Readers Questions: How Does the Law of Attraction Affect Weight Loss?

In this Readers Questions video, a reader asks about the law of attraction and weight loss. Can the LOA be used to lose weight, and if so, how?

I discuss some common LOA advice out there in regards to weight loss, and whether that advice is true or not.

Resources Discussed in This Video

• The Detox Scam: How to spot it, and how to avoid it
• My Journey: An Introduction
• My Journey: How We Started Losing Weight
• Superior Fat Loss

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Topics Discussed

• [00:38] Question
• [01:33] Answer
• [03:57] Does “Detoxing” Work?
• [06:35] Calories In, Calories Out
• [10:04] An Analogy with Money
• [14:55] You Have a Choice

Transcript

Brandon: Hey, everyone. This is Brandon Olivares from Co-Creation Coaching. I’m here this week with another Readers Questions video. Readers Questions is my opportunity every week to answer your questions about the law of attraction. If you would like to ask your question about the law of attraction, you can go to playofinfinity.org/ask and submit your question there.

[00:38] Question

Today, we have a question from a reader about health. This is pretty awesome because actually I’ve been talking about health on my blog lately. This is something I definitely want to be talking about. Our reader asks:

Abraham-Hicks gives a lot of diet advice which frankly does not appear to help Esther Hicks in practice. The advice is something like, ‘When you are in a state of joy, eat whatever seems fun to you, and you will be healthy and slim. But bad foods have probably hooked you with cravings, so have a few days of detox first to get over the cravings. Then your joy will lead you to foods that are actually beneficial for your body, no matter what it might seem like to other people.’ Is this true? Does the law of attraction really have anything to do with diet? If so, what’s the connection?

[01:33] Answer

Like I said, this is a wonderful, wonderful question because I definitely want to be discussing this today. I think it’s something that I haven’t discussed much on my blog prior to last week. I started my first post on my journey with weight loss and health, but prior to that, I really hadn’t posted much about health and weight on my blog.

I want to answer all of your questions. You have a few within this larger question here, and I want to get to all of them if possible. So first of all, does the law of attraction influence diet or health or weight loss? The answer is of course yes. The law of attraction affects everything, so yes, it does. But not necessarily in the way that a lot of people think.

There are a lot of people that I’ve come across—and I’ve been one of them, in the past—who say basically, “As long as you feel good about what you’re eating, it won’t make you gain weight.” If you haven’t read my journey series on the blog, I do recommend it, because I talk a lot more about this stuff than I can fit in a ten-minute video. But basically, I mentioned in my post last week that when I started to really, really want to lose weight, the first thing I tried was using the law of attraction. Let’s see if it can help me. 

I thought, “I will just kind of eat whatever. I’ll see what sounds good to me and feels good to me, and I’ll eat it. I’ll intentionally not feel guilty about it, and that should help me to lose weight. My body—if it feels good—should naturally return to a healthy state.” I will tell you, absolutely, definitely, it did not work. I tried for a bit of time. I kept track on the scale, and there was no progress. I actually think I might have gained a couple pounds within that time. There was no correlation whatsoever between me feeling good about the foods I was eating, and actually losing weight.

[03:57] Does “Detoxing” Work?

Now, that was a surprise to me at first, until I really started to think about how all this works and tie it in with my other manifestations. I’ll discuss that in a few minutes. But first, I want to address the other part of the question, which was about detox. Abraham in the paraphrased quote basically said that detoxing for a few days can help you to reset your cravings. Just with weight loss and health in general, there is so much misinformation out there, so many misconceptions, so many myths and weird ideas out there.

In the research I’ve done and the things I’ve read from real scientific sources, there’s no evidence whatsoever behind detox. I don’t want to start an argument or any kind of debate going or anything like that. There’s simple no scientific evidence that a detox or cleanse actually does anything. Our bodies are incredibly good at cleaning out any kind of toxins from the body. There is, obviously, a medical detoxification process if you have poison, overdose from drugs, or alcohol that happens in a hospital. But as far as what most people are thinking of when they say “detox”—a colon cleanse, or something that cleans out your liver or kidneys or whatever—there’s simply no evidence behind that.

