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Uncategorized

Break Your Addiction to Fattening Foods – Hypnosis Session

 

With hypnosis it is easy to focus on specific aspects of a problem so that it can be resolved in manageable chunks rather than to trying to fix a big problem in one attempt. To that end I have created this ‘video’ hypnosis session designed to help you succeed with that first important step in winning the battle with excess weight.

This video is designed to help to ease you away from fattening and unhealthy foods. This is that vital first step in losing weight. So, as you feel less and less drawn to fattening and sweet foods, you will naturally find much greater pleasure in making healthier choices. You may find it totally effortless, or you may discover that you can make the right choices more of the the time. Either way, you may find that listening to this on a daily basis will give you the encouragement that you need to succeed with your weight loss goal.

Good luck.

 

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Uncategorized

Weight Loss and The Trouble with Diets

 

I decided to have another go at video production and used a chapter out of my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever for inspiration. Above is the result of my efforts. I hope you enjoy it.

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Uncategorized

Words Add More Weight Than Calories

Words make you fat.

My work with hypnosis long ago taught me the power of words. I’ve changed lives, removed fears, eased pain, and helped people to lose weight. I did all of that using nothing more than words. But words have so much power they can harm as well as heal.

A recent long-term US study, conducted by A. Janet Tomiyama, Asst Prof of Psychology, UCLA, followed the weight of 2,379 girls from the age of 10 until the age of 19. Almost 60% of these children had been told they were too fat by the time they were 10. Girls labelled too fat were much more likely to be obese at age 19. The greater the number of people who told a girl she was too fat the greater the likelihood of obesity at age 19.

This is not just a case of fatter children growing into fat adults, because the effects of actual weight were statistically removed in the study. The only factor whose effect was measured was being told you were too fat and by whom. The greater the emotional attachment to the person who criticises the weight – the greater the weight increase in later years.

This is quite fascinating because one of society’s solutions for problems is to point them out.

That’s all that is happening here. People who love the child, and know the problems that obesity brings, simply want to help by encouraging the child to become aware of their problem.

But it has the opposite effect.

Of course if you’ve read my book How to Lose Weight and Free Yourself from Diets Forever you’ll know all about emotional eating. So what is it going to do to a ten year old girl to tell her, no matter how lovingly, that she is too fat – in a world where attractive & loved & popular & famous = SLIM?

It’s not going to cheer her up.

It is going to make her unhappy.

And what do overweight people do when they are unhappy and can’t control their world?

They eat.

Do they eat lettuce and apples? No! They eat sweets and cakes and fats and sugars.

“When people feel bad, they tend to eat more, not decide to diet or take a jog,” Tomiyama said. “Making people feel bad about their weight could increase their levels of the hormone cortisol, which generally leads to weight gain.”

All that matters, especially with a young child, is that they learn to feel good about themselves. Not good about what they look like, or whether they fit in with society’s current view of physical perfection, but good about who they are; good about their talents and abilities; good about how kind and loving they are; and good about everything they do.

Yes, it’s a good idea to ensure they have a healthy diet, but you can do that without stigmatising a child, or regarding a healthy diet as some sort of punishment for getting too fat. I mean what 10 year old has any idea of the connection between their long-term weight and enjoying an ice cream?

Be kind.

Encourage and support a shift to a healthier diet and more active play rather than computer fun. That’s all you need – except…

You just might want to tell your ten year old daughter how beautiful she is.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-girls-too-fat-obese-20140428,0,4057459.story

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-04-simply-fat-young-girls-obese.html

Categories
weight control

Fat Acceptance is the New Weight Loss

It seems that there is a new Buzz Phrase in the weight loss world – Fat Acceptance. It’s going to catch on. It’s going to be big. It’s going to be huge because it makes it sound like being fat is ok, and if you are overweight that’s exactly what you need to hear.

There is only one problem with it – it isn’t new. I’ve been teaching this to my clients for 15 years. I just never gave it a fancy title.

“Fat acceptance is the idea that an overweight individual has every right to be happy and content with respect to their sense of self as well as their own body.” Caroline J. Cederquist MD.

What I have always taught is that you cannot lose weight while you hate your body the way it is now. Of course this is difficult for my clients because most of them end up in my consulting room because they hate the way they look and have battled their fat for years – all to no avail.

I explain to them that the very first thing you need to do is to be ok with your body just the way it is. It’s all you – even the fat cells contain your DNA. The fat on your body is not your enemy. Do not fight it. Instead, be appreciative of who you are and the journey you have made to arrive here.

Of course the overweight body does not meet society’s expectations of attractiveness and so the problem faced by my clients is how to accept and appreciate that which they themselves find unattractive. This is no easy task when every time you turn on a TV; open a magazine; or even take a walk through town; you are bombarded with images of what society currently considers attractive/beautiful. What else can you do except compare yourself and find yourself woefully inadequate?

Well you could look on facebook at all the photo albums of your friends. There you will find real people – the kind that the world is actually full of. This will give you a reality check. Tv, magazines, and posters create an illusion of some mythical world filled with physically attractive people. It isn’t the real world so you can safely ignore it. If you really must compare yourself with other people then compare yourself with the people you see in the supermarket, or on the street, or in the doctor’s waiting room. Notice that there are people who are more overweight than you are and there are people who are slimmer than you are.

Once you arrive at the realisation that there is nothing special about your excess weight, you can move to a state of okayness about it. From there you move to acceptance. Acceptance isn’t saying to yourself this is fine let’s just carry on overeating and die from some horrible weight-induced disease. Acceptance is recognising that you are the way you are right now and right now that’s just how it is, and right now that isn’t going to change, so right now there is absolutely no point in beating yourself up over it. You think the beating up is what motivates you to change. It isn’t. It motivates you to think about change and start that battle with your body where you seek rapid weight loss and all the pain, cravings and denial that requires.

What you resist persists.

Acceptance allows you to acknowledge what is and then make plans for a different future.

Do you not treat someone you love in a very different manner from someone you hate?

Would you force feed someone you love so they slowly became a bloated, overweight, unhealthy human being who had little pleasure in life simply because moving around was so difficult?

Acceptance is like love. It wants what is best, but doesn’t berate what is. Love guides gently, carefully, supportingly towards the goal. Love commiserates with failures, but encourages you to keep going. Love is always there and will ensure success – no matter how long it takes. Love never, ever, ever, gives up on you.

So accept you the way you are right now. Learn to love your body – it is after all your home for life.

 

 

If you are curious about an easy way to lose weight through acceptance then check out my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself from Diets Forever.

 

Inspired by:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/caroline-j-cederquist-md/positive-body-image_b_4766811.html?utm_hp_ref=healthy-living

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
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.