MODULE 2

WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE

Section 1

Start here for a foundational approach to weight that creates a whole new set of distinctions in understanding this powerful topic.

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PART 1

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. And here we are about to begin a very wonderful conversation around weight and body image. And we're gonna start by focusing on weight, dynamic eating psychology, and a mind body nutrition approach. Now let me preface this conversation by saying that, wow, what a fascinating topic. And as always, we are going to be starting out a little bit wide. We're gonna be starting out with a big picture, look at weight, and from there we will be narrowing down in terms of how to actually work with people in terms of protocols, in terms of approach. The challenge is, here we are, and life on earth isn't so easy when it comes to this topic called weight.
This is indeed one of the most difficult, challenging, confusing, oftentimes heart wrenching, disappointing, frustrating, and really baffling conversations that we can have because science, psychology, nutrition, medicine, the field of dietetics is all at odds with each other, with itself within itself, around how do we deal with weight. So what we are going to do is we're going to do our best to thread the needle. We're going to do our best to go right into the eye of the hurricane and come out with a new understanding, a new approach, a new wisdom around this fascinating topic, my friends put it simply, it's time to revision our relationship with weight and its loss. We've been looking at weight in some very interesting ways. We don't always see properly, we don't always hear properly, and we have a lot of judgment about when it comes to weight. We have so many concepts about it that are charged with a negativity, with a scientific arrogance, uh, with a moralism. Weight is bad, extra weight is bad. Body fat is bad. People who have extra body fat is bad. What's wrong with them? What's their problem? What's their issue? These poor people, they're lazy. They're this, they're that. So, right from the beginning, we have a fascinating challenge because once again, there's a lot of weight, hate and hate clouds. The mind judgment clouds the mind. It clouds the best of scientific minds. It clouds the best of clinical minds. And when we start out with the concept that weight is bad, fat is bad, something is wrong, inherently with people who have extra weight, they're poor, they're lazy, what whatever they are, once we start out attacking weight, once we start out looking at weight as if it's a demon, as if it's the enemy, we're gonna go down all kinds of wrong roads to actually get where we want to go. I wanna remind you that every study that ever comes out about weight, not every study, I'm gonna say probably 99 out of a hundred, uh, is generally some version of a short term study. And they are going to this, the quote unquote successful studies will gloat about, yes, we did this, we did that, and these people lost this meager amount of weight. Uh, rarely do you see a follow up six months later, a year later. And the reason why we don't see a follow up is because that's really where the action is. 99% of all humans who lose weight on a weight loss diet gain it back within a year to two years and then some. So we are in a position where we need to change our approach dramatically.
So here's some of the questions we're asking when it comes to weight. What's really going on? Why is weight loss so big? Why is it so difficult? Why is it such an ongoing conversation that never quite hits the target? Why do the experts disagree with one another? And how can we update and reinvigorate the conversations around the strategies that we use when it comes to weight? Once again, you know, the turf, if you really look around, this topic of weight is steeped in confusion, darkness, distortion, disagreement. Unsuccess a hell of a lot of suffering, a heck of a lot of differing clinical views, scientific concepts, this diet, that diet. Try this, try that, my friends, no wonder why we are confused. No wonder why humans are confused. We're just, we're just laying out the territory. Every month or two, there's another bestselling diet book that comes out and that eventually goes that everybody forgets. No wonder we're confused. No wonder we're confused. When we keep seeing the weight of our kids growing and we keep hearing, well, here's why. Here's what's going on. No wonder we're confused when there's, you know, a new diet pill or a new weight loss system. You know, back in the early days I worked for several infomercial companies and infomercial companies have, um, made a heck of a lot of money on weight loss products. And I'll tell you from behind the scenes, um, particularly in the early days, but really throughout the history of infomercials, when it comes to any health topic and especially weight, they're very clear behind the scenes. We are selling a promise. They're not selling a solution, they're selling a promise. The companies I worked for had zero interest and they were right up front about it. When I say upfront, I mean in the boardroom. Um, we're not interested in creating products that work. There's no interest whatsoever. In fact, every weight loss product that has ever been infomercial out there always has a 100% money back guarantee. Why? Because they only get a few percent return rate. Why? Because nobody wants to say, Hey, I tried this and I didn't lose any weight. Most people don't wanna raise their hand and say I was unsuccessful. So they're selling a promise.
And weight loss approaches are often selling us hope, understanding from the backend that their approach really doesn't give a result. So what I'm saying here is we, the collective, we, we as students of this topic as, um, interested humans of this topic, really have to use our mind, heart. We really have to use all our brain power to see through And what we're going to see is that weight is far more complex than we've been taught. Weight and it's loss, it's far more actually interesting than we've been taught. So our task is to be bold and courageous enough to go into new territory around weight and its loss. Our task is to be flexible enough in our thinking to allow ourselves to think new and better thoughts. Our task is to be willing to be at the leading edge here, the edge of the unknown. That's where discovery happens, my friends, that's where new things go on. So it takes a courage. Our task is to be willing to experiment with new ways. Our task is to be willing to relax into the weight loss experience with ourselves personally, with our clients, with life, with the world. Because as you know, as soon as we get into the topic of weight, if you have weight to lose, your client has weight to lose Whoever you are in the conversation with, chances are the listening is, I gotta lose this weight. I gotta have this body. I gotta get rid of this body fat from here or there. And there's an upset, there's a nervousness, there's an anxiety, there is a stress. And when we are operating from that place with this very automatic instinctive stress, oh my God, how do I get rid of this yesterday? Well always end up going into the wrong neighborhood. We always end up going about the task of weight loss in a way that doesn't truly get us where we want to go.
Here's a challenge my friends, people, scientists, clinicians have very intense beliefs and prejudice around the phenomenon of excess weight, body fat and weight loss where you are swimming in an invisible atmosphere of weight hate. You gotta look at your own weight hate. You gotta look at your own weight hate when it comes to the people around you, when it comes to yourself. The more you can start to relax around that weight hate, the more you can notice that it's out there and the more you can be unaffected by it, that's a challenge. But that's your challenge. The greater the effectiveness we can have. By the way, weight hate and prejudice are aimed at us by those outside of us and by our own condition mind. That's the challenge here because so many humans, particularly from a young age, have been hit hard through media, through culture, through family, friends, school, their social system, the world around them, the images they're exposed to, they've been given the message you're no good based on what you look like, what you weigh.
And from that place, instead of resisting that, because our young mind tends to be very vulnerable to criticism and critique, the young mind especially is vulnerable to criticism and critique around its essence, around its body. The feminine mind. In particular, the feminine within all of us is very vulnerable to critique around looks, weight, and shape. So when those unkind judgements are given to us by the world, we tend to take them on. We do, we do the programmers a favor, and we take on their programming and then we aim those same prejudices at ourselves. Now, another piece of the challenge is that the food industry has corrupted the research and the popular conversation around weight. Corporate greed in this realm is extremely rampant. The food industry supports research that essentially says, Hey, eat less, more exercise. They love that one because they're producing foods, uh, in large quantities for cheap that they're selling you, that hook you on those very foods. So as they're telling you to eat less, they're designing foods that are grabbing your brain and telling you to eat more. They're giving you the message, you're lazy. And honestly, I I don't meet a lot of lazy people when it comes to weight. Most people that I know who've been trying to lose weight have given a lot of effort at different points in their life. So despite the fact that science has continuously failed us when it comes to weight loss and finding our natural weight, there's actually this collective belief that science will save us via drugs or some arcane genetic research. I wanna bang my head against the wall every time. You know, I get online every day, okay, what's the latest studies? And they're always dangling the carrot of this drug, that genetic research, I'm sorry my friends, you can't wait for that because life isn't solved by drugs or genetic never, has never will be. Will that information help here or there? Yes. I'm not anti-drug. I'm not anti genetics. What I am is Antifa promise. What I am is anti, wait a second, we're blowing this out of proportion. In order to reach our natural weight, we have to live our most natural life, given the world that we live in, not wait for a drug. So another challenge when it comes to weight is that toxic nutritional beliefs about weight are profoundly limiting us. My friends, I'm, I'm on it with you about this one because until we are able, you I, our clients are able to notice, number one, that we have toxic nutritional beliefs about weight. Notice that we have those notice that they might not be so good for us. And then be able to work, practice, do the kind of daily practices, watch the mind, check ourselves around those toxic beliefs. We will have a profound challenge when it comes to reaching our natural weight, whatever that might be for us. So, you know the toxic nutritional beliefs right now, but you're gonna hear them again. Food is the enemy. Ouch. You have a weight loss client coming to you with food is the enemy. If that's what, if that's the little app, if that's the program, that's the conditioning, that's the voice that's constantly speaking in their brain. That person will never get where they wanna go because it's a bizarre belief that has been given to us by the world. No blame for the person who has it. Food is the enemy. That's like saying oxygen is the enemy. That's like saying blood flow is the enemy. That's like the very thing that is designed to nourish you, make you feel good and continue life. Somehow we've conditioned ourselves to believe that it's the enemy. Not so good. Food makes me fat. Fat and food means fat on my body. All toxic beliefs. Appetite is the enemy. Know my friends appetite is your best friend. When your appetite finally goes and disappears, you will be dead soon after.
The most profound potentially toxic scientific belief when it comes to weight, less food plus more exercise is the royal road to weight loss. Does it work for some people? Yes. How much? Ah, 15%. Maybe. Maybe when I am thin, when I lose weight, when I have the perfect body, then I'll be happy. Then I'll finally be the real me. So everybody's putting the cart before the horse, meaning, okay, I'm not happy, I don't like myself, but let me just change my body. And then I'll like myself, you know something, my friends, I have met a, a truly a small percentage of humans over the years, whether it's my clients or, or I love stories. I love talking to people, you know about their relationship with food and body and health. And every once in a while, yeah, I'll hear a story about somebody who was miserable and they lost a bunch of weight and then they became happy. But honestly, that's a rare story
because a certain amount of weight and a certain look guarantees us nothing. You know, the people who have the nice bodies quote unquote, and they're not happy with themselves. You know, the people who've lost the weight and they're still not where they want to be internally. So a specific waiter shape guarantees us nothing.
Let's talk about some weight facts, my friends.
First and foremost, we, nobody truly knows how much anyone ought to weigh. There is zero, and I mean zero science to how much any particular human should weigh at any particular time. Zero science. Yes, we can say don't get extremely thin. Okay? Science agrees on that. Don't weigh 80 pounds. You know, if you're a full size adult, don't go into that anorexic extreme. Don't go to the other extreme and weigh five or 600 pounds, okay? When it comes to extremes, we know not so good. But when it comes to every place in between for 98% of human beings, we don't know. That's number one. The science behind weight and health is also incomplete and uncertain. You will constantly hear, constantly, constantly that, okay, obesity is bad. Fat on the body is bad, extra body fat is bad. We are gaining weight as a nation, as a world. This is bad. And I'm gonna say, you know, maybe I'm, I'm kind of agreeing with that. But at the same time, it's not that the weight so much is the bad thing. It is what got us to a particular weight. What have we been eating? What have we been consuming? What have we been ingesting? What are the stresses we've been taking on from the world? What are the prescription drugs we have been doing? What are the substances, the energies, the toxins that have been infiltrating the body, infiltrating the gut microbiome, you know, bypassing our immune system and creating a body that's not healthy. You know, this is the obesity paradox. I want you to google this and study it. I want you to start to learn how to do a little bit of research on your own. This is why I love Google, because you can start to learn, you can sniff around and you can watch what's happening in the conversation. The obesity paradox is simply this. When it actually comes to actually looking at people who are supposedly quote unquote obese, what you will find is that they live slightly longer. What you'll find is that their health ain't so bad. In fact, oftentimes it's a little better than their quote unquote thinner counterparts. This, by the way, is also the thrust of the health at every size movement. So there's a bucket load of research out there that is essentially saying in the, in the health, that every size movement, Google that and study it. What they are saying is, Hey, there's all this research that says something different from the fat on your body is bad for health research. And the truth is, I fall in all camps. Yes, it's good. Yes, it's bad. And it depends on the person. It really does. Somebody could be quote unquote 50 pounds overweight, quote unquote. And that is actually the perfect way for them. That's a perfect body for them. That's gonna be the perfect health for them. That's their size. That's what's right for them. Plain and simple. Um, so once again, we don't truly know how much anyone should weigh. If this is difficult for you, we need you and I need to embrace paradox my friends. Remember paradox? Yeah, you love the person who you love. You love your kid, you love your, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your husband, your wife, your best friend. And there's moments where you might hate them. Paradox, gotta learn to live with paradox. The paradox is obesity can be good for the body. Obesity can be not good for the body. It depends. So decades of insistence upon the eat less exercise, more strategy for weight loss has shown to be ineffective for most humans, that is a fact. Why is that a fact? Because we've been doing that since the 1960s and it hasn't gotten us where we want to go.
When you force humans to eat less and exercise more, what was that television show? The biggest Loser, you follow up with those people, they gain it back. Why? Because you force them to eat less. You force them to exercise more. And yeah, we can force a body to lose weight, but that doesn't mean anything.
It doesn't mean that that is a permanent sustainable strategy that actually addresses where a person's body needs to be when it comes to their natural weight. And if it is really true that they need to lose weight so they can reach their natural weight, we don't really know what those factors are until we explore them deeply. So if those humans have been forced, I'm gonna just push it and use willpower and have, have my fitness person and my nutritionist and my whole team of people going, come on, you can do it. You can do it. Sure, we can do it.
But it comes back because we didn't address whatever it was that needed to be addressed, whether it's a personal, emotional, nutritional, metabolic issue. So here's an interesting weight fact that has not caught up yet with science. Uh, and it's very unfortunate and it's weight loss is not purely an exclusively a function of calories in, calories out. My friends, this is an antiquated model.
And there's a lot of people, especially non-scientists who think that this is, you know, one of the 10 commandments. You're fat 'cause you eat too much and you don't exercise. It's so, and, and I mean this, I'm going to call it foolish because anyone who is holding that position hasn't done their homework, they haven't done their research, and I promise you that they are not at the front lines of clinical nutrition working with actual people and trying these things out and seeing what actually goes on. So this model is antiquated, outdated. It's scientifically inaccurate. So consequently, we are constantly being inundated by what I'm gonna call heroic and quick fix. Weight loss strategies and products that don't work. Come on, you can do it. You could be a hero. You can run a marathon. Now, I'm not saying marathon running is bad, but there's all these hero products. My supplement's gonna save you. My specific weird ass diet is gonna save you. Experts become heroes around this will fix it all. And as soon as we see the heroic scientist expert product or we take on, yes, I'm gonna do this like a hero and use all my willpower to control my appetite, it is such, IIII would just love to bet my money on everybody that goes down that road because it's not gonna be sustainable. So once again, my friends, we're just
looking at the turf. We're laying out the territory, we're doing our best to call things as we see them. People, your clients, humans will invent weight loss numbers that we give a religious, I mean, we worship those guys. We give a religious and scientific value to I must lose 20 pounds. I must lose 30 pounds. And it's based on nothing substantive.
Humans have a number in their mind that they, I'm I'm telling you, we worship those numbers. So I'm asking you to be aware of that. I'm asking you to notice that. I'm asking you to notice how much value people put on that number. Like it's something like it's gonna enlighten them, like it's gonna save them.
That's the challenge. Looking for something to save us.
We're looking for a certain weight to save us. You getting your client, getting to a certain weight doesn't save anything. You save you. Your client saves themselves how by becoming a better person, by working on themselves, by learning how to embody, by stepping up in their life, by looking at themselves and seeing who am I? Where do I need to grow? Where do I need to expand? How do I need to take better care of myself when it comes to food, nutrition, body health.
But we don't know how much we ought to weigh. You could say, yeah, I wanna lose 50 pounds, I have to lose 50 pounds. Like says who, why isn't it 48? Why isn't it 27? The body has a wisdom. Life has a wisdom. So then when we get this religious number in our mind, we then look to achieve such a weight, believing is gonna make me happy. This is it. And then we think something's wrong with us when we can't lose this amount of weight. And then so we get pulled into lifelong dieting, lifelong self-rejection. And we have created this awful conundrum for ourselves. And by the way, we really didn't create that conundrum. It was put on your plate. 'cause this is what the world has been subtly and directly teaching us nobody's fault. I never, ever, ever blame a single human being for their weight loss strategies, their weight, their this, their that. Because they're just doing what they think is right. We're all doing what we think is right. It's okay, but can you see this? We invent a number, we give it all this religious value. We do these intense weight loss strategies that are not sustainable. And then you might even lose the 50 pounds or a hundred pounds or the 20 pounds, whatever it is. But you can't keep up whatever that diet or exercise strategy was. The weight comes back on and you think there's something wrong with you and you don't like yourself.
And many people have been dieting for 20, 30, 40, 50 and more years. Most long-term dieters do not even realize how programmed, how conditioned, dare I say brainwash. They become to live a life that guarantees them. Dissatisfaction And failure around weight loss breaks my heart. And that's why I do something about it. That's why I'm in this conversation with you. Uh, because this is my way of raising my hand and saying I object. But not only do I object, I have some different ideas around this. I have a different set of experience around this. And hey, there's a whole new set of possibilities to get where we want to go without the nonsense. And that will at the very least move us in the direction more of our natural health, of natural state of being our natural weight.
Once again, my friends, our popular weight loss strategies are virtually a hundred percent ineffective. The numbers have been shifting over the years. 96 to 99% of all people who lose weight on a weight loss diet gain it back within one to two years once again. And then some. It's a stunning statistic. Absolutely stunning. It should be, it should be at the front page of every newspaper every single day because it will then remind us that, hey, the strategies that we have for weight and it's loss don't work. And we have to look a little deeper.
Now, here's an assumption that we're going to lean on a bit in this training. Here's an assumption, I wanna share it with you. Some new terminology I'm gonna suggest offer that every human has a natural weight, a natural weight that the body will shift towards, that the body will naturally move towards and experience sustainably when we're indeed living in a accord with what's natural for us.
Doesn't that make sense? I mean, I mean, doesn't that ring an intuitive bell for you? I wanna say that again. You and I, we have a natural weight that the body will always look to move towards and experience sustainably when we're indeed living in accord with what is natural for us. My friends observe nature, observe animals in nature. Look at the animals. They're exactly where they ought to be. You're never looking at any creature out there and saying, oh my God, that snake needs to gain a little weight. It's so skinny. Or that snake needs to lose weight. It's so fat. You look at a creature and you can see that animals instinctively are living in a accord with their environment. They're darn good at that. Why? Because that's what they do. The animals, as far as we can tell, aren't here to build civilization.
They're different from us humans. Now, when I say that every human has a natural weight that will move towards when we're living in a accord with what's quote unquote natural for us. Well, what does natural mean? Here's what I'm going to suggest natural means. And it could have other meanings as well. So you can fill yours in. But natural means, hey, foods that best sustain us, a way of living that really serves me a way of thinking that's more natural. IE, that's not self attacking. You think animals walk around self attacking. It is nonsense. What's natural for us is self expressing and conducting ourselves in a way that has us fulfilling our potential and following our soul's code. In other words, we're not living a life that's not ours. We're not living a life that we can't stand. We're not living out of alignment with our heart, with our soul. What's natural for us is a lifestyle that supports our health. Whatever that means. An inner world that's healthy. Relationships that are healthy and growthful doesn't mean it's all gonna be easy. I'm not saying this stuff is easy, natural is not easy. Animals are not walking around their environment thinking, man, this is so easy. You know, they gotta hunt and gather. They're working hard oftentimes. So what's natural means? And and attention to the details of the body that has us ongoingly. Checking in with ourselves to see am I practicing good habits? Am I practicing good nutrition? Is this the way I wanna move? Is uh, is, are these the foods and the substances I want to eat and consume? And how much is good for me of this coffee or this alcohol or this sugar or whatever it is? And and what are the kinds of energies and toxins that are impacting me?
So we live in a very unnatural world, my friends. And at the same time we're humans. We're interesting and we can do our best
to say what truly nourishes me. What is most natural for me? Because as we start to move in that direction, the body can then shift towards its natural weight. So if you're gonna see weight loss clients or you're already doing, so, consider this shift in how you language what you do.
Instead of saying to people, Hey, I work with weight loss. I help people lose weight, weight loss, weight loss, weight loss. I help people lose weight, lose weight, lose weight.
I generally, you will hear me say the term weight loss, you will hear me say the term lose weight. I try to limit those terms as best I can in my vocabulary because those terms are very loaded. So I let people know I work with weight. One of my specialties is weight. I help people with weight. See the distinction? I work with weight, I help people with weight. Why? Because it's actually the most honest thing we can say to our clients. When I say to a client, I work with weight, I am good with the universe, I am good with life. I ain't a liar. Why? Because I do work with weight and many people who have come to see me over the years and they are convinced I need to lose X amount of pounds. And honestly they don't really need to. There are a subset of humans, my friends, I'm sorry to say this, but they are convinced that they need to lose, fill in the blank. One pound, five pounds, 10 pounds, 20 pounds. And they don't, they could spend the rest of their life trying to lose that amount of weight and it ain't coming off. So I work with weight and if I begin to see with a certain client that, wait a second, you don't need to lose weight eventually you bet that's gonna be the conversation. And I want to help that person liberate themselves from banging their head against the same wall for a lifetime, trying to achieve something, putting all their life force into it, which is gonna drain their energy and take it away from, from life, from relationship, from kids, from love, from intimacy, from men, from women. Is this because we get so hung up on this nonsense
At the same time, some people have some weight to lose, but not as much as they think they do. So when I tell people, so if you say to person, yep, I work a weight loss, what they're hearing in their mind is, oh, you're gonna help me lose the number of pounds I wanna lose. I'm not interested in helping anyone lose the number of pounds. They say they wanna lose no interest. What I'm interested in is helping a human get where they truly need to go, which is their highest self-expression, their most natural self-expression on planet earth as a person and as a metabolic being. So they have a natural weight, I don't know what it is. They might need to lose more weight than they say they wanna lose. And if I can help them get to where they ought to be, then I'm doing my job.
So I don't know. So therefore I work with weight. You know, some people are on the kind of weight loss journey where they may lose weight, but there's still a lot of work to do long before weight loss can happen. There's a subset of clients that this is what's true. I wish it wasn't the case. In other words, there's some people who truly have weight to lose. They come in to see you, you do this, that, and the other thing with them and the weight comes off for whatever reason. Life is a mystery. Life is a journey, a relationship with food, body health and weight is a journey. Some people, they just got some work to do that's very personal and emotional and spiritual. Before weight can actually come off. And this could be months, it could be years. I don't know why, but that's what I observe. That's what I've observed in clients, friends, loved ones, and people in my environment. And if you look around, that's what you're gonna see. Also still, there are other people who will come to see you like, I need to lose weight, I need to lose weight. And honestly they need to completely defocus on weight loss.
They need to focus on letting go of their own weight, hate self-hate self-attack. They need to just get the whole weight conversation out of their head for 2, 3, 4 months and start to experience what life is like without having that nasty monkey grabbing onto your brain and, and, and just, just smacking your head every day.
That person, maybe they have weight to lose, maybe they don't, but their actual work, the work that they have to do is get this nonsense out of your head. The reason why you haven't been able to lose weight is because you are so banging on that door and you're so banging your head on that door for so long that it's actually time to give that conversation a rest and completely defocus on weight loss. Focus on some other things for a while and then we'll circle back to that. That's me working with weight. See the distinction, my friends, this is super important in my opinion. So I work with weight concerns, I work with weight challenges, I work with weight. I hope, I hope, I hope you can see the difference. And the distinction here, once again, it keeps me and you good with the universe. It keeps us honest. We're being honest with our clients. You are not gonna tell your client all of this stuff right up front that I'm explaining to you because their head will explode. They don't understand it. We give people information gradually. You need to slowly reeducate your clients.
I have been slowly reeducating you in this conversation that we've had since the beginning of this training. And it's actually a little bit on fast forward because we're hitting hard here. We're going right into the belly of the beast when it comes to your clients. Yeah, there's certain clients you can, you can talk strong and hard and there are certain clients you have to go nice and slow and gentle and easy. How do you know? You learn through trial and error. You learn by noticing people. It's not a skill that can be taught. Chances are you actually already have that skill because you're a human being on planet earth. And you know people, Hey this person man, I can go toe to toe with them. I can argue with them. This person's tough. And there's certain people who are a little more sensitive. There's certain people who are a little more dense, a little more thick, a little more bought into the party line.
So you need to start to learn to trust your intuitions. Trust your street smarts and do your best.
So my friends, here's the good news. Weight and weight gain is not the problem is not the enemy whatsoever. We have to completely, completely wipe the slate clean on this one. And it's hard. I get it. Weight is not the enemy. Weight is not the problem. If we start to reframe it, we are looking at weight as a doorway. And that doorway will take us into healing. It'll take us into growth, it'll take us into understanding. It'll take us into wisdom. It'll take us into evolution. Meaning we grow as a person. We grow in character and soul. And being weight as a doorway will take us into, okay, you know, here's how to take care of yourself better. Here's how to eat better. Here's how to move better. We don't know where the doorway is going to lead us to. And that's one of the ways where you actually find out where the doorway leads to is because you're open.
Because you come to every person that you meet, every client who has a weight concern. And you wonder to yourself, I wonder where the doorway called. Wait is going to lead us, my friends. Once you get this, once you open yourself up to this concept, this reframe is gonna change your life. It's gonna change the life of your clients. Your success rate will change if you're already a practitioner and you will be one of those important people who is actually a change agent in the world, A positive change agent when it comes to the whole conversation around weight.
'cause the conversation around weight has been so toxic. We've been beating each other up and beating ourselves up for far too long. That's not the world I wanna live in. That's not the world I wish to create. So here I am with you creating a different world. So what I'm saying is that weight is asking us to listen. Weight is asking us to pause and walk through its doorway in a humble way.
It is asking us to not know.
In this training, we're looking at every condition, every eating challenge, every health challenge as a doorway, as an opportunity to grow. What a beautiful thing, what a powerful thing that's so positive. It reframes everything because it then empowers us on our journey, which is how it ought to be.
So the doorway called weight can lead us anywhere. The doorway called weight and it's loss can take us into, yeah, diet, food, nutrition, and you're gonna be helping your client eat better food, eat more high quality food, change their macronutrient, balance, whatever it is, that's fine. You know, the doorway cold weight might lead us into the medical realm. And you inspire your client to check their thyroid, check their blood sugar, are they pre-diabetic? What might be going on for them? The doorway called weight might ask us to quite frankly look into our past. It can lead us into all kinds of work ourself. It can lead us into how we are doing relationships of all different kinds, relationships with our significant other, with our parents, with our kids. It can, it could take us anywhere. It could take us into our experience of love, of spirituality, work, sexuality, who we are as a man, as a woman. It can take us into our purpose. Why we're here so, so, so much more. And it could take us into any combination of these.
A person's quote unquote excess weight might truly, ultimately have nothing to do with eat less and exercise more. And yeah, that person might be eating too much, but the reason why they're eating too much is because they're in a relationship where they're challenge in relationship is not taking them where they need to go. They can't move through that challenge and they're in pain and they're suffering. Maybe their partner's not communicating, maybe their partner's not honest, maybe they're not, whatever it is. And then all of a sudden, how do I deal with this fact that my heart is breaking or I can't express myself or I'm in pain and suffering. Well I'm gonna turn to food and I'm going to eat. Or you can say, well just stop eating. Well, no, stopping eating is not the problem. Where the action is is I have to up my relationship game. I have to create communication. I have to create an open channel. I have to do the best I can to grow in this relationship. Because as I do that I will not need to turn to food to regulate my emotions around this challenging relationship scenario. I'm just giving you this as an example.
So yeah, a person might be eating too much, but it's not a willpower problem. They're eating too much for a good reason. Anytime your client is eating quote unquote too much, there's a damn good reason.
For some people, they gotta work on their food, they gotta work a little bit on their past, they gotta work a little bit on their present. They gotta work a little bit on getting back into their body. For some people it just might be identify the food allergy and eliminate that allergic food and wow, you know, everything changes. It's different for everyone, my friend. So we just have to be open to that. I, you know,
as a practitioner who is not just a lose a bunch of pounds of body fat, motivational expert, I want you to think of your role when it comes to a weight loss client a little bit in this way. You're a bit of a Trojan horse, but of a Trojan horse. Um, you don't need to reveal your philosophy and your precise beliefs and approach in the first moment of the first session. And in all of your information, you're here to bring your client along slowly, gradually at their natural pace into a new awareness. So this is the skill you are learning to develop as a coach, as a practitioner, you are learning to develop the skill called how do I help bring someone along in a pace that's right for them. So yes, when a weight loss client comes to see me, my friends, I wanna be very clear with you, big hug is what I do. Hello, weight loss client. I am happy to help you. I think I can help you. Now, by the way, whenever I say to a client, I think I can help you, or I will often say to a client, and you'll, you'll hear me in different case stories and studies talking about this. Um, I'll tell a client, I'm very confident I can help you. I didn't say, I'm very confident I can help you lose 190 pounds. I didn't say, I'm very confident I can help you lose 20 pounds or five pounds, whatever the heck their number is. I said, I'm very confident I can help you because I am confident that I can help most clients. Whether it hits their number or that or not, I, I don't know. But if I see, oh wow, based on their diet, based on their strategies, based on what they're doing, I could definitely help this person. I'm being honest. So yes, I'm gonna proceed with my client as if I am trying to help them lose weight because weight is a doorway. And I will take the next logical steps with them and I will make the next logical suggestions. And we're gonna get into that. We're gonna get into all the listening distinctions of what we do directly. So I might be working with eating speech stress while eating, eating meal timing, rhythm, all that sort of thing. I might be working with macro macronutrient, balance with food allergies. So yeah, I'm gonna take logical steps based on what that client is presenting with. While at the same time, I am also helping my client focus on letting go of their toxic beliefs. I'm helping my client love themselves into the weight loss journey rather than hate themselves and punish themselves into the weight loss journey.
I'm helping them step into all the habits in terms of life habits, lifestyle habits, thinking habits, habits that will help them reach their natural weight, their natural self.
Even if your weight loss client never loses a pound. And I mean this, and I say this with conviction, the work will have been successful if you help them step into greater success when it comes to how they are in relationship with body and or mind and or heart and or soul. Again, I will tell you, I have had so many clients over the years who have said to me, at the end of our work, I didn't lose the amount of weight I wanted to lose, but I've learned so much. I'm a whole different person. I have a different relationship with my body. Uh, fill in the blank. They've had so many great breakthroughs in their life,
you and I need to redefine success, my friends. Because if you are gonna define success by the religious number that your client gives you where they invent out of nothingness and nowhere that if they don't reach that number, then your work with them is unsuccessful. If you're gonna buy into that, you will be miserable in this work. And quite frankly, I know so many doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, health coaches, fitness professionals over the years who that's what they do. They're thinking, okay, I have to help my client lose this amount of pounds 'cause that's what they said and if I don't do it, I'm not successful.
Can you see how silly that is? Can you see how that doesn't work? Can you see how we have to have a much more expanded view of working with a weight loss client?
Okay, my friends next, check out this useful fact. According to the sum total of all the research on weight loss. Now, by the way, you would have to go to an international obesity conference or you would have to dig in to their research and their main findings. But I'm gonna tell you what, what pretty much happens every year according to the sum total of all the research on weight loss, science cannot conclusively say if obesity and how we define obesity is exclusively a disease. It's if it's a symptom, if it's a non-factor in disease or perhaps it's a risk factor in disease, we can't say if it's a health benefit because it is sometimes and it isn't. We can't even say if it's a psychosocial problem or a genetic problem. Why? Because it could be any of these, all these and none of these in any given moment,
which is actually in, in, in the obesity. Researchers look at it and they say, well, more research needs to be done to determine if it's a disease or a symptom or a non-factor or risk or health benefit. A psychosocial problem. A genetic problem. No, we don't need any more research. It's anything. And it's everything. And it depends on the person.
Duh, there it is.
The scientific mind or the unevolved scientific mind wants to look at an issue, find the one molecular cause or the one, the one nutritional cause or the one genetic cause, or the one drug solution. And that's what the scientific mind when it comes to weight and its loss is often reduced to, doesn't work. It's not okay. It's old, outdated thinking. So once again, weight and it's loss is a journey. It's a journey, my friends, you're going on a journey with your weight loss client. When my weight loss client comes in to see me inside myself, I'm taking a deep breath and I'm knowing that this journey with this client, this weight loss journey has a wisdom. It's got a wisdom to it that is far greater than we I, you, my client, any of us could ever know and understand.
So we are trying to look at life through the perspective of a higher lens, through the perspective of a bigger understanding,
through the perspective of what you might actually see if you let go of all your prejudices and all your beliefs and just watch what happens. Weight and its loss is a journey for some people. That journey is just, it's very inspirational and it's very exciting for some people that journey has been beating them up for a long time. For some people that journey has been traumatic, it's been emotional. For some people, that journey has been filled with success. Unsuccess more success, more unsuccess. For some people that journey has been frustrating, painful, confusing. It, it's enlightening. In darkening it, it could be anything. So we are here to walk alongside of our client and help them read the signs along their journey so that this journey can help them be a better human, help them be a better person. And that this journey, this walking through the doorway called weight and it's loss, can not only help us grow as people, but can actually help us see, okay, then where does this take me? Does this Weight loss journey indeed take me into weight loss? Does it take me into some weight loss? All of the weight loss, more of the weight loss? We don't know. You don't know where your journey is taking you of, of any kind. If you're a person on this planet, you don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. You can have a job that you're entrenched in. You don't know where that job is gonna take you. You could have a career, you could have a, you know, just a profession that you're learning. You don't know where it's gonna take you. You don't know where this relationship is gonna take you. You get pregnant. You don't know where being a parent is going to take you. We don't know. That's life.
Our issues are challenging. Our challenges with weight are whispering from our guardian angel.
Our issues with weight are whispering from our guardian angels said in a different way are challenges with weight. It's the wisdom of the universe talking. It's the wisdom of the body talking. It's the wisdom of life talking. It's the wisdom of a hidden code, a deeper architecture to life talking to us.
So simply put, our job is to listen a little more deeply. My friends,
you know, many moons ago when I first started researching weight and its loss and really trying to understand it, I came across a study and talked about the few percent of people who lose weight and keep it off. Turns out they have something interesting in common. They report the few percent report a life change. And I've tested this out. I've watched it with my own clients. I watched this just with people who I interview and notice just in the course of my day, oh yeah, I lost a bunch of weight. I lost the weight I wanted to lose. It's permanent, it's sustainable. Whatever permanent means, nothing's permanent. Um, everybody reports a life change. Now what exactly does a life change mean? A life change can mean they had an epiphany, they had a revelation, they had a spiritual opening. A life change could mean they got divorced. A life change could mean they got married. A life change could mean they opened up to love. A life change could mean they forgave someone. A life change could mean they moved. A life change could simply mean I sold my house and I finally got rid of it. People who lose weight and keep it off often report a life change. That's just interesting because a life change is a change. It's a deeper change in our story, my friends. It's a change of the Journey that we're on. We all on a journey, we all are living out an epic story. That story is very interesting. Your client's story is very interesting. Your story is very interesting, eh, honestly, it's more than interesting. It's fascinating. Gotta learn to fall in love with the fascinating story that is your client with the fascinating journey that they are on.
So I'm always aware that for many of my clients
that there's something that wants to shift, something that wants to change that's far different than, well just losing 25, 55, 95, whatever number of pounds it is, we put so much value on the poundage
as if the number on the scale is gonna guarantee something happens.
Okay, back to science a little bit and back to correcting outdated science. Let's look again at how, dive in just a little more deeply how weight loss is rarely a function of calories in and calories out for your average weight loss client. The reason why weight loss is rarely a function of calories in calories out is because the human being, the human body is not a simple input output calorie burning machine. It is, it's so silly. Um, I I I don't understand why that concept is so religious in the scientific community.
