Your Own Brain is Sabotaging Your Efforts to be at Your Goal Weight!

Humans are separate from other living creatures in our ability to think and reason. We are capable off recognizing that being overweight is something we want to change. We decide to go on a diet/specific eating plan. We are successful for a time, and then we just aren’t. We lose our willpower and give up fighting our urge to eat sugar and flour and drink alcohol.

What happens to our brain that initially decided to lose weight and made a decision to follow a weight loss plan? That very same brain took over the tired thinking brain. Our cortex is the source of our ability to think, decide and act. Our primitive brain – which we have in common with other living creatures – wants to keep us alive. We have evolved and survived because we successfully avoided pain, sought pleasure, and were able to lessen the effort required to survive. All living creatures do that.

Our primitive brain makes sure we maintain a healthy blood pressure, digest our food, and maintain a beating heart. We cannot consciously stop our heartbeat or stop our digestion. It is this very powerful – and necessary – primitive brain that keeps us alive and demands that we eat the food and drink that gives us pleasure. Our primitive brain wants us to feel pleasure, and the dopamine response we get from eating sugar and drinking alcohol, and taking drugs answers that desire. Permanent weight loss requires understanding our primitive brain and recognizing urges for what they are – a false desire for survival through dopamine.

Our cortex understands and can reassure our primitive brain that we will not die if we fight an urge. We need our primitive brain to survive. We use our cortex to thrive. The difference is simple and profound.