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I have always felt like there was something else controlling me when it came to eating. I could always get the motivation to exercise consistently, but eating healthy has been a struggle for me my whole life.
I always chalked it up to lack of self-control, but honestly it was more than that. When I filmed this video back in 2006, I was struggling with a beast:
It was like there was a beast inside of me that wanted to eat as much as I could because Mike was out of the house. To be completely honest, that beast won that war. Not that day, but over the last three years, I have been unable to control it.
Yesterday, I talked about my digestive tract being a symbiont within me. An animal that lives within my body that controls how much I eat. It might be an incredibly DUMB animal with only one hundred million neurons in its “brain,” but it is a STRONG animal. It can take control of me when I least expect it.
How can I retrain the beast within me? How can I make it understand that I want to be thin? It’s not like I can just sit down and have a little conversation with the animal inside of me. I have to train it like a dog to do what I want instead of what it wants.
Tune in tomorrow for some ideas on how to retrain the beast within all of us.
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April 30th, 2009 at 9:43 am
I think you said the key phrase – “I have to train it…” Many of us were trained to eat “everything” on our plates growing up because it was a waste. For me that meant developing poor eating habits with no discipline because along with being trained to eat everything, many times “eating” was a part of entertaining ourselves. My problem has been a life-long pattern of learned habits that call for me “re-training” my brain. For me that’s where my beast lies–in my brain.
April 30th, 2009 at 10:12 am
I love the metaphor of the beast within! I can totally relate!
Well, after many years of fighting with the beast, I have decided to use the energy of the beast, sort of Aikido like, for my own purposes. In fact, I am letting the beast take over the job, that I, in my neo-cortex hubris was trying to do, but it really was the beast’s job all along. That’s why it was fighting me. It’s union, baby!
April 30th, 2009 at 6:24 pm
I think it is incredibly admirable how open and honest you are with your readers! Many of us are fighting the same battle and ashamed to admit it; terrified to reveal just how “weak” we are. It takes great strength to publicly acknowledge the Beast and you have made it that much easier for myself and many others to accept the existence of our own.
Only once that shame and denial has been lifted can a true synergistic life with the Beast be sought.
Thank you for this post!