Does Losing Weight Have to be a Battle?

January 31st, 2012 by Michael No comments »

One phrase that springs to mind when I think about weight loss is ‘fight the flab’. This phrase was coined by DJ Terry Wogan many years ago when he used to have a slot on his Radio 2 show about Fighting the Flab. I never used to take a great deal of notice of the content because my weight was under control – but the phrase has stayed with me. It’s interesting that it does highlight one hugely important aspect of weight loss. It focuses on how many people regard their overweight bodies as some sort of enemy that needs defeating.

It’s almost as if we think that our bodies have somehow betrayed us by accumulating so much weight, especially when everyone else is so slim. That’s when the battle begins, and I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s a battle you can’t win. The reason it’s a battle you can’t win is quite simple and it is down to the way minds work. Anything you push against you create more of.

What you resist persists.

So the very act of deciding to push against your fat ensures that it will remain.

Now, I realise that sounds like a recipe for doing nothing, but we both know that that doesn’t work either. So how do you make some changes and reap the reward of a slimmer more attractive body without hating the way it is now? This is tricky territory, because it is the dislike of what is that is the motivational force that gets you to take action. It might be when you can no longer get into your already oversize clothes and you refuse to move up another size; it might be when you look in the mirror one day and see what’s really there; or it might be that you’ve been to the doctor and the choice is lose weight or lose life. But it is something that moves you from the place of tolerating your excess weight to not tolerating it that causes you to choose to make some changes. Without that dislike of what is, where would the motivation come from? Without that, why would you even bother? If you liked yourself the way you are, then surely you would just leave things as they are and continue to enjoy your unhealthy lifestyle?

The solution of course is to love yourself.

When you love yourself you don’t stuff your body full of fattening and unhealthy foods in the way we might stuff a turkey just before we pop it in the oven. When you love yourself you recognise that, like it or not, a body is designed to move – lots. So that means making exercise a top priority, for without exercise, weight loss is just a huge uphill struggle. When you exercise out of love for yourself and your amazing body, what you will find is that the exercise itself becomes a pleasurable, and eagerly anticipated, activity. I walk between two and three miles a day, except when the weather is unkind. Those days when I can’t get out I can feel my legs ‘complaining’ about the lack of activity.

Now exercise itself doesn’t shift a huge amount of weight, but it does shift some. For instance an hour’s walking at a reasonable pace can burn around 500 Calories. Do that every day and you’ve burned off the equivalent of 1lb of excess fat in a week. But that isn’t the only reason I encourage exercise – exercise does so much more for you than burning calories, but that’s a little off the subject here. If you want to find out more about the hidden benefits of exercise then download a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

So by making exercise a daily priority; by choosing an exercise form that you enjoy; by engaging in a daily exercise routine long enough for it to become a habit; you side-step the battleground and you totally avoid the should I/shouldn’t I debate that always ends up by turning the TV on and grabbing a snack from the kitchen – because all of that thinking about exercise has made you hungry.

But it isn’t just exercise that’s going to make a significant difference to your weight. There’s something else that I’ve discovered in my many years of working in the weight loss industry. Clients who are overweight rarely love themselves. Most of them don’t even like themselves very much.

If you like yourself, start working on changing that to loving. If you don’t like yourself, then make that your first target.

So how do you do that?

You can start by recognising a Truth. The truth is that right now you are the weight you are and right now nothing in the world is going to change that – in this instant. You can recognise in this instant that you’d like to change your weight, but it won’t change instantly. If you can recognise that Truth and recognise that you are the way you are right now, and you can do that without feeling any negative emotion, then you have moved into a state of acceptance. Acceptance is the place from which you can make changes with very little effort.

I need to stress that acceptance is very different from resignation. Resignation is a giving up; it is a sense of powerlessness over your own destiny. Acceptance is an understanding that all change starts here. Acceptance allows you to move in any direction you wish to move and make any change you wish to make.

Start to appreciate the things you do. Choose to see that every single thing you do is worthy of appreciation by you.

Just in case you think I’m sending you on an ego-trip – I’m not. I’m not suggesting that you think you are in any way different from anyone else. I’m not suggesting you brag about what you do or demand that others appreciate what you do. I’m just asking you to notice what you are failing to notice. What you are failing to notice is your loveliness. Your loveliness is expressed in everything you do and the more lovingly you do it, the more lovely it is.

