COURSE PROGRESS
[progressally_progress_pie_chart post_id="26351" size="100"]
COURSE NAVIGATION
MODULE 2
WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE
In this comprehensive module, we dive into the two most important and prevalent eating psychology challenges: weight and body image. This is one of the most powerful and cutting-edge modules in the entire training – so get ready!
Using the principles of Dynamic Eating Psychology and Mind Body Nutrition, you’ll learn how to understand each client’s unique weight loss journey, and how to help them transform their body from a truly holistic and compassionate place.
You’ll discover how to do an individualized, effective weight loss intake, and learn the key protocols for successfully working with weight, strategies for healing body image, embodiment practices, along with highly relevant weight loss and body image case studies. Additionally, you’ll learn a powerful coaching and listening tool: “The Four Questions.”
This module is rich in clinical tools and distinctions that will sharpen your skills as a helping professional, while providing a paradigm shifting approach to working with weight loss.
So, let’s get started!
Begin with your Module 2 Overview Video, and then be sure to watch all the videos for this module, and complete all of your checklist items below…
Overview Video
Greetings.
Once again, friends, Mark David here, founder
of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating.
Let us dive into weight loss and body image.
So we are entering into arguably the most
challenging place that we can possibly go when it comes
to eating challenges and our relationship with food.
And you know, this might very well be the hardest place
that you and I can possibly go as coaches, counselors,
teachers, practitioners, because really there isn't a bigger
or more widespread concern in eating psychology than
what we weigh, how we're shaped,
and what we think we need to look like in order
to be happy humans who can finally celebrate our own lives
and feel good about who we are.
So in many ways, this whole concern challenge
around weight is actually a big mystery with a capital M.
So we have to respect that. We have to be humble to that.
I also wanna say this, we know that there's a lot
of emotional hurt, a lot of pain
and suffering when it comes to carrying extra weight.
We also know that when it comes to body image, you know,
someone could have the perfect weight,
they could look amazing to you and me.
And yet that person who has the classic perfect weight,
perfect looks, perfect shape, they can walk
around thinking, I'm too fat.
My body's not good enough, I'm not okay.
I'm not lovable as I am.
So the body doesn't guarantee us anything.
And the reality is, when it comes to weight,
this particular concern goes far beyond mere physiology.
It goes far beyond metabolism and health
because our concerns around weight, they really get
to the heart of who we are.
They get to the heart of how we see ourselves
and how we see the world, and honestly how we see life.
So, you know, one of the great challenges when it comes
to talking about the topic of weight
is there's actually a lot of disagreement around weight.
There's so much bias, there's a lot of blame.
We are swimming in an atmosphere of weight hate.
There's a lot of old science
and what we can call heroic weight loss, you know, methods
that yeah, you exercise hard and you eat not a lot of food.
And those methods might work short term,
but you might have noticed
that they're simply not sustainable.
So let me say this.
Here's the statistic that no one really wants to talk about.
There should be headline news, but it isn't.
And that's that 98 to 99% of all humans
who lose weight on a weight loss diet,
gain it back within a year.
And oftentimes then some.
And that's shocking. That's stunning.
What we're doing isn't working.
And when you look at all the research
and you actually do a meta analysis on weight, on obesity,
when you sum total all the weight loss research,
scientists will tell you obesity.
Researchers will tell you, we cannot conclusively say
whether extra weight, meaning fat, obesity
is a health issue, a risk factor in disease, if it's a
positive factor when it comes to health,
if it's a genetic issue,
if it's a psychosocial issue, we don't know.
And as it turns out, my friends, it's actually very simple.
Let's save the scientists a lot of trouble
because weight can be all of these,
it could be none of these.
It can be a swirl of these depending on the person.
Everyone's different. Now, I know that might sound strange
to you because the media has been hitting us pretty hard
about how extra weight is a major health issue.
And the truth is, it is when it is,
and it's not when it's not.
Because the facts don't exactly bear this out.
Meaning, let's be real here.
You could be slender and skinny and have the perfect weight
and be in extremely poor health.
By the same token, you could be
slender and skinny and be healthy.
Um, you can be what science claims to be overweight,
yet still be extremely healthy.
As a matter of fact, uh, there's a phenomenon
that scientists, the obesity paradox.
And what the obesity paradox means is
that we're expecting the obese ones to have a shorter life.
And it doesn't really turn out that way all the time.
Uh, in fact, it's a little longer.
You know, at the same time, we can look around
and easily see that we are gaining weight around the world.
That doesn't appear to be a secret. So what do we do?
There's the challenge. And on top of all that,
here's something interesting.
We don't, the scientific, we, we don't truly know
how much any particular person ought
to weigh at any given time.
There is absolutely zero science to this, my friends.
It's all guesswork. It is all made up.
So our clients come to us, they often invent
a weight loss number that they give a deeply religious value
to, meaning they're worshiping this number
like it's a deity.
And they believe once I hit this number,
once I hit this number on the scale, what's gonna happen?
Life is gonna be great. I'm gonna be the real me.
I'm gonna be fabulous.
All my problems are gonna be solved
and I'm gonna finally live happily ever after
because I've somehow hit that magic number.
By the way, that's what we call a toxic
nutritional belief, my friends.
So you
and I, we are going
to look at weight from a big picture perspective.
We're always gonna start that way.
We're gonna look at each client as unique.
We're gonna let go.
Believe it or not, we're gonna let go of the goal
of weight loss with our clients.
