I spend a lot of time thinking about the different questions I receive, as well as the questions I read about and/or listen to on podcasts. So many of them are, in the end, very similar; we look for a way to hold onto certain things and wanting to justify our choices and actions. While our awesome brain-to-body mass ratio is what sets us apart as a species, our brains are also often what get us into the most trouble. We are so prone to OVER-thinking, to reading too much into things - while at the same time being subjected to the copious amounts of priming and advertising in our society that our innate instincts become limited and we begin to make decisions that are not good for us...often finding some way to justify them. Thus is human nature.
Since awareness is a key player, I want to talk about priming for a moment. As defined by the ever-accessible wikipedia: Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences a response to a later stimulus. Since this, among other psychological practices, can influence our decision making, it is used a lot in sales and marketing. Think about the first thing you see in our grocery stores. You walk in on one end of the store and the first thing you smell is freshly baked bread. Take it from a girl who hasn't eaten a piece of bread in two years, it still smells amazing! How does this prime us to view the racks of baked goods just beyond the registers? Fresh and delicious perhaps?
Maybe you enter the store on the other end and the first thing you see is some amazing display of fresh flowers or produce. This is not something done by accident. Think about how this may set the tone of your whole trip...priming us for our shopping. When we see these beautiful or fresh displays, does it influence our opinion about how fresh everything in the rest if the store is? Of course it does! The same holds true for the picture of the farm house or the sunny pasture on the packages of bacon or cartons of milk. What do you think this tells us about what we are actually purchasing?
In the end, these things mean nothing. Priming tells us absolutely nothing about what is inside of the package, yet it influences us; priming our minds to project a bit of a fantasy onto it. But here is the kicker...priming doesn't work anywhere near as well if you are prepared for it, if you are looking for it. Could this potentially help you make better decisions?There seems to be a pretty general consensus among most - changing your diet and lifestyle is not easy! I would like to call out the important distinction between simple and easy here. The changes that need to be made really are simple changes, but that does not necessarily make them easy to do. Take smoking for example. We all know smoking is bad for us, and the solution is simple. Either don't smoke, or quit. Anyone who has ever actually done the latter can tell you, quitting smoking is not easy! (I am one of these people!) The key player for me was all mental. You must get your mind right, change your way of thinking. Making these conscious changes to my thought process is the only thing that has gotten me to where I am today, smoking, exercise and otherwise. (You can read my full bio here.)
I have written about mental shifts and changing your thought process in the past, and you can read one such post here. There is only one I want to touch on at this moment: Do something everyday to remind yourself why you have decided to make different, healthier choices! Knowledge is power, and while I am approximately two years into my own life-changing journey, I still do this. Make checklists, write down your goals daily, express gratitude for the wonderful life you have been given, read a blog, listen to a podcast, talk to like-minded people, ask questions...there are ENDLESS possibilities to surround yourself with the right people and create the right mentality for your own journey.
I would like to end by giving you some food for thought:
- Your body seeks health and homeostasis! It doesn't want to get things like lung cancer, therefore if you don't smoke, your body won't develop lung cancer. The same holds true for obesity and other metabolic disorders. Your body does not want to be overweight and diabetic, therefore you just have to feed yourself the proper diet and exercise!
- If your diet drink has zero calories, zero sugar and zero fat, what the heck are you drinking?
- Breakfast: (one of the most frequent questions I get) Don't let Kelloggs and General Mills tell you what is breakfast food! This morning I mixed a bunch of sautéed veggies with eggs, poured it into muffin cups and baked it to get little "egg cupcakes." Yesterday I ate a salad...for breakfast! Don't limit yourself!
- Following the latter: You cannot put a brand, patent or label on real food and real health. If a company is telling you their product is good for you, it is probably only good for their wallet.
- Most people will have no idea how good their body is designed to feel. You do not have to be one of these people!
- The quality of the foods is what drives the quantity of calories we need to eat until we feel full.
- Over 2/3 of the calories you burn every day has nothing to do with physical movement of any form, let alone exercise. Thinking of the body as this beautiful holisitic thing, with all these self regulating systems, and NOT as a mathematical equation can change EVERYTHING! It is critical to healing and sustaining health.
- The idea that you become fat by eating fat is just as silly as to say that you become green by eating green vegetables. (from - Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD, via Jonathan Bailor's book The Calorie Myth)
- Basing your diet on calorie count is like taking a medication that treats the symptoms of an illness, but doesn't cure the underlying cause. We can monitor our bodies all we want by tracking calories in versus calories out, but if we're not eating foods that fuel our biological processes and help to regulate our hormones, we're not curing our bodies.
