Are you a Dieting Expert? Beware the Creepies
as the Pounds Return Insights Feb 2006
I’ve come to the conclusion that losing twenty pounds is pretty easy. That first twenty pounds is the beginning of the diet when you’re all fired up and determined. That’s before the plateaus, the frustration, and the cravings start to win out over the latest and greatest diet method that’s sure to work.
All diets work for a while. One alternative is to continue trying a new diet every year, losing those same pounds over and over.
Any dieter knows about the creepies. You diet like crazy and lose weight and look great and feel great. Then, slowly but surely, the weight starts to creep back on. It doesn’t come all at once.. After a while, the creepies have you right back where you started, and the whole show has to play over again. The only problem is, you know the outcome. First, the weight loss, then the creepies, over and over again.
It’s depressing and inevitable – unless you tackle the issues underlying the fat. Here’s where it gets strange. If you heal your issues around food and weight, you can eat without gaining weight. Some years ago when I developed the methods for the Mind Over Weight Weekend Workshop (see my website for previous Tone articles) I lost fifty pounds without any dieting or exercise. Since then I have continued an ongoing addiction to cheezies and chips, enjoyed desert when I felt like it, and ate anything I wanted to eat without gaining the weight back. Other people who have used self-mastery confirm this phenomenon: it’s not what you eat. It’s how your body interacts with the food.
Think about that for a minute. If it was the food, then everyone who ate desert would be fat. Oh, I know all the arguments about metabolism and heavy bones and genetics. We’ve all used them as we shopped in oversize stores. Meanwhile, my husband of 140 pounds has always been able to sit beside me and match me, cheezie for cheezie, and still be skinny. If it was the cheezies, he’d be fat. I knew this when I started developing the tools for this program, so I didn’t get confused about what had to be achieved. I had to heal my body so that it would treat food the way my husband’s body treats food – eat it without getting fat.
Over the years I’ve written many tools in this column to help you work with your body to change how it processes food. Here’s another one. This one is about food association. Food association is created when we have a belief system about the food we eat, and therefore a chemical reaction to that food in our bodies. And guess what – you can have the chemical reaction even if you don’t actually eat the food. Now that’s unfair -- true, but unfair.
Here’s an example. If you close your eyes and imagine about eating something sour, like a dill pickle, you’ll produce saliva. Your body is reacting as if you’d eaten the food. It’s not just the saliva. Most of those chemical reactions are happening in places you can’t detect – well, you see the results on your scale.
Here’s the key. You’ve heard you can activate your body’s ability to heal with meditation and self-mastery tools. Those same functions affect how your body interacts with food. If you’ve dieted, then you know that you can’t look at any food without evaluating its impact on your waistline (or your thighs, or your butt.) You know about calories, and fat counts, and good fats and bad fats and all that stuff because you’re a dieting expert. You’re probably noticed that it gets harder and harder to lose that twenty pounds, too – there are chemical reasons for that, too.
Take a moment to pay attention to your body. How do your muscles, mouth, stomach, bowels and skin feel? Think about a food that makes you fat. (No challenge there.) Think about eating that food – a lot of it – and see if you notice any changes in your body.
Imagine you can hold that food inside a glass ball, like one of those Christmas snow balls. Imagine you can see strings and wires attached to that ball you are holding, which represent your belief systems about this food and its affect on your body. One string might be about calories, another might be about fat, and lack of exercise, and so on, so there are lots of strings, and some of them are intertwined. Our beliefs about food are complicated.
Imagine you can release all those beliefs by getting rid of those strings and wires. You can burn them away with fire, or wash them away with liquid light, or blow them away. Whatever works for you. Yes, dynamite is okay. Express yourself.
Clear away all the belief systems you hold about that food. This might take several repetitions because it’s a lot of belief system. Let it all go. You might feel some sensations in your body as you do this, because your beliefs are held in your physical body. That’s a good sign. When you have finished clearing it all away, wait a day and do it again, until you don’t see any wires or strings. Until you can think about that food without having an immediate judgmental reaction about it.
Then, notice what it feels like if you imagine eating that food. It’s different.
Our bodies need certain nutrients to function at their optimum. When you have food associations, they mess up your ability to take in good nutrients as much as they mess up the way your body processes food. In many cases, doing this exercise helps drastically reduce food cravings for the food you worked with, so not only will your reaction to the food change, you won’t want it as much. That’s an added bonus.
Creepies are depressing. Dieting won’t conquer the creepies. Learn to change how your body processes food, so you can enjoy what you eat and feel good about yourself.
|
Self-Mastery
Relationship
Challenge
Going Beyond Success
EVENTS
|
