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MODULE 7
ADVANCED PRACTITIONER SKILLS
Section 7
A deeper look at working with weight.
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Greetings once again, my friends.
This is Mark David, founder of the Institute
for the Psychology of Eating.
Let's have a conversation about weight.
Let's see if we can summarize some of the key
distinctions we've learned about weight.
Let's see if we can deepen into this topic
just a little bit more.
Now I'm returning to the topic of weight,
because when you're in the business of nutrition,
when you're in the business of health,
when you're in the business of eating psychology,
this will in many ways be the number one
priority for a significant amount of your clients.
Weight loss will be a number one priority, wishing
to not gain any weight.
It can be a number one priority.
Um, being tremendously afraid
to gain weight can be a number one priority.
Wanting to lose the fewest amount of pounds for many people,
2, 3, 4, 5 pounds can be a number one priority.
Wanting to lose a large amount
of weight can be a number one priority,
wishing to change their shape.
So it's on and on.
So I'm just reminding you that regardless of
your personal challenges
and interests, when you work in the health, nutrition
and eating psychology
and personal development universe, US weight
and its loss, my friends, it's huge in this world right now.
So with that in mind,
I'm asking myself the question, what's really going on? What's really going on when it comes to weight?
What I've noticed, and you can read the statistics that we are gaining weight collectively and globally. So the statistics bear that out. There are some researchers, and this is a small minority who claim that, um, such statistics might not be so accurate. Um, in my experience, in my opinion, I think the stats are accurate and that there is a certain amount of increased weight that's happening globally. The challenges, were not sophisticated enough scientifically to assess whose weight is a healthy one and whose weight is not a healthy weight.
Yeah, we can dive into one specific person and do enough testing on them to determine, oh, you're a healthy human being. But there are so many experts and so many practitioners who it doesn't matter how many checks we can check off in the checkbox about all the different ways a human can be healthy, there's a tremendous amount of weight prejudice and a deep overall overarching belief that if we think your fat, if we, the collective scientific, we think that you are fat or obese
and you fit into our numbers when it comes to
how we're shaking those numbers out today, then we're gonna consider you unhealthy.
This is the same thinking that believes that weight and its loss, particularly its loss, is all about calories in and calories out. And people who have what is considered to be excess weight, they're viewed as lazy and having a lack of willpower.
So what's really going on is that weight is a fantastically complex topic, and we're treating it in a very simplistic and reactionary and prejudiced way.
Indeed, what's really going on when it comes to weight is we don't truly know how much any individual, any human should weigh at any given amount of time.
So you and I, and anyone interested in looking at this topic through fresh eyes, we need to step to the edge. We need to step into the wilderness, so to speak here. And when it comes to, we don't exactly know how much anybody should exactly weigh, remember, I don't talk about extremes when I'm saying this. As soon as you get into extremes, then we can, as reasonable human beings, as reasonable clinicians, look at a human and say, yeah, okay, you're in that you are at an extreme. You've gained hundreds of pounds, or you've lost a hundred pounds and you now weigh 60 pounds. Okay? Those are extremes. Those are rather unhealthy.
So yes, we can have guesstimations about how much one ought to weigh, but at the end of the day, there's a place where the majority of humans, we can't pinpoint within five pounds or 10 pounds or 15 pounds or 20 pounds, or even more how much anyone should weigh. So that's what I'm saying, if you are looking for a science for that, it does not exist.
If anybody tells you there's a science for that, they are scientifically uneducated
and there's this kind of global belief that there is
some way of knowing this. And usually what happens is the individual takes that on and has their target weight number that they invent in their mind. We'll talk about that in a bit. So some guidelines, when you and I are working with weight,
and I want you to remember that in general for me as a professional, here is my preference. I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm actually suggesting you highly consider it that if you indeed wish to work with weight, then you use the term weight and not weight loss. I work with weight. The majority of people who come to see me when it comes to weight, they want weight loss.
I do not assume that every client who says that they want to lose weight indeed has weight to lose. I do not assume that every client who says, this is my target weight, that that is a useful, good, reasonable, and natural and doable target weight. So I work with weight and a lot of times I have to help my weight loss client let go of the need to lose weight.
Sometimes I have to help my weight loss Clients see that they might need to gain a little weight because their body image is so distorted and they are so going into a bad place with themselves. So I work with weight as opposed to weight loss. Now, might I be working with weight loss? Sure, but in general, I work with weight this way. I'm not making a false promise to anyone.
I will never make the false promise that I am here to help you lose weight. Rather, I am here to do my best to help people find their natural weight.
And in order to find one's natural weight, one has to be one's natural self as best as possible. And that comes to diet, that comes to lifestyle, that comes to our inner world, that comes to our personal world. So many factors can influence that. So we have to remember that humans in general can be very dogmatic and very judgmental about the topic of weight. You are stepping into a hate zone. You are stepping into a stress zone and anxiety zone. You're stepping into a field where there are landmines exploding when you're working with someone's weight.
So indeed, one of the best ways to proceed is for you, the practitioner, to be in as best you can, a shame free zone about your own body.
The more you can be loving and accepting of your own body. Believe it or not, the more you can broadcast indi in invisibly that energy to your client.
The challenge is when it comes to working with weight, there's so much weight hate, and it's so toxic,
and it's most toxic when your client is aiming it at their own self. People have surely experienced weight hate around them when they're kids, when they're growing up. They experience directly, they experience it indirectly. We can feel it, it's in the world and it's intense.
So I need to help my client slowly clear out the weight, hate from their system that they aim, aim at themselves. And until we can see the challenge of weight and it's potential excess through clear and kind and wise eyes, we can expect little success on any level. In other words, if you're looking through the sunglasses called hate, weight, hate, I just gotta get rid of this. This sucks. This is terrible. This makes me a bad person. Bad people have more body fat. Good people have less body fat. If that's where my client is living, I can expect no success. And in fact, I'm not doing my job if I'm not helping them see that their weight hate is the problem, not the weight really. So, you know, it's a challenge, but I think we have to reclaim the word fat, the F word, and use it without judgment. You know, I'll say bigger people, larger people, I'll say fat people. When I say any one of those, I'm not aiming judgment with it. So if you do use the word fat or fat person or yeah, some people are fatter than others, wow, that person's fat. Um, oftentimes I will let my client know if I'm going to be using the F word that I'm, that, that, that I'm not saying that with judgment, that I'm reclaiming that word.
This is in part in alignment with my very strong belief and my experience that before anyone can lose anything, they need to own it first. I think that is simple logic. If you wanna lose something, you gotta own it. You wanna lose a thousand dollars, you have to own a thousand dollars. You wanna lose your car, you gotta own your car. You wanna lose a bad habit. You have to notice the bad habit first. You have to actually embrace the bad habit. Wow, here's my bad habit. Here's when I do this unwanted bad habit. Here's maybe some of the reasons that stimulate me to do this bad habit. Oh, it makes perfect sense that I would be doing this habit. There's always a brilliant reasons somewhere in biology or psychology or both for having unwanted habits. So we're owning it first. Before you can lose weight, before your weight loss, client can truly lose weight. If they truly have weight to lose, they must own what they have first. IE you can't be beating it up, hating it, cursing it, attacking it, demeaning it, demeaning self for having it attacking self, for having it.
It is an illogical strategy. It has never worked.
Maybe let me correct that. It has never worked sustainably. Let me correct even that. There might be people walking around who have reached their target weight sustainably by hating their body that they used to have. And I promise you, that person who has lost their weight by disowning it, hating it, exercising themselves to death and starving themselves to death, they're not a happy human. They're not embodied. It's not the person you wanna go roller skating with. It's not the person you wanna necessarily play with. It's not the person you wanna hang out with and spend time with because their whole internal world, they're kind of a prisoner to their relationship, to their body. So when it comes to our weight loss clients, I really want you to get this. I really do. Uh, this is so important. I want you to be effective as a professional. Your client has to slowly learn to own what they have. As you own your body, you embody in it. As you embody in the body, you have, as you land in the body, you have, you can then operate it better. You could drive it better, you can move it better. You can feel it and sense it better. You can get feedback from it better.
There is a an odd hard to describe magic that happens when we go from I'm disembodied because I hate my body to, okay, is not the perfect body for me. Yeah, I'd like to change it. I'd like to shift it and let me just love this thing. Let me get in it. Let me start to move it, bathe it, touch it, get it some help, get it some love. Pay for some health services. Feed it better, nourish it better. Understand better how it ideally works. That's embodiment. That's accepting the body you have.
I mean, I'm thinking it's no different than if you owned a business and you had an employee and you wanted them to change. They were doing things you didn't like. Well, you have to dialogue with them. You have to be present with them. You have to embrace them. If you want someone to change, and it's hard for them to change, hating them, despising them, doesn't help them change. Loving them, honoring them, respecting them, showing them that you're on their team, that that's what's gonna inspire someone to change.
Body's no different. Okay? You know what we call excess weight. Obesity being overweight, as you know, can impact health in a negative way or a neutral way, or a positive way.
That's the research, my friends, when you sum total up all the research, I don't care when anybody says no, if you're overweight, you're unhealthy. It, it's not true. I'm sorry, inaccurate. And interestingly enough, the same concept goes for what we call slender, skinny, or thin. Anybody can be slender, skinny, or thin, and that can impact their health in a negative way or just a neutral way, or very positive way.
It's 'cause you're slender or skinny or thin. Doesn't mean you're healthy. Come on, it's silly. Again, extremes in any direction, tell us that we're not in a good place.
And I always want you to think in terms. Here's, here's the concept that helps guide my approach to weight. I believe we have a natural weight.
Oddly enough, though, our natural weight changes throughout the course of our life just changes. Doing more exercise, less exercise, more sitting, less sitting. You gave birth, you didn't give birth, you gave birth to your second kid, your third kid. Sometimes the body just shifts. The body changes, the body morphs. As we get older, just as the mind changes, shifts and morphs our emotions, our inner world. So there is legitimately a natural weight that follows us throughout the course of a lifetime. And for many of us, that natural weight can change. It might deviate by just a few percent. It might deviate by 10 or 15%. We don't know.
I have noticed what my postulation here is that in general, you and I have the best chance to reach our natural weight as we are living in accordance with the natural needs of our body and living in accordance with the natural needs of our personal, emotional and spiritual worlds.
Everybody thinks, okay, in order to have my natural weight, I now have to fill in the blank, punish my body. No, it has nothing to do with that. We have to uncover what it means to be more and more our real self, our natural self. Do I have to do work in my dietary world? So I'm eating more in alignment with the nature of my biology and the nature of my nutritional needs? Do I need to move in a different way and move more in accordance with the natural needs of my body? Plenty of people doing all kinds of exercise that's just not natural to their body. It doesn't work. Are you being who you're supposed to be? Are you pretending to be somebody else?
Are you neglecting your inner world, your personal world, your emotional world? That for many people might be the key place to work when it comes to reaching their natural weight? It's different for everybody. You give me 20,000 different weight loss clients, and I will show you 20,000 different paths
to help that person get where they need to go. And again, when I say get where they need to go, some of them don't need to lose weight, and they think they do. Just 'cause somebody comes to you and says, I need to lose weight, doesn't mean they need to lose weight. And you immediately have to go, oh, you need to lose weight.
So this is the tricky part about this work, because then the work becomes, we have to slowly invite them and sneak them into a broader perspective. So of course you're gonna work with all the clear places to work with someone.
And our job is to gradually invite people into more embodiment, more awareness, more consciousness, and a clearer understanding about how they are relating with their body.
I have helped many, many, many, many people lose the need to lose weight who either didn't have weight to lose, or we did everything right in my opinion, and the person didn't lose weight. That happens a ton.
Goodness, I've done so many right things for so many clients to lose weight. And They don't, they don't lose weight. But 98 times out of a hundred, the work will always finish. And they will always say, thank you. I'm a better person. I'm a better this. I'm a better that. I grew here, I grew there and they got tremendous value from the work. Who says anyone has to lose whatever weight they say they wanna lose when they wanna lose it? We don't know. We are not gods in that way. We do not control the universe in that way. There is a mystery with a capital m to life, to health to our journey, and certainly to wait.
Just respect the mystery and stop being a baby and saying, well, no, but what if somebody doesn't want? What if? What if my client doesn't lose weight? Why are you so worried? Then they won't lose weight. It's not a, it's not an indictment against you.
Somebody just aren't gonna lose weight right now. It's just what it is. Why? Who knows?
I know that's hard to hear sometimes. Um, you know, any weight loss journey, you know this that's guided and fueled by self-hate and self attack and self-rejection is going to be futile. You've gotta see this, my friends. So when I'm noticing my weight loss client, and that is their inner world, that's what I'm working on. That's what I'm helping them change. Those are the intellectual interventions I'm doing. I'm explaining to them that self-hate self attack and self-rejection is a major stressor. I am then explaining to them the stress response and what happens in the human body and to metabolism and to digestion and to calorie burning capacity and appetite regulation. When we're in a stress response,
everybody wants to lose weight and have the body they want so they can love themselves more. Therefore, it is logically impossible to hate ourselves throughout the weight loss journey and expect an outcome of self-love. It is literally psychically, morally and logically impossible. But go ahead. If you don't believe me, try it out. Notice your clients who have been trying that strategy for months, years, or decades doesn't work.
So really our job as a practitioner is to help our client grow and evolve and heal and transform and become their best self.
And that gives us the best chance to help our client find their natural weight. And of course, of course, of course, of course, of course. We're working with the key principles that we've learned in eating psychology and MINDBODY Nutrition to help our clients along their journey.
We're doing strategies that are sustainable,
but never, ever, ever elevate the weight loss goal as being the person's primary goal.
I know it's their primary goal. I know it is often times, but it's not your primary goal,
nor is it really their primary goal. So even though they're sitting there thinking, my one goal in life is to lose weight, if I don't lose this weight, then I'm, I'm, my life is worthless, is where a lot of people live. So they're elevating it as their primary goal. I'm looking at them and I'm thinking something very different. It is never truly a human being's primary goal in life to lose weight. You did not come into this world to lose weight. A higher power. God did not invent you and put you on this journey just so you can come here and burn a bunch of calories and then have everybody love you because you burned a bunch of calories of body fat. Do you really think that,
you know, we all wanna lose weight or have the body we want for a key reason, and that is to feel better about ourselves. So the strategy, the journey is always to feel better about ourselves along our journey. And the challenge is people have believed and do believe that I cannot feel better about myself until I lose weight. And that is the problem. So that is what I am helping my client slowly detoxify from. It takes time.
Now, you know, I mentioned globally there's a bit of weight gain. I see it. Other people see it. Why? I just wanna mention some factors. I just wanna revisit this for a moment. And I think it's useful to see the big picture. In the big picture. We have a food chain that has poor quality food. I put that at the top of the list, my friends. We have a food chain that is very poor quality food that by itself will cause us to gain weight. Everything else is icing on the weight gain cake.
