Victor Frankl in the seminal Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote of how we find meaning through how we choose to live our life moment by moment. As a psychiatrist and a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp, where he lost all but one of his 20 relatives, he posed, for me, the most elegant of all scientific hypotheses: ‘If there is meaning to life, it can’t be a fair-weather meaning. It should exist here with me in this spartan life, in this concentration of suffering.’ It was a simple life in the camp and so there was less to examine – if meaning was there it was going to be easier to find. It was the one meal a day that ultimately proffered the answer. With the piece of bread and the bowl of swill, it dawned on Frankl that he had choices – some of which were more meaningful than others. ‘I could eat this bread now, or save it for later, or trade it for something to read. I could drink this swill immediately, or I could share it with my sick friend.’ Each choice had more or less meaning for him and as he pursued the more meaningful choices – like imagining himself speaking of his work at medical conferences in the future – he noticed a profound change not just in his immediate mood but in his outlook on life.

At many junctures during our day, we can choose to respond to life’s many challenges in a way that is more meaningful or less meaningful for us. In this way, step by step, moment by moment, we can create a more meaningful life. Franklreminds us that life is not inherently meaningful, but that it is through exercising our freedom of choice, that we make it meaningful, more rewarding.  This awareness forces us to work out what it is that we truly value, what it is that we want to choose to attend to – as I discussed in the recent blog on where we place our attention.  Through becoming aware of what is meaningful to us, for it is different for each of us, we can slowly but surely move our life towards our purpose and live in a way that aligns with our values.

Often we don’t even realise that we have the opportunity to choose. More to the point, we don’t want to. It is much easier to go through our days conveniently overlooking our opportunities to create meaning in our life. Like all forms of creation, it takes effort and it doesn’t always achieve the desired outcome – we can ‘fail’. By choosing we take responsibility for things not working out -  this is Existential Responsibility, the yin of the ‘choosing meaning’ yang.  ‘Failure’ is painful – but then nothing focuses us on what we need to learn more than pain. This is why pain gives us much more potential for growth – providing we don’t just beat ourselves up with it as I discussed in an earlier post. But this pain is nothing compared to the slow, inexorable, quiet despair of living a meaningless life because we don’t have the courage to take the responsibility and choose. A close second to this despair, that makes it all worse, is one’s disappointment in one’s self, deep down, for not having the courage to take this responsibility.

In an earlier post on managing ‘Lag-Time’, I wrote about what I see as one of the most powerful ways to master our mind and achieve true personal freedom. This is something I teach most of my patients – it is that important. By reducing our ‘Lag Time’ to zero we can finally exercise our freedom to choose and behave in a way that is conscious, a way that we choose, rather than being driven by old unconscious programming. (Lag Time is the time between when we trigger one of our old unconscious programs and when we realise we have done so.)

The other key to mastering our mind and making the most of our power to choose is to use this power of choice to focus our attention on how we want to feel. Whereas reducing our Lag Time is about taking control over what we do, the focus here is on taking control of how we feel. (Can I say at this point that I not talking about people suffering with intense grief, acute anxiety or clinical depression here – in those states we have little influence over the way we feel.)

So, how does it work? In any moment, we will feel certain feelings depending on which thoughts or feelings our mind is focussed on. Whatever we focus our attention on will simply expand in our awareness – in simple terms, we will feel more of it for longer. So, if you are focussed on that embarrassing thing you did earlier, you will feel, and expand, the negative feeling that went with it. If you are focussed on how productive you felt when you were working on that project at work yesterday, you will expand that positive feeling.

Now here’s the rub. From what I see in my psychiatric work, most people seem to ‘forget’ they are the masters of their mind. Indeed, I think our mind wants us to forget this ultimate truth. Why? Because it’s easier. One of the hardwired, very old programs in our minds is to find us the easiest way forward. Helpful for trekking up mountains and down valleys, not so helpful in running our emotional world. It was Eckhart Tolle who reminded us that our mind is just a tool, not the master. Like a hammer, we need to pick it up when we need it and put it down after we are done.

Your mind needs to be told what to focus on. Remember, whatever you focus on will expand in your awareness. Choosing what to focus your mind on is your primary responsibility as a human. This ability to choose our attentional focus separates us from other animals – so make the most of it! At any one time you could focus on a whole range of different thoughts or emotions that are hanging around in your mind. Take a moment to notice which ones are available to you. For some people they will feel more comfortable focussing on concrete thoughts, for others of you the focus will be an emotion.

You will find all kinds of thoughts and feelings hanging around if you let your attention wander over what is happening in your mind. Think back over the last few days. Think about what’s coming up in the next few days. If you wake up in the morning feeling warm and dozy, focus on that feeling, hang on to it. If on awakening your mind wants to focus on what you did wrong yesterday, think about it long enough to learn the lesson it is wanting to teach you (‘Next time I will handle that situation this way ….’) and then choose where to focus your mind next. (Or, if your good at managing your mind, you might say, ‘Not now mind, I will come back to that later – make sure you do, or your mind won’t believe you next time!) Don’t struggle with your thoughts, instead simply choose which thoughts or feelings you wish to connect too. These are the ones you will amplify. Some people prefer to focus by thinking thoughts about it, others by simply connecting to the feelings – whatever works best for you.

To really master this you will need to check-in throughout your day. Yes, this takes more effort but then there’s that reward … feeling better. What price that? Oh, and by the way you deserve to feel better!!