And I mean that. And this is actually very important.
If you want to truly help somebody with their weight,
we have to help people let go
of the intense goal of losing weight.
You're gonna hear me say that a lot
and I'm gonna detail that out
as we move forward in this section.
But as we let go of the goal of weight loss
and just be with a client who they are, as we truly listen
to our client and listen to their weight,
whether it's extra weight
or not, we have to listen to the weight.
We're going to learn a lot
because every client that comes to see you to lose weight
is beautifully unique.
They're different. So some of the questions, um,
often circulating in the back of my mind when I'm
with a weight loss client, does my client
actually have weight to lose?
Because believe it
or not, some people, no matter what they do, I don't care
how much they exercise and how much they don't eat,
they cannot and will not lose weight.
Their body happens to be very happy where it is.
So if they truly do have weight to lose,
somebody truly does have weight to lose.
What is that weight asking of us?
Meaning somebody's extra weight might be asking us
to change my diet.
It might be asking us to look at stress.
It might ask us to slow down.
It might ask us to look at movement versus exercise.
It might ask us to explore our emotional world
that can impact our weight.
It might ask us to look at a past hurt
or hurts traumas, abuses extra weight.
Might ask us to look at our toxic nutritional beliefs
that'll profoundly affect us.
It might ask us to look at mind-body nutrition distinctions
such as food allergies, macronutrient, balance,
extra weight, could ask us to look at some of these.
All of these, the possibilities. My friends are endless.
And that's what makes the work so beautiful.
So in this training, you are going to learn distinctions
that I consider quite unique,
quite powerful, quite different.
And they're going to set you up for success.
Success is an important word when it comes
to the weight loss universe.
But I want to emphasize and underline that word success
because when it comes to weight loss, we actually need
to redefine success
and immediately, so, so I'm gonna do that for you right now.
I'm gonna do it a few more times
throughout the course of this training.
Success can actually mean many different outcomes
in the weight loss universe.
You're going to have success with some
of your clients simply
because they hit their exact weight loss target.
And that's the classic definition of success.
They wanna lose 40 pounds. They lose 40 pounds.
You can have success with some of your clients
because they lost some of the weight they wanted to lose.
And that's all the weight the body wants to lose.
People make up numbers. The body has its own wisdom.
You might have success with other clients
because they lose just a little bit
of the weight that they wanna lose.
You might have success and your client has lost no weight whatsoever, believe it or not. But what they lost was their anxiety, their stress, their body hate, their self attack. They learned to love themselves more. They learned to get out of their head and get into their body and start living their life. Had a lot of clients like that. By the time we finished, they said, thank you. I didn't lose a pound and I'm such a better person. So you're gonna hear a lot of case studies that help us redefine success in this realm. There's gonna be a lot of your clients, my friends, who actually lose their need to lose weight. Every person's different. Success looks different for everyone. So you have to make yourself bigger. Now again, there's a whole spectrum of clients, many of whom have walked into my office over the years and they're trying to lose weight and they don't have any weight to lose. And it shocks me and it stuns me there, there there's really no part of their body that can lose weight. And my friends, this is a part of the challenge of how we are all conditioned and programmed by the world, by culture, by media. We get a little brainwashed to believe that a certain body shape or a certain body size and a certain kind of slenderness is the gold standard of how a human being should look. How a man should look, a woman should look. And it's just not true. And it's polluting our minds. So we're going to listen to the body. And most people don't realize the extent to which we have been adversely programmed with the toxic nutritional belief called, I'm too fat, I'm not good enough, my body's not good enough. We don't realize how much toxic beliefs have gripped us. And they drive us and they stress us and they change our physiology and they change our behaviors. So our goal here is to help our client relax into a relationship with food that works to help them relax into a relationship with their body that works, to follow a diet that's nourishing, loving, sustainable, healthy for that person and with enough leeway to have some life, some fun, and to celebrate being alive. So our goal is not necessarily, um, that, You know, know that whatever number of pounds a person says they needs to lose is exactly what that person needs to lose, or else you're gonna see how we work with that. That's why, by the way, I never say to a client or to the public, I work with weight loss. I will say I work with weight. See the distinction? If I say that I work with weight, what that means is I'm gonna work with your challenge around weight. Your challenge around weight might be that you need to lose more weight. Your challenge around weight might be that what you weigh is fine and you gotta learn to love your body. Your challenge around weight might be that you're trying to lose five pounds and you wanna lose those five pounds around your midsection because you want to have the abs of steel and you're making yourself crazy. So I work with weight as opposed to weight loss. And if weight loss is truly wanting to happen, the body will go there. By the way, in my experience, one of the secrets to truly having success with weight loss clients and to actually help people lose weight, who truly have weight to lose, is to focus, check it out, to focus on their larger goals and not their smaller goals. So we focus on their larger goals, not their smaller goals. What does that mean? A person's largest goal, and I'm gonna make a global statement here, A person's largest goal in life is to be in this world and become the fullest, highest, most self-expressed version of who they're meant to be. In this world, a person's highest goal is to hit the target of their potential that they came into this life with. That's our highest goal. Now, when I'm helping my client be the best person that they can possibly be, everything else begins to fall into place. So yes, I'm gonna focus on the weight for sure. That's how clients come to see us. We focus on the weight, but that's really the smaller goal. So I'm gonna look at a person's weight, but I'm also looking at what do we have to do with this person to improve their overall way of how they nourish themselves, how they diet, how they're in relationship, how they do work, how they do money, how they do purpose, spirituality, sexually, that can all come into play. So when it comes to body image, we have so many people, so many clients who are walking around thinking, you know, I can't love my body until it looks exactly like this. I am not going to love my body until it looks like that. Now, if