Calorie burning metabolism, also called thermic efficiency is in part, here's a list of some things, some main things that impact calorie burning metabolism other than how much food you intake and then how much calories you burn through movement and exercise. So your calorie burning metabolism, forget about food amount for a moment. Forget about exercise. Your calorie burning metabolism will very simply be impacted up or down by how much stress or relaxation you experience. IE are you living in parasympathetic nervous system dominance, sympathetic nervous system dominance? Are you overproducing over secreting insulin and cortisol and other stress hormones, which will signal the body literally to store weight, store fat, not build muscle store weight, particularly around the midsection. We know this, we've had research on this for decades. It's simple. Um, there it is. There it is. That's and, and it's number one on the list for a reason. Eating rhythm. I, i, I Literally, I don't understand this why this is in headline news. Um, the time of day that you eat will dramatically impact your calorie burning metabolism. It's, it's, it's simple. Does that mean that, oh, stress and relaxation. That's how I lose weight rhythm. It, it depends. It's different for different people. But when you eat will impact how you calorie burn. Why? Because the way your body is designed, it will calorie burn differently at different times during the day. Duh, it makes perfect sense. 2, 3, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning, you are at your least calorie burning efficiency. 12 one o'clock in the afternoon, you're at the height of your calorie burning efficiency, my friend's oxygen intake, breathing oxygen uptake. That's what exercise is all about. By the way, oxygen uptake will have a powerful impact on calorie burning metabolism. There are people who just literally adopt breathing exercises and you could lose X number of pounds just by learning how to breathe more deeply. The thoughts that we are thinking, the thoughts that you think, if they are creating stress, boom, it creates stress chemistry in the body. Our emotional flow will impact weight. This is a little bit more challenging to understand, but it is clearly seen when you are dealing with people who have post-traumatic stress, people who are dealing with a past history of trauma. Trauma, emotional trauma, physical trauma will live in the body as a stressor. It can live inside of us as anxiety, fear, hurt, upset until we learn how to release the stress from our system. Until we learn how to let emotions flow, how to let tears move, how to let anxiety move through the system, how to better regulate that. Oftentimes the body will stay in its post-traumatic stress state. And our emotional flow creates a chemistry I've seen this time and time again. And if you talk to practitioners who've been at the front lines who work in this way, there are plenty of clients I've had over the years. They'll have a personal or an emotional breakthrough and boom, there comes weight loss. Is that for everybody? No. Is it for a lot of people, yes.
Pleasure, chemistry, my friends, this is this. People don't get this. Does this mean? Well, if I just sit and eat and be in pleasure all day, like a glutton, I'm gonna lose weight. No, don't be silly. Don't be foolish in your thinking. Okay? Evolve yourself. Educate yourself. Everything in moderation, including moderation. But when it comes to pleasure, pleasure catalyzes a relaxation. Response, pleasure from food. A nourishing experience of food will help you regulate your appetite. But pleasure, chemistry by itself will put the body into a relaxation response, which is the optimum state of digestion, assimilation, and day in, day out calorie burning.
So if you have a lifeless pleasure, less relationship with food and experience of food, or a pleasure less experience of your body and of life, definitionally, you're actually living in a certain degree of stress. Because as humans, we are designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And without life's little pleasures, we will oftentimes end up, uh, in a state of anxiety and tenseness. IE stress, IE stress chemistry, IE sympathetic nervous system dominance, your story, the story that we're living out, the story that you have in your mind. And once again, this is always gonna point to, in my opinion, in my strong belief, the stress, relaxation continuum. If your story about life is you're born and whoever has the most toys wins. But I have no toys and I don't have enough money, and I don't have what I want, so therefore my life sucks. Um, I don't have this particular body, she has this particular body. He has this particular body. I'm jealous. I'm a victim. My life sucks. If you are living and cursing your own life, if you're cursing your past, if you're cursing your history, if you're cursing your body, and I'm using cursing in the very archetypal sense of how, you know, the witches, the warlocks, the evil beings, they put a curse on us. They basically say some bad words and somehow those bad words get into our system and it puts us to sleep. Well, guess what? You curse yourself. We curse ourselves with what we believe. Yeah, my life is awful. This world is awful. Well, gosh, if your life is awful, if you've been a victim, um, if the universe has singled you out as the person who we're gonna make miserable, yes my friend, you will be living in a certain degree of stress, chemistry. And that stress chemistry will impact your ability to digest, assimilate, calorie, burn, and naturally regulate your appetite. So just checking in here for a moment. I'm just giving you a list of pieces, factors that will impact our calorie burning metabolism. Some of these we have very clear research on stress and relaxation, rhythm, um, pleasure. Others of these were expanding upon what we know about science and pushing the limits of it so we can better explore and see generational inheritance will impact your weight. What does that mean? It means genetics. Yeah. Our genetics are gonna impact us. Um, but it's not just the pure genetics, because we don't just inherit the DNA of our parents, grandparents and our lineage. We inherit their alcoholic tendencies. We inherit depressive tendencies. We inherit, you know, happy tendencies. We inherit all different kinds of things. We will literally inherit. And there's some interesting fields in psychology that looks at generational psychology and how oftentimes we will be living out some of the stories of our par uh, our grandparents, even our great-grandparents who don't even realize it. So there's a way in where our lineage is living in us
in good ways and challenging ways, because that's what life is. We inherit tendencies, we inherit genetics, we inherit a body from our lineage, and we gotta work with what we got. And some of us are genetically inherit a challenge when it comes to weight and health. Uh, that was me. I inherited some rough health challenges. Um, some rough inner challenges. A lot of people do. So anyway, that is going to impact genetics. Yes, it impacts us. Macronutrient balance. This is a big one. There's all kinds of research. Now this is, this is where honestly, if you go behind the scenes in, in scientific nutrition research, this is where there's a lot of people standing at the, you know, at the top of the mountain saying, I told you. So. This all started essentially back with, uh, Dr. Atkins, who started giving people high fat, high protein diets, and they would lose weight, and he was considered, uh, foolish. Um, and it turns out as we, we, the collective scientific, we have been doing research on paleo or ancestral diets, um, Atkins diet, et cetera. Yep. It turns out you take a lot of people off of high sugar, high carbohydrate diet. You put 'em on a higher healthy fat, higher protein diet, and you see weight loss.
And it is not based on calories. You can have people eating more calories from protein and fat, and they'll lose weight because it's, it, it body chemistry is different than what we think it is. So macro. Now, does this mean everybody should be on that diet? No, it depends. We're all different, my friends. Everybody is a different, unique being. There is no one size fits all. I I hope you're remembering that. If your brain is trying to latch onto, well, well, is this the right diet? There's no right diet for all people, all time. It's exploring what's right for me, what's right for you, what's right for my client? Toxicity, my friends, what we are learning, and there's research out on this, yes, there are ways that when a human being becomes toxic, uh, there's a term called bioaccumulation. There are certain substances that'll accumulate in the body for many people. You accumulate enough heavy metals in the body, enough mercury that can cause weight gain. There are certain people who, when you literally put them on a detoxification diet, you clean up their diet, you start to clean out their body, you clean them up off of alcohol and just a lot of poor quality foods. I'm not saying alcohol is bad. I mean excess, excess alcohol, excess caffeine, excess sugar, excess poor quality foods, and they're eating as many calories, but they're eating high quality foods. You, you can see miracles when it comes to weight loss. Um, so we are seeing how there are many, um, what's called xeno, toxins in the diet, toxins that come from outside of us, that when they get into the body, xenoestrogens substances, toxins from the environment, chemicals from our environment. When I say environment, your car, your newspaper, the world, what you breathe in when you walk outside, um, there's a lot of substance that will mimic estrogens that will attach to estrogen receptors throughout the body. And that will signal the body to store weight. Uh, there are, there's, now, I don't know, the list of xenoestrogens is, is probably well over a thousand that we've identified. It's stunning. It's stunning. You get it in your food, you get it in your air. So when we start to clean that up, that changes the game. Food allergies is another big place where you will see people who are allergic, especially to the big ones. Uh, the big food allergies, gluten, soy, dairy, corn. For some people you put them on an elimination diet and lo and behold, the the weight comes off. Their body changes completely why it's been in an alarm response. Their metabolism has changed, their calorie burning has changed because their body is constantly in sympathetic nervous system dominance whenever they eat that allergic food, because a food allergy will literally send the body into a localized stress response in the gut.
So that's another place where you can see that it has nothing to do with calories in, calories out. Certain medications will impact weight loss and weight gain. Um, I don't want to go into that now, but this is especially true for many people when it comes to antidepressants. It can be true for certain people on birth control. It can be true for women who have intrauterine devices, IUDs, I have worked with many women. I've known many women who they get rid of their IUD and all of a sudden there goes their bloating, there goes their excess. What seems like belly fat or inability to lose weight, a foreign object in your body that doesn't belong there, that's toxic to it. That is literally telling your body, don't have a baby because something's wrong with the body. That's kind of how it works. Um, so medications will impact calorie burning, metabolism, gut health, we know this. We're learning this now. There's a ton of research. Just google gut microbiome, Google gut, bacteria and weight.
And you'll start to see all kinds of fascinating studies that show that when you shift somebody's gut microbiome, you can shift them into weight loss. Why? Because we are learning that the bacterial colony that inhabits our gut has a fantastic impact on all aspects of health. All aspects of the body, including weight and calorie burning metabolism, what your in utero nutrition was, and your early childhood nutrition will also impact calorie burning metabolism. It's why if you're a parent, it's good to pay attention to this once you, if you had poor in utero nutrition, um, and childhood nutrition. Yeah. Then when we get older, if we're dealing with weight challenges, oftentimes it's a little bit more difficult for us. So we have to find out what works.
Exercise style impacts calorie burning metabolism. Meaning if you're doing the kind of exercise that's driven by self-hate, driven by stress, this is observationally. What I have seen over the years over exercising, we know will put the body into a stress response over exercising. Can, you know, you, you're, you're over exercising when it comes to tennis over exercising, when it comes to any repetitive motion. Not only can you hurt your joints, but you can also create a stress response throughout the body, which will impact calorie burning metabolism. Which is why you can have a lot of people, and I have met far too many of them over the years, who are literally running marathons and they can't lose 10 pounds and they can't understand why, because it's their exercise style. They're actually stressing out their body by the kind of exercise they're doing, even though technically speaking, they should be burning off most of their body and their body fat. And I've seen it. And chances are, if you ask enough people, you'll hear the same story. We already talked about meal timing, blood sugar, and insulin regulation. A lot of us, because of the typical standard diet that we've been exposed to, has shifted us, shifted the pancreas, shifted the body into an unnatural state of blood sugar and insulin regulation relative to the amount of poor co poor quality, carbohydrates and sugar that we're eating. When you start to regulate that better and you start to include more fiber in the diet, more healthy protein, more healthy fat, all of a sudden that changes. And there's more. So I'm just hoping this little conversation that you're seeing, that weight loss is far, far, far more than calories in, calories out. Once again, as you've seen, stress is the key. Stress chemistry for so many people can lead to excess weight. That's all about insulin. Cortisol, inflammation, um, stress, as you know, can impact thyroid function. Thyroid is will, will impact the metabolic rate of every, just about every cell in the body. Stress will impact mitochondrial health. Those are the powerhouses of the cell that will impact the metabolic rate of just about every cell in the body. So my friends, what we're saying is, any strategy for weight loss, check it out. Check it out. Any strategy for weight loss that's inherently stressful is oxymoronic, anti-scientific and destined to fail.
Any strategy for weight loss that's inherently stressful is oxymoronic, anti-scientific and destined to fail.
What do I mean by that?
When I say stressful weight loss strategies, I'm talking about food deprivation. You are depriving yourself of the natural need for a certain amount of food by trying to artificially control your appetite. Because food is the enemy. Food in my body means fat on my body. And so we try to hold off from breakfast, lunch, we eat tiny amounts of fat. We deprive, we deprive, we deprive. Well, that is not a natural state. That's like trying to hold your breath all day. You're gonna be, you're gonna be stressed out if you try to hold your breath constantly. That's what happens when you do food deprivation. You will change the chemistry of your body, of your brain. You will change your calorie burning metabolism. You will literally tell your body, yo body, I'm depriving you of food. And then the body goes, Hmm, I don't sense any food. I must be on a desert island. There must be a famine. I better slow down calorie burning metabolism. Your body's smart. I better store weight, store fat and not build muscle because building muscle takes a lot of nutrition. So I need to just fatten up and slow down calorie burning capacity because otherwise I'm gonna die. 'cause there's no food around. That's what your body does. That's a stressful weight loss strategy. Low pleasure food. I don't care what it is. If you're following a diet that is miserable to you, and you're either eating low pleasure food or you don't know how to receive pleasure from good and healthy foods, which is retraining the body, it's retraining the tongue. Uh, taste is an intelligence. It's true. Taste is not a sense. Hearing is not a sense. Sight is not a sense. It's actually an intelligence. It's part of your brain. Um, anyway, A low pleasure existence will create stress. Once again, I'm not saying that doesn't mean, oh, I could just do anything that's pleasurable all day long. No, no, no, no. Doesn't mean that at all. Mature yourself around. Pleasure, punishing exercise. We've already talked about that punishing exercise, exercise you hate, you don't like, or is forcing the body too much inherently stressful. I'm calling that oxymoronic, anti-scientific destined to fail. All of these, any kind of motivational thoughts that you are thinking that are based on unloved and self-hate will take you in the opposite direction of where you wanna go. It's anti-scientific
because science, the science is oh, so clear about the impact of stress on most human bodies. So anything that is creating self-chosen stress, you will have natural stress or stress is not bad. Stress is okay. But when we have a huge, huge collection of self-chosen stress that we simply don't need, you're no good. I hate you. You're too fat, you're ugly. No one's gonna love you. No one will ever love you. I will never love you. Ouch. And you're using that to motivate yourself. Not gonna work. And it hasn't worked. You know, it hasn't worked and it hasn't worked because it can't work. It's scientifically impossible to work. And the reason why people are thinking motivational thoughts that are based on unloved and self-hate is because that's what the world has taught us. Nobody's fault. So that's what we're helping our clients with. Constant weighing and critiquing. Ouch. Geez, my friends. Constant weighing and critiquing for most humans is very stressful.
It's stressful. Oh my God, I didn't lose a pound. Oh my god, I gained a pound. Oh my God, I only lost, I have a pound. Oh my God, I'm no good. That's an inherently stressful strategy. That's anti-Scientific, watching your weight. Weight watchers, not weight losers. Not finding your natural weight, not transforming your body, not transforming your life and transform your weight. It's just weight watchers. Watch your weight. Watch your weight. That's a good business. You'll be watching your weight for the next thousand years. Just, just watch. It doesn't work. That company doesn't work. Their system doesn't work. I'm not a believer. So my friends we're revisioning. Weight loss, losing weight. Let's talk about some principles about revisioning weight loss. Right now, losing weight is about gaining life.
Yep. Losing weight is about gaining life. So whenever my client comes to see me and they're looking to lose weight, great. You're looking to lose weight. One of the main strategies I will do with any client, I'm thinking in the back of my mind, I am here to help you expand into your life, gain more life, expand into your life, whatever it means for that person. Because chances are the person who is constantly trying to lose weight and hasn't gotten there, and finally come to your office and finally found you. There's places where they're limiting themselves. They're limited in their thinking, they're limited in, in their self-love. They're limited in their understanding of the world, of relationship, of what's impacting their body and their health and their calorie burning potential. So losing weight is always first and foremost. It's about gaining life. It's expanding. So for my weight loss client, I, I, I really wanna see if you can get this. When they walk into my office, I have zero interest, zero interest in, ah, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, when you lose weight, your life is gonna be so much better. When you lose weight, I'm gonna like you more. And I'm sure other people are gonna like you more too, my friends. I never think that thought. My weight loss client comes in and, and I know I could see it, you can see it on people's faces. You could see it in their energy field. You could see it in their body. They're not loving themselves. They've been beating themselves up. They've been working hard with diet, with exercise over the years with different strategies. They've been trying this, trying that this work, that work didn't work, that whatever.
And they've been challenged, they've tried it all. And I'm not thinking I'm gonna love you more. I'm already loving them as better as I'm gonna, as best as I'm gonna ever love them. I'm unconditionally accepting them for who they are. I know that if I help them expand into who they are, expand into their, into who they came to be, their greatest self-expression on this planet, their greatest self-expression on this life, who did you come here to be? What's, what's your highest self-expression as a person, as a parent, as a human in relationship, in love, in your mission or your purpose in the world? Whatever you're here to do, however you're here to express your creativity. If I could help a person do that, yeah, I'm gonna work on their diet and their exercise and all that kind of stuff, of course I'm doing that. But if I can help them expand into life, then I am helping them get where they want to go.
So you cannot look at your weight loss client as poor. You weight loss client, my weight loss client comes in. I'm, I'm looking at them going, you got a winning lottery ticket in your pocket
and you're functioning as if you don't. You're functioning as if you're a loser who hasn't lost enough weight. So I'm helping my client slowly over time, reframe their relationship with weight loss. And I'm doing that by being me. I'm, I am, I'm not saying, Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I totally unconditionally accept you for who you are. I am beaming that. I am demonstrating that with my energy, with my words. I'm not buying into their self attack. I'm not buying into their negativity. I respect them more than they respect themselves.
You are modeling for your client a way for them to be. You're gonna hear more about that. Okay? More revisioning. Weight loss. Losing weight is often about lightning up. Well, you know something, you know, one of the reasons I I wanna lose weight is I'm gonna feel lighter. You know something, it is actually true. A human being that is indeed carrying around excess weight. When they lose excess weight physically, you will feel lighter, most likely. However, you ever meet a skinny, depressed person who walking around real heavy, there's tons of them around. They feel heavy. They don't feel light. Have you ever met a person who's got a big body, somebody that other people might consider fat, and they walk into a room and they light it up and those people are lit up
and they're fine with who they are and how much they weigh. So yeah, I get that. My weight loss client, many of them, many of them wanna feel lighter. At the very least, I am looking in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, okay, is the person sitting before me who wants to lose weight? Are they heavy in their emotions? Are they heavy in their spirit? Are they heavy in soul? Are they heavy in their life? 'cause I wanna help them lighten up because when you start to lighten up, when my weight loss client starts to lighten up, they are creating the very energetic, emotional conditions to potentially lose weight. Will they lose weight? I don't know. But they're creating the conditions and they're getting lighter, quote unquote.
I'm not kidding you, my friends. This works. Losing weight is about lightening up. So yeah, you lose X amount of pounds, you can feel lighter, but not everybody does. But at the very least, whatever a person weighs, if they are being heavy about their weight, if they're being heavy about their body, if they're being heavy about life, how can I help that person lighten up?
And oftentimes what that means is we're looking at, okay, where are there challenges? Where are the stressors in their life? And how could we go into those and address those so we can bring more light? What are some of the toxic thoughts and beliefs that we need to examine and begin to let go, such that that person can lighten up? You see where we're going here? When you start to feel lighter, there are days when you feel heavy. It doesn't matter what you weigh. Come on, think about it. Uh, for those of you out there who weigh exactly what you want, there's days when you feel heavier. There's days when you feel lighter, something happens really good in your life, all of a sudden you, you're, you're lightening up, you feel lighter, you get on the phone and somebody has good news for you. You lighten up. The lighter we are, the easier it is to be lighter on any level. Okay? Next. Revisioning weight loss. This is a big one, my friends. You've got to own something before you lose it. You have to have to have to own something before you lose it. What is happening is everybody's walking away walking around, I wanna lose weight, I wanna lose weight, I wanna lose weight. And they hate their weight. They hate their body. They hate what they got. They're self attacking. And you can't lose something if you don't own it. You know, if you wanna lose $50,000, you gotta have $50,000 first.
Yeah, once you have $50,000, yeah, then you could do something with it and lose it or spend it frivolously. But you gotta have it. You have to own your weight. Your client has to own their weight. They have to own their body. What do I mean by own it? We have to embrace it to, we gotta accept it. We gotta give it a big hug.
If you're a parent, you know this. If your child is having an issue at school, your child's having difficulty reading.
If you wanna help your child lose that difficulty reading, you gotta own the, you gotta own the challenge here. You gotta own the fact that my child is having difficulty reading. My child might be dyslexic. My child might need a different teacher. My child might need tutoring. My child just might need a little extra help, whatever it is. But you have to embrace the problem. You can't be going, I hate reading issues. I hate reading challenges. I hate kids who don't know how to read as good as the best kids in the class. Hate those kids. Really? You're gonna hate your own kid. That's how you're gonna change them. No, you embrace the problem, the challenge, the situation. You own it. You own it. Okay. Wow. Yeah. This is what's happening. What do we do now?
This is my body. This is my weight. Big hug. I don't, big hug means this is not necessarily what I want. That's fine. But it's what you got right now. It's what you got. Give it a hug. Love on it. Accept it. Embrace it. Because when you learn, hint, my friends, is a big hint. You're going to hear me go into this again. But what I wanna say is, for many people, what does the trick for them when it comes to difficulty losing weight and they truly have weight to lose?
What often does it is dropping into self-acceptance where they finally are able to say, okay, instead of fighting this body, fighting this body, I'm gonna have a moment of self-love and just, just love your body.
If your child was crying because they didn't have the body that they wanted, would you go, yeah, you know, kid, you're right. Your body does suck. It ain't good, but you know something, when it's good, I'm gonna love you more. That's what it's like. Would you hate on your own child? No. You would love them into themselves.
You would demonstrate love to them. And by demonstrating love to them, they start to embrace it might take a little time.
So we need, our clients need to own their weight before they lose it. Owning it means embrace hug self-love, call off the dogs, stop self attacking. You've got an issue in your house. You know, I don't know. The plumbing's not working. Are you gonna hate it?
I don't even, I hate this. I hate this. And you're running around screaming, I hate having a plumbing issue. No, you gotta own the fact. Oh wow, I have a plumbing issue. I don't like plumbing issues, but you know something. Here's what it is. Let me get online. Let me find a plumber.
This is my house. I'm not gonna start bashing my house and breaking windows just 'cause the plumbing ain't working. We have to own it before we lose it, my friends. That is what I'm helping my clients do, because that final dropping into self-love, believe it or not, oftentimes for many people, heal a deep wound. It heals a deep booboo. It heals a deep trauma. It heals a deep stressor that has been living in the system such that when there's a moment of self love, when you own something, believe it or not, my assertion is that there is a deep, deep, deep level of relaxation and that deep level of relaxation is healing. Next, revisioning weight loss. You've gotta be in the body. This is very similar to what we just said. You gotta be in the body embodiment to make a lasting metabolic shift.
We will talk more about this when we talk about body image, but it ain't gonna change your body unless you decide to inhabit it. You can't think, well, oh, when my body loses weight, then I will enjoy my body and then I will actually start to treat it well, and then I will get back inside of it. Now, many people who have been trying to lose weight have abandoned their body. They've energetically, emotionally, spiritually, stepped outside of their body in an odd way. They're living in their head and the body is a life support system, and it's time to just inhabit the body. Even though the body ain't perfect, even though it's got a little fat here, or a lot of that there, whatever, it's, somebody's gotta love it. Might as well be the person whose body it is.
The more we start to get into the body, oh, okay, even though I wanna lose 120 pounds, you know something, I can still love myself. I can still nourish myself with food. I can love this body interchange, self-love is a form of embodiment. We're gonna hear more about this next as we're revisioning weight loss. Weight loss has absolutely zero. Nothing to do with will power. Are there moments where you need a little willpower? It's really self-observation. You don't have a willpower problem with food or with appetite. Nobody has a willpower problem with appetite. Your appetite is natural. You don't need to control your appetite in order to lose weight, as we have seen. And we will continue to see, especially when we get into conversations around overeating, binge eating, emotional eating. As we've seen with cephalic phase, digestive response, as we've seen with fast eating, if we're not present, if we're not eating slow, if we're not receiving pleasure and nourishment, the brain will think, I haven't eaten. It will literally drive us to eat more. And then you think you have a willpower problem. No, you don't. You have an awareness problem. That's all. You just weren't staying awake at the plate, weren't doing the thing that we were doing, which was eating and being present and embracing food and embracing nourishment. Because then when you do that and you take enough time and you eat in a natural way to give the body the food it needs and the time it needs and the love that it needs, the pleasure it needs, the nourishment that it needs because you're a human being. When you give it that, the brain is satisfied and your natural appetite comes out, your natural appetite regulation comes out and it's not an issue. And yeah, might there be times where you overeat or your bingey, sure, but it's occasional and you love yourself and you forgive yourself and you get back on the horse and you're fine.
Okay, my friends, let's wrap up this part of the conversation. Some final musings for now. You, the practitioner, are most useful to your weight loss client when you are not attached to any particular weight loss outcome. I mean that, I mean that, I mean that you are most useful to your weight loss client when you are not attached to any particular weight loss outcome. Of course, of course, of course. We wanna help our clients lose weight. Just don't believe in your heart and soul that losing X amount of pounds is the ultimate measure of success. I mean that we are learning to work with weight in a whole new way. This is a more fulfilling way. It's an honest way, it's a deep way it, I'm calling it an effective way, a more multidimensional way, a more scientific way. No false promises, no quick fixes that don't work. No hype, no silliness, no nonsense, no lies. So what that means is we need to be patient
with ourselves, with our clients, with the journey. We need to be patient. We need to walk on the journey of food, of body, of health, of weight. My friends, I hope this was helpful for you. This is the end of wait, part one, part two is next. You know this. Always appreciate your time, your attention, your willingness to kind of go with me a little bit to the edge here. Take what works for you, leave behind what doesn't. We're here to inspire each other. We're here to inspire our clients. Thank you. And more to come.

PART 2

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are continuing our big conversation about weight and body image, and particularly we're focusing on weight right now at Dynamic Eating Psychology and Mind Body Nutrition approach. This is part two of eight of talking about weight and laying a good foundation for this very interesting, juicy, fascinating topic, which in so many ways, um, really is ground zero for much of eating psychology in our relationship with food. Now, obviously, not all of your clients will be dealing with weight challenges. However, there's a remarkable number of people who, even if they are not dealing directly with weight issues, or they're not directly coming to see you for weight issues, their relationship with weight, their relationship with their body, their relationship with body image is often driving their eating habits. It's often driving how they do their relationship with food because they might be excessively worried about gaining weight or maintaining it, or, oh my goodness, I better not gain a pound or two or three. So many, many, many of our clients have the challenge of weight, either in the foreground of their mind or in the background of their mind. So previously we were talking about revisioning weight. So as always, we're starting big and wide with a topic before we begin to narrow down. So as we continue to revision weight and its loss, here's something I wanna suggest. Every single eating challenge that we face, every unwanted eating habit, every ounce of excess weight has a brilliant reason that is rooted somewhere in biology and or psychology. So when it comes to weight, I'm gonna say that again. Every ounce of excess weight, if it's truly excess weight, has a brilliant reason for its existence. And that brilliant reason is rooted somewhere in biology or psychology, my friends. This is so important. A human can be carrying around extra weight because from a perspective of biology and evolutionary biology, oftentimes the bigger the creature, the more protected it is, the more unassailable it is, the more of an immune system. It has an immune system, meaning, I'm big, don't bother me, don't go near me. I'm protected. I'm a fierce creature that you can't take down. Now, I'm not saying this applies to everyone with excess weight, but certainly for some people, for other people, the brilliant reason for excess weight on the body is yeah, maybe they are eating in a way, they're following the kind of diet, they're following the kind of poor quality diet, or they have the kind of macronutrient balance that simply doesn't work for their biology and does not help them achieve their natural rightful weight. So we're looking to look at weight from a positive, generous perspective from the mind. And I mean this, I want you to hear this of a true scientist, a true scientist, and this is hard. There aren't many true scientists. Strangely enough, a true scientist is able to suspend judgment as best as humanly possible and simply observe and look at the evidence.
So your job with every client, your job with yourself, your job with anyone when it comes to weight, is to do your best to suspend all your judgment, all your beliefs, all your previous thoughts, and just look at and listen to the person who is sitting before you and listen for the brilliant reasons of why they might need to carry around extra weight. Somebody might be carrying around extra weight because they're overeating, or they're binge eating, or their emotional eating, and we can say, oh, well the problem is overeating or emotional eating or binge eating. But that's not a problem. That's a behavior. And that behavior is pointing to something. Well, we're overeating or binge eating or emotional eating for a reason. It could be a life challenge. It could be a hurt. It could be a place where we are afraid to grow. It could be a place where we are afraid to step into our power. It could be a place where I'm afraid to be the real me. It could be a place where I'm afraid to speak the truth with my wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, parent, coworker, boss, whoever.
So I'm saying there's always, always a brilliant reason rooted somewhere in biology or psychology for why a person would truly carry around extra weight.
Once we understand that brilliant reason, my friends, once we begin to even get some ideas or even start to listen for that,
it helps us and it certainly helps our client begin to let go of some of the self-judgment, self attack and self blame. Because self-judgment, self attack, and self-blame on the part of your client who is trying to lose weight, will stop them from losing weight. It will get in their way of losing weight because self-judgment, self-blame and self-attack equals stress response equals sympathetic nervous system dominance equals increased cortisol, insulin deregulated appetite increased cortisol and insulin will most often signal the body to store weight, store fat, not build muscle, retain weight.
So we are literally going against our own best, best wishes. So we in this work, my friends as professionals, I can't emphasize this enough, you are looking to take away continuously in small doses as best as you can, the self-chosen stress that your client has around weight, the self-chosen stress that they have around their body. Because as they are able to do that, they actually have more of themselves. Now, they're actually not in self attack. They're not running around like a chicken without a head. They're not banging their head against the wall. All of a sudden they're present, they're aware they're a little bit more here and in their body and available for transformation in a much easier way. So once again, my friends, some brilliant reasons for excess weight. It could be literal emotional protection. If I have extra weight, I am emotionally protected to some degree. The bigger your body, the more of a barrier there is to the outside world. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all. That's a very good thing when it's a good thing. Each body has its own natural weight for any particular time in its life cycle. Sometimes we need emotional protection and sometimes our emotional protection. We have a good strong emotional immune system. Some people know how to protect themselves emotionally, how to not get sucked in to being harmed by people's words, their thoughts or their deeds. Some of us have a strong emotional immune system in certain places, and oftentimes when we don't have that, for whatever reason, a big body helps. Similar to that, a large body can be sexual protection, meaning previously I've been hurt sexually, emotionally, physically, I've been hurt by people's words. Or I'm just born on planet earth and I look around me and it's a crazy place, and I don't know how to handle and navigate the sexual universe. And quite frankly, I feel the need to protect myself. So one of the great ways that a human can protect themselves sexually, and this is in an unconscious fashion, we don't deliberately choose to do this, is that the body gets bigger. Because when you have a bigger body, for many people, it sends off the signal, I'm not a sexual being, or I'm not the typical sexual being that you see out there in the posters and the movies and the images that are supposed to attract you around that, but energetically within the person. It's a sense of strength. It's a sense of boundary, and it's a sense of don't come near me. And many of us have a brilliant reason based on our own history, our own inner sensitivity as to why we might need to have a bigger body to have sexual protection. Um, yet another brilliant reason for excess weight is because we have been sending the body survival starvation signals. What does that mean? We've been chronically dieting forever. We have been calorie restricting. We have been meal skipping. When you calorie restrict, when you meal restrict, when you are constantly underfeeding yourself, when you are lacking in a macronutrient, be it protein, fat or starch, particularly fiber body will scream, the body will hang on to body weight as vigorously as it can because it literally thinks it's on a desert island. So this is a brilliant response. Unfortunately, it doesn't match what we're asking for. We're asking for weight loss, and we think that calories in equals and calories out is the royal road to weight loss, meaning eat less, exercise more. So we starve the body. But I'm telling you from a scientific perspective, it has the complete opposite effect, which is arguably the main number one reason why diets simply don't work. They're not sustainable. It's not a way that humans are meant to live. We're meant to be in relationship with our environment, regulate with our environment. I'm hungry, I eat, I finish, I'm done. I'm onto the next thing. That's how we regulate ourselves. For some people, the brilliant reason for excess weight is it's a way to store untapped energy. So on one level, the untapped energy of excess weight is simply caloric energy. Okay? Somebody eats too much food, you're eating too much food. Well, when you eat too much food for whatever reason, you're eating too much food. There's a reason why the body gets fat. 'cause the body's going, huh, I'm a natural creature. This person's eating a lot of food. Oh, that must mean we're fattening up now because winter's around the corner when there's going to be lean times ahead. So great news, I'm gonna store all this extra food as body fat, and I'm gonna burn it off throughout the long cold hibernation of wintertime.
So that's storing untapped energy.
But as we'll also see, there's other kinds of untapped energy that we store. Excess weight could be stored, personal energy, emotional energy. It could be stored personal power. Excess weight can be stored creativity, it can be stored energy to just help me be me in this world. It can be stored untapped communication, stored untapped wisdom and intelligence. But we, for whatever reason, used food to
cover that because we're not always comfortable as humans, we're not comfortable stepping into growth. We're not comfortable stepping into expansion and transformation and stepping into our potential because A, it takes work. B, oftentimes, as you grow as a person, you might leave certain people behind. You might leave a lifestyle behind. You might change the way you look at the world and things change. And there's a cost to growing. And part of that cost can feel painful. Because oftentimes when we grow, we grow out of a certain lifestyle, a certain social group. We grow away from certain people. We grow away from things that used to be important to us.
So a brilliant reason for storing excess weight, once again, is it's a wise response to a nutrient lack. You could be eating a lot of food, your client could be eating a ton of food, but if it's junk food and it's not nutrient dense,
the body just wants to take all that food. It wants to store it as caloric energy, and it's gonna keep being hungry. It will keep being hungry. The more poor quality food we eat, it's a reasonable bet that the body will drive us to eat more, simply because it's looking for nutrition. So we will be hungry. We will continue to quote unquote overeat despite the fact that the body is getting larger, because for some reason, the way we're eating, the body is hungry. It is not getting the nutrient density that it wants, meaning vitamins or minerals. It's not getting the macronutrient balance that it wants. You know, my friends, there's a certain subset of people, certain subset of people, and it's a smaller one, but I see it who their excess weight is a protest. Literally, the excess weight is a protest. It's kind of like a screw you. Y'all want me to look like this, y'all want me to be skinny, y'all want me to have this perfect body. I ain't doing it. In fact, I'm gonna eat whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. I'm gonna let my body look however I want it to look. That's one way to protest. Another protest might behave, you know, don't tell me what to do. I'm gonna eat whatever I want. I'll get as big as I want. I'll gain as much weight as I want. Don't tell me what to eat. Don't tell me who to be. Don't tell me to take care of my, he just, I don't wanna hear it.
It might be a protest against a particular parent.
And us gaining weight will impact that parent in a strange way more than it impacts us. It could be a protest against life. It can be a protest against our upbringing. It can be a protest against men, against women, against whatever we're in protest about.
For some people, there's a little bit of protest in their excess weight. It's not the main reason, but eh, there's a piece there. So it's often good to examine that, to check it out, to understand in the back of our mind that that's actually a brilliant reason to have excess weight. I'm calling it a brilliant reason. I don't want you to see that. If somebody has a protest about something, I I, there's just about a hundred percent chance that somewhere along the way they have a good reason for that protest. There's a legitimate reason why they're saying, well, I'm gonna eat whatever I want to eat and gain as much as I want. Maybe maybe that person wasn't raised in a way where they were given freedom. Maybe nobody ever paid quite attention to them and really got to know them and see them and understand them and get them.
For some people, excess weight might be a call for help. It's like, Hey, I don't got this figured out. Help, plain and simple. For some people, excess weight, honestly, it's a way to pull back and go more inward. Because when that person has excess weight, they don't want to be around the social universe as much. They might not want to date. They might not just wanna be out there conquering the world, and it gives them an opportunity to go inward. It gives them an opportunity to get to know themselves in a whole different way. Nothing wrong with that. So there could be a thousand reasons, brilliant reasons rooted in biology or psychology, why a human might be carrying around excess weight.
Next, my friends, when it comes to revisioning weight loss, if you weren't, I have a challenging relationship with food or body, then we're here to heal it. We're here to use that challenge for growth and evolution. If anyone has a challenging relationship with food and body, and in this case weight. If a human has a challenging relationship with weight, then definitionally, they're here to heal it.
We're here to do some work. So this principle assumes that we have a higher destiny, a higher purpose to our lives other than just losing a bunch of pounds of body fat. We're here to heal. Whatever that that is, maybe we deeply believe we have all this weight to lose and we don't. And our bodies fine the way it is.
I have to tell you, my friends, I see a lot of that. I see a lot of people who are so, so focused on losing X amount of pounds. And really what they need to do is lose the need to lose X amount of pounds, learn to adapt a little bit of self-love. So yes, we're looking to help people lose weight when people indeed have weight to lose, while at the same time
we're here to heal and transform whatever it is that that excess weight might be pointing to. And that excess weight might once again, not even be excess weight. It might be that we are defining it as excess weight. Uh, by the way, this is not a popular position to take when talking about weight loss.
But we need, you need, I need, all of us need, I believe, and I believe this very strongly, to collectively embrace that possibility with every single weight loss client. In the back of my mind, I'm definitely asking the question, does this person actually need to lose any weight, really? And we can never know. We don't know what life has in store, but it's still a legitimate question to ask because I have dealt with hundreds of clients over the years who their healing and their transformation came when they let go of the need to lose, fill in the blank, X amount of pounds. And for many people, once they let go of the need to lose X amount of pounds, either X amount of pounds starts to come off, or some amount of pounds starts to come off, or no amount of pounds comes off and it's all good.
