Why You Don't Have a Relationship with Food

We can't just say, "Right.

That's it.

You and I are over.

Get out." Sometimes I wish we could.

I have worked with a fantastic man called Paul Beck, and he was a guest on this podcast not that long ago.

And Paul, well, he doesn't like this term either, and I must admit I'm not a fan of it, but he's known as a mindset coach.

And mindset is now so woke that I don't like using it.

Weight maintenance is not just about the food we eat.

It's about the way we relate to that food.

What else goes on around the food that we eat? Now, there has been a lot of studies done on how we become our own individual, our own personality, our own character, and basically, the most authoritative research says that we are conditioned to become who we are between the minute you enter the womb until the age of seven.

The first seven years of any human's life is when we learn the most that develops who we become.

What do I mean by that? It's not that somebody sits you down from the age of zero to seven and says, "You're going to be this, and then you're going to become a doctor, and you're gonna go to this school, and you're going to laugh at these things, and you're going to..." Of course not.

But in those seven years when our own communication is not governed verbally by how we communicate, when we pick up what we learn from the environment, from things we hear, from things that are done or that we do.

For example, as a baby when we cry, the chances are, Mum or Dad will come along and give us a cuddle, pick us up, or give us some food.

And however they relate to our crying is what we learn as the payoff.

We learn very quickly, "If I cry, I will get such and such." And it gets stored into memory.

And everything we do in our lives that have become habitual are stored in our brain's memory, and particularly s- sectioned out as to responses that make us happy and responses that make us sad or afraid, and it treats them very differently.

If we have taught our brain that there are certain foods we like, for example, as soon as we get into the car, the first thing we will do is open a bag of crisps that we've brought out with us, then every time you get into the car, the brain will relate that to, "Oh, it's time for us to have some crisps." If you come home from work, you're tired, you've had a great day, all you wanna do is sit down, peel off your shoes, have a lovely glass of wine.

And if you do that all the time, every time you come in through your door and you kick off your shoes, you will get a signal from the brain that says, "Time for a lovely glass of wine," and you will repeat it.

It becomes a habit.

It becomes who you are.

And as I say, a lot of the habits that we build started from when we were born, and it is very, very difficult to recognize what those patterns are, what those lessons were.

And Paul Beck, who, as I say, I mentioned earlier, a fantastic guest on this podcast, he has developed a method that he teaches on a regular basis, and it is called CYT, catch yourself thinking.

CYT.

Now, I am going to ask Paul if he will come back onto the podcast and actually go in depth about how it works, where it comes from, and give you some exercises that you can do to try and catch yourself thinking because he's the expert.