The Predictive Brain and Weight Loss: Why You Do What You Do Around Food
Updated: 5 days ago
If you've ever tried to lose weight and been failed by diet after diet, this post is for you.
Before you turn away thinking this is more diet advice, give me just 3 minutes of your time and I'll help you understand something you may not yet know about yourself.
No, this is not advice about how to be more motivated, change your mindset or have more willpower. I want you to understand something about your brain and the decisions you make around food, exercise, relationships, and every other aspect of your life.
Learning about the autonomic nervous system changed my life. I began to understand why I reacted the way I did, why I could never fully relax and why I felt stuck in the same cycles over and over again. Learning about the predictive brain added a whole other level of understanding and also helped me understand why diets fail over and over.
I'm not trying to be a therapist here. This is not therapy advice. This is what I've learned about the way our brain is designed to respond to what's going on within us and around us.
Let me introduce you to the predictive system of your brain. I'm going to tell this as a story to keep it easy to follow and remove the complicated neuroscience spiel.
You come home tired after a stressful day. You have also been cutting your calories low all day. You are hungry, but you're not consciously noticing your hunger signals because stress is overriding your awareness of what's happening inside you. Your body is also under pressure from being hungry, and you see crackers and dip and start eating them without even thinking about it. All of a sudden you've eaten them all and feel like crap, physically and emotionally.
The first response is to see this as a motivation and willpower problem, but there are a few things going on here that most people have no idea about.
Your brain's fundamental job is to keep you alive and maintain the stability of your internal environment. In that moment, meeting your body's immediate needs can take priority over your longer-term goal of losing weight. Based on many years of experience, your brain is constantly using what it has learned, along with information from what is happening inside you and around you, to predict what is happening and what might help. In this situation, it may have learned that eating something sweet provides quick energy and helps reduce the discomfort associated with hunger and stress. Your conscious intentions can be overridden by automatic responses that have worked well in the past to solve similar problems.
It’s not that you consciously decided to abandon your weight loss goal. Your brain was responding to the information it had available to it and reaching for something it had learned could help. Once you understand this, you can start to look at the behaviour differently. Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” you can become curious about what was happening inside you, what was happening around you, and what your brain may have been predicting you needed in that moment.
Most diet books and plans focus on food choices, willpower, mindset and eating specific foods at specific times. None of this takes into consideration you, your environment, your stress levels, your experience of life.
This is why I've been developing the Getting to Know Yourself programme. This first 5 week programme in the Lose Weight Without Losing Your Mind framework. Not because I think that you don't know yourself, because I know you do. But because I could see the gap between what women are being taught is the problem and what is going on beneath the level of conscious awareness.
So if this sounds like a more powerful way to look at weight loss, and you are ready to explore a new perspective, I am offering 5 women the opportunity to join the founding cohort commencing on the 21st October.
You can find all the details about this program here...
This is a new way to look at weight loss, and an opportunity to get to know yourself on an even deeper level. This is not therapy, and is not designed to replace therapy, but you will finish the program with a better understanding of why you show up for yourself in the way that you do, with more empathy, more understanding and a clearer path towards a more sustainable way to lose weight.
If you'd like to chat with me about your weight loss experience, I’m always interested in listening and developing a deeper understanding of your needs. The weight loss industry has a lot of catching up to do, and there’s a lot to consider that goes way beyond food and calories.
Mel x
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