So it's poor quality food in this world. More specifically excess sugar and poor quality carbohydrates, more specifically, again, poor quality fats, meaning fats that are stripped of their essential fatty acids.
We are dealing with not only poor quality food, but that poor quality food is actually engineered to hook us. It's engineered to, I don't like to use the word addict us, but it's engineered to grab us to addict, to make us habitually wanting that food
to that add exposure to thousands of human made chemicals that it turns out are endocrine disruptors and obesogens chemicals that for various reasons, they will mimic certain hormones in the human body. They will latch onto certain receptors that we don't want them touching. Obesogens are substances that will literally human made substances that will signal the body to fatten up.
You didn't invent those chemicals someone else did. You're exposed to them by picking up a newspaper, by drinking milk, by eating most commercial dairy products and meat products, uh, just, just by sitting on your couch is
Add to that, our in utero or early childhood diet, if that's poor quality food, that gives us a difficult start, add to that poor gut health, which comes from poor quality food, um, comes dramatically. So from antibiotics, lack of breastfeeding, those are the big ones.
Add to that, people get disembodied. They're just not connected to their bodies these days. We're sitting down a lot, our young people are sitting in classrooms. And you add in all this other, these other factors. When a human is disembodied, it is easier to gain weight. Unnaturally. You look at the overall toxic burden of being a human being alive on planet earth. It's hard to be at one's natural weight and add in all the stressors of life.
And in a lot of ways, there's your global weight gain.
Now, here's the wrong response, which is what we, the collective we ends up doing is that we tend to lump all people into the same weight loss strategy, dieting, plus exercise, plus shame.
And when you add up, and when you take people who
stupid exposed, exposed to poor quality food and excess sugar and foods that are engineers to addict them, and they had a poor quality diet in childhood, and while they were in the womb and they've been given antibiotics and they might not have been breastfed and they've had a lot of stress and they've been, disembodied is not their fault.
But then when we tell you, well, you don't exercise enough and you're eating too much food that we sell you because it's addicting.
So what happens is people end up hurting, confused, and frustrated and unsuccessful and disempowered because the strategies that they're given don't actually work.
And because the diet universe is largely about calories in, calories out largely, and because the diet universe is largely filled with diets that are unsustainable, weight loss methods that are not sustainable. Yeah, sure, you can go on a 30 day juice cleanse, that's fine, but a 30 day juice cleanse, yeah, that can help a lot of people lose weight. And I've seen people lose a lot of weight and gain it right back
because whatever the true challenge was, the true issue has not been addressed. So, so many people are going from diet to diet to diet, they're over exercising on top of that, they're weigh down by the weight hate from the world and that they aim at themselves, the weight hate from people around them.
That's a lot of stress.
And because people are putting sincere effort into losing weight and things aren't really working, weight loss, here's the challenge, it becomes the primary activity of people's life. You know, a lot of your clients, no, they're fine. They have a good life and they just wanna lose some weight. Good. I love those clients. And there's a lot of clients who weight loss is the primary activity of their mind.
It consumes their emotions, it consumes their life. Even if they have kids, a job, a marriage weight loss can actually kind of show up as number one inside their brain.
And in general, you have a lot of people walking around. They're refugees, they're weight loss refugees, meaning they're shellshocked. They don't know where to go,
and they haven't been treated well
and they're starting to get a little tired.
So this all those reasons that wasn't a happy story, but that's why you and I look to empower our clients. That's why I am here to help my client step into their greatest self because everything I just described to you, disempowers people, the world's response to weight gain is bizarrely disempowering.
So our first job is to empower our client. Our primary activity is to help our client empower them, meaning to help them step into the person that they're meant to be. So in order to do that, there's things we have to unlearn. Remember about unlearning.
Learning happens by addition. Wisdom happens by subtraction, by unlearning. So we look to unlearn toxic nutritional beliefs. You're tracking your client. Do they believe food is the enemy? Fat and food is the enemy. Fat on their body is the enemy. Appetite is the enemy. I will do clear, concise, intensive. You can't miss the fact that I just gave my client an intellectual intervention around food is the enemy, appetite is the enemy. Fat and food is my enemy. Fat on my body is the enemy.
I have told them why these generate stress response, what the stress response does to the body, and how you cannot possibly hold an illogical belief system and expect that you will then have a metabolism that is natural and takes you where you naturally need to go and want to go. If you are holding powerful beliefs that create a day in, day out stress response and drive our psyche mad food is the enemy. Makes us a little crazy. If you think appetite is your enemy, that makes people a little crazy. And I mean that. This is why we help our clients embrace a journey that's driven by self-love. This is why we help our clients embody now
because they have been jerked around by the weight loss universe. They are refugees, and it is not their fault. Whenever I have a weight loss client who's tried a hundred different ways to lose weight, I think, man, you've put in a lot of time and a lot of effort, their failures, so to speak, are not their fault. I mean, really, that's why we take baby steps with our client because it takes baby steps. And we look for sustainable, honest, natural, and effective ways to help people find their natural weight. And that's what you've learned through the various strategies. And it's why you, yourself, as a practitioner, you need to empower yourself when working with weight loss clients.
The moment you go, ba ba, but, but my client complained to me that she's not losing weight.
What I hear you saying when you say that is, I'm not empowered with my client.
It's your job to help your client.
It's your job to help your clients see that their intense need
might not be the thing that's going to help them actually get where they want to go.
They might not get immediate gratification or even semi immediate gratification. They might not lose weight sometimes with a weight loss client. And I've done every great thing I could do with them, and their body doesn't wanna lose weight. You bet. We go into the conversation. Okay, homework assignment for the next couple weeks,
I want you to start to think about what would life be like if this was the body that I had for the rest of my life, what would I do? Who would I be? How would I show up? Would I hate myself every day? Would I curse myself when I see in the mirror? What would you do if you knew this was gonna be the body for the rest of your life?
Sometimes my friends, sometimes the key move that we need to make is to let go completely
the deepest letting go around having the body we want or demand from the universe. The deepest letting go is oftentimes a deep relaxation response, which then helps us be a more relaxed and happy human being. And it could be the thing that helps shift our weight or not, but it's always the best move. And again, my friends, this is why we always emphasize working towards our client's highest goal, even as we're moving them towards their smaller ones.
I wanna remind you, hi, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I know you wanna lose weight, but I only work with your highest goals. I I never want to hear you say anything even vaguely like that to your client. Really, you never need to go there.
I might talk about that at the end of my work with a client when our work is done and we're reflecting on it and there's been some satisfaction and success. Yeah, I might say in here's how we got there. We worked on you not just your little pounds of body fat.
So you're not telling your client, you're just doing it and you do it in a way that they don't know that you're doing it.
This is why we as practitioners need to let go of actual weight loss as the key measurement of success with a weight loss client. That is not my measure of success with a weight loss client, actual weight loss. They've lost weight on and off. Was that a success?
I know it sounds like a conundrum for your head. Every weight loss client you've ever seen, they gain weight loss, they gain it, loss, they gain it, lost it.
So does that mean they had success here? They are coming to see you to lose weight.
So actual weight loss is not a success to me. It can be, but I'm not holding that up as the key measurement. I am holding up good work that we do on self, whether it's around food, whether it's around specific parts of diet, whether it's around eating rhythm, eating slow, relaxing with meals, starting to let go of self-chosen stressors in their life. My clients starting to step more into their power, into their creativity, noticing the places where the universe is calling them, where life is asking them to step up to grow, to improve, and watching my client then do that. Those are measurements of success. And then when weight loss starts to happen around all that, then I know in the back of my mind, we're on a good road here. Again, if your client complains, well, I I did this, I did what you said, and no, no, no, no. And I didn't lose any weight. Think to yourself, I am now talking to a child. Think to yourself that they want their immediate gratification. I understand, I understand. And you have to do an intellectual intervention. I need you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein to step into your adulthood. I need you to be a king. I need you to be a queen. I need you to understand the road that all humans who look to lose weight, often take, which is it is an uncertain road. We don't know when the body's gonna lose weight, how it's going to lose weight. It is a mystery. If there was a clear, simple science to all of this, then you would've done it. We would've done it. Everybody would've done it. The world would know it. Somebody would be really rich off of this, and there would be no weight issues in the world.
You, Mr. Mr. Klein, are hinging everything on you needing to lose weight. I understand that you wanna lose weight, I get it.
Part of the challenge for you is that you're so convinced that only weight loss will make you happy.
And that might be the very challenge you need to overcome. That's like me saying, well, only having $20 million will make me happy. I'm, I'm sorry, I just need to hit that number. Well, says who, who made that up?
Do you know Mr. Mr. Eline? Anybody who looks like you has the same body that you have, has the same weight that you have, and they're happy and they're energized and they're sexy and they feel good about themselves and they're married, or they've got a, a nice partnership.
I mean, really. Do you know them? Do you meet them? Do you see them in school, at church, at home, at work, on the street, in the mall? People holding hands with each other. I see them every day.
So it's your job when your client complains to call them into their adulthood because that's the thing they need. They need to step into their dignity. They need to step into their maturity. They need to let go of, well, I'm gonna only let myself if I, if I lose weight, and if you don't make me lose weight, then I'm not gonna let myself, and I'm gonna be mad at you. Okay? It's one way to do it. How's that way been working for you?
And that's hard for some people. It's very hard. I get it. And that's the work. We all have various kinds of hard work that we have to do in life. I wish it was easier. Sometimes, you know, one of the more difficult questions to answer that I get asked a lot, because you'll hear me use the term often times. Yeah. Well, if your client legitimately has weight to lose, and I'm asked the question, well, how do you know if someone legitimately has weight to lose?
Is a great question, my friends. How do you know? How do I know if someone legitimately has weight to lose? Okay, so I'm gonna give you some opinions here. We are now stepping out of the realm of science
and into just the realm of human experience. So that's where I'm speaking to you from. As somebody who has been obsessed about this topic and studied it and watched it, this is a very difficult question to answer because the truth is, number one is, you know, we can't always know
the greatest experts in the world in this realm cannot truly know if someone legitimately has weight to lose.
This is no, we don't know. We don't know the wisdom of life and what it's, what's got going on next. Here's another answer to that question. It definitely takes some experience to be able to look at someone
and determine, Hmm, just by looking at them. Yep. You got weight to lose.
Now, normally, yeah, there's plenty of people walking around who think that they know. They can look at anyone's, oh yeah, you got weight to lose, you got weight to lose, you got weight to lose. Um, it's not just looking at a person's weight. You observe people, you observe their body, you observe their energy, you observe their relationship with their body. You observe their level of embodiment or disembodiment. You observe their relative health, their relative vitality, how they carry themselves. So there's a lot of tuning in and seeing on a deeper level that I will do when I'm looking at a person. And because I've been doing this for a long time
and I've had a lot of trial and error and trial and success, I've gotten to play around and begin to see, oh, okay, here's, I'm noticing some similarities. My client's history, meaning their story for most of us, will be the best tool to, to determine if somebody legitimately has weight to lose your client's history and story. In other words, it depends on the amount of weight my client wishes to lose relative to their history. Have you ever weighed that amount? If they've never weighed the amount that they wanna weigh? Well, I don't know if they have that much weight to lose. Like really? I don't. That puts us in a more challenging part of the probability curve if the amount of weight that they want to weigh. If I start to do the math in my head and I see that this is gonna make this person ridiculously thin, then you bet my, my caution light is on. I'm watching from my clients and listening for my client's perfectionism. The minute I sniff out perfectionism, that tips me off immediately that my client needs to relax and accept more. And there's a good chance their number's too high, their weight loss number is too high. Perfectionism always tips me off to that urgency
by far and away tips me off that my client must relax and accept and embody otherwise they will never lose weight.
Urgency to lose weight equals extreme difficulty in losing weight and or losing it sustainably. As soon as you put urgency into the weight loss soup, it, it just ruins it. It's like you're dumped in too much salt. You know?
So urgency truly means my client needs to relax and accept. And only then can we begin to get a real sense of, okay, where does this body want to go?
So it takes a little experience, my friends, and it's not just looking at it, like I said, a physical body. It's looking at somebody's embodiment,
it's looking at their energy, looking at their health, looking at the invisibles. Um, so it's a hard one, but history, your client's weight history is a key factor here. And the visuals, you have to know, you have to know what five pounds of fat actually looks like. It's far more than you think it does.
So when my client says they wanna lose five pounds or 10 pounds or 20 pounds or 40 pounds, I need to be able to visualize that on them, and I will, I'll look at them and I'll think, Hmm, and I'll wonder to myself,
and you don't know if someone legitimately has weight to lose until you take them on the weight loss journey and do the best that you can and do all the good things that you know how to do and make weight loss to smaller goal and not the larger one. If weight loss is a person's largest goal in life, then that is why they have been unsuccessful.
And it is a challenge, my friends, because there are some people out there who legitimately like legitimately have weight to lose and they might've tried all the good strategies and they might have tried loving on their body and taking all the right baby steps and the body still doesn't budge.
That's a hard one. I've had clients like that. It's heartbreaking because sometimes there's just, we don't know. We just hit the limits of science. It's gotta be something going on in the body or something going on in the psyche that's impacting the body.
So that's why we're at the edge a lot of times with weight loss clients because we don't know a lot. So we have to be humble. Once again, my friends, we're gonna break it down for any weight. Some people weigh what they weigh and there's nothing wrong.
So somebody comes to me and they say, I wanna lose weight. That person might weigh what they weigh and there's absolutely nothing wrong and they don't know it. For some people, diet and nutrition and the various mind body nutrition factors that we've learned, those are key to help a person lose weight. The person has weight to lose. And if you do diet strategies, nutrition strategies, and mind-body nutrition strategies as the key strategies, a lot of people boom, that's it. It's, it's, it's food allergies. A lot of people, boom. It's it's meal timing and it's food quality. Boom, you can help them. A lot of people, it's macronutrient balance, boom. You can help them. And in a dramatic way, for some people it's their personal and emotional world. Those are the keys. Yeah, we've done some diet work, we've done some mind-body nutrition work, and it was needed and necessary work, but the thing that's gonna drive it is whatever work we have to do on a personal or an emotional level that could be around loving yourselves into the weight loss journey. That could mean about working in a person's relationship world, their relationship with their sexuality.
