Categories
health

Fever Is Good For You

Well, up to a point, fever is good for you.

I remember, when I was a young parent, that babies seemed to get feverish several times a year. The wisdom, from our GP, was to use Calpol (liquid paracetamol) to bring the fever down. The subliminal message was that fever was bad and should be exterminated as quickly as possible.

As I grew older, and wiser, I began to wonder about this advice, advice that seemed to be universal.

Part of the problem with babies is that we don’t want them to suffer. We want to do anything and everything we can to be good parents and get them to feel well, healthy, and happy as fast as possible. But we also don’t want to be seen as bad parents. I mean, what Mum would want to stand at the school gates, amidst a horde of Calpol addicts, and speak the heresy of letting her child just suffer and get better on its own? They would be ostracised, seen as a bit weird, and generally avoided.

If not, this strange idea that the body’s immune system can look after the body – without any outside help – just might contaminate their comfortably medicated worldview.

But these are helpless babies we are talking about here. And that is entirely the problem. We see those babies as helpless when in fact what they have is a young, undeveloped immune system that needs some training. It needs training to identify pathogens and develop appropriate antibodies so that as an adult it remains healthy and already has an immune system fully equipped to deal with infections quickly and easily.

So what exactly is going on with this fever thing?

Broadly speaking one of two things.

  1. Either the white blood cells, on encountering an invading organism, create a substance called pyrogen. This is detected by the hypothalamus (where temperature regulation takes place) and it resets the body’s thermostat. The hypothalamus allows the body temperature to rise. This in turn makes the environmental conditions uncomfortable for the invading organism and so it dies out. When we use drugs to reduce this natural healing process we allow the pathogen to remain and reproduce for longer – and so we suffer for longer. We also infect more other people because we are spreading live pathogens for a longer period of time.
  2. There is a complication. Some pathogens produce a pyrogen-like substance to fool the hypothalamus into heating things up. Body organs start to become damaged when the internal temperature hits 105F.

 

So the trick, I believe, is to monitor temperature and only take action when it reaches dangerously high levels. Otherwise let things be and let nature take its course. But for things like colds and flu, fever is just the body’s way of defending itself. Certainly on those occasions over the last 20 years when I’ve had a cold or flu, with accompanying fever, I just let my body deal with it. The help I give my body is to rest and take fluids – not fill it with potentially toxic medication that may introduce substances that further stress it and prolong the discomfort.

New research from McMaster University supports this view. It has found that drugs like ibuprofen and paracetamol increase the rate of flu by 5% AND consequently cause an additional 1,000 deaths each year in North America alone. This is because with the fever reduced, people go to work and spread viruses amongst their colleagues, thinking because they feel better they are getting better. But the truth is that they have just created an environment for the virus to proliferate for much longer than it would otherwise have done.

Finally, don’t forget that any ‘wisdom’ than involves regular purchases of over-the-counter medication is putting money into the coffers of pharmaceutical companies so there is also a vested interest in resisting any attempt at changing the status quo – which, for them, is very comfortable.

From the Calpol website – after some helpful suggestions for making your child physically comfortable:

“If your baby is still uncomfortable, you can treat the symptoms of a fever at home with infant paracetamol or ibuprofen – something we’ve been helping mums and dads do for over 45 years.”

Notice that ‘helping’ and ’45 years’. The subliminal message is that if we’ve been doing it for 45 years it must be good. Also notice that if making the child comfortable produces no change then your only option is Calpol. No suggestion of wait and see. No suggestion of monitoring temperature and using Calpol as a last resort.

They have 8 attractively packaged products with pictures of happy/sleeping babies on the front. Who could resist that? Help in a bottle. Instant infant ease.

Paracetamol (acetaminophen) sales in 2008 amounted to $2.6 billion in the US. This stuff is big business.

There is no suggestion here that you should ignore symptoms, or not treat symptoms if your baby is clearly distressed, but do it from a place of wisdom and understanding that fever is the body’s way of killing off invading organisms. Humans, in the space of about 100,000 years, have managed to create about 7 billion of us. Easy access to pharmaceuticals has only been around for much less than 100 of those.

Consider letting the body use its own wisdom to fight disease.

 

Ref:

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/AdvisoryCommittees/CommitteesMeetingMaterials/Drugs/DrugSafetyandRiskManagementAdvisoryCommittee/UCM175767.pdf#page=5&zoom=auto,442,36

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140122091318.htm

Inspired by: http://www.wddty.com/fever-fighting-drugs-increase-flu-cases-and-deaths.html

Categories
health weight control

Weight Loss Isn’t Just About The Calories

The trouble with science is that it has no soul.

It says if you do this and this and this, then that will always happen.

That’s what happens when science gets involved with weight loss – it says if you eat this many calories and burn this many calories then what’s left turns into this much fat.

I’m not suggesting that this isn’t true, but it isn’t as true as it seems because what you burn isn’t just about physical activity. A supremely fit athlete burns many more calories just sitting watching TV than someone who is overweight and covered in flabby muscles and fat.

