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Chakra Dowsing For Improved Health And Healing

Here is an easy way to find out about the health of your own chakras, or the health of a willing volunteer. I have to say it is a lot easier if you have a volunteer who can lie down while you work – though you can use this technique on yourself.

All you need is a pendulum. I use a shaped lapis lazuli suspended on a chain (similar to the one in the picture), but you do not need to use a crystal. I’ve used a watch on a chain (like they use in hypnosis), or any weight I could fasten to a piece of string. They all work.

Chakra dowsing. This was at a training workshop and the chakras have been located with crystals to assist the students.

You might want to ‘condition’ your pendulum before you start to use it for chakra work. This is more to convince you that something will happen once you start to test chakras than for any other reason. Just suspend the pendulum from your dominant hand at the full length of its chain. Then ask yourself any question for which the answer is a definite ‘yes’. You could say “is my name…?” and state your name. Then watch the pendulum with an expectation of movement. The pendulum will move in one of four ways. It will describe a clockwise circle; an anticlockwise circle; it will swing back and forth; or it will swing from side to side.

Repeat the process but this time ask yourself a question for which the answer is a definite ‘no’. Again wait and watch for the movement. It will move in a different direction this time.

Now you have satisfied yourself that your pendulum will respond you can start work on some chakras. For this description I am going to assume that you have a volunteer. If you haven’t then just work on yourself with your head propped up comfortably so that you can see the pendulum. You will need a mirror to see what is happening with your throat and crown chakras, but the rest you will probably be able to see ok.

Start at the base chakra (if you are unfamiliar with the names and locations of your chakras then you will find chakra descriptions here ) suspend the pendulum about an inch above the physical body at the chakra location, empty your mind of trivia by focusing on the pendulum and holding the intention that you wish to see the chakra condition reflected in the pendulum’s movement.

In a healthy chakra the pendulum will describe a clockwise circle around 3 inches in diameter. The speed of movement of the pendulum indicates the vigour of the chakra. Sluggish movement, no movement, a very small diameter circle, or a distorted circle, all indicate health problems. If the movement describes a narrow oval I usually find that the long axis of the oval is pointing towards the problem area in the body.

Repeat this process for all seven chakras.

If there is a problem with any of the chakras I have found two excellent ways to fix them. I appear to have some healing ability so I usually just work with the energy until the chakra is restored to normal functionality. In my own experience this produces immediate relief from symptoms.

The other method is to use visualisation. I use this technique with my hypnosis clients who come to me for help with physical problems and I find it very powerful. I’ve reproduced this in  a Chakra Meditation CD so that you can easily benefit from this technique.

If you would like more information on chakras and chakra healing then watch my video.


Michael

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Fun Gadgets To Help You Lose Weight

You look at yourself in the mirror one morning and don’t like what you see.  You constantly need new clothes because the old ones are so tight they show all of your bulges. Members of the opposite sex no longer seem to notice you. And the bathroom scales obviously need replacing because you could not possibly be that heavy.

Whatever the trigger is, something causes you to see the truth.

You have let yourself go. You need to do something about it. But you have been here before. You know that diets don’t seem to keep the weight off. Not only that but diets are hard work and mean months and months of struggle.

There really is only one problem to solve and that is maintaining motivation over the long haul. Slow weight loss is the only way to make it permanent, but what you really need is a coach – someone to look over your shoulder and keep on with the encouragement even when those pounds do not seem to be shifting. But a coach is going to be expensive, so how else can you get that encouragement?

Well, it seems that there are a lot of websites out there that help you keep track of your weight loss and fitness goals. They make it so much easier for you to keep track of progress and maintain your determination to not only reach your realistic target weight, but also to maintain it.

MyFitnessPal is a handy free service that helps you keep track of goals. If you like to count calories it has a database full of foods and a calculator that will give you a pretty good idea of how many calories you are eating. If you tell it how much exercise you do it calculates how many calories you are using and lets you know how much you need to eat to lose weight at a healthy rate. It also has an app that shares your details with your smartphone/tablet so you can keep on track.

Talking of apps there’s a great bathroom scale available now, the Withings WiFi Body Scale. It keeps track of weight, body fat, and BMI and talks to either your web browser or an app on your smartphone/tablet.

Add to that a heart rate monitor so that you get the maximum calorie burn when you exercise and you have given yourself a well-deserved gift that will help to motivate and encourage you long-term.

