It’s All in Your Head

It’s All in Your Head

The great Buddhist treatise, The Dhammapada opens with the verses:

Mind precedes all mental states.  Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.  If  with  an impure  mind  a  person  speaks  or  acts  suffering  follows  him  like  the  wheel  that  follows  the  foot  of the ox.

Mind precedes all mental states.  Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought.  If  with  a  pure  mind  a  person  speaks  or  acts  happiness  follows  him like his never -departing shadow.

So what has this got to do with weight loss and taking control of our lives?

Glad you asked.

When I read these verses I understand that what the Buddha was telling us is to get our head into the right place and everything else will follow. Losing weight is fundamentally a head event. Yes, I know that the fat eventually comes off our arse & gut, but it doesn’t decide to do this by itself.

There has to come a time when we look at a reflection of ourselves, or wake up yet again feeling like shit, and make the decision to do something about it. Maybe this never happens and we have a health scare and it is a medical professional who gives us the alternatives of doing something about our weight or being dead within five years, and we begin to reluctantly do the things we should have been doing all along. Either way, a decision is made by or for us to do something and to not ignore the increasingly limited options in terms of mobility and life expectancy that our obesity presents to us.

For some, and this includes myself, the head space needed to lose weight wobbles. There have been periods when the self-discipline is present and I have lost and kept off a lot of weight and done it in a short period of time. There have also been periods when my self-control was awful and I struggled to control the bingeing. Neither heat waves nor lack of sleep are my friends when it comes to weight loss. When I’m tired and or heat stressed I binge, usually it’s on sugar.  I know I shouldn’t be doing it, but with feeling like complete shit and that instant type lift that sugar gives, usually I give in. I give in and binge, but notice that I make the decision to do so. No one is forcing me to eat the chocolate or add the sugar to my tea. The decision is mine. In other words, the opening verses of the Dhammapada are still valid.

Every person who has lost weight will tell you that they lost the blubber when they decided to do something with their diet. Deciding to change your diet is the single biggest cause of weight loss. No one has or ever will simply wake up one day and find their excess weight has vanished overnight. It is absolutely true that weight is gained or lost naturally in the kitchen.  After all, engaging in a “liver detox” by eating nothing but kale for a week is a decision and at some point you will spend time in your kitchen preparing the kale. Or deciding to engage in one of those diet programmes such as Weight Watchers is obviously a decision which involves a kitchen at some point. I have looked at well researched evidence and decided to remove sugar from my diet. I have also found a deep logic in the reasoning that we shouldn’t need a tertiary qualification in chemistry to understand the ingredients in our food, and that food has identifiable origins….we should be able to identify that it does have “parents”. I have decided not to eat manufactured crap. So if I can’t taste the cheese or see the veggies… I have decided that it isn’t going into my mouth. My mind is leading the way.

When I began my journey from morbid obesity to health back in 1997 and then returned to losing the weight I had regained in 2008, the very first thing I did was change my self-perception. As I have written before in other blogs, my self-perception was changed from denial to acceptance that I was obese and something needed to be done by me before the reality of my dangerous obesity killed me.  Although very clearly obese, I decided that I was a thin person, a fit person and would do all the things I saw thin, fit people doing. 

 

So the fact that weight loss begins in our heads is now obvious. Weight loss only ever happens when we make the decision to engage in it. Which connects us to the quotes from the Dhammapada.