Loving yourself is being kind, being generous, being supportive, being gentle. When a child makes a mistake a loving parent does not berate the child. A loving parent simply demonstrates how to do it appropriately. It is a sharing of knowledge and wisdom. When a child falls over a loving parent just helps it up and gives encouragement for success. A loving parent never encourages a child to give up. A loving parent never sees failure – just learning.

So end the battle now. Eat appropriately, exercise more and support yourself in your goal to lose weight by appreciating the love you are expressing for yourself by taking action to move in the direction of a healthy weight for you.

If you enjoyed this article, or have any questions for me about losing weight, then please comment below.

Michael

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The Search for Alternative Health.

January 24th, 2012 by Michael No comments »

I’ve been reviewing my bookcase over the last few days. My bookcase, if you ignore the gardening, photographic, and tarot books, is full of self-help and spiritual volumes. It was these I was looking at with a view to seeing what was actually helpful to me. I found it quite interesting just looking at the titles (it took a while because ‘bookcase’ is actually three bookcases in three different rooms) and I realised that they reflected my personal journey and how my interests and focus had changed over the 15 years or so I’d been buying this stuff.

The only authors I own more than one volume of are Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, and Esther & Jerry Hicks. They have all been favourites at one time or another. Deepak Chopra approaches health from a medical background with a scientific basis and I highly recommend Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine. Wayne Dyer is a psychologist whose books, read in order of publication, take on a deeper spiritual perspective as time goes on. Esther & Jerry (why am I thinking about ice cream?) leave the physical world pretty much alone and focus on what they call the Law of Attraction, or what I used to call creating your own reality.

Now the creating my own reality is the thing that really grabs my interest and I knew it was happening long before I came across Ask and It is Given. In fact my own book Mirror Mirror – The Looking Glass Self delves into this territory from a spiritual perspective. But you know what, it was like I had all the pieces of this huge jigsaw, but didn’t have the box and so had no idea what the picture was and then Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires showed me the picture on the box. Can’t say I’ve got it working properly just yet, but I’m certainly moving in that direction.

But this is what I find with a lot of these self-help and personal development books – they are a great read; they inspire me; my thinking changes for a while and then it slowly drops back to the way it was when nothing seems to be changing. Or what I usually experience is that change happens almost immediately but then I can’t reproduce it and I’ve spent a lot of years looking for why that is.

Now trying to attract money or the perfect relationship, say, is pretty much a read about and take whatever action the book says. So that’s when we get into all that visualisation and emotional processing and looking for the blocks and the things that are in the way because they all pretty much say that if you don’t experience your abundance then the only reason for that is that you are somehow preventing it from arriving. That’s the best get out clause ever. Do this, but if it doesn’t work it’s your fault. I’m hugely sceptical of a lot of things, but my own experiences suggest a lot of truth in this particular ‘catch-22′.

There is also another niggle that I have with all of this. When results don’t appear after a reasonable amount of time – and for me a reasonable amount of time is always as soon as possible – is it because I’m not doing it right/hard enough/long enough or is it because it’s crazy to think I can influence the material world with my mind and I’ve been suckered into believing something that just isn’t true? Is it my desire for a solution that I can orchestrate and control within my own mind, and without having to interact with anyone else, that is blinding me to reason and sense?

Sometimes things just don’t work and I wonder sometimes if this is just an industry that’s tapping into our desire for easy magical solutions to life’s natural problems.

The trouble is, of course, that my own experiences, and probably yours too, have shown me that there is some sort of a creative connection between my mind and the exterior physical world. My research has also shown me that there is an overwhelming body of evidence that supports the idea that what you do in your mind can bring about miraculous, or less spectacular but still amazing, changes in the body.

Now one of the problems with the search for healing is that you pretty much need it to work and you need it to work straight away – especially if you’ve got a health problem that’s trying to kill you. In these circumstances you can’t really afford the time to fool around and spend years looking for all of your inner blockages and childhood frustrations that are causing the ill-health. You just need it fixing.

