The “Improvisor” (4% of the population)
Like Catherine the Great, you have tremendous abilities and can use them to achieve success in this program if you desire. You find weight management easier than some of the other brain types when you give it a high priority and are able to stay focused. Otherwise, like Ben Franklin, if health is not one your top priorities, you may struggle more than some of the other brain types in keeping pounds off and breaking unhealthy habits. Setting the right goals, based on your creative imagination, and remaining focused on them will set you up for this challenge.
Forming a strategy is easy for you, but sticking with it over the long term is more of a challenge since your wiring tends to improvise along the way to keep life interesting, surprising and entertaining. For example, you would find it easier than most other brain types to create a business plan for a new startup, but would then put it in a drawer and choose to follow your impulses soon after starting.
Following the plan that you create for yourself, and sticking to it, will drastically increase your chances for success. It will also strengthen your brain and the wiring necessary to stay on track with other things in your life. Resolve to stick to your plan and remind yourself of your strategy every day. Post your strategy where you will see it often, like on your bathroom mirror, refrigerator or even as the background wallpaper for your phone, so you are reminded of it often.
Your brain type is wired for improvisation, which also happens to make you good at humor (both understanding it and delivering it). Your brain needs to have fun and to experience a health and fitness journey that is enjoyable. You quickly tire of things that feel tedious, routine or boring, so if that happens, stop and immediately build in something you enjoy to keep that health or fitness habit going.
You are a highly visual brain type. You enjoy food photographs on healthy recipe sites and will find inspiration to make certain recipes from seeing them. Because of your visual tendencies, you will also be more effectively motivated with “after” pictures posted beside your plan for achieving health and fitness. Some people with your brain type already have a personal “after” picture because they were in better shape in the past, so just use that if you have one. If not, look through a magazine or go online and find someone with your similar body type, who has the body you would like to achieve and then use that as your “after” picture. Make sure it’s realistic though, or you can become discouraged if it feels like it’s too far off or too difficult to attain.
It is important to clearly define your ideas in order to have a better sense of direction. This is especially important with your goal setting, so you will want to make sure that you write down a very clear end goal as well as distinct goals along the way. Be sure to post your long-term goal along with your plan so you can remain focused on it every day.
The Visualization technique will be very effective for you. Your gift of imagination and affinity for images will help you make this very effective. If you practice it regularly, your brain will accept your imagery as a present fact, which will help you by reducing your need for willpower reserves tremendously.
Like Socrates, you are considered a visionary with a scientific mind, so this program may appeal to you for a few different reasons. Facts alone aren’t very meaningful to you though. Concepts make more sense, so the new and innovative ideas in this program, based on the research behind them, will be more convincing and interesting to you.
You might need help with time management and organizational skills, so it would benefit you to make appointments in your schedule for times to prepare food, shop, and exercise. Treat these appointments as the highest priority (as part of your already top priority of health), not to be rescheduled or interfered with by anything that’s not a life or death emergency. This attitude will help keep you focused and on track.
You rarely play by established rules and are always open to new possibilities. You enjoy outwitting the system, to experience the joy of being ahead. Be careful with this tendency, because if you try your own experiments to “outwit” this system, you will most likely be treading on dangerous ground that could negatively affect your health and fitness progress.
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is most commonly associated with your brain type. That doesn’t mean you have it because most of the cases within your brain type are misdiagnosed, but because you are interested in many different things, you might tend to zip around from one thing to another without sticking with it long enough to see it through.
Your vivid imagination pulls you towards new projects, new situations, and new activities. Be sure to commit to this program closely for at least 3 months to give it enough time to produce results for you. Once you see those results, you will be less likely to be distracted by and switch over to a “new and shiny” idea. The Remembering Your Why technique below will help get you back on track quickly when you have wandered off.
If you do genuinely have ADD though, you will find that those symptoms will go away once you have achieved optimal health with this program, resulting mainly from the kinds of foods that you eat. These results will happen due to the benefit of your brain chemicals balancing out, but also due to your gut flora normalizing. Be sure to read that section, because it will most likely make a ton of sense to you.
Like comedian talk show hosts John Stewart, Steven Colbert and Bill Maher, you are good at improvising quickly for minor challenges, but you prefer to depend on advance preparation to meet life’s bigger challenges. It will be helpful for you to see this program as one of those “bigger” challenges, whether you have much weight to lose or not, and to place your focus on the goal of optimal health for life, instead of just weight loss for the short term.
Like Leonardo Da Vinci, you do not like to do the same thing twice, and you rarely follow directions precisely. Instead, you prefer to improvise with methods of your own design. Feel free to alter recipes in this program and create your own variations, provided of course, that you stay within the guidelines.
Because of your social affinity and need to be around people, you will certainly benefit from dieting with friends. You are also competitive, so it could likely benefit you to join some type of online competition to feed that competitive spirit and help keep you on track. There are plenty of them to choose from and some even have accompanying smartphone apps, so I would highly encourage you to look into that. Even common fitness devices like Fitbit and health apps like Argus have fun competitive contests and features.
