Let’s touch on what goes on in the brain.  I like analogies.   To keep it simple, we’ll say you have 2 “brains”. A small logical “thinky” brain, and a big powerful emotional brain.

In the book, The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathon Hardt suggests we imagine it like an elephant with a rider. Your logical brain (the rider) has a flyswatter to steer the emotional brain (the elephant).

When everything is going just fine, it’s pretty easy to steer the elephant. But when the elephant gets annoyed, bored, startled etc … it completely overrides any instructions from the rider.

Over the course of a working day, you’re using your logical brain (the rider) a lot. By the end of the day, it’s exhausted.

So when the elephant decides to smash some cake at night because it’s bored … the rider feebly puts up some resistance (“Bad elephant”, a couple of whacks from the flyswatter)

The elephant completely ignores the flyswatter and smashes the cake anyway.

The rider says “I’m a failure, I have no willpower … sob” 😭

The elephant says “Shut up, I’m trying to eat this cake” 😡

You get the picture … humans are not logical, we are predominantly emotional, it’s what distinguishes us from robots.

Yet somehow, on our weight loss journey, we think things should follow a logical pattern.

You can try to beat the elephant, but in the end, the elephant always wins.

Why do people still smoke despite knowing how damaging it is? Logically, it’s a terrible idea. But we aren’t logical.

So, it looks kinda bleak … and it’s made worse by the fact that our brains have basically been hijacked by marketers, who know exactly how to make our brains work against us with food marketing.  That cupcake is SUPPOSED to be irresistable.

If permanent weight loss is the goal, you have to learn how to work with your brain, instead of fight it.

By the time the elephant is eating cake, it’s too late. The conditions that led to the elephant eating cake, happened long before.

I can give you tactics … like, go for a walk, or drink a mug of tea (not a bad idea), but eventually, tactics alone don’t work. You end up basically just putting out fires every day, and never making progress.

Willpower can be strengthened like a muscle, but it still gets used up. You can only “white knuckle” fat loss for so long before it fails.

This is why diets have an 80% failure rate within 1 year and a 95% failure rate within 3 years.

This is why I have the hashtag #noFNdiets

Diets are you trying to fight the elephant and win.

So, yeah, this is why I developed my program Lifestyle-180.

It’s overwhelming for most people to try and figure this all out themselves and how to navigate it.

What is nutrition coaching? I’m like a tour guide who comes along to help you steer the elephant, and I know the path pretty damn good, because I’ve walked this path hundreds of times with people.

The path is never going to be easy, but I show you a shorter, easier path to permanent fat loss (Destination Awesome) than you going it alone.