One thing I’ve found worked at healing a couple of minor problems that I had was using the tapes that Brandon Bays has to accompany her book The Journey. The Journey tells Brandon’s story of how she used her mind to remove a large life-threatening tumour in the space of around 6 weeks. Then she details the processes that she has devised and that have worked with other people too. I like this because it’s very like what I do with hypnosis to heal physical problems and I have to admit I have had some successes with that – but not with anything life-threatening, and that’s largely because people with life-threatening problems, quite rightly, tend to visit doctors rather than hypnotherapists.

Another problem I’ve discovered is that illness is not always the best time to seek out new alternative treatments. That sounds a bit daft, I know, but when you are sick the anxiety the illness causes makes it difficult to concentrate on mental exercises like visualisations. Pain also makes it difficult to focus and if you have something like a cold or flu there is very little energy in the body to apply to self-healing.

So what is one to do?

Clearly the answer is to put the information into practice when you are well so that you never get sick.

But that brings to light another difficulty that I’ve found. When you are well there is little to drive the motivation to spend time engaging in regular activities, like meditation or visualisation, when you could be doing something much more interesting instead. I’ve found time and again that minor problems that don’t interfere with life are ignored until they go away. It’s only when a health problem interferes with the smooth running of my life that I then invest time and energy in doing what I hope will bring about healing.

And when self-healing activities are only ever instigated when there is a serious problem there is also that problem of a lack of belief in one’s own ability to create the change – which of course prevents anything from changing.

If you practise diligently on the small problem, then when you have a big problem, you will know that you have the ability to heal yourself and your chances of success increase tremendously. This is because belief plays a huge part in the ability to self heal. If you have no doubts that you will succeed then you increase your chances of success tremendously. By dealing with small problems as and when they arise you also very much decrease the chances of the big problem ever appearing.

And don’t forget, you don’t have to do it on your own. Don’t neglect the help and support of the medical world. That doesn’t stop you from doing the mind-work that you need to do, and the relief that medical assistance provides may actually free up some of that worry space, or that pain space, so that you can use it for self-healing.

If you like the idea of using your mind to affect your world I highly recommend you check out The Sedona Method and The Silva Mind Control Method. They both produce inexpensive and helpful books and very expensive and helpful CD courses.

If you enjoyed this, or have any questions about self-healing then please leave a comment below.

Michael

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Lose Weight Respectfully – and Regain Control of Your Life

December 28th, 2011 by Michael No comments »

It’s all over now, so roll out the diet plans. I hope you enjoyed your mid-winter festival of feasting and gift giving. Whatever reason you have for doing it, its origins lie in the celebration of the return of light, lengthening days, and a new season of growth, fresh food, and a new harvest. But, whatever its causes, I’ve already noticed on the social media the comments beginning about losing weight and dieting. It’s almost as if people want to punish themselves for having fun and enjoyment. ‘I’ve over-indulged, so now I have to pay for it by going on a diet’ – seems to be the rationale behind this.

But New Year is traditionally a time of renewal and a time for recognising that life isn’t quite working out the way you planned and it’s time to do something about it. Unfortunately, New Year’s resolutions rarely make it to February – so why bother?

We bother because we want to feel like we are taking control of our lives. We bother because we hate feeling helpless and in the power of others. In the current climate, with this financial meltdown and Governments making ridiculous decision after ridiculous decision just to desperately maintain the status quo of the power brokers – we feel more powerless than ever, so we look round at this time for pretty much the only thing we still appear to have control over – our bodies. And then we take all our frustrations out on them.

A diet is a horrible thing to do to a body. There is no need to suffer because you had fun over the holiday. Yes you are carrying too much weight – so what. Yes you probably did add several pounds in the space of a week – so what. You were probably already overweight. The problem is not what you did over the Holiday, it’s what you’ve been doing for the past decade or two. So given that this is not a new problem that suddenly needs fixing, allow yourself a little time to solve it.

The minute you give yourself a little time to solve your weight problem, you can be gentle and loving with your body and allow the weight to disappear gently and slowly. You do this not by starving yourself, but by being gentle with you and exploring the small changes you can make that are sustainable.

Did you know that 20% of dieters barely last two months and about half never make it to the end of the year. Almost all of them end up heavier than they were before they started the diet. There’s loads more information about why diets are seriously bad for your health, and how you can lose weight permanently by following just 10 simple steps in my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever – available from Amazon.

