Category: Alternative

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Alternative health hypnosis self-help

Insomnia and How to Beat It

Difficulty getting a restful, rejuvenating, night’s sleep – or insomnia, is  a surprisingly common problem. It affects over 60 million Americans, and almost one-third of the UK adult population. We all suffer the odd night when we have difficulty sleeping because of a worry, or excitement, or a minor illness. That’s not insomnia. Insomnia is when it happens night after night after night and you wake feeling almost as tired as you when you went to bed and often feel as if you haven’t slept at all.

Some people feel they aren’t getting any sleep night after night, but the good news is that you do actually get some sleep, simply because after several days without any sleep, you start to experience micro-sleeps (lasting half a second to half a minute) outside of your awareness, and you may also begin to experience hallucinations. Physical health also starts to suffer with prolonged sleep deprivation eventually leading to death. What tends to be experienced is long periods of being awake and getting frustrated at the lack of ability to fall asleep – interspersed with short periods of sleep, which tend to be forgotten.

Others have difficulty falling asleep, but when they eventually do, they have a decent sleep.

Yet others have no problem falling asleep, but awaken after a couple of hours and then can’t get back to sleep.

The patterns are quite varied so here’s a little help:

If you

  • have difficulty drifting off to sleep
  • experience patchy sleep, waking frequently
  • Go to bed and can’t drift off
  • Have a short sleep but awaken too early
  • Don’t feel refreshed after sleep
  • Have trouble concentrating because of tiredness

Then you have insomnia.

The amount of sleep each person needs is different, but generally speaking an adult requires around 7-9 hours. If you think you’re sleeping but feel permanently tired then you probably have insomnia.

It doesn’t matter how long it’s been going on for you, insomnia isn’t normal, and, unless there is some underlying physical problem, you can be helped.

There are some easy fixes and some less easy fixes. Sort out the comfort of the room if it’s too hot or too cold. It may be that your bed is not as comfortable as it could be. Stop taking non-prescription drugs. Use earplugs if noise is a problem, and eye-shades if the room is too light – this can be a particular problem in higher latitudes. Where I live (UK) in summer it starts getting light at about 3:30am and on a clear morning is almost fully daylight by 4:00am.

Less easy to fix is sleep deprivation caused by stress, anxiety, or even depression. If you suffer from any of these problems I highly recommend that you have a read of my book Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis. It is full of tips and helpful techniques to use to reduce stress and anxiety as well as helping you to move toward lifting your depression.

Most insomnia, whether or not you realise it, is down to the establishment of poor sleeping habits, and one thing hypnosis is very good at is breaking bad habits. With that end I have created this Insomnia recording available for instant download. It is not designed for listening at bed time, so listen at least a couple of hours before you go to sleep. Listen daily until you have established better sleeping patterns.

As well as this you can help by introducing a regular bedtime routine. Stop doing anything mentally stimulating about an hour before you sleep. If there is anything on your mind write it down and pick it up again in the morning. Have a warm milky drink – chocolate is good. Get into a warm bath with lots of bubbles and just soak and maybe listen to some soft music. Read rather than watch TV and most definitely turn off the computer/phone/tablet at least an hour beforehand. Relaxing music is good even if you’re not in the bath.

Once you are in bed do not read, do not watch TV, do not listen to music, just settle down as comfortably as you can and give yourself permission to have a good and restful nights sleep. If you download the recording you will discover that there is just one more thing that you can do that will assist you in drifting off for a deep and satisfying sleep until the alarm goes off in the morning.

Categories
Alternative

Chakra Activation & Healing Meditation

This video is really an audio that is best listened to with headphones to receive the greatest benefit from your time spent listening.

This is a pleasant introduction to chakra meditation. I hope you enjoy it and aren’t as irritated as I was by the spelling mistakes in the on-screen instructions at the beginning of the video. Still it’s not mine so I can’t fix it.

Categories
Alternative health

Do Vaccines Damage Your Immune System?

The news recently reported an outbreak of mumps at Fordham University in New York. On the day of the report there were 13 cases of mumps confirmed. One interesting factor is that one of the entry requirements for Fordham is proof of vaccination against, amongst other diseases, mumps.

So we have an outbreak of mumps in a University full of students who have all been vaccinated against the disease. The university immediately shifts into panic mode and requires infected students to remain at home and institutes all sorts of hygiene regulations.

