As women over 40, we are taught that weight loss is the secret to happiness.

Stop weight loss self-sabotage by understanding our primitive brain's agenda.

Wondering how to stop weight loss self-sabotage?

Your cave woman brain only wants you to do three things: avoid effort, avoid pain, and move toward pleasure. To lose weight, we need to do exactly the opposite.  Here's how.

 Back when our early ancestors were focused on just surviving, our brains needed to be focused on three main things, which we call the motivational triad.

1.  Avoiding effort (which is why your brain always tells you that you don't need to work out). Back in the day, calories were hard to come by, so any time your brain could keep you safe in the cave and not wasting energy was a great thing.

2. Avoiding pain.  In the cave, this kept us from walking into the fire in the cave.  Pain bad.

Nowadays, though, there's really not too much risk of physical pain for most of us most of the time.  We have seat belts and most of the tigers are in cages.  So our primitive instinct to avoid pain is mostly focused on avoiding emotional pain.

Sometimes the emotional pain isn't some deep seated childhood drama – it's the pain of telling ourselves we won't have a cookie because it wasn't on our plan, but that we can put it on the plan for tomorrow.  Your brain will always steer you away from pain.  It thinks it's helping, but it's really undermining our ability to get what we most want in the long term by recommending we give in to short term desires.

3.  Moving toward pleasure.  Again good when we needed a reason to take the risk of getting out of the cave to get berries and to procreate.  But today, food scientists have taken a naturally sweet berry and turned food into food products, scientifically determining the maximum sweetness we can tolerate so they hit the “bliss point” and keep us coming back for more.

Our poor primitive brain is no match for the planning brains of the food scientists.

So given the fact that our primitive brain is wired to survive in olden times, not thrive in modern times, what's a savvy lady to do to maintain her health?

Well, good news.  We've got newer hardware up there – the fancy modern prefrontal cortex.  The planning brain can put together a plan for our long term benefit, and then the conscious mind can choose at each moment to ignore the arguments from the primitive brain and stick to that plan.

Your primitive brain doesn't have any control as long as the conscious mind is in control.

The way we keep it in control is shining the light of awareness on the chatter of the primitive brain and making conscious choices to ignore it or to persuade it to get on board with the plan.

And the way we do that is with coaching.  Coaching helps us stop weight loss self-sabotage.

Are you ready to get coached?  Schedule a time to get started by clicking here.