it looks like this, I can't love it. So I have to hate it, hate my body, have to hate it into looking like, like this by, by punishing it and forcing it and and shoving it with exercise and limiting it with like a minimalistic diet. And I hope you notice that this just Doesn't work. It's a god awful strategy. The whole purpose, my friends of losing weight for most people is so we like ourselves better or we love ourselves more. So that's the purpose, to love ourselves more. To finally feel empowered about who we are and be happy. That's what people really want when they have their ideal body. So with that, how can we possibly go down a road where we're in a, we're in constant self attack and self-hate and speaking so unkindly to ourselves. How could you go down that road and expect to arrive at a place of self? Love is a logical absurdity, my friends, the journey informs the destination. You gotta love yourself into weight loss, not hate yourself into it. That's the secret. We should also take notice that the age old strategy of weight loss, which is the scientific gold standard for about 60 plus years, scientific golden standard for weight loss has been eat less, exercise more. And that's what everybody's been saying forever. Well, if eating less and exercising more truly worked, it would've worked a long time ago. And you and I would not be in this conversation right now. And I'm gonna tell you, I've been around a lot of people. People are not lazy. We got this thing. Oh, overweight people are lazy, they're not lazy. I know a lot of dieters who work really, really hard and they've been working hard for decades. And so many dieters and exercisers are doing the same strategies decade after decade, dieting and exercise. And they keep ending up in the same suffering, the same misery, and essentially with the same body. Or they lose weight, they gain it, they lose their and and it's just this endless cycle. So weight and its loss is simply far more complex, far more interesting and far more fascinating than we have allowed it to be. So we're gonna make this a juicy conversation. There are many, many, many factors in the realm of mind-body nutrition and dynamic eating psychology that we're going to look at that can have an impact on helping a person reach their natural weight in a sustainable way. So a few examples of this can include stress. It can include self-chosen stressors, self-chosen stressors are the kind of stressors you don't need, such as toxic nutritional beliefs. Food is the enemy, fat and food is my enemy. Appetite is my enemy. Unless I lose this weight, nobody's gonna love me. Uh, we are, our weight is influenced by undigested life experiences, meaning challenging events in life. It could be a divorce, it could be a breakup, it could be somebody died. It could be I lost a job and we take a hit. Oftentimes people have an intense weight game after an extremely stressful experience. Not everybody. We're gonna look at macronutrient balance that can impact weight in a big way. Food allergies, eating speed, food quality, bio circadian nutrition, meaning meal timing has a big impact on our calorie burning metabolism. Pleasure influences our relationship with appetite and weight. How we do our emotional metabolism, meaning how we process emotions. Are you expressing them? Are you burying them? It's a stress or to bury emotions. And you know what stress does? Stress will cause the body to increase insulin and cortisol, to not build muscle, to deposit more fat. That's what it can do. Digestive health can impact weight, antibiotic use movement versus exercise. And of course we always have to look at the impact of our relationships, intimacy, spirituality, work, money, purpose so much more. So we're gonna actually look at all those because they can impact our physiology, our calorie burning capacity and helping our body reach its natural weight. So part of what you and I are helping our clients do really is to wake up in life. We're helping them step up. We're helping them become better people. We're helping them wake up to their body and to live in their body in a way that's actually nourishing and sustainable and beautiful. And that works for them. We think in order to lose weight, we have to hate ourselves and punish the body. Think about how nonsensical that is. Your natural metabolism and natural health and natural weight doesn't need you to attain that by self punishment and self hate. It's not the way we're designed. So weight, my friends will do what it does. Again, if a client truly has weight to lose, they're likely going to lose it. If you do the right steps at the same time, we're gonna see that weight is a mystery because you don't, we don't know how much someone is supposed to weigh or when they're supposed to weigh it. Some people I find are truly meant to lose weight, but not right now. And no matter what we do, they're gonna keep that weight on until body and soul are ready. That's just the mystery. Can't always have what we want when we want it. Life has its own wisdom. You know, you can do everything right and the weight doesn't come off. Or maybe until five months from now it comes off. Or maybe a year from now it comes off. I've had clients who I've worked with and all it comes off five years later when they're not even doing anything different. So again, there's a mystery factor with a capital M to this. We are still the collective scientific we the nutritional we we are at the beginning. We're still in the infant stage of understanding how to work with weight. And in this training we're gonna look to advance from that infant stage. We're gonna take some big, big baby steps and a lot of them, maybe even bigger than baby steps, maybe even some giant leaps. Now what I'm asking of you really is to trust in your own journey as a practitioner, I want you to begin to notice that you are not here to fix your client. You are not here to fix your weight loss client. They're not broken. They're whole human beings on a journey in life. The measure of success, remember, is not, excuse me, oh, I helped my client lose X amount of pounds. I'm such a great practitioner 'cause they wanted to lose 30 pounds and I helped them lose 30 pounds. That's not the measure of success. You really wanna make somebody lose 30 pounds, tie 'em up in the basement with their hands behind their back and don't feed them. You're gonna be proud of yourself and making 'em lose 30 pounds, that's not sustainable. It's not a good strategy. The measure of success is, did I invite my client to wake up? Did I invite them into more self-love, more nourishment, more self-care? Are they now in a lifestyle that really works for them? Did I help my client drop some of their toxic nutritional beliefs, their beliefs about life, their beliefs about who they are that have been holding them back and draining their energy? Have I helped my client expand into the person that they were truly meant to be here on planet Earth? If I've done that, my friends, I've done my job success, no matter how much weight the client eventually loses or doesn't lose. Now if you did that with your client to any degree, then they have gotten their money's worth times 10. So, and no matter where their weight loss went, I've had clients work with me and really they end up gaining some weight. And honestly, they needed to gain weight and they thought they needed to lose it. And I know you don't want to