So before you go rushing out to look for the latest fad diet, or hand over your sign-up fee to Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, Slimming World or any other weight loss organisation,check out my book – it’ll cost you a lot less than one week’s attendance fee and has the power to free you from diets… …forever.

You see, when you lose weight with respect for your body (which is what my book teaches you how to do), that respect overflows into other areas of your life. When you are gentler with you, you are effortlessly gentler with everyone else. Because you are gentler with everyone else, people treat you with greater kindness and appreciation. In other words, the World feeds back to you how you are with you. So by making a simple choice to lose weight naturally you regain that control you felt you had lost and as you regain control over your body shape you will find, almost magically, that you will begin to experience much greater control in other areas of your life too. Things will start to work for you, and you will begin to experience a greater happiness than you have known in a long time. You cannot be happy when you are fighting your body, any more than you can be happy when you are fighting unruly, misbehaving children.

So check out my book about diet-free weight loss and discover that new you that you were looking for.

Whatever you decide – I wish you luck, and the body you desire.

Michael

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Radio Interview

December 23rd, 2011 by Michael No comments »

I had a phone call the other evening from Sue, a DJ at Halton FM radio, wanting to know if I’d be ok doing an interview over the phone to promote How to Lose Weight Easily. The interview was set for an hour later so I’d have time to prepare.

That’s what gave me pause for thought. I’m more of a spontaneous person. I don’t enjoy preparation I like being asked questions, having a moment or two to think and then responding. I realise that a moment or two to think doesn’t really work very well on the radio because it comes across as silence. Still, the last time I visited Sue at the studio, when I was helping my friend Janette Fleming to promote our Paranormal Week event at the local library, the spontaneous thing worked quite well until we had a phone in question about UFOs, when I gave an answer that wasn’t really what the questioner wanted to hear – largely because I’m not a real believer in an alien presence in the sky. But I quite like that thinking on my feet, and it’s so much easier than doing homework when you have someone like Sue asking intelligent and thoughtful questions.

But this time I wanted to promote my book How to Lose Weight Easily and that left me with a problem.

You see I put all the good stuff in the book and I didn’t really know how to generate interest without sharing all of the content. I only had about a ten minute slot, so I opened up the Word file and looked at my chapter headings and made some notes and tried to get a sense of what the book was about. Now the book is about weight loss – I know that much. But there are a gazillion other books out there about weight loss so what makes this one special?

I looked and wondered and came to the conclusion my book had three main points of focus that might interest the listener. The first is how we get into this state of overweightness in the first place. That’s largely down to the training we received as youngsters that helped us to develop not only an unhealthy relationship with food, but also mistaken beliefs about the power that food has to make us feel better.

Next was the massive revenues of the weight loss industry and the misinformation they provide. I only found out about this after publication, but it reinforces the message in the book that the weight loss industry is not to be trusted. I read a story about Jessica Simpson being paid $3,000,000 to promote Weight Watchers. So prospective customers see a high profile celebrity being highly successful at losing weight because they follow the Weight Watching rules. What the article then went on to mention was what the customers don’t see. They don’t see the personal trainers, or the dieticians, or the rest of the staff provided to the celebrity totally free of charge because failure is not an option. I mean if someone was paying you $3,000,000 wouldn’t you succeed at whatever amount of weight you had to lose? It’s false and creates unreasonable and unrealistic expectations. But this is typical of the way that the diet industry manipulates the expectations of prospective customers. And that’s where we get to the point I did mention in the book – if you fail it’s your fault, not ours. My book busts that myth and others – wide open.

The final area of focus is looking at your body and how it responds to food shortage. This is important because my method is to focus on losing weight in a natural and healthy way because understanding your body’s responses is essential to being clear about why diets don’t work.

Anyway I made my notes on one side of a piece of A5 paper. Made myself nice and comfy and waited for the phone to ring.

…and that’s when all of that stuff went right out of my head and I just talked about whatever I found myself talking about. I think it went ok but I actually found it much harder doing this over the phone than when I’ve been in radio studios before (I’ve also been a guest on Roy Basnett’s Zone Unknown at City Talk FM a couple of times). I like to watch the presenter for cues and clues about when to start and when to stop. An interesting experience and one I enjoyed the challenge of. Hopefully I’ll be able to get hold of a copy of the interview and post it on here some time soon so you can have a listen and let me know if you like it.