All this over a minor, uncomfortable illness that I experienced for a week or so as a child.

The world has gone mad.

Either that or there is just too much money to be made out of compulsory vaccination.

But it got me to thinking, because this news synchronistically showed up after I had written yesterday’s post about needing disease to stay healthy. I looked back at my childhood and the list of diseases that I experienced – measles, chicken pox, mumps, tonsillitis, whooping cough, and I may have had others when I was too young to remember. All most of these meant to me was a couple of weeks off school and a little discomfort in the early stages.

Putting those two things together – getting sick and the necessity of it – reminded me of something I’ve thought for quite a few years now. In fact ever since I’ve been involved and interested in the world of alternative health it has appeared to me that our immune system needs training. That training takes place when we are young and before our bodies become flabby and unfit. The training, just like a work out at the gym to strengthen your muscles, involves fighting invading organisms.

I believe experiencing these diseases when we are young is essential to the health of our immune systems.

Mumps is something you need to experience pre-puberty otherwise it can get very uncomfortable and even cause sterility. What the vaccination programme has clearly done is to push the mumps experience out of its correct place in the body’s developmental cycle and push it to where it likely will cause you some problems. I mean Fordham are making a lot of fuss about this outbreak.

Anyway I figured, that makes sense to me, and my experience tells me that what makes sense to me is frequently true even though no one else believes it. But I was curious to see if any research had been conducted that provided evidence that vaccination weakens the immune system, because otherwise all I had was a theory.

There is a study published in Clinical Pediatrics (sic) in 1988. They looked at the incidence of acute illness in children for the 30 days before and the 30 days after being vaccinated against diphtheria, whooping cough, and tetanus (DTP).

“A total of 82 healthy infants received DTP, and their symptoms were reported by parents and observed by a pediatrician at weekly intervals. Those babies experienced a dramatic increase in fever, diarrhea, and cough in the month following DTP vaccine compared to their health before the shot.”

This study excluded the three days after vaccination when a fever is a common reaction to the vaccine.

1988!!! That’s 26 years ago.

“An uninformed patient is compliant” says Dr Martin Smith. This is typical of the medical attitude to negative evidence about what they routinely do. It seems to me that the medical attitude is one of if we ignore it, it will go away.

Another study demonstrated that the measles vaccine produced a long-term immune suppression.

Yet another that annual flu vaccination depletes T-cells. T-cells are an important part of a healthy immune system.

A study of dogs at the Purdue Veterinary School showed that vaccinated dogs developed antibodies to many of their own bio-chemicals. This meant that the vaccinated dogs “were attacking their own fibronectin, which is involved in tissue repair, cell multiplication and growth, and differentiation between tissues and organs in a living organism.”

The unvaccinated dogs were perfectly normal.

These studies clearly demonstrated that the dogs developed auto-antibodies to their own DNA.

How did the medical world respond?

‘We need more studies’ anything to continue with things the way they are.

You are going to get bored if I continue quoting research, but there is loads of it out there. Vaccination damages our immune system. The medical world isn’t interested, they believe they are doing good.

As for Big Pharma ineffective vaccines are a huge cash cow – especially when Governments are persuaded to buy them by the shipload. Vaccines are just a licence to print money. The only tests to get FDA approval need to show that they increase the presence of the appropriate antibodies. Other damage isn’t looked for and no long term research on this is conducted by the vaccine manufacturers.

The Big Fear that Big Pharma promotes and encourages is that we will all die horribly and our children will all be crippled and deformed if we don’t pump them full of these chemical concoctions. But all we do is damage our children’s ability to be healthy, whole human beings with a natural ability to ward off disease organisms and enjoy good health and rapid recovery from minor infections.

My thanks to:

Dr. Randal Neustaedter at http://www.healthychild.com/do-vaccines-disable-the-immune-system/

http://gaia-health.com/gaia-blog/2011-12-01/flu-vaccine-damages-childrens-immune-system-is-the-risk-of-cancer-increased/

http://www.dogsadversereactions.com/scienceVaccineDamage.html

Categories
Alternative health weight control

Goal Weights: What Are They and Why Do I Need One?

Your goal weight is the target you are aiming at. It is also, for about half of dieters, a place that is forever in the future. For those who keep up the struggle and achieve their goal weight, it is the point at which celebration takes place, and a return to normal eating, which very quickly puts that goal weight back in the past.