If you add to that mix a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily you will have the perfect weight loss kit. My book, by the way, has loads of useful hints and tips on how to lose weight without suffering as well as a 10-step guide to successful, lasting, weight loss.

Successful weight loss is all about motivating yourself to keep going until you reach your target. So surround yourself with whatever tools, or equipment,  that you need in order to be successful. Take advantage of everything that you need to support yourself. No one else will do it for you and you do not need any one else’s permission to look after yourself the best way you know how.

Remember, it is how far you have come, not how far you travelled yesterday, that matters.

Michael

The links above are for European readers. If you live in the US please use these:

Withings Body Fat Scale

Heart rate monitor

How to Lose Weight Easily

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Insomnia And How To Beat It

Sleep is probably the only thing we do each day that really matters. But many people fail to get the quality of sleep they need.

Sleep appears to be a quite natural process that we have no control over – largely because we are unconscious when we do it. But, we can actually do quite a lot to improve the quality and quantity of our sleep without having to resort to medication.

A survey by the National Sleep Foundation showed that 35% of the people surveyed had sleep problems.

The problems fell into four categories:

  1. Difficulty falling asleep
  2. Frequent waking during the night.
  3. Waking up too early and staying awake.
  4. Waking without feeling any sense of refreshment.

I think all of those things happen to all of us at some time, but there comes a point when they are happening frequently, or worse still, nightly, and that’s when you have a problem. The problem is twofold. First of all you no longer look forward to bedtime because you know what’s going to happen. Secondly you are not energized by your night’s rest and so fatigue sets in early along with problems concentrating and staying focused. Enthusiasm is difficult to find, temper gets short and relationships suffer.

The interesting thing is that poor sleeping patterns can usually be fixed quite easily and without resorting to medication.

Anxiety is one of the major causes of sleep disruption, and that’s quite understandable if it is just an occasional disturbance. But when the anxiety is a background state that is always present then it is time to take action.

Anxiety falls into two main categories:

  1. Anxiety about things you have no control over
  2. Anxiety over things you have control over.

If you can do something then take action. If you can’t do anything then recognise that you are powerless, it is in the lap of the Gods, and make peace with it.

I know that simplifies things a little too much, so here is another angle.

Anxiety is all about thoughts that wander through your mind. The thoughts will be thoughts that cause your emotional energy to drop into the territories of anger, fear, or grief. Anxiety is either a fantasy about what might happen, or a regret about what has happened. Neither of those is going on in the present.

The problem is rarely what has happened, or might happen, it is your thoughts about that. The thoughts are the problem. It is the thoughts that disturb your sleep, prevent you from dropping off, and wake you early.

So attend to the thoughts.

Now you may think that you are powerless to impact your thoughts. After all, you only know about them once they appear and once they appear it is a little late to do anything about them.

At least that is what your thoughts would have you believe.

Worrying is a choice and an addiction.

You can control it, but not directly. You have to sort of sneak up on it through the back door.

Here are three simple things you can do to begin to take back control of your mind.

Bathe:

Just before bedtime, run yourself a nice warm bath. If you like bubbles and candles and soft music, do that too. Get in, then just lie there soaking in the warmth and allow your mind to drift to somewhere pleasant. Plan a dream holiday to a place you’d love to visit; fantasise about a new toy you’d like to possess; start to write your novel in your mind by developing the story line and characters; let your mind run free to explore anything at all that you find fascinating. If at any time you realise you are back on your favourite worry subject, then just let that go and return to your imaginary world. After about half an hour of this, get out and go straight to bed.

Turn off TV:

An hour before bedtime turn off the TV. Instead listen to some relaxing music, something drifting and dreamy if you have it, definitely not something that makes you want to get up and dance. Read a really good book that takes you away and engrosses you, or read something really boring.

Exercise:

Fit some vigorous physical activity into your evening routine. Join a gym, go for a fast walk, buy yourself a rowing machine. It doesn’t really matter what the exercise is or where you do it but get physical. The exercise generates endorphins which make you feel good. When you feel good it is much harder to get hold of negative thoughts.

There are also some don’ts.

Go to bed to go to sleep. So don’t read in bed. Don’t watch TV in bed. Don’t listen to the radio, or anything else, in bed. And most important of all, don’t nap during the day or evening.