Michael

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New Weight Loss Book Out Today

December 14th, 2011 by Michael No comments »


Well after weeks of writing and proof-reading and making minor changes, my book is finally on Amazon’s electronic shelves. Despite the fact I must have read it a dozen times at least – it still engages me, so I reckon there’s an excellent chance you’ll like it too.

It’s only available as a Kindle Edition at the moment so you’ll need a Kindle, or an iDevice, or Android thingy, with the Kindle app on it in order to enjoy it. I’m hoping to get it on to iBooks, but that won’t be for a while yet and the Kindle app is one that I use so there’s no need to wait. The price is almost a giveaway.

Here’s the Description I posted on Amazon:
If you’d like to know how to lose weight easily, naturally, and in a way that works with your body rather than against it, then this is the book for you. It’s about a healthy way to lose weight that is so much simpler than all of those complicated charts and calculations that you have to do when you engage in dieting. The author explores the ways in which diets not only make you fat but are also seriously bad for your health. This book exposes the myths that the Diet Industry perpetuates in order to keep people hooked on dieting. Simple solutions are offered so that attitudes towards food and eating can be easily changed. The focus is on an easy step by step approach, for which the author offers a simple 10-step action plan. This leaves the reader in control of their eating and losing weight in a way that is sustainable without the need to ban any specific foods.

And that’s pretty much it. If you follow my guidance, and read it now and again, this book could change your life, your relationship with food, and your weight. It could free you from your battle with food if you engage with the ideas I present within. It encapsulates a lot of what I’ve discovered over the last 14 years helping people to lose weight and it’s life-changing potential makes it incredibly valuable.

And if you’d like to have a preview then you can search within the book and get an excerpt. Just type your search string in the box below.



Search the full text of this book

All this for about the price of a cup of Coffee. What have you got to lose?

If you buy it and you like it be sure to leave a comment below. I’d really appreciate your feedback – and if there’s any aspect of weight loss you’d like me to address then please use the opportunity to let me know.

Michael

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Lose Weight Without Dieting

November 27th, 2011 by Michael No comments »

I’ve just finished writing my Lose Weight Without Dieting eBook.

It’s free, so there’s no sales pitch here. Just click on the link above, leave me your email address, and I’ll send you the download details so you can read it at your leisure. The whole process doesn’t take very long.

weight loss book cover2 graphic

Now, if you’re like me, you’ve probably downloaded a few ebooks. Most of them, in my experience, promise the earth and then tell you that if you actually want the earth you’ve got to click on this link to get it. Then when you click on the link, what was promised as free information actually costs you $297 – but you get about $5,000,000 worth of useless and unwanted bonuses with it.

I’m not doing that.

Yes I have a got a great product for sale, but the book isn’t it. The book is just so you can get to know me and my style and by the time you’ve finished reading my Lose Weight Without Dieting eBook, you’ll realise that I know a lot about weight loss – even though you’ve never heard of me.

And if you’re wondering why you’ve never heard of me it’s because, up until now, I’ve just been helping people on a one to one basis. But there’s a limit to how many lives I can change like that, so I’m exploring ways to help more people live the life they want to live. This is my first foray into that arena so I could really use your help – if you enjoy the book send the details to anyone you know who you think might benefit from it too. That way you can enjoy the buzz of making a positive difference to someone’s life.

Now if you’ve ever tried to lose weight using a traditional or ‘designer’ diet, or you currently have a weight problem, then this book has information for you that you truly need to be aware of.

My Lose Weight Without Dieting eBook demonstrates simply and clearly how you have been misled and mis-sold by the diet ‘gurus’ and led along a garden path that will always take you back to where you started rather than where you want to go.

It even contains one or two hints and tips that you may find helpful in losing weight without buying anything from me, but my intention mainly is to make you aware of a truth that has been withheld from you. When you read this book you will discover why diets make you fat and clears up all the nonsense about your metabolism. Though if you like to use low metabolism as an excuse not to bother losing weight, then you might not like what I have to say – but if you read it you’ll find out that you can change it if you want to.

Check it out. It’s FREE. And if you enjoy it and recognise, from the insights that I share with you, that I actually know a great deal about helping people to lose weight – then you might just want to check out the link at the very end of the book. If you do you’ll find out that I have something that may very well help you to lose those excess pounds easily and effortlessly.