The goal weight is important. It lets you know where you are aiming and when you get there. These are good things. Using arrival at this goal as a signal to return to normal eating; that’s a bad thing.

The goal weight needs to be attainable and maintainable.

It also needs to be thought about, rather than a number you just pick out of the air.

I have had many clients sitting in my consulting room, carrying anything up to 7st (100lbs ish) excess weight, deciding that their goal weight is what they weighed at 16 when they were sylph-like and hadn’t yet discovered the joy of over-eating to solve a whole stack of emotional problems.

The goal weight needs to be realistic.

Targets that are attainable with just a little effort, create huge internal rewards. There is nothing like success at something that was at least a little challenging to make you feel really good about yourself. It also sets you up with an increased chance of success with the next target. So if you need to lose 7st (100lbs) then do it in 1st (14lb) steps. Or even 7lb steps.

The goal weight does not need to be your final weight.

The goal weight is really just a tool – something to help you get where you want to go. One of the big problems, if you are very overweight, is that the job of returning to a normal weight is really difficult. There is no other way of looking at it. It is no use kidding yourself it will be easy. You can’t undo years of food abuse in a couple of weeks. There isn’t a pill you can take that will let you off the personal responsibility hook.

Acknowledge that the weight is there because you eat too much and exercise too little.

It’s no big deal. But taking responsibility means you can own the results and the successes that will come your way. So think sensibly about the weight you are aiming for. Bear in mind also that this is just a number you are picking influenced by the weight of all the people around you who are a healthy weight. They are not you. It does not matter what other people weigh. What you probably want is to be a specific shape, or clothes size, (again influenced by the opinions of others) and are guessing the weight that matches that vision of the future you. That’s ok as long as you understand what you are doing.

But bear in mind that fat and muscle have different densities and you can be shapely with lots of muscle or blobby with lots of fat and be exactly the same weight. So choose your goal weight wisely.

If you need to lose a lot of weight then set an easily reached goal initially like 1st or maybe 10lbs to give yourself a taste of success. Learn to maintain that lighter weight for a couple of months before moving on to the next step of losing a little more. The key to successful weight loss is not losing the weight – it’s keeping it off.

If  you want to know a little more about how easy it is to keep that weight off once you have lost it then check out my book How to Lose Weight Easily and Free Yourself form Diets Forever.

Inspired by:

http://www.3fatchicks.com/how-to-pick-a-goal-weight/

Categories
Alternative health

You Can Heal Your Life

This is the title of a book written by Louise L Hay. Louise Hay is also the founder of Hay House; publisher of many famous self help authors like Wayne Dyer, Don Miguel Ruiz, Esther Hicks, and  Marianne Williamson.

Hay House is certainly the place to go for high quality Mind, Body, Spirit books. But I wanted to write a little about You Can Heal Your Life to follow on from yesterday’s blog post If the Mind Creates Illness, How Can We Use it to Create Wellness? This book has been around since 1984, but it is still completely relevant. It was written when the exploration of the Mind-Body connection was in its infancy and pioneered by just a few – people like Caroline Myss. My copy of You Can Heal Your Life is a beautifully illustrated gift edition full of colour and wonderful illustrations that provide a real lift to the spirit. It is cheering just to leaf through the pages.

At the beginning of the book Louise Hay lists several statements about her philosophy.

Two of special note are:

We create every so-called illness in our body.

Releasing resentment will dissolve even cancer.

One of my favourite parts of the book is the quick reference guide which consists of several pages of health problems and their likely causes. I find these disturbingly accurate and very helpful.

If you are interested in self-healing, and there is no suggestion here that you should do this instead of seeking medical advice, then this book is a must for your bookshelf. Louise Hay even healed herself from cancer using what she teaches in this book. She states ‘dis-ease can be healed, if we are willing to change the way we think and believe and act.’

This book is much more than just a list of physical problems and their possible causes it is a way to live. It is split into four parts. Part 1 is about Louise Hay’s beliefs about life and living. Part 2 is about how problems arise, how we resist change and what we need to do on a daily basis to ensure healthy living. Part 3 looks at those main areas of life that we pretty much all need to be working well in order to live happily: relationships, work, success, prosperity, and the body. It also includes that list of problems and solutions I mentioned earlier. Part 4 winds things up and Louise Hay writes about her own encounter with cancer and what she did to heal it.

