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Does Losing Weight Have to be a Battle?

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

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

What you resist persists.

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

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

The solution of course is to love yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

So how do you do that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael

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The Search for Alternative Health.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is one to do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael