Self-image lessons from a plastic surgeon
Hello, good morning everyone. So with Octagon Fall challenge kicking off a week today, which is an eight week total health challenge, I want to cover what the book club is and the two books, and then a bit of information from the first book, which I think is quite a fascinating book in the history of it. Two books, first one is Psycho Cybernetics, which essentially is the first book written in 1966, it's kind of the first self help book that penetrated deeply into a practical change maybe. So there's a lot of quotes going about and all that, but this book really has a fascinating origin where the author is a plastic surgeon and realised that people would come to him, he would kind of fix them or whatever they thought would fix them, say their nose or scars, and afterwards some people's lives would be completely changed. They would go from like a really quiet shy person to a totally confident person overnight, and he was like this is amazing, the power of my hand essentially.
Speaker 1:But then what he realised was actually there's some people that are coming in and I'm doing the best kind of facelift or whatever it is, I've got rid of the scars or whatever, but they still haven't changed it afterwards. So he realised actually it wasn't his hand that was the magic wand here, that it was their self image that became the magic wand. So if their self image didn't change after surgery, then nothing changed, no matter how much physical change happened. And I've covered this in many podcasts about weight loss. Unless you're working on your mindset and your self image of yourself and how you see yourself, if you're not seeing yourself as being a healthy person, taking daily action on that, the byproduct of this is if you take any steps in, you're looking after your food intake, you're high protein, you're doing weight lifting a few times a week maybe, or some form of exercise, you're not catastrophising, you understand mindfulness, you understand awareness of food, you understand emotional eating, you're curious like a scientist.
Speaker 1:All of these things come together and that is a healthy person and that is you. If you don't think that and you think I'm just going to do this for a bit to lose weight and then things will change, well that's never worked and that's never worked at all because once you reach the goal you're like, well I'm no more confident, I haven't worked on myself, I don't understand anything more about nutrition because I've gone on a crash diet, I'm more confused than ever, why am I not happy, actually I need to get abs now and you keep moving the goalpost forever. This is very common and this book covers this in a different angle where it's a genuine physical change overnight. It's like someone saying I want to lose 100 pounds and overnight 100 pounds are gone. And then the same situation will happen, some people's lives will be changed of course, some people are like, that's amazing, I'm done, I'm happy now, I'm confident.
Speaker 1:But then that will become the new norm and there will be someone else, right? But then there will be some people even after the weight loss, they'll still see themselves in a bad light. And that's what he's getting to the point of in this book. You need to think about that deeply with yourself as well, like, am I restricted to myself image, or what I think my self is? Now he does talk in the book as if the self image is a new discovery in the 1900s.
Speaker 1:It's not. The Buddhists and stuff, you go back thousands of years, they talk about the self. But they talk about the self as this kind of entity that we create inside ourselves, and the self as an image, and the image is made up of essentially all your experiences and memory. There are some core beliefs, and this is again known in CBT, there's core beliefs that we subconsciously live from, that we think are facts, we think a lot of these things are facts, they're not facts at all. Unless we understand that, true change can happen.
Speaker 1:Now James Clear mentions this in Atomic Habits. Says true change is an identity change. He's just saying the same thing in a different way. This identity, our identity, is our self image. And our self image is put together mainly by what other people say about us.
Speaker 1:That's the crazy thing, we don't maybe realise it right now but it kind of is that. A lot of the chunk of our self image is put on us by other people. Oh, you're stupid, oh you're silly, and Dean Leek mentions this when he does talks, right? He thought of himself as stupid in school because someone said it to him once and he lived with that for years. And he worked on the team that did the book The Chimp Paradox, it talks about this, there were memory bank where the computer stores these things away, these belief systems away.
Speaker 1:This has all been touched upon a lot in different many ways now, and this book is the original modern interpretation of it. So let me share some core to do now about this book. We're gonna cover the book in the first four weeks, what happens is every Thursday we're gonna meet live on Zoom, there'll be replays obviously, and we're gonna chat about what we've read so far. I'm also gonna do a little slideshow for the first ten minutes with key quotes and discussion points, so even if you don't have time to read the book, you can still join the book club. Okay?
Speaker 1:So he says in the book, your key to a better life. Okay? The most important psychological discovery of this century is a discovery of the self image. Whether we realize it or not, each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It may be vague and ill defined to our conscious gaze.
Speaker 1:In fact, it may not be consciously recognisable at all, but it is there, completely down to the last detail. This self image is our own conception of the sort of person I am. It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves, but most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences of success and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood. Okay? From all of these mental constructs is self or the picture of the self.
Speaker 1:Once an idea or belief about ourselves goes into this picture, it becomes true. As far as we personally are concerned, we do not question its validity but proceed to act upon it as if it were true. The self image can be changed. Numerous case histories have shown that one is never too young or too old to change his self image and thereby start to live a new life. The trouble with these students was that that they weren't dumb or lacking in basic aptitude.
Speaker 1:The trouble was the inadequate self image. I don't have a mathematical mind. I'm just naturally a poor speller. They identified with their mistakes and failures instead of saying I failed that test. Factual and descriptive.
