Why Will Power Is Not The Answer
Welcome everybody. We’re talking about desire today.
Our desire to overeat.
If you wanna start to change your desire and decrease your desire to overeat now getting a handle on the desire to overeat. It really is the holy grail for most of my clients. I know, I thought it was a holy grail as well when I was trying to figure out. This issue for myself, right? People come to me for so many reasons.
They might come to me because they’re tired of thinking about food all day, or they’re frustrated that sometimes they eat too much and they don’t know why. And. No matter what it is, everyone will say the same thing. They’ll say, I wish I didn’t desire to eat so much. Right. I wish I didn’t really like chocolate I wish I didn’t like pasta or cake or whatever it is.
Right. And if I didn’t desire food, it would be so much easier to lose weight. And, you know, wanting to contain your desire. It’s not unique to food, right? It’s something that people think about in lots of different areas of their life, right? The same can be true for money. Right. People who are trying to save money will be frustrated by their desire to spend it.
And they’ll say…
“I wish I didn’t have this desire to go shopping or buy clothing or go on vacation, you know, whatever it is” but it’s that desire to spend it. That’s making it so hard to save. All of us can relate to wanting to desire something less. And most people believe the answer is willpower, right?”
The ability to resist your desire, right? The ability to say no, the ability to turn your desire down. And when we give in. We blame a lack of willpower and we think we just need more of it. We need more discipline, more ability to say no, now willpower can work and you may have used willpower yourself.
So here’s how I used to understand my desire to eat. I really understood it in two ways. The first was my desire was kind of. Inexplicable. And so I thought that my desire was this mysterious force that would sometimes appear. And sometimes it made sense when it appeared. Right. And other times it really didn’t.
It’s not just something that you have because there was a time in your life. Like when you came home from school or when you ate dinner and when you went to restaurants, when you went to parties and when you watched TV and you did not desire to overeat because you didn’t over eat. Right. So it was something that you learned and if you learned to desire overeating, you can also learn how not to desire it.
The answer is that you have to build in a pause. And this is how you do it. You need to wait for your desire to eat, to appear. You need to wait for that desire to appear, and then pause. You need to delay eating delay the reward, right? The reward is having food and that delay will allow you to surface your think.
Now, the reason that this works is because you aren’t used to doing this right. You’re used to doing the opposite. You’re used to having a desire appear, and then shortly thereafter, fulfilling that desire, giving yourself the reward, eating the chocolate. Right. That’s what you’re used to doing. And because it happens so quickly sometimes like you’re at a restaurant and you describe the bread, right?
You come home from work and you just head into the pantry. It happens so quickly. There is no time to notice any thinking. And that’s what the pause is there for. That’s why you need to delay so that your thinking can start to reveal itself. Once your desire to eat has appeared, pause or delay for at least the first 30 minutes.
Noticing your thoughts is going to make such a big difference because it will show you how much you are creating your desire and that it’s not created outside of you. It’s not created by this mysterious force. And that will make you feel so much more in control. Okay. So let me know how it goes. I’m always really curious to hear from you how these different techniques are working.
Thank you so much for listening and if you need help getting back on track, let’s talk about it in our coaching call! Schedule with me HERE.