hear that, but there's people who come in and because of where they're at with their body image, they can be skinny, they could be anorexic, and they look in the mirror and they see a fat person. So you and I need to be smart professionals here. We need to not be bullied by our own outdated concepts about weight. We need to not be bullied by what the world has taught us about weight that's simply outdated and toxic. Too much weight, hate too much old science. The body will find its rightful place. When we help our clients step into their greatest potential as a human being. The body follows the laws of not only biology, but of higher cosmic principles, as does the psyche, the soul, the heart and emotions. So we're looking to tune into higher law here. My friends, we're trying to use these higher laws, natural laws in terms of how we work with the body practically, how we work with our clients, how we work with weight. Remember, personal power equals metabolic power. The more we work on who we are as a human being, the more we push our pedal to the metal on our personal growth, our character development being better people, the better chance we have to step into our metabolic power, our metabolic potential. In this case, I'm talking about our natural rightful weight. Now here's a heads up. You will tend to see your client's body the same way you see your own body. Meaning if we're walking around thinking, oh man, I've gotta lose five pounds. I don't look good enough. I wish I weighed this amount because then I could really work with clients and they could really see that I'm really wonderful because I've got the perfect body. No, no, no, no, no. I would love for you to just love your body more and more where it's at. 'cause that's what we have to help our clients do. Before you shape shift the body, you gotta be in it. So I would like you to step into, here's my journey as a person in a body. Here's my journey as a counselor, a coach, a teacher, a healer, a practitioner. Here's where I'm at in this stage of my journey. And have some love and kindness and compassion towards yourself. Because if you can do that for you, you can help your clients do that for themselves. You are modeling a way of being. That's the name of the game. We gotta start by loving the body that we have right now. We loving it. Interchange, not heating it, interchange. So if you can more and more, stop trying to fix your body so that it's perfect so that you can be loved, so that you can have the life that you think you're going to live at some point in the future, then you can impart that same gift to your client and my friends. It's gonna rock their world. I'm not saying don't want to shapeshift your body, but you have to love yourself into it. And you have to start with where you're at. So my wish for you is that if indeed this is a challenge for you, if weight is a concern for you personally as a practitioner, to let go of reaching the magic weight number for yourself, let go of the ideal perfect body for you that you're going to have someday. You know, when I have this ideal body, I'm gonna be the ideal counselor. And uh, I'll have proven to everyone and proven to my clients that I know exactly what I'm doing. Now, by the way, there are plenty of people, and you've heard me say this, that have the perfect weight. They got the perfect body, and they're spending all their time and all their life for us still exercising their brains out, still dieting their brains out. 'cause they're maybe afraid to gain the weight back. They're not happy. I don't want you to be that person. I don't necessarily want other people to be that person unless they're truly meant to be that person. But I don't think so. So you and I have bigger things to do with our life. You have a mission to do. You have people to love, people to be in relationship with you and I have work to do on this planet. We have work to do in this world that goes beyond the constant obsession with food and the constant obsession with a perfect body. We can really drain our energy there. And that's where so many people are trapped. And believe it or not, their obsession with losing weight stops them from losing weight. And that's where we have to help many of our clients elevate from including ourselves. So what I'm suggesting is for you to relax more and more into your journey and invite your clients to relax into their journey.
You know, a lot of practitioners are using their counseling or coaching practice as a motivator for themselves to lose weight, which, you know, that could be fine. And they're thinking though, I can only be in this business if I have the right body. And then they're using this to torture themselves because I have to lose this weight. Otherwise, I can't counsel other people in weight loss. And I've seen this a lot and they're using their coaching practice nutrition and eating psychology as a way to try to be winners in the weight loss game. And, and I'm not saying don't work on yourself. I'm, I'm fine shape, shift your body in whatever way you want to do it. But don't force the issue on the universe that you have to lose weight in order for you to make money. That's not fair. It doesn't work. I haven't seen people be successful at that. So if you're doing that, just catch yourself because there's no shortcuts to self love. We all need to let go and love what we have right now if we truly want to help others in this realm. So it sounds counterintuitive, but letting go of the weight loss goal in a strange way helps us move more effectively towards that weight loss goal. And please, my friends, do your best. I know this is gonna be hard, but try not to be intimidated by how am I gonna fix my client? How am I gonna help them lose weight? Because that's what I gotta do. I have them lose weight. How am I gonna do this? Right? Right. How am I gonna be perfect? And, and you gotta get in this realm. There is no perfect, there is no right. You're not gonna do it right all the time. Nobody does. Uh, you have to let go of perfectionism in the weight loss realm. You have to let go of certainty because if there was a perfect way to do weight loss that was tried and true, um, if there was some great all knowing, all seeing practitioner or some system or some book, uh, or some supplement or some drug, we'd all know about it. And once again, we would not be in this conversation. The best practitioners, I've met them, I've worked with them, they're my friends, they're my colleagues. The best practitioners in this realm ain't very perfect. They don't always do it right. And the success rate, um, in terms of exact amount of pounds lost that the client exactly wanted to lose is far below 50%. So what I have seen though is that really the best practitioners relax into their journey and we let the cosmic chips fall where they may, this is not about you satisfying your client's weight loss number. Yes, we invite them in through the doorway of weight loss and we're gonna do the best job we can with each client. That's the best you can do. But we're gonna invite them in through the doorway of weight loss. Yes, we're gonna focus on all the strategies that can help a person reach their sustainable weight, but we're also gonna focus on the strategies that help them evolve as a human being so they can be in right relationship with themselves, with their heart, with their soul, with their mind, with their emotions, with the world.