For some people there's a metabolic condition underlying things. They've got a thyroid issue, they've got pre-diabetes, they've got diabetes. And there it is For many people, it's the stress from all different kinds of stress, any different, every kind of stress that is really the driving factor. And until we help that person de-stress about their urgency to lose weight and de-stress about just their general state of freakout, some people live in a state of anxiety, fear, stress, and that is what they consider normal. And if they truly have weight to lose, until I help them de-stress, I'm not gonna be able to help them lose weight for more people than we realize. Embodiment is the key. If a human being has disembodied, they checked out of the body and they hold the belief that I will be in my body. I will love my body, I will find my body wonderful and fabulous and pleasurable and delicious, and I will, you know, just, just, I don't know, gl glide across the dance floor when I lose all this weight. But meanwhile, I hate my body. I'm not in it. I'm disconnected from it. I know it's, it's, you're gonna lose weight by not being in your body. Many people have abandoned their body. Whoever you meet who has abandoned their body, has always abandoned it for a good reason. It has been a source of turmoil, trauma, and pain and upset. So we check out of the body. You cannot scientifically measure how much a person has checked out of the body. You have to learn how to observe that in order for that person to lose weight, they must get back into their body. They must feel themselves. They must listen to body feedback. They must start to love their body. They must start to own their body. They must start to nourish their body. That is embodiment. Disembodiment is when you think your body is the enemy and you have either just abandoned it or you attack it in little medium or or large ways.
Some people, my friends, I hate to say it, are metabolic casualties of the world. They have undergone so many insults when they were in the womb. They've undergone insults when they came out of the womb, perhaps in terms of antibiotics, in terms of vaccinations, in terms of drugs that they've been given in terms of toxic exposure that they've had in terms of the last two to three generations of their family and what their family has eaten. And it is just hard to shift their body weight because all of a sudden their, their genetics are changing and it's difficult. Just say it. Um, you've heard me say for a lot of people it's a mystery. I don't know how we're gonna help you lose weight. Nothing seems to work or we're just not sure. And of course, my friends, it could be a swirl of anything I just mentioned. Any or all of this. So this is is wonderful by the way. I don't want you to look at this and get all confused. I want you to look at this and go, great. Wow, there's so many possibilities here. Now I can actually go about the business of potentially being truly useful to someone as a professional when it comes to helping them with weight. Because I have all these different distinctions with which to pull from.
I have strategies to pull from. I have an understanding to pull from that's not just calories in, calories out. Just don't eat food and just exercise like math.
I'm gonna make fun of that till the day I die, um, because it deserves it. Okay, so my friends, here's a postulation is an important one. The degree to which a person is in stress, anxiety, fear, and hate around their weight or shape is the de is the degree to which they need to defocus on literal actual weight loss and focus on finding their center, their power, their embodiment, and their dignity.
IE that's their highest goal in a lot of ways. A person who is in stress, anxiety, fear, and hate around their weight or shape. What's the degree to that? That is the degree to which you have to help them defocus on actual weight loss and focus on finding their center, their power, their embodiment, and their dignity. So yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do little strategies for them that to their mind says weight loss. Yeah, we're gonna improve your food quality. Yeah, we're gonna change your micronutrient balance. Yeah, we're gonna change when you eat what you eat. Yeah, we're gonna slow down. Okay? So we're doing things that I am letting their left brain know, yes, this is gonna help you weight loss. But at the same time, I'm doing all kinds of intellectual interventions around their fear driven, stress driven, hate driven approach to weight loss and what that stress does to their body. I am hitting that home so hard.
Once again, you gotta own something before you lose it.
We must help our clients own the body they have right now. Embrace it, embody in it, step in it. If you're gonna help them change it in any way. It's like trying to help somebody decorate their house, but they don't wanna go in their house. They don't want to touch their house, they hate their house. They want it to look different. But I don't wanna, uh, I'll, I'll love my house when it's perfect. Well, we have to be in the house and kind of just walk around and see and start to do things and take little baby steps.
We cannot wait to embody after we have found our perfect weight. If your client thinks that, if you think that you need to change your thinking, I mean that, like I really mean that. It's just an erroneous thinking. You didn't invent it. It's illogical. Life doesn't work that way.
You can't magically embody if you are disembodied and think, well, when I reach my perfect way, but of course I'll love my body, I'll be in my body. That's like saying, you know, I'm gonna learn to make a lot of money after I have a lot of money. Once I have a lot of money, I'm gonna just invest it so well that I'm gonna make even more money. But in order for me to be really rich, i I i first, I need to be rich.
Doesn't that sound silly? You wanna make more money? You gotta start where you are right now. You gotta learn the basics of money and investing and making money right now.
You're not gonna magically know all about money. Once somebody puts $10 million into your bank account, quite the opposite. You won't know very much and you will stand a far better chance of losing it. I've watched people do that. Yay. Okay. You know, you and I have to remember my friends weight hate clouds. Our thinking, our thinking, meaning you're thinking my thinking, the thinking of the world. You're thinking of the, the thinking of your client. Not only are we swimming in white hate, we are swimming in an atmosphere that oftentimes has a lot of perfectionism in it, and that's powerful in a bad way. And on top of that, people are hypnotized. They're hypnotized, but what by what the media has told them since they were little kids about how they're supposed to look.
And at the same time, there's this false belief, there's a toxic belief that floats around in the atmosphere that says we win a lottery prize when we have perfection, when we have the perfect body in the perfect weight, there's this lottery prize.
And then from that place, everybody's doing all kinds of stress driven, hate driven, fear driven strategies to lose weight that actually lock in the weight, such as underfeeding,
underfeeding, particularly if a person's eating the right amount of food, which a lot of people are. But, but even if, even if somebody is overeating, undereating is not the solution. I hope you get that somebody is overeating because they're eating fast, because they're not present with themselves because they're in a bad habit, because they're macronutrient imbalance, because they're nutrient deprived,
because they're not conscious, they're not present. So whatcha are gonna say to them, well, well, well just eat a 10th of what you're eating. It it, no, they have to learn how to be an eater.
So do you see how this food amount thing is a bunch of nonsense? Even if somebody's truly eating too much food, the eating of too much food itself is not the problem. There's a reason why they're eating so much food. You think your weight loss client is that dumb, that they don't know that, oh my goodness, if I just stopped eating tons of food, I could lose weight. Of course they know that It's a reason why they can't stop. That's where you come in to help determine why
you know, and you're gonna have a challenge with your client because people can be extremely impatient around weight loss. It is shocking how impatient people get it, even if they haven't lost it in years or decades. That's what I'm saying. So do not ever let your clients impatience drive you. I really mean that. Never, ever, ever let them drive you.
As soon as you and I let our clients impatience their stress, their freak out about losing all this weight yesterday, when we let that affect us, when we let that regulate our emotional universe, we're in trouble. We're not gonna be effective for our client. We're not gonna help them get where they wish to go. It is that very impatience, it is that very stress and freak out. That is the very thing we need to help them lose. Not the weight, lose the impatience and you have a better chance to lose the weight. I mean that,
I wanna say a few words about beauty. This is a tough conversation my friends, because there's a lot of darkness actually. Um, in the subject of beauty, there's a lot of confusion. I believe there's a lot of, um,
chaos in our relationship with beauty. What I wanna say is this, here's my postulation. My postulation is that our collective relationship with beauty is extremely immature and is unexamined. I mean, how the world relates to it. The world that you are born into, the world that you watch, movies and TV shows has an extremely immature and unexamined relationship with beauty. On the one hand, beauty is worshiped.
Beauty is really worshiped. And I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. I just want us to notice that we worship this thing we call beauty. We worship it through our actors, actresses, all the famous people, all the models.
If you haven't noticed from the time you were very young, you have been given that which you are supposed to worship via the media, via your culture. Here's who we are telling you you need to look up to as your role model. This is who you essentially worship. We are putting them on the large screen. We are putting their name everywhere. We are putting them on every altar, worship them.
Now I think, I think we can all mostly agree that culture and media indeed create an artificial standard.
Now I start that statement, and here's the reason why, because it gets tricky here because I believe there is an artificial standard. However, all the research that's ever been done on beauty and how we determine it, recognize it, experience, all the useful research has shown that there's a built in standard of cross-cultural agreement around beauty. And a lot of it has to do with symmetry, with actual mathematical, measurable symmetry, mostly of the human face, but to a lesser degree of the body. But when you do studies on infants and how they react to faces, there's a way that, that the youngest people that we have react to symmetry, cross-culturally across different images of people, of men and women, which definitely speaks to a universal idea of beauty.
Now, our politically correct mind doesn't like this. While everyone's beautiful, interesting. I think there is a truth to that.
And I also believe that there is a truth to the fact that the human brain will focus on certain faces as quote unquote more beautiful, which is a measure of the symmetry, which once again speaks to a beyond the beyond universal idea of beauty that is built into us.
So what I'm suggesting to you is there's a paradox. I'm not saying that every human doesn't have beauty,
and I'm saying there are some that will universally be considered more beau than others. Ain't nothing wrong with that. Like just why can't we just be okay with the idea that some people are gonna be considered more beautiful than others, male, female, kids, dogs, snakes? I don't know. The challenge is beauty often creates a sense of competition. It creates jealousy, it leads to judgment, it leads to hate, it leads to self-judgment at leads to self-hate. It leads to hating the beauty in another.
So as much as we worship beauty in this culture, there's actually, if you've noticed this, if you've known people, women and men who are considered beautiful, there's oftentimes a lot of hate that is aimed at quote unquote beautiful people in the form of jealousy. Competition. I don't have that. I want it mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them? All the bad queen or king or prince or princess in us? If we covet the beauty of another, we will hate it. So what I'm suggesting is we need to begin to respect beauty on its own terms. I think beauty has its own terms that actually goes beyond our political correctness, and it goes beyond our beliefs of what it should be and ought to be. And it actually just has its own terms.
So I think there's a way that, yeah, we, we naturally honor beauty in certain things. You know, you see a beautiful work of art. It's easy for a lot of people to honor that beautiful work of art. If you see a beautiful flower, it's easy for many, many people to honor that beautiful flower. If you were looking at the beautiful flower and you're looking at another flower that's old and is dying and is brown and is drying up, you're not gonna focus on its beauty or be moved by that beauty. Does that mean that that dying flower is not beautiful on some level? Sure, there's a beauty in it and there's a whole different beauty in a flower that's in all its glory and all its beauty. We have to learn how to honor beauty rather than covet it.
I see that for a lot of my clients who are looking for the perfect body. There's and the perfect, perfect looks. They're, they're actually not in a good relationship with beauty. They haven't learned to honor it and respect it in others or celebrate it in others. They're living in a form of jealousy that stops them.
There's a lot more to say to that, but let's just leave that at that for now. Um, let's talk about target weight for a moment. Now, you know this, we don't know how much anybody should weigh. So as soon as my client has their target weight, I'm thinking to myself says who, I don't say that, but says who. I one lose 20 pounds, 25 pounds, 75 pounds says who? That's what I'm thinking in the back of my mind. So as a reminder, I wanna let you know that people in their target weight, they give this number an undeserved amount of power. I have found it is seldom, not half the time, not a quarter of the time, seldom has a person's target weight been an accurate or a useful number in the work that I've done with that person.
People will, I, I, I, seriously, I've worked with people who've lost a lot of weight, who lost over a hundred pounds, but they have just target number in their mind and all of a sudden their life has changed. Everything looks great, and they lose a hundred plus pounds and they're wanting to lose 15 more. One, five. And they become obsessed with that. Woo, that's a hard one.
We often use the target weight as a distraction
because getting to your natural weight is all about being once again in relationship with yourself, your body, with life, with food, with the world, with your inner world in a good way,
focusing on a number that means nothing.
And then giving that number. All this power is a fruitless pursuit. It's a waste of energy.
It can be a lower level masculine approach. IE left brain scientific mind approach. Like when I say lower level, it's just a made up number, but it sounds good. Well, I need to lose 125 pounds or I need to lose 30 pounds. Like, okay, so there's a number
that pulls us away from the feminine, from embodiment.
Imagine telling every woman on the planet, here's the exact number you need to weigh in order for everybody to think that you're beautiful and everybody to love you. You would drive every woman on the planet crazy
that would be weighing themselves all day. They'd be dieting, they'd be exercising,
or they would be just resentful of that whole process and just like not pay attention to you. Um, but if we forced that upon our women at a young age, they would all have disordered eating. And guess what? We kind of do that usually not with a number, but with an image. And then people see these images and they affix a number to it.
Artificial target weights beget artificial and unsustainable strategies.
It's a package deal.
We often believe that if we dislike our body disapprove of it enough or hate it, then changing it will surely make us happy. So people have their target weight and the target weight is complexed with self attack, self shaming approaches, and a self attacking journey to reach our target wage. This place where you finally feel love.
So you know this sustainable weight loss or sustainable happiness with the body can only come through a path of love. Only prove me wrong. I'm happy for you to prove me wrong. And again, you'll find one or two people if you'll look around enough, who have had a sustainable weight loss,
uh, through a path of self-attack and self-hate. But I promise you, that person lives in self-attack and self-hate or they live in a very narrow bandwidth. And if you want to be like them, you can, you can go for it, but not my suggestion.
So our target weight is often driven by self lack or it's driven by perfectionism or it's driven by just bad thinking. It's just not well thought out. People are not experts here. They're emotionally driven. They're driven by the weight hate of the world. They're driven by everything that's drilled into their head that you need to look a certain way in order for you to be loved. And we're like, okay, okay, okay. I need to lose this amount of weight. Here's my target number. I promise I'll reach this.
It's hard being a person on planet, on earth when it comes to this weight thing for a lot of people. So my friends, of course, it's fine. Have a target weight, okay, have a target weight. But you have to make sure you evaluate that target weight with your client.
What do I mean by evaluate it? Okay, Mr. And miss client, when was the last time you weighed this amount?
How old were you? How did you get to that target weight? Like was there something that got you there?
How long did you stay at that target weight? 'cause apparently it came back on 'cause that's why you're here to see me. Okay. Why do you think that weight came back on?
Is this a truly realistic target weight for you? And if not, what would be more realistic?
IE you know this, a lot of people have a target weight and the target weight happens to be a weight that they had when they were 16 years old and now they're 56. That's not a good target weight. I don't care what it is.
Okay, maybe they're in their thirties, forties, fifties, and they were at this target weight when they were in their twenties, thirties, or forties. Okay. How did you get to that target weight? Well, if they got there through marathons, running and starvation and just some ridiculous diet that was unsustainable. Okay, so how long did you stay there? Okay, that wasn't sustainable. Six months, three months, two months. Why did the weight come back on? Well, I don't know. Well, no, come on. Something must have happened. Well, I couldn't follow that diet. I couldn't do the exercise anymore. I couldn't eat that food. I couldn't. Yeah, that's right. You couldn't, couldn't continue that pace. So is this truly a, a realistic target way for you? So in this series of questioning, I'm trying to help my client arrive at an answer themselves
through my logical reasoning with them,
which happens a lot, especially when people see that their thinking is not so clear.
