...and they say abs are made in the kitchen...

I often hear fitness experts say that getting six-pack abs is 70% diet and 30% exercise…but it’s my awareness that this formula is missing something. We all know a person (maybe it’s you) who is meticulous about their diet, spends an hour at the gym 5x/week, does everything "right", yet barely sees any long-term results. What’s up with that?

My interest in neuroscience leads me to believe that the missing piece that no one ever talks about is the mind – specifically, the subconscious mind.

In this post, I’m going to teach you how to harness the power of your mind to achieve the body of your dreams. If you would like to know the scientific premise for these tips, read my older posts "Brain vs. Mind" and "Taming the beast."

1) Make the image of your ideal body “familiar”

Because of the genes we inherited from our ancestors, our mind is wired to love the familiar and resist the unfamiliar. Think about hunter/gatherer times – the people that survived and passed on their genetics were the boring ones that ate from the same berry bush every day and drank water from the same stream – venturing out into the unfamiliar could (and often did) result in death.

For many of us, our body settles on a weight and shape that is familiar to us. If you aren’t content with your weight and shape, you can diet and work your ass off and see some changes, but the mind will be eager to direct the body to revert back to its “familiar” shape the first opportunity it gets.

The good news is you can teach the mind to make a new weight and shape familiar. I personally do this through visualization when meditating in a state of gratitude (state of gratitude = state of receivership). I show my subconscious mind exactly how I want to be in this world, and once my subconscious mind gets on board with my goals, changes are streamlined – they happen quicker and easier. Your mind starts working for you rather than against you.

So, give your mind a clear blueprint of the body that you want, and visualize/meditate on it daily so that image of yourself becomes more familiar to you than your current shape….which leads me to my next point…

2) Love, love, love

Ok, real talk - when you look in the mirror and aren’t happy with what you see, that typically triggers feelings of discouragement, disappointment, guilt, and shame – so you force yourself to go to the gym because you hate the way you look, and your workout feels like punishment. When it comes to eating, you starve and deprive yourself which isn’t sustainable and eventually leads to binging. For some people, hating themselves/being angry with themselves serves as their primary source of motivation…and in some situations, this seemingly works.

I, however, would like to propose that there’s a much more powerful source of motivation that we can tap into that’s actually in alignment with our design, rather than contrary to it. In order to prove my proposition, consider the following scenario:

Imagine a guy in the World’s Strongest Man competition – he’s currently tied for first place and the tiebreaking event is to lift up the front end of a car and whoever holds it up the longest, wins. So the guy is feeling good, feeling strong, feeling confident as this is an event that he has spent significant time training for. He lifts the car. He is using proper form and all of the cognitive strategies that his coach taught him to maximize performance. When he starts to struggle, he implements the mental techniques that have been proven to foster optimal focus and distraction from pain, but then he starts feeling like his fingers and arms are ripping out of their sockets, he feels the car starting to slip, he does everything in his power to keep holding on. The car drops. The thud was echoed just milliseconds later by the thud of his opponent’s car. The man lost the competition. While reflecting on his performance, he tried to pinpoint something he could have done differently…he drew a blank. He followed his training perfectly, he exhausted everything he had, there’s no way he could have held on any longer. Right? What if his kids were under the car and they would have died if he dropped it? Could he have held on longer? Love wins >>>

See, love is the most powerful source of motivation we can experience as humans…why? Because love never runs out. Drawing motivation from a place of anger, fear, hatred, greed, or a desire for glory has nothing on a motivation of love.

So, when you look in the mirror and you aren’t happy with what you see, this is what you say to yourself: “I love you. You are perfect where you are at on the way to where you’re going.” You might not believe that statement the first few times you say it, but with repetition, that perspective will become the new, default way in which you view yourself (for more info on how to effectively form a new belief/habit, check out my post called “Taming the beast”).

When you love yourself, taking care of your body temple becomes an inherently high priority. You want to give your body the gift of nutrients and movement that it deserves. You'll learn the language of your body and how to identify its needs far more reliably than any doctor, fitness guru, or diet expert.

That being said, I know loving yourself can be such a challenge in this day and age - so, I want to let you in on a secret: the only words that actually matter are the words that you say to yourself. See, the only reason other peoples’ words/society’s messages impact us is because we often let those words change our words. If someone were to tell me, “Mica, you’re unattractive”, but the truth that I stand firm in is, “Mica, you’re a gorgeous miracle of a human being", then I don’t have to let their words in. I don’t have to let them change the words that I say to myself - my narrative - the words that I know to be true. At any point, you can decide to become your own greatest cheerleader and the parent you never had. You can tell yourself all the things that you desperately need to hear in order to achieve your dreams, and you can rewrite your narrative. The words you say to yourself are far more potent, important, and powerful than anyone else's words to you - so choose them wisely.

**If you are really trying to upgrade your self-talk, but there’s another, louder voice in your head that’s consistently bringing you down, I’d suggest looking into the modality of hypnotherapy. ❤ Message me with questions.**

And finally, I just want to gently reinforce some existential truths (…because I like to take every opportunity to combat the rampant, BS beliefs that saturate our society)

By design, you are a genius, you are perfect where you are at on the way to where you’re going, you are beautiful, you are gorgeous, you are a miracle, you are gifted, you are unique, you have something of value to offer this world, you are entirely deserving of love, you are a treasure with immeasurable worth, and you are a force of light in this world. In a sense you have already won at life, because you are the only one who can be you. There has never been anyone like you, nor will there ever be again. You belong here. You are somebody’s hero. You are the answer to somebody’s prayer. That is the truth.

