Have you no shame?!

Excuse me for being gender specific, though I really have found it to be a 'thing'.

Yes, the big difference for me when treating men and women for weight issues, is that intelligent, bright, beautiful women experience a great deal of SHAME about their bodies and 'losing' weight. I don't want anyone to lose anything, let's gain some lean, strong and healthy vibes here - AND be free of that shame, eh?

Just one day in the life of a Hypnotherapist.... Here I offer you a transcript of part of a session. This is from Sarah, who very willingly wants you to know exactly how I helped her overcome her shame and her weight issues. I know you probably want to leave reading this until the New Year(!) though, trust me, it will begin helping right now...

Sara is one of many extreme dieters. She will enjoy her Christmas, she says (and we all enjoy things in different ways) and then she will knuckle down and DIET in the New Year. One extreme to another, this is - and so you join us in the Therapy Studio, as I condense everything she has told me about her eating and exercise patterns over the last thirty years into a typical week! I comment to you throughout, by way of italicised text.

Jennie: So, being the personality that you are at the moment, going on past strategies, on the first day you would have a couple of lettuce leaves (laughter), cycle 70 miles, (laughter), and wake up in the morning saying, ‘oh right, today’s my fat day, I can eat whatever I want!’. So, what is it, what is it that you would look forward to eating?

Client: ohhhh, chocolate. Sweets, cake, biscuits.

Important information now, establishing what, specifically, are the changes in eating habits that will be of most use and promote the most noticeable changes in behaviour.

Jennie: Particularly what chocolate?

Client: I like it all!

Jennie: And biscuits, what biscuits in particular?

Client: I like them all. If I can’t make my mind up I will just take everything.. You know, like the vending machine at work in the morning break, a packet of crisps, a chocolate bar and going back and having another chocolate bar.

Jennie: And would you have had your healthy sandwiches with you at work?

Client: Yes, I probably would have taken fruit with me. And yoghurts. I would be prepared, but would still want them.

Jennie: So how would that affect how you felt, from having the chocolate bar and the crisps and then returning for another chocolate bar?

Client: It’s almost like physically you feel better because you are giving yourself that buzz, you have satisfied that need, but mentally, I know I have kind of sat there and weighed up who is there in the room (God it’s terrible) because you don’t want everyone to know that you have had two bars of chocolate…

Client is admitting shame. Important for the therapist to realise that client will be using the term ‘you’ to dissociate and presume that everyone else shares same dilemma, therapist knows statements do not apply to them. Beware of being hypnotised by your client!

Jennie: So this is ‘shame’ here we are talking about, isn't it?

Do you remember the adverts presented by the celebrities of the time eating oozing fresh cream cakes seductively saying the slogan ‘naughty, but nice’? And how about the pretty young girl in the field eating the chocolate flake? So you can forgive yourself on this score, because you see you did not DECIDE on these actions. Consciously you planned to eat the healthy sandwiches and yoghurts you had prepared for yourself.

Unconsciously, which became a habit at a certain point in time, what you were perhaps looking for was the excitement, the fulfilment of desire, the ‘getting away with it’ even. It wasn’t about the nutritional content of the foodstuffs though it is time for me now to draw my graph.

You may know this though it is always good to bring it through to consciousness. When you wake up in the morning your blood sugar level will have stabilised.

I am now drawing a graph to illustrate the exaggerated peaks and troughs of blood sugar levels throughout the day of a sugar addict.

Client: Yes

Jennie: Everything you have learned in the past is useful; though now is a new time. I want you to begin to relate to your body as a biochemical machine. Which is what it is, and to understand now what happens physically within the body. After this session your mind is going to be back in control, after you now realise how your body has been affected chemically by these behaviours.

To assist with that I shall draw the graph. Most times when you get up in the morning you have had something sweet. Cereal with sugar that you say you cannot eat without Anything sweet, marmalade, jam, sugar etc (and this is not saying that any food is ‘bad’ this is just for understanding what happens chemically to you) will shoot your blood sugar right up. This will feel good.

You will have an abundance of energy, your physical self will have this increase in energy and your body will not need to break down any fat into glucose which is what happens when you break down fat, the fat turns into sugar. Even if you were a body builder and all you ate was protein, eggs and steak all the time, your very clever body would convert the excess protein into sugar. It would be a harder task for it to do, but it would. It is a survival mechanism. If you have freely available sugars just go into your bloodstream and elevates it dramatically.

You know that your body is always aiming for balance, so if you have excess alcohol it would be striving to purify the system and stabilise it once again. Your body is always striving for balance and to be ‘normal’ so what it does here, is that it releases insulin to bring about that stability as quickly as it can. If you have a lot of sugar, hopefully there is going to be a lot of insulin unless you are heading towards being diabetic. Which then means you may experience a drop in that energy, it’s not really a drop, though compared to the elevated levels you have experienced it seems like an unpleasant place to be.

