I don't know the diet you're following, but I'm sure there are certain foods you obsess about and feel deprived because you can't have them. These foods surely must include Giant Salamander, Chimpanzees and Gorillas, Caribou, African Forest Elephant, Green Sea Turtle, River Dolphins and Gaurs (a wild relation to the cow found in Southeast Asia).
What's that you say? You don't feel deprived by not eating these foods? Why not?
The answer, obviously, is that you don't focus your energy on any of these foods (you probably never even heard of some of them). But some people would feel very deprived if they couldn't get these "delicacies" (all these animals are on the list of endangered species that people still eat).
Let's consider that word "deprived." Consider first some things that have nothing to do with food. Do you feel deprived because it doesn't snow in the summer? Do you feel deprived because you don't live in France? Do you feel deprived because you don't have a 55-room mansion?
You probably don't feel deprived, but why not? It's because you don't obsess over these things just as you don't obsess over the foods mentioned in the first paragraph. Maintaining an obsession requires that you focus intense energy on the object of your obsession and it's unlikely that you focus intensely on any of the foods or items I've mentioned so far. If you did, you would, indeed, feel "deprived."
You see, the reason you feel "deprived" when you're on a diet (or the reason you feel "deprived" by not having anything) is because you tell yourself over and over and over and over and over again that, because you've chosen not to eat certain foods, you are deprived.
You may read that and say, "That's too simple." If that sounds too simple, it's because it is simple. Getting over feeling deprived requires that you stop telling yourself that you're deprived.
I'm sure you've heard the saying that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth. In fact, anything that we repeat often enough will become the truth for us. If we keep telling ourselves how deprived we are, it's not a mystery that we believe ourselves to be deprived.
In other words, it requires work to imprint on our brains the thought of deprivation. But we've been doing this imprinting for so long that it now feels like the truth. We simply forgot that we were the ones doing the imprinting.
Any habit (being right handed, speaking English versus Mandarin, getting angry at a particular relative and finding some foods pleasant and some repugnant) gets hardwired into our brains through continual repetition. We've been doing this for so long that we've simply forgotten that we created that habit. This repetition creates connections in our brains that, over time, we come to call "who we are" and we feel deprived or, at the very least, uncomfortable when we try and break that habit. We call this discomfort "deprivation."
In a very real sense, we choose to feel deprived. It doesn't feel like a choice because we've been choosing in this way for so long that the thought seems like so much a part of us. We've simply forgotten that we created it.
You have to hypnotize yourself into believing you're not deprived in the same way you hypnotized yourself in the first place: Through repetition. Catch yourself when you are suffering because you're "deprived" and change that to a different mantra such as, "I love the way I feel about myself when I choose only healthy foods."
Will you immediately feel relief? Of course not. If you suddenly decided to change from being right handed to being left-handed you wouldn't immediately feel comfortable about the change. But if you used your left hand exclusively, eventually, left-handedness would become your new habit.
Moving from "deprivation" to satisfaction requires repetition...the same way any habit gets created. Replace your self-talk that reminds yourself of your "deprivation" with self-talk that reminds yourself of why you're on your diet in the first place.
And be patient. As Dr. Wayne Dyer says, "Infinite patient produces immediate results."
How many diets have you been on in your life? How many have worked? The answer is: all of them. They have all worked and the proof is that you've lost weight on every diet you've been on. But you haven't kept the weight off. Why?
You know that losing weight and keeping it off is a choice, yet you fail to maintain the choice you have made because of blind spots you don't even know you have. You must transform your thinking before you can transform your body. Let me show you how to do that.
Go to http://www.choosetoloseweight.net/ and buy my eBook for only $3.99. What have you got to lose (oh wait. You already know the answer to that question).
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