It’s not going to reset your cravings or have you magically craving better foods. If that happens, it could be a placebo where you think, “Oh, I went through this whole cleanse, and now I feel awesome. Now I’m going to want better foods.” But in time, it’s going to return back to how you were eating before because you didn’t really make any real changes. So that part simply is not true.

I found an awesome article that really goes through the claims and debunking them, so I will link to that article in the description for the YouTube video and on the blog itself. You can take a look at that and come to your own conclusion, but that is my view. Like I said, I’m not interested in starting an argument or a debate or anything like that. That’s just how it works for me.

[06:35] Calories In, Calories Out

So, coming from there, the question is really, “How does the law of attraction affect weight loss?” I guess an implied question is, “How do we lose weight? How do we become healthy?” I’m also going to link to this week’s “My Journey” post because I do have some recommend resources—specifically, a book that I cannot recommend highly enough. Anyone who is interested in this topic, I really highly recommend you get it. As I said in the post, it’s not an affiliate. That person doesn’t even offer an affiliate. I’m just linking to the book for your enjoyment and for your education. Hopefully it helps you.

But essentially, what it comes down to is this: weight loss (I’m not saying “health” here yet, but weight loss) is about calories in versus calories out. It’s a simple energy thermodynamics formula. If you eat as many calories as you burn in a day, then your body is using all the calories from that food to maintain your bodily systems. If you eat more than what you burn in a day, then it uses all that energy that it needs, but then there is some left over, so it stores that as a mix of fat and possibly muscle, depending on a few factors.

But if you eat less than what your body needs per day or burns per day, it has to get that from somewhere, so it breaks down cells—hopefully mostly fat, sometimes muscle and other tissues. Basically, anything in your body is the same, so it does break down muscle as well, but the goal in weight loss is to lose mostly fat. That’s how weight loss works. If you’re eating more than what you burn, you’re going to gain. If you’re eating the same, you’re going to maintain and stay the same weight. If you eat less, then you’re going to lose. This has been documented over and over and over again. There are some awesome studies out there.

There was something really well known as the “Twinkie Diet.” There was a professor from Kansas State University, if I remember correctly, who for two months—just to prove that calories are equal—ate nothing but twinkies and snack foods and things like that. Almost nothing, but not quite. A large part of his diet came from that. But he made sure he maintained a caloric deficit. I think he ate 1800 calories or so a day. He lost 27 pounds. His bad cholesterol went down. His good cholesterol went up. He was overall healthier and a lower weight. There’s lots more studies like that. The book I suggest that I’ll link to gives a lot of different studies like that that it references. That’s another reason I recommend it.

There have been countless studies on this subject, and the only thing that weight loss comes down to is calories—not carbs, fat, or anything else. Just calories. Not how good you feel while you’re eating it.

[10:04] An Analogy with Money

I do want to address that now. Like I said, I was surprised when it didn’t work—“Oh, if I feel good about what I eat when I’m eating, then I can’t gain weight.” How I got through that was by thinking of this the same way as I would think about money. If I have $2,000 in my bank, that’s how much I have to spend. I can hope that I get more, or I can hope that I’ll come across discounts and can get more with it, but I have $2,000. I wouldn’t spend that and think, “Oh, if I feel good about what I’m spending, I’ll actually have $2,500 to spend, not $2,000. I’ll magically get $500 extra without anyone giving it to me. It will just sort of appear in my bank account because I feel good about what I’m spending.” Or, “If I feel good about what I’m spending, it won’t actually come out of my bank account.” 

Obviously that’s false and kind of ridiculous and silly, but that’s the kind of thinking people are employing when thinking that if you feel good about what you eat, you’ll lose weight. If you imagine you have 2,000 calories per day that you get to spend on any kind of food that you want to—whether that’s something nutritious or not. That’s your choice. You have 2,000 a day (that’s just an estimate; it’s different for everyone). If you spend those exact 2,000 calories a day, then you’re going to maintain your weight, just like if you were going to spend those $2,000 that day, then you won’t have anything left, but you also didn’t go over.