By the way, my friends, this is going to be the longest of all the sections in this training. And it's the longest because it's, it's the beefiest. It's the juiciest, it's the most raw, it's the most powerful. You know, we're diving into two very, very, very difficult areas, weight and body image. So you're gonna get a lot more time and you're gonna get thrown into the mix. And I am going to do my best to over deliver for you in this section on weight and body image. Meaning you're gonna get a full meal when it comes to these topics. It's gonna be a lot. And if that's a fault of mine, then let's call that a good fault. Um, because I really want you to come away with as much as possible. I want to condense what I know, what I've seen work, um, into, you know, the smallest amount of material possible. And I do want to say the material will grow on you. It will become clearer and clearer as you move through the training. It will become clear and clearer for sure as you work with more and more clients in this realm. Now a lot of you are going to say later on, you know, oh, now I get it. Now I understand. That's what often happens in this training. And by the way, because there's a lot of material coming up on weight loss and body image, you can always return to it later on. Uh, if it feels like a lot for you. And again, I promise you, it's gonna keep sinking in deeper and deeper and it's gonna give you more confidence. So as you see clients, as you see more and more clients as you practice, 'cause remember this is a practice. It's a practice. It's not a perfect experience. Your work in the field, your work at the front lines experience is what's gonna help you be the best practitioner. That's gonna be your best teacher. So my friends, I'm really excited for you. I think the material is, is beautiful. It's powerful. I believe it's on target. Uh, you're gonna hear distinctions you haven't heard before. Uh, I'm gonna ask you to be real open and as always, you take what works for you. You leave behind what doesn't work for you. I want to remind you that we live in an atmosphere of a lot of weight hate. And we have a lot of preconceived notions around what weight is and isn't and what it should and shouldn't be. And there's a lot of judgment about people around weight. We have to learn how to let that go. We have to love each other into our goals and our desires. So let's dive in. Thank you for your time and your attention. I know you're gonna love this part of the work. You're gonna get so much information, um, it's gonna leave you with some more questions and that's good. You should always have more questions. That's what life is about. It's gonna, it's gonna keep us moving. So in weight loss as in life, you know, you tend to learn a lot. And then you more, you know, oftentimes the more you know how much you don't know, it's a bit of a paradox, you know, but at the same time, you will get more skilled. You are going to get wiser. And I'm going to bet every dollar that I have that that's where you're going to end up with after we finish with this topic. A lot wiser, more skilled, more effective, helping people, more confident. So my friends, enjoy. Thank you so much for your time, your energy, your attention. And I will see you on the other side.
You might have success and your client has lost no weight whatsoever, believe it or not. But what they lost was their anxiety, their stress, their body hate, their self attack. They learned to love themselves more. They learned to get out of their head and get into their body and start living their life. Had a lot of clients like that. By the time we finished, they said, thank you. I didn't lose a pound and I'm such a better person. So you're gonna hear a lot of case studies that help us redefine success in this realm. There's gonna be a lot of your clients, my friends, who actually lose their need to lose weight. Every person's different. Success looks different for everyone. So you have to make yourself bigger. Now again, there's a whole spectrum of clients, many of whom have walked into my office over the years and they're trying to lose weight and they don't have any weight to lose. And it shocks me and it stuns me there, there there's really no part of their body that can lose weight. And my friends, this is a part of the challenge of how we are all conditioned and programmed by the world, by culture, by media. We get a little brainwashed to believe that a certain body shape or a certain body size and a certain kind of slenderness is the gold standard of how a human being should look. How a man should look, a woman should look. And it's just not true. And it's polluting our minds. So we're going to listen to the body. And most people don't realize the extent to which we have been adversely programmed with the toxic nutritional belief called, I'm too fat, I'm not good enough, my body's not good enough. We don't realize how much toxic beliefs have gripped us. And they drive us and they stress us and they change our physiology and they change our behaviors. So our goal here is to help our client relax into a relationship with food that works to help them relax into a relationship with their body that works, to follow a diet that's nourishing, loving, sustainable, healthy for that person and with enough leeway to have some life, some fun, and to celebrate being alive. So our goal is not necessarily, um, that, You know, know that whatever number of pounds a person says they needs to lose is exactly what that person needs to lose, or else you're gonna see how we work with that. That's why, by the way, I never say to a client or to the public, I work with weight loss. I will say I work with weight. See the distinction? If I say that I work with weight, what that means is I'm gonna work with your challenge around weight. Your challenge around weight might be that you need to lose more weight. Your challenge around weight might be that what you weigh is fine and you gotta learn to love your body. Your challenge around weight might be that you're trying to lose five pounds and you wanna lose those five pounds around your midsection because you want to have the abs of steel and you're making yourself crazy. So I work with weight as opposed to weight loss. And if weight loss is truly wanting to happen, the body will go there. By the way, in my experience, one of the secrets to truly having success with weight loss clients and to actually help people lose weight, who truly have weight to lose, is to focus, check it out, to focus on their larger goals