The covid crisis and related idle cycles in brain left me to give a deep thought about weight loss and the concept of mind & body.
The inception to the deeper thought process started with hitting a wall with my weight loss plan. I was on a low carb — low calorie diet, having 1200 calories per day and had lost 14 kgs in a span of 4 months. I wanted this badly.
The low carb diet took a toll on my physical activity and reached a point where body was beginning to stall. I couldn’t get out of sofa or bed and the body wanted to not burn any calories and was in hibernation mode.
This is when i started wondering
why is the body not behaving the way I want to ?. My mind is literally telling my body every second that there is abundant food and we don’t need to store it as fat cells.
If “I” the mind is the super power controlling every aspect of this body, then why isn’t it able to instruct the body to stop storing food as fat cells. There seems to be some disconnect between them.
Shouldn’t weight loss be as simple as my mind telling the body to not rely on new food(eat), use the existing fat cells for energy ! Trust the mind when it says we have money to buy food and food is abundant !
The next question that came is about who is the boss ? A boss has ultimate powers and he wants to drop the fat cells, but he doesn’t seem to have control over this massive body. Mind is able to lift hands, legs and control certain aspects of the body, but when it comes some internals such as organs and the working, it seems to not have control.
Does that mean, the body controls the mind ?
Let us attribute a Mind’s lack of control of involuntary organs such as heart, blood vessels, liver, digestion, etc as outsourced functions that are in self-driving mode (auto-pilot is old school). Mind could have thought that these are routine operations and I need to focus and spend time processing Audio and Video input which is both time consuming and immediately impacts me and my body.
Now let us argue the body’s point of view and why it can actually be the boss. Body can also change mood, because of the food that we put it or the quality of the air we breath. The body uses pain and fatigue as ways of communicating back to Mind asking it to find better food or rest. Obviously with weight loss, body has its own way of dealing with things and it has done this probably for several million years.
This led me to search and watch some videos about Psychology. The most interesting point in Psychology states that I don’t have to constrain my views, thoughts and ideas to facts. I am free to imagine anything without constraints, state them and later work towards to proving that the outcome of certain experiments prove this outcome.
This article is full of questions, with no direct answers, will cover some findings that i have gathered down the rabbit hole. The key take away and the questions that you need to ask yourself is
Why is the mind(brain) unable to control the body ?