If anxiety is disturbing your sleep then just doing these simple things will improve your sleep quality, and quantity.

Michael

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As Long As You Do It Regularly – You Can Eat As Much Fat As You Want

At least that’s a rough translation of the research by Dr Hadas Sherman et al at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although the research has only been done using mice as subjects, if it translates to human behaviour, then this is really good news for people who want to lose weight.

The numbers of overweight and obese individuals have only reached epidemic proportions in the last few decades. So this research correlates nicely with a major change in eating patterns that has taken place in that time – snacking.

In my childhood, food was eaten at mealtimes and there were three of those a day, plus a snack for supper at nine every evening. Every day food was eaten around the same time. I was never hungry, and I ate a full meal at lunchtime as well as in the evening. I grew up slim, fit and healthy.

Nowadays people seem to graze, rather like cattle, eating constantly. They eat walking down the street, they eat in coffee bars, and they eat in pubs. They eat in the cinema even though the bucket of popcorn is ten times the volume of their stomach and they had an evening meal a couple of hours earlier. They eat at their desk, and they fill their supermarket trolley with crisps, biscuits, snacks, and chocolate bars so they can continue to graze all evening in front of the tv. But, and this seems to be the problem, there is no regularity to any of this. Breakfasts, lunches and dinners are missed, or eaten early or late, to fit around other activities.  Snacks are used to bridge the space between these irregular meals.

Now, it seems that regularity is one of the ways that the body’s intelligence knows that the food supply is plentiful. When food arrives in the stomach at the same time each day, the body adjusts metabolism accordingly. If it had a voice it would say something like – “ I know that food always turns up at the same times each day, therefore, I know food is plentiful, therefore, I don’t need to store any fat for emergencies. Even if an occasional meal is missed, as long as the next one is on time I know there is no problem.” Food is converted to energy for immediate use or eliminated.

The Hebrew University research found that mice who ate a high-fat diet consisting of regular meals weighed less after 18 weeks than mice who consumed either a high fat diet with irregular feeding, or a low fat diet with irregular feeding. Unfortunately, all the mice, even the ones on a low-fat regular diet ended up heavier than they were. But the interesting thing here is that every single mouse consumed exactly the same number of calories each day.

So, as I suggested some time ago in my article Calories are not Created Equal your weight isn’t just about the Calories that you consume. It seems that you can offset some of the damage by eating meals regularly and cutting out on the snacking. So become a champion for the family mealtime sitting around a table with the tv off, at the same time each evening. Eat breakfast and lunch at the same time each day and forget about all the rest – regardless of what everyone around you is doing.

This, according to the researchers, is going to reset your metabolic clock to a much healthier state. Knowing what times each day you are going to eat and not eating at any other time will leave you fully satisfied – once you develop the new habit – you will almost certainly start to lose weight and the really good news is that you still get to eat whatever you want.

If you would like some more hints and tips on How to Lose Weight Easily get hold of a copy of my book of the same title. It’s available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback at an almost giveaway price.

Michael

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Blood Pressure – The Hidden Disease.

There is a good chance that your blood pressure is high enough to negatively impact your health. I can say that with certainty because 1 in every 3 people has blood pressure that is too high. So if you think of two people who are close to you – then one of you probably has high blood pressure.

The reason I’ve called this the Hidden Disease is that moderately high blood pressure, like smoking, produces no noticeable symptoms. However, just like smoking, after a few years of ignoring it, you start to suffer serious health problems. The worst of these, heart attacks and strokes, can be lethal or severely disabling.

High blood pressure causes:

  • Artery damage and narrowing
  • Aneurism
  • Coronary artery disease
  • Enlarged heart
  • Heart failure
  • Transient ischaemic attack
  • Stroke
  • Dementia
  • Mild cognitive impairment
  • Severe kidney damage and failure
  • Eye and sight damage
  • Erectile dysfunction
  • Loss of sexual desire, lack of arousal and orgasm (women)
  • Osteoporosis
  • Sleep problems

Yes, hypertension is serious, and since it is endemic you need to do two things. Find out if you have it and, if you have, take steps to reduce it.

The only way to discover that you have high blood pressure is to measure it. There are two ways you can do this.