So we don't know. And I know that might scare you if you're thinking to yourself, well, well, I wanna lose such and such amount of weight, and I understand that we're human. We want what we want, and it's perfectly legitimate to want what you want. And at the same time, we have to explore what is it that I'm focusing on when it comes to weight? How is it that I am bringing myself into the experience of my body of weight and weight loss? If we are walking into the experience of weight loss with self attack, with shaming, self shaming, with self-hate, and with various toxic nutritional beliefs, then that's where the healing needs to happen. Maybe we have weight to lose, and maybe we will, or maybe we won't. But until this other healing happens, IE where we begin to love ourselves into weight loss, we begin to respect ourselves. We begin to get back into our body. We begin to stop abandoning ourselves and embrace ourselves on this journey and nourish ourselves into the weight change experience. From there, we have the best chance to truly shapeshift the body.
Does that make sense? Give that some thought. I think it's important. You know, here's another way to think about that. If you wanna shape, shift the body. If my client wants to shape, shift the body, you know, that's a big ask. That's a big ask of the body. It's a big ask of life. You know, the body does what the body does. We do what we do. So to ask for a 10 pound weight loss from here, or a 20 pound or a 50 pound or 150 pound, we're asking something big of the body. How do I know that? Because we all know this stuff isn't easy. It's not easy to shapeshift, the body takes work. So when you're asking something big,
you oftentimes have to offer something big. Hmm. And I'm gonna say that in weight, as in life, if you're asking something bigger, the universe, you gotta come up to the table and wager something big. My friends, you want a lot of money. You, you wake up one day and you decide, I want a lot of money. Well, you don't want a lot of money says, why would you deserve that? What are you bringing to the table? What are you risking? What are you wagering? What kind of work are you putting in such that that amount of value can come your way? My friends, this, this is, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how life works.
We must bring equal value to the value that we're asking to get. If you want a relationship where you're being loved, my goodness, if you're hating on the other person, do you really think that a relationship where you're being loved is gonna be forthcoming and easy to get? I, if you want a relationship where someone really cares for you and adores you and attends to you, or just really gets you, well, don't we have to give that same gift to the best of our ability? So what I'm saying is, when it comes to shape shifting the body, we have to wager something. And it's not just, well, okay, I'll only eat a piece of toast for breakfast and I'll only eat a piece of lettuce at lunch. I'm not talking about that. That don't work. What I'm saying is we have to be willing to do a different kind of work. And oftentimes, oftentimes, that work is an inner work. And oftentimes that work is around revisioning, how we're approaching the very problem that we're trying to solve.
Again, you cannot shapeshift the body through hate, through self attack, through shame, and through negativity. Actually, you can, but it ain't gonna last, number one. And if it does, you're gonna be living in self attack, negativity, self shame, and oh, you're gonna be under the constant spell of, am I gonna gain this back? You will have not grown as a person, and you're gonna be a scared little mouse in your nice new body.
Who wants to live life like that? Don't be so shallow. So if you wanna shapeshift the body, if your client wants to shapeshift their body, what are they willing to ask? Are they willing to do? What are they willing to risk? Are they willing to do inner work?
This, my friends, I believe from my experience in watching people is a key.
And oftentimes that key is, are we willing to be more conscious? Being more conscious means looking at our toxic beliefs and beginning to let them go and incorporating new beliefs. Are we willing to love ourselves into this journey? Are we willing to actually as a way to lose weight? Let go of losing weight for a while?
Now, granted, I'm gonna tell you, I've had clients over the years who say to me, okay, well you told me to let go of losing weight, and I let go of losing weight for three months, and I haven't lost any weight. And they bitterly complain. I'm like, well, you really didn't let it go. Really? You didn't. 'cause otherwise you wouldn't be complaining like this. So it's learning to love ourselves for the sake of loving ourselves and to let that be enough. And then we let the chips of life fall where they may when it comes to weight. Next, my friends revisioning, weight loss. You know, our relationship with food is a symbolic playground of the psyche, psyche, meaning the soul, the mind, your inner terrain, your inner world. Our relationship with food and body is a symbolic playground of the psyche. Now, essentially what this means is that whatever's going on in our inner world, the psyche will often use food in our relationship with it to essentially help us play out the lessons that we're trying to learn.
So, as an example, we might decide, I might decide, all of a sudden it just happens. I have this obsession around having a perfect body in the perfect weight. I'm obsessed about it, and I'm going to the gym, and I'm controlling my diet, and I'm getting online and I'm going on YouTube, and I'm following this person and that person. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. I'm counting my macros, whatever, whatever it is people do. And I'm obsessed about having this perfect body and this perfect weight. And on the outside it looks like, wow, this person's really committed. This person's really dedicated to really working on their body and working on their weight and their fitness and their shape. But meanwhile, really what's going on is person's very insecure. They don't like who they are. And one way to play out
and work out this sense of insecurity is to say, okay, well if I have the perfect body in the perfect way, then I won't be insecure anymore. Because look at all these people with perfect bodies and perfect weight. They have everything like they're the happiest people in the world, and life gives them money and riches and beautiful men and beautiful women, and, and everybody should want that.
Um, so all of a sudden we're on this quest for a perfect body and perfect diet. But really what's going on is I don't approve of myself. I don't love myself. And this symbolic playground, all of a sudden me going to the gym and doing this diet, that's kind of like a placeholder. It's, it's a symbolic way that I'm working through my insecurities. I might attain the exact weight I want in the exact body that I want, and, and then I'm gonna see, okay, do I feel better about myself? Maybe yes, maybe no. Oftentimes what happens to people in this specific example is many of them will get to their target weight and their target body, and all of a sudden they change the target. Well, I just want, now I want my six pack abs to show more. And they get more obsessed.
You know, we might use needing to weigh some specific amount as an unconscious strategy for not doing the work of self-expression in other parts of life.
You know, I meet a lot of people, a lot of people, a lot of clients, just people, humans who are focused on way, focused on way focused on way focused on a number. And really what it does is it pulls them away from intimacy. It pulls them away from being a good parent. It pulls them away from being a good partner. It pulls them away from just expanding themselves in other ways, because it's so much easier in a weird way to just like, okay, I'm gonna focus on a number on the scale. I'm gonna focus on my diet and I'm gonna focus on exercise because I have control over that. Whereas I really don't have control in my relationship, and I don't really want to work things out and talk about difficult subjects and go into difficult conversations. I must much rather obsess about my weight. Person doesn't even know they're doing that, but they are.
So what I'm trying to say is, you need, you as a professional need to be able to look at another human, to look at a client, and dare I say, to look at yourself. And notice when your or your client is so attached to a weight goal and a body shape goal, they're so attached to it. They're giving it so much energy that there's something not quite right about it.
It's too much. What are they avoiding? What are they not wishing to look at? Where is the action really in their life? 'cause that's where the action is, my friends. Truly, truly, truly. I mean that it doesn't mean the person ought not want to lose weight. They might truly have weight to lose, and it's totally legitimate for them to wanna lose it. It's totally legitimate. Just so you know, whatever a person's weight loss goal is, good for you, good for them. I got no issue with somebody's weight loss goal. I'm fine with it. But if you're my client and you're coming to see me and you have a complaint, I can't lose weight, then you are saying to me as the practitioner help, and I am hearing your request for help, and therefore I'm going to do what I know best, which is I'm going to do my best to determine does this person actually have any weight to lose? And how come they haven't been able to lose weight? What are the strategies that they've been doing and what's really going on? If they truly have weight to lose, then why would the weight not be leading their body?
Are they overly focused on it? For some people, that's the case. They're using the whole weight game and the weighing myself game and the whole, I've gotta have this kind of body and this kind of weight.
Honestly, for a lot of people, it's a distraction. It doesn't mean you ought not lose weight, but the amount of energy that goes into it, the amount of life force, the amount of oomph, the amount of gusto, it's too much. It doesn't match up with what life is asking. So you and I need to be very attentive to that, my friends. Okay? As we're continuing to revision weight loss, remember that the language of the psyche of the soul and the brain itself, language of the physical brain is deeply embedded in metaphor.
What is a metaphor? Love is like a rose. That's a metaphor. Well, well wait a second. A rose is a flower. It's not like love, but huh. How did a rose become the symbol of love? Well, red is associated with the heart. A rose has such a beautiful magnetic fragrance. There's something about a rose.
Love has a beautiful fragrance. Love has a passionate color to it.
Love is like a rose. Food is love.
Food equals love, which is equal to intimacy, which equals pleasure, which equals connection, which equals safety, which equals mother, which equals fulfillment, which equals home base. Every word that I just said, you could substitute for the other food equals love equals intimacy equals pleasure, equals connection equals safety, equals mother equals fulfillment equals a sense of home base. I'm here. This is how the brain works. This is why food is a wonderful symbolic substitute for love, for intimacy, for pleasure, for connection, for safety, for a feeling of fulfillment of home base, for a feeling like I'm being nurtured by my mother, that maybe she was never nurturing, but when I eat this food, I feel nurturing.
So the mind works like that. And it's fine, because that's who we are. That's how we are program my friends. The mind is very metaphoric. So as you begin to understand that, and as you begin to access that part of your brain and begin to think like that, you become a far, far better practitioner. And you become, quite frankly, a far, far more effective and interesting human being in my experience. So each one of us, every human being, has a deep association with food that's just very real and human and complex and beautiful and quite informative when it comes to understanding our unwanted habits and eating challenges. So earlier on, I said excess weight can often be protection. That's a metaphor. We're looking at excess weight. Symbolically, it's protection. It could be emotional protection, physical protection, sexual protection. It could be grounding weight grounds us. If you weigh 40 pounds, you would be blown around by the wind. If you weigh 240 pounds, ain't a lot of wind gonna blow you around. That's just the way it is. Excess weight can ground us.
So I'm looking at my client and I'm looking at their weight, and sure, I'm gonna look at their weight and their relationship with their weight. I'm gonna look at it symbolically. I'm going to look at it metaphorically. How does it fit for this person? How does it make sense for this person?
Sometimes excess weight is kind of putting us on hold. We use it to put us on hold. Well, I can't be the real me until I lose all this weight.
Okay? That's interesting. You can't be the real you until you lose all this weight. So clearly you're not ready to be the real you are you. Otherwise you would've lost the weight, and therefore you would've been the real you. So a lot of us are not quite ready to be the real me. That might be true, but being the real you has nothing to do with losing a bunch of pounds, losing a bunch of pounds doesn't all of a sudden create the real you. The real you is created when you create the real you. If the real you is more outgoing than you have to be more outgoing. If the real you is more adventurous, you need to be more adventurous.
If the real you is more sensual, then you have to be more sensual. None of that's dependent on weight, plain and simple. So you and I have deep associations with food that are just very real and beautiful and human and complex. And I'm just asking you to consider how your client, before you fix them, before you try to help them lose a pound, you wanna understand a little bit. You wanna just begin to see how they're relating to their weight, how they're relating to their body, how they're relating with food, how food and their relationship with losing weight might a symbolic playground for things they're trying to work out, and how their use of food might be connected to love, intimacy, pleasure, fulfillment, grounding. Okay, let's move on. We've mentioned how food is a profound symbolic substitute. When you can't get the thing you want, the psyche wisely reaches for the closest approximation thereof. So food can be a stand in, a symbolic substitute for love, for pleasure, for sex, fun, intimacy, excitement, entertainment, and much, much more. My friends, ain't nothing wrong with that. I just really want you to hear that. Great. This is why we have wonderful restaurants and famous chefs, and this is why you go out on a first date and you do a a, a, a, a sexy dinner because it's all connected somehow. So there's nothing wrong with using food for substitute love, pleasure, sex connection, fun, intimacy, excitement, entertainment, all of it. I, and at the same time, let's acknowledge and own that it can become problematic when we overdo it plain and simple. So as I'm getting to know my weight loss client, I might begin to see how wow, yeah, you do really like to eat food, and food is your primary relationship. I'm getting it. You're single and food for you is love. It's connection, it's fun. You don't like your job, and food is the one thing that makes you feel good. I get it. And you wanna know something, my friends? I don't take food away from that person. I don't say, well, listen, if you wanna lose weight, you can't use food as substitute love. You can't use it as substitute pleasure and intimacy and excitement. I never say that. What I do say is, Hey, you know something, your strategy makes perfect sense to me. Because if I was in your shoes and I didn't like my job and I didn't have a fulfilling relationship, and I didn't quite feel confident enough to get out there and date and find someone, yeah, I'd probably be turning to food or I'd turn to television or whatever. No, I'd probably turn to food. So what you're doing makes total sense because you're human and you need a sense of intimacy, you need a sense of connection, you need a little pleasure.
So Mr. And Mrs. Klein, I'd never take that away from you. And we need to start looking at how you can up your gain in life. Because you came to me and you said you want to lose weight, I get it. I understand I am happy to do my best to help you lose weight, but in order for me to help you lose weight, you're gonna have to be gaining life in other parts of your existence. In order for me to help you lose weight, you need to not have food, be your primary relationship. You need to have relationship, be your primary relationship. So we need to look at what you need to do to get out there, to start creating connection, to get out there and start dating, to get out there and see what else there is for you in the work universe. You need to get out there and see what else can create a sense of entertainment and excitement for you. So I don't want to take anything away. I'm not taking anything away. I just want to add things. And I'm gonna give you a hint, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, as we start to add some of that, as you start to create more fun and excitement and more connection in your life, as you start to get out there more socially, you will have less and less of a need to use food for all of that, because you are getting that from the places where they ought to be coming from. And in the meantime, use food. Because I don't wanna take that away from you. I don't want you to have a completely miserable existence because if we just took away your food and we worked on your willpower and said, okay, you're gonna have a bland, lifeless diet for the next four months, sure, you can probably lose a bunch of weight, but you're gonna be miserable and you're gonna gain it right back.
I hope that makes sense, my friends. Next, you know, when it comes to weight and its loss, a lot of our weight loss clients are gripped with emotional eating. They identify themselves as emotional eaters. What I would like to say is emotional eating is natural. It's inborn and is perfectly human. It's very important. Emotional eating is natural. It's inborn. It is perfectly, perfectly, perfectly human. What the heck does that mean? My friends, we eat with emotion. That's a beautiful thing. I eat at holiday celebrations at Thanksgiving, you, you know, at Christmas time, it's whatever you eat on a romantic date. We eat and feel love and connection with others. You know, you eat when you're at the movies or the circus and you're all excited. We eat and we get relaxed. We eat when we're sad and lonely. So usually, usually when there's eating, there's some kind of emotion. We're emotional creatures. We're always experiencing some version of emotion for the most part. And we're programmed from infancy to use food to regulate our emotional and physical experience. We're programmed from infancy, crying, screaming, infant. Yeah, about 80% of the time when they're crying and screaming, there's a damn good chance that the bottle or the breast is gonna make them feel better. You know, unless it's something else, there's a darn good chance. Soon as that infant gets bottle and breast, it goes, ah, feel better. So we know from a very young age, food will help regulate my emotional and my physical experience. So where we often get an emotional and physical discomfort, because we're humans living on planet earth, and you're gonna have all kinds of opportunities during the day to experience emotional and physical discomfort, food can help with that.
So yeah, we use food to regulate our emotions. It's all about getting good at that. Because what's the opposite of emotional eating? On emotional eating? You wanna be a robot? Good luck. Try. That doesn't work. Yes, many people I know, know one person who just eats unemotional. They just have this, this is what I eat and I eat the same thing every day, and this is what I like, and I just eat exactly this amount. And they just have a very unemotional relationship with food. Fine, good for them. That's their, they're an outlier.
Don't to be like them. If you are not like them, that's silly. So we're learning how to use food to regulate our emotions in a way that works for us, because it's a matter of degree. So what I'm saying is don't get rid of emotional eating. You will be an emotional eater for the rest of your life, meaning you will be an emotional human being for the rest of your life. You will be an eater for the rest of your life, and there's a good chance that whenever you eat, there will be some emotion attached to it in some way, shape, or form. So it's just learning how to do that better. We have to embrace the emotional nature of eating before we can get rid of this thing we call emotional eating. Where, oh my God, I just feel so bad that I just have to eat food.
Believe it or not, the first step to
graduate from emotional eating is to literally embrace it. To literally embrace the fact I'm an emotional human being and I will eat for emotional reasons. And there ain't nothing wrong with it. Okay, my friends, let's move on. When it comes to revisioning weight loss, weight is not a personal issue. Excess weight is not a personal issue, or I should say it's far more than a personal issue. It is a collective issue that personalizes within us
when hundreds of millions of human beings across the globe are dealing with, I wanna lose weight. There ain't nothing personal and unique about that. That's a collective challenge. And that collective challenge finds a home in the people that it finds a home in. Now, to me, this is important, and it's extremely useful because there's so many people, all your clients, perhaps you yourself, might be walking around thinking, Hey, this is my extra weight, it's mine. Look, see, here it is. It's on my belly. Don't tell me it's a collective issue. This is me. Wo is me, me, me, me, me, my weight, my weight, my weight, me, me, me, me. Now in truth, yeah, person's, right? And it's reasonable to assert that the most important person in the world is me, meaning you, most important person in the world to you is you for the most part. Yeah, of course, my son is important. My partner might be important, this person's important, that person's important. But at the end of the day, you're living in your own head. You're living in your own body, and you're the important gall or guy now to your client, that client, they're the most important person in the world to themselves. So I'm saying of course, of course, of course we need to be me focused because we are a me, I'm a me, you're a me. But we live under the false notion, the erroneous conclusion, That my extra weight is my problem, and it kind of is my problem. But the reality is it's a bigger problem than just my problem. It is a global challenge.
Yes, I get that my client, I'm not gonna, you know, my client's not gonna walk in and say, oh, you know, I wanna lose this weight. And I'm not gonna say, well, you don't really need to lose weight. The world needs to lose weight. No. What I'm saying is this is an important distinction, at the very least for you, the practitioner, to understand. Because at some point with my client, I will in some way with my weight loss client, who is a little bit in a tizzy about weight loss and losing their weight and losing their weight, and the people who are so me focused, who are so caught up in themselves and can't get outside their own mind, yeah, I'm gonna let them know, Hey, you know what I want to tell you? I get that you wanna lose weight and I really want to help you lose weight. And at the same time, I just gotta remind you of something. Are you aware that there are hundreds of millions of people across the globe who are dealing with the same challenge you are? I just want to tell you that, you know, wait, this challenge doesn't just belong to you. This is, this is a big challenge that we face. And now there's so many different reasons why we face it, but all I'm trying to say is, you are not this terrible, miserable creature that's all alone, and you are the only one that has this problem. And woe is you because the rest of the world is happy, except for you. It's not like that. And trust me, I see a lot of people like you. Now, I'm not saying this to you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, to take away your desire to lose weight. Um, saying it because, you know, I, I would just love to see you relax just a little more, just a little more, a tiny bit more around all of this.
See, what I'm trying to tell you, my friends, is that some of our clients become so me focused that they become paralyzed.
It paralyzes them because they feel like the one person in the universe who has this issue and has this challenge, and it just ain't so, and it ain't true, and they don't get it, and they can't see that. And sometimes we have to bump up to a bigger picture. And the reality is, we're part of a collective, and everybody in the collective needs help with something. And there are so many factors in the collective that impact our weight that lands on our body as individuals. So there's a huge dimension where with, where it's, it's, it's nobody's fault that they're fat. It's not about fault. It is not your fault that you are fat. It is not someone's fault that they are truly carrying around extra weight. It is not about fault, but people live in fault. It's my fault, my fault, my fault. What did I do? Woe is me. Um, you know, there's a dimension where, guess what? You were probably raised on junk food. Guess what? You probably didn't get the best food while you were in utero. Guess what? You grew up in a stressful world that taught you to turn to food and turn to sugar and turn to this and turn to that. Um, and guess what? Here you are. You're fighting against a certain genetic pressure. You're fighting against your upbringing. You're fighting against a world that is constantly telling you to lose weight. But at the same time, it's, it's, it's throwing all this sugar at you and throwing all this easily get addicted to junk food at you. My God. Geez, we have it hard.
It's not easy, my friends. So it ain't your fault. It's not my client's fault. Now, that doesn't mean we don't have responsibility. It's like, okay, here's this extra weight. It's landed in my body. Ah, it's my body. I'm the one responsible for it. Meaning I have to take responsibility for it. If you have a dog, if you have a cat, they're your responsibility. It's just the way it is. So if they bite someone, okay, it's your responsibility. You're the one that has to pay a doctor bill. You're the one that has to deal with that. So is it your fault that the dog bit someone? Maybe not, but you have to be responsible for it. It's just kind of how the world works. So I'm just reminding us that weight is a collective issue and humans will turn to food as a way to regulate living in a difficult world. It's not your fault that you've been given prescription antibiotics. Chances are for much of your life, which did you know will impact your gut microbiome, which did, you know, can impact weight regulation For many, many people, that's not your personal problem. You didn't cause that. You didn't make it happen. It's not your fault. And we have to deal with it. So we have to see, okay, wow. So how do I take care of my gut health? How do I take care of my body?
How can I look at myself not as, oh, I'm this lone, miserable, victimized creature who everybody else has such a great life except for me. No. Now I'm not saying every person who wants to lose weight is thinking like this, but I'm saying many think like this. And I'm asking you to notice this and be alert to it because it is that kind of thinking that will make sure, that will lock in your client. Chances are to never losing a pound,
because it's that kind of thinking that will tend to perpetuate the very thing that they're trying to get rid of. It is that kind of self-chosen stressor that will create the kind of physiology that hangs on to weight. It will create the kind of psychology that has us, has us reaching for food to regulate ourselves.
And we never step into a place of empowerment because we feel like the universe has victimized us with excess weight, whereas it's a collective issue that personalizes within us.
So we're gonna continue on this topic, but let me say this, when we're looking at the collective roots of weight loss, you and I are born into a world. We're a little more disconnected from nature these days from our own naturalness, just the way it is. I'm not saying that in a judgmental way, I'm just making that observation. We are not the same of our ancestors who are walking around in loin cloths, hunting and gathering. We have a very different world that we live in. We grow up in a stressful, difficult, and hard to manage environment. We have all kinds of input coming at us from tv, movie, media, computer that is odd. It's strange, it's bizarre. Again, we grow up with a constant supply. Many of us poor quality food and advertising that brainwashes us to eat that poor quality food. We grow up in a world that has extreme mixed messages around food, around body, around weight, around sexuality, around our desirability as humans, around our health.
She's no wonder we turn to food. I'm trying to paint a picture of my friends by saying, Hey, without blame, this is the world we're coming into is a difficult world.
I'm just raising my hand and saying something that I think is obvious. Because what happens is far too many humans are walking around in self attack and self blame. So we must, must, must, must remove this thing called personal fault from the weight loss equation. Oh my God, it's my fault. I'm miserable. I have no willpower. I can't control myself. I must have done something wrong. Woe is me. Somehow I'm not good enough. I'm not valuable enough. I'm not lovable enough. That's kind of faulting ourselves. We must at some point begin to remove the guilt and the self blame we have to guilt and self blame will continue to draw to itself. Behaviors that reinforce guilt and self blame, guilt and self blame, love to regenerate themselves. They love to, to just live. So if I'm feeling guilty and guilty and guilty and guilt has a way of just getting off on itself, it wants more. So we get a little bit attached to the guilt. So we're bound to do something else later on in the day or the evening or the next day that makes us feel guilty once again. And self-blame once again. And then that guilt and self-blame reinforces, yep, I'm no good. I'm not enough. I'm not lovable as I am, as who I am as a human being.
Remember from the perennial philosophy, when we get separated from the source, when we get separated from a higher power, separated more from the natural world that we came from, we begin to feel separate. We feel alone. And from that place of separation and aloneness, we begin to feel guilt and we begin to feel self blame. And we then create behaviors that reinforce that sense of separation and guilt and self blame, overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, gambling difficult, choosing crazy relationships. Whatever it is. And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. We're letting go of, well, it's my fault. But we're taking responsibility. Responsibility from the standpoint of we're responding. Oh, okay, here's this weight on my body. God, totally understandable. It's a difficult world. I use food to regulate my emotions. Maybe I was brought up on junk food. Maybe I didn't know how to eat. I didn't know how to deal with my home environment with this person, that person, the other person. This situation, that situation, of course it makes perfect sense that I might have gained weight. It makes perfect sense that I used weight for protection. It makes perfect sense that I used food for love, whatever. It's makes perfect sense because when you see the brilliant reason, you could begin to take a deep breath and let go a little bit,
my friends, let me,
let me say this a different way. Um, collectively, we've been making individuals wrong for weight gain. I want you to see this. This is important. 'cause you're being brainwashed by the world, by the media, by the guys that are trying to sell you nonsense. They make individuals, we make the collective, we, we make individuals wrong for waking. Well, you don't, you eat too much. You don't exercise enough. That's the message. You eat too much. You don't exercise enough. You're a bad person. You're a fatty. There's something wrong with you. You're no good. We are going to hate on you. We're making you wrong person with extra weight that we have determined you have extra weight. So I'm just, I'm, I'm laughing because it's, it's bizarre. It's, it's nonsense, but honestly it's not funny. Um, it's, it's, it's horrendous.
And once we make individuals wrong for their personal weight gain, we then insist that they make these individual heroic efforts. You gotta diet hard. You gotta exercise hard. You gotta be the biggest loser. And you know something. I have some heroic science for you. I've got a special diet. It's hard to follow. I got a special supplement. It is gonna cost you some money. I got a new exercise, gizmo. It looks pretty good. And don't worry, there's gonna be a drug for this. There's gonna be a genetic breakthrough for this. More research is needed.
So we insist that the individual makes heroic efforts or in the background, we promise that don't worry. Heroic science will save you someday, but in the meantime, you're a loser who can't really lose any weight.
That is the message we have been giving humans that we, the collective we determines as overweight or fat, it's horrible. It's mean, it's ugly, it's bad. It's no good.
It needs to change. We need to understand that it's a collective issue that personalizes within us. It's not our fault. And we're here to take responsibility. And you don't have to do these heroic efforts. You have to climb to the top of the mountain and fast for hundreds of days. Stop with that nonsense. None of that, none of it works.
Heroic individual efforts to lose weight. 99% of the time, I'm going to guesstimate fail.
You don't have to be a hero to shapeshift your body.
You have to love yourself more. You have to learn how to slow down. You have to learn how to listen. You have to do personal work on yourself if that's what's needed. You have to make some changes in your lifestyle or your diet if that's what's needed. You have to have some changes in your toxic beliefs if that's what's needed. Maybe in your macronutrient balance or looking at food allergies, if that's what's needed. Maybe understanding some of the key stressors in your life, if that's what's needed. By the way, we're gonna be getting into my friends the nitty gritty specifics for now. We're still laying a little bit of a foundation here. I so, so, so, and I really mean this. I so hope you're getting the point I'm trying to make. I'm harping on it because it's huge. Because when you understand, when you, the practitioner understand this distinction, even if your client doesn't, your work is gonna be more effective with them. And at some point you will have the right moment where you'll be able to share with them something like this and they'll be able to hear it and they'll be able to relax a little more. Now, I am gonna say this in a different way, and I want you to hang in there with me for a moment. This is a different kind of languaging and it lends itself more to the invisible realm. I'll call it the energetic realm. I'll call it the shamanic realm, but it's very practical. So in my work with clients, uh, I, I'm, I'm very practical, I'm very grounded. I'm very, to me, science-based, true science observation. Look, listen, experiment, try, see what works, eliminate what doesn't, and give a big hug to what does. Okay? So when you, the counselor, a coach practitioner, when you understand that, yes, when I'm working with this individual client, okay, let's say here's this person and, and she's trying to lose 30 pounds. Now when I'm looking at her, I'm asking her every possible question about her life, her journey, her story, her weight, her health, her marriage, her kids, her family, her upbringing, her diet, her time of day. She eats all of it. Everything she's tried. I wanna know everything about this person. And while I'm working with her and getting into the details of her personal, individual, unique life, here's the kicker. I am also looking at her as if she is the collective. I am looking at her at the same time as if she is every person who is carrying extra weight. So literally, when I'm speaking to this one woman,
I'm speaking to her, but I'm speaking to the collective. It's literally like I'm speaking to every single human out there who's wishing that they could lose weight. I'm speaking to the collective as it lives in that person.
This is an advanced PhD concept. In my opinion, when you speak to the collective in a person, I am suggesting to you that the wisdom that you're imparting goes deeper inside. Because we are all individuals within a collective. We are point people in the collective. Everything's connected to everything. You're not one individual person. That's the issue. We all think I'm alone. I'm separate. I'm disconnected from everything, and everything's disconnected from everything. And we're random molecules in a universe. And here I am, this random person with this, how did I get this extra weight? Why can't I get rid of it. I'm alone in the universe with all these pounds of body fat, and I'm unlovable. You have a disconnected human. The only way you can heal a disconnected human is to help that human create connection.
So the world we live in is a beautiful web of connection. Everything is connected. Nature is all interconnected. The world is interconnected. From an energetic perspective, from a microscopic perspective, I think if we really knew how connected everything is, it would, it would blow our minds. If you could see how the roots of a redwood tree in a redwood forest all join together underground and hold each other up, it would blow your mind. If you could see mushrooms in the ground, one little tiny mushroom above the ground. Their mycelium, their roots can, can go hundreds of yards away and create this whole ecosystem under the ground. We're connected in very invisible ways. Children are all connected. Women are all connected to women. Men are connected to men. Men are connected. We're all connected.
You know, some of us especially feel nature. Some of us feel the women of the world. Some of us feel the men of the world, the children of the world. Some of us feel the plants. Some of us feel the animals. Some of us feel the dolphins, the whales, the dogs, the cats, whatever it is. Okay? So yes, when I'm sitting with an individual, I'm working with that individual very personally, very directively. I'm working on their story, their body, their diet, and it's excessively individual. And at the same time, paradoxically, I'm working from a collective level, and I'm speaking to that person almost in two ways. I'm holding them as an individual, and I'm holding them as part of the collective. So I'm speaking to all people who are in the shoes called, I'm overweight. I'm trying to lose weight. I can't lose weight. I feel victimized by these extra pounds. And if I can only lose these extra pounds, then I will finally be happy and I will be liberated.
So we're learning as a collective how to be in this world together. We're learning as a collective how to nourish ourselves. We're learning at, as a collective how to feed ourselves at the most fundamental level. We're learning as a collective how to care for the body. We don't know how to do that. We're learning as a collective how to talk to each other in an honest, real useful way about food and nutrition. We don't do that. We're learning as a collective how to actually produce food that nourishes us and makes us better humans, makes us healthier. Humans, we're still learning. We're learning how to produce and manufacture food that's truly in alignment with the human body. To do that is, is, is takes a lot of courage, takes a lot of risk. We're learning how to share. We're learning how to love. We're learning as a, as a world how not to abuse each other, how to include each other, how to share the resources, how to share the wealth, how to not be so mean, how to not hoard, how to not be evil. How to not spend all our energy trying to control the have nots so we can be the haves.
So when my client, I'm seeing the collective in every client, I'm seeing all women in every woman client. I'm seeing all men in every male client. I'm seeing all overweight children or teens in every overweight child or teen that I see.
That's all. It's just a beautiful feeling. It's a beautiful place to come from because then you are speaking from a different place.
It's all about communication, my friends, you are going to be a more and more effective practitioner. The more you learn how to effectively communicate what it is you want to say, the more you learn how to effectively communicate what the person in front of you actually needs to hear to help move them forward.
If this concept doesn't make sense to you, my friends, do me a favor. Don't worry about it. Just, just let it go. Uh, if it makes sense to you, great. Play with it. Use it. Um, notice it and see how it makes your style of communication different. Because on the one hand, oftentimes what happens as practitioners is we're sitting there trying to fix the person in front of us. It happens. I I've said, of course, we're not here to fix people, but of course we want to help them. We want them to be out of pain. We're human. We're compassionate. We care. That's why you do this work, because you're a caring person. I get it. I'm a caring person as well. I don't want my client sitting there in pain. I don't want my clients sitting there hating on themselves because they can't lose 50 pounds or 150 pounds. Um, so I want them to be out of their discomfort. I want them to be out of their suffering. Um, at the same time as I'm looking at them as an individual, I am seeing the bigger picture. I'm seeing the collective in them. So it helps me let go. It helps me take away some of the stress of having to fix someone. And again, what I wanna say is language is very powerful. Our words have power. You know, it's interesting. So many, uh, creation myths, whether it's from Judeo-Christian heritage, what's, whether it's from the Hindus, um, you know, in the beginning it's always in the beginning was the word. You know, God says, let there be light. Let this happen. Let that happen. Braa says something and creates the universe, uh, in the Hindu worldview. So there's something about how our words have power to create.
So I'm saying this is one way to use our words more intentionally. Okay, my friends, we've started the conversation that excess weight is potential energy. It could be potential metabolic energy, IE stored fat. It could be potential emotional energy, creative energy, transformational energy. Um, this is an important reframe. It helps us see the generosity in body fat. I mean this, you've gotta reclaim the f word. You've gotta reclaim fat. It's the F word. It's so true. It's your body. Fat is generous. You know, it's, it's, it's, I don't know why I'm in a Bible head today. You know, there, there's a metaphor somewhere in the Bible where they talk about living off the fat of the land. Um, fat is abundance.
So body fat is abundance. Body fat is potential caloric energy. That's what you're gonna learn in your physiology. Textbook, any basic physiology textbook, and it's true. Extra weight, extra food, extra caloric energy is stored as body fat. It's brilliant. Many creatures in nature, many humans need to do that. Your body weight will naturally go up in the wintertime. For some people it's only a few pounds. But if you can track average human body weight across the seasons, particularly people who live in a four or so season climate, you'll find that in wintertime there is a small weight gain because the body remembers we wanna store fat for the winter, because there's often lean times ahead. So the body remembers that from eons of time. So excess weight is literally stored nutrition that helps us survive. What a beautiful, generous thing for a lot of people. Their excess body fat. You know, I look at my, excuse me, client who's sitting there and he's complaining about his all his excess weight and complaining about his excess weight, and, and, and he might have 150 pounds to lose. And I'm sitting there looking at him going, man, when you don't have this complaint, when you step into your power, you're gonna have so much creative energy. All I see is this ton of creative energy sitting there. Literally, I'll be sitting with a client and, and they'll be in woe is me mode. And, and I'm literally looking at them as, you got a winning lottery ticket. This, this excess weight. It's just your creative energy is blocked right now. That's how it's being stored. That's how your creative energy stored. For some people, it's emotional energy. For some people, what happens is there's a lot of anger in there. For some people, there's a lot of rage in there. For some people, there's a lot of love in there. For some people, there's a lot of caretaking and nourishment and mothering energy or fathering energy in there. And then energy hasn't gotten to express itself. For some people, there's a lot of sadness in there. For some people, it's a combination of all the emotions that I just said, or some of them, or two of them, or three of them. And because we've never expressed those emotions, what happens is when you don't express emotion, that emotion has to live somewhere. That emotion will come out as symptom. Listen to this, my friends, very important concept. I didn't invent this concept. Uh, but it's super important concept. Whenever we are not expressing our emotional natural emotional flow. When you're angry, you're angry, you're sad, you're sad, you're happy, you're happy. If you're sitting there happy and you have to suppress it all the time. Um, if you're angry and you have to suppress it all the time, what happens to angry people who suppress their anger all the time? All the time you walk around, it looks like they're clenching their jaw. A lot of people who have jaw issues actually just have unexpressed anger is locked up in the jaw. Um, you know, what does an aggressive animal do? When an animal wants to let you know, I don't like you. I'm going to eat you. I'm gonna defend myself against you. You know, they give you that jaw thing. So anyway, all I'm trying to say is emotional energy. When it's not emotions, when they're not expressed, when we bottle them in for understandable reasons, we bottle them in because we were not safe. For some reason. We were not safe to express those emotions. For whatever reason, we didn't learn. Our environment didn't teach us. Maybe our parents weren't good at expressing those emotions. Maybe our parents overexpressed those emotions and we're under expressing that whatever it is,
when we don't express our emotions, and that becomes chronic and habitual, it comes out as symptom. So it could mean a locked jaw. It could be 10 shoulders, it could be high blood pressure, it could be heart disease, it could be joint pain. It could be a lung issue. It could be, you know, asthma. It could be excess body fat. It could be digestive issues. It could be a combination of these.