While dieting with friends is helpful for your brain type, it’s better for you to join the competition aspect with strangers though, because since you have a tendency for “one-up-manship,” you also may have a tendency to “over celebrate” your victories to the people you are competing with, which can offend some of them with a different brain type. They might feel like you are “rubbing it in,” and build resentment, but not so much if they are a stranger who doesn’t know you. I’m not saying this tendency is a bad thing. On the contrary – it’s a good thing and will help you succeed, but just know that friends could take this personally while strangers won’t.
Your brain type tends to be the one who enjoys traveling the most, so it’s important for you to know and plan what snacks to bring with you on your trips and to seek out health food when you’re on the road.
Be sure to study the snack section of the recipe website carefully and plan ahead for which snacks to bring with you when you travel. It’s also important to book your lodging with a kitchenette in the room if possible and to plan a strategy ahead of time to get to nearby healthy grocery stores and know where the healthy restaurants can be found.
You tend to follow your impulses, so self-control strategies and exercising your PFC can help you more than the other brain types. Meditation will be your most effective technique for this. I would recommend the meditation technique at least 5 days a week for your brain type. The more meditation the better too – especially in the afternoon or evening when you feel your willpower reserves starting to wane. If you find it too hard to sit long enough for the meditation technique, just do it for 1 minute and then expand from there.
The EFT techniques will be even faster for you in cases where you are on the go or patience is severely limited. You may even try EFT first, in order to center you enough to be able to do the meditation technique.
You need a loving, disciplined and structured environment. If you had this growing up, you are already equipped with these skills and will find discipline and structure easier to come by. If you were not raised in this environment though, you will need to work on putting more discipline and structure in your life. Creating for yourself structure and discipline now will help your brain rewire itself faster. Loving yourself, loving others and being with a loving partner who supports your new habits and goals will also help you tremendously.
You might eat faster than other brain types and therefore, consume more food because of the natural delay in your hunger mechanism response. This delay for you will be about 20-30 minutes, so if you eat fast, that could be a lot of food before your body tells you it’s enough. You might also be less aware of what you are eating. You often do things in life in a very big way, and food is often no exception. The Conscious Eating technique will help you with this.
You might find that your desire to be around others and to eat socially makes dieting a struggle for you. Dieting may also seem antisocial in a crowd or at a party with friends, causing it to drop on your priority list and then easier to put off for the time being. The 7 Minute Rule will help you in these situations.
You may tend to act first and reflect second. It’s important to remember that eating on the spur of the moment is okay, as long as what you’re eating falls within the guidelines of this diet. Be sure to have an ample supply of healthy snacks with you at all times so those are available anytime you find yourself hungry – especially without a plan for that day or food prepared already. Having a healthy snack handy can buy you the time you need to come up with a plan or follow through with your plan and get that healthy food in you.
Part of your plan should be to make food ahead of time and take it with you each day, wherever you go. That will make it easy for you to just grab the food you have already prepared, instead of “improvising” with fast food or unhealthy options.
You can benefit from keeping a food diary. This will help you realize more than other brain types what your health habits truly are from an objective viewpoint as you can look back on the diary. You typically become bored with routine and monotonous tasks though, so you may find yourself keeping this diary for only a week or two at a time before discarding the idea or conveniently “forgetting” and then getting off track.
This is OK, actually, because forcing yourself to continue with monotonous tasks can turn them into a chore, so take a break from food logging and journaling when you get bored with it, but during that time, pay special attention to staying on track. Weighing yourself every few days might be helpful during these times while staying off the scale while you are food journaling might also be a good idea.
It is important to keep your focus more on optimal health than on dieting or body weight. You will need to make sure that you enjoy the process along the way as well as focusing on the outcome. Only focusing on the end result by itself won’t be enough to keep you motivated.
Focus on the parts of your body that are changing and ignore the parts that aren’t changing for faster and more consistent progress. Then it will be easier for you to visualize success and see your end goal happening. This will be a very effective way for you to stay focused on the process and outcome at the same time.
Summary and Recap
Goal setting: Set clear goals based on health and not weight. Form a plan and stick to it. Post your plan where you can see it every day. Post an “after” picture with that plan. Focus on the parts of your body that are changing.
Best Workout: Group exercise that is safe. Some examples of this would be X Gym style, interval training, and Spinning. Be sure to schedule your workouts, so you stick to your plan.
Motivated by: Competition (preferably with strangers). Noticing small results along the way will keep you focused on the end result of optimal health.
Supported by: Other fun loving people who encourage you and notice your progress and accomplishments.
Areas to strengthen: Social eating and overeating. Make appointments to exercise, plan your meals, shop for them and prepare them. Create a loving, structured environment for yourself.
Strengths to use: Your vivid imagination will help you to easily focus on your short-term and long-term goals. Your creativity and ability to improvise will help you think of creative healthy things to eat, especially when you are in a bind.
Brain training techniques: 7 Minute Rule, Conscious Eating (Part 1 and Part 2), EFT, Visualization, Meditation, Remembering Your “Why.”