  1. Get your doctor to measure it.
  2. Do it yourself.

Now you may think that your doctor’s is the best place to have your blood pressure measured, but it isn’t, the best way is to do it yourself. You see anxiety is one of the things that pushes blood pressure up and a lot of people suffer from what is known as White Coat Hypertension. This is high blood pressure caused by being in a medical environment.

Also blood pressure (Bp) varies, quite naturally, throughout the day. Your blood pressure is lower when resting and relaxed, than it is when you are active. When you measure it yourself you can, if you wish, measure it several times a day, or just once a day when you are relaxed. When you do this regularly and keep a record this gives your doctor a much more accurate picture and helps them to help you with much more relevant treatment, because many of the pharmaceutical treatments for hypertension are quite harmful in other ways.

Now, in the days when blood pressure was measured with a column of mercury and a stethoscope you had little choice but to get it measured by your doctor, but nowadays there is a huge range of accurate, electronic Bp monitors that are so simple and easy to use that anyone can take accurate blood pressure readings.

Omron make a great range of accurate blood pressure monitors. The Omron M6 Comfort  Blood Pressure Monitor has automatic inflation, lets you know if the arm cuff isn’t positioned correctly, and warns you if the reading is too high. All you have to do is sit down, slip a cuff up your arm and position it just above your elbow, rest your arm on a table, then press a button. The machine pumps up the cuff, takes the measurements and displays the results clearly.

These machines give you three numbers, systolic pressure, diastolic pressure, and pulse rate. Systolic is the higher of the two numbers.  Your blood pressure is in the healthy range if systolic is 120 or below, and diastolic is 80 or below (120/80). Now it’s unlikely that your blood pressure will be in that range because most adults have blood pressure above that but below 140 over 90 (140/90). This is what is now known as pre-hypertension. If you are in this range then you need to be taking steps to reduce your blood pressure. Above 140/90 and you definitely need to have a word with your physician.

If your Bp is in this pre-hypertensive range then there are a range of things you can do yourself, without need for medication, in order to bring your blood pressure down. But I’ll give you time to absorb this, and find out whether or not it applies to you, before I show you some things you can do to improve your health and well being. But it will require that you make some small easy changes to your routine, so prepare yourself for that and you will find that helping yourself to a longer, healthier life is much easier than you think.

Michael

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Stress Adversely Affects Unborn Children

It’s a real shame that pregnancy affects so many people because it’s tough being in the womb when your Mum is finding that life is not as easy as she hoped it would be. Mum-to-be can’t smoke to ease her frazzled nerves. And almost anything she consumes has the potential to end up in you, so drinking and drug taking (prescribed or otherwise) have to be monitored carefully or, preferably, stopped altogether.

Now, according to a recent Dutch study by Eva Loomans, a psychologist at Tilburg University, you can’t even get stressed or depressed without your unborn child suffering. The problem is that stress and/or depression appear to cause low birth weights. There was also a small, though statistically significant, connection with babies born pre-term. Being born early has the potential to cause health problems throughout your life.

Now, you and I both know that stress is a part of modern life. We cannot escape from it, but these pregnancy problems arise when the stress interferes with normal functioning. When the worry causes you to change behaviours; to avoid situations, or just people; or it stops you from living normally; that is when it becomes a health issue. This state of affairs applied to around 25% of 7,700 women who took part in the study.

A lot of people suffer from stress, anxiety, worry or depression. But if they happen to be pregnant it affects their unborn child too. Of course, if you are pregnant or thinking of starting a family, all this knowledge is going to do is to add to your worries because now you not only have all your current worries, you also have to worry about your worry damaging your baby’s health too.

What you need is a solution.

The doctors may give you medications, but there is always a danger that they will probably affect your child as well. It’s a bit of a Catch-22 situation. The worry is making you worry more and the medication to solve that problem is going to do as much or more harm than the worrying is already accomplishing.

A good idea is to learn a different approach to life and living – an approach that reduces the amount of worrying you do and frees you up to spend that worry time doing something much more interesting instead.

There are a lot of tools you can use to help you start with this. I’m in the process of creating products and writing books that will guide you through many of these so I’ll just introduce you to a few here.

Meditation

Learn how to meditate. Meditation is one of the best tools I know to reduce stress and anxiety. You can learn to meditate on your own or listen to a guided meditation.