There are so many body-centered psychology disciplines that understand this, that teach us that. Here we are taking that important concept and bringing it in to the realm of nutrition, health, coaching, eating, psychology, whatever kind of practitioner you are. Um, so excess weight can be stored. Emotional energy. Some people just need to start expressing their rage, their anger, their happiness, their love, their mothering energy, their fathering energy, their whatever it is. Um, a lot of times your people, uh, stored fat is really energy for relationship. I, I, I just, I've observed that a lot. There's a lot of humans out there who crave relationship like a good one. Um, and body fat become, it's, it's stored that they're emotion eating. They're binge eating. They're constant reliance on food. Yeah, it's because I don't have relationship. But you see how we're languaging a different way that's stored energy for relationship. That's, that's your desire for relationship. Let's liberate that guy. Let's liberate that desire for relationship that's far more interesting than, okay, start exercising young lady or a young man. No. Okay, maybe that's a part of the puzzle, but no start owning what's in there for a lot of people, it's just their personal power. There's stuffing down their, their growth. They're stepping down their personal transformation with food, with weight, because whatever reason, they got the message from life, from media, from parents, from upbringing, from their environment. Don't get bigger as a person. Meaning don't get bigger in your personal power. Don't get bigger in your success. Don't get bigger in, you know, how you show up in the world. Don't get bigger in your goodness or your greatness or your wonderfulness. Stay small. A lot of us choose to do that because we don't wanna surpass our parents. And then this excess weight comes on and we think there's something wrong with us. And nope, all that excess weight is, it's your personal power just waiting to be liberated.
A lot of people, that is really, so for some people it's financial power. I mean that a lot of people, it's sexual power, but it's just sexual energy that's looking to be expressed. It's sexual expression looking to be expressed. Some people are just not sure. They haven't explored, they don't quite know. And somehow food gets into the equation and somehow the weight comes on. So I'm not exploring that part of my life because, oh, I'm not a drag, I'm not this, I'm not that. And they're, excess weight is just potential energy for sexual power and, and enjoyment and release and experience. For some people it's energy for change. Just change. Time to change. Yeah, we don't like change so much. So if you don't wanna change, just stay in one place and you wanna stay in one place, yeah, the, the, the more baggage you have, the more weight I can carry, the more it makes me wanna stay in one place. But, you know, change really wants to happen sometimes for, for people who have care, truly carrying around excess weight. It's just potential energy for change. It's energy for healing, for learning. It's life force. My friends, this is all positive. This is good news. I hope you're getting this, this is damn good news. You need to see your weight loss client very differently.
'cause if you're looking at your weight loss client, that they're this poor, miserable, fat creature who woes you, then you completely miss the point. 'cause there's no poor, miserable people like that really, that are your clients that are coming to see you. Who they are is people with a potential that's not being expressed, and in some way their excess weight is unexpressed potential energy. So ask yourself, when you're with a client, play with this concept, my friends. Play with it. Play with it. Play with it. Hmm. How might my clients extra weight be potential energy for something? What kind of potential energy would it be?
And it's a great exercise for you personally. If you're the kind of person who believes you have extra weight and or if you do have extra weight and or you are trying to let it go, what is that potential energy that is within your weight? Because it is potential energy science tells us it is potential caloric energy. And it's true. Any smart scientist will understand that concept. It's straightforward, it's simple, it's meaningful, and it bears out in truth, if you watch how things actually work in the real world and in nature, it's true. What I'm saying is it's a limited viewpoint.
Science. Forgot to see that. Yeah. It's also potential energy for everything we've talked about. Creative energy, emotional energy, energy for relationship, personal power, financial power, sexual power, energy for change and transformation and for healing, for learning, for life force, for stepping into your goodness.
Such good news, my friends. Let's move on. Key counseling strategy to remind you, be committed to your client's largest goal, not their smaller ones. When it comes to weight loss, I don't care how invested your client is when they come to see you.
For them, their biggest goal in life, chances are, is weight loss for you. I want you to hold in the back of your mind that their biggest goal is to be the most fully expressed human that they are here to be. We are here for a greater purpose. We're here for more than just having nice apps. Yes, many of us wanna lose weight. Many of us perhaps need to lose weight. Weight loss is a smaller life goal.
Forgive me if I've shared this with you before. You know, I love reading stories about, you know, people who supposedly die and, and they come back to life afterwards and they went over to the other side and they saw the light. And you know, across so many different religions, what we keep hearing is, yeah, people who die, they will have some experience where they see the light or God or Jesus. And, and they're always given some deeper message, uh, that wow, you're not ready to go yet. You have to go back and love people. You have to go back and, and, and learn something. You have to go back and step more into your power. You have to go back and be important in this person's life, that person's life. I have never heard of one of those near death experiences where, where God or Jesus or the light tells the person, you need to, you need to go back to earth. It's not your time to die because you gotta lose 45 pounds. Never heard that one. Um, that's a smaller life goal, my friends, I'm sorry. That doesn't mean it's not important to your client, but you are the smart guy here. You are the professional. You are the practitioner. You are here to guide and mentor your client. So you are here to understand that even though they don't know it, they have a larger life goal to be the most alive presence, self-expressed person that they can possibly be in this world. Our larger goal is to fulfill our destiny, to find our purpose. Our larger goal is to love, to grow, to heal, to learn, to live into whatever our potential is. And it doesn't have to be these great, wonderful things. It just could be the human who you are and who you be, and just how you go about your business, being a good person in the world, how you go about your business, creating good relationships, conscious relationships with all the people around you. It, it doesn't have to be some, some great book that you write or whatever it is. Most people have in their mind that it has to be some lofty thing. No, but you're always focusing on what is my client's largest goal in life.
Okay? So my friends, you know, slowly and gently and thoughtfully, you're gonna be reeducating your client about this deeper approach to weight loss. As you work with them, you're gonna be revealing little snippets of what we've talked about. Not gonna sit in the first session and try to teach them everything. Yes, with my weight loss client, I'm letting them know I'm here to help you lose weight. And I am committed to help you get where you wanna go. And at the same time, you know, inside that helping them be the person they're meant to be will give them the best chance to have the body they're meant to have.
So again, I always tell my client, I always tell my weight loss client, listen to this, Mr. And Mrs. Weight loss client. I am committed to helping you get where you wanna go. Now stop for a second here, my friends. Notice how I didn't say Mr. And Mrs. Client, I am committed to you losing the 78 pounds that you say you wanna lose. Actually, nobody ever said 78 pounds, but 75 pounds you wanna lose. I don't say that to anyone. But listen, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I am committed to helping you get where you wanna go.
So there's a little bit of a redirection there because really what I'm speaking to is their highest goals in life. 'cause people wanna get to their highest goals in life. 'cause why do they wanna lose weight? They wanna lose weight because they think it's gonna make them be happy. They think it's gonna make them feel fulfilled. They think it's gonna make them be the self-expressed person that they wanna be. That's where they want to go. So I am fully committed to helping my client get where they wanna go. And secondarily, if they truly have weight to lose, I tell myself, in the back of my mind, they truly have weight to lose. Of course, I wanna help them lose their weight. Absolutely, of course, course of course. But I never say to my client, I'm committed to you losing the weight ever because I'm not sorry. I'm not however I'm committed to truly, and I mean this, I'm committed to helping them get where they want to go. But where they really wanna go is to step into their highest level of happiness. Self-expression. Glad to be here. I love myself. That's where I want to help them go. And I know that as I help my client be the best person that they're meant to be, their body's gonna have the best chance to become what it's meant to be. Personal power equals metabolic power.
Can you see how when we language it that way, we're staying good with the universe? And again, I'm gonna say to you, life reveals, you have to let life reveal. Does this person really have weight to lose? If they do, you bet. I want to help them lose the weight and I would do everything I can to help them lose that weight. But that is not my sole focus, that's my secondary focus. Even though it looks like to my client, it's my primary focus. Even though I might just be talking about food and body and weight for the first two sessions, it's still not my primary focus. I'm inviting them into a whole different approach in a whole different world. So just some final musings for this part of our conversation. Just because a human is large or big or fat, does not mean that they have weight to lose or should lose weight. I wanna remind you of that. Uh, there are people that, uh, many of us might assess your big, your fat, you need to lose weight. I don't know that that's true. Just because a human is larger, bigger fat does not mean that they have to lose weight or should lose weight at all. Some humans are simply bigger or fatter than others. And for this reason, it is very useful, once again to reclaim the F word and not hold it fat and not hold it as bad or evil or wrong. You know, my friends, a lot of us need to go through different incarnations in this life. Meaning we go through different bodies and different weights. How many different bodies have you had in this life? Think about it from the time you were a little belittle, inkling inside mama's womb.
We've had a lot of different bodies since we popped out. A lot of different weights, a lot of different shapes as adults, many of us have different bodies, different weight. It's just part of the journey. Relax, it's part of the journey.
I, as a professional, only help people lose weight. I'm only interested in helping people lose weight only if they wanna lose weight. I'm reminding you of this because students often ask me, well, you know, my friend, my husband, my wife, my father, my mother, you know, they have, they really need to lose weight. And then they ask me a question and I say, well, do they want to lose weight? Or they asking me for help? Oh, no. Well, don't help people lose weight. If they don't wanna lose weight, particularly your friends or your relatives, leave them alone. Leave 'em alone. Alone. You're, you're not the wait police. Nobody asked you. I mean that. It doesn't mean you don't care about people. I didn't say don't care about people, but you don't know. I don't know. We don't know somebody's journey. We don't know the wisdom of somebody's journey. So I'm suggesting to you, and, and I know that you can, I know that if you want someone to lose weight, it's coming from a caring place. But part of it is also coming from a place where you and I can't help somebody if they're not asking for help. In fact, we're not helping them at all. We might even be hurting them and we might not be seeing the bigger picture of who they are and what they actually really need. Or maybe that person needs something else from you and not your weight loss advice. Maybe they need a little more self-acceptance from you. Um, you meaning you accepting their self. Maybe they need a little bit more compassion and love for you. Maybe they need a little bit more patience and kindness from you.
Lastly, my friends, please be prepared to constantly define and redefine success when it comes to working with weight loss clients. Because success can look like anything can look like weight being lost. It can look like for some clients, a little bit of weight being gained, believe it or not, could look like any amount of pounds, any percentage of the weight that they wanna lose coming off. It doesn't matter on a certain level. Success means is your client a better person? Do they have more tools, more skills? Are they a more expanded human by the time they finish working with you, have you helped them along their journey? Truly? Have you been a stepping stone for them? Or have you been 10 stepping stones for them because that's successful? If you're one, if you've helped them walk one good step on their journey. Success. Because sometimes for people that is truly what success looks like. Your definition of success does not count. What counts is a higher wisdom. What counts is the wisdom of life and how it defines success. So our job is to listen eavesdrop on the universe a bit and see how it is defining success for your client. We always have to be patient, my friends, when it comes to weight loss because sustainable weight loss for many, many people takes time. It took them enough time to wind themselves into knots to create this kind of body. Sustainable, true, sustainable weight loss takes time. I also wanna say to you and remind you, I have worked with some of the best, arguably best practitioners, or the most well-known ones you've heard of in the world when it comes to people who are helping people lose weight or get healthy. Uh, and I'm gonna tell you, for the best of practitioners, it is difficult. You will always hear the success stories. I love success stories, but I'm gonna tell you something, as much as I love success stories, I love the quote unquote unsuccess stories that my colleagues tell me that I have to hit 'em over the head to get those stories.
I don't know many practitioners who are close to the 50% point when it comes to saying, yeah, my weight loss clients come to see me and I help More than 50% of them lose their target weight. I, I, those are rare. And that's not a judgment against anyone. What I'm trying to say is that this is difficult for the best of practitioners and we don't always use all the best available skills available to us. That's what I'm trying to impart, suggest, teach, offer you, you know, so we're learning an approach that considers a multitude of possibilities when it comes to weight loss. And that, I believe puts you in the best position to succeed. You know, more to come. My friends, we're gonna be diving in. Uh, some of these concepts are big wide, maybe a little. Are they heavy for you? I hope not. Uh, are they opening things up for you? Are you seeing things a little bit different? If so, that's good.
Honestly, I told you about, you know, the best practitioners I know don't even come close to 50%. I'm gonna say on average. And, and you talk to the practitioners that you know, and you really get them to start to do a little bit of counting. At best, I'd probably say the success rate For most practitioners, long-term success, track that client a year from now. Success rate is probably no more than about 15% when it comes to true sustainable weight loss. It's difficult, but we're learning a different way that I am believing will take us further. And I'm shooting. I want you to have close to a hundred percent success rate with your clients.
And the way you're gonna have a hundred percent success rate is you're going to redefine what success is. Because success is not just the client says they wanted to lose 30 pounds and they lost 30 pounds. I did you help them on their journey? Are they a better person? Have they truly learned tools, skills, awarenesses distinctions that furthered them on their journey, furthered them on, on their path that helped make them a better person, better human, better person in relationship, a better parent, a better child to their parent, better person in the world?
That's success. You can easily shoot for a hundred percent success rate knowing that you've positively impacted your client. You've made an impact on the world. I hope you're getting this point. I really do. I think it's so important because then you can go to sleep at night and feel good about yourself. And you can carry that same approach into this world and any interaction that you have. It's just a way to make the world a better place. Hey my friends, thanks so much for hanging in there with this conversation. There is lots more to come on this topic. I can't wait. You take care. And this is the end of, uh, wait part two. Next is part three.

PART 3

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating, your guide on this wonderful journey together. Here we are continuing our conversation around weight and body image. And right now we are in weight, part number three of eight. And as we continue our conversation, let's just begin with a couple of usings just to get us warmed up. I wanna remind you that success with weight loss clients begins not with any pounds of fat lost, but it actually begins within the mind and the heart of the practitioner. That's where your success with your client begins inside you, believe it or not, meaning your inner world and how you approach your client's challenge will powerfully contribute to their outcomes. I believe this, I know it, I've experienced it, I watch it, and it's something that we have some great input on when it comes to our own inner world. So you know that weight loss is a journey and it always has been and it likely always will be. And what I mean when I say weight loss is a journey. It means we're packing our bags and we don't quite know what this adventure will be like. We don't know what's gonna happen with the weather. We bring all our gear with us. We might have to pick up some along the way. We don't quite know what's gonna always be around the corner. Sometimes we do, sometimes we have a map, sometimes we don't. Sometimes our cell phone and our GPS is picking up all kinds of good signals and we know exactly what's going on. And other times, ah, we're a little cut off and we're just not certain.
And that's all good because that's the nature of a journey. And when we embrace the fact that it's a journey, then we can relax a whole lot more and we can let go of some of our own inner struggle as practitioners. And at the same time, we are inviting our clients into a space. Now, as you likely know, our weight loss client most often comes to us unhappy. They most often come to us in self-rejection. They're frustrated, they wanna lose weight. Yesterday, they're often upset, and rightfully so, my friends, that whatever they've done hasn't worked or it hasn't worked sustainably, and they're paying you money, they're paying me money to do something about all that. And quite frankly, they want us to do it quickly. Even if they don't say they want us to do it quickly, they're in a rush. Nobody wants to say, Hey, sure, I wanna lose this weight and I'm happy to let it take a few more years. Everybody wants their weight off right now for the most part. So with that in mind, I'm going to say that it's imperative that we as practitioners know who we are, why we are here, and what we represent, my friends. So with that said, when working with a weight loss client, work on yourself first. This means aligning our inner world in some of these following ways and and meaning this. Firstly, in order for you and I to help our client, remember the person who will naturally be a little bit uptight around this conversation. We have to relax ourselves first. So if it's an in-person session, my friend, before and during the moments when your client walks in your space, your office, I want you to relax and let go. I want you to relax into the comfort of not knowing. I want you to relax into uncertainty. I want you to do your best to let go of fixing. Just give it up, be fresh, start new, know nothing.
Do your best to let go of what you think the outcome needs to look like. Just drop it and, and really embrace the unknown.
I would love for you to actually love your clients extra weight. They don't like it. They're not interested in it. They're likely attacking it. They're likely in a bit of self hate. Oftentimes they want to beat that weight into submission, my friends. And your job is to actually love it. Your job is to love their extra weight, to embrace it, accept it, and model for them. This is what you're doing silently, energetically with your words, all of it. Your job is to model for them exactly how you wish them to be. And I'm suggesting that we wish our client to begin to relax around their own weight and embrace it because when they can, we're in business. So in order for us to get where we need to go when it comes to weight loss, we have to embrace the weight we already have right now in order to shape shift it. That's the punchline. It's the punchline. It's the bottom line. And honestly, that's the place that few people in the weight loss universe want to go. Why? Because we want to believe in our worship of self attack and attack the fat and attack the weight. And we wanna believe that because that's what we've been taught. That's what the world has given us. No blame.
So our client ultimately would do themselves a big favor to love the body they have right now in order to put it in the right conditions to shapeshift.
You know, I know we know it's not easy for people to love their quote unquote extra weight. So that's where you come in. You are loving it silently. You don't have to sit down with them and look them in the eye and say, oh, I love all your extra pounds of body fat. But you're holding that space. You are looking at them as if you don't need to change them. You don't need to change them to love them any better, respect them any better like them any better. And unconditionally regard them any better. You're looking at your client as complete and whole and not needing to change anything whatsoever on the planet. While at the same time you're understanding, oh yeah, I got it, you wanna lose some weight. I understand that. No problem. Yeah, a lot of things I wanna change about my life too. But it doesn't mean I have to hate the existence I have now in order to make changes. I don't know in how I'm decorating my apartment. In order for me to make changes in the clothes I'm wearing, whatever, you know from that place, you and I are now poised to begin our work because we're going to be seeing their extra weight as a beautiful opportunity. And I really mean that. I'm not kidding you. If you, the practitioner is stressing into it. If you're uptight, if you need to perform, if you need to fix it, you need to have certainty. If you need to know exactly when this is gonna work and when they're gonna lose the weight. So you can guarantee them this, that, the other thing. And guarantee that for yourself, nobody's gonna benefit. You're not gonna get where you want to go. You're not gonna help your client get where they wanna go.
So we can't get there with fight or flight. We can't get there with self attack. We can't get there with self rejection. We can't get there with self-hate and intense judgment about who I am, how I look, and how much I weigh. What we can do is we can get there when we begin to see our extra weight as an opportunity, as a doorway that we walk through with our clients. This weight is here to teach them something. It might be here to teach them a lot of things. I don't know what that is for your client, but wow, let's find out.
And indeed, in truth, look at them as if they don't need to lose any weight because maybe they don't. That's a possibility. Your client might not need to lose a single pound. Your client might be perfect as they are. They might think they need to lose five or 10 or 15 or even 20 pounds or I, I don't know. That's up to life. That's up to the universe. It's up to the grand design of things. All you and I can do is to take the good, wise, intelligent, skillful next steps based on their complaint. I wanna lose weight based on, okay, how much weight have they truly gained and in what period of time. So we can do all the rational pieces. We can look at the mind-body nutrition components, all the dynamic eating psychology components. We can look at the high probability places to work that will tend on average to give us a good bang for our buck when it comes to weight loss. And, and, and, and at the end of the day, we have to let the spiritual chips fall where they may because the wisdom of the universe is guiding this process. And it's gonna determine how much your client needs to weigh and when. And you are gonna do your part as a practitioner to help your client best move in the direction of weight loss. And you're gonna help your client best move in the direction of your high, of their highest goal. And you know what that's about. So you might be looking at your client thinking, oh yeah, you've got weight to lose and you might be wrong. That's why I love to approach weight loss with a beginner's mind. That's why I'm asking you to relax yourself. That's why I am asking you to relax into not knowing. That's why I'm asking you to embrace uncertainty. Love your clients' weight, love their extra weight unconditionally, accept who they are as a body and a being, whatever it is. And you let go of the need or the neediness to change them. And here's the paradox as you move forward to help them get what, where they want to go. Because if you can find places to work, ultimately you're going to help them. By the way, I'm gonna remind you again, and you're gonna hear this soon enough as we start to talk about intakes. You know, one of the things you're gonna be doing with a weight loss client is you're gonna be also finding out what their other health complaints are. And the reason you're gonna be finding out what their secondary health complaints might be is because you know something, oftentimes when you and I start working with a weight loss client and we find good places to strategize when it comes to, you know, meal timing, when it comes to macronutrient balance, when it comes to food allergies, when it comes to eating slowly, eating in a relaxed state, eating with more pleasure, oftentimes those strategies might not result in your client losing weight the first, second, third, or fourth week. But it might result in their digestion improving. It might result in their energy improving. It might result in their, in their skin issues clearing up. It might result in them just feeling better. So then you know you're on the right track. You know your strategy is working because oftentimes before weight loss happens for somebody that really needs to lose weight, there's other things that might need to happen. Digestion might need to improve, assimilation, might need to improve energy, might need to improve mood might need to improve. Things happen in their own time where respecting the wisdom of the body. So this is your spiritual practice, my friend, because when you are able to love your client in who they are without a need to change them, there's a magic that happens. Your modeling for your client where you know it's a good place for them to go.
When we are looking at another human being through the eyes of unconditional acceptance, when we are looking at another human being through the eyes of, I don't need to change you to, to respect you and unconditionally regard you anymore. Trust me, people feel that. You know that. Think, think of the times in your life. Think of the people in your life who, who don't need to change you. They just accept you for who you are. Do you have one person like that? Or have you had that? It's powerful my friends. It's a beautiful experience. You know, if you've been thinking, well, come on, let's just start to get into weight loss and let's just start to get into the techniques and tell me how to help people lose weight. If you'reY about that, you know, personally, I understand that I'm actually a little bit okay if you're a little bit antsy about that. And I'm gonna tell you why. Because the foundation that we're laying here is so important and so fundamental to you being the best strategist, the best practitioner, the best coach when it comes to working with weight loss. When you are getting right with the world, right? With the universe, right? With how things actually work.
I don't care about the calories in calories out model because I observed it for decades. And I actually watched what happens to actual people in the actual real world when you actually gave them these kinds of strategies. If you really start to gather data and you will, and chances are you have, you're gonna start to see how the weight journey actually goes down. It is unpredictable.
It doesn't always have certainty and clarity. And there's an atmosphere that your client brings in that they've inherited from the world of a lot of stress and upset.
And it's no different than if anybody came into your space who wants to be effective. I don't know, in learning math, in learning a musical instrument, in learning how to speak a foreign language that you're gonna teach them. If anybody walks into your space and they need your help and they wanna learn something, heck, if you're trying to save a drowning person in the ocean, they gotta relax a little bit.
If the person who's trying to come in and learn something is all freaked out,
if their internal state is discombobulated and there's self attack and self-hate is gonna be hard to create learning and growth and transformation and breakthrough. It is hard to save a drowning person if they're flailing.
You need them to slow down a little bit and stop flailing away. There's actually a little bit of relaxation. It sounds counterintuitive, that needs to happen for so, so many of our weight loss clients, okay?
Preparing yourself for weight loss clients. Know my friends deep inside, you're here first and foremost to help your client in their highest goal, to become the most self-expressed, highest possible version of who they're meant to be. To help our client fulfill their greatest potential in this life. I'm, I'm saying that's your job. If you don't like that job, don't do it. But I am postulating, I'm offering, I'm asserting that that's your job and that's the best way for you to actually help them lose actual weight where they failed in every other round. Because 99% of the clients who are coming to see you have already failed in their strategy. Weight loss is a smaller life goal. Doesn't feel that way to your client. I get it. Might not feel that way to you personally, but I'm saying it's, and when we are helping our client with their larger goal, their smaller one tends to fall into place more naturally. Finding our natural weight is a function of more and more and more. Being our best self and our best self might mean our best, uh, self care, our best nourishment. Eating, eating in a good way, nutrify the body in a good way with good nutrition. Our best self might mean more love upping our game when it comes to relationship. Upping our game when it comes to communication, to personal development, to growing in character, to spiritual or religious maturity, to growing in our creativity, to embracing more. Who am I in this world? What, why am I put here? What am I here to learn? How am I here to show up our best self? Means increasing the way we do our parenting in terms of how good we do it, in terms of friendship, in terms of cleaning our inner house. So you and I are living in alignment with a higher code.
I say this a bunch of times 'cause I want you to remember this. Don't ever forget this. This is important stuff, I think. So we don't really know how much anybody ought to weigh, so be humble, my friends. I mean that if you take outta your mind, okay, this person says they wanna lose X number of pounds, I think I should lose X number of pounds
right then and there, I'm going to suggest to you, and I want you to try this on with yourself. Try this on with clients. If you're already seeing them, try this on with your friends and loved ones. Be humble to the number that you come up with for yourself, or the number that anybody comes up with for themselves. Meaning, huh, you know something, I think I know this is what I want, but I don't really know. No one knows for sure. So you're remembering that extra weight is stored, potential energy waiting to be expressed. What a beautiful thing. What a beautiful reframe. Consider that it is stored caloric energy and stored nutritional energy. Yes, that's from the scientific perspective, but it's stored power, creativity, love, celebration, stored emotion, stored purpose, stored spirituality, stored energy to do your day. It's stored life with a capital LIFE. Ain't nothing wrong with having those extra pounds. We are just looking to liberate the energy that they're holding.
And you know, sometimes we liberate that energy and we lose weight and sometimes we liberate that energy and we don't, by the way, there are plenty of people walking around that you or I or someone else, or most people might consider big and fat and you can say they got stored energy. But let me tell you something, they're expressing their life. There's nothing being left back. I always, always, always want you to be on the lookout for people that break your paradigm, for people that you observe in life. Men, women who have big bodies, who might have what other people consider or what you consider fat body. And they are, they're doing their life. They're self-expressed. They're embodied, they're here, they're loving on themselves. Watch those people study them. They have something to teach us. So extra weight is talking, it's talking to our client, it's talking to you and me as the practitioner. It's a messenger. And our job is to listen on behalf of our client, to listen to their body wisdom, life wisdom, the universal wisdom, higher power, higher code, whatever you wanna call it. We are listening to wherever the higher wisdom comes from, we're listening on behalf of our client because our clients come in and they're not always listening so well because they're the ones with the challenge and understandably so. So with that in mind,
what might extra weight be saying?
Extra weight might be asking us to eat less. Maybe it might be asking us to exercise or move more. Maybe it might be asking us to, hey, check our,
check our medical condition when it comes to thyroid health or the diabetes blood sugar regulation spectrum.
Extra weight might be just asking us to relax and listen more. It might be asking us to slow down, might be asking us to stop self judging.
It might be asking us to love more. It might be asking us to step more into our feminine or our masculine, or maybe even both.
It might be asking us to examine our relationship, our key relationships to, to take stock of our inner world and where we need to grow. There's a million possibilities. And with that, in working with the weight loss client, we're gonna use various checklists. Okay? So let's get into some more nitty gritty here. So I'm gonna mention six checklists right now that we're gonna be diving into. So when it comes to my weight loss client, in the back of my mind, I got these checklists going. I have a diet and mind body nutrition checklist. I got a lifestyle checklist, I got an eating psychology checklist, I got a soul lesson checklist, I got a collective distinctions checklist, and I have an archetype checklist. Don't worry about memorizing all these. So we're gonna begin. So we're gonna use these checklists. Now, once again, I don't want you to worry about committing anything to memory whatsoever. You're gonna have these notes, you're gonna have these PDFs, you're gonna have these audios, you're gonna have everything you need to come back to it right now. I just want you to let the material land for you in the way that it does, and there will be certain things for sure that are going to naturally stick for you. So first on this list is the diet and MINDBODY nutrition checklist. Now, once again, when I say diet and mind body nutrition checklist, I'm talking these distinctions. Stress, relaxation, eating speed, macronutrient, balance rhythm, nourishment pleasure, food allergies, food quality, powerful substances.
In the back of my mind when I'm working with my weight loss client, these terms are swimming in the back of my mind somewhere. Because as I'm talking to my client, listening to them, learning about them, doing my intake with them, these are the things I'm listening for in the back of my mind. Because heck, if I notice that they're constantly in a stress state when they eat, wow, that's a place I can work and potentially not only help them with weight loss, I might be able to help them if they have a secondary issue of, uh, digestion, digestive complaints, I'm listening for their eating speed. Because guess what? If they're complaining that they're overeating or binge eating or emotional eating, changing your eating speed will dramatically impact all of that. Uh, and oftentimes quickly. So if I notice that their macronutrient balance might be off or that's a place to experiment, that might not only help them lose weight, it might help with mood, it might help with energy, uh, it might help with cognition, brain function during the day, um, looking at their eating rhythm, when they eat what they eat, that will impact weight, that will impact energy, that will impact overeating, binge eating emotionally. So I think you are getting the picture here. Now I'm gonna dive into each of these distinctions on the mind-body nutrition checklist, just so you can get a sense how I think about them with a client. But I wanna remind you, these checklist are gonna take you a while to commit to memory and to be able to call them up in an intuitive and creative way. So what I want you to know is these distinctions are like gold for you as a coach or practitioner. So when using this checklist and all these checklists, just be relaxed, let go of trying to figure out your client. I know you wanna figure them out. I wanna figure out every one of my client. But paradox is I also have to let go of figuring out my client. And at the same time, I'm using these distinctions to assess, dare I say, to diagnose. So you will be most successful at this when you paradoxically let go of your goal to help them lose weight, which is, hey, okay, I wanna help my client. I really do. If they really wanna lose weight, that's really gonna make them happy. Of course I wanna help them, but I wanna paradoxically let go of the goal and listen with all different kinds of openness and curiosity. Okay? First distinction on the diet and mind body nutrition checklist. Who could have seen this coming? Stress, relaxation, continuum and weight loss. Okay, if you, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, let me just zing this right home, my friends. I mean this. If you can't help your client relax into the weight loss experience more than they have been, there's a darn good chance that you cannot help them lose weight.
I, this is so important because literally you have a human being sitting opposite from you who is saying, I need to get rid of my headache. I need to get rid of my headache. And at the same time they're banging their head against a wall and I'm thinking to myself, huh, I can definitely help you get rid of that headache. You're banging your head against the wall. You don't realize that the headbanging against the wall is causing you your headache. That's the same thing I want you to see. When your client is sitting there at self attacking, self-hating, self judging in a, in a tizzy about losing weight yesterday, they're freaked out about who they are, how much they weigh, and everything that that means to them. So they cannot possibly in their mind, relax into the weight loss journey and understandably so. And because they can't relax into the weight loss journey, what happens is their toxic thoughts, their stressful beliefs, their stressful approach, and then your client's continuous adopting of different diets and strategies that will ultimately fail them.
That creates sympathetic nervous system dominance. It creates a chemistry, my friends. It creates a physiology. This is the one place where please believe in the power of the mind because it is freaking powerful here. So letting go for your client, letting go of major self-chosen. Listen to the term self-chosen stressors is non-negotiable. I'm gonna suggest you when it comes to working with your weight loss client.
If your client has been trying to lose weight for years or decades, and they have been unsuccessful in the traditional methods of eat this, don't eat that exercise more, eat less, then the wisdom of life is telling us to try something else. Think about it. We gotta do something else. It is bizarre. It's insane how we, the collective we have been conditioned to diet for decades to calorie restrict for decades and still not get sustainable weight loss. I get passionate about this because I am passionate about it because it's, it's, it's such an easy doorway, not so easy. It's a clear doorway to walk through to begin to shift things, to begin to change the landscape, to begin to change our metabolism.
So when you notice that your weight loss client has a lot of self-chosen stressors in their life, they're constantly acting like a victim. They're complaining about work, they're complaining about how everybody's the bad guy and everybody's the mean guy, but them, if they are isolating themselves, that can create stress. Whatever it is that their major stressors are. At some point in the conversation, in a first or second session, you're gonna explain to your client, with simple scientific mind cookies clearly and powerful, how the relaxation response will begin to rock their metabolic world. So this is where you're gonna use scientific mind cookies. So this is where you're gonna practice explaining to somebody about how stress impacts weight, about how the relaxation response impacts weight, about how each of these impact appetite regulation.
You're gonna let your client know, yes, Mr. And Mrs. Client stress will negatively impact appetite regulation, nutrient assimilation, calorie burning capacity, and a long list of physiologic parameters that are key factors in weight loss. So you can use my book, the Slowdown Diet to memorize more of the scientific mind cookies. Make sure to share with your clients the reasons why they need to invite the relaxation response more into their life when it comes to finding their natural weight.
That's your job. And it's a wonderful job because you are helping your client change their whole worldview. You're helping them change their metabolism by changing how their mind has been working and their mind has been working in a way that is out of control. So my friends, on one level, this training is all about how you and I help our clients regulate their discomfort and regulate their emotions and their thoughts when it comes to food and body.
Because when we cannot regulate our thoughts,
the yogis love to say, you know, the mind is like a dog and the breath is like a leash. I mean, the mind's gonna be all over the place unless you yolk or leash the mind through breath, through meditation, through consciousness, through awareness, through being present, that dog's gonna just pull you all over the place in any different direction without any logic or good wisdom to it. So there is a very powerful inner game to weight and it's loss. More importantly, there's a powerful inner game to how to transform our metabolism by transforming how we think. Just think about it. Anybody who is in a state of obsession, anybody who is in a place where they're in deep self-loathing or self-hate not gonna be happy in this world. I'm not gonna be effective in this world. We're literally humans. So many humans, so many of us, all of us to some degree are learning how to love self honor, self stand by self help self in a way that is actually helpful. We are learning how to get smarter, wiser, clearer cleverer and understand that some of the habits that we have adopted from the world, oh, you want to get where you want to go, self attack. That'll do it for you. We have to understand that those strategies don't work. And in fact, when it comes to weight loss, it takes us in the opposite direction. So in case you forgot, stress will cause increased insulin, cortisol, which can lead to weight gain, inability to lose weight or weight loss resistance, by the way, inability to lose weight, weight loss, resistance, same thing. Stress can cause fat deposition around the midsection, decreased day in, day out, calorie burning capacity, gut microbiome die off nutrient excretion. When I say nutrient excretion, especially vitamins, minerals, especially water soluble vitamins and minerals, but actually all of them decreased thyroid and growth hormone, those substances affect the metabolic rate of probably 95% or more of cells in the body. Stress will cause decreased muscle building and increased muscle wasting. Why is that important? Because muscle to the greatest degree is your calorie burning body tissue. The vast majority of every calorie you burn is burned in muscle tissue. So you lose just a little bit of muscle, little bit of muscle, you're gonna lose a little bit of your, you're gonna, you're, you're gonna lose some calorie burning capacity opposite. You just increase a little bit of muscle and you increase your calorie burning capacity. Stress will lead to decreased mitochondria amount and or function. Mitochondria, the little powerhouses in, in most cells in your body, they're, we call them just really the little energy factories. So stress will make those mitochondria less functional and it will cause them to just not reproduce in our system. Um, not that they reproduce amongst themselves, we recreate them as we break down tissue and build tissue up. Stress can lead for most people to appetite. Deregulation either end up eating more, smaller percentage of people end up eating less stress will desensitize us to pleasure. That is strictly a function of cortisol. Cortisol signals the body to blunt itself to pleasure. Why? Because when you're running from a lion, you don't need to have all your pleasure sensitivity on, uh, you don't wanna get sidetracked looking for chocolate. You need to put all your energy into survival. So when you're in stress, you actually can't sense pleasure, which means if you eat the piece of chocolate, you eat the cake, you eat the thing you love, you won't even feel the pleasure. So you have to eat more of it. And then you think you have a willpower problem. No, you are eating under stress and you are chemically, metabolically, physiologically driven to eat more because your brain and nervous system was in a stress state and you weren't sensitive enough to pleasure from a chemical perspective. Stress can also impact sleep, which for many different reasons can impact weight,
stressful cause or can cause for most people, eventually decreased oxygen uptake in the body, which once again, uh, uh, oxygen, that's your, that's your number one nutrient really, which will impact the metabolic rate of virtually every cell in the body. Stressful, as you know, adversely impact prefrontal cortex, the executive smart wise dude that sits on top of your brain, um, and kind of runs the show.
Just wanted to remind you of that. Okay? And remember my friend, stress doesn't just mean the real and common life stressors that most humans experience because we all have stress. And I want to say again, here's the paradox, stress isn't bad. Life has stress. Stress can make you strong. Stress can make you more powerful. Stress can motivate you, stress can inspire you. Stress can make us study for that test, do better on our job, get things done, we love it.
