If You Want to Lose Weight, You Must Lose the Heavy Thinking First

Weight loss is more about what’s on your mind than what’s on the plate from my experience.

“It’s like a weight lifted from my mind,” Charlotte said. I get this. Many clients say the same thing. But what causes this intangible weight? That feeling as if you’re wearing an antique nautical helmet.

Worry and stress weigh you down; your mood is heavy when you have a lot on your mind, and whilst this mostly happens when you’re trying to find answers to problems or obsessively thinking about what worries you, it also happens at other times.

When you’re trying to lose weight, you know that weight loss is more about what’s on your mind than what’s on the plate, right? So, how does too much thinking affect your weight?

Thinking About the Food You Eat

Weight loss clients tell me that food is always on their minds because it feels like they’re always thinking about what to eat.

Apart from when they eat. And how do I know this?

Because almost every weight loss client tells me how fast they eat.

I used to eat at speed as if I had ten siblings who would steal my food if I lingered. People used to look at my empty plate at buffet tables and implore me to try a few things, not realizing I’d already polished off my second plateful.

And when you eat fast, you can’t taste the food as your taste buds are on your tongue, so if you’re sliding food past them at speed, you don’t stimulate them, and they can’t register what you’re eating.

Strangely, they often stop thinking about food when they eat.

Maybe you think about food because it makes you happy.

Thinking about food gives you pleasure because dopamine is released at the thought of the food. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, says dopamine is not about reward but anticipation.

The more you think about food, the happier you feel, so it makes sense to follow the thought and eat.

But dopamine isn’t released as you eat the food.

And what happens when you decide to cut down on what you eat? Instead of releasing dopamine and feeling happy when you think about food, you start to feel deprived.

And that feels heavy.

Deprivation often feels a bit like punishment and can make you anxious. After all, aren’t you denying yourself something that you want?

Parents deprive their children of going out with friends and ground them as a punishment. People talk about sleep deprivation as something to avoid.

When you feel deprived, you think about something you want; let’s use chocolate as an example. You imagine chocolate, and then you imagine the taste of chocolate, and you fire up dopamine and think about how much you like the taste of the chocolate.

But then you remember you shouldn’t eat chocolate because you’re on a diet.

Instantly, you feel miserable because you want that chocolate, and you start to go into the ‘it’s not fair’ thoughts and feel bad. Why is your life so hard?

Heavy, heavy, heavy.

You’ve created the idea of what you want, and then you create the idea that you can’t have it, and you feel upset.

You Have Too Much on Your Plate

This applies to how much thinking you have about your life and weight and how much food you should have on your plate.

If you know that you need to lose a few pounds and put less on your plate than usual, you might feel instantly unhappy.

You’ll start thinking about how you won’t feel full after your meal and fire up the ‘it’s not fair’ thoughts again.

Dr Deborah Cohen, author of A Big Fat Crisis: The Hidden Forces Behind the Obesity Epidemic — and How We Can End It, says,

“People are designed to feel hungry when they see food. If they’re served too much, they eat more than they should. We should be doing things like standardising portion sizes. Every time you eat out, you’re putting yourself at risk for chronic disease because restaurants generally serve too much.”

If you’re eating out and there’s a 6’5” bodybuilder at the next table, and you order the same meal as them, the restaurant will serve you the same portion size. Why would you eat a generic serving size that someone has decided is right for you?

And do you think that you have to eat everything on your plate? Is this because you were told about starving children somewhere in the world and how you should be grateful?

And did you, like me, wonder how that last potato on your plate would help them?

If you struggle to leave food, make sure that you eat whatever part of the meal you like the most first. Many people like to leave their favourite food until the end of the meal to finish with that taste, but if you do that, you’re obliged to eat everything on the plate.

How Heavy are Thoughts?

When my daughter was young, she sometimes sat, brow furrowing, holding her head in her hands.

“I’m having important thoughts,” she told me as if the important thoughts were heavy. But maybe she was right.

In the late 1880s, an Italian scientist reported that thinking can make the brain grow heavier.

The scientist, Angelo Mosso, placed volunteers on a full-body balance, which looked like a large balance board. Then he asked them to concentrate on something.

And suddenly, their heads grew heavier.

It seems that thinking obsessively weighs heavy on the brain, and weight loss participants have a lot of obsessive thinking.

In 2014, neuroscientists David Field and Laura Inman at the University of Reading conducted a study where they found that when a person thinks deeply, more blood flows to the brain. Their findings are that harder mental tasks have a bigger impact than easy ones.

Reading a newspaper weighs less than a mathematics paper, and listening to music weighs more than a mind at rest. This may be why you feel lighter when you have less on your mind.

Think about it: if you’re constantly stressed, that’s a weight on your mind. A side effect of feeling weighed down by stressful thoughts is gaining more body weight.

But How Can Stress Make You Gain Weight?

When you’re stressed, the body releases more cortisol, adrenaline, and insulin hormones, and cortisol and adrenaline affect brain chemicals that cause you to crave foods you believe will make you feel better again.

Interestingly, as explained in this article by Dr Yildiz, when you have elevated cortisol levels caused by too much stress, the body cannot use stored fat and only burn glucose in the bloodstream or from glycogen stores.

In addition, when you’re stressed, you’re more likely to reach for a doughnut or hamburger than fruit or salad. You want the types of food that you think will make you feel better and are drawn towards sweet and fatty foods to give you energy.

Final Thoughts and Takeaways

If your body feels heavy and you want to lose weight, lose the heavy thinking first. If you get sucked into a vortex of thought about how difficult it’s going to be to cut down, that it’s going to take too long, that life will be miserable, stop.

Recognize that this feeling comes from what you’re thinking. You experience life via thought, and if you have heavy, unhappy thoughts, this is what you’ll feel.

Consider how good it feels to be free from constantly thinking about food, how easy it is to eat slowly and enjoy every mouthful, and how easy it is to eat less and feel your mind clear. And float as light as a balloon.

Thank you for reading my story.