So far I’ve produced two Guided Meditations. Chakra Meditation, and Spirit Guide Meditation. They are both beautifully relaxing meditations available in CD format from Amazon.com and as an MP3 download from my website.

Self-Hypnosis

Self hypnosis is a great way to reduce stress and improve your life. I’ve created a self hypnosis MP3 Download that helps you to learn how to do this quickly and easily so that you can begin to take control of your life and discover that those external pressures do not have to impact you so strongly. As you work with self-hypnosis regularly you will find that your life begins to change and you feel lighter, more energised, and able to see solutions where previously you only saw problems.

Freedom

I have written a book that looks at a lot of stress causing problems, and it’s yours for free. It’s called Freedom and you can get your free copy at the top right of this page.

Hypnosis

If you feel that you need some help and don’t have the strength of mind to take control of your own destiny at this point, then find a good hypnotherapist and sign up for a course of treatment. It will help you to find your way out and back into the world again.

Books

Get down to your local bookshop, or library, find the Self-help section and take home whatever grabs your attention. I’ve organised a selection of titles that I’ve found amazingly helpful during the darker times of my life so check out my self help books page.

Release from Worry

The first step is to realise you have a problem. The second is to recognise, that with some help and guidance, you are the best person to solve it. No matter how difficult life is for you right now, if you are pregnant or thinking of having a baby, then you owe it to your future family to take action now to resolve the anxieties and concerns in your life. Even if you suffer from severe depression, these steps will help to begin the process of lifting you up and back to life in the light.

Understanding that you can change your mind, and then discovering exactly how to do that is your key to freedom and release from your suffering.

Michael

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Coffee Bean That Melts Fat?

That was the subject line of an email in my Inbox this morning. I almost deleted it straight away because it was SPAM from some company I’d never asked to send me stuff, but I thought no, let’s have a look. So I opened it up and was greeted by a scantily clad, skinny lady – rather like the one on the cover of my book How to Lose Weight Easily – and emblazoned across her very attractive bosom in giant writing were the words.

Weight Loss Experts
CAN’T BELIEVE THIS

I couldn’t believe it.

They were absolutely right.

I am a weight loss expert and I can’t believe it.

Having come this far, I thought I’d better check this out, after all it might make for something interesting to write about today. My intention being to quickly discover that it was a load of rubbish and then tell you why and what was wrong with the research.

You might think it’s quite easy to track down a piece of research these days with the internet being what it is. But, truth be told, Google is a bit rubbish when you want to find out specific and accurate information. What tends to happen is that you trawl through twenty, thirty, forty promising looking sites only to find out that they are all rehashing the same information which originated in the same press release. Occasionally there is a snippet of fresh information that leads, like a trail of breadcrumbs either to the goal, or to a giving up on the search.

It really is important to locate the original research paper because, quite often, distortions creep into the reporting of what the results mean. Especially when the reporting is done by a company whose product sales are going to benefit.

For instance one site reported

“16 overweight young adults”

Another…

“The 16 people were obese or overweight and between the age of 22 and 26.”

The study actually used 16 people between the ages of 22 and 46.

The key author of the study is cited as Dr Joe A Vinson, a chemist at the University of Scranton, PA, but the study was conducted in Bangalore, India. Dr Vinson’s research was funded by Applied Food Sciences. Applied Food Sciences are the company that supplied the Green Coffee Bean Extract (GCA – Green Coffee Antioxidant) that the research was testing!!!!

Looking at Dr Vinson’s list of publications on the University website it seems he is a leading light in researching natural products that produce health benefits. But I am nevertheless suspicious when the guy who is paying the bills is also the guy whose products you are testing to see if they do what they say.

Back to the research: 16 people is such a small sample that no statistically significant conclusions can be drawn – which makes me wonder why bother. That said, the results are certainly interesting. The study ran for 22 weeks. Participants had a period with a low dose green coffee extract, a period with a higher dose, and a period with a placebo. There was a two week recovery period between each test. Over that time the subjects showed an average weight loss of 18lbs. 10 subjects had 10% loss of body weight, and 5 of the other 6 lost 5% of their body weight. Average heart rate slowed by 2 beats a minute – this doesn’t sound much but is significant for heart health. There are also indications, but nothing statistically significant, that there might be beneficial effects on blood pressure.