So it's because somebody wants to lose weight and has a target weight and tells you their target weight, doesn't mean their thinking is good or clear, quite the opposite. You can assume that there's a darn good chance that they don't have clear thinking here. Some people do, but my assumption is I'm not gonna assume you have clear thinking until I ask you these questions.
Now remember, people have some beliefs about their target weight, especially if they've been there. And oftentimes these beliefs are excessively religious. They worship these beliefs. I feel so much better at this weight. This is where I feel my best. This is where I feel most comfortable.
So when a client says this, they're referring to a past experience at this weight. I get it. Interestingly enough, okay, you feel your best. This is where you're most comfortable,
but they couldn't sustain it. Hmm, that sounds like an interesting conundrum. So you feel your best. I mean, when I feel my best and I'm feeling my best, so why don't you just stay there?
Chances are they couldn't stay there because it was an unsustainable weight number or, and it was reached by unsustainable strategies. Pretty simple. And what they're left with is a state addiction. State addiction. Meaning they got high at this weight,
but it was a temporary high. Like any drug. When a client says that to me, I always say, yep. And I have a friend who's a drug addict and he feels at his best. He's most comfortable when he's on a cocaine binge or a heroin binge or an alcohol binge. He, he feels great. Yeah, you got a little high. I get it. But that high was temporary for a lot of people. It's this emotional rush when they hit some target weight and they feel so good about themselves. It's a, it's a literal, literal, temporary experience
like any other target we hit in life. And at some point you just, you just get back to, okay, now I've gotta be me again. Now you have the same stuff you gotta deal with. You gotta deal with your husband, your wife, your kids, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your job, your house, your dog, your cat. And it's back to the real world.
My client is insisting I feel so much better this way. I feel more comfortable. They're being in their little manipulative teenager with you
and they need an intellectual intervention here of the kind I just mentioned.
So loving the body is the bottom line event. We are all wanting when it comes to weight loss, really it's the bottom line event.
If I lose weight, then I will love myself.
That's for most people where people say, well it's, I wanna be healthier. Um, 19 outta 20 times. I don't believe that. Um, if you cared about your health and me, okay, well maybe you woke up and realize, wow, I need to really care about my health more. But the health thing is always is is often a smokescreen that people use. Well, my doctor told me this. Okay, your doctor told you that. Um, so everybody gets in their mind and it's this health thing and it's this crusade, therefore it's righteous and it's moralistic because it's for my health. Um, and then people think they're working on their health.
No, you're actually working on your weight. And weight can be there for a lot of reasons, not because you are unhealthy. And if you do healthier foods, yeah, okay. Healthier foods might help you reach your natural weight. It might for some people. I'm just saying Heads up, heads up, heads up, heads up. Majority of people who get focused on weight loss for health, um, they're confused. They're not really focused on me learning how to be in my body. Me learning how to nourish myself, me learning how to use food in a good way so I'm not using it all the time in every way to regulate all my emotions and use it as a symbolic substitute for everything else. People are not gonna focus on that if they're thinking well, but this is about health.
No, this is about you looking at the places where the weight gain is really speaking to. We have to listen to the message and the weight.
'cause yeah, it might be about nutrition. It might be about things that have nothing to do with nutrition. So loving one's body is perhaps one of the ultimate forms of embodiment.
Conditional love when it comes to weight loss doesn't work. I don't love myself now, but when I weigh what I want, then I will love myself.
Do you want a partner like that? Do you want friends like that who tell you those things? No, we're not your friend anymore. No. Conditional love does not work when it comes to weight loss. I just haven't seen it. And loving oneself now and embodying now once again is the last place most people wish to go. 'cause it's not easy. They want to win the weight loss lottery. I win the lottery, I lost the weight. Now I love myself and I feel so good about myself. And all I did was just take a pill or have this magic diet that somehow I must have missed all these years. No, my friends, it is baby steps, always baby steps for most people.
And it's not something you try once loving the body. It's not something you try once. Yeah, no, no, no. I try, I I work with somebody. I tried loving my body. It didn't work really. Okay. Uh, you didn't do it good enough. That's what happened. It's like saying, I tried loving my child. It didn't work. I tried loving my partner. It didn't work. I tried loving myself. It didn't work. No such thing.
It's a practice. It's, it's something we do every day. We take baby steps. It's a lifelong experience. It takes work sometimes to truly love and respect the body. For so many people who have been rejecting it for so long or have been taught to reject it for so long, that loving the body seems like an impossible task. Like literally it seems impossible.
And yet that is the journey. It's the impossible journey for some people.
And you have to have a very strong, um,
spirit inspiration, metabolism for helping people with the impossible. Yeah, my client might think it's impossible to love their body as it is right now,
but that's what they must do if they wish to have a body that they love. If you want to have the body that you want, you must always begin by wanting the body that you have.
First things first. So a secret, a secret to a happy life with weight is that we must decouple loving my body from weight loss
secret to a happy life with weight is decouple loving my body from weight loss. You can want to lose weight. Your client could want to lose weight. And that is a legitimate want, a legitimate desire. Just don't affix. And I can only love my body if I lose this amount of weight. That amount of weight or some of this or some of that amount of weight. Or we have to decouple that.
Yeah, lose weight. Yeah, wanna lose weight. Perfectly legitimate. How do you separate that from loving my body? Meaning your job is to love your body at whatever weight. And do not make loving your body contingent on some amount of pounds of body fat leaving your body.
You are doing the very damage to yourself that the world has inflicted upon you. The world is saying, we don't love you as you look like this. And you're going to yourself, okay, I don't love myself unless I look like this. No, you've been given a bad virus.
So always remember my friends when it comes to weight. Focus on these fundamental, fundamental areas with your weight loss client or look to focus on these. Notice if you need to focus on these slow eating, which means present aware, pleasured relaxation response. When eating, look at a person's eating rhythm. You need to look at their food quality. You need to look at their macronutrient balance. Are they in a pleasurable relationship with food and body in any way? Are they present when they're eating IE eating with awareness? Can you help them create a nourishing relationship with food? If a person doesn't have a nourishing relationship with food, then they cannot find their sustainable natural weight and be happy.
I mean that. So a nourishing relationship with food, I'm saying is the foundation of having one's true natural weight in a sustainable way where you actually then feel like you can love yourself and enjoy yourself. Now, does a nourishing relationship with food? Doesn't mean you do everything freaking perfect with food all the time. Never overeat, never binge eat, never have a down day. No. It just means that overall you have a nourishing relationship with food. You're caring for your body with food. You're celebrating your experience of being in a body with food. You're receiving from your food. You're being grateful and thankful for your food.
You are loving your body through the vehicle of food.
Always remember, help your clients see their relationship with food as a great teacher.
My friends make the connections, if any, between their key life domains and their weight, work with their toxic nutritional beliefs, work with movement as opposed to lifeless. I hate exercise.
Please, please, please, please, please. You have to help your client and body if they've checked out, if they've abandoned their body. You have to help your client love themselves into their weight loss journey. You have to help them be the real me right now. Meaning achieve the end results in the beginning. What are the end results you expect to have when you have the perfect body? Great, let's see the list. Let's start to do that list Now. Everything we could do on the list that we could do now, we do now.
'cause most of it you can always remember to ask the universe on behalf of your client, where is life calling my client? How is life asking them to grow? That's the key.
And you're helping your client choose to be here. You're alerting them to the fact that maybe they haven't chosen to be here because if they haven't chosen to be here, how could their, how could they expect a big shapeshift of the body if you're not here?
If we're not present and we're not here, we can't do big things. We can't do powerful things. Shapeshifting, the body is big. It takes presence. It takes awareness, takes consciousness. It takes curiosity. It takes looking, it takes listening. It takes learning. It takes studying, it takes experimentation. You gotta be here to do that. You gotta wanna be here to do that. You know, a lot of people just don't like their life. They don't like this world for all understandable reasons. They're not fully here. And they think, well, you know, but I'll fully be here when I have this perfect body then, then you know, I'll be happy like everybody else. But I'm kind of not here in the meantime. So help me lose weight. No, I can't. You don't even wanna be here. How do you possibly think you're gonna shapeshift your body? It doesn't work like that.
So practitioner attitude, my friends is everything.
Because inside myself, I'm not looking at weight loss as a number one goal for my weight loss client.
If I was focusing on a specific weight loss number as the ultimate goal, I would be doing my client a disservice. So it doesn't matter what number they say, I don't worship it like they do. Remember, we're not announcing this to our client. It's just how we function, how we think, how we operate. We are slowly and gently sneaking our client into our approach without naming it, we're looking to create harmony and balance and a natural relationship with food and body and life. So yes, I'm gonna give all little tweaks, little homework assignments that move them forward in the actual direct weight loss universe. But at the same time, I'm looking for the other strategies I can do that are necessary that slowly help them step into who am I
supposed to be as a person in this world? How does my client need to evolve emotionally in relationship
in their internal world, in their spiritual world, in their sexual universe, in their financial universe. When it comes to purpose, our natural weight is so often it's just a function of the rest of our life and the things that are most important that we're needing to learn or focus on.
You know the thing is, the challenge is the beauty is weight is different for everyone. Some people feel burdened by their extra weight. Many people are people, people that you would consider fat and they are free and they are liberated.
Many people weigh what they weigh and that is simply the wisdom of their body and their natural weight. Whether they like that weight or not. Like truly, there are human beings who truly weigh what they weigh and that's their natural weight.
And they could accept it or not accept it. Many people, the extra weight, it just humbles us. And we have to just relax and be humbled a little bit.
A lot of people have a truly fine and reasonable weight and they believe they're fat and they live in fear and judgment.
A lot of our clients simply need to go on a very unpredictable journey with weight. I wish it was more predictable. For some people, it's not a predictable journey. Don't think it is. And there are certain things that we do that put us in the best part of the probability curve to help an actual human lose actual weight if they have actual weight to lose.
A lot of us simply need to be awakened and educated, so to speak, by our extra weight. Our relationship with food and body is a great teacher.
Many people are here to learn the lesson of loving and embracing their body no matter what. That's a big soul lesson for a lot of people.
So here are some ways to walk the weight loss journey. To me, the weight loss journey is first and for foremost, my client needs to be walking a transformational path in life. First and foremost, if you want to transform your body, you must transform your life. You cannot separate the two out. I mean that we have to reclaim the body on its own terms, which means always embodiment. You have to inhabit your body, you have to occupy your body. You have to choose to be in this body right now. If you want the body to do something different,
I have to invite my client into a weight loss journey where they begin to trust the body and trust life more and more. Life has a greater wisdom to it. Your body has a greater wisdom to it. We don't know what's gonna go on. We're gonna do our best to help you get where you want to go weight wise. But you gotta trust 'cause that's all we can do. None of us know what's gonna happen next week, next month, next year. You know, some people need to reboot their vi, their body vi by good nutrition and sometimes detoxification and sometimes high quality food. That's a way that kickstarts a lot of people. It's a totally legitimate strategy. Okay? You know, we're gonna put you on all this healthy raw foods and juices and cleansing programs. Sure, that helps a lot of people reboot.
Does it change people permanently? Some what the numbers are, I don't know,
but is every, not a hundred percent for, for a lot of people that that gets them feeling, oh wow, I can feel good in my body. Oh wow, this is what it feels like. Oh wow, I wanna move in that direction. Some people need to walk the weight loss journey and be in better relationship with their feminine archetype. Some with their masking archetype, some, a combo of both.
Some people just need to get in more and better relationship just with nature
or with their spiritual journey.
So remember this metaphor, my friends body fat is indeed stored fuel science considers that a fat, it's stored caloric energy and we are taking that into the metaphoric realm and we're looking at fat on your client's body. If it's, if they truly have excess fat, then great. All I'm seeing is they have excess fuel. Really? They have excess fuel. Sure we can call it caloric fuel, but really it's emotional fuel. It's spiritual fuel. It's fuel for creation. It's fuel for self-expression. It's fuel for giving our gifts in the world. It's fuel for how you love and serve and help others. It's fuel for how you love. In general, it's fuel. If my client is sitting on their power and sitting on their energy, then that's what they're doing. They're sitting on their power and sitting on their energy. If I can help them begin to liberate their energy, wherever their energy, wherever life is calling them to liberate energy, to follow their self-expression more, to step into love in their life, more, to step into being the real me more, that's liberating energy. That's burning up your fuel.
It works for a lot of people. My friends,
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, it's one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely help another without helping himself herself.
That's why we do this work.
Just a reminder that we often teach what we need to learn. It's totally okay. It's all good.
So in the big picture, when it comes to weight, what might the current state of weight challenges in the world tell us?
To me, when I look at the current state of the weight challenge that the world has, I think it's telling us that we have to deepen. We have to deepen our understanding, our perspective. We have to deepen our insight. We have to deepen the conversation. We have to self-examine and self-reflect collectively and personally. We have to get far more mature and intelligent in our approach to weight. A simplistic approach to weight, a sophomoric freshman approach to weight that says the same old nonsense that doesn't work is unacceptable.
I think in the big picture, we're being asked to be more compassionate towards each other. I think in the big picture, we're being asked to update and improve. Our food chain is pretty low quality. We're being asked to change how we nourish ourselves. And really in the biggest picture, we're being asked to reflect on how we've created our world. So we've all participated in creating a certain world together.
How do you create the world that you wanna live in?
How can you start to do that today in your own life?
So my friend, some final musings. Please, please, please inside yourself, accept your client's weight without you needing to change it. I'm happy to help my client change their weight, but I don't need to change their weight for me to feel better about myself or for me to feel better about them. Mocho and ante, my friends, welcome your clients impossible conundrum. They've been trying to lose weight for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years. They've been on this diet, that diet, they lost the weight, they gained it back, and now they're coming to see you. They're in an impossible conundrum. If they could have lost weight, they would've already. So just welcome their impossible conundrum.
And my client comes to see me and they're a weight loss refugee and they've tried all these different things and they have a long story. I just, I'm very hopeful. I'm very positive. Relax into the whole journey together with each other and for you, make it a path of inquiry. Be curious, be willing to make discoveries. Be willing to be a detective and stop focusing on the end goal.
In other words as well, be open to your client losing weight or not losing weight, or gaining weight or losing some of the weight. Be open to anything 'cause anything can happen.
Remember that until your client can accept and love who they are, despite what they weigh is gonna be a hell of a lot easier for them to stay stuck in the weight that they're in or return to it very soon, even if they do lose it.
Another way of saying that as a bottom line, you and I need to help our clients call a cease fire against all self attack.
Your client's self attacking is harming your effectiveness with them. Take it personally if you need to. In other words, you have to love your client into their weight loss journey. They need to love themselves eventually into their weight loss journey. Model it for them. That's what you're here to do. Be patient, be clear. Be kind. Be wise. Be unconditionally accepting. Do not let their emotions regulate you. I didn't do this, I didn't do that. I didn't lose the weight. This is not happening fast enough.