But when we have self-chosen stress, that is where we have to start to look in the mirror and get to work. What does a self-chosen stress mean? Let me remind you, negative self-talk unnecessary. You don't need it doesn't do any good self-harming thoughts, body shaming your self, body shaming body hate, adopting weight loss strategies that are artificial and impossible to maintain. That's a self-chosen stress. Trying to artificially control your appetite as if that is what is going to do it. Appetite control is the biggest dead end strategy in the history of humankind when it comes to weight loss. It's nonsense. I'm sorry. You don't need to control your appetite. You need to learn how to let its natural function emerge. Appetite beautifully regulates itself, breathing beautifully regulates itself. You don't have to sit there reminding yourself, oh my God, I should breathe. Oh, I shouldn't breathe so much. I shouldn't be breathing. Does itself appetite's a little bit more complicated? It's a little more complicated. And appetite is going to be impacted by a whole bunch of things. It's gonna be impacted by food quality. It's gonna be impacted by eating under stress. It's gonna be impacted by eating speed. It's gonna be impacted by macronutrient balance. It's gonna be impacted by meal timing, IE bio circadian nutrition. When you eat what you eat, nobody needs to control their appetite. You need to just learn how it best works. So when your appetite is best working it, it becomes your best friend. Okay? You know, self-chosen stress means limiting a needed macronutrient. People who go super low fat or super low protein, of course the body's gonna scream for more food. Believing that you are unlovable and you will never be loved unless you lose weight or you look differently or eat differently. That's a self-chosen stress. Or sorry, you don't need it
when your kid is sick, your pet is sick, your parent is sick, good stress. Or you want to be stressed in that moment because that puts you on alert, it puts you into action. It puts you in the correct state of, whoa, this is not good. I have to be on it.
Stress alerts us to what needs to be done, what really needs to be done when we create self-chosen stressors of I'm unlovable. That's nonsense. Trying to create an impossible to have body oof so many people do this, that's self-chosen stress unfavorably and consistently and constantly comparing oneself to others. How does that work? Ain't fun. Never takes us where we want to go. Let other people inspire you, fine.
But if you're constantly comparing and despairing, ah, I'll tell you another self chosen stress, believing in a random and loveless universe without any higher power or a deeper code. I mean that if you're living in a random universe, of course you're gonna be stressed. And there's a lot more, there's so many more self-chosen stressor.
So my friends, can you see how who we are and how we think, feel, and believe literally creates our body chemistry and our metabolism? That's the whole point of this conversation.
Can you see how reaching our natural weight is a true long-term gain?
And that to get to our natural weight and metabolism, we need to put ourselves in the more natural inner state that we are meant to be in for a good portion of the day, which is at best the physiologic relaxation response. And at least a place where we are not letting self-chosen stressors that don't do us any good, drive us into the ground and drive us into misery and drive us into stupidity and drive us into self hate and drive us into strategies that, that, that give us nothing.
The relaxation response puts us in the optimum state of digestion, assimilation, appetite, regulation, day in, day out, calorie burning, my friends, it is as simple and as straightforward as that. This doesn't mean get this out of your head right now. This doesn't mean that, oh, I have to turn myself or I have to turn my client into this Buddha, into this peaceful meditator who never gets upset. No, I want you to get upset. I want you to get stressed. I want your clients to be upset and stressed. Why? Because it's gonna happen. It's life.
It's learning how to mature into life. So we're actually letting the real stressors, the real challenges come to the forefront. And we're letting stressors that we invent, that are nonsense, that pull us down, that don't work. We're letting them go. So then we have a different kind of balance in our life. And metabolism begins to reach its natural and rightful place.
So I want you to remember this first and foremost, if you and I cannot help our client a relax into the weight loss journey more and more, I don't want you to think in absolutes because your client will stress into it. They will have stress. It's not like, oh, Mr and Mrs. Client, you just want into stress around this. That's bad. No, you are inviting them slowly into more trust, more faith, more presence, more embodiment, more being here, more being in the moment, more dropping out of there. I hate myself, I hate myself. I dropping out of that nonsense and into, okay, how do I move forward? How do I step into my weight loss day in a whole different way?
Okay, my friends. Second number two on our diet and mind body nutrition checklist when it comes to weight is eating speed.
So on one level, eating speed is everything. This might sound a little bit simplistic to you. I am holding this with such great import. I am holding this. Put this number two to the stress relaxation continuum. Because as you know, if we eat fast, we will definitionally be eating in a physiologic stress response. Why? Because the act of eating fast is considered by your body, by biology. That's how genetics works. You didn't invent that. I didn't invent that. This isn't an airy fairy concept. This is just how we're wired. As soon as you take a, you could be the most relaxed person in the world, here's a meal and you start eating it fast, your body goes into a stress response, particularly a localized stress response around the digestive system. So if we eat fast, we will definitionally be in a physiologic stress response. And you know now what that can mean when it comes to weight. So what I wanna say to you is fast eaters will never be able to find and consistently experience their natural appetite regulation. Period. It's, it's, it's physics, it's math. You cannot get any more scientific than that. You want your natural appetite regulation. You want your clients to have their natural appetite regulation. Then we're gonna be asking them the question you ask every client the question, are you a fast eater, a moderate eater, or a slow eater? Mr. And Mrs. Client, how would you categorize yourself? And if they say fast eater, if they say moderate eater, their job, I don't care how long it takes, is to become a slow eater.
Now we have a natural appetite regulation. It's built in it's wise, it's efficient, and it supports our natural weight and our natural metabolism. And again, technically speaking, appetite regulation ought not be a problem for humans. For most creatures on the planet, appetite regulation is not an issue. The only creatures actually, other than humans that have an issue with appetite regulation tend to be the pets of humans or creatures in the wild that are exposed to human garbage essentially. So it's our eating speed and our poor quality diet that will tend to disrupt our natural appetite regulation. My friends, this is so, so important,
thank you to the field of dietetics that figured out somewhere along the line that it takes the body approximately 20 minutes to realize that it is full.
Another way of saying that is your body needs time to discern what's in your meal. It needs time to break it down and figure out, okay, what did I get? What's here? What's going on? What's going down? That helps your body figure out when it can say, enough, did I get enough fat? Did I get enough protein? Did I get enough micronutrition? So by the way, everything I'm saying to you, you're gonna be saying to your client, so as clear and decisive as I'm saying it to you, that's as clear and decisive that I would love for you to say this to your client. Be honest, be open, be direct. Let them know how important it is.
You need to be able to step into your teacher archetype within a session because there's a good chance that your client has been potentially eating unconsciously and they've been eating unconsciously fast. And it's not a make wrong, it's not like, oh, you client, you're, you're so awful. You know, we eat fast because we've been conditioned by society, my friends, we've been conditioned by culture, by family, by the world. There's a lot of fast eats out there. In other words, this just a habit. It's just a habit. It's a learned habit and it's the kind of habit that you don't need to think to do. It does itself. Usually the negative habits that we have, the unwanted habits, they're automatic and they're unconscious and they're repetitive. You don't have to think, gee, I really want to try to develop a fast eating habit. You've got it. Your body just does it by itself.
Now, even though it's a learned habit, many humans, what is the percentage? I have no idea, but it's a lot. Many humans also eat fast because we secretly fear food. We secretly fear appetite. We believe that food is the enemy. We believe that food will make us fat. We believe that fat in food will make us fat. So because we have those toxic nutritional beliefs running us, we will therefore do something which is actually intelligent, which is we're gonna rush through the eating experience. Because anytime you're confronting the enemy, you wanna get it over with really quickly. You wanna either run the heck away or you wanna defeat the enemy really fast. Lions chasing you, you want to kill it or you want run away. And you don't want that to take all day because it can take all day. Nature knows you got no more than a few minutes to make something happen. So what I'm saying is the survival mind wants to go through something really fast when it feels threatened, that can contribute or cause fast eating for people.
Here's something else I wanna say about fast eating. Eating fast can be, what you've heard me mention is a state addiction. So yes, people can get addicted to alcohol. Yes, people can get addicted to opiates. Yes, they can get addicted to cocaine. Yes, they can get addicted to marijuana, they can get addicted to tobacco. But we can also get addicted to, you know, different states of being. We can get addicted to our own stress. We can get addicted to feeling like a victim. We can get addicted to. Woe is me, we can get addicted to, I gotta move really fast. I gotta rush through my day. And we can literally get addicted to eating fast because it makes us feel good.
By the way, you eat really fast and you eat a lot of food fast and it will often take you from a state of stress, believe it or not, into a state of relaxation. Why? Because first you're stressed at some point, some point, some point when there's enough food in the body and the brain realizes, okay, I'm actually not being chased by a lion and holy guacamole, I've got a lot of food in my gut. I need to digest this food and in order to digest this food, I need to go into a state of relaxation. That's when you start to become like a couch potato. That's when your system literally calms down. 'cause you have a lot of food, you ate it fast. So there's actually relaxation somewhere at the end for many people of state, of, of fast eating. So that's what I'm calling a state addiction. We get addicted to that state. Attached to that state.
Yet another way of saying this is we often eat fast simply because it helps us to not be present. A benefit of eating fast is it helps us not be present. Why is it good to not be present? Well is good to not be present. If I'm in a lot of pain, if I'm in emotional hurt, um, if I don't know what to do about food or what to eat or what's going on, or how do I lose this weight or I hate my body or just this whole nutrition thing and this eating thing and this weight thing, it just made me crazy. I dunno what to do. I just can't. I can't be present to all this. Lemme just eat fast.
Eating fast definitionally means I'm not present.
Honestly, it's no different than okay, if you're a mother or a father and you're with your kid and they're talking, they're telling you about something important and you're just not paying attention, you're on your phone, you're daydreaming, you're pretending that you're listening to them and you're not. You're not being present. You're not being present to the thing that's actually happening. Or if you're with your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, lover, and they're being all close and warm and fuzzy and you're busy worrying about this, that, or the other thing and you're off somewhere else in your head, you're not present. You're not present to the moment. You could be driving in your car and texting and not realize you're about to get into an accident. You're not being present to the thing you're actually doing.
For many people, we don't want to be fully present. And if my client comes to see me and their complaint is, Hey Mark, I want to lose weight. I have not been able to lose weight, you know, and I'm thinking in the back of my mind, great. Then I want to help you lose weight. And one of the ways that a human is able to shapeshift and to get anything, anything accomplished in the world is you gotta be present to the task at hand. You wanna be a better driver, pay attention. You wanna be a better artist? Pay attention. You wanna learn what's in the book. Then as you're reading it, pay attention. You wanna get to know somebody better than pay attention when you talk to them. You wanna learn how to shapeshift your body and how to better nutrify, how to better nourish it, how to better bring out your natural metabolism. Pay attention. What is the most fundamental place to pay attention when it comes to food and nutrition is to actually pay attention in the actual act when you're actually eating it. It's as fundamental, as simple as that. That that's step one. So if I stated this in the positive, let me state this in the positive, we eat fast because we're learning to be conscious, aware and present and we haven't quite gotten there yet, but we're learning.
So you see your client as a fast eater, I'm seeing somebody, okay? You need to learn how to be more conscious, aware and present is that's gonna help you be a better person in your life. And it's actually going to help you better get where you say you want to go. Okay, let's say this in some different words. Fast eating equals stress. Response equals for many people, weight gain or inability to lose weight. Fast eating allows us to be not present. Another way to say not present is fast eating causes us to disembody. It is a form of disembodiment. It is a form of checking out of the body.
Your client, you, anyone who is asking to lose a bunch of pounds of body fat, that is a big ask. You are wanting to shapeshift the physical form. That is a big ask, find, ask, find to ask that fine to want it. But if you want to change the body, you gotta be in it. You gotta be operating in it. You have to be present in it. If you want to make your brain smarter when it comes to learning a language, you have to be present when you are learning your language lessons. If you wanna make better jewelry, then you have to be present and not be doing seven other things while you're making jewelry. You have to focus. You wanna shapeshift the body, you gotta get back into the body. Eating at a relaxed, natural pace where you're present to the food and present to yourself and present to taste, pleasure, aroma satisfaction. You change your physiology, you bring in the cephalic phase, digestive response, the head phase of digestion, which scientists tell us is responsible for approximately 40 to 60% of our digestive power, our calorie burning, and a simulative power at any given meal. The head phase of digestion, taste, pleasure, aroma satisfaction, the visuals, the experience of a meal. You're a human being. You need to be present to that fast eating, as you know, because fast eating is a stressor that stress or can lead to a host of unwanted digestive symptoms. Bloating, gas, heartburn, just feeling queasy after a meal. It's so common. So here's what I wanna say, my friends becoming a slow eater is, check it out, non-negotiable. Gotta do it when it comes to long-term, sustainable weight loss. So if my client says to me, okay, mark, you, you know, thanks for sharing that. Thanks for giving me all the simple scientific mind cookies that you just gave me. But you know, I tried to become a slow eater once. I couldn't do it. So I, I don't want to do this and I'm gonna tell them, great, then I can't help you get where you want to go. And in my opinion, nobody can remind me again, Mr. And Mrs. Client, how long have you been trying to lose weight? How many diets have you tried? How many years has this been? How many strategies have you done? How many times have you lost weight and gained it back? I get that it's hard for you to eat slow. You know, at some point it was hard for you to learn how to tie your shoe or wipe your butt, but you know something, gotta do it. You wanna be effective in this world. You gotta know how to tie your shoes and a host of other basic activities when it comes to the human body. You say you want to lose weight and you are not willing to do the basic work. What you're telling me is you don't wanna lose weight. That's what you're telling me. You don't want to do the key, fundamental, physiologic, scientific, non-negotiable work. You wanna get rid of your headache telling you you gotta stop banging your head against the wall. Nothing else to do.
So many of our weight loss clients, my friends are in a fight. They're in a struggle with food. They see food as the enemy. And eating fast again is a symbolic way to avoid the enemy. I want you to watch the look on people's faces when you are introducing this concept, and I'm always introducing it in an uplifting, upbeat way. I don't smack my client over the head unless they get resistant with me, unless they, you know, argue for their limitations. What do I mean by arguing for their limitations? Oh, I tried that once. Oh really? Yeah. I tried being nice once it didn't work, so I'm never gonna be nice again. It doesn't work like that. I don't care if you tried once, I don't care if you tried 20 times, we're now up to number 21 and you know something, we're gonna get this right because anyone can do it. It's actually doable. People all over the world do it. Kids do it. Infants do it. You can do it too. The reason why it's hard for people
is because there's deep toxic nutritional beliefs in there that are driving them.
Becoming a slow eater is always about becoming a more nourished, pleasured, sensuous, present and aware eater. People think it's like, ah, I gotta do this thing. What people are thinking. It's an experience of enjoyment and savoring. It's not about counting bites and chews. If you're gonna count bites and chews, throw that out the window, it ain't gonna work. Then you're eating with your head, you're crunching numbers. Silly doesn't work. You're gonna be mechanical, you're gonna be robotic. Okay, fine. Some people like to do that as a way to ground this practice, that's fine. But really, when I say slow eating, what I am saying is pleasure and sensuous relaxed here, present. Just, I don't know, think of some great scene in a movie where you know, a couple is at dinner together and they're just enjoying it and enjoying each other and enjoying life and enjoying the food and it's a dance and it's wonderful. That's what I'm saying. So becoming a slow eater means we put our body into a physiologic relaxation response when eating with all the attendant benefits thereof. And I wanna remind you my friends, becoming a slow eater is a practice
and a practice takes time. By the way, you know this piece about being a pleasured, sensuous aware eater. You know, slow is sexy. Slow is the new sexy. Yeah, fast dancing is really sexy, but you know, so is slow.
Slow means not boring. Slow means you are getting into the sensation of life and you're practicing what you say you want to experience, which is to have a better experience of life is to be happier. Well, we're happier when we're feeling pleasured. And every time a human eats, it's an opportunity for pleasure. And your client is not necessarily going to become a slow eater within a week or a month or even four months. I don't care how long it takes. I'm trying to think in terms of clients I've seen over the years, the most it's taken someone to really begin to practice consistent. Slow eating is maybe six months, and that's really pushing that person. They just had a hard time and it was a huge breakthrough when it finally happened because it's not just about changing speed because the slow eating was all about that person getting into relationship with food and letting go of their fear of food. The fear of food was so deep because for them it's really not a fear of food, it's a fear of body fat. And it's really not a fear of body fat. It's a fear of what body fat means, which is I will be unlovable, I will not be okay. Nobody will choose me. The world will hate me. I will be looked upon with scorn. My life will be misery and I will not be one of those glamorous people who apparently has everything. So whenever your client says anything that you want them to do that you know is gonna help them, and if they say, yeah, well I tried that before and it didn't work. Like slow eating, it means they didn't put in the work. The W word WORK work has become a dirty word for a lot of people. Oh, I tried that. It takes Work. It takes practice, practice, practice, practice. Okay, my friends, next on our diet and mind body nutrition checklist, when it comes to weight macronutrient, balance, what a wonderful, wonderful distinction. What a wonderful nutritional tool to use to help people. So simply put, this is a beautiful, powerful nutritional distinction that can and often can and often not always have a profound effect on weight and its loss. So it's a great place to start with for many clients. Why? Because for many clients you will notice that they have excess poor quality carbohydrates in their diet. That for a weight loss client will often lead to weight gain. Another way of saying that is that for many clients, lack of protein or essential fat will lead to weight gain or inability to lose it.
Let's say this another way. For many clients, excess protein and maybe even fat and minimal carbohydrates, which is a lot of people on high protein diets, a lot of people on ancestral or paleo diets or having minimal carbohydrates, they'll end up craving food, which leads to a yo-yo effect on weight
and imbalance in macronutrients also deregulates appetite. When we are deficient in a macronutrient, the body will scream hungry. Your body's not smart enough to tell you when you're deficient in fiber, when you're deficient in fat, when you're deficient in protein or you're deficient in a little bit of sweet, but the body is smart enough to scream hungry. As we're going to see more deeply in our sessions and conversations on binge eating, overeating and emotional eating. An imbalance in macronutrients will invariably, for, for a majority of people, lead to unwanted overeating, unwanted emotional eating, unwanted binge eating. Again, that's the body screaming for what it needs.
You know, experientially, anecdotally, clinically, and now supported by the research we are seeing that diets higher in healthy fat and healthy protein can have a very positive impact on weight and it's loss. Here's the thing, this doesn't mean everyone should do this or everyone should eat this kind of diet.
It is simply a great nutritional tweak. Change to consider
when your client comes in and they're complaining that they wanna lose weight and they can't. It. If I meet somebody and they're eating tons of carbohydrates and tons of poor quality carbohydrates and they're happy and they're healthy and they have the weight that they want, I could care less about changing their diet and not looking to change people's diet. So everybody eats like this or everybody eats like that, or everybody eats like me, careful of that. Please, my friends, be careful. I'm only looking to change someone's diet if they have a complaint, that's all. If they don't have a complaint, then whatever they're doing obviously is working for them and there's no need to have a conversation. Now, when it comes to macronutrient balance, I need you to get this into your mind, into your brain, into your memory banks. There is zero science behind. Listen to this, exactly how much protein or fat any one person should be eating. There are only ranges based upon weight, size, age, and sex.
So if you really need to know, well, I need to know that. Google it. You'll find it. Google it. If you need to know, okay, how much protein do I need? If you need to know how much fat do I need and I need to go look it up online, do you really think a computer is going to tell you how much protein or fat your specific body actually needs? Ain't gonna happen. You know, honestly, you could even go get certain blood tests and it can be determined. Wow, you are deficient in this, you're deficient in fat. Um, now you might be deficient in fat because you're not eating enough fat. You might be deficient in fat because you're not absorbing the fat and you're eating enough. So everything depends. But all I wanna say is this, for the, for 95% of practitioners, and I mean this, you don't need to be living in the world of, well, exactly how much protein and fat and what is the exact ratio that my client should have?
If there was some exact amount and you had to figure out, okay, uh, wait, I only had 17 grams of protein today, I need to eat 20. Um, you'll eventually go a little crazy. Now, yes, there are certain people who are doing certain type of athletic events or bodybuilding. Yeah, you can get real specific with that group. I am, that's not my expertise, nor is it my interest. And that's a very limited group of clientele. And if you wanna learn that, it's interesting and it's fascinating. Um, but it's uber specific. And again, it's not always perfect and it doesn't always work. But with that said, your job as a practitioner is to begin to learn to eyeball your client's macronutrient balance based upon the dietary intake. We're going to be talking about this in a later conversation. I'm not gonna tell you how I do this right now, but your job as a practitioner is to learn how to eyeball your client's macronutrient balance based upon the dietary intake that you do with them. And then you're gonna be adjusting their macronutrient balance based on approximate portion sizes and guesstimations, because humans change every day what the body needs changes every day. And we are learning to just be more natural creatures with our food, with our environment, and not need to follow a number because people have been burdened with numbers, numbers on the scale and numbers of how much nutrients I should have. And yes, it's good if you are in the realm of functional nutrition or you're a functional medical practitioner, um, or you're the kind of practitioner that is working with various kinds of metabolic tests and blood tests, fine play with numbers, that's great, but ultimately you're gonna have to learn how to eyeball things and your client is going to have to learn how to be in a dance with their relationship with food. And by the way, I want you to hear, when I'm talking about macro macronutrient balance, and I mentioned that a lot of people are gaining weight because of excess poor quality carbohydrates in the diet. It's true, my friends, you know, when, when we're looking collectively at what's the problem, it's the excess sugar, high fructose corn syrup, all the refined cookies and cakes and soft drinks and sodas and breads and, and everything that you typically get in a supermarket, we tend to be eating too much of it. So I'm not saying carbohydrates are bad, it's about quantity. So I want you to get the concept of evil foods out of your mind. Oh, you can't eat any of this. No, it's not about that. It's about relative amount as far as I'm concerned. You could eat any junk you want because you're gonna die anyway at some point. So it's your choice. If my client wants to lose weight and that is their complaint, and I notice they are on a high poor quality carbohydrate diet, I'm happy inside because I'm thinking, man, I got a place that I could potentially be a major help to you. And not only is it gonna help you lose weight, it's gonna help you be healthier.
So in this world, we've gotten a little bit hooked on the poor quality carbohydrates because that substance is easy to produce in excess by the food industry, and you can produce a lot of it, and especially with government subsidies around sugar and, um, around sugar, corn and wheat. Um, there's your, there it is right there. Um, which will often sugar corn, wheat, high fructose corn syrup with government subsidies. Food companies are making 'em a good profit on junk food, so they want you to be eating it. Um, so the bottom line is, yeah, we're collectively looking to change our diet for sure, but at the same time, I don't want you to get caught up, nor do I want my client to get caught up and oh my God, I can never have sugar again. No, it's not true. Unless somebody is the kind of person that just freaks out and is truly triggered by a small amount of sugar, then fine. Okay, then try to help them not have sugar. But for the majority of human beings, we're humans, we're on planet earth. You have to have oftentimes a little bit of leeway in there so you're not driving yourself crazy, okay? Please remember that fat and food does not mean fat on the body. A high healthy fat diet is quite underrated, especially when it comes to weight loss and reaching our natural weight. It's, it's really fascinating. Um, and by the way, when I'm speaking of eating a high, higher fat diet, it's always healthy fats. It's always high quality fats. I'm talking about high quality oils that are produced without a lot of heat and without a lot of, uh, chemical processing. I'm talking about your avocados. I'm talking about your high quality nuts and seeds. I'm talking about your high quality dairy, your high quality fish, and yes, even your high quality meats. For those of you that are not vegans or vegetarians, many of our clients for sure, for sure, for sure, are taken aback when we suggest more dietary fat, which to them means more calories and hence more body fat. So it is your job to help them let go of this old, outdated, toxic nutritional belief.
You have to help them understand that healthy fat will help you actually move in their, in the direction that you want to go. So ultimately, reaching our natural weight doesn't mean limiting our food intake. I want you to get that reaching natural weight doesn't mean limiting food intake. It means finding natural appetite. It means discovering, in this case, through experimentation, the kind of macronutrient balance that works for each one of us.
Honestly, I'm gonna tell you my friends, here's a PhD concept, but I think it's important that everybody knows the macronutrient balance that's right for you personally. Chances are it's very different in the wintertime than it is in the summertime, than it is in the springtime, than it is when you're sick, than it is when you're pregnant, than it is when all of a sudden you're starting to do more exercise. And as we begin to listen to the body, as you begin to slow down, when you eat and get present and let go of all the nonsense in our head, I hate my body, I hate my body, but I hate this. What should I eat? And as we just get present, you start to learn about your body and we begin to become more natural. We notice the foods that we're drawn to. Oh wow, look at this. I'm being drawn to eating more protein lately. I'm being drawn to eating more high fat foods lately. I'm being drawn to eating more lightly lately. I'm being drawn to a more vegan diet lately. Whatever it is, I'm drawn to more liquids lately. I'm drawn to detox. Great. Listen to body wisdom, my friends, we must cultivate that for self and we must encourage it in others. That's the name of the game. The name of the game is not your client comes to you, you tell them what to eat. If you had to tell your client what to eat, what do you want? Tell them every day what to eat. No, that gets boring. Your job is not to be a here's what you eat person exclusively. It's helping people learn to be in bigger, deeper, more beautiful, more interesting relationship with their body. Let's move on my friends. So in our diet and MINDBODY nutrition checklist number four, we're listening for eating rhythm, also known as bio circadian nutrition. When we eat what we eat, in other words, the time of day we eat in our overall eating pattern relative to time and amount, can can can have an impact on body weight, on weight loss resistance, and on appetite regulation. Notice that I'm saying that this doesn't hold true for everyone or at every given time. I am, when I'm gonna talk about eating rhythm, when I talk about how we are optimally designed to have our biggest meal at midday, we are optimally designed to not eat our biggest meal at night when we're discussing eating rhythm, it's not about the right way for all people all the time. It's not about you telling your client, oh, this is the way to eat. It's a tool we use when a person has a complaint. If somebody tells me, yeah, I eat a small breakfast, a small lunch, and a huge dinner, how's that working for you? I'm fit, I'm toned. I have the perfect weight. I love my life. I have billions of dollars. I'm the happiest person on the planet. Great. I'm not gonna change their eating rhythm. In fact, I might even try to do what they do. All it is, is it's a tool that we use when a client has a complaint. Because for many people, if their eating rhythm is a bit skewed and they are trying to lose weight and they have been unsuccessful and they haven't tried working with meal timing, this is potentially a great place to work. That's all I'm saying. You only do this if you have a complaint or if you just wish to experiment. That's all. Nutrition is a journey. How we nourish the body. It's a journey. It is an ongoing, lifelong scientific experiment. You don't need to be a scientist to be a scientist, meaning I'm a scientist of my own body. I listen to it, I watch it, I observe it. This is step numero uno. For any good scientist, you must be an astute, non-biased observer. Just observe the details, observe the facts. I eat this, I feel like that I eat at this time. Here's what I notice. Let me change that. Eat a bigger meal at lunch and a smaller meal at dinner, and then notice what happens. My friends, that's just an experiment to see what works, to see if it helps us. So we offer this tweak, this change to our client as an experiment. Let's try this and see what happens.
You know, for many clients when it comes to weight loss for many clients, not all, when it comes to weight loss, skipping meals, particularly breakfast and lunch, breakfast and or lunch, skipping meals will contribute to weight gain and or the ability to lose it, by the way, via the survival response. Body's waiting for food, body's waiting for breakfast, body's waiting for lunch, doesn't get it. Why isn't it getting breakfast or lunch? Because my client thinks, Hey, I'm trying to lose weight. Well, duh, just don't eat food. Well, duh, I'm gonna wake up today and just try to not eat breakfast or this tiny amount. I'll just have a bunch of coffee or try to eat just a salad for lunch. And your body's going, huh? This is my most calorie burning calorie active, metabolically powerful part of the day. IE 11 30 12, 12 31, 1 30, and there ain't no food here. There's hardly any, God, I must be on a desert island. I must be in a survival situation. Better slow down calorie burning metabolism, better store body fat, better not build muscle. That's what your body says.
So skipping meals almost guarantees you that you're gonna slow down your metabolism because your body's smart. It's not a bad thing, it's a smart thing. Now, for many clients, what they'll also do, I've noticed over the years, excuse me, is that they'll have a small breakfast or no breakfast, and they'll try to eat as late a lunch as possible, and they'll actually eat their lunch at two or two 30 or three thinking, oh, I just wanna make it as long as I can without eating food. Well, you've just patched your biggest metabolic window when the sun is highest in the sky, 12, approximately 12 to one 30 I, I'd rather you eat your biggest meal than if you're trying to lose weight and you can't, and you're eating your lunch at two 30 or three. I would rather you eat your lunch at 12 or 1230 or one. You see where I'm saying, you see where I'm going with this? For many clients, they're eating the majority of their calories in approximately the last third or quarter of their day.
Many people I notice who are weight loss clients, they can't lose weight, particularly if they're city dwellers, particularly if they are oftentimes single or they come home late, they really haven't gotten a good meal during the day, they haven't eaten much, they've just scrambled here and there for food, and they come home. And I've had clients over the years, they have a massive meal at eight, nine or 10 o'clock, and they're having difficulty losing weight.
So I'm gonna do my best to have them change that. I'm gonna do my best to inspire them to experiment, having a nice sit down breakfast before they go to work or at work, having a nice sit down lunch, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever amount of time they can afford, take a few deep breaths, put on some music in the office. However, you can carve out that time as an experiment.
And then maybe I might even ask them to have a nice big late afternoon or early evening snack just so when they get home, they're not super hungry and ravenous, once again as an experiment. Let's see if this impacts your energy, your mood, and of course most important, your weight. And it might not, but honestly, for the kind of client I just mentioned, 19 outta 20 times, you do get a nice result. And even if it doesn't help directly with weight, it'll help them clear up other secondary conditions. By the way, working with bio circadian nutrition also helps us naturally regulate appetite because your weight loss client is busy thinking food is the enemy. So in their mind, they have this weird eating pattern, whatever it might be, because they're trying to not eat, and actually they're ending up binging because their body's starving.
So when we're actually eating, for many people, for many people, not all regular meals, regular snacks, all of a sudden their appetite is handled. And you don't find yourself at these odd times of day eating far more than you want to because you have gotten out of your mind and you're now embodying, and you are working with the body in a way where the body actually naturally works. So you're gonna see, when we get into dietary intake, you're gonna be asking your client, what do you eat for breakfast? But you're also eating, asking them, what time do you eat breakfast? Do you have a snack in the morning? What time is that snack? What time do you eat lunch? Do you eat 'em in the afternoon? Snack? What time? So with all clients, I'm getting exactly when they eat and what they eat and the when they eat what they eat tells me a heck of a lot. It gives me a snapshot of their day, it gives me a snapshot of their week. I'm understanding, is there five? Is Monday through Friday, does that look different in terms of meal timing? Then Saturday and Sunday, are they traveling, you know, a week out of the month or twice a month? Again, are they skipping meals? I'm noticing these things. I'm noticing as I'm talking to my client when they say, oh, I don't even eat breakfast. I, I'm never hungry at breakfast. And then, okay, great, fine, go to eat for lunch. And then I get to dinner time and it turns out that they're eating a nine o'clock dinner and then they have a 12 o'clock snack before they go to bed. It is predictable that they're not gonna be hungry when they wake up at seven o'clock in the morning.
So for that person, if they're trying to lose weight and it's unsuccessful, I'm gonna be working with them to shift their meal timing. It's gonna take a little time, but once again, it's an experiment. And when you actually work with a person like that, who's saying, well, I'm not hungry at breakfast now, there, now by the way, my friends, there are some people who are just naturally not breakfast eaters and they're fine. So I just wanna say that there's people who are not breakfast eaters in general. General, general, general, general generalities hear me out. What I wanna say is the three meal a day concept I find is nutritionally useful. Three meals a day with a few snacks I find nutritionally useful for a majority of people. Three meals a day or three meals plus several snacks. And you and I will find people, and you might be one of those who just does two meals a day, you might find people who do eight small meals a day, eat small snacks a day, and they do great. You might find a person who eats a small meal in the morning and a big meal in the evening, and they do great. There are actually times during the year, oftentimes for me during the summer where for a few weeks I will be eating very little during the day and I have a big meal at night. And for some reason my body craves that and that's what works.
I can't explain it to you, actually, I could try. Um, but there's no hard science around that. But we're going with observation. We're learning, you and I, our clients, we're learning to trust the body.
Trust is a big thing, my friends, because your weight loss client doesn't trust their body oftentimes. Why? Because their body's not doing what they want it to do. Why should they trust it? I want a skinny body. You're not a skinny body. I want a thin body. I want a thin her body. I want this body to lose weight is not losing weight. I say, Hey, hence I don't trust it. Now there's a darn good chance that before the whole weight thing, they weren't necessarily trusting their body and nobody's fault. That's how they were brought into this world. That's how they were raised, conditioned, educated, no fault, no blame.
And by the way, when I'm shifting my weight loss client eating rhythm, I'm always doing it in the spirit that this is an experiment and I'm not just looking for it to be a weight loss strategy. Just so you know, I'm also operating on the assumption that this can impact you positively. If the body is carrying around unneeded excess weight, then chances are it's got other symptoms, minor or not so minor, that will be helped and alleviated as we do a way of eating, find a way of eating and nourishing ourselves that actually works for us.
So based on the dietary intake, you'll be noticing when your client eats whatever it is they are eating, weight loss clients, we'll often try to cheat their appetite, control it, and hold off from eating for as long as they can. I just want you to be aware of that. You might not do that. Your client often does. You have to learn that your client is not you. Some of them are very much like you, some of them are very much like me, so that's fine. But you have to understand the person in front of you. You have to understand their psychology. So a lot of this training, what I'm doing is I'm sharing with you the psychology, the thinking process that a lot of humans have in this case when it comes to weight loss, what's going on in their mind. So once you understand what's going on in a person's mind, you can better steer them in a direction that you want them to go based upon what their complaint is and based upon the fact that you want to help them in this case with their weight.
So once again, for majority of humans, we calorie burn most efficiently in the first half of our day.
And this is certainly true for all humans during daylight hours. Can you skew that in terms of exercising late at night and changing your meal pattern? Sure. I'm saying for a majority of humans, this is just how we are designed. We are designed to track the sun. It's simple as that. We're designed to follow the light. Hmm. You know, we tend to peak in our calorie burning capacity when the sun is highest in the sky. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
That's when the world is most hot and metabolically active.
Everything you eat comes from the sun. You eat a plant, the plant exists because of the sun. You eat an animal, that animal exists because it ate a bunch of plants or it ate another animal that ate a bunch of plants. So ultimately we are pulling nutrition from the sun in terms of what we eat.
So we are creatures of the light, so to speak. We're creatures of the sun. You know, lastly, I do wanna point out, and many people simply have a very haphazard and erratic eating pattern. Just doesn't follow a good pattern. They, it's, it's just completely haphazard. I see this with people who travel a lot. I for work, I see this with um, mothers and single mothers, especially if they are not getting a lot of help and they're just dealing with the kids and they're eating their kids' leftovers. Um, and they just have erratic eating patterns that just have no rhyme or reason. And if this is the case with your weight loss client, I'm gonna give you a heads up that a set schedule of regular meals, if your client is a weight loss client and they have an erratic eating pattern, you put them on a set schedule of regular meals as best as possible, that can make a huge difference when it comes to weight loss.
Okay? I love this conversation and it's not over just yet, but it's over for now in this session. So this is the end of weight part three, and I'm going to continue the diet and Mind Body nutrition checklist that we've been working on in part four. Thanks, my friends. Can't wait to see you on the other side.

PART 4

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Once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in our conversation about weight and body image, part four of eight. Now we have been working with our diet and mind body nutrition checklist. We've already talked about numbers 1, 2, 3, and four, stress and relaxation, eating speed, macronutrient, balance rhythm. Now for the diet and MINDBODY nutrition checklist, when it comes to weight, we're going to talk about nourishment. Now, before we start in just a couple of quick reminders. These are distinctions. All of these are distinctions that we listen for when it comes to weight loss. We're trying to determine what factors might be useful when it comes to helping our client long-term in a sustainable way to reach their natural weight. Please notice that by working with any of these distinctions, even though your client might not lose any weight in their work with you, or they might only lose some of the weight, or whatever the number is, working with these distinctions moves you in the direction of success. Why? Because it can help in so many other ways when it comes to energy level, mood, memory, cognition, mental acuity, digestion, sleep, and overall sense of wellbeing. And quite honestly, a more empowered relationship with food and body. So, nourishment and weight loss, my friends, chances are when you have a weight loss client walk into your office, um, their relationship with food might be a punishing one. The bottom line is that slowly baby steps adopting a nourishing relationship with food can lead to natural weight and natural appetite regulation stated in the opposite, my friends, a punishing relationship with food equals stress response. So it's all about baby steps and constant reminders. That's the key. You are here to help your client literally reprogram themselves, reeducate themselves, restore their relationship with food, so they're living in a more nourishing universe. You are helping them claim their actual birthright. Now, my friends, this is nothing short or profound, so I just wanna let you know, my goal with every client, and in this case, every weight loss client, is to slowly help them adopt a nourishing relationship with food. Plain and simple, humans eat animals feed.