It is important to note here that Green Coffee Extract is low in caffeine. The caffeine comes when the beans are roasted. The extract used is primarily chlorogenic acid which is removed from the green beans, but is destroyed in the roasting process so drinking more coffee isn’t going to do you any good.

You’ll find elsewhere on this site my comments about two drugs, Belviq and Qsymia that the FDA recently approved for use with weight loss – both of which look like they could have very serious long-term side effects. A 22 week trial isn’t going to identify long-term side effects, but no short-term side effects were reported in this coffee bean trial.

It looks to me as though this trial was created specifically to provide scientific evidence and backing to promote the sale of Applied Food Science’s GCA. It is too small to be of any use for anything other than to provide quotable results from a clinical trial in order to convince customers of the product’s efficacy. However, the results are interesting, so I cannot say, as I was hoping to, that this is just more junk. If you are desperate for a solution in a pill – this might help you. If you decide to take it then please let me know how you get on.

Michael

 

If you want to check it out yourself you can find the report here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3267522/?tool=pubmed

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Frying Pans Make Your Children Fat

Well not just frying pans. Any pan with a non-stick coating, according to recent research, has the power to impact the way your child’s body metabolises fat in later life. Now I have to say that the research has not yet established cause and effect beyond any doubt, but there is a significant correlation with the levels of PFCs (polyfluoroalkyl compounds) found in the blood of pregnant women and the weight of their children. PFCs get into pregnant women via non-stick pan coatings.

The study looked at medical information from around 450 women who were pregnant in the early 90’s. What they discovered was that the women with the highest levels of PFC in their blood had babies that, on average, weighed 5 ozs less at birth. However, by the age of 20 months these same babies weighed, on average, 1.3lbs heavier than the children of mothers with the lowest levels of PFC.

This confirms the results of a Danish study revealing that girls exposed to PFCs in the womb were much more likely to be overweight by the time they reached the end of their teens.

PFCs are endemic and most people already have them floating around in their bloodstream, though they are not as prevalent in the environment now as they were 20 years ago when those blood samples were taken.

Still, this research does make you wonder. There is a ‘fat’ epidemic, and while a lot of it is caused by eating much more food than is needed, this epidemic does match the rise in the use of non-stick cookware. I had a quick look around my local hardware store today and although there was an extensive selection of pans there was no shiny metal anywhere. Every single pan had a non-stick coating.

Non-stick pan coatings are a source of PFCs. Now I know from personal experience (largely because I use pans until the handles fall off) that non-stick coatings don’t stay on the pans.  I had a set of pans for around 30 years and they started off non-stick and ended up aluminium. What that means is that some particles of the non-stick coating must come off into the food every time the pan is used. The coating just got thinner and thinner. So I ate it and my family ate it.

Now I know the amounts are miniscule but these chemicals interfere with hormones and hormones operate at microscopic concentrations.

After realising that I’d probably eaten the pan coatings, my next set of pans were plain stainless steel. Interestingly I find that I don’t miss the non-stickness at all and rarely have a problem with sticking food. I remember reading somewhere that non-stick coatings were a by-product of the space programme and probably something we all ended up using because of clever marketing rather than any real need.

Now if it was just pans all it would mean was a little more work with the scourer, but PFCs are used to coat all sorts of things – many of which are food related. Our bodies, nowadays, ingest a huge amount of PFCs from the plastic containers and films that cover food – particularly those designed for microwave heating.

So it might just be time for another revolution – one that means a little more work. Using things like glass or ceramic containers to heat up food, rather than the packaging they come in. I know that’s too much effort, but if you consider the amount of energy you exert into going on diets and trying to lose weight, then using shiny metal pans and dispensing with packaging before microwaving is probably a lot less. Not only that but you get to do without all the guilt and suffering too.

Now if you want to lose a little more weight than non-stick pans will give you, and you’d like to make it really easy and not have to bother with all that dieting stuff,  then get hold of a copy of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

Michael

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Is Fasting an Easier Way to Lose Weight than Dieting?

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend at a meditation group and he was telling me all about this programme he’d seen a couple of nights earlier. The programme was about the benefits of fasting. He was buzzing and already on his fast. I didn’t really take a great deal of notice because the minute he mentioned fasting I thought that sounds like effort, real hunger, and going without things I like.

Anyway, I listened with a level of interest that was curious about how it had inspired my friend, but without any intention of doing anything with that information. My friend, by the way is young, fit, healthy, and a keen mountain biker to whom a 40 mile cycle ride is taking it easy.

