Have you ever wondered why food cravings are so difficult to resist? The more you deny your cravings the stronger they seem to become! So, how is this a problem? Well it’s only a problem if the foods that you crave are bad for you and are causing you health and weight issues. Now that’s a very real problem and one that needs to be addressed, quickly.
Will power isn’t working and there is a very good reason for that, there is no such thing! If you’ve been beating yourself up because you can’t stop eating certain foods with your will power, relax, it isn’t actually possible. It’s not possible because it isn’t your conscious mind that is generating the craving, the programme for the craving is running at the unconscious level, in that part of your mind that you’re not consciously aware of right now.
Have you noticed that the more you consciously decide not to eat certain foods, the more you want to eat them and the harder it gets not to eat them? This feels so difficult because you are accidentally setting up a conflict between your conscious and unconscious minds. It usually ends in one mind giving up and because the unconscious mind is unfathomably more powerful than the conscious mind, it wins the battle and runs the programme that has you eating the food.
The way to stop eating the bad food is to change the programme that you are running at the unconscious level and have probably been running for quite some time. The behaviour has been installed as a habit. The first step to achieving this is to become really conscious of your unconscious programming.
The main issue with the food that bad for you is that you are holding a representation of it in your unconscious mind that is really compelling and worthy of action. This internal representation is generating a feeling you have about the food, like it’s satisfying or makes you happy and that is generating your behaviour to eat the food. The profession of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), is all about studying your unconscious programming and learning how to make changes so that you can produce new behaviours, like not eating the food that’s bad for you. The unconscious mind is able to learn and change very rapidly, far more quickly than your conscious mind and so alterations to your neurological programming can be made in as little as a couple of minutes. Imaging that, all that conscious struggling you have been doing not to eat a certain food can be changed within a few minutes. All you need to do is to change the nature of your internal representation so that it is no longer compelling to the unconscious mind and so the eating behaviour stops immediately.
Let’s play with this intriguing concept for a moment, shall we? I would like to encourage you to become more conscious of your internal representations that are generating your habits.
Please consider this question, “When you think about how much you like (insert the problem food), do you have a picture?”
Now, pay attention to the picture that emerges in your mind and how it looks. Is it colourful, bright, big, near, are you looking through your own eyes or can you see yourself in the picture, does it have a frame around it, is it a movie? Pay close attention to how the picture looks.
Next, pay attention to any sounds that are important in the picture, focus on them and discover how they sound. Are they internal or external to you, are they high or low volume, what direction do they come from? Pay attention to the sounds.
Now, pay close attention to how the picture feels to you. Give the feeling a name if you can. Think about where you feel the feeling in your body and how intense it feels, give it a shape if you can.
Great work! Now clear your mental screen of that picture.
Let’s now consider a contrasting internal representation. “When you think of how much you dislike (insert food that you find repulsive), do you have a picture.
Become aware of the new internal representation that enters your mind. Once again, consider how this picture looks, sounds and feels and notice how different it appears and makes you feel from the picture of the food that you really like. When you have noticed everything about this picture, clear your mental screen once again. It’s the differences between these tow pictures that create your behavioural habits and your undeniable food cravings.
At our Enhanced NLP Coach Practitioner Certification Training you will learn some very specific processes for making changes to your unconscious programming by working with the properties of those two different internal representations that you have just noticed. If you can learn to rapidly remove a food craving, think what else you can achieve once you are familiar with the processes? You can remove addictions, change your behaviour towards certain activities that you don’t really enjoy that much, change your behaviour towards certain people in your life, create great and long-lasting relationships, get in control of the way you feel and begin to create the future for yourself as an empowered person who has power over their own internal programming. You can even learn how to help others to do the same.
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