Diet free weight loss – With the Third Area theory.

My wife has been trying to loose weight ever since we met. Over the years she has tried almost every diet under the sun; the cabbage soup diet, the Atkins diet, slim fast, weight watchers and more recently the Paul McKenna’s “I can make you thin” diet. Now I cannot say that these diets do not work, a few might do, but never for the long term.

Although my wife is aware that she is overeating, she has said to me many-a-time that she cannot control her desire to eat, its overwhelming. Being an ex-smoker I know exactly what she means, she is addicted. This got me thinking, I wanted to understand who or what is controlling this overwhelming desire. After a lot of conjugation and deliberation I have come up with the “Third Area” theory.

To understand addictions one has to look at how the mind works, it is commonly known that we have two theoretical areas of the mind:

The first is the conscious mind; this is where decisions like “I am going to loose weight” and “I am going to stop smoking” are made. The majority of us have full control over this area because its state is easily altered (it is programmable).

The second area of the mind is the subconscious; I like to think of this as the Neanderthal or animal mind, this is the area of the mind that controls your breathing, heart beat, fear, pleasure, pain etc. The state of this area of your mind cannot be altered (it is hardcoded).

To explain these two areas a little more, let us take an example of my wife making a decision to exercise on the treadmill, the decision “I am going to exercise” is made in her conscious mind, the actual process of running, which if you think of it, is incredibly complex involving the simultaneous contraction and relaxation of hundreds of her muscles, the raising of her heart rate and breathing etc, she does not have to think bout this, it is all controlled by her subconscious. I hope you can see from this example that the subconscious area of the brain is crucial for our survival, and why it has evolved to be so hard to be reprogrammed.

In order for humans to survive we have, through natural selection, evolved the ability to adapt to our constantly changing surroundings. This, I believe is controlled by the third area of the mind. This area of the mind would normally lie dormant and only be triggered into operation during periods of hardship (“I need to survive”). However, for reasons that I will not get into here, the third area of the mind has been ‘switched on’ in humans in almost pandemic proportions. Because of the nature of the conscious and subconscious minds they are not able to deal with sudden hardships, the third area however is designed to be a medium between the two. So when the area of the subconscious mind that is hardcoded with “I need to eat or I’ll die!” is linked to the momentary programmed area “That tastes nice!” of your conscious mind and is stored in the third area as “I need to survive” “I need to eat or I’ll die” “That tastes nice”) you can start seeing why my wife cannot control her eating.
I must say that even if the third area of our mind has been turned on, it is programmable and because we have full control over our conscious mind. Anyone of us can loose weight without silly diets. As ridiculous as it may sound, always remember “you are in control of you”.