The following morning I was going for a day out with my daughter and she started to tell me about this same programme and how she was going to start a 48 hour fast at the weekend. At this point I started to take notice. The Universe was trying to tell me something here.

So I got out my iPad that evening and watched the programme on the BBC’s iPlayer.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01lxyzc

It’s on again in the early hours of tomorrow (Wednesday 5th Sept) morning if you want to catch/record/make a note to watch on iPlayer.

By the time it was finished, I was hooked too.

This was science, as opposed to New Age weird stuff, and Michael Mosley, the presenter, was talking to some of the world’s leading experts on body fat. Each of these experts had come up with different fasting techniques, but each also agreed that much more research is needed. Among the benefits discovered are the reduction of visceral fat, increased cardio-vascular health, longer life, and weight loss.

Michael Mosley went on a four day fast and managed to survive. In the programme he talked about alternate day fasting whereby you eat what you want one day, then the next day you restrict yourself to 600 Calories (men) or 500 Calories (women) and repeat this forever. Apparently with this regime you can eat what you want on the eat anything day. This produces weight loss and increased health benefits.

There was so much more in the programme that I encourage you to watch it. I don’t want to make this just a review of something you can watch for yourself.

What I wanted to tell you about was why it is having such a powerful impact on the people who watch it.

If you are a regular reader of my words, or if you’ve read my book How to Lose Weight Easily, you will know that I am not a fan of diets or dieting – for reasons that I explore at length in my book. Fasting, however, fits in very well with my approach to weight loss and gives it a boost.

I’ll tell you why.

Other than the fasting period itself, there is no control over what you eat the rest of the time.

I wanted to experiment with this in a way that would be beneficial not only to myself but to others as well. So I had a think about this.

What could I cope with? Four days without eating would be difficult for me. Two days I could manage, but I probably wouldn’t want to repeat it too often.  One day, yes I could do that. I don’t think I’ve gone a whole day without food in my life, but I figured I could manage that.

Now, there was nothing in this programme to suggest that one day of fasting would achieve anything at all, but I wanted to experiment and understand the thoughts and sensations that go along with not eating.  I also decided to not eat anything rather than the 600 calories that was suggested. I thought it would be easier to have nothing rather than be worrying about how filling I could make my allowance.

So I picked a Sunday when I had no plans, got home late after being out with some friends to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower and had a big slice of apple pie around 1:00 am. Then I ate nothing until breakfast on Monday morning around 8:00 am, so it was a little over 24 hours.

The most interesting thing was that I didn’t really feel anything I could call hunger until about 9:00 in the evening, at which point it was so close to bedtime that it was almost over. All I consumed that day was green tea without milk or sugar. This is my normal beverage not something I chose especially for the experiment. I wanted to drink something calorie-free that was a little tastier than water. Interestingly I wasn’t especially hungry when I woke up on Monday morning and could easily have gone another day without food.

When I weighed myself Monday morning I was 3lbs lighter, but a week later I was back to my normal weight.

Two weeks later I did the same again only this time my last food was around 6:00pm on Saturday.

A week later I repeated the experiment once more.

There has been no change in my weight,  other than the 3lbs I lose the day I don’t eat, but I have noticed several things.

My days are focused around meal times. When I take food out of the equation there is a bit of a sense of the loss of a milestone, or an anchor in the day with which to measure progress. I was finding that I had to find more interesting things to do than I normally do. But I stuck to having just a pot of tea instead of food at mealtimes.

While I was on the fast day I never really experienced anything other than transient feelings of hunger until late in the evening. I did think about food, but only when my mind wasn’t occupied with something interesting. The decision to eat nothing for a day made it easy not to eat and to ignore food thoughts.

The week following the day of fasting leaves me feeling hungrier than I normally am, and fuller than I normally feel when I eat. I’m finding that I’m still eating my normal quantities of food but feeling much fuller afterwards. It seems that the fast has put me back in touch with those feelings of hunger and fullness that we seem to lose contact with when we regularly eat more than we need.

Unfortunately I’m still stuck in the old habit and cooking what I used to cook, But I’m starting to reduce what I eat, getting back to throwing more away and being more sensitive to full feelings until I establish the new habit. What I’m realising is how little food I need to eat to stay fit and healthy.

