PART 2- LOSE THE EMOTIONAL WEIGHT OF YOUR PAST JOURNEYS
Now you have a clear understanding of why you have always failed in the past, and how you can now succeed in the future I’m sure you are feeling ready to crack on, but before you navigate through the different elements of this system I want to ensure that you are free from the emotional weight of your past attempts, as this can cause ‘weight loss fatigue’.
So it is crucial that moving forward you are free from this and you have a clear mind free from any mental resistance and high motivation to kick start your journey in the best possible way.
This means releasing any conscious or unconscious negative biases that you may have towards your ability to succeed this time around. Because years of fruitless efforts and disappointment can really take a mental toll that leaves you jaded, fatigued and feeling less than confident in your capabilities.
I vividly remember that whenever I would restart a weight loss cycle I would always announce to my family and friends (including social media friends) that I was going back to “fat club (as I called it), and this time I was I always going to stick at it”. And I always genuinely had high hopes and good intensions but there was always a part of me that believed that if I hadn’t succeeded before, then I probably wouldn’t again. And that belief was further reinforced by my then partner always telling me that he would ‘give me two weeks before I gave up again”, which didn’t help.
And on self-reflection I now realise how tired I was of the whole process. I was tired of trying and especially tired of failing. And every time I inevitably failed again it would chip away at my motivation and self-belief making it even harder to stay focused. I realise now that I had chronic fatigue from it all, but not only that, the process itself had started to make me feel anxious. Every time I would return to my slimming club I would have these underlying feelings of stress and anxiety, which was due to my negativity bias, but I was unaware of this issue back then so unaware of the detrimental impact it was having on my body and mind, and the fact that a ‘clean slate’ was needed to move forward.
NEGATIVITY BIAS
The negativity bias is a cognitive bias that describes the human tendency to pay more attention to, remember, and be more influenced by negative experiences or information than by positive or neutral ones. This means that “bad is stronger than good” in terms of psychological impact.
And anyone that has repeatedly tried to lose weight and failed will have developed a negativity bias on weight loss. This is because the subconscious part of your mind has memory formation, and it has stored every single weight loss attempt you’ve ever made in a mental file named ‘Warning- failure and hard times ahead’ and now very time you enter into another weight loss cycle, your subconscious brain automatically accesses that file for reference and recalls all of the intense negative emotions associated with them, focusing strongly on those memories.
Not only does this tend to create apprehension and fear-based beliefs around the process but it also has a damaging physiological effect on your body by flooding it with stress hormones that can hinder your weight loss success. This is occurs by a part of your brain called the hypothalamus initiating your body’s stress response as a direct consequence of the negativity bias, flooding your system with cortisol and adrenaline to prepare for the stress it predicts based on past experiences stored in that mental file.
And the reason why this can hinder weight loss success is because prolonged adrenaline release can impair insulin sensitivity, resulting in elevated blood sugar levels and potential weight gain and high levels of cortisol can lead to increased appetite (particularly for comfort foods high in sugar and fat), fat storage, metabolism changes (including a slowing metabolism), and insulin resistance.
This means that if you are suffering from fatigue and a negative bias towards weight loss you are already at a significant disadvantage, as every time you begin a new weight loss cyle your body is conditioned to have a physiological reaction to these negative memories which creates physical and mental resistance to losing weight.
Therefore, in order to achieve what you never have before- permanent weight loss results- before you begin working through each section of this system we must rewire your brain and nervous system to eliminate that negativity bias and the conditioned physiological response your body has to it, and instead create a new positive bias that will give you a clean slate, regulated hormones and a strong sense of clarity and self- belief, and we do this with the ‘Tabula Rasa’ Rewire Audio tools to reprogramme your mind and regenerate new neural pathways to rewire your thought loops, giving you the best possible start on this new journey of success.