Who controls what I choose?

“Nooo, I will die without meat. Why then live at all, if you give up all the pleasures ?! "

This is what my clients, men or women, often say. Women usually say it when they talk about their husbands or sons.

I'll make a reservation right away, so as not to frighten, this post is not propaganda of vegetarian or vegan diet. And I will not call here to give up eating meat.

I want to talk about beliefs, and by analogy with the meat example, you may find in yourself some of your personal beliefs that do not serve you, but you are so used to them that you think that nothing can be changed.

The story with meat began when I learned that the elimination of saturated fats from the diet (meat and dairy are two of the main suppliers of saturated fats in our body), radically affects the improvement of well-being with one autoimmune disease (in fact, not one, but I am based on a specific source, which provides specific research, so I write this way).

Further in the text I will use the term "diet" just for brevity, but I will specifically explain what I mean to avoid confusion. In Russian-speaking understanding, a diet is some kind of temporary intervention in the usual diet for a specific medical purpose or for body shaping, which, however, may coincide.

I use the word "diet" in the meaning that it has in English - "diet" means our usual routine, what we eat without pursuing specific goals.

So let's get back to the fact when we understand that a particular food product is harmful to our health, but we cannot refuse it, because it is tasty. It will be useful to find out that it is possible, necessary and easy enough to part with this binding by understanding how our brain works.

We acquire taste habits from childhood. If our parents had never fed us meat, or sweet, or pasta, we would not have formed the habit of eating these foods, and at the age when we ourselves begin to take responsibility for our own nutrition, there simply would be no craving for this. Whatever the variety of national cuisines, we still mostly gravitate towards what we grew up on. And the "taste of childhood" remains with us, because it is the image of pleasure and serenity for us with which he was associated in childhood. By the way, it is the same with unloved products.

The most important function of our brain is to provide us with what is pleasant and familiar to us and to protect us from what we do not like and what is new to us.

Attitudes about what I like / dislike, tasty / not tasty are assimilated by our brain in early childhood and are jealously guarded by it. It absolutely does not care what is healthy for you and what is not. Only an emotional response is important for the brain. If you have experienced the emotional pleasure of eating a piece of meat or a bun, your brain thinks it has done its job perfectly.

This explains the low efficiency of all kinds of weight-loss diets, which require tension to stay in the prescribed regime, are accompanied by an emotional decline due to constant violence against oneself, and have a short-term effect, because weight inevitably returns as soon as nutrition returns to the "pre-diet" period.

The good news is that the attitudes written in our brains can be changed, if desired. Our brain learns by training. Just as building a strong muscle frame in our body requires systematic training of various muscle groups, developing healthy habits requires regular brain training. But if, in the case of muscles, the cessation of training leads to a loss of shape, then the brain can be trained so that new neural connections are formed, and bad habits will be replaced by healthy ones, which will go to the subconscious level and become so strong that you no longer need to put in efforts to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

This applies not only to food habits, but to everyone in general. You can train your brain to love what is good for you and to protect you from what is bad for you.

In the phrase “Nooo, I will die without meat. Why then live at all, if you give up all the pleasures ?! " there is sheer self-deception.

First, for sure, not all the pleasures of your life are contained in a piece of meat, but by saying this, you give your brain an absolutely accurate emotional signal: "Meat is equal to all the pleasures of life for me," and the brain, zealously rushes to fulfill its main role - to provide survival and comfort. Those, every time you see a meat dish, your brain will seduce you emotionally, and the understanding that meat is not good for you will break against this temptation, and you will be torn from an internal conflict: “I understand that it is harmful, but nothing I can help myself. "

Secondly, the phrase "without meat - I will die" is taken literally by the brain, and as I have already mentioned, ensuring survival is the main task of our brain, so it will do anything to prevent you from giving up meat.

The words that we speak and hear, and the images that we create in our imagination, are the language of communication with our brain, so this tool must be treated very carefully. What is a metaphor for you, and you are not at all going to die without meat, is an instruction taken literally for your brain.

So we find ourselves hostage to the image that our brain once appropriated about what is "good" for us, in its opinion, and it does not matter whether it serves our health / success or not, useful or harmful, right / wrong, he follows his script.

Using the method of Rapid Transformational Therapy, developed by an English psychotherapist Marisa Peer, and based on a combination of various hypnotic and psychotherapeutic methods, you can easily discover the roots of harmful attitudes that were formed in you mainly in childhood, and rebuild neural connections in a way that will be useful for your health and a successful life. This will require a certain amount of training period from you, but in the end, you will get a lasting result in the form of a healthy habit.

To do this, you just need to decide whether you want to control your brain yourself, choose what lifestyle you want to lead and train your brain what you need, or want to remain in the delusion that nothing can be changed, I am who I am, and to give control of your life to the programs embedded in your brain when you could not be aware of it.