But the strangest thing of all, and this has nothing to do with weight, is that I feel more alive, more alert and have more energy – more bounce.

This for me is the biggest benefit.

I don’t think a one off fast will achieve anything lasting at all. But I think if it is built into your routine, like me, maybe one day a week, or the day on, day off, with a restricted calorie intake on alternate days – then I see the potential for huge benefits and really easy weight loss.

Michael

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Highly Sensitive People and the Key to Freedom

Elaine N. Aron coined the term Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and explored this idea in her book The Highly Sensitive Person – How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You. It’s all about the trait of High Sensitivity and the impact it has on the life of an individual. I was almost tempted to write an individual who suffers from it but it isn’t a disease or an illness. Mind you it certainly feels as though there’s something wrong when you are an HSP.

HSP’s are people for whom the world seems to have too much going on and too many expectations of them. They feel different, isolated, and frequently end up with psychological problems. Being Highly Sensitive itself is not a psychological problem, but growing up without understanding the differences between you and everyone else is what frequently causes the HSP to end up suffering.

So is this you, or is there another reason for your anxiety and stress?

Do the opening words of the book’s preface resonate with you?

“Cry baby!”

“Scaredy-cat!”

“Don’t be a spoilsport!”

Echoes from the past? And how about this well-meaning warning: “You’re just too sensitive for your own good.”

If it does, you may be one of us.

If you have a keen imagination and vivid dreams; need time alone each day; are too shy, or too sensitive (at least in the opinion of others); or find yourself wanting to withdraw from bright lights and noise, then there is a good chance that this is you.

According to Aron’s research about 1 in 5 people fall into the category of HSP, so there are plenty of us around. In fact the world would be a much poorer place without us, for she says we are the writers, historians, philosophers, judges, artists, researchers, theologians, therapists, teachers, or just conscientious citizens. But it’s frequently a painful journey to arrive at that place of wisdom and insight you wish to share with others.

My interest in this is partly because reading Aron’s book explained much of why my life wasn’t working and what I could do to change it; partly because so many of the people who come to me for help with anxiety and stress problems fall into this category too. The main reason for their suffering is a lack of self-acceptance – not I hasten to add because there is anything unacceptable about them – but because they can’t accept themselves. The reason they can’t accept themselves is because society says to be acceptable you need to fit in, and they just don’t.

There’s no room for manoeuvre there.

Just something as simple and joy-filled as a party can be hell for an HSP. Loud music, lots of people talking, loads of stimulation, lots of food choices to make. It’s so easy to be that person alone against the wall pretending to be fascinated by what you are eating, when you would much rather be at home with your head in that really good book you just started. But that’s anti-social, and being anti-social is frowned upon. If you stay at home you’ll end up with no friends and being lonely is worse than being an HSP.

The real problem is not the party. It’s the sense of having to be there and having to stay until a reasonable amount of time has passed.

I had a client recently who was really struggling with this. So I suggested he simply go with the intention of enjoying himself and leave as soon as he feels he’d had enough. When he came back for the next session he told me how incredibly freeing this was. The idea that he could leave when he’d had enough – even if that was just ten minutes after he arrived. It now meant that he could enjoy social events with family and friends. The big fear here is that of disapproval, but I explained to him that most people aren’t bothered about you. Most people are only concerned with themselves. When you say you’ve got to go, people will just accept it as long as there is no doubt in your mind about your intention to leave.

And this was what surprised him most. He stayed for around an hour, then said he had to go and no one was bothered, just pleased that he’d made the effort to come.

Being a Highly Sensitive Person is not easy, because it means making your own choices, monitoring your own internal stimulation levels, and frequently going against the flow of what everyone else in your social circle wants.

But once you take charge and discover that you can leave anywhere anytime, as soon as you’ve had enough, then you can return, socialise and enjoy living your life on your terms – rather than someone else’s.

The Highly Sensitive Person is well-worth reading. If it doesn’t apply to you, one of your children may well be an HSP. With the knowledge in this book, you can ensure their life is fun-filled, rather than the nightmare it could so easily turn out to be.

Just before I go, there is  another book that looks at this subject from a slightly different angle. It’s called Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking. I thoroughly enjoyed this one too and author, Susan Cain, references Aron’s work and even attends an HSP conference in her search for answers.

Michael