Just model what you wish for them to have, which is being patient, being relaxed, having a journey of love.
I hope this conversation was helpful, my friends. And the good news is we're gonna talk a little bit more about weight after this and we're gonna look at the larger weight loss client and see if there's any useful distinctions we can pull out from there in case you find yourself working with that population of people. Thanks as always, my friends, for your time and your attention and your energy and your thoughtfulness. I always appreciate it. I'll see you on the other side.
I'm asking myself the question, what's really going on? What's really going on when it comes to weight?
What I've noticed, and you can read the statistics that we are gaining weight collectively and globally. So the statistics bear that out. There are some researchers, and this is a small minority who claim that, um, such statistics might not be so accurate. Um, in my experience, in my opinion, I think the stats are accurate and that there is a certain amount of increased weight that's happening globally. The challenges, were not sophisticated enough scientifically to assess whose weight is a healthy one and whose weight is not a healthy weight.
Yeah, we can dive into one specific person and do enough testing on them to determine, oh, you're a healthy human being. But there are so many experts and so many practitioners who it doesn't matter how many checks we can check off in the checkbox about all the different ways a human can be healthy, there's a tremendous amount of weight prejudice and a deep overall overarching belief that if we think your fat, if we, the collective scientific, we think that you are fat or obese
and you fit into our numbers when it comes to
how we're shaking those numbers out today, then we're gonna consider you unhealthy.
This is the same thinking that believes that weight and its loss, particularly its loss, is all about calories in and calories out. And people who have what is considered to be excess weight, they're viewed as lazy and having a lack of willpower.
So what's really going on is that weight is a fantastically complex topic, and we're treating it in a very simplistic and reactionary and prejudiced way.
Indeed, what's really going on when it comes to weight is we don't truly know how much any individual, any human should weigh at any given amount of time.
So you and I, and anyone interested in looking at this topic through fresh eyes, we need to step to the edge. We need to step into the wilderness, so to speak here. And when it comes to, we don't exactly know how much anybody should exactly weigh, remember, I don't talk about extremes when I'm saying this. As soon as you get into extremes, then we can, as reasonable human beings, as reasonable clinicians, look at a human and say, yeah, okay, you're in that you are at an extreme. You've gained hundreds of pounds, or you've lost a hundred pounds and you now weigh 60 pounds. Okay? Those are extremes. Those are rather unhealthy.
So yes, we can have guesstimations about how much one ought to weigh, but at the end of the day, there's a place where the majority of humans, we can't pinpoint within five pounds or 10 pounds or 15 pounds or 20 pounds, or even more how much anyone should weigh. So that's what I'm saying, if you are looking for a science for that, it does not exist.
If anybody tells you there's a science for that, they are scientifically uneducated
and there's this kind of global belief that there is
some way of knowing this. And usually what happens is the individual takes that on and has their target weight number that they invent in their mind. We'll talk about that in a bit. So some guidelines, when you and I are working with weight,
and I want you to remember that in general for me as a professional, here is my preference. I'm not saying you should do this, but I'm actually suggesting you highly consider it that if you indeed wish to work with weight, then you use the term weight and not weight loss. I work with weight. The majority of people who come to see me when it comes to weight, they want weight loss.
I do not assume that every client who says that they want to lose weight indeed has weight to lose. I do not assume that every client who says, this is my target weight, that that is a useful, good, reasonable, and natural and doable target weight. So I work with weight and a lot of times I have to help my weight loss client let go of the need to lose weight.
Sometimes I have to help my weight loss Clients see that they might need to gain a little weight because their body image is so distorted and they are so going into a bad place with themselves. So I work with weight as opposed to weight loss. Now, might I be working with weight loss? Sure, but in general, I work with weight this way. I'm not making a false promise to anyone.
I will never make the false promise that I am here to help you lose weight. Rather, I am here to do my best to help people find their natural weight.
And in order to find one's natural weight, one has to be one's natural self as best as possible. And that comes to diet, that comes to lifestyle, that comes to our inner world, that comes to our personal world. So many factors can influence that. So we have to remember that humans in general can be very dogmatic and very judgmental about the topic of weight. You are stepping into a hate zone. You are stepping into a stress zone and anxiety zone. You're stepping into a field where there are landmines exploding when you're working with someone's weight.
So indeed, one of the best ways to proceed is for you, the practitioner, to be in as best you can, a shame free zone about your own body.
The more you can be loving and accepting of your own body. Believe it or not, the more you can broadcast indi in invisibly that energy to your client.
The challenge is when it comes to working with weight, there's so much weight hate, and it's so toxic,
and it's most toxic when your client is aiming it at their own self. People have surely experienced weight hate around them when they're kids, when they're growing up. They experience directly, they experience it indirectly. We can feel it, it's in the world and it's intense.
So I need to help my client slowly clear out the weight, hate from their system that they aim, aim at themselves. And until we can see the challenge of weight and it's potential excess through clear and kind and wise eyes, we can expect little success on any level. In other words, if you're looking through the sunglasses called hate, weight, hate, I just gotta get rid of this. This sucks. This is terrible. This makes me a bad person. Bad people have more body fat. Good people have less body fat. If that's where my client is living, I can expect no success. And in fact, I'm not doing my job if I'm not helping them see that their weight hate is the problem, not the weight really. So, you know, it's a challenge, but I think we have to reclaim the word fat, the F word, and use it without judgment. You know, I'll say bigger people, larger people, I'll say fat people. When I say any one of those, I'm not aiming judgment with it. So if you do use the word fat or fat person or yeah, some people are fatter than others, wow, that person's fat. Um, oftentimes I will let my client know if I'm going to be using the F word that I'm, that, that, that I'm not saying that with judgment, that I'm reclaiming that word.
This is in part in alignment with my very strong belief and my experience that before anyone can lose anything, they need to own it first. I think that is simple logic. If you wanna lose something, you gotta own it. You wanna lose a thousand dollars, you have to own a thousand dollars. You wanna lose your car, you gotta own your car. You wanna lose a bad habit. You have to notice the bad habit first. You have to actually embrace the bad habit. Wow, here's my bad habit. Here's when I do this unwanted bad habit. Here's maybe some of the reasons that stimulate me to do this bad habit. Oh, it makes perfect sense that I would be doing this habit. There's always a brilliant reasons somewhere in biology or psychology or both for having unwanted habits. So we're owning it first. Before you can lose weight, before your weight loss, client can truly lose weight. If they truly have weight to lose, they must own what they have first. IE you can't be beating it up, hating it, cursing it, attacking it, demeaning it, demeaning self for having it attacking self, for having it.
It is an illogical strategy. It has never worked.
Maybe let me correct that. It has never worked sustainably. Let me correct even that. There might be people walking around who have reached their target weight sustainably by hating their body that they used to have. And I promise you, that person who has lost their weight by disowning it, hating it, exercising themselves to death and starving themselves to death, they're not a happy human. They're not embodied. It's not the person you wanna go roller skating with. It's not the person you wanna necessarily play with. It's not the person you wanna hang out with and spend time with because their whole internal world, they're kind of a prisoner to their relationship, to their body. So when it comes to our weight loss clients, I really want you to get this. I really do. Uh, this is so important. I want you to be effective as a professional. Your client has to slowly learn to own what they have. As you own your body, you embody in it. As you embody in the body, you have, as you land in the body, you have, you can then operate it better. You could drive it better, you can move it better. You can feel it and sense it better. You can get feedback from it better.
There is a an odd hard to describe magic that happens when we go from I'm disembodied because I hate my body to, okay, is not the perfect body for me. Yeah, I'd like to change it. I'd like to shift it and let me just love this thing. Let me get in it. Let me start to move it, bathe it, touch it, get it some help, get it some love. Pay for some health services. Feed it better, nourish it better. Understand better how it ideally works. That's embodiment. That's accepting the body you have.
I mean, I'm thinking it's no different than if you owned a business and you had an employee and you wanted them to change. They were doing things you didn't like. Well, you have to dialogue with them. You have to be present with them. You have to embrace them. If you want someone to change, and it's hard for them to change, hating them, despising them, doesn't help them change. Loving them, honoring them, respecting them, showing them that you're on their team, that that's what's gonna inspire someone to change.
Body's no different. Okay? You know what we call excess weight. Obesity being overweight, as you know, can impact health in a negative way or a neutral way, or a positive way.
That's the research, my friends, when you sum total up all the research, I don't care when anybody says no, if you're overweight, you're unhealthy. It, it's not true. I'm sorry, inaccurate. And interestingly enough, the same concept goes for what we call slender, skinny, or thin. Anybody can be slender, skinny, or thin, and that can impact their health in a negative way or just a neutral way, or very positive way.
It's 'cause you're slender or skinny or thin. Doesn't mean you're healthy. Come on, it's silly. Again, extremes in any direction, tell us that we're not in a good place.
And I always want you to think in terms. Here's, here's the concept that helps guide my approach to weight. I believe we have a natural weight.
Oddly enough, though, our natural weight changes throughout the course of our life just changes. Doing more exercise, less exercise, more sitting, less sitting. You gave birth, you didn't give birth, you gave birth to your second kid, your third kid. Sometimes the body just shifts. The body changes, the body morphs. As we get older, just as the mind changes, shifts and morphs our emotions, our inner world. So there is legitimately a natural weight that follows us throughout the course of a lifetime. And for many of us, that natural weight can change. It might deviate by just a few percent. It might deviate by 10 or 15%. We don't know.
I have noticed what my postulation here is that in general, you and I have the best chance to reach our natural weight as we are living in accordance with the natural needs of our body and living in accordance with the natural needs of our personal, emotional and spiritual worlds.
Everybody thinks, okay, in order to have my natural weight, I now have to fill in the blank, punish my body. No, it has nothing to do with that. We have to uncover what it means to be more and more our real self, our natural self. Do I have to do work in my dietary world? So I'm eating more in alignment with the nature of my biology and the nature of my nutritional needs? Do I need to move in a different way and move more in accordance with the natural needs of my body? Plenty of people doing all kinds of exercise that's just not natural to their body. It doesn't work. Are you being who you're supposed to be? Are you pretending to be somebody else?
Are you neglecting your inner world, your personal world, your emotional world? That for many people might be the key place to work when it comes to reaching their natural weight? It's different for everybody. You give me 20,000 different weight loss clients, and I will show you 20,000 different paths
to help that person get where they need to go. And again, when I say get where they need to go, some of them don't need to lose weight, and they think they do. Just 'cause somebody comes to you and says, I need to lose weight, doesn't mean they need to lose weight. And you immediately have to go, oh, you need to lose weight.
So this is the tricky part about this work, because then the work becomes, we have to slowly invite them and sneak them into a broader perspective. So of course you're gonna work with all the clear places to work with someone.
And our job is to gradually invite people into more embodiment, more awareness, more consciousness, and a clearer understanding about how they are relating with their body.
I have helped many, many, many, many people lose the need to lose weight who either didn't have weight to lose, or we did everything right in my opinion, and the person didn't lose weight. That happens a ton.
Goodness, I've done so many right things for so many clients to lose weight. And They don't, they don't lose weight. But 98 times out of a hundred, the work will always finish. And they will always say, thank you. I'm a better person. I'm a better this. I'm a better that. I grew here, I grew there and they got tremendous value from the work. Who says anyone has to lose whatever weight they say they wanna lose when they wanna lose it? We don't know. We are not gods in that way. We do not control the universe in that way. There is a mystery with a capital m to life, to health to our journey, and certainly to wait.
Just respect the mystery and stop being a baby and saying, well, no, but what if somebody doesn't want? What if? What if my client doesn't lose weight? Why are you so worried? Then they won't lose weight. It's not a, it's not an indictment against you.
Somebody just aren't gonna lose weight right now. It's just what it is. Why? Who knows?
I know that's hard to hear sometimes. Um, you know, any weight loss journey, you know this that's guided and fueled by self-hate and self attack and self-rejection is going to be futile. You've gotta see this, my friends. So when I'm noticing my weight loss client, and that is their inner world, that's what I'm working on. That's what I'm helping them change. Those are the intellectual interventions I'm doing. I'm explaining to them that self-hate self attack and self-rejection is a major stressor. I am then explaining to them the stress response and what happens in the human body and to metabolism and to digestion and to calorie burning capacity and appetite regulation. When we're in a stress response,
everybody wants to lose weight and have the body they want so they can love themselves more. Therefore, it is logically impossible to hate ourselves throughout the weight loss journey and expect an outcome of self-love. It is literally psychically, morally and logically impossible. But go ahead. If you don't believe me, try it out. Notice your clients who have been trying that strategy for months, years, or decades doesn't work.
So really our job as a practitioner is to help our client grow and evolve and heal and transform and become their best self.
And that gives us the best chance to help our client find their natural weight. And of course, of course, of course, of course, of course. We're working with the key principles that we've learned in eating psychology and MINDBODY Nutrition to help our clients along their journey.
We're doing strategies that are sustainable,
but never, ever, ever elevate the weight loss goal as being the person's primary goal.
I know it's their primary goal. I know it is often times, but it's not your primary goal,
nor is it really their primary goal. So even though they're sitting there thinking, my one goal in life is to lose weight, if I don't lose this weight, then I'm, I'm, my life is worthless, is where a lot of people live. So they're elevating it as their primary goal. I'm looking at them and I'm thinking something very different. It is never truly a human being's primary goal in life to lose weight. You did not come into this world to lose weight. A higher power. God did not invent you and put you on this journey just so you can come here and burn a bunch of calories and then have everybody love you because you burned a bunch of calories of body fat. Do you really think that,
you know, we all wanna lose weight or have the body we want for a key reason, and that is to feel better about ourselves. So the strategy, the journey is always to feel better about ourselves along our journey. And the challenge is people have believed and do believe that I cannot feel better about myself until I lose weight. And that is the problem. So that is what I am helping my client slowly detoxify from. It takes time.
Now, you know, I mentioned globally there's a bit of weight gain. I see it. Other people see it. Why? I just wanna mention some factors. I just wanna revisit this for a moment. And I think it's useful to see the big picture. In the big picture. We have a food chain that has poor quality food. I put that at the top of the list, my friends. We have a food chain that is very poor quality food that by itself will cause us to gain weight. Everything else is icing on the weight gain cake.
So it's poor quality food in this world. More specifically excess sugar and poor quality carbohydrates, more specifically, again, poor quality fats, meaning fats that are stripped of their essential fatty acids.