It does seem a little unfair though, doesn’t it? Imagine two people sitting on the couch next to each other watching TV. One is covered in muscle, the other is covered in fat. The muscley one is getting thinner just sitting there, while the fat one is getting fatter just sitting there.

Why is this?

Muscle tissues needs energy just to live and breathe. Muscle burns calories just by existing. Fat just sits there. Of course in order to maintain that muscle, physical exercise needs to take place. The more exercise you engage in, the more muscle you build, the higher your metabolic rate, and the more calories you burn.

Of course science likes to deal with numbers, and you want to know how many calories going to the kitchen for a snack is going to burn.

1lb of fat converts to 3500 Calories (that’s big C Kilocalories for the scientists). This is great news because all you have to do in order to lose 1lb a week consistently is burn 500Cals a day more than you eat.

So how easily can you do that?

Moderate walking (3mph) burns about 250 Calories an hour; birdwatching 140; dusting 180; golf 350;  Cycling (easy, less than 10mph) 300; yoga 300; gentle skipping with rope 600; cross country walking 470; swimming breaststroke 800; weight lifting/body building 470; and housework 250.

You don’t need to join a gym to burn calories. You just need to move. But you need to move daily and consistently and for at least an hour. Remember, that Mars bar is going to take two hours walking to pretend it never happened.

But that’s just the sums that scientists like to do. You see when you do that hour of yoga, hour of housework, or hour of walking every day, you build muscle tissue. When you build muscle tissue your metabolic rate goes up and your resting heart rate lowers. So over time, you burn more calories during the day and so your weight loss increases rather than drops – for the same effort. You also get fitter, your body shape moves in the direction that you desire, and your endorphin levels increase. This means you feel happier, more alive, and more interested in enjoying life rather than spending it watching mind numbingly boring TV shows. When your body feels fit and well, you are quite naturally and effortlessly attracted to healthier foods, and the fats and sugars that used to fill your plate gradually drift away. No resistance, no battle, no struggle, just a gentle natural movement towards foods that you enjoy.

It isn’t just about Calories. It’s about you feeling good. You achieve that by making a conscious choice now to move a little more today than you did yesterday and to make that same choice tomorrow, and the next day, and…

 

 

If you’d like to find out more then check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever

Categories
health self-help weight control

Weight Loss Is Not About Fighting Hunger

 

Feeling hungry isn’t really the issue with weight loss. By that I mean that people who are overweight eat regardless of whether or not they are hungry. Sometimes the problem is simply that they are so out of touch with the sensations their body produces that they just respond to external stimuli as the trigger for eating. But most of the time it’s about the tricks other people play with our minds.

It’s really difficult to watch an evening of tv with all of those food & snack adverts and not, at some point, decide you need something to eat. This is the subtle hypnosis of tv. It puts ideas in your mind purely because of the associations it creates. When was the last time you saw any food advert with fat people in it? When was the last time you saw any food advert with unattractive people in it? When was the last time you saw a food advert with miserable people in it? Unless, that is, they were miserable because they were not getting the food that was being advertised.

I especially remember a series of food adverts that M&S ran. It stuck in my mind because of two things – the stunning quality of the photography, and Dervla Kirwan’s sexy, seductive voiceover. No people appeared in these ads just the food. But there was a hidden promise if you buy this stuff.

It doesn’t mean that you are weak-willed if you are influenced by this stuff. It’s designed to do that. It’s designed by experts to make you want to eat, and to become familiar with the brand so that you automatically pick it up on your next trip to the supermarket. That way, when you next see the advert there will be some of that in the cupboard. The subliminal message is that you too will have the lifestyle and body shape of the people who eat this stuff on tv.  

What you actually get is fatter.

Feeling negative emotion is another eat trigger. Anything from boredom to despair can trigger a trip to the kitchen for something to eat. It passes the time, it reminds you of getting treats as a child and knowing you were loved. Watching an evening of tv is quite likely to fill you with negative emotion even if you didn’t have any to start off with. That’s why the food manufacturers’ advertising is so effective. The soaps are dreary, the news is never good, and reality tv is nothing like reality. It is hardly surprising that we seek a distraction and food is the easiest and quickest solution.

It would be great if it actually worked though. If food truly made us feel better then we’d all be happy fatties and the world would be a better place. But we’re still miserable fatties the next evening and the next and the next and we never stop to question whether or not the feel bad-eat, or feel bored-eat strategy changes anything except our weight.

If you want to change this then next time you realise you are heading to the kitchen in a commercial break go to the staircase instead and walk up and down ten times, then return to watch tv.

Don’t forget to check out my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

Categories
health self-help weight control

Radio Interview

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

Categories
health weight control

New Weight Loss Book Out Today


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

Categories
health Personal Development self-help weight control

Lose Weight Without Dieting

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

Categories
Alternative health hypnosis Personal Development self-help weight control

What are your biggest difficulties with losing weight?