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Our mantra needs to become ‘I can have it if I really want it, but is it worth the calories?’ For most people who struggle with their weight the default mantra is ‘I can’t have it – so I will!’  But to shift mantras, first we need to be mindful enough to be aware that our unconscious is in play. Mindful awareness comes from learning to pause just before we eat something to wonder what is going on in our minds. So often we think we are making a conscious decision when we simply are not – when an unconscious mantra is in play.

I read a fascinating study published in Nature Neuroscience* that showed that our conscious mind becomes aware of a decision that we have already taken at an unconscious level up to 10 seconds later! This means that when we think we are taking a conscious decision we are often just rationalising a decision that we took using processes we have little awareness of. The challenge is to pause before we put food in our mouth and ask the question, ‘Which mantra is at play here?’

*CS Soon et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.  Nature Neuroscience 11:5;543-5, 2008.

Our children’s book has been a little while coming and while it will be a little longer before it is in stores (you can order your advance copy by clicking here) what we are really excited about is the song! Two really talented people – singer Jenny Wilson and musician Sean Peter – have just sent us their first cut of the Taste with your face song. One of the big issues for adults is that we ‘forget’ how to eat mindfully and savour our food – this is what the song is all about. While kids are much better at being present in the moment than us adults, we need to make sure that we don’t let them lose this wonderful skill. Mind you, while kids are better than adults at being present-centred, they also need help to keep focussed! Click here to have a listen:  The Taste with your face song. Please do us a favour and give us your feedback by clicking on ‘Comments’ below. If your computer has problems playing it then you can right click on it and first save it to your computer (e.g. to Desktop) and then play it from there.

Click here to access the GL Table from Weight Loss for Food Lovers

Recently Lulu wrote to me saying:

I have just finished reading Weight Loss for Food Lovers. I found that overall the methods that the book outlines have made an enormous impact on the way that i feel about and perceive my eating habits. Now that i have finished the book however, i feel that i am still lost in terms of knowing what foods i can eat freely and which ones i need to be careful with. Although the table at the end of the book gives a guide to eating based on Glycemic load, it does not incorporate the consideration of fats.

Please help!

Lulu is quite right, my book does not provide dietary details – it’s the book you read before you go on a medically sound weight loss plan – I recommend two in my book The Low GI Diet and the CSIRO Diet, or visit a recommended dietitian – here is a link to the one’s I have trained: approved dietitians. My book’s focus is on how deprivation of the foods we love will ultimately cause us to crash any weight loss plan. The only reason that I do talk about GL is to help people make sense of carbohydrates, which are now contributing to obesity much more than fat intake is. Most people know which are the healthier fats and lower fat foods, but they’re much more confused about carbs and GL is a great tool for making sense of this.

In my book I do go into some detail about how and when to eat the more fattening foods you love – both snacks and meals – around these times we need to eat in a healthy way. If you would like a brief (one page) overview of what I advise my patients to eat the rest of the time, click here.

I recently read a well-balanced article on this contentious subject in the Los Angeles Times (December 21) by Amina Khan. In the first case of its kind, in June 2009 a South Carolina mother, Jerri Gray lost custody of her son, Alexander, after being charged with criminal neglect. At the age of 14 he weighed 555 pounds (252kg). Ms Gray is facing 15 years on two felony counts. Other parents have been told to demonstrate progress in helping their children to lose weight or risk losing them.

Should parents be held responsible for their child’s obesity? The proponents of advertising junk food to children argue that what children eat should not be controlled by regulation, by a ‘national nanny’, it should be up to parents to ultimately decide what their children eat.  But can they? Can parents compete with the one billion dollars spent each year on the estimated 30,000 advertisements their children will see and be influenced by? Can parents compete with cheap junk food being available at every turn? It’s a  simple idea to blame and charge parents – but ‘simple’ is the only word I can find to explain the attraction of charging parents with abuse – pity that obesity is an incredibly complex pyschophysiological condition.

To my mind, we can’t blame parents until we first give them the resources they need to do the job properly and then they fail to use them. Government need to help them by treating the marketing of foods to children in exactly they same way as they treat the marketing of cigarettes and alcohol to children – for exactly the same reasons! Excess food, like excess alcohol, is dangerous to the health of our precious children. Secondly, parents need help in how to create healthy eating habits in their children – while our work is obviously all about this – we are at the beginning of a very long haul.

Let’s remember exactly why it is that we don’t advertise cigarettes and alcohol to children and why we don’t rely just on parents to discourage kids from smoking and drinking …

I’m really pleased that my wife, Penny, who did so much to make my first book a success, has agreed to co-author these children’s books with me. My wife and I have had a lot of fun (mostly) finalising the first book in our Food Loving Kids series. It has just gone off to the printer in the UK for a pre-Christmas release over there. It will be out in Australia in March 2010 (to find out the latest on this just subscibe to this site as I will be posting updates as we get closer to the release date.)

The first book, Taste with your face: Adventures in healthy eating, is all about teaching children to savour their food. Tasting with your face, rather than just your mouth, is about using your eyes and nose as well. In this way we come fully into the now to get maximum tasting pleasure – remember, we eat more because we taste less. By tasting more, it becomes so much easier to eat less.

I say ‘mostly’ had a lot of fun, because when I’m writing I normally only have myself to argue with. I could ask an opinion of someone and if I didn’t like what I heard, I could go away and do it my way. Not so now …

Today, driving to work, I had this troubling insight come to me. … I’ve realised Penny has this extremely annoying habit - she significantly improves any work I do!