We are dealing with not only poor quality food, but that poor quality food is actually engineered to hook us. It's engineered to, I don't like to use the word addict us, but it's engineered to grab us to addict, to make us habitually wanting that food
to that add exposure to thousands of human made chemicals that it turns out are endocrine disruptors and obesogens chemicals that for various reasons, they will mimic certain hormones in the human body. They will latch onto certain receptors that we don't want them touching. Obesogens are substances that will literally human made substances that will signal the body to fatten up.
You didn't invent those chemicals someone else did. You're exposed to them by picking up a newspaper, by drinking milk, by eating most commercial dairy products and meat products, uh, just, just by sitting on your couch is
Add to that, our in utero or early childhood diet, if that's poor quality food, that gives us a difficult start, add to that poor gut health, which comes from poor quality food, um, comes dramatically. So from antibiotics, lack of breastfeeding, those are the big ones.
Add to that, people get disembodied. They're just not connected to their bodies these days. We're sitting down a lot, our young people are sitting in classrooms. And you add in all this other, these other factors. When a human is disembodied, it is easier to gain weight. Unnaturally. You look at the overall toxic burden of being a human being alive on planet earth. It's hard to be at one's natural weight and add in all the stressors of life.
And in a lot of ways, there's your global weight gain.
Now, here's the wrong response, which is what we, the collective we ends up doing is that we tend to lump all people into the same weight loss strategy, dieting, plus exercise, plus shame.
And when you add up, and when you take people who
stupid exposed, exposed to poor quality food and excess sugar and foods that are engineers to addict them, and they had a poor quality diet in childhood, and while they were in the womb and they've been given antibiotics and they might not have been breastfed and they've had a lot of stress and they've been, disembodied is not their fault.
But then when we tell you, well, you don't exercise enough and you're eating too much food that we sell you because it's addicting.
So what happens is people end up hurting, confused, and frustrated and unsuccessful and disempowered because the strategies that they're given don't actually work.
And because the diet universe is largely about calories in, calories out largely, and because the diet universe is largely filled with diets that are unsustainable, weight loss methods that are not sustainable. Yeah, sure, you can go on a 30 day juice cleanse, that's fine, but a 30 day juice cleanse, yeah, that can help a lot of people lose weight. And I've seen people lose a lot of weight and gain it right back
because whatever the true challenge was, the true issue has not been addressed. So, so many people are going from diet to diet to diet, they're over exercising on top of that, they're weigh down by the weight hate from the world and that they aim at themselves, the weight hate from people around them.
That's a lot of stress.
And because people are putting sincere effort into losing weight and things aren't really working, weight loss, here's the challenge, it becomes the primary activity of people's life. You know, a lot of your clients, no, they're fine. They have a good life and they just wanna lose some weight. Good. I love those clients. And there's a lot of clients who weight loss is the primary activity of their mind.
It consumes their emotions, it consumes their life. Even if they have kids, a job, a marriage weight loss can actually kind of show up as number one inside their brain.
And in general, you have a lot of people walking around. They're refugees, they're weight loss refugees, meaning they're shellshocked. They don't know where to go,
and they haven't been treated well
and they're starting to get a little tired.
So this all those reasons that wasn't a happy story, but that's why you and I look to empower our clients. That's why I am here to help my client step into their greatest self because everything I just described to you, disempowers people, the world's response to weight gain is bizarrely disempowering.
So our first job is to empower our client. Our primary activity is to help our client empower them, meaning to help them step into the person that they're meant to be. So in order to do that, there's things we have to unlearn. Remember about unlearning.
Learning happens by addition. Wisdom happens by subtraction, by unlearning. So we look to unlearn toxic nutritional beliefs. You're tracking your client. Do they believe food is the enemy? Fat and food is the enemy. Fat on their body is the enemy. Appetite is the enemy. I will do clear, concise, intensive. You can't miss the fact that I just gave my client an intellectual intervention around food is the enemy, appetite is the enemy. Fat and food is my enemy. Fat on my body is the enemy.
I have told them why these generate stress response, what the stress response does to the body, and how you cannot possibly hold an illogical belief system and expect that you will then have a metabolism that is natural and takes you where you naturally need to go and want to go. If you are holding powerful beliefs that create a day in, day out stress response and drive our psyche mad food is the enemy. Makes us a little crazy. If you think appetite is your enemy, that makes people a little crazy. And I mean that. This is why we help our clients embrace a journey that's driven by self-love. This is why we help our clients embody now
because they have been jerked around by the weight loss universe. They are refugees, and it is not their fault. Whenever I have a weight loss client who's tried a hundred different ways to lose weight, I think, man, you've put in a lot of time and a lot of effort, their failures, so to speak, are not their fault. I mean, really, that's why we take baby steps with our client because it takes baby steps. And we look for sustainable, honest, natural, and effective ways to help people find their natural weight. And that's what you've learned through the various strategies. And it's why you, yourself, as a practitioner, you need to empower yourself when working with weight loss clients.
The moment you go, ba ba, but, but my client complained to me that she's not losing weight.
What I hear you saying when you say that is, I'm not empowered with my client.
It's your job to help your client.
It's your job to help your clients see that their intense need
might not be the thing that's going to help them actually get where they want to go.
They might not get immediate gratification or even semi immediate gratification. They might not lose weight sometimes with a weight loss client. And I've done every great thing I could do with them, and their body doesn't wanna lose weight. You bet. We go into the conversation. Okay, homework assignment for the next couple weeks,
I want you to start to think about what would life be like if this was the body that I had for the rest of my life, what would I do? Who would I be? How would I show up? Would I hate myself every day? Would I curse myself when I see in the mirror? What would you do if you knew this was gonna be the body for the rest of your life?
Sometimes my friends, sometimes the key move that we need to make is to let go completely
the deepest letting go around having the body we want or demand from the universe. The deepest letting go is oftentimes a deep relaxation response, which then helps us be a more relaxed and happy human being. And it could be the thing that helps shift our weight or not, but it's always the best move. And again, my friends, this is why we always emphasize working towards our client's highest goal, even as we're moving them towards their smaller ones.
I wanna remind you, hi, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I know you wanna lose weight, but I only work with your highest goals. I I never want to hear you say anything even vaguely like that to your client. Really, you never need to go there.
I might talk about that at the end of my work with a client when our work is done and we're reflecting on it and there's been some satisfaction and success. Yeah, I might say in here's how we got there. We worked on you not just your little pounds of body fat.
So you're not telling your client, you're just doing it and you do it in a way that they don't know that you're doing it.
This is why we as practitioners need to let go of actual weight loss as the key measurement of success with a weight loss client. That is not my measure of success with a weight loss client, actual weight loss. They've lost weight on and off. Was that a success?
I know it sounds like a conundrum for your head. Every weight loss client you've ever seen, they gain weight loss, they gain it, loss, they gain it, lost it.
So does that mean they had success here? They are coming to see you to lose weight.
So actual weight loss is not a success to me. It can be, but I'm not holding that up as the key measurement. I am holding up good work that we do on self, whether it's around food, whether it's around specific parts of diet, whether it's around eating rhythm, eating slow, relaxing with meals, starting to let go of self-chosen stressors in their life. My clients starting to step more into their power, into their creativity, noticing the places where the universe is calling them, where life is asking them to step up to grow, to improve, and watching my client then do that. Those are measurements of success. And then when weight loss starts to happen around all that, then I know in the back of my mind, we're on a good road here. Again, if your client complains, well, I I did this, I did what you said, and no, no, no, no. And I didn't lose any weight. Think to yourself, I am now talking to a child. Think to yourself that they want their immediate gratification. I understand, I understand. And you have to do an intellectual intervention. I need you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein to step into your adulthood. I need you to be a king. I need you to be a queen. I need you to understand the road that all humans who look to lose weight, often take, which is it is an uncertain road. We don't know when the body's gonna lose weight, how it's going to lose weight. It is a mystery. If there was a clear, simple science to all of this, then you would've done it. We would've done it. Everybody would've done it. The world would know it. Somebody would be really rich off of this, and there would be no weight issues in the world.
You, Mr. Mr. Klein, are hinging everything on you needing to lose weight. I understand that you wanna lose weight, I get it.
Part of the challenge for you is that you're so convinced that only weight loss will make you happy.
And that might be the very challenge you need to overcome. That's like me saying, well, only having $20 million will make me happy. I'm, I'm sorry, I just need to hit that number. Well, says who, who made that up?
Do you know Mr. Mr. Eline? Anybody who looks like you has the same body that you have, has the same weight that you have, and they're happy and they're energized and they're sexy and they feel good about themselves and they're married, or they've got a, a nice partnership.
I mean, really. Do you know them? Do you meet them? Do you see them in school, at church, at home, at work, on the street, in the mall? People holding hands with each other. I see them every day.
So it's your job when your client complains to call them into their adulthood because that's the thing they need. They need to step into their dignity. They need to step into their maturity. They need to let go of, well, I'm gonna only let myself if I, if I lose weight, and if you don't make me lose weight, then I'm not gonna let myself, and I'm gonna be mad at you. Okay? It's one way to do it. How's that way been working for you?
And that's hard for some people. It's very hard. I get it. And that's the work. We all have various kinds of hard work that we have to do in life. I wish it was easier. Sometimes, you know, one of the more difficult questions to answer that I get asked a lot, because you'll hear me use the term often times. Yeah. Well, if your client legitimately has weight to lose, and I'm asked the question, well, how do you know if someone legitimately has weight to lose?
Is a great question, my friends. How do you know? How do I know if someone legitimately has weight to lose? Okay, so I'm gonna give you some opinions here. We are now stepping out of the realm of science
and into just the realm of human experience. So that's where I'm speaking to you from. As somebody who has been obsessed about this topic and studied it and watched it, this is a very difficult question to answer because the truth is, number one is, you know, we can't always know
the greatest experts in the world in this realm cannot truly know if someone legitimately has weight to lose.
This is no, we don't know. We don't know the wisdom of life and what it's, what's got going on next. Here's another answer to that question. It definitely takes some experience to be able to look at someone
and determine, Hmm, just by looking at them. Yep. You got weight to lose.
Now, normally, yeah, there's plenty of people walking around who think that they know. They can look at anyone's, oh yeah, you got weight to lose, you got weight to lose, you got weight to lose. Um, it's not just looking at a person's weight. You observe people, you observe their body, you observe their energy, you observe their relationship with their body. You observe their level of embodiment or disembodiment. You observe their relative health, their relative vitality, how they carry themselves. So there's a lot of tuning in and seeing on a deeper level that I will do when I'm looking at a person. And because I've been doing this for a long time
and I've had a lot of trial and error and trial and success, I've gotten to play around and begin to see, oh, okay, here's, I'm noticing some similarities. My client's history, meaning their story for most of us, will be the best tool to, to determine if somebody legitimately has weight to lose your client's history and story. In other words, it depends on the amount of weight my client wishes to lose relative to their history. Have you ever weighed that amount? If they've never weighed the amount that they wanna weigh? Well, I don't know if they have that much weight to lose. Like really? I don't. That puts us in a more challenging part of the probability curve if the amount of weight that they want to weigh. If I start to do the math in my head and I see that this is gonna make this person ridiculously thin, then you bet my, my caution light is on. I'm watching from my clients and listening for my client's perfectionism. The minute I sniff out perfectionism, that tips me off immediately that my client needs to relax and accept more. And there's a good chance their number's too high, their weight loss number is too high. Perfectionism always tips me off to that urgency
by far and away tips me off that my client must relax and accept and embody otherwise they will never lose weight.
Urgency to lose weight equals extreme difficulty in losing weight and or losing it sustainably. As soon as you put urgency into the weight loss soup, it, it just ruins it. It's like you're dumped in too much salt. You know?
So urgency truly means my client needs to relax and accept. And only then can we begin to get a real sense of, okay, where does this body want to go?
So it takes a little experience, my friends, and it's not just looking at it, like I said, a physical body. It's looking at somebody's embodiment,
it's looking at their energy, looking at their health, looking at the invisibles. Um, so it's a hard one, but history, your client's weight history is a key factor here. And the visuals, you have to know, you have to know what five pounds of fat actually looks like. It's far more than you think it does.
So when my client says they wanna lose five pounds or 10 pounds or 20 pounds or 40 pounds, I need to be able to visualize that on them, and I will, I'll look at them and I'll think, Hmm, and I'll wonder to myself,
and you don't know if someone legitimately has weight to lose until you take them on the weight loss journey and do the best that you can and do all the good things that you know how to do and make weight loss to smaller goal and not the larger one. If weight loss is a person's largest goal in life, then that is why they have been unsuccessful.
And it is a challenge, my friends, because there are some people out there who legitimately like legitimately have weight to lose and they might've tried all the good strategies and they might have tried loving on their body and taking all the right baby steps and the body still doesn't budge.
That's a hard one. I've had clients like that. It's heartbreaking because sometimes there's just, we don't know. We just hit the limits of science. It's gotta be something going on in the body or something going on in the psyche that's impacting the body.
So that's why we're at the edge a lot of times with weight loss clients because we don't know a lot. So we have to be humble. Once again, my friends, we're gonna break it down for any weight. Some people weigh what they weigh and there's nothing wrong.
So somebody comes to me and they say, I wanna lose weight. That person might weigh what they weigh and there's absolutely nothing wrong and they don't know it. For some people, diet and nutrition and the various mind body nutrition factors that we've learned, those are key to help a person lose weight. The person has weight to lose. And if you do diet strategies, nutrition strategies, and mind-body nutrition strategies as the key strategies, a lot of people boom, that's it. It's, it's, it's food allergies. A lot of people, boom. It's it's meal timing and it's food quality. Boom, you can help them. A lot of people, it's macronutrient balance, boom. You can help them. And in a dramatic way, for some people it's their personal and emotional world. Those are the keys. Yeah, we've done some diet work, we've done some mind-body nutrition work, and it was needed and necessary work, but the thing that's gonna drive it is whatever work we have to do on a personal or an emotional level that could be around loving yourselves into the weight loss journey. That could mean about working in a person's relationship world, their relationship with their sexuality.
For some people there's a metabolic condition underlying things. They've got a thyroid issue, they've got pre-diabetes, they've got diabetes. And there it is For many people, it's the stress from all different kinds of stress, any different, every kind of stress that is really the driving factor. And until we help that person de-stress about their urgency to lose weight and de-stress about just their general state of freakout, some people live in a state of anxiety, fear, stress, and that is what they consider normal. And if they truly have weight to lose, until I help them de-stress, I'm not gonna be able to help them lose weight for more people than we realize. Embodiment is the key. If a human being has disembodied, they checked out of the body and they hold the belief that I will be in my body. I will love my body, I will find my body wonderful and fabulous and pleasurable and delicious, and I will, you know, just, just, I don't know, gl glide across the dance floor when I lose all this weight. But meanwhile, I hate my body. I'm not in it. I'm disconnected from it. I know it's, it's, you're gonna lose weight by not being in your body. Many people have abandoned their body. Whoever you meet who has abandoned their body, has always abandoned it for a good reason. It has been a source of turmoil, trauma, and pain and upset. So we check out of the body. You cannot scientifically measure how much a person has checked out of the body. You have to learn how to observe that in order for that person to lose weight, they must get back into their body. They must feel themselves. They must listen to body feedback. They must start to love their body. They must start to own their body. They must start to nourish their body. That is embodiment. Disembodiment is when you think your body is the enemy and you have either just abandoned it or you attack it in little medium or or large ways.
