In the book, The Once and Future King, by TH White, Merlyn tells the young Arthur, and I am paraphrasing, that, “whenever you’re down, whenever you are hurt, whenever you feel that the whole world is against you and you have no friends, learn something.”
Really great advice, when we begin, and continue in, the process of learning our minds and emotions have to make a choice to override the thing that is bothering us with the thing we are trying to learn. And I am re-stating a principle that I have stated earlier, the emotions must follow the mind, not the mind the emotions. What I mean by this is that we will still feel bad for a while when we begin the process of learning, but we will lose the bad feelings as we continue on.
Let me restate our minds must not follow our emotions, we must allow our minds to lead. The idea of following your heart is wonderful in fiction, and sometimes it works out in real life too, but most of the time it leads to trouble. How many of us have put high calories food in our mouths because we followed our emotions? Let’s take this up another notch, how many of us have found ourselves in deep trouble of all other kinds because we followed our emotions?
There was a saying years ago that went like this, ‘common sense isn’t that common.” And the saying is accurate on the surface of behavior, but underneath I think you will find that, it’s not the lack of common sense, so much as the lack of listening to our brains and ignoring our emotions. The days of, “if it feels good, do it,” must end, and the days of “do what is best”, what our “minds tell us to do,” must come to the forefront. Let’s stop allowing our emotions to lead our lives, and begin to allow thinking out our lives to lead.
A good practice to begin this process is to learn. Reaching any goal, involves the process of learning, weight loss in particular. We have to learn what foods are good for as well as how to prepare them, some of us need to learn which one are bad for us as well. I know in my own process, I have found out that some foods that I thought were bad for me are good for me, and other that I thought were good for me were bad. We don’t always know what we think we know.
This week, go out and buy or borrow from a library a simple book on nutrition. Nutrition for Dummies, is a good place to start or any book in the whole “Dummy” series. Watch the healthy programs on The Food Network. If you are already advanced in these areas, pick a subject that already interests you, such as, wel… anything in the entire world. In other words stop concentrating on what you want and start concentrating on what you don’t know. This small step will begin to move you away from emotional eating as well as other emotion based behavior, and move you toward a life that is thought out and planned.
I am not anti-emotion. Emotion provides us with some of our most beautiful moments in life. I am anti emotion driven lives. This type of living is what leads us to lives of excess and ultimately pain.