But read my Lose Weight Without Dieting eBook first. I don’t like being ripped off, and I don’t like seeing other people being ripped off – so I’m making this information available for free.

If you enjoy it, come back and leave a comment below.

Michael

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What are your biggest difficulties with losing weight?

November 2nd, 2011 by Michael No comments »

I’m in the process of creating an amazing new weight loss program and I need your help. Most people who decide they need to lose weight have done it before so you’ll know what the tricky bits are, what are the areas that you find most difficult, and you’ll know what is going through your mind when you eat that fattening food that, when you went to bed last night, you said you weren’t going to eat any more.

So I’m really interested in the problems you’ve experienced in the past. Why you believe you failed to keep the weight off and what makes you make unhealthy choices once you’ve made that decision to lose weight.

So if you would like to help then please leave a comment below, or, if you prefer just email me here.

And if you’d like me to let you know when this amazing new weight loss program is available, or other personal development items that I think may be of interest to you, then be sure to leave me your email address at the top right of this page.

Many thanks,
Michael

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Posted in Alternative, health, hypnosis, Personal Development, self-help, weight control

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The Biology of Belief – Bruce H. Lipton PhD: A Review

October 23rd, 2011 by Michael No comments »

Wow! This is one of the most powerful books I’ve read in a very long time. Can’t in all honesty say it was an easy read, at least not for the first half of the book, but it certainly rewarded the effort it took to get my head round some the concepts and ideas introduced here.

Bruce Lipton is a cell biologist who taught this subject at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and later at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. As a teacher of medical students, not only in the mainland US but also for a couple of years on Martiinique and Grenada, I had to assume that Bruce Lipton was an expert on his subject.

The early chapters of the book look at the basics of how cells function – not aimed at the medical student level but aimed at the laypersons level of understanding. Now I don’t know you but I’ve never formally studied biology so didn’t really have a clue about stuff like eukaryotes and prokaryotes (which, amazingly, I find that I now do), cytoplasm, enzymes and DNA – and of course the key to everything, proteins. Now I thought protein was just something you had to make sure you included in your diet, but it seems it’s the key to allowing the ‘machinery’ of an individual cell to function, as well as the key to deciding which of your genes are allowed to exert their influence. This is the bit where it starts to get really interesting, because the author then goes on to discuss how the genetic material, the DNA, is not actually the driving force of life, reproduction, or the expression of genetic material in a body.

This is what has been taught for decades, the DNA is in control. Bruce Lipton says no – the cell membrane is not only intelligent, but also in charge. He then goes on to prove this hypothesis.

If all that sounds a bit heavy it is written in a beautifully entertaining and interesting way and I was left with an understanding of cell mechanisms almost effortlessly.

The author then moves on to belief and explores the placebo effect and the amazing nature of a mind that can heal a body (even of something that requires surgery) just because it thinks it is receiving medical treatment. After that he looks at how belief translates into quantum effects that impact the cell membrane and bring about physiological responses to thought.

The only thing missing is what to do with this information in order to change your own reality – but the author does offer some suggestions for further exploration of this particular area.

Brilliant, thought-provoking and a new way of looking at life not from an ideas point of view but from the perspectives of the mechanics of how the science works. It brings these ideas of Mind over Matter, ideas that have been in the world of New-Age airy-fairyness for a long time, right down into the practical world of the science lab showing you the exact mechanisms and how they function at an atomic level.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles is Highly recommended.

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Posted in Alternative, Continuous Professional Development, Happiness, health, hypnosis, self-help, training

Lose Weight Without Dieting

October 15th, 2011 by Michael No comments »

Seems like a ridiculous claim, doesn’t it? But did you know that 90-95% of people who lose weight by following a diet plan regain all of that weight, and frequently more, within a few years.

The truth is that weight loss diets don’t work and the evidence is out there if you look for it. After all if diets worked you’d only do it once. Yet many of my clients have been serial dieters.

The trouble is we are bombarded with information about weight loss that claims that restricting calorie intake by cutting out this or cutting out that, or just eating carbs or grapefruits or cabbage or some other ridiculously gimmicky plan with a celebrity name attached to it is the only solution. But the real problem is that, as a society, we are trained from an early age that when something doesn’t work – do more of it. Do it better, do it harder, do it longer – the fault is with YOU. So when a diet eventually palls you see yourself as a failure and 12 months later when the weather turns warmer we seek out the next ‘better’, latest, diet to fail at again.