3) Zero-tolerance policy for negative confession

When you say things like my legs are the size of tree trunks, I have cankles, I eat like a pig, I can’t say no to sweets, my butt is the size of a barn – OR – I can never put on weight, I am genetically scrawny, etc. then your subconscious mind is saying, “Oh, fantastic! I’m doing my job! I’m giving them exactly what they want!” Seriously, the subconscious mind is like the friend that nobody likes – they take everything too seriously, they don’t understand your jokes, and they eavesdrop on your words constantly – yet, you keep them around because they care about you SO much and genuinely have your best interest at heart.

In any case, when you say and think things like that, your mind is using those phrases as a blueprint. The fields of epigenetics, neuroscience, and quantum physics continue to produce more and more compelling evidence proving that our thoughts and words have an incredibly powerful impact on the creation of our personal reality. We are not victims of our biology, genetics, or the nature/nurture aspects of our upbringing. When we use our minds correctly, we can change our brains, gene expression, internal environment, and external reality (for the scientific evidence supporting these statements check out my previous blog posts).

So if you are serious about changing your body, implement a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to thinking or saying things that you don’t actually want to manifest.

4) How to beat the addiction to sweets and processed foods

So, I learned something very important from my vegetarian/vegan friends: when you slap a sizzling, juicy steak in front of them, what they actually see is a dead animal that was inhumanely raised and slaughtered. A principle of the mind is that it responds very strongly to the images we make in our head. The food industry knows this, and uses it to maximize their profits at the cost of human health – this is why sugary “treats” are equated to heaven, luxury, pure bliss, and ecstasy, and it’s why they are always made to look so damn enticing. But let’s be real, that’s quite literally a gut-wrenching form of false advertising. If we can change the images we see in our head to more accurately reflect the truth about sugar – i.e. see it as a poison that contributes to cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, obesity, and the list goes on…it no longer looks very appetizing. Sugar cane is a food, bleached white sugar is a foodless food. It is so processed and weird that our body doesn’t even know what to do with it.

Now let’s talk about fats. First of all, the whole idea that eating fat makes you fat is completely false. We need good fats. The membrane (outer coat) of each cell in your body is made of fats. And where do you think your body gets those fats from? Your food. The saying “you are what you eat” couldn’t be more true. The main problem-child in the fat family is trans-fats. These guys show up in essentially every processed food out there because they extend shelf life. Again, just like with sugar, trans-fats are so weird that the body can’t do anything good with them.

Now time for some accurate advertising – here’s some images/ideas you can keep in mind next time you go grocery shopping:

Coke = diabetes in a bottle

Diet coke = liquid osteoporosis

Artificial sweeteners = a biohazard

Preservatives = the undigestible poison

Gelatin (jell-O and jelly candies) = boiled horse hooves

Margarine = glue

Sugar = has caused FAR more deaths in the United States than its identical twin, cocaine (oh, and they are both equally addicting)

The 7+ isles of the grocery store stocked with processed foods = where they sell all the cancer, cardiovascular disease, strokes, and obesity

“We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.” ~Alfred E. Newman

Alright, so the point is, saying “I don’t want to eat unhealthy foods anymore” usually isn’t enough. You need to literally start SEEING the unhealthy foods for what they truly are. This is a potent mind hack that will absolutely step up your ability to transform your body.

5) How to stop self-sabotage

So, a lot of times we use our minds incorrectly. We think things like “Don’t eat the cake, don’t touch the cake, don’t even look at the cake." But then 5 minutes later what do we do? We eat the cake. An interesting property of the mind (and the universe) is that they cannot actually distinguish whether we want something or we don’t want something, they just acknowledge that we are giving energy to the something, and then that’s what we attract more of into our lives. This is where the saying “what you resist persists" comes from.

On the other hand, your brain responds very well to empowering statements. To prove my point, give this a try: think of some food that you have a hard time saying “no” to. Now close your eyes, picture that food, and say to yourself “I can’t eat that, I shouldn’t eat that, I mustn’t eat that” and now change your language to “I choose not to eat that." Feel the difference?

Okay, the final tip is an important one. Do your best to completely eliminate the phrase “I’m trying to LOSE weight.” The word “lose” has a very powerful effect on the mind, and it will absolutely sabotage your weight reduction efforts. Your mind inextricably associates “losing” and “loss” with pain. Entertain me for a moment, and try to think of a situation where losing something (besides fat) is actually a good thing…you can lose your keys, your wallet, your cell phone, your loved ones, your hair, your mind, etc. It’s never good. So your mind thinks all loss is bad. When we say we want to “lose” weight, the mind is like, “Oh goodness, no. Losing things is painful. I won’t stand for that.” So, if you go on a diet and workout really hard, you might see some results, but overtime, all the weight comes back…and just know that your subconscious mind is very pleased about that. What does work is using more neutral words like “I want to reduce my weight, drop a dress size, or shed some pounds.” The mind doesn’t perceive those words as good or bad, so speaking this way will prevent you from going kamikaze on the quest to your ideal body.

Comment any questions, comments, concerns!

In health,

Mica

The summer before starting medical school vs. the summer after year 1 of medical school

#health #fitness #weightloss #powerofthemind #becomingsuperhuman #holistichealth