NLP - an introduction Part Two

2.
And much the same developments from the primitive to the very very sophisticated, fast and available have taken place in every traditional industry including marketing and advertising, as well as the new ones like the slimming industries.

It is a very long and convoluted story as to exactly how these new industries came into being as society changed, and it probably isn't relevant here. Our beliefs and expectations have changed, and there are commercial companies who can feed our expectations and desires. Worse still, they can now invent them for us, and nowhere is this more common than in the area of weight management. Our whole belief systems have been transformed from outside to make us less dependent on thinking for ourselves and more dependent on external agencies. Life has become so much more complex and so fast that there isn't the time to learn about every aspect of our lives so we depend on 'support agencies'. We don't grow our own foods, we buy them. We may not even prepare our own meals but buy them ready made to reheat. We aren't aware of our bodies, let alone our minds, so if something goes wrong, then we head for the doctor or the hospital to get it fixed.

And while all of this progress has given us lives our great grandparents could never have conceived of, even in the pages of H.G. Wells, it has also made us relatively helpless in the matter of running our own lives. Too many people outside are involved in doing it for us, and in simplifying our lives, the process has also rendered us helpless in key areas. Our expectations can be unrealistically perfectionist but our knowledge of how to achieve our expectations can be woefully low. And this is effectively the situation in the area of 'weight'. We fear, it, don't know enough about it, and depend almost totally on external agencies to resolve difficulties.

Were we a mechanical device like a car or a toaster, this might be fine. Take it to the repair shop and its fixed and returned to us. Or we are told that it is past repair, and we need to buy a new item.

Unfortunately, the drift of the world over half a century has caused us to behave about ourselves as if we were no more complex than the car engine. Worse still to believe this about ourselves. This is where the slimming industry can and did and does slot in both to offer 'solutions' based on this view of ourselves, and to manipulate it.

If you step back and apply a little logic, you'll begin to see that slimming companies cannot possibly afford to have their clients take one product and never return. They are far too vulnerable as a commercial entity. A diet plan can be copied and passed around by word of mouth, and if the plan worked, then the whole industry goes into a nose dive that ends in its disappearance through a successful elimination of a world wide 'scourge' obesity. The way it works in practice is a sort of ad hoc 'cartel'. You follow one diet plan which doesn't work. So you try another, and as time goes on, the chances are that you'll return eventually to try the first companies new improved plan.. Dr Atkins, for instance, was first around in the early 1970's. His revolutionary new plan is doing the rounds again since the late 1990's. It didn't work first time, and it doesn't the second either. And it's the same with the others. You might get a little apparent short term success before the weight comes back, and this is sufficient to feed the tiny flicker of hope that keeps you going on, to try the next diet, and the next. Or the increasing desperation.