Will Power

inchwormbyinchworm

These are my personal notes from my favorite blogger that I want to share with you. I encourage you to read the original sources.



http://blackgirlsguidetoweightloss.com/its-all-mental/the-myth-of-will-power/



"If you’re not used to telling yourself no… where are you going to develop that herculean strength?

You learn self-discipline… you don’t just all-of-a-sudden find this giant mass of it within you. It’s a growth process. That stupid “all or nothing” mentality doesn’t apply."

Erika indicates in the article that first she controlled what she bought at the grocery store.

Then she avoided fast food.

Then she educated herself about what ingredients are in processed foods:

"If a company spends $30 million on studies for creating the “perfect spaghetti sauce,” and spends years on taste testing for the perfect balance… then guess what – they’re investing all of that money and doing all of that taste testing to find out which sauce will please the majority of the public. (Note: This will almost always be a sauce full of sugar and salt. The sugar makes it pleasing on the tongue and in the brain. The salt makes you want to use more of it.) It makes sense, then, that the majority of the public would be [find it difficult to say no to the sauce.]

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http://blackgirlsguidetoweightloss.com/its-all-mental/the-will-power-series-can-self-control-be-developed/



If one isn’t making conscious, mindful choices in their food intake, it can trigger a pattern of priming, incentive salience, and hyperphagia because of habituation… a pattern which can then be cemented by pleasant chemical reactions in the brain.

What do all these terms mean? Hyperphagia, incentive salience, dopaminergic activity…. why the hell can’t it be simple? Why can’t I just turn it down and go on about my business?

I like to think, really, that it actually is that simple… but the presence of processed food in our lives made it much more difficult. Once you know that you can experience X amount of satisfaction and “happy hormones” from eating X foods, you never unlearn that feeling.

It also takes time getting to the point where you can safely say “I’m okay with that."

Self control is about learning to wait. And be patient. And focus elsewhere.


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http://blackgirlsguidetoweightloss.com/tools-for-weight-loss/the-will-power-series-why-is-it-so-hard-to-develop-self-control/


[What is] the psychology behind habit development?

Priming (the act of being primed) is the unconscious development of a connection between two things. <snip>
priming allows a person to believe (without consciously remembering where it came from) that an item can make you feel a certain kind of way. It happens long before you actually begin to analyze the meaning of the connection.

priming creates unconscious connections between items and the way they can make us feel.

Conditioning is the affirmation of actually receiving that feeling after having acquired that item.

natural foods like fruits and vegetables, meats and the like, have their own built in mechanisms – sugar/sweetness, fat and salt/bitterness, also referred to as “hedonics” – to create pleasure in the brain.

The minimal amount of hedonics in food triggers what’s called a “dopaminergic response,” which basically means it compels dopamine – chief of the reward centers of the brain – to react to what you’ve done.

Processed food has those hedonics ‘all the way turnt up.’

steady overflow of dopamine in the brain actually results in the body becoming addicted to the response that comes with the excess dopamine, so
body starts requiring more of the stimuli in order to recreate the same levels of dopamine.

This is habituation: developing a tolerance to something, due to repeated excessive use, thereby requiring an increased “dosage.”

This triggers the hyperphagia… which is a polite term for “bingeing"

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https://blackgirlsguidetoweightloss.com/blog/the-will-power-series-saying-no-never-becomes-easy/

learning how to “say no” doesn’t erase all the memories you’ve connected to saying “yes” for your entire life.

The memories associated with all those “yes”es are damned powerful.

When I look at my food journals and think to myself about how much it’s gonna “suck” having to give up what I enjoy, I might groan and lament the new changes, and it might be one hell of a challenge to let go. But now, I have so much more to live for and enjoy, such a new perspective on life and living, and such a deeper understanding of how I’ve been handling my emotions… that I can adequately say that I have far more to lose by saying yes, and it makes saying “no” even easier.