Speaker 1:Again, this is objective covered in Tiny Harbets as well. You must be objective in your data. You cannot say you are that. They concluded I am a failure instead of saying I flunked that subject. They say I am a flunk out.
Speaker 1:For those who are interested in learning more of Lecky's work and he talks about that. Okay, that's an interesting one, okay, because a lot of you will put weight on over a weekend, and no matter how many times I say it, a lot of you still believe it's fat gain even when your calories and protein have been around your target. So if you're on a fat loss target and you hit that target, you're in a deficit. So if you're in a deficit and you've hit your calories, you've hit the protein, you've got your steps in and your weight's gone up, a lot of you still believe that's fat gain. You identify with the fact that you've gained fat and that there's something wrong with you, then you go down the rabbit hole, there must be something hormonally wrong with me, this and that.
Speaker 1:Your weight will go up and down every single day no matter how good the day before was. Some days you have a day of eating crap and you wake up the next day and you actually weigh less. And some days you have bang on macros and you wake up the next day and your weight's gone up. This is part of it. Your weight fluctuates at least within the zone of five pounds.
Speaker 1:Between zero to five pounds, your weight will fluctuate, but over time it will trend down. Right? Now a lot of you will say, again, if you look at the spelling, I'm just an atria pose where there's something wrong with me, instead of just saying my weight has gone up, objective, fine, that's no problem, you say I've gained fat, there's something wrong, and you go down this catastrophising route. And it happens all the time. And you have to catch yourself doing this, because if you were to tell your best friend or you're trying to teach someone about these things you would say the opposite.
Speaker 1:You'd say, Look at the facts. Your weight has gone up, fact. Your weight is meant to go up and down. Fact. Your body is 60 to 70% water.
Speaker 1:Fact. Your water weight will fluctuate every day. Fact. Fat gain? You cannot accumulate more fat mass if you're in an energy deficit.
Speaker 1:Fact. You can't gain fat. You can't store excess energy away when you haven't provided the body with excess energy. You can't fill the reserve tank up of fuel when you don't put any fuel in. Where is it coming from?
Speaker 1:Where is the energy coming from? It's not being made up of thin air. Water doesn't contain energy, but it is weighted. It's got weight to it. And that is why your weight changes, but weight isn't the main thing, it's fat mass.
Speaker 1:So you're going to lose fat mass. Weight is not guaranteed, but if you're in a deficit, fat mass is guaranteed to be lost. As well as muscle mass if you're not careful, if you're not eating a high protein diet. I see this happen all the time, though, I'm an anxious person', for example, I'm anxious, I'm always an anxious person' or 'I felt anxiety in that moment'. You can't base your entire way of living off these moments.
Speaker 1:Obviously, before a competition, I feel anxiety. I'm not anxious all the time, but it's normal to feel anxiety and nerves. If we didn't have anxiety, by the way, we would be dead. Anxiety is this byproduct of being vigilant as humans have evolved. It's a very good thing to be on alert.
Speaker 1:It's not a bad thing, but we can use our frontal cortex and executive function to say if it's worth keeping the anxiety on or not. When you get anxious, you see something move in the dark and your body's oh, what is it?' and then you realise it's like a balloon and then you settle down, right? And then it goes away. You don't keep the anxiety on after you realise it's a balloon and not like a massive rat. And you've all got examples of this.
Speaker 1:You shake someone and you realise it's nothing. Well you're going to get this anxious stuff sometimes maybe when you see your weight go up or when you look yourself in the mirror sometimes and you feel oh I'm not looking but I'm bloated and then you need the reality to check-in on that. It's not fat gain, so calm down like it's a balloon. And you look in the mirror and you're like, I'm bloated because yeah, I've had food and bloating is part of the process. Fine, it's not fat.
Speaker 1:And you should be calming down. But because you think these things are true, they build up, catastrophize and they actually become real. Let me just say about the way he talks about the plastic surgery does, and then I just want you to think of your self image today and what you think it is and write it down. What about all the others who acquired new faces but went right on wearing the same old personality? Or how explain the reaction of those people who insist that the surgery has made no difference whatsoever in their appearance.
Speaker 1:Every plastic surgeon has had this experience and has probably been baffled by it as I was. No matter how drastic the change in appearance may be, are certain patients who will insist that I look just the same as before, you didn't do a thing. Friends, even family, may scarcely recognize them, may become enthusiastic over their newly acquired beauty, yet their patient herself insists that she can see only slight or no improvement, or in fact deny that any change has been made. Comparison of before and after photographs does little good except possibly to arouse hostility. By some strange mental alchemy, the patient will rationalize, of course, I can see that the hump is no longer in my nose, but my nose still looks the same.
Speaker 1:Or the scar may not show anymore, but it's still there. Nor can such a theory explain the people who visit the office of a plastic surgeon and demand a facelift to cure a purely imaginary ugliness. There are 35 to 45 year old women who are convinced they look old even though their appearance is perfectly normal and in many cases unusually attractive. Such imaginary ugliness is not all uncommon. A recent survey of college co ed showed that ninety percent were dissatisfied in some way with their appearance.