If you know nothing, or very little, about self-healing then this book is the best place to start. It is easy to understand, well-written, and will leave you feeling as though you are back in control again.

It is also the start of a journey, a journey where you will never look back.

Categories
Alternative health self-help

If the Mind Creates Illness, How Can We Use It To Create Wellness?

Let us assume, just for now, that the Body is the expression of the Mind. What I mean by this is that you need to pretend that your body reflects back to you what is going on in your mind. So, if there is an ache in your body then we must assume there is an ache in your mind. If there is a pain in your body then there is a pain in your mind. If there is irritation on your skin then there is irritation in your mind.

You get the idea.

Of course, you will be way ahead of me by now, looking within your own BodyMInd for those connections past and present to discover if what I say is true – but remember I said to pretend, just for now.

Naturally in your thoughts about this it will be obvious that serious disease processes in the body cannot escape from this allusion. So you would also have to pretend that problems like cancer, diabetes, asthma… all fall into this category. And then we step into that minefield of babies who are born sick, or develop life-threatening or debilitating diseases while they are very young. Then what about genetic problems like cystic fibrosis?

It gets very complicated very quickly.

Then there is another aspect too.

If your body’s ill-health is a reflection of your state of mind, then surely that means that all disease is self-inflicted?

Well that would be a yes too.

But there is a world of difference between deliberately causing something to be, with full awareness of the consequences, and innocently causing something to happen because you had no awareness of  the negative consequences 20 years later. No one in the process of dying from lung cancer would ever have lit up a cigarette 40 years earlier had they been fully aware of the anguish and agony they and their loved ones would eventually have to endure.

So yes, there are problems with this assumption, but let’s just keep it simple for now and pretend the assumption is true for minor illnesses and that it isn’t true for children at all.

Give yourself a quick body scan.

Is there any discomfort, irritation, ache, pain, anywhere in your body? If there isn’t then do this when there is.

Get a good sense of that area of your body. Feel into the discomfort fully. Move your mind, as best you can, into the space the discomfort occupies. Feel its boundaries and limitations. Then allow your mind to wander and feel your way to what these sensations remind you of. Say, for example, you have an itch – a skin irritation – who or what in your world causes you to prickle inside? Who do you want to scratch when you interact with them? Who makes you see red.

If you have a painful knee, then think about what it prevents you from doing that you don’t like.

Look for the connections between your discomfort and your world. See the similarities.

Remember we are pretending. This is just a game of the imagination to see if you can see connections and similarities. Don’t forget also to let your mind drift back into the past. Sometimes these things take a while to germinate. Have fun with this and don’t take it too seriously.

See what you come up with, maybe keep a notebook on you. One of the interesting things that happens with this game is that you may not be aware of a connection while you are deliberately looking for one, but that connection can pop into your mind at any time. A notebook is a handy way to make sure you don’t forget those fleeting connections.

Just collect the connections – no matter how crazy they may seem. Once you have a dozen or so, ponder on your records and see if you think this was just an interesting game or a new reality you have just entered.

If you would like to get a little deeper into this exploration and learn some techniques to actually change your body’s responses then check out my book Change Your Life with Self Hypnosis. In these pages I go into much more detail on this subject. In fact a large section of this book is dedicated to exploring the possibilities for using the Mind to Heal the Body.

Categories
Alternative

Great New Book on Self Hypnosis – Free on Kindle until 27/03/13

My book change your life with Self Hypnosis is on promotion this weekend and until Wednesday, so download your free copy now.

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00BIML2XI

US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BIML2XI

 

This is a self-help training guide for self hypnosis. It teaches you how to use your mind to change your world. There is a powerful connection between mind, body, and the external world. This book explores that connection and takes you through the steps to achieve mastery. Discover how to calm emotional disturbance, exert control over physical problems, and live a life of happiness and freedom.

If you’d like more details check out the book’s website at: www.self-hypnosis-mastery.com

By the way you don’t actually need a Kindle. Amazon provide free apps for all smartphones, tablets, laptops, notebooks, MACs, & PCs so whatever you have you can get your own copy of this book

So grab one now.

…and I hope you enjoy it.

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.