If you were to eat or spend more than those 2,000 calories—say, 2,500 calories—then that extra energy that you’ve basically spent (or in calories, have consumed) has to be stored somewhere. In the money example, say you have $2,000 and you spent that and then continue to spend another $500. Your bank keeps giving that out to you, but now you’re in debt and you owe that money back. It’s not just free money. When you ate those extra calories, it’s not just free calories. It’s going to have an effect on you.

Similarly, if you spend less than the 2,000 calories—if you consume 1,500 calories, for example—then you have a margin. You have calories left over that your body is burning but you didn’t consume, so you lose weight. In the money example, if you spend $1,500 and leave $500, that’s going to be added to your net worth and savings. It’s going to be a benefit for you. I think of this like money. If you ate the same 2,000 calories a day, you’re going to maintain weight. If you eat more, you’re going to gain. If you eat less, you’re going to lose.

When we are talking about manifesting money, we don’t talk about feeling good while spending. It’s just not going to come into our bank account. We don’t talk about money coming out of nowhere. We talk about receiving money. We talk about getting discounts, things like that. The equivalent with health and losing weight would be basically learning to eat less than what you burn. I think the one way that the law of attraction might be able to influence this subject (weight loss) is if your metabolism burns more. If you’re burning 2,000 calories a day, and you’re able to increase your metabolism to 2,200 calories a day, then eating the same amount will actually get you farther along. You’ll lose more weight because you’re burning more calories.

In the money example, you could say that your budget for each day was increased to $2,200 instead of $2,000. You have extra to spend. Or, if you spend the same, you’re going to be saving more every day. That’s the only way I can see the law of attraction working. The other way is just simply to help you to not eat as much or make better decisions. The law of attraction can help you with that.

[14:55] You Have a Choice

What it really comes down to (I know we’re going over here) at the end of the day is choices. I always tell myself this. I tell Christine this because we are both on this journey together. You have decisions to make about what you’re going to eat, how much of it you’re going to eat, and that’s about it. If you eat through those 2,000 calories in a day and you choose to eat more, that’s a decision you made. It doesn’t have anything to do with the law of attraction. It wasn’t a negative manifestation. It was something you deliberately chose to do. The result of that will be gaining weight. There’s no way of removing that.

It comes down to choices and decisions. Unlike most other manifestations, if you want more money, there’s only so much you can do about that. If you try to get a job, you can do your best. You can go to the interviews. But it’s really ultimately up to another person whether you get hired or not. If you start a business, you can do your best, but ultimately it’s up to people buying from you or clients coming to you or whatever. If you want a relationship, you can do your best and go out and try to find people you’re interested in, but ultimately, it is up to the other person whether they reciprocate. So with a lot of other things, we don’t have physical control, so we resort to the law of attraction so that we can exert spiritual control, I guess you could say.

With a subject like health and weight loss—especially weight loss because it comes down to the simple formula—you have absolute, 100% control. Yet somehow (and it’s understandable) we feel like we have the least control over this area. But if you realize what it comes down to, then you can make better decisions. You can be more self-aware and know what kind of decisions you’re making and how those decisions will affect your life in both the short-term and the long-term.

We have absolute control. No one is making you eat any more or less than you do. That is a decision you make consciously and deliberately. Sometimes we have cravings and things like that, so it feels like we don’t have as much control, but that’s all in the subconscious. You still have that choice to go through with it or not.

So this is an area where you do absolutely have complete control. The law of attraction—all that can really do is make it easier for you in a few different ways, as I mentioned earlier. I hope that answers your question. I hope this helps everyone else who is listening to this. It’s a pretty involved topic. There’s so much to it. I recommend checking out the links I’m going to post and looking at my series about my own journey with all of this. If you have questions, feel free to let me know. If you want to see the transcript for this video, head over to playofinfinity.org/rq10

Again, if you’d like to ask your own question for Readers Questions, you can go to playofinfinity.org/ask. So with that, I hope that everyone has a wonderful week. Once again, I am Brandon Olivares with Co-Creation Coaching. As always, anything is possible.

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Topics Discussed

• [00:38] Question
• [01:33] Answer
• [03:57] Does “Detoxing” Work?
• [06:35] Calories In, Calories Out
• [10:04] An Analogy with Money
• [14:55] You Have a Choice

Transcript

The transcript is for members only. If you’d like to get the transcript, please sign up below and you’ll get instant access.

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