Some people, my friends, I hate to say it, are metabolic casualties of the world. They have undergone so many insults when they were in the womb. They've undergone insults when they came out of the womb, perhaps in terms of antibiotics, in terms of vaccinations, in terms of drugs that they've been given in terms of toxic exposure that they've had in terms of the last two to three generations of their family and what their family has eaten. And it is just hard to shift their body weight because all of a sudden their, their genetics are changing and it's difficult. Just say it. Um, you've heard me say for a lot of people it's a mystery. I don't know how we're gonna help you lose weight. Nothing seems to work or we're just not sure. And of course, my friends, it could be a swirl of anything I just mentioned. Any or all of this. So this is is wonderful by the way. I don't want you to look at this and get all confused. I want you to look at this and go, great. Wow, there's so many possibilities here. Now I can actually go about the business of potentially being truly useful to someone as a professional when it comes to helping them with weight. Because I have all these different distinctions with which to pull from.
I have strategies to pull from. I have an understanding to pull from that's not just calories in, calories out. Just don't eat food and just exercise like math.
I'm gonna make fun of that till the day I die, um, because it deserves it. Okay, so my friends, here's a postulation is an important one. The degree to which a person is in stress, anxiety, fear, and hate around their weight or shape is the de is the degree to which they need to defocus on literal actual weight loss and focus on finding their center, their power, their embodiment, and their dignity.
IE that's their highest goal in a lot of ways. A person who is in stress, anxiety, fear, and hate around their weight or shape. What's the degree to that? That is the degree to which you have to help them defocus on actual weight loss and focus on finding their center, their power, their embodiment, and their dignity. So yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do little strategies for them that to their mind says weight loss. Yeah, we're gonna improve your food quality. Yeah, we're gonna change your micronutrient balance. Yeah, we're gonna change when you eat what you eat. Yeah, we're gonna slow down. Okay? So we're doing things that I am letting their left brain know, yes, this is gonna help you weight loss. But at the same time, I'm doing all kinds of intellectual interventions around their fear driven, stress driven, hate driven approach to weight loss and what that stress does to their body. I am hitting that home so hard.
Once again, you gotta own something before you lose it.
We must help our clients own the body they have right now. Embrace it, embody in it, step in it. If you're gonna help them change it in any way. It's like trying to help somebody decorate their house, but they don't wanna go in their house. They don't want to touch their house, they hate their house. They want it to look different. But I don't wanna, uh, I'll, I'll love my house when it's perfect. Well, we have to be in the house and kind of just walk around and see and start to do things and take little baby steps.
We cannot wait to embody after we have found our perfect weight. If your client thinks that, if you think that you need to change your thinking, I mean that, like I really mean that. It's just an erroneous thinking. You didn't invent it. It's illogical. Life doesn't work that way.
You can't magically embody if you are disembodied and think, well, when I reach my perfect way, but of course I'll love my body, I'll be in my body. That's like saying, you know, I'm gonna learn to make a lot of money after I have a lot of money. Once I have a lot of money, I'm gonna just invest it so well that I'm gonna make even more money. But in order for me to be really rich, i I i first, I need to be rich.
Doesn't that sound silly? You wanna make more money? You gotta start where you are right now. You gotta learn the basics of money and investing and making money right now.
You're not gonna magically know all about money. Once somebody puts $10 million into your bank account, quite the opposite. You won't know very much and you will stand a far better chance of losing it. I've watched people do that. Yay. Okay. You know, you and I have to remember my friends weight hate clouds. Our thinking, our thinking, meaning you're thinking my thinking, the thinking of the world. You're thinking of the, the thinking of your client. Not only are we swimming in white hate, we are swimming in an atmosphere that oftentimes has a lot of perfectionism in it, and that's powerful in a bad way. And on top of that, people are hypnotized. They're hypnotized, but what by what the media has told them since they were little kids about how they're supposed to look.
And at the same time, there's this false belief, there's a toxic belief that floats around in the atmosphere that says we win a lottery prize when we have perfection, when we have the perfect body in the perfect weight, there's this lottery prize.
And then from that place, everybody's doing all kinds of stress driven, hate driven, fear driven strategies to lose weight that actually lock in the weight, such as underfeeding,
underfeeding, particularly if a person's eating the right amount of food, which a lot of people are. But, but even if, even if somebody is overeating, undereating is not the solution. I hope you get that somebody is overeating because they're eating fast, because they're not present with themselves because they're in a bad habit, because they're macronutrient imbalance, because they're nutrient deprived,
because they're not conscious, they're not present. So whatcha are gonna say to them, well, well, well just eat a 10th of what you're eating. It it, no, they have to learn how to be an eater.
So do you see how this food amount thing is a bunch of nonsense? Even if somebody's truly eating too much food, the eating of too much food itself is not the problem. There's a reason why they're eating so much food. You think your weight loss client is that dumb, that they don't know that, oh my goodness, if I just stopped eating tons of food, I could lose weight. Of course they know that It's a reason why they can't stop. That's where you come in to help determine why
you know, and you're gonna have a challenge with your client because people can be extremely impatient around weight loss. It is shocking how impatient people get it, even if they haven't lost it in years or decades. That's what I'm saying. So do not ever let your clients impatience drive you. I really mean that. Never, ever, ever let them drive you.
As soon as you and I let our clients impatience their stress, their freak out about losing all this weight yesterday, when we let that affect us, when we let that regulate our emotional universe, we're in trouble. We're not gonna be effective for our client. We're not gonna help them get where they wish to go. It is that very impatience, it is that very stress and freak out. That is the very thing we need to help them lose. Not the weight, lose the impatience and you have a better chance to lose the weight. I mean that,
I wanna say a few words about beauty. This is a tough conversation my friends, because there's a lot of darkness actually. Um, in the subject of beauty, there's a lot of confusion. I believe there's a lot of, um,
chaos in our relationship with beauty. What I wanna say is this, here's my postulation. My postulation is that our collective relationship with beauty is extremely immature and is unexamined. I mean, how the world relates to it. The world that you are born into, the world that you watch, movies and TV shows has an extremely immature and unexamined relationship with beauty. On the one hand, beauty is worshiped.
Beauty is really worshiped. And I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. I just want us to notice that we worship this thing we call beauty. We worship it through our actors, actresses, all the famous people, all the models.
If you haven't noticed from the time you were very young, you have been given that which you are supposed to worship via the media, via your culture. Here's who we are telling you you need to look up to as your role model. This is who you essentially worship. We are putting them on the large screen. We are putting their name everywhere. We are putting them on every altar, worship them.
Now I think, I think we can all mostly agree that culture and media indeed create an artificial standard.
Now I start that statement, and here's the reason why, because it gets tricky here because I believe there is an artificial standard. However, all the research that's ever been done on beauty and how we determine it, recognize it, experience, all the useful research has shown that there's a built in standard of cross-cultural agreement around beauty. And a lot of it has to do with symmetry, with actual mathematical, measurable symmetry, mostly of the human face, but to a lesser degree of the body. But when you do studies on infants and how they react to faces, there's a way that, that the youngest people that we have react to symmetry, cross-culturally across different images of people, of men and women, which definitely speaks to a universal idea of beauty.
Now, our politically correct mind doesn't like this. While everyone's beautiful, interesting. I think there is a truth to that.
And I also believe that there is a truth to the fact that the human brain will focus on certain faces as quote unquote more beautiful, which is a measure of the symmetry, which once again speaks to a beyond the beyond universal idea of beauty that is built into us.
So what I'm suggesting to you is there's a paradox. I'm not saying that every human doesn't have beauty,
and I'm saying there are some that will universally be considered more beau than others. Ain't nothing wrong with that. Like just why can't we just be okay with the idea that some people are gonna be considered more beautiful than others, male, female, kids, dogs, snakes? I don't know. The challenge is beauty often creates a sense of competition. It creates jealousy, it leads to judgment, it leads to hate, it leads to self-judgment at leads to self-hate. It leads to hating the beauty in another.
So as much as we worship beauty in this culture, there's actually, if you've noticed this, if you've known people, women and men who are considered beautiful, there's oftentimes a lot of hate that is aimed at quote unquote beautiful people in the form of jealousy. Competition. I don't have that. I want it mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them? All the bad queen or king or prince or princess in us? If we covet the beauty of another, we will hate it. So what I'm suggesting is we need to begin to respect beauty on its own terms. I think beauty has its own terms that actually goes beyond our political correctness, and it goes beyond our beliefs of what it should be and ought to be. And it actually just has its own terms.
So I think there's a way that, yeah, we, we naturally honor beauty in certain things. You know, you see a beautiful work of art. It's easy for a lot of people to honor that beautiful work of art. If you see a beautiful flower, it's easy for many, many people to honor that beautiful flower. If you were looking at the beautiful flower and you're looking at another flower that's old and is dying and is brown and is drying up, you're not gonna focus on its beauty or be moved by that beauty. Does that mean that that dying flower is not beautiful on some level? Sure, there's a beauty in it and there's a whole different beauty in a flower that's in all its glory and all its beauty. We have to learn how to honor beauty rather than covet it.
I see that for a lot of my clients who are looking for the perfect body. There's and the perfect, perfect looks. They're, they're actually not in a good relationship with beauty. They haven't learned to honor it and respect it in others or celebrate it in others. They're living in a form of jealousy that stops them.
There's a lot more to say to that, but let's just leave that at that for now. Um, let's talk about target weight for a moment. Now, you know this, we don't know how much anybody should weigh. So as soon as my client has their target weight, I'm thinking to myself says who, I don't say that, but says who. I one lose 20 pounds, 25 pounds, 75 pounds says who? That's what I'm thinking in the back of my mind. So as a reminder, I wanna let you know that people in their target weight, they give this number an undeserved amount of power. I have found it is seldom, not half the time, not a quarter of the time, seldom has a person's target weight been an accurate or a useful number in the work that I've done with that person.
People will, I, I, I, seriously, I've worked with people who've lost a lot of weight, who lost over a hundred pounds, but they have just target number in their mind and all of a sudden their life has changed. Everything looks great, and they lose a hundred plus pounds and they're wanting to lose 15 more. One, five. And they become obsessed with that. Woo, that's a hard one.
We often use the target weight as a distraction
because getting to your natural weight is all about being once again in relationship with yourself, your body, with life, with food, with the world, with your inner world in a good way,
focusing on a number that means nothing.
And then giving that number. All this power is a fruitless pursuit. It's a waste of energy.
It can be a lower level masculine approach. IE left brain scientific mind approach. Like when I say lower level, it's just a made up number, but it sounds good. Well, I need to lose 125 pounds or I need to lose 30 pounds. Like, okay, so there's a number
that pulls us away from the feminine, from embodiment.
Imagine telling every woman on the planet, here's the exact number you need to weigh in order for everybody to think that you're beautiful and everybody to love you. You would drive every woman on the planet crazy
that would be weighing themselves all day. They'd be dieting, they'd be exercising,
or they would be just resentful of that whole process and just like not pay attention to you. Um, but if we forced that upon our women at a young age, they would all have disordered eating. And guess what? We kind of do that usually not with a number, but with an image. And then people see these images and they affix a number to it.
Artificial target weights beget artificial and unsustainable strategies.
It's a package deal.
We often believe that if we dislike our body disapprove of it enough or hate it, then changing it will surely make us happy. So people have their target weight and the target weight is complexed with self attack, self shaming approaches, and a self attacking journey to reach our target wage. This place where you finally feel love.
So you know this sustainable weight loss or sustainable happiness with the body can only come through a path of love. Only prove me wrong. I'm happy for you to prove me wrong. And again, you'll find one or two people if you'll look around enough, who have had a sustainable weight loss,
uh, through a path of self-attack and self-hate. But I promise you, that person lives in self-attack and self-hate or they live in a very narrow bandwidth. And if you want to be like them, you can, you can go for it, but not my suggestion.
So our target weight is often driven by self lack or it's driven by perfectionism or it's driven by just bad thinking. It's just not well thought out. People are not experts here. They're emotionally driven. They're driven by the weight hate of the world. They're driven by everything that's drilled into their head that you need to look a certain way in order for you to be loved. And we're like, okay, okay, okay. I need to lose this amount of weight. Here's my target number. I promise I'll reach this.
It's hard being a person on planet, on earth when it comes to this weight thing for a lot of people. So my friends, of course, it's fine. Have a target weight, okay, have a target weight. But you have to make sure you evaluate that target weight with your client.
What do I mean by evaluate it? Okay, Mr. And miss client, when was the last time you weighed this amount?
How old were you? How did you get to that target weight? Like was there something that got you there?
How long did you stay at that target weight? 'cause apparently it came back on 'cause that's why you're here to see me. Okay. Why do you think that weight came back on?
Is this a truly realistic target weight for you? And if not, what would be more realistic?
IE you know this, a lot of people have a target weight and the target weight happens to be a weight that they had when they were 16 years old and now they're 56. That's not a good target weight. I don't care what it is.
Okay, maybe they're in their thirties, forties, fifties, and they were at this target weight when they were in their twenties, thirties, or forties. Okay. How did you get to that target weight? Well, if they got there through marathons, running and starvation and just some ridiculous diet that was unsustainable. Okay, so how long did you stay there? Okay, that wasn't sustainable. Six months, three months, two months. Why did the weight come back on? Well, I don't know. Well, no, come on. Something must have happened. Well, I couldn't follow that diet. I couldn't do the exercise anymore. I couldn't eat that food. I couldn't. Yeah, that's right. You couldn't, couldn't continue that pace. So is this truly a, a realistic target way for you? So in this series of questioning, I'm trying to help my client arrive at an answer themselves
through my logical reasoning with them,
which happens a lot, especially when people see that their thinking is not so clear.
So it's because somebody wants to lose weight and has a target weight and tells you their target weight, doesn't mean their thinking is good or clear, quite the opposite. You can assume that there's a darn good chance that they don't have clear thinking here. Some people do, but my assumption is I'm not gonna assume you have clear thinking until I ask you these questions.
Now remember, people have some beliefs about their target weight, especially if they've been there. And oftentimes these beliefs are excessively religious. They worship these beliefs. I feel so much better at this weight. This is where I feel my best. This is where I feel most comfortable.