This coincides with your mid morning break. There is memory within every cell, the latest scientific research by Candace Pert (discoverer of the opiate receptor) proves so. So it is as if your very body then remembers how good it felt when you had the chocolate bar last time and guess what?

Client: ...... Wants it again!

Jennie: To begin the cycle again. Yes. The signals will be going back up into your brain to say we want to feel that energy again and your instinct will be to go back to the vending machine.

There is also, coupled with this, a kind of wave permeating from way back when of all that deprivation coming flooding through you, that now you are a grown up, now your mom’s not here to watch, almost represented by those others around you, there is now a naughtiness that I can do what I want and it’s my money anyway…….. etc.

Your experiment then would be, because don’t trust what anybody says, don’t believe everything I say, do this for yourself and find your evidence. Test it out for yourself, if you woke up tomorrow morning and had eggs instead of cereal you will not get the up and down of the blood sugar - nuts are good too. Then just see if your appetites are different. Relate to food as if it were friend or enemy, rather than blaming yourself for the cravings.

I am sensing now that I have enough from the client to work with, so now my voice is becoming more assertive, more commanding and the hidden commands are coming through, to benefit the client who is looking for direction. ‘… believe everything I say, do this for yourself’

Jennie: Tell me how different you feel your behaviour needs to be at this point in time in order for you to be the physical size and shape you want and what it is specifically you would want to be different from this moment onwards for you.

More commands, ‘.. your behaviour needs to be [different] … to be the physical size and shape you want…. You want to be different from this moment …. For you. Establishing need for change whilst empowering client to do this for herself. Requiring client to be specific as to what changes need to be in place.

Client: I want to be more in control. I feel I am at the mercy of my emotions or cravings or mixture of both. It is always such a big issue. Every time I am eating I am either feeling self righteous or guilty and I don’t want it to be such an issue for me anymore. I want to feel easy around food and make the right choices naturally.

Jennie: Can you remember a time when you did eat naturally?

Client: I went on my first diet when I was 18. Prior to 18 I didn’t have an issue with food

Jennie: … and you didn’t have an issue with weight?

Client: That’s right

Jennie: So it began when you were 18 then. So for those years before there were times when you didn’t even want to come in for tea, or you wanted to stay outside on your bike, did you ride a bike when you were young?

Client bringing up the fact that pre dieting, everything was fine physically and emotionally with food. It begs the question as to why the first diet was embarked upon though we trust unconscious has spotted that one too…. Putting the client now into a suggested situation that she can challenge or agree upon, though main idea is to return to positives of pre diet experience and re-establish.

Client: Oh yes

Jennie: … and you just wanted to stay out there on your bike and somebody was running after you with a cardigan (laughter) and you didn’t even know it was cold?

Client: (laughter) No!

Jennie: So you will know, by watching your daughter, you will know and you will remember as you unconscious will enable this to happen, that once the obsession has stopped, or held in abeyance, even for half an hour, you will remember when you have taken her to school and watched children just run for the sake of running. They invent games so that they can run about.

Client: Yes, they do.

Jennie: Until they get perhaps to teenage years there is no child skulking in the background leaning against the wall, they are all running around.

Client: That’s right yes

Jennie: And there are those parents who are saying ‘just stay here, don’t you dare run off’ and by the way, the unconscious mind does not recognise a negative, so if you ever hear yourself or anyone else, saying to your child, ‘don’t you dare run’, or ‘now when we get to this place, I don’t want you to….’ And then we describe the very behaviour we don’t want them to do!

In the same way, if you were saying to yourself repeatedly, ‘I mustn’t forget my keys in the morning, I mustn’t forget to post that letter, or in the morning I mustn’t forget to take something out of the freezer ready for dinner’, your unconscious has to make a picture in your mind of you NOT doing the thing that you want to do, in order to try and discount that possibility! (laughter)

All it thinks about is forgetting the keys, finding the urgent bill still in your handbag after the last post has gone, or searching the cupboards for something to eat that doesn’t resemble a frozen brick. Much more useful to say, ‘in the morning I shall remember my keys, I shall remember my keys, remember my keys’. So, because children are operating at mostly an unconscious level, the worst thing that we can do really, again with all good intentions, is to say, ‘don’t you dare run’ or ‘when we there, don’t go running off like you did last time’, because they are imagining themselves, on your instruction, running off and then trying to negate it. It may never have occurred to them to do such a thing, but you put it right there in their visual cortex.

Client: Yes! (laughter)

Jennie: Much more effective to promote the positive rather than to install the negative, if you like. So, you would like things to be different.

From what you have said to me and what you have said to your unconscious mind, you would like things to be different and you would like things to be more balanced. You would almost like to have the same attitude to food that you had when you were 18?

Client: Yes. But in saying that, I have got to lose weight, so I have got to take that into account too. Whereas then, I did not have a weight problem, so it would have been easier, does that make sense?

Does it? Does this really make any sense at all??? Read next week to find out. If you want me to continue this next week, please comment below to see how I set her free and how she became the slim, fit, happy and healthy person she is today!