Q&A 31 – Overeating: Why diets work temporarily

When we start a new diet or eating plan we often have success for the first few days. Why is that? And why does that success quickly fade away? In this episode, we discuss how this is caused by a lack of understanding about how our thinking works and how a deeper understanding of Thought can help us to resolve an unwanted overeating habit.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

* What specifically creates success at the beginning of a diet?

* Why does that success begin to fade?

* How does this phenomenon point toward the nature of our thinking?

* How is thinking related to unwanted habits like overeating?

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

* Unbroken episode 29 with Juliet Faye

Transcript of episode

Hello, explorers, and welcome to Q&A; episode 31 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor, and I’m so pleased that you’re here with me today. 

Today, the question we’ve got is, why do diets work temporarily? 

I stumbled across this idea, perhaps again, perhaps I haven’t encountered it before. But in a recent interview episode with Juliet Faye, Unbroken episode 29 – I’ll link to that in the show notes for this episode at unbroken podcast.com – and we were having a conversation and I had a big insight about why when we go on some sort of a diet plan, or some sort of program to overcome or conquer our unwanted over eating habit. Why do they work initially, in the beginning? 

Because they do. I’ve had this experience, and you probably have as well, where for the first, let’s say, two or three days, maybe a week speaking personally, at the outside, the plan that I’m on really seemed to work. It felt good, and I felt energized and excited. And things go really well for the, as I say, for the first few days, and then the wheels fall off. For me, the the longest I could go was maybe a week in a situation like that. And that happened over and over and over again. 

The really cool thing is that I realized in that conversation with Juliet, was that, that occurrence, the fact that these diets and programs that we try out, only work for a few days or a few hours, in some cases, is actually really great evidence for what the Inside Out understanding is pointing to. It’s evidence for the work that I do, and that the other practitioners do, who are sharing this understanding. And here’s why that is what happens. 

So, let me back up a little bit. When we have an unwanted habit, there’s part of us that enjoys it, of course, the indulgence and the feelings of comfort, and soothing and that kind of thing that go along with the unwanted habit. And what the habit is actually doing, like I touched on in last week’s q&a; episode, is it temporarily quiets down our thinking. 

I remember when I was doing some coaching work with Jason Shiers, and he said, this incredibly profound thing to me that really changed my world was that an unwanted habit or addiction, always comes back to a thinking problem. Always. It’s always a matter of overthinking. And we’re using that substance to quiet o...