You know, animals are not worried about dining. They're not worried about, should I eat this nutrition, that nutrition, they have instinctive behavior. Animals aren't needing books. They're not getting online. They know what to do. It is built into their DNA humans. We're in a different situation. It's just the way it is. We're kind of in this strange, in-between state, where we need, as a human being on planet earth, we need to learn how to nourish ourselves. We need to learn that a punishing relationship with food has a negative impact nutritionally, metabolically on the body, but it has a negative impact, you know, in our entire personal world. Now, I really want you to be able to sniff out with your clients. In a first session, I want you to be able to tell me, if I'm a fly on the wall in your first session with a client, does your client have a relationship with food that's nourishing or punishing? And I'm assuming that at best, for a majority of your weight loss clients, it might be neutral. And on average, it likely might be punishing. So you are here to help reeducate your client. You know, so many people do things to the body. They actually feed it correctly. They actually exercise it correctly. They actually take good supplements, and that's great. But I know so many people who are doing all the right things, and they still don't have a nourishing experience of food and body. It's like they have all this information in their head and they're doing these things, um, and there's no real sense of nourishment. And when I say nourishment, it's warm, it's fuzzy, it's sweet. It's a natural glow that we experience in this world. When we feel we are, we're getting what we need to smile. We're getting what we need that touches us. We're getting what we need that opens up our mind, our heart, our chemistry. So on one level, we're actually helping our clients reeducate themselves to live in a nourishing universe. Forget about food for a second. I'm talking about a nourishing universe. That's what I say when I mean, you're helping your client reclaim their birthright, because we are often taught that the world is a jungle. It's a dog eat dog world. It's a competition. And a lot of people are competing with themselves, with invisible others to have the nicest body they want the hottest this and the hottest that. And if we don't have that, we're not okay. We won't be loved. We won't be good with who we are. And so, not only does food become malnourishing in our experience of it, but the world feels like it's a competitive jungle. And the reality is, you know, the world feeds us. The world feeds us with beauty, with nature, with sun, with touch, with warmth, with love, with communication, with people, with relationships, uh, with art, with music, with children, with animals. The world's feeding us in so many ways. You know, oftentimes we collapse nourishment and make it just mean about food. And here's your client. They're constantly obsessing about food and body. And there's not much nourishment coming in. There's not much nourishment coming in with food. And honestly, there's not a lot of nourishment coming in from other places in life. So helping someone have a nourishing relationship with food, again, it's a journey. It's a process. It's not something, oh, you just do this. You push this button, you eat this food. You think this thought, um, uh, you know, by the way, it's fine to let your client know that it's clear to you that their relationship with food is not a nourishing one. Please let them know at some point when you see you're not gonna hit them hard in a first session, it's always in a gentle way. You can explain to them the implications, how, you know, when my relationship with food is not so nourishing, but it's more punishing. That's gonna create a physiologic stress response. And here's how stress can likely impact weight. So you're gonna look to give your client nourishment practices, nourishment practices that might include creating a positive eating environment, eating with people who uplift us, eating quality food, putting good energy and time into meal prep, slowing down with food, allowing yourself to feel pleasure with food, creating a more nourishing experience at work, or when you are eating out or when traveling, planning meals, planning snacks when you're on the road, getting help with meals or meal prep, if that's what my client truly needs. Eats relaxing into the eating experience. So what you're gonna be doing is listening to your client. And your job is to invent homework assignments that are specific to your client based upon your assessment, your intuitions, and what you're seeing about that person as you're learning about them and asking questions about their experience of food, body, and life, their experience of, you know, are they creating a nourishing, uh, environment sensation when it comes to any given meal? By the way, your job as a practitioner is also to conscientiously. Listen to your client in every session for the places where they need to change their language around food. You know, we often talk in a way that's very negative. Oh, I just can't control myself around eating. Oh, well, if I could just stop eating that and only eat this, wait a second. Time out. Big deep breath. We're human. We want to pay attention to our speech and our choice of words and how we verbally express about food and body. I want to invite my client into a nourishing, positive conversation about food. You know, when my client comes in and reports to me, oh, I can't believe I ate that this week and this this week. And I I really tried to, but I did. I couldn't do it. It's okay. Mr. And Mrs. Client, we're gonna start over because you know something, it's not always easy to have a nourishing relationship with food. So the the reality is you tried. The reality is you're putting your energy in that direction. The reality is you're doing your best. And you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna push the reset button now, and this next week, we're gonna just try again because you know something, whenever we don't exactly hit the target that we're trying to hit, um, we oftentimes kick ourselves when we're down. And you know what happens when we do that? We lose momentum. We're self attacking, and it actually doesn't move us forward. So anytime you hear your client using language in a diminishing, attacking, negative, insulting, defeatist, or pessimistic way, that's your opportunity to gently raise your hand. Very gently raise your hand because language creates our reality. You might have already explained to your client that their overeating, let's say, is not a willpower issue, and they might shake their heads and agree with you, and then they're gonna come back in in the next session, said, yeah, I really overrate this past week. I can't believe I did that. I just don't have any control over myself. Whoa, time out. Um, what exactly happened? Did you pay attention? Did you look to slow down when you eat? Did you create a nourishing experience? Or were you eating on automatic pilot? So it's not that you have a willpower problem around food or your appetite, really what you have is you're being challenged to get present when you're having a meal. You're getting challenged to be present with food. So that's what your task is. It's no different than being present when you're driving the car. If you get in the car and you're not paying attention, ah, it's not always gonna go. So well, let's move on my friends. Next. In our diet and MINDBODY nutrition checklist, when it comes to weight, let's talk about pleasure.
As you know now, pleasure is a literal metabolic enhancer.
Many of our weight loss clients have a natural and understandable fear of pleasure. And the reason why is because we humans often equate pleasure eating with weight gain. Oh my goodness, if I relax into pleasure, if I enjoy myself, I'll never stop eating. For many people, that is a core fear. Their core fear. If I actually enjoy this, I won't stop. We are here to learn how to live in a body. Your client is here to learn how to live in their body. Many of our weight loss clients who truly have weight to lose, in part, what they're looking to do is learn how to live in a body in a way that works, even if we don't have weight to lose. This is for all humans. From the time you pop out the wound, you're learning how to live in a body. You're learning how to manage all of its functions. Its ups and downs, its challenges, its pains, its pleasure, its discomforts. Now, as you remember, we are inherently designed at the most fundamental level of biology to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Every single creature on the planet, from a single celled organism to a multi-celled organism, to a lizard allian, we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure from food is both a psycho and physiologic requirement. Pleasure from food is required by mind. It's required by our being. Because we're very conscientious about our palette, we're very conscientious about our experience of pleasure. Many people know exactly what gives them pleasure and exactly what doesn't give them pleasure. That's great. So
all those sweet taste buds on your tongue, all those salty taste buds on your tongue, they're sitting there literally waiting for something sweet or waiting for something salty. One of the reasons why they are there is they are literally there to make eating a pleasurable experience. Biology demands, wants, is brilliant enough to want to make eating a pleasurable experience. Biology is brilliant enough to want to make procreation a pleasurable experience. Why? Because if you don't do one of those two things or both, the species doesn't continue game over. No more life on earth. And so we need to eat and we need to procreate, and we need to be driven to do those things because if we're not driven to do those things, they're not gonna happen. So stated differently. When we avoid pleasure with food, when we suppress it, when we try to keep it at bay, the body will Respond with a signal hungry, even if you've eaten a good sized meal.
So for so many of our weight loss clients, they must get into relationship with pleasure, my friends. And we need to invite them back into that experience. And it is not just pleasure with food, even though for many people it is, it is also pleasure in other parts of life. Think of it this way, my friends, when we cut off pleasure from one place, we often end up cutting it off. In general, if you cut off pleasure from food, there's a darn good chance you're gonna cut it off from other places in life. If you cut off pleasure from touch, sensuality, sex, you're gonna cut it off. In other places in life, when we can let pleasure flow with food, with body, with just, just being alive every day, you can just feel pleasure sitting down. You can feel pleasure looking at the sun and taking a deep breath. An unpleased and unpressured human is generally an unhappy and or stressed human.
An unpleased, unpleasure human is generally an unhappy and or stressed human. And once again, you know what physiologic stress does to our metabolism when it comes to weight. That's the point here. Now, I really wanna remind you, this is not a frivolous concept. When I'm talking about pleasure, I'm talking about a deeper level of psychology. I'm talking about a deeper level of science. I'm talking about a deeper level of the human experience we have in this world. Many, many, many humans walking around who do not trust the pleasure experience in their body. They just don't trust this whole thing around pleasure. Oh my God, if I eat, I'm I'm, I'm just never gonna stop. That means you can't trust yourself. And it's understandable, by the way, it's understandable. 'cause that person, for whatever reason, has not learned how to regulate pleasure. And it's not easy. People get hooked on alcohol. People get hooked on drugs. Those are both pleasurable experiences that if we don't learn how to regulate it properly, can lead to a dark road, can lead to an intense addiction. When it comes to food, we often fear the pleasure of food.
Yes, there are also people who get attached to the pleasure of food and they love the pleasure of food. And food becomes their number one source of pleasure. And they return to it again and again and again because it's a great symbolic substitute for other pleasures that we might not be getting. So it's our job to study our client, to listen to our client and to make sure that we understand what is my client's relationship with this wonderful thing called pleasure. Because honestly, for your particular weight loss client, this might be one of the main puzzle pieces that helps light them up. Because I'm gonna tell you something, A lot of people, once they start to invite pleasure back into their life because they have banished it in many ways, it has reverberations when it comes to food body relationship, just their whole experience of the world. People are often in a lot of guilt and shame and protection and stress and anxiety when they're trying to hold off pleasure.
Same with sex. We are taught that, yeah, well, pleasure from sex is fun, but sex is bad. But sex is good, but sex is bad. We get so many mixed messages that so many people don't know what to do with their sexuality or their sex drive. They don't trust it or they might trust it too much, whichever the case might be. But the reality is pleasure has a complexity to it. It's something we need to explore.
It's something each of us has. You, me, your client, every human has their own unique relationship with pleasure.
This is not a cookie, a cookie cutter approach, my friends, none of this is yes, we do our best to bring out the cookie cutter when it's useful. And that's why we're going through these checklists. That's why we're in a diet and mind body nutrition checklist right now. Here's what to listen for. But once you're listening for it, every client is unique.
Does my client have a somewhat healthy or aware or conscious relationship with pleasure? That's what I'm looking to ask. So very specifically, metabolically pleasure catalyzes the relaxation response, which means full healthy digestion, assimilation, and day in, day out calorie burning. How does pleasure catalyze the relaxation response? Okay, it is just how we're designed. Difficult day at work, come home, get a shoulder massage. Ah, that feels so good. Pleasure is designed most levels of pleasure to relax us. Yes, there's certain pleasures that can become so intense that yeah, they can pick up your heart rate and your blood pressure. That's okay. Those are more intense pleasures. Day in, day out pleasures will catalyze a relaxation response, which means pleasure will regulate appetite.
Pleasure can rewire. When we introduce pleasure back into our life, simple pleasure through food, just simple pleasures. It rewires so many of our old patterns of distraction and anxiety. I also believe pleasure points us to this spiritual in a certain way, and it invites our clients to just embody more. Embody means your learning to get to know your own body and to trust it.
Trust my friends equals relaxation response and all that that means. So let's say it directly, reclaiming pleasure with food is a deep act of embodiment, liberation, and freedom that impacts our entire life.
I've seen it again and again and again. So very simply, you could have your clients do a pleasure inventory. Okay, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I want you to go home. I write, want you to write down everything you're gonna do. A pleasure inventory, wrote down everything, persons, places, things, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, foods, substances, anything, any experience that gives you pleasure.
And then when they come back, go over their inventory and start to look at it. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, what did you notice when you wrote down this inventory? Just, did you notice anything, any insights, any aha moments? This is what came up for you.
And you're gonna be listening for where your client, yeah, sure might be relying on food for the majority of their pleasure, but you're gonna go over that inventory. You're gonna see where they can create action steps, where you can create action steps and suggestions. Oh wow. Here are simple pleasures on your list that you can incorporate every day into your life easily.
When you start to help people build up their daily and weekly pleasure inventory, you create a happier human.
If somebody's overly relying on food for pleasure, let me remind you that you cannot take that away from someone. Oh ho Mr. Mr. Alein, you're using food for symbolic pleasure. You have no other pleasure in your life. No wonder you're eating so much, you have to stop doing that. No, never stop my client from doing that. You can take away somebody's main pleasure. What you can do is to invite other doable pleasures, slowly, baby steps over time. Let's include this, include that, include this, include that. And then all of a sudden there is less of a need for food to be somebody's main source of pleasure. So one of the keys, interestingly, is to make this part of your work with clients. Make it celebratory, make it fun, make it interesting, smile about it. The whole point is your, your, your client's on a journey and you are on a journey with them. The more the journey is interesting, the more the journey is fun. The more you celebrate the journey, the more, the more you could laugh along with them, poke them, prod them. Yeah, you know, it's gonna be difficult for your client. But hey, is this so awful to help another human being invite more pleasure into their life and to expand their definition of it and noticing where they're limiting themselves. What wonderful work you get to do. And this work, believe it or not, is as important in the nutritional realm as eat this, don't eat that. There's just different layers of the work that we do with a client to help create a positive long-term nourishing relationship with food and body. Okay, my friends next distinction on our diet and mind body nutrition checklist are food allergies. I'm gonna talk about food allergies. When it comes to weight loss from the big picture, my friends, we live in a time of lowered, lowered immunity. You and I live in a time of poor quality food, genetically engineered food. And we have already had at least several generations of humans who have been exposed to poor quality nutrition and health practices. Which means, you know, there's a little bit of genetic pressure on us.
We don't necessarily have the same strong DNA that our ancestors might have had four generations ago. As far as we can tell, one of the results of this is food allergies. Now, there are many reasons why food allergies show up. Food allergies show up oftentimes because of the actual quality of the food itself. How the food has been genetically engineered over time, such that it is more and more unrecognizable to the human body. Certain foods themselves are genetic experiments, experiments meaning, oh, let's see dairy and milk from a cow, and see what happens. Well, for some genetic strains of humans that works for others, it definitely doesn't something like wheat, as far as we can tell, wheat might not be more than 12,000 years old or 15,000 years old at the most, perhaps in terms of when we started cultivating it. 15,000 years might be a very small time in human development and evolution. That's a short time for an experiment, and it just might be an experiment long term that doesn't work. So bottom line is food allergies can come from lowered immunity, poor quality food. Our DNA is just getting a little weaker, and the genetic strains of certain foods are not as healthful. And when you eat a food, you're allergic to, the body is essentially mounting an immune attack on that food. It's considering that food harmful mounts an immune attack against it.
So the symptoms of a food allergy, here's the thing, can mimic just about any single common symptom You can imagine hundreds of them literally think of any symptoms, brain fog, headache, joint pain, uh, sniffling, postnasal, drip congestion, canned sleep, jittery energy, mood issues, it's so digestive concerns. Um, all of that can be contributed to or caused by a food allergy or a food sensitivity. One of the common symptoms of a food allergy, believe it or not, is weight gain and then ability to lose weight. Another important common symptom of a food allergy is, believe it or not, bloated. And many people are bloated around the midsection because of a food allergy or sensitivity, and they actually think they have belly fat. And really what they have is they just got a lot of liquid in their gut.
Yet another symptom of a food allergy is overeating. Oddly enough, for whatever reason, the human body is strange, it will often continue to go for that which is not good for it. If you are an alcoholic, you will continue to crave alcohol. That's not body wisdom. That's body wisdom being hijacked. Uh, if you are any kind of a drug addict, your body's gonna want that drug, even though that drug's no good for your body, oftentimes people have a food allergy. That food allergy creates a stress response, a mild alarm response. Believe it or not, it actually pumps up your cortisol. It, it, it, it gives you, it can give you a little bit of energy. Um, and we get attached to that state. We literally continue to crave the very food that is harming us.
Interesting phenomenon. Just worth noting. So this is an important nutritional experiment and strategy. Notice how I call it an experiment. I'm always interested in, honestly, the main food allergens, gluten, dairy, soy, corn to a lesser degree. Eggs. That's it. It's, it's, yeah, you know, if somebody's allergic to peppers, they're gonna know it. If somebody is allergic to a weird spice like cumin and they don't know it, um, I'm not gonna be worried about that spice causing my client weight gain. I I just don't see that. I don't know anyone who has. Um, so we're looking at the main food allergens that have been described for many decades. Gluten, dairy, soy, corn, egg. So for many humans, I'm not gonna teach you how to do an elimination diet. You can learn that on your own. The elimination diet is a profound weight loss tool. It can be, can be,
you know, the elimination diet is a, is one of the more profound nutritional strategies in general, other than just eating quality food, I might consider eating quality food. Number one great nutritional strategy closely related is the elimination diet. Great nutritional strategy. Closely related to that in terms of a great nutritional strategy is experimenting with macronutrient balance, right there. Three great nutritional strategies that can change the lives of probably 99 out of a hundred people on planet earth.
So in general, I don't look at food allergies ever in a first session, meaning I'm not starting to talk to a client about that. The reason why is I'm not gonna work on food allergies until with my, and this is with my weight loss client. Talking about a weight loss client. The first thing I'm gonna look at is I want to help them get into slow eating. If they're fast eaters, I want to help them become relaxed eaters. If they're stressed eaters, I will sooner work on macronutrient balance before food allergies. And I'll also sooner work on eating rhythm. Why? Because for most people, most people, food allergies, working with them is a little bit more sensitive. Most humans, if they eat gluten, IE most weak pro wheat, any weak product you can imagine, cookies, cakes, breads, pastas, bagels, muffins, all of it. Um, pizza. They don't wanna be given that up. That's a tough ask in a first second or a third session or a fourth session. It's just a big ask. Um, to ask somebody to let go of dairy, milk, cheese. That could be a big ask. And just so you know, I never frame this as you need to let go of these foods forever. I never ever say that. Always let my client know there's an experiment. We're gonna let this go for about a month and just see how you feel. Just see how you feel. Don't worry about it. It's not a forever thing. See how you feel. Why? Because let's say a client, let's go of gluten and dairy, and all of a sudden they feel great. No more brain fog, no more congestion, no more bloating. They're so happy, they're losing weight. Like, great, Mr. And Mr. Client, what do you wanna do? You wanna try eating that? Go for it. Tell me how you feel I and let them see how they feel. Because after you haven't eaten it for a month and you have all these positive results and you start to eat it again, you start to get the negative results again. So then a person has a choice.
And when body wisdom wakes up and the body wisdom realizes, oh my goodness, I went without this food for four weeks. Look at all these amazing results. I feel great, and now I eat this food again and I don't feel great. Hmm. Your choosing muscle is actually stronger at that point to say no to the offending food. Can you have little bits here and there? Probably, sure. Some people, if their allergy is extreme, then maybe not. But that is up for you to determine. But I'm going to say in general, um, it it, it's not about your client limiting themselves. It's about learning about their body. It's about empowerment through doing what works, through experimenting. You gotta let go of your fear when your client brings up fears. But, but, but, but, but I don't wanna let go of this forever.
You know, when when I hear that, I hear in the back of my mind, you know, I don't wanna let go of my blanket. Don't take away my stuffed animal. I get it. I don't want anybody taking away my stuffed animal and my blanket. I don't want anybody taking away my, my my pizza. Uh, it is a tough one, really. I get it. And sometimes that's our task is to let it go to a great degree. But I'm not gonna harp on that at the beginning. Don't worry, Mr. Mrs. Client, it's just an experiment. Now, by the way, my friends, I just want to tell you something. I wish every person who works with food allergies and food sensitivities, every dietician, every nutritionist, every doctor understood the simple concept of what I'm saying about how to work with a client, how to work with their humanity. Because I've worked in clinics, um, where the compliance was, was awful when it comes to working with people and their food allergies because the practitioners are completely insensitive, completely insensitive, you know, and maybe they're very robotic about their diet, the practitioner and themselves. And they are fine. And nope, I'm not gonna eat this 'cause this is not good for me. Zo is not eating it. You gotta understand your client, your client's, a human being. We get attached to food. You have to know how to talk to your client. So you are inviting them in to your worldview. You're inviting them into exploration. You're inviting them into experimentation with a, with a sense of an adventure, with a sense of positivity.
Handle their objections. Don't worry, it's not forever. That's their objection. This is called handling objections upfront. When you handle objections upfront, you will get far better compliance. It's simple as that. You know, the bottom line here, many people can get unstuck when it comes to weight loss by focusing on an elimination diet or simply letting go of the common food allergens for about a month or so. Now I'll bargain with my client. I'll say, Hey, Mr. Mr. Klein, if I'm suspecting a food allergy, I've already been working with them for 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 sessions maybe. We've worked on macronutrient balance, we've worked on eating slow, we've had certain successes and they still have weight to lose. Or maybe they had 75 pounds to lose and they've already lost 20. And then they plateau. I'm like, great. What's next? 'cause weight loss is often a journey. A client will lose X amount of weight and then they'll plateau, and then they might lose X amount of weight again, and then they'll plateau. So what's next? Oh, you know, you know, I've noticed that you're a regular eater of gluten, of mostly wheat products. You really like your pasta, you like the bread, you know, you like your cookies, you like your gluten containing desserts. I also noticed you drink a lot of milk. Hey, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna let go of all dairy products. We're gonna let go of all gluten as best you can. You know, if you get a little bit here, there in your soy sauce or whatever, no big deal. But we're gonna let go of this for about a month just to see what happens with your weight. This might be the thing, Mr. And Mrs. Client, that helps get you off of this plateau and triggers the next level of weight loss. Clients like to hear that. I, I just want you to see this, Mr. Mrs. Client, this is an experiment and just gonna see what happens.
Again, I'm gonna tell you, for many people, this is, this is the ticket for others it's not. Now of course there can be a tremendous upside. Once again, when it comes to other symptoms your client may have as well, especially low energy, mood issues, brain fog, poor digestion, joint pain, anybody who's dealing with any kind of inflammatory condition, headaches, nasal congestion, breathing issues is a big one. Skin symptoms, um, swelling around joints, and I'm gonna say a lot more, but, but those symptoms I just listed, if you have a sensitivity to gluten and or dairy, woo. It can be a revelation. Once again, working with potential food allergies when it comes to weight is not a forever thing.
Put your client at ease and it will help you. Help them get where they need to go.
I love this work. Okay, next on the checklist, when it comes to weight in our diet and mind body nutrition checklist. Let's talk briefly again about food quality. You know, about this, focusing on high quality food is one of the best, easiest, most powerful, most universal and most underrated nutritional strategies that we can possibly practice. Plain and simple. If I was master of the nutrition universe and I was given one tweak that I can make nutritionally for, for everyone, that's the one thing I would, I would say to impact the most people everywhere, is to just change the food chain. So whatever we were eating was the highest quality version, the most organic, the most natural, the most fresh, the most in alignment with nature. The most toxin free, the most organic, you name it.
Now let's get a little bit more granular here. Let's get a little more specific. Nutrient-dense food naturally regulate appetite. I wanna say that again. Nutrient-dense foods naturally regulate appetite stated in the opposite. Poor quality food, deregulates appetite. Your brain gets confused when it is eating something that doesn't come from the natural world, plain and simple or that is very far from what it recognizes from the natural world. The brain gets confused, brain gets confused. When you eat large amounts of carbohydrates that don't have much nutrient density to them, vitamins, minerals, and other ancillary nutrients, the brain just goes, okay, I'm eating a lot of food, but there ain't no nutrition in here. Hungry is your brain's job to make sure your body has needed nutrients. This is the way the brain lets you know, it scares the meal. It says, I didn't get what I want. Brain, unfortunately is not smart enough to say, Hey, you ate poor quality food. It is not nutrient dense. The brain just simply says hungry. So we are driven to eat more. On top of that, there are many xeno toxins, particularly xenoestrogens, meaning substance and hormones. Sub xenoestrogens are substances that mimic the hormone estrogen. They bind to estrogen receptors and they can have the tendency to cause humans to gain weight and to cause for girls early menstruation to cause for boys, um, various symptoms of, um, hyper estrogen, which could be development for boys and breasts. Uh, and all that comes from diet. It comes from particularly dairy. It can come from meats that are all grown with hormones. Um, but it can come from many, many other foods. Plastics in our environment, oddly enough. So this is all about looking to switch your diet, looking to switch your client's diet to higher quality food, gradually noticing what they eat, noticing where they're shopping. You don't hit your client all over the head and try to change everything they do overnight. Immediately. You're bringing them along slowly, you're negotiating with them. You know, one of the things I do with a client, if they're eating a lot of classic junk food and that's what they know, I'll ask them, do you have a, do you have a health food store in your area? Oh yeah. Have you ever gone in, oh, maybe once. You know, I want you to see if you can start shopping for some things in a health food store. I just want you to poke around the health food store, start to get familiar with it. They might have a whole foods near them. Whatever it is, get them accustomed to it. Just that invitation alone, because trust me, there are clients out there who are afraid to do that. You might have those clients, so you are inviting them into a new experience of food and quality, but you're listening for them. You're listening for what are the doable next steps that they can take?
Okay, my friends last on the list. Ah, one more thing here
when it comes to food quality and weight loss. Let's get a little bit real about weight here. We really can't possibly expect to have our natural sustainable weight or have sustainable health if we're eating poor quality food consistently. The majority of our diet biology simply doesn't work that way. So ultimately for my client, I'm noticing their diet and I'm knowing that if they're a true weight loss client, that at the end of the day I have to get them eating 70, 80, 90% real healthy, high quality food. Otherwise, they will not be able to sustain natural weight, natural appetite.
So that doesn't mean no junk food ever. I, I don't live in that camp. If I meet someone who is, Hey, I just don't wanna eat any junk food, I just don't want to go there, like, good for you, hallelujah. Big hug, I like you. Most people are not like that. And here's where people get caught up in their inner nutritional tennis game of eat bad, eat good, eat bad, eat good, eat bad, eat good. And I want to eliminate that. It's an either or proposition. That's why if my client can hit the target, let's say 85% or more of one's diet is higher quality, your client's gonna be doing much better than if it's 50% or 10% healthy food. For many people, if you take off the table, you can't eat junk food ever. Helps them relax, it helps them comply and then allows them con, to continue to live life because they might be around people who, that's what those people eat. And just give people their preference. It's okay, we don't have to be the food police. A little bit of sugar here, a little bit of junk there is not gonna kill somebody. And if it does, so be it. Okay, my friends last on the list. Our diet and mind body nutrition checklist. Number nine, when it comes to weight loss, I want to understand my client's use of powerful substances. Simply put, limiting or eliminating powerful substances from the diet is all about rediscovering our natural metabolic state, our truest neurochemistry. It's all about experiencing our innate potential. There are certain substances we consume that hijack metabolism, that pull our body chemistry into an odd strange direction because we're subjecting the body to a powerful substance. You know, your body can handle loud sounds. So if you watch in nature on some, on various occasions in nature, there are extremely loud sounds. There might be an earthquake that's a very loud sound. Uh, there can be lightning thunder. That's a loud sound. Otherwise there's not a lot of loud sounds. So if you were subjected to extremely loud noises constantly, that would be a powerful stimuli that would eventually affect your nervous system and your health and your immune system and your body. Intensely loud noise is a major stressor and it will wear you down.
You will occasionally experience blinding light, let's say lightning. It's not a regular input, but if you're experiencing blinding light on a regular basis, that would not be good for your system. Same goes with the substances we put into our body.
When I say powerful substances, I mean sugar, caffeine, alcohol, each of these can lead to weight gain or inability to lose it via various metabolic pathways. So we're simply experimenting with moderating these or eliminating them. I'm always letting my client know that this is an experiment. Simply put, let's look at sugar. One of the most powerful substances we commonly consume that can have a very dramatic impact on weight. This is so well documented. It's, it's mind boggling, um, through science, through through just straight up clinical observation. And at the same time, the food industry is,
puts a deaf ear and a blind eye to that simply because that's money in the bank for them. So we know the nutritional, we, the experts know, most people already understand it, but it's still hard to get. We're still society's still catching up that this is a powerful substance. It does not mean you have to eliminate it. It does not mean sugar is evil. It means if it is a staple substance in the diet and one is trying to lose weight and one cannot lose weight sustainably, and one is eating a lot of this, then this is a place we're gonna play with. It makes very simple sense. Notice how I am languaging this. I'm not making sugar the enemy. Soon as you start to get your client all worked up about sugar and they're eating it and they love it, they're gonna be freaking out. I don't make a big deal of it. Just, here's what it is. You wanna lose weight, I want you to lose weight. You're eating a lot of sugar. There's a lot of sugar in all your food. Great. We're gonna experiment. We're gonna change that. We're gonna ship that around and we're gonna see what happens. And you know something, Mr. Miss client, if that doesn't work for you, you could eat sugar. Do you have to eliminate every drop of sugar? No. If I'm dealing with a weight loss client, I will not, I will not ask them to eliminate every drop of sugar. In fact, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make sure that they have their strategic desserts here and there. So I'm making sure my client has pleasure.
I'm making sure they have a nourishing relationship with food. I'm making sure they have a little fun. I'm making sure that they wanna work with me because I'm not being the food police with them and I'm letting them know, Hey, I'm human just like you.
Caffeine. I mentioned caffeine is a powerful substance. When I say powerful substance, I don't mean bad. I mean powerful. So
when you use caffeine in a smart way, it's great. However, if your client has weight loss resistance, they can't lose weight. And you notice they're consuming a large amount of caffeine. And when I say large amount of caffeine, you have to sum total up. How much coffee are they drinking? How much energy drinks are they doing? How many sodas or diet sodas that have caffeine are they doing? You add all that up together. And I get a lot of clients, especially those who are, you know, working hard, working in a city somewhere and they're hooked on coffee, hooked on energy drinks, hooked on diet sodas, hooked on any combination thereof. Um, and they're thinking, yeah, you know, I'm just drinking a soda and it's diet and it's got caffeine in it. So caffeine in small amounts can be thermogenic. Meaning it can help you burn calories, excess caffeine in the diet. Excess can for many people mimic a more intense stress response,
which once again means increased insulin, increased cortisol, which can for many people signal the body to store weight, store fat, and not build muscle. This is a place we play. I don't eliminate caffeine. I look to see what my client can do. Hey, Mr and Mrs. Client, are you the type who likes to go cold Turkey or eliminate things slowly? Oh, I'm a cold Turkey person. Or, oh no, my god, I can't go cold Turkey on caffeine. Great. You know, I've noticed that you are consuming like seven hits of caffeine a day between coffee and energy drink and diet sodas. And I want you to have your natural metabolism back, whatever that is, we're gonna discover your natural sweet spot. But in order to do that, we have to start letting go of caffeine. Can I get you down to three cups of coffee a day and two energy drinks instead of six coffees and four energy drinks. Okay, right. That's doable. So then you do that for a week or two, then you cut it down a little more and cut it down a little more.
Lastly, I wanna mention, alcohol here is often a hidden source of calories for weight loss clients. I'm nothing against alcohol. All I'm doing is I'm looking to see, based on my client's complaint, if they have a complaint, they can't lose weight. And if I notice every evening they're doing 2, 3, 4 glasses of wine at night, that's gonna be a place where I might ask them to cut down. And it's often a very interesting conversation. But it's the little things that we do that help move our client in a good direction. Make sense my friends? Okay, let's go on to our next checklist.
Let us look at a lifestyle checklist. In our lifestyle checklist. I'm gonna put under that checklist, toxic nutritional beliefs, our sense of embodiment. We're gonna talk about menopause, we're gonna talk about movement and exercise. We're gonna talk about medications. Let's dive in. You've already heard about toxic nutritional beliefs. I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this right now when it comes to weight loss. I'm just letting you know that when it comes to weight loss, when it comes to weight and its loss, we need with weight loss clients to be very much focused on listening for what their toxic nutritional beliefs are. Because this is the number one powerful place to work. We must change how we see the world
of food and body and life working with toxic nutritional beliefs. When it comes to our weight loss client, I am saying very directly to you, this is a non-negotiable, non-negotiable and fundamental place to work. You have to work here with your client at some point if there are toxic nutritional beliefs that are in place. Food is the enemy. Fat is the enemy. Fat and food is the enemy. All that stuff. If those are in place, inability to lose. Weight is predictable.
Suffering is predictable. Confusion is predictable. Anxiety, stress and fear. Whenever one encounters food is predictable, a skewed metabolism, a body chemistry that supports the holding onto of extra weight, extra body fat and not building muscle is predictable When we're walking around with toxic nutritional beliefs that drive a stress response, that drive a worldview, that drive our behaviors. I really need you to see this, my friends, I really need you to get this. This is so important. Work is a little deep, but it's not that deep that you can do it. Don't be afraid of deep. Don't be afraid of getting your hands dirty. Don't be afraid to go to the source where the action is,
my friends, why is it that we've gone through now 50, 60 years of people trying to lose weight by eating less and exercising more and it doesn't work 'cause it doesn't work. 'cause we've been looking at all we've been, we've been looking for love and weight loss in all the wrong places. Now we're looking at what I'm gonna say are some of the right places.
And in order to look in those places, we have to expand our mind. Every single toxic nutritional belief invariably leads to a stress response, which will mean difficulty losing weight. And I'm gonna tell you, I often begin to address and conquer these by no later than the second session with a weight loss client.
Isn't that interesting? No Later than the second session. In fact, it might be, and and you're gonna hear me talk about this how I do a first session, but after every first session, a first session, I'm gonna just give you a little hint, but we're, we're gonna be covering this, um, you know, first session is like a first date. And I'm gonna let my client know at the end of the first session my weight loss client, okay, Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's what I see happening for you. Here's what I see going on. I really think I can help you get where you want to go. Some of the places we're gonna work, we're gonna work on macronutrient balance. 'cause I notice your ratio of protein, fat and carbohydrates might be a great place to work to help stimulate weight loss. You won't even have to eat less food. In fact, you might even be eating a little bit more calories and you'll feel more full and more fulfilled. And you know something I'm gonna tell you, we're gonna work on what I call toxic nutritional beliefs. I noticed you had this belief that food is the enemy, you know, and I'm gonna just tell you briefly, when you and I are walking around believing that food is the enemy, why would we believe that? You know why? Because we think that, oh my God, I'm fat. Need to lose weight. What's making me gain on this weight? It's food. Ouch. So if I could just stop eating food, if I can get rid of food, then I can lose weight. And if I lose weight, I'm lovable. And people like me, I gotta find love and everything's gonna be okay and everything's gonna be perfect. But I have to make sure that, that I don't deal with the enemy, which is food. But oh, but wait a second. I need food to live. So you're in a conundrum, Mr. And Mrs. Client. And that creates a stress response when you and I believe that food is the enemy. Anytime the brain senses enemy threat, it goes into a stress response. Stress response means heart rate up, blood pressure, up blood moves away from your midsection, which means your digestion and a full blown stress response shuts down our level of insulin and cortisol increases those hormones when we secrete them day in and day out. Over secrete them can signal the body to store weight, store fat, not build muscle, just the opposite of what you want. Stress also deregulates our appetite at all generally causes you to want to eat more. Some people it causes them to want to eat less, but that doesn't sound like it's what's happening for you. So you see, I just give them these little teasers
and then we get down to a little bit more business in the next session. So again, the key toxic nutritional beliefs around weight. Food is the enemy. Appetite is the enemy. Fat in food equals fat on my body. Less food plus more exercise equals the royal road to weight loss. When I am thin, when I lose X number of pounds, then I'll be happy. Those six toxic nutritional beliefs, you have to handle those with clients at some point. Now, it doesn't mean your client's gonna go, oh, thank you, thank you practitioner for telling me food is the enemy. Oh, I love food. Now it's all over for me. You, you just had to tell me, no, it is not gonna change. But what's going to happen is a little bit of daylight comes through and they start to consider that. And you can invent homework assignments. You gotta be creative, my friends. You must learn how to be a creative in this work. You notice when you start to introduce, okay, here's how you be creative. You notice you're working with your client and your client. When you introduce this Concept in a first session towards the end, when you're giving your client all kinds of confidence about how you are, are feeling good about working with them on their weight loss journey, and you feel you can help them get where they want to go. You mention toxic nutritional beliefs. You mention food is the enemy. And you see when you mention that to them, that they get it. And oftentimes when a person gets it, it actually makes their face a little bit more scared. 'cause they've been identified, they know it, okay? They know, oh, I'm that guy that's walking around thinking food is the enemy. So I might say something to them like, Hey, Mr. Mr. Klein, I wanna send you home
with a fun assignment to do. It's a, it's a journaling assignment. Write it down on paper in a journal, on a computer. I want you to write, just, just journal a little bit about
how is it that I see food as the enemy? How does that play out for me? What does that look like for me on a daily basis? How does that feel for me? What happens when I walk around thinking food is the enemy? Where might that have come from for me? How does that impact me?