It is a treadmill.

You can step off it.

There is an alternative.

The alternative is my Diet-Free Weight Loss Program. Now, clearly I’m not suggesting that you can carry on the way you have done and expect to lose weight. That would be as ridiculous as dieting. You recognise, of course, that for change to take place in your life, you have to do something different. My Program is Something Different. It does create change within you. But it makes that change as easy and effortless as I know how to make it.

The most significant difference between my Diet-free Weight Loss Program and a diet is that my weight loss programme doesn’t have any rules about what you can and can’t eat. But clearly you have to eat less if you want to lose weight. Can you believe that you can eat less and still have as much as you want?

A lot of the food we eat isn’t food that’s actually wanted.

A lot of the food we eat isn’t needed by our bodies.

A lot of the food we eat is eaten unconsciously.

This is the food that is reduced – and it isn’t missed. It isn’t missed because you never really noticed eating it anyway. Habitual eating – because of the time on the clock, or because there’s a commercial break on the tv, or because all your friends want to go to MacDonald’s or order pizza. Then there’s the food that you eat simply because it’s still on the plate after you’ve eaten your fill.
My diet-free weight loss program, in easy simple steps – each one of which is easy to master, gently leads you to a place of mastery over these unconscious drives that cause you to eat unnecessarily.

I help you to take control of your eating so you enjoy what you eat more and more and eat less and less of what you don’t enjoy.

If you’d like to find out more about how I can help you to lose weight then check out my Diet-free Weight Loss Program and watch the first in my series of free video – and don’t forget to leave me your email so I can send you the rest of the free videos.

Copyright 2011 Michael J. Hadfield

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Michael J. Hadfield has been successfully helping people to lose weight for 14 years. If you would like more information about how to get off the diet treadmill then visit the Diet-Free Weight Loss Program for more information and be sure you leave your email address so you don’t miss out.

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How a Personal Video Recorder (PVR), or a Sky Box, Can Help you Lose Weight

October 10th, 2011 by Michael No comments »

So why is losing weight so difficult?

I was sitting in front of the tv last night doing what I rarely do and watching a film ‘live’. I usually record films before watching so I can fast forward through the adverts. And I was actually recording this one to watch later anyway, but it was Sunday and although I usually end up working when there’s nothing on tv I’d not been giving myself much time off lately so I thought I’d sit and enjoy Eddie Murphy’s Trading Places.

I’d eaten 4 hours earlier – a satisfying & filling meal, with some delicious home-made apple pie and a little soya-based ice ‘cream’ (my body no longer allows me to enjoy dairy products) for dessert – so hunger wasn’t an issue, but there was a nagging in my mind to go and eat some more.

I’m sure you know the sort of thing; those thoughts that keep hinting that there’s something nice in the kitchen. Usually that ‘nice thing’ is full of fat or sugar. This is exactly what I was experiencing and it was hard to resist.

I explored the problem to see if I could find out what was going on. Part of the problem was those interminable commercial breaks every few minutes. They break up the flow of the story and make it much more difficult to be entertained and engrossed. This piecemeal presentation of snippets of story is, I believe, a significant factor in the explosion of overweight and obesity problems.

I do have a solution to this problem that I consistently recommend to my clients – not because I imagine it’s a good idea but because I use it myself. I tell them to keep a book handy, or a crossword puzzle, or a Sudoku puzzle, or a piece of knitting or embroidery – something that it’s easy to pick up and put down when the commercial break ends. More and more I tend to find myself using IMDB on my iPad to check out the goofs in the film I’m watching so I can keep an eye out for them or just reading a little about the history of the movie and seeing if I can correctly identify some of the faces that seem familiar.

I can do that from my armchair, but sometimes I even get up and go sit at my desktop for five minutes checking if my friends have been up to something on facebook, or just checking something out that’s occurred to me while watching the movie.

Last night though, none of this seemed to be working. When I looked at what was going on I found that the book I was reading wasn’t fully engaging me. I’d noticed a new Wayne Dyer (Stop The Excuses: How To Change Lifelong Thoughts) last time I visited the library, so I picked it up. Now when I first started on my self-development journey I was a huge fan of Wayne Dyer and bought many of his books. Then I bought Getting In The Gap. That was about meditation, something I’ve been doing for a long time and it just didn’t work for me. I picked up copies of his new books after that but he seemed to be going off in a direction that was of no benefit to me.