Speaker 1:If the words normal or average mean anything at all, it is obvious that ninety percent of our population cannot be abnormal or different or defective. Yet similar surveys have shown that approximately the same percentage of our general population find some reason to be ashamed of their body image. Right, okay, so what's going on here? You'll find out in Book Club where we're going get into this in-depth. There's going be some deep chats about this stuff, guys.
Speaker 1:It's important things. We can do any physical changes we want. If the root isn't looked at, the root isn't changed, you're not changing at the root, you're not changing at all. Different leaves coming on the branches, okay great, but it's still the same root, same tree. So I think about this.
Speaker 1:Fascinating topic. I love this stuff because when I read this stuff and I read Buddhism and I read Krishnamurti, the philosophy of Krishnamurti and I read stoicism and I read various texts and stuff. These striking sentences, they just hit a truth card within me and I look at them and go 'wow, that's so true'. It's just bang on. It strikes me instantly how important these matters are.
Speaker 1:He talks in the book as well about it's like positive thinking doesn't work because it's like you're not changing a self image, you're forcing some positivity on top of it and the root is not changed. He talks about this, and this is in the 50s, imagine you would have seen today's world where you've got a lot of this fake positivity going around that actually goes against us. This neutrality view is probably the best view. I'm neither positive or I'm a pessimist, I am neutral and I understand reality. Being in the middle of the storm and being calm and collected reality you don't get distorted by the emotions or this and that.
Speaker 1:And I think that's one of the key things. It's like, can I look at myself like a scientist? Which is in the middle. Some scientists obviously have biases, and like we're humans, but you don't want us a scientist. You want to be able to look at data whether you like it or not, it's going to say the facts and if it goes against your hypothesis, Your hypothesis is there to be either proven or disproven.
Speaker 1:So you look at your numbers, I look at myself, I look at my stats, look at my data, look at my day to day. It tells a picture and that's the picture, it is the numbers and facts and I go okay. I've eaten too much energy in the last seven days. My steps have been too low. My steps are low.
Speaker 1:These are just full stop at the end of these things. There's no need to add a story, an emotional turbulence to them. We will look at the facts and we put actions into place daily in our lives which increases the by product of a healthier, happier, more resilient human being. That's what it's about. I get emails, I look at the turtle emails, I look at the emails we get in other domains, in Instagram and so on, not the emails but TMs.
Speaker 1:And a lot of people have got this problem where they're still I use the word obsessed but maybe it is obsessive, I don't know. Maybe they're still stuck on the numbers on the scale as opposed to the actions they're taking. So I'll finish with this. Would you rather be the person that can manipulate total body weight in a few days? So you can go on an Epsom salt bath, can go on a sauna, you can drop seven pounds, yeah?
Speaker 1:Drop seven pounds overnight, but you haven't been walking, you haven't been hitting a good intake of calories, you haven't been hitting your protein, you haven't been doing any exercise, none of that. You've simply dropped a lot of weight and when you wake up the next day you're seven pounds down, but it's water. Would you rather be that person or would you rather be the person that actually wakes up, gets their steps in, good for their mental health, and the best exercise you can do, has a good intake of calories, energy, hits their protein target, lifts weights for their bone and muscle density which is a key for long term health, reads five or 10 pages of a book a day, but hasn't lost weight overnight, has actually put a pound on. Which one of those do you want to be? And if you are the first person, you really need to read this book because if all that matters for you is optimising your weight, regardless of the fact if it's fat or whatever, and it's just weight you care about, you are stuck to some old core belief about weight being the most important thing in the world based on magazines and diet culture back in the day.
Speaker 1:You are stuck in the past. You are stuck in a false world, and it's causing you pain. It's gonna cause you pain and suffering until you die. Sorry. If you are person b, you've you've succeeded because that's where you wanna be.
Speaker 1:You wanna be the person that looks at actions, not end results. I take these actions because they are the actions of a healthy person. Over time, they will equal a healthy resilient person that's going have a long happy life, which has got a high level of quality. Focus on doing those actions, let go of the results. The results will take care of themselves, I promise you.
Speaker 1:So stop only looking at 'if my weight's come if my weight's come down, if my weight's come down'. It will come down as long as you do those actions. And you do those actions with a smile on your face and be so serious about these things take smile on your face, go out on a walk and enjoy yourself. It's not all this serious doom and gloom stuff, and you look back in ten years, you go, look how miserable I was doing those daily actions that really I should have loved and enjoyed doing because I was happy I was doing it, now I've got an injury, can't walk. Maybe one day I won't be able to walk and you look back and go, god, look how miserable I was doing all those healthy activities day to day.
Speaker 1:I was only focusing my weight, how silly was I? That's what happens guys, you don't fall into that place. Weight is a good metric over time, day to day no, over time yes. If you are walking around with too much body fat, yeah it increases health risks, of course we know this. But at the same time we go down slowly, we become healthy people through the actions we take daily, remember that.
Speaker 1:You can only do it one day at a time, so crack on and I'll speak to you all tomorrow.