So when a client says this, they're referring to a past experience at this weight. I get it. Interestingly enough, okay, you feel your best. This is where you're most comfortable,
but they couldn't sustain it. Hmm, that sounds like an interesting conundrum. So you feel your best. I mean, when I feel my best and I'm feeling my best, so why don't you just stay there?
Chances are they couldn't stay there because it was an unsustainable weight number or, and it was reached by unsustainable strategies. Pretty simple. And what they're left with is a state addiction. State addiction. Meaning they got high at this weight,
but it was a temporary high. Like any drug. When a client says that to me, I always say, yep. And I have a friend who's a drug addict and he feels at his best. He's most comfortable when he's on a cocaine binge or a heroin binge or an alcohol binge. He, he feels great. Yeah, you got a little high. I get it. But that high was temporary for a lot of people. It's this emotional rush when they hit some target weight and they feel so good about themselves. It's a, it's a literal, literal, temporary experience
like any other target we hit in life. And at some point you just, you just get back to, okay, now I've gotta be me again. Now you have the same stuff you gotta deal with. You gotta deal with your husband, your wife, your kids, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your job, your house, your dog, your cat. And it's back to the real world.
My client is insisting I feel so much better this way. I feel more comfortable. They're being in their little manipulative teenager with you
and they need an intellectual intervention here of the kind I just mentioned.
So loving the body is the bottom line event. We are all wanting when it comes to weight loss, really it's the bottom line event.
If I lose weight, then I will love myself.
That's for most people where people say, well it's, I wanna be healthier. Um, 19 outta 20 times. I don't believe that. Um, if you cared about your health and me, okay, well maybe you woke up and realize, wow, I need to really care about my health more. But the health thing is always is is often a smokescreen that people use. Well, my doctor told me this. Okay, your doctor told you that. Um, so everybody gets in their mind and it's this health thing and it's this crusade, therefore it's righteous and it's moralistic because it's for my health. Um, and then people think they're working on their health.
No, you're actually working on your weight. And weight can be there for a lot of reasons, not because you are unhealthy. And if you do healthier foods, yeah, okay. Healthier foods might help you reach your natural weight. It might for some people. I'm just saying Heads up, heads up, heads up, heads up. Majority of people who get focused on weight loss for health, um, they're confused. They're not really focused on me learning how to be in my body. Me learning how to nourish myself, me learning how to use food in a good way so I'm not using it all the time in every way to regulate all my emotions and use it as a symbolic substitute for everything else. People are not gonna focus on that if they're thinking well, but this is about health.
No, this is about you looking at the places where the weight gain is really speaking to. We have to listen to the message and the weight.
'cause yeah, it might be about nutrition. It might be about things that have nothing to do with nutrition. So loving one's body is perhaps one of the ultimate forms of embodiment.
Conditional love when it comes to weight loss doesn't work. I don't love myself now, but when I weigh what I want, then I will love myself.
Do you want a partner like that? Do you want friends like that who tell you those things? No, we're not your friend anymore. No. Conditional love does not work when it comes to weight loss. I just haven't seen it. And loving oneself now and embodying now once again is the last place most people wish to go. 'cause it's not easy. They want to win the weight loss lottery. I win the lottery, I lost the weight. Now I love myself and I feel so good about myself. And all I did was just take a pill or have this magic diet that somehow I must have missed all these years. No, my friends, it is baby steps, always baby steps for most people.
And it's not something you try once loving the body. It's not something you try once. Yeah, no, no, no. I try, I I work with somebody. I tried loving my body. It didn't work really. Okay. Uh, you didn't do it good enough. That's what happened. It's like saying, I tried loving my child. It didn't work. I tried loving my partner. It didn't work. I tried loving myself. It didn't work. No such thing.
It's a practice. It's, it's something we do every day. We take baby steps. It's a lifelong experience. It takes work sometimes to truly love and respect the body. For so many people who have been rejecting it for so long or have been taught to reject it for so long, that loving the body seems like an impossible task. Like literally it seems impossible.
And yet that is the journey. It's the impossible journey for some people.
And you have to have a very strong, um,
spirit inspiration, metabolism for helping people with the impossible. Yeah, my client might think it's impossible to love their body as it is right now,
but that's what they must do if they wish to have a body that they love. If you want to have the body that you want, you must always begin by wanting the body that you have.
First things first. So a secret, a secret to a happy life with weight is that we must decouple loving my body from weight loss
secret to a happy life with weight is decouple loving my body from weight loss. You can want to lose weight. Your client could want to lose weight. And that is a legitimate want, a legitimate desire. Just don't affix. And I can only love my body if I lose this amount of weight. That amount of weight or some of this or some of that amount of weight. Or we have to decouple that.
Yeah, lose weight. Yeah, wanna lose weight. Perfectly legitimate. How do you separate that from loving my body? Meaning your job is to love your body at whatever weight. And do not make loving your body contingent on some amount of pounds of body fat leaving your body.
You are doing the very damage to yourself that the world has inflicted upon you. The world is saying, we don't love you as you look like this. And you're going to yourself, okay, I don't love myself unless I look like this. No, you've been given a bad virus.
So always remember my friends when it comes to weight. Focus on these fundamental, fundamental areas with your weight loss client or look to focus on these. Notice if you need to focus on these slow eating, which means present aware, pleasured relaxation response. When eating, look at a person's eating rhythm. You need to look at their food quality. You need to look at their macronutrient balance. Are they in a pleasurable relationship with food and body in any way? Are they present when they're eating IE eating with awareness? Can you help them create a nourishing relationship with food? If a person doesn't have a nourishing relationship with food, then they cannot find their sustainable natural weight and be happy.
I mean that. So a nourishing relationship with food, I'm saying is the foundation of having one's true natural weight in a sustainable way where you actually then feel like you can love yourself and enjoy yourself. Now, does a nourishing relationship with food? Doesn't mean you do everything freaking perfect with food all the time. Never overeat, never binge eat, never have a down day. No. It just means that overall you have a nourishing relationship with food. You're caring for your body with food. You're celebrating your experience of being in a body with food. You're receiving from your food. You're being grateful and thankful for your food.
You are loving your body through the vehicle of food.
Always remember, help your clients see their relationship with food as a great teacher.
My friends make the connections, if any, between their key life domains and their weight, work with their toxic nutritional beliefs, work with movement as opposed to lifeless. I hate exercise.
Please, please, please, please, please. You have to help your client and body if they've checked out, if they've abandoned their body. You have to help your client love themselves into their weight loss journey. You have to help them be the real me right now. Meaning achieve the end results in the beginning. What are the end results you expect to have when you have the perfect body? Great, let's see the list. Let's start to do that list Now. Everything we could do on the list that we could do now, we do now.
'cause most of it you can always remember to ask the universe on behalf of your client, where is life calling my client? How is life asking them to grow? That's the key.
And you're helping your client choose to be here. You're alerting them to the fact that maybe they haven't chosen to be here because if they haven't chosen to be here, how could their, how could they expect a big shapeshift of the body if you're not here?
If we're not present and we're not here, we can't do big things. We can't do powerful things. Shapeshifting, the body is big. It takes presence. It takes awareness, takes consciousness. It takes curiosity. It takes looking, it takes listening. It takes learning. It takes studying, it takes experimentation. You gotta be here to do that. You gotta wanna be here to do that. You know, a lot of people just don't like their life. They don't like this world for all understandable reasons. They're not fully here. And they think, well, you know, but I'll fully be here when I have this perfect body then, then you know, I'll be happy like everybody else. But I'm kind of not here in the meantime. So help me lose weight. No, I can't. You don't even wanna be here. How do you possibly think you're gonna shapeshift your body? It doesn't work like that.
So practitioner attitude, my friends is everything.
Because inside myself, I'm not looking at weight loss as a number one goal for my weight loss client.
If I was focusing on a specific weight loss number as the ultimate goal, I would be doing my client a disservice. So it doesn't matter what number they say, I don't worship it like they do. Remember, we're not announcing this to our client. It's just how we function, how we think, how we operate. We are slowly and gently sneaking our client into our approach without naming it, we're looking to create harmony and balance and a natural relationship with food and body and life. So yes, I'm gonna give all little tweaks, little homework assignments that move them forward in the actual direct weight loss universe. But at the same time, I'm looking for the other strategies I can do that are necessary that slowly help them step into who am I
supposed to be as a person in this world? How does my client need to evolve emotionally in relationship
in their internal world, in their spiritual world, in their sexual universe, in their financial universe. When it comes to purpose, our natural weight is so often it's just a function of the rest of our life and the things that are most important that we're needing to learn or focus on.
You know the thing is, the challenge is the beauty is weight is different for everyone. Some people feel burdened by their extra weight. Many people are people, people that you would consider fat and they are free and they are liberated.
Many people weigh what they weigh and that is simply the wisdom of their body and their natural weight. Whether they like that weight or not. Like truly, there are human beings who truly weigh what they weigh and that's their natural weight.
And they could accept it or not accept it. Many people, the extra weight, it just humbles us. And we have to just relax and be humbled a little bit.
A lot of people have a truly fine and reasonable weight and they believe they're fat and they live in fear and judgment.
A lot of our clients simply need to go on a very unpredictable journey with weight. I wish it was more predictable. For some people, it's not a predictable journey. Don't think it is. And there are certain things that we do that put us in the best part of the probability curve to help an actual human lose actual weight if they have actual weight to lose.
A lot of us simply need to be awakened and educated, so to speak, by our extra weight. Our relationship with food and body is a great teacher.
Many people are here to learn the lesson of loving and embracing their body no matter what. That's a big soul lesson for a lot of people.
So here are some ways to walk the weight loss journey. To me, the weight loss journey is first and for foremost, my client needs to be walking a transformational path in life. First and foremost, if you want to transform your body, you must transform your life. You cannot separate the two out. I mean that we have to reclaim the body on its own terms, which means always embodiment. You have to inhabit your body, you have to occupy your body. You have to choose to be in this body right now. If you want the body to do something different,
I have to invite my client into a weight loss journey where they begin to trust the body and trust life more and more. Life has a greater wisdom to it. Your body has a greater wisdom to it. We don't know what's gonna go on. We're gonna do our best to help you get where you want to go weight wise. But you gotta trust 'cause that's all we can do. None of us know what's gonna happen next week, next month, next year. You know, some people need to reboot their vi, their body vi by good nutrition and sometimes detoxification and sometimes high quality food. That's a way that kickstarts a lot of people. It's a totally legitimate strategy. Okay? You know, we're gonna put you on all this healthy raw foods and juices and cleansing programs. Sure, that helps a lot of people reboot.
Does it change people permanently? Some what the numbers are, I don't know,
but is every, not a hundred percent for, for a lot of people that that gets them feeling, oh wow, I can feel good in my body. Oh wow, this is what it feels like. Oh wow, I wanna move in that direction. Some people need to walk the weight loss journey and be in better relationship with their feminine archetype. Some with their masking archetype, some, a combo of both.
Some people just need to get in more and better relationship just with nature
or with their spiritual journey.
So remember this metaphor, my friends body fat is indeed stored fuel science considers that a fat, it's stored caloric energy and we are taking that into the metaphoric realm and we're looking at fat on your client's body. If it's, if they truly have excess fat, then great. All I'm seeing is they have excess fuel. Really? They have excess fuel. Sure we can call it caloric fuel, but really it's emotional fuel. It's spiritual fuel. It's fuel for creation. It's fuel for self-expression. It's fuel for giving our gifts in the world. It's fuel for how you love and serve and help others. It's fuel for how you love. In general, it's fuel. If my client is sitting on their power and sitting on their energy, then that's what they're doing. They're sitting on their power and sitting on their energy. If I can help them begin to liberate their energy, wherever their energy, wherever life is calling them to liberate energy, to follow their self-expression more, to step into love in their life, more, to step into being the real me more, that's liberating energy. That's burning up your fuel.
It works for a lot of people. My friends,
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, it's one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely help another without helping himself herself.
That's why we do this work.
Just a reminder that we often teach what we need to learn. It's totally okay. It's all good.
So in the big picture, when it comes to weight, what might the current state of weight challenges in the world tell us?
To me, when I look at the current state of the weight challenge that the world has, I think it's telling us that we have to deepen. We have to deepen our understanding, our perspective. We have to deepen our insight. We have to deepen the conversation. We have to self-examine and self-reflect collectively and personally. We have to get far more mature and intelligent in our approach to weight. A simplistic approach to weight, a sophomoric freshman approach to weight that says the same old nonsense that doesn't work is unacceptable.
I think in the big picture, we're being asked to be more compassionate towards each other. I think in the big picture, we're being asked to update and improve. Our food chain is pretty low quality. We're being asked to change how we nourish ourselves. And really in the biggest picture, we're being asked to reflect on how we've created our world. So we've all participated in creating a certain world together.
How do you create the world that you wanna live in?
How can you start to do that today in your own life?
So my friend, some final musings. Please, please, please inside yourself, accept your client's weight without you needing to change it. I'm happy to help my client change their weight, but I don't need to change their weight for me to feel better about myself or for me to feel better about them. Mocho and ante, my friends, welcome your clients impossible conundrum. They've been trying to lose weight for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years. They've been on this diet, that diet, they lost the weight, they gained it back, and now they're coming to see you. They're in an impossible conundrum. If they could have lost weight, they would've already. So just welcome their impossible conundrum.
And my client comes to see me and they're a weight loss refugee and they've tried all these different things and they have a long story. I just, I'm very hopeful. I'm very positive. Relax into the whole journey together with each other and for you, make it a path of inquiry. Be curious, be willing to make discoveries. Be willing to be a detective and stop focusing on the end goal.
In other words as well, be open to your client losing weight or not losing weight, or gaining weight or losing some of the weight. Be open to anything 'cause anything can happen.
Remember that until your client can accept and love who they are, despite what they weigh is gonna be a hell of a lot easier for them to stay stuck in the weight that they're in or return to it very soon, even if they do lose it.
Another way of saying that as a bottom line, you and I need to help our clients call a cease fire against all self attack.
Your client's self attacking is harming your effectiveness with them. Take it personally if you need to. In other words, you have to love your client into their weight loss journey. They need to love themselves eventually into their weight loss journey. Model it for them. That's what you're here to do. Be patient, be clear. Be kind. Be wise. Be unconditionally accepting. Do not let their emotions regulate you. I didn't do this, I didn't do that. I didn't lose the weight. This is not happening fast enough.
Just model what you wish for them to have, which is being patient, being relaxed, having a journey of love.
I hope this conversation was helpful, my friends. And the good news is we're gonna talk a little bit more about weight after this and we're gonna look at the larger weight loss client and see if there's any useful distinctions we can pull out from there in case you find yourself working with that population of people. Thanks as always, my friends, for your time and your attention and your energy and your thoughtfulness. I always appreciate it. I'll see you on the other side.
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