But, it wasn’t going to cost me anything, so I picked it up, took it downstairs and checked it out. It certainly isn’t grabbing me the way his books used to, and a significant part of his guidance is to use affirmations. I’ve done affirmations and, in my opinion, they are a waste of time. But these are so long-winded that you’d need to write them down, carry them round with you, and read them when you needed them. But there’s other stuff that is interesting me and I fully expect to get some value from Wayne Dyer’s words. They just aren’t grabbing me like they used to. I think I’ve moved on past the point in development where he is aiming his teaching.

But despite all that, I still wanted to eat something and my thoughts were encouraging me in the direction of toasted tea cakes. And you know what it’s like when you get that picture in your mind – in my case it was four halves of lightly toasted tea-cakes dripping with melted yellow fat (my dairy-free margarine). I was even imagining the way the warmed fat would drip down my fingers and the aroma of those lightly spiced buns.

You can see what’s happening. My thoughts are somehow not in tune with my greater desires and needs to follow my own advice that I give to people to help them to lose weight. There’s clearly some sort of rebellion going on here. I think we all have that rebel as part of our make-up. That part of us that wants to do just what it wants to do and enjoy instant gratification regardless of the consequences. In the same way that smokers enjoy the pleasure of a cigarette now and ignore the disease that will probably visit them in the future.

And in a way this is a real problem for me with what I teach. I encourage people to focus on the present moment. I tell them the future is only imagined. The past is a memory that has only the power that you give to it. Live NOW, because Now is the only moment when you are ever alive.

So I’ve got a bit of a problem here.

But I’ve also got an apple tree in the garden with about 80lbs of apples hanging from it. This is a dessert apple called Jupiter, which cooks very nicely too. My apple pie was made from a few of them.

Now, apples have a wonderfully high fibre content and contain a carbohydrate called pectin which is really good at satisfying hunger. They are free of sodium and even have some Vitamin C. An average-sized apple contains only about 60 calories.

So I recognised a couple of things. I wasn’t really in the mood to engage with some of my distraction techniques, but there was no way I was going to eat any more wheat-based products today. I wanted something sweet. You can see where this is going. Apples were the solution. I selected two, one medium, one small, peeled cored and cut into segments (This is not because there’s anything wrong with just biting into the apple) but it used up some of the ‘unsettled’ energy that was creating the ‘eat’ thoughts in the first place. A task is always a good thing to engage in as a distraction and it filled the commercial break space.

I enjoyed the apple slowly while watching the next segment of the movie and felt satisfied.

Yes I did consume some unnecessary calories, but so what. The apples were about 100 calories, but the tea cakes would have rated at least 400. I didn’t give myself a hard time about it. I didn’t beat up on myself because I gave in when I should be following my own example. You see the key to what I teach about weight loss is gentleness with self. You have to be gentle with you always. It is the harshness that leads to habitual over-eating.

Every day is a new day.

In part you see what I did is freeing. Because it left no guilt or bad-feelings, or any sense that I failed or did something wrong – which is what you tend to get when you follow a diet. These ill-feelings create a low mood state which tends to cause more over-eating and more ill-feelings. It’s a self destructive cycle.

But what I did is more than that. I used my knowledge and experience to look at what was really going on and then find a solution that was satisfying but did not violate my greater intention to be what I teach.

Look for solutions that require no calorie intake first of all; if that doesn’t work then look for solutions that satisfy, but require minimal calorie intake.

So my present moment Now experience became one of recognising that I have a challenge right now that needs a solution and that solution needs to honour my long-term commitment and intention.

Oh! …and the title of this post. Clearly the whole problem started because I didn’t wait and watch the recorded version. Obviously if I’d been fast forwarding the commercials and concentrating on catching the re-start of the movie, then I’d have had no time to think about food.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my thoughts and can take some valuable insights from them. If you haven’t seen my videos and you’d like to explore more of my ideas about how to lose weight easily without dieting then have a look at the first of my free weight loss videos and be sure to leave me your email address so I can send you the details of how to access the other free videos.

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