and not their smaller goals. So we focus on their larger goals, not their smaller goals. What does that mean? A person's largest goal, and I'm gonna make a global statement here, A person's largest goal in life is to be in this world and become the fullest, highest, most self-expressed version of who they're meant to be. In this world, a person's highest goal is to hit the target of their potential that they came into this life with. That's our highest goal. Now, when I'm helping my client be the best person that they can possibly be, everything else begins to fall into place. So yes, I'm gonna focus on the weight for sure. That's how clients come to see us. We focus on the weight, but that's really the smaller goal. So I'm gonna look at a person's weight, but I'm also looking at what do we have to do with this person to improve their overall way of how they nourish themselves, how they diet, how they're in relationship, how they do work, how they do money, how they do purpose, spirituality, sexually, that can all come into play. So when it comes to body image, we have so many people, so many clients who are walking around thinking, you know, I can't love my body until it looks exactly like this. I am not going to love my body until it looks like that. Now, if it looks like this, I can't love it. So I have to hate it, hate my body, have to hate it into looking like, like this by, by punishing it and forcing it and and shoving it with exercise and limiting it with like a minimalistic diet. And I hope you notice that this just Doesn't work. It's a god awful strategy. The whole purpose, my friends of losing weight for most people is so we like ourselves better or we love ourselves more. So that's the purpose, to love ourselves more. To finally feel empowered about who we are and be happy. That's what people really want when they have their ideal body. So with that, how can we possibly go down a road where we're in a, we're in constant self attack and self-hate and speaking so unkindly to ourselves. How could you go down that road and expect to arrive at a place of self? Love is a logical absurdity, my friends, the journey informs the destination. You gotta love yourself into weight loss, not hate yourself into it. That's the secret. We should also take notice that the age old strategy of weight loss, which is the scientific gold standard for about 60 plus years, scientific golden standard for weight loss has been eat less, exercise more. And that's what everybody's been saying forever. Well, if eating less and exercising more truly worked, it would've worked a long time ago. And you and I would not be in this conversation right now. And I'm gonna tell you, I've been around a lot of people. People are not lazy. We got this thing. Oh, overweight people are lazy, they're not lazy. I know a lot of dieters who work really, really hard and they've been working hard for decades. And so many dieters and exercisers are doing the same strategies decade after decade, dieting and exercise. And they keep ending up in the same suffering, the same misery, and essentially with the same body. Or they lose weight, they gain it, they lose their and and it's just this endless cycle. So weight and its loss is simply far more complex, far more interesting and far more fascinating than we have allowed it to be. So we're gonna make this a juicy conversation. There are many, many, many factors in the realm of mind-body nutrition and dynamic eating psychology that we're going to look at that can have an impact on helping a person reach their natural weight in a sustainable way. So a few examples of this can include stress. It can include self-chosen stressors, self-chosen stressors are the kind of stressors you don't need, such as toxic nutritional beliefs. Food is the enemy, fat and food is my enemy. Appetite is my enemy. Unless I lose this weight, nobody's gonna love me. Uh, we are, our weight is influenced by undigested life experiences, meaning challenging events in life. It could be a divorce, it could be a breakup, it could be somebody died. It could be I lost a job and we take a hit. Oftentimes people have an intense weight game after an extremely stressful experience. Not everybody. We're gonna look at macronutrient balance that can impact weight in a big way. Food allergies, eating speed, food quality, bio circadian nutrition, meaning meal timing has a big impact on our calorie burning metabolism. Pleasure influences our relationship with appetite and weight. How we do our emotional metabolism, meaning how we process emotions. Are you expressing them? Are you burying them? It's a stress or to bury emotions. And you know what stress does? Stress will cause the body to increase insulin and cortisol, to not build muscle, to deposit more fat. That's what it can do. Digestive health can impact weight, antibiotic use movement versus exercise. And of course we always have to look at the impact of our relationships, intimacy, spirituality, work, money, purpose so much more. So we're gonna actually look at all those because they can impact our physiology, our calorie burning capacity and helping our body reach its natural weight. So part of what you and I are helping our clients do really is to wake up in life. We're helping them step up. We're helping them become better people. We're helping them wake up to their body and to live in their body in a way that's actually nourishing and sustainable and beautiful. And that works for them. We think in order to lose weight, we have to hate ourselves and punish the body. Think about how nonsensical that is. Your natural metabolism and natural health and natural weight doesn't need you to attain that by self punishment and self hate. It's not the way we're designed. So weight, my friends will do what it does. Again, if a client truly has weight to lose, they're likely going to lose it. If you do the right steps at the same time, we're gonna see that weight is a mystery because you don't, we don't know how much someone is supposed to weigh or when they're supposed to weigh it. Some people I find are truly meant to lose weight, but not right now. And no matter what we do, they're gonna keep that weight on until body and soul are ready. That's just the mystery. Can't always have what we want when we want it. Life has its own wisdom. You know, you can do everything right and the weight doesn't come off. Or maybe until five months from now it comes off. Or maybe a year from now it comes off. I've had clients who I've worked with and all it comes off five years later