21st November, 2012
What do you say when you talk to yourself? Pay close attention. You may just learn something very important. Have you ever made comments like the ones below?
•I’m so fat and ugly.
•I know God loves me.
•I just hate myself!
•I’ve decided to change my lifestyle.
•I’m out of control.
•I’m in control of my choices.
•I deserve this soft drink.
•I think I can do it
•I’m so stressed.
•Why am I so depressed?
•I won’t give up.
•I can’t do it.
•I believe God will help me.
•I’m such a failure.
•What’s wrong with me?
•I understand what I’m doing wrong.
These statements reflect a mix of both thoughts and feelings. And that is exactly what the soul is —a blend of both mind and emotion. Our brain stores information. With our intellects, we think, reason, and choose how to respond to that information. Our feelings are direct responders to our thoughts. Without thought, there would be no feeling in the emotional sense. So to change your feelings, we must change your thinking. “As he thinks in his mind, so is he.” Proverbs 23:7. In essence, our most dominant thoughts “win.”
Thankfully, God has blessed us with the ability to experience the joy and excitement of life on an emotional plane. Yet every positive emotion has it’s negative twin. We would not be able to appreciate the height of joy without having tasted the depth of sorrow.
And so when we speak of the soul, it is both thoughts and feelings we address. Those thoughts and feelings ultimately drive us to action. The mind is the pilot of the soul; it is the control centre of our entire being.
All humans are designed by their creator to respond in specific ways, no matter what their spiritual beliefs may be. Just like the heart, liver and kidneys are designed to perform certain functions, the mind also has been physiologically designed to do its job. Therefore, it is very helpful to understand how God designed this magnificent globe of grey matter and see why it does what it does! We can better appreciate the complexity of our feelings and behaviours when we understand the physiology of the human brain.
Our brain is more masterfully engineered than any man-made computer. It has been programmed to respond with consistency to an endless variety of situations. But like a computer, our brain does not place judgement on its data. True or false, it just stores it day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year. Ultimately, we come to believe the strongest messages —those messages that have played the loudest and most frequently throughout our lives. But what if that information is wrong? Well just imagine what will happen if someone replaced the data that is stored in the NASA computers with wrong information. The result will be disastrous. The same is true with your mind.
Those who have studied human behaviour know that how we think drive our choices and behaviour. Our brain functions as a storage centre for information. Therefore there is no permanent way to change your behaviour without first changing your mind. That is why diet don’t work. All the change is external. And when the diet is over, 99 per cent of people revert to old behaviours.
Listen to yourself when you look in the mirror each morning. What words do you express as your resolve to lose that excess weight? How do you describe your body, your fitness, your energy, your self-control? If you keep telling yourself that you are fat and you hate exercise, you’ll continue to believe it . Those beliefs will sabotage your ability to make lasting change.
Like some others you’ve probably struggled to change old habits. You resolve to be successful this time. But how can you be successful when you have been programmed to fail. Experts agree that it takes twenty-one days to begin breaking an old habit. It takes at least as long to form a new one. Yet on an average, people can only stick to New Year resolutions for seventeen days. No wonder they fail.
Perhaps you are trying to shed that final ten, twenty, or thirty kilogrammes of body fat. Or maybe you have struggled for years to overcome a food addiction or an aversion to exercise. Before you have another go at it, try a more permanent approach. Try changing your mind before you change your behaviour.
Helpful Steps
•You need to have a healthy relationship with food
•Choose to refrain from some foods because you want to improve your health or feel better.
– know that you can have anything you want, anytime you want it, so you don’t have to have it all right now.
•Know when enough is enough and find other coping mechanism in life besides food to help you through tough times
• The easiest way to burn body fats and stay healthy is to move, move, move! When we engage in large muscle, sustained activity such as walking, biking, swimming, skipping or even dancing, we significantly increase the amount of fat burned for fuel.
We need to make conscious effort to get our bodies moving. For some, that means exercise. From my perspective, the “E” word represents a very specific activity designed to work the body for an intended result. It has its advantages. Exercise tends to be time efficient and, if done properly, can be very effective.
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