There's their assignment. It doesn't matter what they come up with, of course it does. But what you're doing is you're sending them home to do the work. You don't do the work. Okay, well, what do I do to make sure the person just doesn't have food as the enemy anymore?
If you ask me that question, please don't. Okay? Uh, so I'm I'm I'm hitting it off at the pass here. If you're asking that question, you are thinking that you have to fix the person. And it's an understandable question. Here's the good news. You don't have to fix the person. You have to understand that it is your job to cultivate a human being. It's your job to coach a human being. It's your job to educate them. The root word to educate is to draw out.
Does a student show up in a classroom and the teacher goes, oh my God, I have to make sure everybody memorizes everything and everybody figures everything out. No, your teacher gives you readings, they give you assignment, and you go home and you grapple with it. For goodness sake. The learning happens when you go home. The classroom is the magic place where, where the cauldron, where things get opened up, it's a container, things get triggered, new ideas come in. Uh, it's, um, it's a think tank, but your client goes home and does the work. So you're giving them food for thought. You are giving them a way to grapple with this.
Now my client comes back and, oh yeah, you know, I really didn't do the assignment. You know what I say to them just like this? I say, bad boy, bad girl. Because this is how you're gonna get where you wanna go. I want you to get your money's worth from this relationship. I want you to get your money's worth from this experience. You told me last session in our first session that you have been trying to lose weight for 25 years and it's been unsuccessful sustainably. I want to help you. I want to help you break that cycle. In order for me to help you break that cycle, you have to, you have to roll with me here. You have to follow my lead. You're paying me, I'm gonna give you the best that I have. This is different from what you've done. And thank goodness because what you've done hasn't worked. No offense. And it's not your fault because these are the strategies that the world often gives us. These are the strategies that the media and the experts give us. I've learned a different approach and a different way. And you're gonna have to do some work here. You're gonna have to look at yourself because that's where a lot of the change is gonna happen, and that's where the success is gonna happen for you. So you see what I just did? I spanked my client a little bit, but at the same time, I framed it in the positive.
You and I, you have to learn how to be able to spank your client and uplift them at the same time. Make sense? Okay, my friends. Next, the lifestyle checklist. Let's talk about embodiment. Ugh, i i when it comes to weight loss, I love this term.
Once again, if you're not in the car, you can't make it go anywhere. Many, many of our weight loss clients have on some level abandoned their body and they checked out of it. You have to cheer, lead them back in. Anyone who is checked out of their body has a damn good reason for it.
Most people, when you start to explain embodiment to them, you know what embodiment is. Mr. And Mr. Klein, it's, it's, it's kind of like, do you know anybody? Or have you ever had this experience in yourself where you feel like your, your, your body is just kind of a life support system for your head? Now a lot of clients understand that. A lot of people understand that right away, and they'll actually laugh with you. Um, it's a strange concept to embrace because it's not fully quote, scientific, but this is as important a concept when it comes to health, when it comes to personal growth, when it comes to weight, when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to all of it. I, I, my friends, I, I just wish I can, I can take you all and just walk you down the block here and point out to you and say, yep, look at that person. Embodied, not so embodied disembodied checked out of their body. Once you start to notice, you can, you can have a feel for it, and you're gonna begin to learn. Once you start to notice, think in your own life. One of the times when you are just really like distant from your body, out of your body, when did you start to embody a little bit more? Notice it feel. Its nuances, its specifics. Start to inhabit it. I'm gonna tell you again. Bottom, bottom, bottom line. It is impossible, virtually impossible to shapeshift the body in a sustainable way unless we inhabit it. I'm sorry. You just can't do it unless you inhabit. It mean you. It becomes your home Again.
Many people who have gained weight or who don't like their body, or who've been told that they're fat, or who truly have weight to lose for whatever reason, gained it. Many people, they step out of their body, they abandon it, they check out of it because it's too painful to be in that body because they're getting weight hate from other people. They're getting weight hate from themselves.
They keep getting zinged by the media. They keep getting the message. You're no good, you're no good, you're no good. So of course we wanna abandon the body. If we've been harmed emotionally, physically, sexually, in any way, it's easy to abandon the body. If people have harmed us at a young age with their words, intentionally, unintentionally, it's easy to check out of the body. It's all different kinds of reasons why a human will check out of the body. If you wanna shapeshift the body, you gotta get back in. And again, there are many people, it looks like they're in their body 'cause they're exercising hard and they're eating right, but they're literally living in their head, exercising their body and eating right. Remember we talked about false positives. They have the body they want, they have the shape they want. They might have the fitness they want, but inside they're unhappy. They're upset, they're worried, they're in anxiety. They haven't truly grown. They're living in a drama-filled world, in an anxious state, and they're pushing things hard.
People mistakenly believe that losing weight or having the right body or shape will somehow put them back into their body, despite the fact that they've already cast it aside and made it the enemy. So somehow magically, when I lose weight, boom, I'm gonna be back in my body. It don't work like that. I'm just telling you very directly doesn't work like that.
The only way to get back in your body is to get back in your body, to slowly inhabit it, to start to feel it, to start to sense it. Am I receiving pleasure? Am I receiving nourishment? Am I in contact with my senses? Am I paying attention to my body when I move it? Am I present with my body? If you are hating your body and heating your body and heating your body, it is very difficult to inhabit it. Who would want to inhabit something that is filled with hate?
So the more you aim hate at self definitionally, the more you will disembody.
The more we are disembodied, the easier it will be to eat things that are not good for us. To have lifestyle habits that don't serve us. Why? Because we're outside the body. And then when you eat something and it's not good for you, you eat in a way that doesn't work for you. You move in a way that doesn't work for you. You don't even notice it.
'cause you're not in the body fully. Why should you notice it? The whole point is to not notice it. Many of us are silently and unknowingly, unknowingly committed to not notice it. What we do to the body. Ouch. That hurts. It hurts us to be unconsciously committed to not knowing. There's an old African saying, ha ha, not to know is bad, not to wish to know is worse, not to know is bad, not to wish to know is a lot worse. So we have to wish to know how we're impacting the body. Once again, embodiment is always, always, always, my friends is about baby steps.
And it's truly a practice.
Again, I wanna remind you that this is a difficult concept for many people to grasp. Once again, it's your ability to be present in the body, to inhabit it, to be connected to it, to feel a sense of our muscles, our limbs, my organs, my breath, my movement, my hunger, my pleasure, my pain, my energy, my fatigue, my gut sensations, my intuitions to be connected to the senses, to incarnate myself, my soul into my body.
You really know what I'm talking about. Even if you are the kind of person listening right now, who's disembodied and trust me, I was disembodied for many years of my life. Um, I had to work hard to get back in because growing up my body was a deep source of pain and discomfort. Asthma, allergies, joint pain, confusion around food, confusion around sexuality. You mix all that together. Get me to heck out of his body. There's too much craziness. And then we have to work to get in. It's not so bad. It's not so bad in here. That's why we introduce nourishment and pleasure and sensation. Simple pleasures, again because of pain, hurt, disappointment and difficult past our upbringing, stresses, abuses, illnesses, all kinds of human challenges. My friends, it makes perfect sense that a human being would want to abandon their own body and not fully inhabit it. Here's, here's something I ask you to do. If I haven't asked you to do this already, after this session is over, I, I would love for you to ask yourself, look in the mirror. Take a moment. Do that now if you want. How embodied am I? Scale of one to 10, 10 being, man, I'm just in my body. I'm here. This is it. This is me. This is my soul and my body. Here we go. Let's do this. I know there's hurts. I know there's pains. I know there's symptoms, but there's also goodies. And, and I'm gonna be in my body. I'm gonna respond to my body. Where would you rank yourself? 10 being fully in my body, zero being gone.
And are you willing to stern embody more no matter what number you're at?
Interesting idea. Embodiment is the key to helping heal and transform just about anything. Embodiment, by the way, is also about agreeing to be here. Remember that soul lesson? It's agreeing to this body,
even though, even though it ain't perfect, even though it looks like this, it's this old, that old is this big, is this small? Is this fat is not, this is just shaped like this. It looks like that. He's, he's more this. She's more pretty. He's, they're more that than me. Embodiment is about agreeing to be here in this body. You don't gotta love it to pieces. You just gotta agree. This is it. Let's do it. Embodiment is about learning how to not abandon ourselves. Stop abandoning self. The opposite of abandoning self is standing by self. There's gonna be stuff that happens that we don't like. There's gonna be stuff you do to yourself that you go, why did I do that? I sabotage myself. If you're the kind of person that self sabotages, if you know someone who self sabotages, if you have clients who self-sabotage. Here's a very simple tool, okay? You self-sabotage. Can I tell you something? Self-sabotaging client or person, A lot of humans do that. It's very human. It's weird. We do good things for ourselves. We do not good things for ourselves. We go against our own best wishes. This is the nature of humankind. We do that. Poets, philosophers, writers, artists.
I've been talking about this since forever. There ain't nothing new about this. So when you sabotage yourself, it's all about then coming back and saying, okay, I did that, and now I'm gonna stand by myself. Yeah, I just did that. Ouch. That hurt. Dust yourself off. Pick yourself off. Give yourself a little hug
and then stand by yourself again. Okay, I'm gonna try again. I'm gonna stand by myself instead of kicking myself when I'm down. Stand by yourself. Easier said than, than done. That's the practice. It's catching ourselves. It's you learning how to do that with your client.
Next, my friends, let's talk about menopause and weight. Ooh, this is a juicy one. So juicy.
Most clinicians and experts agree that weight gain is often predictable during menopause. I'm gonna tell you that, sorry to say this. Most clinicians and experts agree that weight gain is often predictable during menopause. Now, I'm gonna also tell you that some have argued otherwise. And what I'm gonna say, I, I've, I've worked with a large population of menopausal women, really, um, and I'm gonna say everybody's probably right to some degree. I've just seen it all. I've seen women gain weight during menopause. I've seen them have difficulty losing it during menopause. I've seen menopause not affecting weight gain. It, it's, it's really, you could see anything. Uh, so the jury's not out on all this other than the fact that it, it comes up, it really comes up. So what I'm going to guesstimate with you is that I tend to see more weight gain or more inability to lose weight during menopause than other times in a woman's life. What I definitely see is that many women are extraordinarily, extraordinarily anxious about weight during this time.
When you are extraordinarily anxious about weight during this time. Think about that, my friends. What does that mean? It means extraordinary stress. What does stress mean? Stress response. Inability to lose weight.
Very simply put your job is to help your menopausal client relax into weight loss. Relax into letting go of weight loss. It's a paradox. Paradox, paradox. Paradox. Okay, Mr. Ms, Mr. Ms. Fine. Okay, Mrs. Client, I get it. You wanna lose weight, I get it. You're going through menopause, you've gained some weight. I want to help you get where you want to go. Here's the thing, this sounds weird. In order for me to help you get where you want to go, I understand that you got a lot of stress around this. You didn't want to gain this 20 pounds. I feel for you. I'm a guy, but honestly, I've seen a lot of women clients who have been going through what you go through. So I have a, a lot of compassion, I have a lot of experience with this. So there's just this weird paradox here, Mrs. Client. And in order for you to have the best chance to lose weight or to not gain more, you have to be in a relaxation response more and more. And what I see is that this is gripping your life. This weight gain or this inability to lose it is deeply gripping your life. And if it's deeply gripping your life, that means you are going to have supreme difficulty in getting where you need to go. And then I'm going to explain the stress response to them and how that impacts weight.
So here, I'm laying a foundation for my menopausal client.
Now, what I want to tell you, simply put there is zero agreed upon universally agreed upon science or even clinical wisdom when it comes to weight gain and menopause or weight loss during menopause. So if you hear differing opinions, here's what I want you to say. There's differing opinions. Don't get caught up in what's right or wrong. I, I, it's, it's a useless argument. I will argue either side, and they're both correct. It's a useless argument. Oh, this is, you know, yes, you can lose weight during menopause. It's easy. Just do this or I, I it's let it go. What we can say for sure is that if a woman goes down into despair and stress and upset and emergency around weight during this time, it will tend to subvert weight loss potential.
So our job is, as practitioners, is to help talk our clients off of the cliff called, I must lose weight during this time, otherwise my life is worthless and my future's meaningless.
Plain and simple. You know,
I wanna say that this is a very special and difficult time for many women. Menopause. Forget about the physiologic transition. Now, actually embrace the physiologic transition. It's a time when a woman's body is changing to the degree that it was clearly saying, I am no longer a child bearing, um, biological entity.
I am no longer able to bear children. I am no longer young. I am no longer a princess.
I am no longer in any of those archetypal stages. So menopause is not only a biological transition and transformation, it is a life passage with a capital L and a capital PA menopause is a psycho spiritual initiation if you don't wrap your head around that, if you don't believe it, and you're dealing with a weight loss client who's a menopausal woman, and they're freaking out, and all they're thinking about during menopause is, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Then that's extremely unfortunate. And you have a disempowered human. You have a disempowered woman who is not stepping into her archetypal queen hood, who is not ascending her throne. What she's doing is she's throwing herself into the streets and throwing herself into misery. I'm telling you straight up, menopause is a time when a woman morphs into a new, more complete, more whole and more self-empowered human. That's what it's for. Obsessing, obsessing, obsessing about weight at this time, aborts, this important alchemical process.
There's a bigger fish to fry during menopause than losing a bunch of weight. It's a psychospiritual transition. Who are you, Mrs. Client, where's your life going? We need to take stock. What do you think the next 25 years of your life ought to look like? Who do you want to be in this latter third of your life? How do you wanna show up? Who do you want to be as a person?
Can you stand by yourself? Can you stop abandoning yourself? Can you stop self attacking yourself? Can you let go and begin to trust a little more?
Yes, women have power surges. You've heard this line. I'm not having a power. You know, they, they have, what do you call it? Um, hot flashes. No, I'm not having a hot flash. I'm having a power surge. Well, it's, it's a time of power. And when women jump to the other side and make it a time of disempowerment, then that's what it becomes. This is a time of imprint vulnerability. Humans are very vulnerable during imprinting times. Imprint, vulnerable times are at the very least, uh, puberty for boys and girls. 12 ish, 13 ish. Another imprint. Vulnerable time is menopause for a woman. What you're thinking and feeling and believing and doing and what you're setting up will impact you into the future.
I get that you wanna lose weight, but I will not support a woman in having weight loss be her end all and be all during this time. Weight loss should be a secondary activity or third activity next to who are you turning into? How can you step into your queen hood? How can you look back on your life? What are you letting go of? What do you need to let go of in your life, in your, in your actual life? How do you need to clean house? How do you need to clean your inner house? What are the thoughts, the beliefs that you carry around that no longer work for you? How is it that you treat yourself that no longer works for you? That's what's important. That's the kind of baggage you want to get rid of, rid of. You can't get rid of that baggage. How are you gonna lose weight? Really? You gotta let rid of. You have to let go of the inner baggage at this time as best as humanly possible. It's work. Menopause is work. Life is work a lot of times. So my friends, for menopausal women, I want you to encourage all the positive steps of how one can work with achieving one's natural weight at that time. Okay, Mrs. Client, we're definitely gonna work on this, but we're gonna work on slow relaxed eating. We're gonna work on macronutrient, balance, pleasure, nourishment, eating rhythm, quality food, toxic nutritional beliefs. That's what you're gonna focus on. Not extreme exercise, not extreme dieting. So yeah, work on that. But at the same time, paradoxically, I want you to help your client defocus on weight loss as the single most important thing during menopause. And I want you to focus on that person's life because chances are czar your female client, your menopausal client might not be doing that with anybody else. She might not have another human, excuse me, where she can explore these topics with. So you are doing her a big, huge, wonderful, powerful service because this is a psychospiritual initiation. If you see it as anything less, as a, as a woman, you are shortchanging yourself. You're insulting yourself, you're cursing yourself, you're making yourself small, you're making it hard for yourself. You're making it hard for every other young woman on earth who is trying to figure out what does it mean to be a female on this planet? What's my trajectory? This is your time. Menopause. When you're becoming a queen, it's the bottom line. Queen does not sit on her throne and go, oh my God, I gained 2, 3, 4, 5. I gained. Look at this. Is my belly okay? What do I need to do? Should I be exercising more? Um, how can I have, you know, abs of steel? Are you gonna follow that queen? Is that the queen? You want queen in your kingdom, your queendom? No, no, no, no, no. Not at all.
A real queen knows herself. She accepts herself. She stands by herself. She sits on her throne. She doesn't care what anybody else thinks about her. She's doing the right thing. She's owning herself. She owns her body. She loves what she got. She's not comparing herself to other people.
You know what happens when you start to compare yourself? Mirror, mirror on the wall. That's not a good queen. That's not gonna be a good ending for that queen. So this is a time when a woman, lets go of the princess stage, absolutely crucial, which means, and many women haven't let go of the perfect body, the perfect weight. They haven't let go of that dream. And it's understandable, by the way, why nothing wrong woman hasn't done anything wrong. If she hasn't let go of the princess stage at this point, because that's how she's been programmed, conditioned, educated, and taught by the world. Women are not taught to be queens where they are not invited into queen hood. They're basically told you either be a princess or you're worthless. Same for men. They're taught, you know, be, be a prince, conquer, do stuff, get things negative prince accumulate. Get what you want as long as you can.
So they'll never step into being a true king. So life is not teaching us that way. That's why your work with your client is so important. 'cause you might be the only person in their world who is inviting them into a bigger, deeper conversation that will actually help them get where they want to go. Can a woman who truly has weight to lose lose it during menopause? Yes. Mm. Is it as easy to do during menopause at other times? Quite frankly, in my experience, no.
That's why I want her to defocus on weight I and focus on once again, the good strategies. Slow, relaxed, eating, macronutrient, balance, pleasure, et cetera. But to defocus on weight loss and focus on stepping into queen hood.
You're gonna hear more about this as we go into different case stories. Okay, next on the lifestyle checklist. Number four, movement. Exercise.
My friends, for many people, exercise means punishment, stress, push force, which means physiologic, stress response and all its downside around weight. Your job is to coach your client into movement. Movement for many people is the highest form of exercise for many people, especially for women.
Movement invokes the positive feminine. When I say movement, I mean a way of movement. Your body, way of exercising your body. But that's actually joyful, that's fun, that's pleasurable, that makes you feel good after, because when you're doing joy, fun and pleasure and relaxation response, that is one of the royal roads to weight loss. So really all depends on the internal place a person is coming from. You gotta gauge that with yourself. You gotta gauge that with your client. What's the internal place I come from around going to the gym around being on the treadmill about doing these kind of classes? Am I coming from a place of I love to do this, this lights me up. Or are you doing it because you're punishing your body because your body has body fat and you want to burn it off? If you are a human and you're exercising to burn off, that is the nature of your relationship with exercise. I exercise to burn off. You gotta be honest with yourself. If you are that person and, and, and, and end your complaint is, I can't lose weight sustainably, then I'm going to look to get rid of your exercise and find out what kind of movement gives you joy independent of how many calories you think it burns.
I mean that again and again. I have will tell you, I have seen people lose, finally lose weight when they give up marathon running, when they give up intense, strange, crazy push force, shove kind of exercise classes that they get no pleasure from whatsoever, but they're doing it to calorie burn and they're literally doing less calorie burning exercises, more dance, more yoga, more whatever they think is fun. And all of a sudden your body is relaxing. It's in its natural state. You're not freaked out, you have changed your inner universe. So it depends on the internal place we're coming from. I do wanna say that for the archetypal masculine, particular, particularly many men, movement and exercise is often is, is, is, is is often about challenge pushing through going beyond limits. For many men, that's what they need, particularly if they've been overemphasizing the feminine in their life when it comes to exercise, they need to get into their masculine, they actually need to do the push force challenge kind of exercise because that's the archetypal energy that they need. Do some women need that? Absolutely. But if a woman comes to me and she has had unsuccess and she's doing very archetypally, masculine exercise, push force, shove challenge, hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. And she hasn't been able to lose sustainably and she's coming to see me for weight loss, you bet I'm gonna look to change that because it's a good probability yet that I'm gonna help that person get where they want to go.
Weight loss clients especially benefit from letting go of all exercise that feels punishing again or is only being used for burning calories and fighting body fat. Because exercising from this place, it it, it guarantees unhappiness, it guarantees internal, I don't like this.
The simple switch from force exercise to enjoyable movement can be a revelation for people. And then people say, oh, I'm not gonna be burning calories. You're gonna say, this is an experiment. Because what's happening is I think you're in a, you're creating a stress response. Many people have exercise induced stress response. It's called over exercise. People do it all the time. And many people who let go of over exercising can actually see weight loss for the first time and at the very least and just makes people happier even if they don't lose weight. What often what, what happens? There's a certain subset of people when they give up intense calorie burning exercise, especially running when they hate running. Especially, you know, certain kinds of intense aerobics when they hate that and you give it up, you might not lose any weight, but you definitely don't gain weight and you're a hell of a lot happier and you got more time on your hands. And people are always surprised because we are so conditioned for the whole calories and calories out model. Okay, last in this conversation for now on the lifestyle checklist when it comes to weight loss or medications. When it comes to weight, you've heard me say this, I wanna remind you before a first session, find out what med your client is on before the first session. Have them meet, uh, you know, Mr. Ms client, I just have a couple of questions to ask you before you come in. You know, I ask them for their name, their birthdate, uh, if it's a phone client, I'm gonna ask them. I often ask them to send me a picture or you know, where could I go on Facebook? Just see, just so I can get a sense of what you look like, you know, so I know who I'm talking to. Um, are you on any medications? Prescription drugs? Please list them. Why? Because they're gonna list them and you're gonna look up all the side effects online. You're gonna familiarize yourself with what those drugs are. I want you to have a simple understanding if these powerful substances, because medications are powerful substances. I am not anti-medication, I am pro medication. I am pro-education about medication. I am pro taking a medication if you need it. I am pro getting off of a medication if you don't need it. Simple. Um, so are these powerful substances influencing weight gain or inability to lose weight? Very specifically, antidepressants are especially notorious for stimulating weight gain or for inability to lose it. If one of the side effects of my client's antidepressant is weight gain, I might ask them to talk to their doctor to see if they can go on a different medication. That's the punchline and all that. Because quite honestly, over the years I've seen people on medications, particularly antidepressants, and they have had a long history of inability to lose weight. You know, sometimes people can get off of their antidepressants, sometimes they can find another doctor who will treat their depression more naturally.
A human does not have to be on an antidepressant for the rest of their life. So it's a useful conversation to have. That's all. It's a useful place to explore. It's up to your client at the end of the day to grapple with that. But it's also reasonable for you as the practitioner to educate, to alert your client. Hey, this could be an impact here. Okay, my friends, there's more to come on this checklist for now. Let's say this conversation is complete. So this is the end of wait part four. We'll continue the conversation in Wait part five. Thank you. And I mean that, thanks for hanging in there with me as always. Thanks for being on this journey together. Trust me, there's so much more good stuff to come. And we're gonna get into the specifics when it's time to get into the specifics, which we're already starting to do.

PART 5

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. We are continuing our conversation around weight and its loss. We're in part five of eight right now. Let's start out with a few reminders and musings. Now remember, we don't truly know how much anyone should weigh, and that's the scientific truth of the matter. And when we believe we need to lose weight or we wish to lose weight, you know, we're going on a fascinating, challenging, and oftentimes a very complex journey. I want you to get that. That's simply the nature of weight. We need to relax into its complexity. Complexity doesn't mean you can't understand it. Complexity doesn't mean, oh my God, we're never going to figure it out. Complexity means that there's depth. Complexity means that there's layers. Complexity means that there's a beauty to the situation, and it's our job to understand. Now, you know this. There are many, many, many reasons why any person may truly be carrying around excess weight. That's important. If you don't know that, I want you to start consider knowing it. Many, many, many reasons why any person may truly be carrying around excess weight. Our job as the practitioner is to help our clients explore this terrain in an honest, effective, and compassionate way. And by exploring the various personal and emotional factors that can impact weight, we're doing our client a pretty powerful service, whether they lose any weight or not. Now, in this conversation, we're going to be looking at our next checklist, which is a dynamic eating psychology checklist. When it comes to weight, once again, our job is to listen through the kinds of filters in the back of our mind that help us catch some of the key interesting juicy puzzle pieces, places in our clients' lives where work or growth or transformation are wanting to happen. So once again, we're learning how to listen. Just listen. Just listen and exactly what to listen for, because listening is the key for, we could do anything about anything, about anything about anybody's challenge, we have to listen into it deeply. We have to gather data information. We have to see, hear, feel beneath the surface of things.
So grasping and appreciating your client's story, their journey is the key. So our job is to relax into listening before you actually start to do anything. So in the dynamic eating psychology checklist, when it comes to weight, here's what that's gonna look like. I have about 13 distinctions here. Numbing out, grounding, filling up, loneliness, emotional holding, survival, stress protection, burden of work, sexual wounding, the burden of money, shame, perfectionism, undigested life ex experience. By the way, just so you know, none of these are bad. None of these are anything that we're trying to fix.
We're learning how to listen for when these factors might be showing up in who our client is and what they're about in their life when it comes to their relationship with food. This is for your weight loss client. And we're gonna listen to see if any of these 13 distinctions are indeed operating. Now, sometimes you might notice, yeah, a person is using food to numb out or they are using food for protection and there's not necessarily anything to do about that, but it's helping us understand the person better. And that might sound a little bit hard to wrap yourself around. Well, well what do I do about it? There's nothing to do. But to understand it, to feel, to get your client, to get their world, to be able to put yourself in their shoes and understand, oh, here's your relationship with food. Here's what it's about. Here's, here's why you do what you do and how you think the way you think. So remember that for some people, weight loss is indeed about just food and food amount and quality of food and making a bunch of nutritional course corrections. Those people exist. What I wanna suggest to you is that for majority of people, the common solution called eat less exercise more is ineffective, incomplete, simplistic, and goes against all rational human experience, clinical observation. And you know, just about 60 years of eat less, exercise more. Again, if it were that simple, humans would not continue to be struggling with weight and endlessly dieting. This whole meme nonsense belief that well overweight people, they're just lazy. They don't have willpower. Uh, it's an insult, it's foolish. We have to leave that the trash heap. And it's time for us to get smarter and understand. Uh, I've watched people over the years work so ridiculously hard about the eat less exercise more thing for decades and not get where they wanna go and it doesn't work. So this is in part why we listen for some of the deeper eating psychology distinctions that may, may be at play with our client.
So first on our list
of eating psychology distinctions to listen for is this thing called numbing out. There's a lot of us humans who use food at different times to numb out. Well, what does that mean? Um, rough day, and I'm not feeling good about myself. I had an argument with him, her this, that work was this relationship, was that being a mom, being a dad, trying to be a human on planet earth. And you know something, there's a lot of feelings that come along with being alive on planet earth and you wanna know something. It is actually easy in a way to eat food and to kind of disappear in the act because many of us, when we're carrying around a lot of thoughts and a lot of mind activity and a lot of emotions that we can't handle, that we can process, oh my God, what are you gonna do if you start to just eat a bunch of food? You can disappear into the eating experience. So what I want you to hear right off the bat is that this is a strategy that makes perfect sense. It actually works. It's useful. It can help de-stress a human. It can help de-stress, you, me, our client and why be in stress or upset and we can medicate with food. So, so right from the beginning, I want you to hear, you don't wanna beat up the strategy, nor do you want to beat up the person who does that strategy. What we wanna do is understand the strategy and see the brilliance in it. See why it works. To really understand that life can be hard. And this is, this is something us humans do to cope. And honestly, the bigger the pain, the bigger will chances are be the desire to numb it. 'cause who wants to be walking around with a bunch of pain struggles, stress upset. So again, the positive side of numbing out with food is that it helps us relax. The downside is that it can pull us away sometimes from actually taking a deeper look at, is there something we need to address in our life? Is there a bigger picture that we need to look at? Am I numbing out too much with food?
Am I not including other strategies in my life that would help me such that I don't have to turn to food so much to numb out? So the bottom line is, I'm always, always, always gonna make my client, right? I want you to hear this. Make your client right. I don't care what behavior they do, if they don't like it, make it right. They have many good reasons to use food to numb out. How do you know if your client's numbing out with food? Because you're asking them questions. You're asking them about their day. So what happens? So you say, Mr. And Mrs. Client that you overeat. You say you emotionally eat. Oh, when do you do that? Oh gosh. When I get home from work, I just sit in front of the TV and I just eat a bunch of ice cream and I just disappear. Okay, great. They just told you now I'm not gonna go. Oh my God, you're numbing out with food. I'm gonna just take note. I'm gonna just watch that. I'm gonna watch their description to me of what happens when they say, yeah, when I get home from work and I'm not feeling good of myself and I'm lonely and I'm not in a relationship. Yeah, I turn on the tv. Yeah, I pull out the ice cream from the freezer. Yeah. And, and I just eat and I, I feel better or I just disappear.
So if I notice my client has a lot of guilt around that, I might say, as I've just been saying to you, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, that strategy makes perfect sense. I just wanna let you know. See, I'm noticing if my client has guilt or shame around that because I wanna burst their guilt or shame bubble as much as possible. I want to take the temperature down on their guilt or shame thermometer.
'cause they don't need it, at least not for very long. And part of taking away guilt or shame is when you can help a person understand the useful correct reason why they might be doing the thing that they're doing that doesn't work for them. Because all of a sudden they see your, by their side, your functioning as a coach, as a best friend, as an advocate, which now means you have a client, which now means your client can trust you, which now means you have a connection. And it now means that eventually when you do offer a strategy that might work alongside that. Okay, what else can you do to manage your stress from the day? They're gonna be a little bit more open to listening to that and to trying that. 'cause you're not making them wrong and you've actually helped them relax a bit around their challenge. I really want you to hear that.
So here's another interesting distinction I want you to play with this. I want you to consider this. Uh, men often use food to numb out, to disappear, to check out to dull emotional pain. I'm saying that observationally, that men will often use food to numb out, to disappear, to check out to dull emotional pain. It's just a noticing. Women on the other hand, will often use food to fill up and to actually feel, to have sensations, to have pleasure, to feel good about myself, to have an explosion on their tongue. Men can sit in front of the TV and drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of food, and they don't even remember how much they ate, what they ate, how it tasted. It's literally the act of disappearing. The masculine polarity wants freedom. And freedom often means this state of transcendence. Transcendence means oftentimes this place of meditation and meditation can look like or feel like on the lower end of the spectrum just disappearing. I, I, I just evaporate, men will understand this a little bit better if they've done it, and doesn't mean it's that numbing out is specific to men. It's just something I've noticed. So we're, again, we're listening simply listening to our clients, noticing if this is a strategy that they seem to lose, if we are trying to lose weight and we're using food to numb out, then it will likely be difficult to impossible to lose weight until we find another strategy or strategies or more effective ones to manage our need to disappear.
It's also useful to notice what we need to numb out from and how we might lean into the thing we're trying to numb out from just a little bit more. You know, I might suggest to my client, Hey, before you sit in front of the TV and numb out with food, what would happen? Uh, do you like music? Do you like listening to music? I love listening to music. Okay, can you put your headphones on and just play some favorite music and just disappear for a while and see what happens? Just experiment with that for a week. And and I'm not saying don't eat food after that, but I just want you to notice what happens if you do a different disappearing strategy first before you do the eating one. Just notice. So you're playing, you're inventing a homework assignment on the spot based on your client and what might work for them.
Next, my friends on the dynamic eating psychology checklist when it comes to weight, is grounding how we use food to ground. This is a beautiful principle, uh, and it's really wonderful food by nature, just so you get this food by its very nature, grounds us. There's nothing wrong with that. Um, grounding, what does that mean? Means it helps me land, helps me get present in my body, makes us more dense, more embodied, more full, more here. You know, think of it, if you're ever really hungry and all of a sudden you start to get lightheaded and you kind of disappear and you can't focus, and then all of a sudden you eat something and you're more here, you're more present. You're grounded. So food grounds us. It actually embodies us a bit. The process of digestion itself is grounding. Digestion roots us to the earth. You know, a cow has multiple stomachs. They're my favorite grounding digestive creatures. The, the, the cow is the poster person, poster animal, poster creature for digestion on this planet. What do they have? Like six different stomachs. Literally one after the next. Um, they're all about digestion. That's what their physiology is geared towards. And they're kind of grounded creatures. They're here, they're on the earth, they're present, and there's a cow. So when we are digesting, you start to ground, it roots us into our midsection. That's where your center of gravity is. So when there's food in your belly, all of a sudden there's action. There's activity. Okay, let's bring metabolic energy. Let's bring digestion. Let's bring enzymatic activity. Let's bring stomach churning into our midsection, into the center of our body. It grounds us. So as always, this is a perfectly understandable and good strategy because people will often use food to ground them. As humans, we need to have ways to ground ourselves. Some people are naturally more grounded than others. Think of a person in your life or that you know who you might describe. That's just a very grounded person that that's who they are. They're natural, they're focused. They can get things done. They're in their body. They're more methodical, they're present. Their mind doesn't seem to wander so much. They're not so ditzy. You know, some of us are naturally very grounded and a lot of us need to do different things to ground ourselves. Some people get very grounded with exercise and movement. Some people get very grounded with certain kinds of exercise and movement. You know, some people get grounded, really grounded when they weight lift. Talk about grounding. You're just grabbing a bunch of heavy metal and using it to resist against your muscles. So anyway, we're humans and we need to be present. We need to be here. We need to ground. So the question is, if we use food consistently to ground, how else might we ground? So that's what I'm gonna be wondering. Now, how do you know if your client's using food to ground? Hmm. You have this distinction in the back of your mind. You're learning, you know, the way you learn. Notice yourself first, do I use food to ground? In what ways? In what situations? When how. Um, do, how about the people I'm closest with? Do they use food to ground? You know, sometimes people get very nervous and all of a sudden they might eat. Or they're in a social situation and they want to go for food. And oddly enough, it's actually a very good grounding strategy for them.
So I just want you to notice yourself, the people around you. That's how you learn about this. There's subtle distinctions, but they're very, very useful, especially if you want to get better and better and better in this work. So, other grounding strategies with your client. Breathing, just simple breathing. Any kind of mind, body centering exercise. There's a thousand of these. Whether you're standing in a yoga posture, whether you're just standing in a, in, in, in sort of like a tree pose, um, actually with two feet on the ground instead of one. Um, planting your feet in the earth, grounding yourself. Exercise and movement can ground us. You know, there are certain foods that are better at grounding one than others. Protein and fat will sooner ground a person than will a bunch of sugar or very light carbohydrates or liquid. In fact, most sugar and most sweet foods will do the opposite of grounding. That's an old principle from macrobiotics. That sugar sweet, um, is often very yin. It's expansive. It takes us into our heads. It takes us a little bit out of the body. Whereas food, protein, fat, something with more substance will land us in the body. Make sense? Some of your clients, especially weight loss clients, especially if they're intense dieters and they're complaining about, um, irritability, or they're complaining about Fatigue, or they're complaining about brain fog, they need to ground, they need to embody. And oftentimes chances are, there's so many dieters that I've seen over the years, and we're gonna learn more about this when we talk about endless or chronic dieters and the whole concept of dieting and what happens personally, emotionally, metabolically. Uh, one of the things that goes down when we artificially food restrict, calorie restrict, we withhold, um, substance macronutrients that the body needs is we become ungrounded. And when we become ungrounded, what that can look like to our brain is, oh my God, I'm fatigued. Oh my god, I'm moody. Oh my God, I'm irritable. Uh, oh my goodness, I can't focus.
So some of our clients need to ground. In fact, I might even mention that to somebody who's trying to lose weight and they can't, and they're calorie restricting and they're complaining that I'm hardly eating food and I'm, I still can't lose weight. And I'm doing all this exercise, and at the same time I have these other symptoms, IE brain fog can focus fatigue. I get tired, I get irritable. Yeah, you need to ground.
So when you're understanding the concept of grounding, the, it's a continuum. So humans need to ground, some of us who are looking to lose weight are actually very ungrounded. Uh, some of us who are looking to lose weight, um, might be consistently using food to ground and need to look at other strategies. Next, my friends filling up, this is great. This is celebrating, filling up with food is filling up with life. We want to be fulfilled. We want to fill up. You wanna go to the, go to the gas station and fill up your tank. What a good feeling. You know, you got a full tank of gas. What a good feeling. Perhaps you've had this feeling. Um, a lot of people haven't oddly enough, but perhaps you've had this feeling of you have a meal and you really ate enough and you are full, but you're not stuffed. You just, you're full to the, to the sweet spot point where you feel fulfilled. You walk away from that meal. You don't need to eat anymore. You're not stuffed, you're not heavy. You're just fulfilled by that meal.
