This pillar, whilst headed neural as in the brain, it will cover a number of aspects related to the brain. The first will be Neural Plasticity.

By Neural Plasticity I’m talking about the process in which your brain’s neural synapses and pathways are altered as an effect of environmental, behavioral and neural changes. So what’s the big deal about neural plasticity? Well, have you ever heard the saying that to change or make a new habit takes two or three weeks? If so, or if you have ever tried really hard to change the way you think about or do something you know you have to keep at it continuously for two or three weeks or more until the new way of thinking or acting becomes a new habit.

To succeed with my Be Lean For Life protocol you are definitely going to change the way you think and do things. For example, the number of days to accomplish Mark Sisson’s Keto Reset Diet is 21 days. Melissa Hartwig’s Whole 30 is a 30-day program, Johnathan Bailor’s SetPoint diet is 21 days. The reason these programs take some time to complete is that neural plasticity is being used to engineer change to your neural synapses and pathways. Once achieved the new way of thinking and doing becomes a habit. While creating these new synapses and pathways you are undoing some of the old ones. So if those old synapses and pathways are no longer present, which has basically erased a particular part of your memory you no longer have the desire to go back to do things the old way.

This is incredibly powerful as it means your new habits are sustainable. However, for your new program to be sustainable, it has to overcome your will power in the process. Your will power is mostly a mental activity, however when you make a significant change in your diet, for example, your body and more specifically your hormones will attempt to return your body to homeostasis the state it had been happily or maybe not so happily chugging along in for a while or even years or decades. Your body was designed to do this, so failing with a diet, and basically all diets fail, is not really your fault because over a period of time your will power just gives in to the body’s hormones that were designed to create homeostasis. It’s a fact. The type of diet I am talking about is a caloric restriction or deprivation of some kind with the added belief that burning more calories than you digest will somehow help you lose weight when all it does is make you more hungry further complicating the hoped for a transition.

To engineer neural plasticity, you need to think outside the box because making your brain work differently literally changes your mind. The more we use our brains and the more knowledge we acquire the more the brain adapts and creates a new way of thinking and feeling. To break the chains of your hardwired programming in your brain takes considerable effort and requires new knowledge to make the brain work in different ways. You begin to perceive reality differently as you start to see your life through the lens of your changed mind. The same way of thinking and making choices as you have in the past is called a habit. To change that habit requires a degree of discomfort as the new state is unfamiliar and doesn’t feel “normal”. We don’t feel our usual selves because we are not. We can no longer predict the future in the way we did by operating off habits of the past. It will not happen overnight because it takes time to move into the world of your new self (21 days or so). If your new way of thinking has you feeling uncomfortable, it is easy to go back to your old way of thinking and feeling generating that familiar feeling of comfort, and as a result, no long term changes occur.

We need to understand that feeling of discomfort is the death of the old self, a necessary stepping stone to the new you. In the case of changing your eating habits, you are suffering the withdrawal from the chemical, emotional, addictive aspects of your previous diet. I’m not saying this is an easy process, but if you ride it out, you will have a new way of thinking and feeling that will change your life. To be able to make this change we need to continually create the new experiences and thoughts in our minds, so we form a new habit and disassemble all the old synapses and pathways that created the old habit. We have created a new self and the associated physical and biological expressions of the new self manifests as you becoming someone else. While this may seem pretty scary remember when you started that was what you wanted, or better stated what was needed to transform.

For example, maybe the first time you tasted a beer or red wine you didn’t really like it. It may have appeared bitter and you were not used to drinking bitter things. Fast forward a few years and maybe now you actually enjoy beer or wine. Worst case you may even crave it. You can substitute any food you like in this example. However, let’s say the food you did not like in the first instance was leafy greens, and we all now know leafy greens are very good for us. How good would it be if through persisting with eating leafy greens you eventually really like them, even craved them? When you change to continually eat foods that you were designed to eat you harness the power of part of your brain called the orbitofrontal cortex to rewire your cravings through the process we call neuroplasticity. When you consistently eat these primal foods your orbitofrontal cortex along with other parts of your brain physically change and reprogram you to crave primal foods as deeply as you may currently crave less than optimal foods. You see the pleasure is not in your food it’s in your brain which is a great thing because that means you can rewire your brain to eat healthy foods. So you can crave non-starchy vegetables while finding fast food disgusting. It’s all about your brain rewiring and upgrading and that is exactly what happens when you go through a reset diet that changes you from a carb burner to a fat burning beast.

So, in summary, you have to go through some degree of discomfort to make the transformation ( no pain, no gain, right?) However, by using the appropriate dietary reset as described in my Be Lean For Life protocol and recognizing what is going on in your brain to support it, your transformation will be complete, no more yo-yo weight losses and gains. You become a new lean fit healthy person for life.

This whole process is fascinating to me and these activities in the brain can actually be monitored and filmed in real time. It is beyond my capability to perform such scientific acts so I am going to introduce you to Dr, Joe Dispenza in the form of a video where you can actually witness these transformations in real time. As we move into the pillars of meditation and the quantum field I will be leaning on Dr. Dispenza quite a bit as he is recognized worldwide for his practice and research in these areas. I would recommend that you watch the whole video below which is some 30 minutes long, but if you are only interested in the amazing footage of real-time brain transformation and some animation then watch the section between 16 and 19 minutes.

Essential Oils play a large role in Neural Plasticity

Nervous Systems: Black Pepper, Black Spruce, Blue Tansy, Cedarwood, Celery Seed, Citronela, Citrus Bliss, Geranium, Ginger, Juniper Berry, Lavender, Myrrh,Peppermint, Roman Chamomile, Rosemary, Sanalwood, Serenity, YarrowPom,

Note: Many different oils are listed above. While they are all relevant, nobody would ever use them all. If you are a Be Lean For Life Coaching client you may have the oils personally mapped to your specific requirement based on data collected during the coaching program.Paragraph

If you want to go it alone feel free to peruse the doTERRA Ebook Library. Alternatively, you can buy all these oils at wholesale prices by becoming a member