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

Categories
Alternative Continuous Professional Development Happiness health hypnosis self-help training

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

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.

Categories
Alternative health self-help weight control

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

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.

Categories
Alternative health pain self-help

Chronic Pain – Relief or Reduction

One of the things that hypnosis is not so well-known for is chronic pain control. I remember this being a surprise to me when the idea was introduced during my hypnosis training way back in ’97. One of the solutions we played with was glove anaesthesia where, with direct suggestion, one of the subject’s hands are made to feel numb (as if wearing a leather glove) and then that numbness is transferred to the part of the body that is painful. As usual with a lot of the techniques I tried during training, they worked on the person I was working with, but they failed totally on me. (I’m a bit of a rubbish hypnotic subject). Consequently I could never convince myself that glove anaesthesia was worth even attempting – too much risk of failure and consequent loss of a client.

Belief in hypnosis is always a little tenuous and for the vast majority of people it is very much a last resort. So anything that doesn’t happen that should happen (even though everyone is different and different people require the use of different techniques) is almost certainly going to result in a client not returning for necessary follow-up sessions.

Later on in my training I was invited by my tutor to a Masterclass on something called Psychoneuroimmunology – PNI for short. This absolutely fascinated me – especially the part about curing cancer using mental imagery.

The first time I used this technique was when I was doing some counselling work and a client arrived with a headache that had been with her for a few days and was resistant to painkillers (medical attention had been sought). I thought, here’s an opportunity to try this stuff out and see if it really works. Her chronic pain was completely gone in less than five minutes and didn’t return. I was as amazed as my client.

Then, when I started doing hypnosis and a client mentioned they had some chronic pain or other physical discomfort I would spend the first few minutes of trance work dealing with the discomfort and it always lessened or disappeared.

Then one day I had a phone call from a lady who was suffering from something called fibromyalgia (I’d heard the word but had no idea what it was). When clients report any discomfort that they want me to work on I always ask them to score it on a 0-10 scale. 0 being no discomfort, 10 being the worst agony they can imagine. This client scored 8/9 while she was talking to me. Her world was one of never more than two hours sleep a night, being unable to work, and a hell filled with chronic pain.

When she left an hour later the pain was scoring 3.

When she came back a week later she reported 8 hours sleep every night that week and the pain was still a 3.

When she left after that second session the pain was 0. She contacted me a couple of years later still largely free of pain and working (when the pain re-appears she uses the techniques I taught her and it goes away),.

And that brings me to the reason I’m writing about this now, because that was all quite a few years ago. Another client of mine rang me up a week or so ago telling me she was suffering chronic pain. She’d had a lumpectomy followed a couple of weeks later by a mastectomy and was due to start chemotherapy shortly. This chronic pain was reported as preventing enjoyment of life and it was constant. I could see the toll it was taking just by looking at her.

Once I started treatment we had the pain much reduced after about 10 minutes, another 10 minutes and it was gone. ‘Gobsmacked’ is perhaps the best way to describe her reaction and the thing that amazed her most was the total freedom of movement of her arm which, when she arrived, she could barely lift to shoulder height. She hadn’t mentioned the arm to me so that was a nice surprise for both of us.

The other interesting thing is that I decided not to work in trance. So there was no hypnosis here. I just asked her to close her eyes (to facilitate visualisation) and directed her imagination for a minute or two, then we stopped and checked the results.

Of course one of the most difficult aspects of this sort of work is dealing with the disbelief.

There is a severe, or just debilitating, pain that is resistant to painkillers. Doctors – the experts in this territory – are unable to do anything about it. Then I come along, ask you to close your eyes, imagine this, imagine that, for a few minutes, the pain reduces, and maybe even eventually disappears.

There has to be some trick, surely.

I must be tricking them into thinking their chronic pain has gone when it really is still there!

Or it can’t be real. The pain will come back in a minute. I watch them sitting in the chair opposite me trying to recreate the pain, because what I’ve just done doesn’t fit into their ideas about reality and health and it just doesn’t make any sense.

So I had this lady who came in pain and who left, free of pain and totally relaxed, and the treatment itself probably lasted 20 minutes and no hypnosis was used.

And that got me to thinking. I’m very good at this and hardly anyone ever asks me to help free them of their physical discomfort, so maybe the world just needs to know that chronic pain might not be quite what it thinks it is, and it might be possible to be free of it, or to reduce its intensity to the point where quality of life significantly improves.

This is something where I feel one to one sessions give the best results, simply because I can adapt to however the body is responding. But I have created a CD where you can get a taste of this and see how effective the techniques I use are. The Cd may not remove your pain completely, but it may well bring you some relief and you can listen to it whenever you want (which you can’t do with a one to one session). And certainly I can do this sort of treatment easily over the phone. So if you want details of that just email me.

But in the meantime download a copy of the CD and see how it works for you.

You can get your copy here http://www.hypnosisiseasy.com/painrelief.htm

Michael Hadfield