when they're not even doing anything different. So again, there's a mystery factor with a capital M to this. We are still the collective scientific we the nutritional we we are at the beginning. We're still in the infant stage of understanding how to work with weight. And in this training we're gonna look to advance from that infant stage. We're gonna take some big, big baby steps and a lot of them, maybe even bigger than baby steps, maybe even some giant leaps. Now what I'm asking of you really is to trust in your own journey as a practitioner, I want you to begin to notice that you are not here to fix your client. You are not here to fix your weight loss client. They're not broken. They're whole human beings on a journey in life. The measure of success, remember, is not, excuse me, oh, I helped my client lose X amount of pounds. I'm such a great practitioner 'cause they wanted to lose 30 pounds and I helped them lose 30 pounds. That's not the measure of success. You really wanna make somebody lose 30 pounds, tie 'em up in the basement with their hands behind their back and don't feed them. You're gonna be proud of yourself and making 'em lose 30 pounds, that's not sustainable. It's not a good strategy. The measure of success is, did I invite my client to wake up? Did I invite them into more self-love, more nourishment, more self-care? Are they now in a lifestyle that really works for them? Did I help my client drop some of their toxic nutritional beliefs, their beliefs about life, their beliefs about who they are that have been holding them back and draining their energy? Have I helped my client expand into the person that they were truly meant to be here on planet Earth? If I've done that, my friends, I've done my job success, no matter how much weight the client eventually loses or doesn't lose. Now if you did that with your client to any degree, then they have gotten their money's worth times 10. So, and no matter where their weight loss went, I've had clients work with me and really they end up gaining some weight. And honestly, they needed to gain weight and they thought they needed to lose it. And I know you don't want to hear that, but there's people who come in and because of where they're at with their body image, they can be skinny, they could be anorexic, and they look in the mirror and they see a fat person. So you and I need to be smart professionals here. We need to not be bullied by our own outdated concepts about weight. We need to not be bullied by what the world has taught us about weight that's simply outdated and toxic. Too much weight, hate too much old science. The body will find its rightful place. When we help our clients step into their greatest potential as a human being. The body follows the laws of not only biology, but of higher cosmic principles, as does the psyche, the soul, the heart and emotions. So we're looking to tune into higher law here. My friends, we're trying to use these higher laws, natural laws in terms of how we work with the body practically, how we work with our clients, how we work with weight. Remember, personal power equals metabolic power. The more we work on who we are as a human being, the more we push our pedal to the metal on our personal growth, our character development being better people, the better chance we have to step into our metabolic power, our metabolic potential. In this case, I'm talking about our natural rightful weight. Now here's a heads up. You will tend to see your client's body the same way you see your own body. Meaning if we're walking around thinking, oh man, I've gotta lose five pounds. I don't look good enough. I wish I weighed this amount because then I could really work with clients and they could really see that I'm really wonderful because I've got the perfect body. No, no, no, no, no. I would love for you to just love your body more and more where it's at. 'cause that's what we have to help our clients do. Before you shape shift the body, you gotta be in it. So I would like you to step into, here's my journey as a person in a body. Here's my journey as a counselor, a coach, a teacher, a healer, a practitioner. Here's where I'm at in this stage of my journey. And have some love and kindness and compassion towards yourself. Because if you can do that for you, you can help your clients do that for themselves. You are modeling a way of being. That's the name of the game. We gotta start by loving the body that we have right now. We loving it. Interchange, not heating it, interchange. So if you can more and more, stop trying to fix your body so that it's perfect so that you can be loved, so that you can have the life that you think you're going to live at some point in the future, then you can impart that same gift to your client and my friends. It's gonna rock their world. I'm not saying don't want to shapeshift your body, but you have to love yourself into it. And you have to start with where you're at. So my wish for you is that if indeed this is a challenge for you, if weight is a concern for you personally as a practitioner, to let go of reaching the magic weight number for yourself, let go of the ideal perfect body for you that you're going to have someday. You know, when I have this ideal body, I'm gonna be the ideal counselor. And uh, I'll have proven to everyone and proven to my clients that I know exactly what I'm doing. Now, by the way, there are plenty of people, and you've heard me say this, that have the perfect weight. They got the perfect body, and they're spending all their time and all their life for us still exercising their brains out, still dieting their brains out. 'cause they're maybe afraid to gain the weight back. They're not happy. I don't want you to be that person. I don't necessarily want other people to be that person unless they're truly meant to be that person. But I don't think so. So you and I have bigger things to do with our life. You have a mission to do. You have people to love, people to be in relationship with you and I have work to do on this planet. We have work to do in this world that goes beyond the constant obsession with food and the constant obsession with a perfect body. We can really drain our energy there. And that's where so many people are trapped. And believe it or not, their obsession with losing weight stops them from losing weight. And that's where we have to help many of our clients elevate from including ourselves. So what I'm suggesting is for you to relax more and more into your journey and invite your clients to relax into their journey.
