal" than the old, unhealthy ways and take hold), you might try thinking about what you were taught or learned along the way which may have been unintentional but then took on a life of its own.
I'm not suggesting taking a timeout or suspending your resistance training, cardio nor nutrition program...I am talking about during the process of "doing" your program, think about how it came to be that the way you were living developed into an unfit-lifestyle...how did you know to do that? People don't do behaviors without learning how to do them per se...How did you know how to be unfit?
Ultimately, the cycle of consuming SADCRAP and then craving even more relates to the absence of adequate nutrition in the brain. The more SADCRAP you eat, the more nutrients get used up trying to process the stuff out of the body. Until you have enough BNBBs in your system, the cravings for SADCRAP will not stop and you won't be able to will-power your way out of it...hence, yo-yo dieting.
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