You know, a lot of practitioners are using their counseling or coaching practice as a motivator for themselves to lose weight, which, you know, that could be fine. And they're thinking though, I can only be in this business if I have the right body. And then they're using this to torture themselves because I have to lose this weight. Otherwise, I can't counsel other people in weight loss. And I've seen this a lot and they're using their coaching practice nutrition and eating psychology as a way to try to be winners in the weight loss game. And, and I'm not saying don't work on yourself. I'm, I'm fine shape, shift your body in whatever way you want to do it. But don't force the issue on the universe that you have to lose weight in order for you to make money. That's not fair. It doesn't work. I haven't seen people be successful at that. So if you're doing that, just catch yourself because there's no shortcuts to self love. We all need to let go and love what we have right now if we truly want to help others in this realm. So it sounds counterintuitive, but letting go of the weight loss goal in a strange way helps us move more effectively towards that weight loss goal. And please, my friends, do your best. I know this is gonna be hard, but try not to be intimidated by how am I gonna fix my client? How am I gonna help them lose weight? Because that's what I gotta do. I have them lose weight. How am I gonna do this? Right? Right. How am I gonna be perfect? And, and you gotta get in this realm. There is no perfect, there is no right. You're not gonna do it right all the time. Nobody does. Uh, you have to let go of perfectionism in the weight loss realm. You have to let go of certainty because if there was a perfect way to do weight loss that was tried and true, um, if there was some great all knowing, all seeing practitioner or some system or some book, uh, or some supplement or some drug, we'd all know about it. And once again, we would not be in this conversation. The best practitioners, I've met them, I've worked with them, they're my friends, they're my colleagues. The best practitioners in this realm ain't very perfect. They don't always do it right. And the success rate, um, in terms of exact amount of pounds lost that the client exactly wanted to lose is far below 50%. So what I have seen though is that really the best practitioners relax into their journey and we let the cosmic chips fall where they may, this is not about you satisfying your client's weight loss number. Yes, we invite them in through the doorway of weight loss and we're gonna do the best job we can with each client. That's the best you can do. But we're gonna invite them in through the doorway of weight loss. Yes, we're gonna focus on all the strategies that can help a person reach their sustainable weight, but we're also gonna focus on the strategies that help them evolve as a human being so they can be in right relationship with themselves, with their heart, with their soul, with their mind, with their emotions, with the world.
By the way, my friends, this is going to be the longest of all the sections in this training. And it's the longest because it's, it's the beefiest. It's the juiciest, it's the most raw, it's the most powerful. You know, we're diving into two very, very, very difficult areas, weight and body image. So you're gonna get a lot more time and you're gonna get thrown into the mix. And I am going to do my best to over deliver for you in this section on weight and body image. Meaning you're gonna get a full meal when it comes to these topics. It's gonna be a lot. And if that's a fault of mine, then let's call that a good fault. Um, because I really want you to come away with as much as possible. I want to condense what I know, what I've seen work, um, into, you know, the smallest amount of material possible. And I do want to say the material will grow on you. It will become clearer and clearer as you move through the training. It will become clear and clearer for sure as you work with more and more clients in this realm. Now a lot of you are going to say later on, you know, oh, now I get it. Now I understand. That's what often happens in this training. And by the way, because there's a lot of material coming up on weight loss and body image, you can always return to it later on. Uh, if it feels like a lot for you. And again, I promise you, it's gonna keep sinking in deeper and deeper and it's gonna give you more confidence. So as you see clients, as you see more and more clients as you practice, 'cause remember this is a practice. It's a practice. It's not a perfect experience. Your work in the field, your work at the front lines experience is what's gonna help you be the best practitioner. That's gonna be your best teacher. So my friends, I'm really excited for you. I think the material is, is beautiful. It's powerful. I believe it's on target. Uh, you're gonna hear distinctions you haven't heard before. Uh, I'm gonna ask you to be real open and as always, you take what works for you. You leave behind what doesn't work for you. I want to remind you that we live in an atmosphere of a lot of weight hate. And we have a lot of preconceived notions around what weight is and isn't and what it should and shouldn't be. And there's a lot of judgment about people around weight. We have to learn how to let that go. We have to love each other into our goals and our desires. So let's dive in. Thank you for your time and your attention. I know you're gonna love this part of the work. You're gonna get so much information, um, it's gonna leave you with some more questions and that's good. You should always have more questions. That's what life is about. It's gonna, it's gonna keep us moving. So in weight loss as in life, you know, you tend to learn a lot. And then you more, you know, oftentimes the more you know how much you don't know, it's a bit of a paradox, you know, but at the same time, you will get more skilled. You are going to get wiser. And I'm going to bet every dollar that I have that that's where you're going to end up with after we finish with this topic. A lot wiser, more skilled, more effective, helping people, more confident. So my friends, enjoy. Thank you so much for your time, your energy, your attention. And I will see you on the other side.
[progressally_objectives post_id="26366" objective_id="1" layout="hide|left"]
Checklist
MODULE 2
Use this checklist to track your progress for Module 2.
REQUIRED
[progressally_objectives post_id="26366" objective_id="1,2" layout="hide|left"]
Click to track your progress for all module videos.
[progressally_objectives post_id=”26366″ objective_id=”6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13″ layout=”hide|left”]
[progressally_objectives post_id="26366" objective_id="3,4,5" layout="hide|left"]
OPTIONAL
- Read the supplemental materials, and complete all supplemental exercises.
- Read the Module 2 suggested reading books, & complete the corresponding reading list questions.
- Jump into our online community, and ask any questions about what you’re learning!
Course Materials
MODULE 2
Complete all learning sections for Module 2 by clicking through each of the course content links below.
SECTION 1
Weight
SECTION 2
The Four Questions
SECTION 3
Weight Loss Case Studies
SECTION 4
Weight Loss Intake
SECTION 5
Transformational Protocols for Weight
SECTION 6
Body Image
SECTION 7
Body Image Case Studies
SECTION 8
Simple Strategies for Embodiment
Journaling
Exercises
WEIGHT LOSS
Supplemental
Materials
BODY IMAGE
Supplemental
Materials