A lot of us are looking to be fulfilled by food, and rightfully so because we know food can give us that experience. And it's a great emotional physiologic state. It's a, it's a psychophysiologic state to be fulfilled with a great meal, to be fulfilled with food. We love it. And rightfully so. Um, humans generally don't enjoy feeling empty or devoid.
The human in us, especially the feminine in us. We wanna feel stuff. We wanna experience sensation. We wanna be alive. We wanna experience life. So food becomes fulfillment, which is great. And food can become substitute fulfillment as well, you know, uh, because the mind is metaphoric. So what I'm looking for fulfillment in life and I'm not quite getting fulfillment in life. It's easier if I feel easily fulfilled by food to go for food to fulfill me. Beautiful strategy we love. It makes perfect sense. It's reasonable. Once again, you notice your client doing this. We're always gonna make the behavior right. I'm never gonna try to take that away. You're using food to fill up. I can't believe you're doing. And no wonder you're gaining weight or you can lose it. I, I would never even think that thought. 'cause it's not true. You don't want to take away the strategy. You wanna acknowledge it. You want to more than acknowledge it. You wanna honor it and show the wisdom in it. You wanna also wanna be curious about it and find out what else for us as human beings would help us fill up.
Once again, the feminine in us tends to wanna fill up with food. The masculine in us will tend to wanna use food to check out or numb out. Notice the distinction. When our clients, oftentimes women clients seem to be using food to fill up. Um, you know, it's a great indication that they're hungry for something more plain and simple. Perhaps it's more love, more connection, more into intimacy, more communication, more attention, more pleasure, more celebration, more life. That's what your client needs. They don't need to stop filling up with food, bad person, bad boy, bad girl. Put the fork down, you know, chew 20 times. Use your willpower. It's such nonsense. It's such a backwards way of doing things that doesn't work, that's gonna have you crashing all over the place. Use food to fill up great, smart strategy. And you know what, if that's now one of the pieces that is leading to the fact that, yeah, I'm relying on food. Yeah, I wanna lose weight. Oh wow, there's a connection here. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I perfectly understand why you want to use food to fill up. You know, what else are you hungry for to fill up? And we're gonna look for that. We're gonna explore that and we're gonna acknowledge that and focus on that piece. Not focusing on stop using food to fill up. In fact, I will say to my client, I never want you to stop, to focus on, stop using food to fill up. What I want you to do is begin to focus on filling your tank with some of these other pieces that you really want in your life.
We can focus on those slowly, but that's where the action is. And until those start to come into your life, you're gonna need food. I would need food to continue to fill up. So again, you're not trying to stop people from filling up with food. We're trying to inspire our client in a whole new direction in terms of what they're truly hungering for. Please, please, please, my friends, never underestimate the power of what can happen when you make your client right for something that they secretly feel shame and guilt around you. Show them why it's a good human strategy. You show them how that's a learned strategy that so many humans do. That makes perfect sense. That is a perfect symbolic substitute. Good for you for figuring that out. And now without even trying to fight that. Sure, I get it. Keep doing that. And again, we're going to focus on where you truly want to go in your life. Your bigger goal, not the little one. Oh, I gotta lose weight, so I gotta stop filling up with food. So I'm gonna come home and say, don't fill up with food. Don't fill up with food. No, that never works. That's silly. Okay, next on the list, my friends of eating psychology distinctions when it comes to weight is food and loneliness. Ooh, this is such a juicy one. Um, many of us humans feel isolated. We feel unseen, we feel lonely. Oftentimes, we are literally isolated. We don't have a lot of people around us. Oftentimes, we are literally not being seen so much because of whatever it is, for whatever reason. We're not the social butterflies and we're lonely. Um, many people are surrounded by all kinds of humans and family and friends, partners, workers, coworkers, whatever it is. And they're still inside feeling isolated, unseen and lonely. So isolated, unseen, and lonely can be a function of people around. One meaning not having any people around us or much, um, or it doesn't matter. Um, so you also wanna notice that because there's a lot of clients who are, uh, Very socially robust, but they're actually lonely because they don't create intimacy in their life. So first and foremost, let's acknowledge that loneliness is a difficult emotion to experience. It's no fun. Nobody wants to be lonely. You don't wake up in the morning with loneliness as your goal for today. And if loneliness is present, ugh, let's just, let's just get down to business. Food can be a great substitute friend. The ritual of eating can make us feel connected and less alone. When you eat, you feel connected to the happiness that that food reminds you of. You feel connected to the sensation, you are joined with the food. It's an experience. It takes us back to the feeling of feel bad, eat food, feel better that we had when we were infants, when all of a sudden somebody is holding you and feeding you at the same time.
I believe that being alone, um, is for many people at different times in life, a soul lesson.
What do I mean by that? What I mean is that, uh, think about times in your life where you were just lonely, where life conspired. You're just feeling lonely or feeling alone.
And sometimes we need to learn how to access ourself, access our own core. Sometimes we need to learn how to be with me, how to self-regulate, how to begin to be my best friend, how to begin to stand by myself, how to move through my loneliness or my aloneness, and be present with myself, love myself, despite the fact that I'm feeling alone.
So when we take this loneliness feeling, so interesting distinction, yeah, I could feel lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely has this longingness to it. If only I had oomph, this perfect partner, or this great social life, or this perfect body which will then magically give me this great social life and all these wonderful people who love me, then I won't be lonely.
So loneliness. When we're feeling lonely, we're oftentimes looking for something. When we change the word lonely to alone, uh, yeah, sometimes I need to be alone with myself so I can be getting along with myself. So, so I can get to know myself better. In other words, we need to learn to be okay. Being alone, befriend ourselves, stand by ourselves, and to not necessarily need other humans to medicate our feelings. Now the reality is God made all kinds of other people on this planet just didn't make you. You know, it's not just you walking around planet Earth or me. There's a lot of us. So we need each other. That's the truth. There's a bit of a paradox here, but there are times in life when life seems to be giving us the aloneness program.
And when it does, we need to break the habit of, oh, I'm so lonely, I'm so lonely, where that energy brings us down. And instead we take that loneliness, we start to strengthen ourselves. Now, this could be a great exploration with your client. Just get to know your client. What, what is their life like? What's their day like? Who are the people around them? What's their social life like? Are they lonely? People will tell you, you know, if you're not sure, ask. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, let, lemme just ask you this question. I'm not quite getting it. It's just is, do you get lonely during the day or the week? Like, how do you feel? Do you feel connected? I know for me, I can go through these intense times of just, just feeling loneliness. Just what is that for you? So it's okay to ask. And oftentimes you'll just notice based on listening to your client and listening to their story. So it's just a sweet, interesting exploration. Now, once again, I'm never looking to stop my client from eating to regulate their loneliness. I wouldn't do that. Once again, your job is to acknowledge the intelligence of this strategy. Who wants to feel lonely? Nobody. Well, let's eat food. Makes perfect sense. And of course, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you know, this strategy can become problematic if it's contributing to your unwanted weight or your inability to lose it. So we're looking to see what the next correct step for our client might be in terms of what their loneliness is teaching them, what it's asking of them, what life is asking of my client through their loneliness. Perhaps it's time to create more connection with friends. Perhaps it's time to work on their social life to step out of their shell. Perhaps they need to date, perhaps they need to reach out to family. They're close with, get on the phone more. Perhaps they need to share what's really going on for them to step more into life. Perhaps they need to elevate themselves in their alone time and learn how to manage their aloneness better. Once again, Mr. And Mr. Client, what else can you do when you are alone? So you're not just exclusively, exclusively using food to medicate that loneliness. Are there, you know, are there TV shows you could watch that are more uplifting? Is there music you can listen to that's more uplifting? Is there an activity you can do, taking a walk? Do you have a pet? Like what, what, what else? Ask your client. And if they say, well, I don't know, I never let my client give me the answer, I don't know. It's their life. They have to explain to me. They have to do a little bit of inner work and inner digging to find out what else can it possibly be. And you know, sometimes people truly get stuck in their baffled fine. So then you gotta get a little sharp and you have to make suggestions and see what feels like it might be sticking for them. Again, whether it's music, whether it's taking a walk, whether it's making a phone call, whether it's, you know, reading a book, whether it's going online to a favorite teacher, thought leader, comedian, singer. I don't care what it is, what would help uplift you in that moment? So even though you are alone, you're not feeling as lonely. Because what you're doing when you're in this conversation, my friends, is you are helping a person slowly learn how to re language their conversation that they have inside around food. Because they're busy, afraid of food, fearing food, fighting food, fighting body fat, fighting their loneliness, using food to medicate their loneliness, feeling upset that they're using food to medicate their loneliness. And now you are coming in, you're observing that you're making it right, you're making it correct, you're acknowledging, of course this makes perfect sense. And we're gonna just look at other strategies. You can start to do baby steps. Mr. And Mrs. Client, that's gonna slowly help you move in a different direction. So you are creating a new and positive story around a person's relationship with food. Because once we start to create a new and positive story, then we have a new and positive story. And then life becomes a new and positive movie becomes a new and positive journey more and more and more.
And we're taking away all the negative self-talk. Not all of it, but we're starting to delimit it. We're starting to let go of it. And as you take these baby steps with your client, um, it builds on itself. Okay, next on the dynamic eating psychology checklist. When it comes to weight, oof, this is an interesting one. I'm gonna try my best to download. Explain to you what I mean by emotional holding. Okay? First and foremost, when it comes to food, when it comes to life, okay? Emotions are a flow. You and I have an emotional metabolism. Uh, what do I mean? You know, you feel this way in the morning and then you feel this way at lunch and you feel this way in afternoon and you feel this way in the evening and you feel this way when you're with this person. And then you're with that person and you feel this way. When this thing comes up and that thing comes up. And in the course of a day, a human can go through a million different emotional experiences. Okay? Maybe not a million, but it's probably in the hundreds where emotions, s**t, they change. So we're constantly metabolizing that meaning, yeah, you get really happy about something and you probably don't stay in that peak happiness that eventually metabolizes. And now all of a sudden you are driving your car and you're focusing on the road. Uh, and maybe you're listening to your favorite podcast or maybe you are thinking about something. And so we're constantly metabolizing our emotions and they change and they shift. Just same way you metabolize a meal, okay? There's a lot of food in the belly. Now all of a sudden you break it down, you assimilate it, you absorb it, you excrete it, and all of a sudden there's nothing left in your belly. You've metabolized it, it's moved on. Okay? That's your emotional metabolism. Now, just as I can become constipated in my digestive metabolism, it's easy for us humans, some of us humans, many of us humans, to become a little bit emotionally constipated, to stop the flow of my emotions, to not express them. Why would a human become emotionally constipated? Or my emotion or emotions stop flowing here or there? They're not being expressed. Why? Because there are certain emotions that us humans in general and certain people in specific, we don't like 'em. You like certain emotions, you don't like other emotions? I like feeling good. I don't like feeling bad. I like happy. I don't like sad. I definitely don't like anger. I definitely don't like rage. Whether it's me feeling it or you feeling it. I definitely don't like disappointment. I definitely don't like guilt or shame or hurt or sadness. Could you blame me? Could you blame you? We don't like 'em. And the more we resist them, you know what happens? What you resist tends to persist. When we stop the flow of any particular emotion. 'cause I don't like anger. Hey honey, it, it's what I just say, anger you. Oh no, it didn't. And you're looking at that person and like their face is turning red and their jaws clenched and they're trying to put on a smiley face and you know they want to kill you or kill the person next to them. Oh no, I'm not angry. Of course you're angry, but they don't want to express it because for whatever reason, not a bad person. It's just that they haven't been conditioned, educated, raised in such a way that they can easily metabolize, anger. Certain cultures, certain people, certain families, uh, are better at certain emotions than others. Quite frankly. I've just noticed that in general, anger tends to be a different, a difficult emotion. Rage is a difficult emotion. Disappointment is a difficult emotion. Guilt and shame. They're difficult ones for humans to feel.
And when we stop the flow of a particular emotion, discomfort and symptoms are predictable. What does that mean? Discomfort and symptoms are predictable. Okay? All of a sudden I'm really angry, but I'm not expressing it. But that anger's building up and it's like, oh my god, what's going on? I on my buddy and I, all of a sudden I go and I eat. And what does that eating do? It actually stuffs down my anger even more. And that eating all of a sudden puts a big meal in my belly. And all of a sudden that anger I was feeling that was starting to get me all stressed and put me in sympathetic nervous system dominance, eating. Ooh, gave me a little pleasure. Ooh, gave me a little grounding. Ooh. And now my belly is realizing, oh my God, there's food here. I need to eventually get into a relaxation response so I could digest this meal. So all of a sudden you've semi metabolized an anger, but not really. We've temporarily glossed over it by using food to layer over that anger. Meanwhile, there's anger under there. We use food to kinda medicate it, but it's not a medication that really works. It masks the emotion that we're not wanting to feel.
So I just want you to notice this, my friends. That's all. I just want you to notice this. Don't ask me or anyone else how to fix this just yet. You can't fix anything until you observe it and learn about it and, and get to know it and get cozy with it and get curious about it first. That's all. You wanna fix a car, you gotta understand cars first. You gotta ask a lot of questions. You gotta do a lot of observation. That's all. So I just want to notice, hmm, my client, Hmm. Emotions. Hmm? Their emotional metabolism. Hmm. Are there any particular emotions I might notice in my client that they don't seem to like to deal with?
I'm I gonna jump on my client? Aha. I have just determined that you don't like to experience guilt. Haha. Bad client. You don't like guilt? No, no, no, no, no. I'm just gonna bookmark in my mind when I notice that happening and when the time feels right, when I've built up a little bit of connection with my client where there's a little bit more trust and there's more flow between us. At some point I might say, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I've noticed, you know, I've known you now for what, two or three sessions and you got a lot going on in your life and you know, you got a lot to be p****d about. Like, I gotta say, if I was in your life, I would definitely be p****d at my boss and I would definitely be p****d at my partner and I would definitely be p****d at my next door neighbor for doing that. It makes perfect sense to me. Um, in fact, I'd be a hell of a lot more angry than you are. And y you know something I notice, correct me if I'm wrong, but anger's not quite your favorite emotion to feel. Is it? You know, it's not something you like to express. You kinda like to pretend everything's kind of nicey nice. Is that true for you? Now, I'm only gonna ask that question if I've already determined that that's what I think is going on. Your client might say, Nope, that's not me.
Now if I really think it is, I might poke them a little bit more. Are you sure about that? And if they're not on board, then fine, I'm not gonna push it 'cause they're not ready. And if they are on board, oh yeah, that's me. I don't like anger. So then we might start cycling back and talk about how to better work with their anger, whatever the emotion is so they can learn to move that energy instead of bury it down.
And just so you know, a lot of this training really is working with emotional metabolism and how to learn as human beings to best regulate our emotions. How to learn, how to best regulate the thoughts in our mind. So once again, ultimately with your client, you are here to help them better regulate their emotions. And you are here to help them better harness their mind. So the mind is working for them, not against them. The mind is not torturing them with, I hate you, I hate your body, I hate your weight, I hate this, I hate that. Um, because you know, that doesn't take us where we wanna go when it comes to any kind of eating challenge. Okay, my friends next.
Emotional holding is essentially a stressor. When you're holding in an emotion, it is kind of like you need to take a pee and you're not peeing. That's a stressor. I gotta pee. Why would you hold it in? So when you hold in an emotion, it's a stressor. And you know what physiologic stress means for the body when it comes to weight, when it comes to calorie burning capacity, when it comes to appetite regulation.
So we're now understanding from a very physiologic perspective that when you don't let your emotions naturally move through you, it doesn't mean if you're angry, you beat the guy with a stick. It just means that there is always a way to channel that energy effectively. Doesn't mean it's gonna look pretty. It might mean you have to walk away from a situation and beat a pillow. It might mean you have to walk away from a situation and just calm yourself down. Um, it might mean you have to take a little bit of space talking about anger between you and the other person. Or it might mean you need to b***h and moan and groan to a friend just so you can move that energy.
Make sense? So emotional holding is a stressor who could have seen that coming? So this is your task. Learn to do this with yourself. Learn to do this with the people you're closest with. If you wanna really experiment in your, not the kind of person who's already seen clients, then study the people around you. Study the people that you know best. Where do they, where do they not express certain emotions? Where do they hold emotions? Is there any way that they are using food to regulate their unexpressed emotions? To push those down a little bit to medicate them. So just something to ask. That's how you learn. Okay? Also, when it comes to weight, I am listening for survival and stress. I'm always listening for where my client is in stress. You're gonna hear more about this. Stress by the way, again, can mean anxiety, fear, anxiousness, confusion or upset.
Fact, take away the word stress for a moment. Listen for where your client is in anxiety. About what? Fear, about what anxiousness, about what? Confusion. About what? Upset about what you know, animals and creatures in the natural world sense very, very well. When other creatures are in stress, it's true, especially predators, but animals of the same ilk. Dogs know when their fellow dogs are in stress. Horses know elephants know if you're around animals, you watch animals know when other animals, especially of their kind are in stress and even others of different kinds. So all I'm saying is, you and I need to learn this skill.
I really want you to learn that skill because there's some people, you know, these people, they're cool customers, they put on their game face. And it's easy to think that they're not in anxiety, fear, confusion, upset because they have a good mask. So this is a tool that you gradually develop. It's a sixth sense that you gradually develop learning to see where is my client in anxiety, fear, anxiousness, confusion, upset. 'cause when you know that, excuse me, you're gonna know some key places to work with your client that can yield some powerful results. And when I say powerful results, just in their life,
they're coming to see you to lose weight. And they think, I don't know what they're thinking that you're gonna do. You're gonna give them a magic pill, a magic diet, and they've been trying to lose weight for all this time and nothing's worked. And all of a sudden you're talking about their personal life because you start identifying places where they're anxious and confused and upset that they're hiding or they're didn't really talk to anybody else about. And all of a sudden it's a topic of conversation. And now you're off to the races because you're doing real work. You're moving towards a bigger goal, which is our highest full, most fulfilled self-expression. Us becoming the best possible person we can be in this world. Because when we do that, our smaller goals start to fall into place more. So again, important skill as a practitioner and it tells us more than anything else where the places are that we will eventually need to work with our client. The impact of stress chemistry on the body is profound, my friends. It really is. Now here's a bottom line. If we can't help our weight loss, clients relax more and more and more into the places of their most stress, especially self-chosen stress, then the job of weight loss becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible.
I mean, that doesn't mean, oh, I have to make my clients stress free. It doesn't mean a human has to be stress free. You have a lot of stress and lose a lot of weight. But we're learning how to metabolize that stress better and better and better as opposed to emotionally hold it and not transform it and not dig deeper into my relationship, stress my work, stress my life, stress, my stress around intimacy, my stress around sexuality, my stress around my femininity, my masculinity, my stress around who am I in this world? Whatever it is, we're we're leaning into that more. And instead of having stress around it, we're going, okay, let me embrace this. Let me use this as fuel for my growth. Let me use this as fertilizer for my growth. You know what I'm talking about next on the list, my friends protection.
If you're alive on planet earth, you need to protect. Protection is a good thing. Keeps you alive. Your whole body is a, is a is an immune system. Your largest immune system, according to science is the skin. It's your covering, it's your shell. Gosh, we need to protect. And protection is good, built in survival strategy. You must know, I must know. We all must know. Every creature on the planet has to know some strategies to protect ourselves. Protection is good. I can, you need to sometimes protect yourself physically, you know? Okay, don't get in that elevator if you don't feel that person is safe, that stranger standing next to you. Um, well don't walk on that mountainside if you're afraid of heights and it's slippery. Okay? So we need to know how to protect ourselves physically. We need to know how to protect ourselves emotionally. You know, to sometimes not take on other people's stuff, not take on their emotions, not take on their unkind words and let it into our system. Uh, so we need to know how to protect ourselves with, with words. Literally. Um, some people with weapons, some people just with knowing some people, we use our faith to protect us so much more. So all different ways we protect ourselves and they're all beautiful.
The human brain, interestingly enough, 'cause it's smart, you got a smart brain. The human brain will often use physical size as a substitute for all kinds of protections. I was hurt as a child. I was emotionally abused. I was physically abused. I was sexually abused. I was just confused by this crazy world and all these strange people around me. And what am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? I'm not, I don't feel safe. For whatever reason, the human brain will use physical size as a substitute for all kinds of protection. If you and I didn't feel protected at some earlier time in life, body size can not always will for some people. How many people nobody knows. Body size can become a substitute for a sense of power and safety. Why is that? It is because nature is smart. The body is smart. Creation is smart. The intelligence that created us is pretty on point. The biggest creatures in the jungle are the ones that have the least amount of predators. It's just the way it goes. The biggest creatures are the ones that if you wanna attack them, you better have a lot of buddies. You better have a lot of weapons. So the bigger we are, the more protected we are. Nature knows that. The primitive brain knows that and understands that. So for many people, their survival brain
on its own, without you trying to think about it or my client trying to think about it, the survival brain says, damn it better get big better, get big better get big. Why? Because if I'm big, I got this layer of protection. Brilliant. And it's smart because it actually does give a certain kind of protection. Because by the way, a very small, helpless or thin body is a vulnerable body. That's just the truth. Using weight for protection is something that you as a person and a practitioner, you learn to notice. To intu it, intu it to glean from your client's story, begin to notice the people around you. Just notice the people around you. If you're already seeing clients, just notice them. It is not something I spring on a client. Ha ha, you're using, you got a big body because you're using it for protection. Um, it's not something I say until the moment is right and until I can say it in a way that lets my client know, damn brilliant strategy. Wow, did you need that?
And you know what, Mr. And Mrs. Client, that was a good strategy when you were a kid. That was a good strategy when you were a teenager. Might even have been a good strategy when you were in your twenties. I don't know that you need that anymore as your primary protection strategy. What do you think? So for the practitioner, just noticing, noticing, noticing can be very helpful. Gives you more information and the conversation. When you do notice, this eventually moves towards how our client can begin to see the world they live in as just a safer place. What might you be protecting against Mr. And Mrs. Client? Who might you be protecting against? How has weight as a protection been a helpful, useful, and why survival strategy for you? Gimme a list right now.
How has weight and, and, and maybe it hasn't been for you. So you can ask this question if you're not sure, or if you wanna play and your clients playful. Some clients love to play, they love to explore this stuff. If you have a client like that, great. Go play. Okay. Kay. You know, I got a question for you Ms. Klein. How has this been if, if if weight is a protection, if weight is a protection, if the biggest creatures in the jungle are the most protective, so nobody can mess with them, how has, how has your extra weight, which is giving you a bigger body, stronger body, more protected body, how has that actually been a helpful, useful and wise survival strategy for you?
And how might this strategy no longer be useful?
And what else might we substitute in terms of a protection strategy? By the way, other protection strategies. Using our words to say no, beginning to understand boundaries and what our boundaries are. What our boundaries are about our body, what our boundaries are about our sexuality, what our boundaries are about, what kinds of words people can say to us, what our boundaries are around, uh, somebody touching us physically when they're angry, what our boundaries are in terms of people using words to insult us or harm us. What our boundaries are in terms of people taking up our time. So protection means boundaries, creating personal boundaries. So many different kinds of boundaries. Protection is also understanding sometimes for some people, um, getting in connection with their higher power, whatever that is for them.
What's your connection, Mr. And Mrs. Client, between a higher power and you feeling protected in this world? Just describe that for me. So it's an exploration and you might choose to create homework assignments that thread the needle for your client to help them explore this more. Not about fixing it, it's about exploring it. Because in that exploration process we learn and in the learning process we grow. And in the growing process it becomes more natural and we grow as human beings. And all of a sudden the ways that we turn to food to protect us or use a big body to protect us aren't so necessary anymore.
It's amazing how it works. Okay, next my friends, I want you to listen for your client and their relationship to work, especially when work is a burden. So let's assume for a moment that work is a necessary human activity. It's a necessary function and, and it's a necessary joy.
So for many people, work is joyful or it has joyful moments or joyful times in it. And a lot of times work. It just work is just work. And work can be a burden. Especially a lot of us are carrying a heavy load when it comes to our work life. And when it comes to our responsibilities in terms of who we gotta take care of. So this is not self-imposed, okay? Some people create burden around work and it's self-imposed. So I want you to look at that, um, because there are some people who have more control over their work schedule than, than they say they do. And they could actually take more time to eat and they could actually create more spaciousness for themselves, their family, for movement, for exercise. And there's a heck of a lot of people who work is a necessity, uh, providing for themselves, their family, whoever is a necessity. Uh, and, and welcome to Earth is what we gotta do. So simply what I wanna say is many of our eating concerns are directly connected to in some way, not necessarily caused by though they can be, but at least there's connections to our work life.
Now again, it's not about fixing somebody's job or career, it's about exploring how our client can begin to make adjustments so they can be better nourished and cared for even though they have to work. And even though work might be a challenge, work might be a burden. Work might be a stress, okay? Does what work is for you? How do we come in, Mr. And Mrs. K client and just bringing a little bit of support for you here. How do we get more nourishment into your workday? How do we get more self care into your workday? I get it's hard for you. I get that it's not easy. I get that work stresses you out. I get that you just can't up and leave this job. There's a lot of people that simply cannot up and leave their job for all different kinds of reasons. So then you're the coach, you're the practitioner, it's up for up to you to get creative, my friends, and see how you can help your client who is feeling that work burden.
You know, for some people the burden of work is concomitant with the challenge of raising kids with little or no help. Being a single parent and having a job, being the primary breadwinner. Um, you know, uh, being a primary breadwinner and having a partner or a family member that's ill and that you're supporting, um, holding a job that offers little job security. You know, that happens. So often people are in a quote unquote good job. They make decent money and they're carrying a big load and they get, and they're in fear of losing that job or being older and afraid of losing one's job to someone younger that's, that's big. Um, or you're working hard and you need to work hard, but feeling ill or burnt out or kinda running on fumes. So there's all kinds of distinctions here. So I want you to discover, I want you to learn based on your questioning of a client. Really just get down to the nitty gritty of is there overeating? Is there emotional eating? Is there binge eating? Is there I'm eating too much food, that's why I can't lose this weight. Is it connected to work? And if so, let's understand what is their job life like? How much time do they have for lunch? Where do they eat? Are they having problem? Because there's all kinds of food in the office and it's junk and they can't resist. So you're just listening for the details and then looking to see where you can do the work.
And when it comes to our weight loss clients who are facing a work challenge, you just gotta have a lot of compassion and a lot of space for their challenge. You really do. And in such cases, here you are, you're becoming a life coach, you're becoming a work coach, you're becoming a work cheerleader. And we're doing our best. Again, doing your best. You're not gonna fix your client's life and take away all their burden. If you, this is what first time practitioners do. Oh my god, my client's so stressed out about work. I gotta make sure they're not stressed out about work. Really? Gee, you're gonna be a bazillionaire if you can figure out how to do that. Everybody's gonna want your service. Um, it's not about that. It's not about taking away our client's pain and our stress. It's about listening, learning and looking to make the small adjustments that can help our client get where they need to go. Okay, my friends, here's the juicy one. Sexual wounding. Woo. I'm just listening. I am listening, I'm listening to my client. This can mean sexual wounding, direct sexual abuse in some way, shape or form, or somebody that simply experiences emotional hurt in this realm. Somebody might have cheated on them. And that's a wound, that's a sexual wound. Um, a lot of people have confusion around sexuality that's ingrained in us via media, via culture, by the fact that we're going through puberty. What's going on? I don't know who I am. I don't know what's right. I don't know what's wrong. And it's tough. And when there's sexual confusion or sexual hurt or sexual abuse, um, it's easy to turn to food.
Far too many humans feel shame around their sexuality. You're gonna hear the topic of sex come up a number of times in this training because the topic of food and sex is ever present. Omnipresent. It's juicy. It's highly unexplored. And no, I know of no books on this topic. Here we are, we're learning about it right now. We're at the leading edge 'cause you and I are in the conversation and we're willing to be explorers here.
Go back to the Bible. Guilt and shame are ancient. They're biblical when it comes to our sexuality. You know, I'm talking about the story of Adam and Eve. They break a food rule. There's your original connection between food and sex. Adam and Eve guy upstairs makes the first food rule. They break the food rule, don't eat the piece of fruit. They eat the fruit. Woman eats the fruit first. Interesting. Um, it's the women who tend to have the bigger challenges around their relationship with food and body. And what's the first thing you see after woman breaks the rule? The man follows suit, and all of a sudden they're hiding in the garden. They're covering up their private parts. Shame about the body. Break a food rule. Shame about the body. Shame runs very deep. So maybe this is just an allegory that reminds us, lets us know that shame around sexuality can run very deep and it can profoundly impact our relationship with food. Our relationship with food and our relationship with our sexuality is often deeply connected. We often believe in falsely so that if I can change this body through food and exercise to be more sexually desirable, then I will finally find love, happiness, the goodies I hit the big time. I'm one of the glamorous ones in the glorious ones. And I've, I made it. I did it. And my friends, that is such a false nonsense, dead end notion. And I mean it. And if you got it, you know that that's the thing you gotta let go of. That's the toxic life belief, toxic dietary belief that we need to slowly massage out of existence. More women are especially prone to experiencing the downside of the food, sex connection. Women are extremely the feminine in us as extremely vulnerable to critique and insult around weight, shape, and beauty.
Don't take my word for it. Observe the world. We are taught in, especially American culture, that's the one I know most about, especially American culture. But that culture is being exported across the, across the world. We're being taught to equate weight loss with sexual desirability. And hence the best chance to find true love and partnership.
Women who want true love and partnership are being told, you gotta look like this. They're being taught that from a young age, and they're dieting from a young age, and they're wanting to shapeshift their body from a young age.
So we're using the shape and the weight of the body as a billboard, as an advertisement for true love. And if that's what we're doing, Hey, look, I made my body really skinny or slender or this or that, really? Is that gonna give you true love? Really? Is that what gives it to you? Are are people gonna start lining up? Oh, I love you. Doesn't happen. And if a human has to hook another human through false advertising through a billboard, through the body, look, look, look, look, look, I put all this energy. I'm not to weigh what you wanna weigh, be what you wanna be, that's fine. It's okay. But to think that that delivers true love is, is a terrible belief that's been ingrained by culture. That is is just dead end. So anyway, when we're working with weight loss clients, we as practitioners are listening for our client's relationship to their sexuality. Are they hiding it? Are they expressing it? Are they comfortable with, are able to talk and share about their sex life? Are they protecting against their sexuality, their sensuality? Notice them. How do they move? How do they dress? How do they talk? How are they embodied in their sexuality? What do you see? What do you notice? Notice that people around you, oftentimes our clients are weight loss. Clients are in knots, they're knotted up around the confluence of food and sexuality, weight and sexuality, weight loss, and sexuality. Because it means desirability, because it means connection, intimacy, and love relative to what the world has taught them. So ultimately, our job as practitioners is to encourage conversation in the realm of sexuality, sensuality, pleasure and intimacy. So conversation, time to talk. We're here to help our clients see where they might be using food as a substitute for these, we are here to listen for how weight might be used as a protection or a distraction from claiming our sexuality and our life. Oh, as soon as I lose weight, then I'll be the real sensual and desirable me. But until then, until I lose his weight, I go, Hey, how could I be sexual, central, intimate, desirable? Until then, I'm just a blob. Nobody loves me. I don't love me. Why should I love me? Nobody else loves me. Um, so I'm not lovable until this happens.
Would you tell that to a kid? Would you tell that to a baby? Would you tell that to a child? Not gonna love you until you get rid of that fat, until you get rid of that baby fat? That's what you're doing. That's the level of insult to the soul that this toxic belief is that you didn't invent that your client did invent invented by the world. We absorb it through the invisible neural net of media. It's circulating around us. It's hurled through. The invisible atmosphere is what we gotta deal with. And it's a good thing to explore. And it's a fascinating topic. And as you get more comfortable with it, your client will get more comfortable with it. Next closely related to the burden of work, by the way, is the burden of money. When I say burden of money, meaning a lot of people are burdened by not having enough or the fear that they won't have enough, or the fear that I will lose what I have. And for many people, that burden is actually very, very, very real. Even though you probably know, I probably know. In fact, I do know people who have more than enough money and they worry more about money than people that don't have a lot of money that I know. So how much money almost doesn't matter. And I've had some very wealthy clients who money was their primary worry, uh, and they have enough wealth for 50 of us for a lifetime. So it could be very actually real in terms of monetary terms, or it could be simply how that person relates to life and the world. So bottom line is the stress around money. You know, this can be very deep. So I wanna listen to my client's relationship with money, just some just listening. I wanna notice their languaging. When the topic of money comes up, I wanna notice their facial expression. I wanna notice their posture. I wanna notice their intonation. I want to notice their voice. I wanna notice if they're going into fear around money. Some people honestly need to practice better money management. Some people need to learn to trust a bit more. Some need to learn the lessons that only money can teach us. A lot of us are just, we're in constantly in process. We're constantly on our money journey.
So just listening, I just wanna notice, is there a connection? Maybe, perhaps. It doesn't mean a causality. My client's relationship with money is making them gain weight. No, it's not about that. It's about connections
and it's about listening for opportunities. So I just wanna mention that next, my friends shame is an interesting emotion. Let's call shame of feeling an emotion of stated of being. That can run very deep and it can direct our relationship with both food and body. I wanna say that shame is epic. It's epic, it's big, it's genetic, it's historical, it is biblical. Shame about the body, shame about food, shame about some people are just shame of being born.
It's fascinating. I just want you to notice a client notice their shame quotient. Just want you to notice it. And one of the things you do is, I'm gonna love my clients. Yes, a little bit more in their journey with shame.
I might even at some point when I feel more comfortable and my client feels comfortable for me, I might say something like, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, you have a very similar challenge that so many humans in this world have, which is we're learning to deal with our shame. Shame is irreducible meaning, it, it, it's, it's just, you can't dissect it down any further. It's this emotion that lives inside of us. And here's the, here's the remedy. You're not gonna, you might not love this or like it, um, but this is the remedy, the best remedy I've discovered for shame. If you've got another one, let me know. When I notice my client feeling shame, I'm gonna let them know. It's not about letting go of shame. Believe it or not, it's actually acknowledging your shame and learning to love yourself even though you feel shame. It's not about getting rid of the shame, it's learning to love yourself while you're feeling shame. Just imagine for a moment, somebody you loved the most in the world. Your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your kid, your kids. Now imagine for a moment that they are feeling just ashamed about their body and they're just in breakdown and they're so, they're so feeling shame and they're so heating on themselves and they're so feeling like they don't deserve to exist. Would you be saying to them, you're right. You shameful person. You should be ashamed of just two pounds of body fat here and this weight here. And they're like, I'm not gonna say that. What are you gonna really do with someone you love? You're gonna love them through that experience. You're just gonna love them. Big hug. So that's the strategy for your client. Can you actually give yourself a hug while you're feeling that shame? I love myself even though I feel shame.
Once that little bit of self-love starts to get in there into your emotional metabolic system, healing begins to happen. It is like bringing a candle into the darkness. I mean that, I want you to think about that, and I want you to try it on for yourself. If you are the kind of person that can go through bouts of shame, when you're going through a bout of shame, I want you to continue to feel the shame and then say, can I love myself as if I'm a separate person? As if I'm my best mother, my best father, my best friend, my best partner.
Can I love myself right now, even though I'm feeling shame? That's what I'm saying. Shame is often connected to wanting to lose weight.
A lot of people feel shame about their bodies. Why? Because they have been fat shamed into hell, um, by culture, by people around them, by people from their past whose voices continue to live inside them. Fat shaming is all pervasive. It's all powerful. It's horrible, and it lives inside humans. We interject it and we turn it into our own voice, and we take over the fat shaming on ourselves. And because that horrible voice is living inside of us, how do I get rid of this horrible voice that's torturing me? Aha. I have an idea how to get rid of this horrible, fat shaming voice. If I just lose the weight, then I could finally lose the voice, lose the shame. That fat shaming voice won't shame me anymore. Excuse me for laughing, because it's true. We all do that. And we don't just do that with fat. We do that in all kinds of ways. If you're ashamed of how much money you have, and well, if I just get rich, and oftentimes what happens, even for people that lose the weight, that force themselves into weight loss so they don't feel ashamed about themselves, they're gonna still be oftentimes living in fear of gaining the weight back. And all of a sudden they're not self-confident or they're self-confident for a little bit of time, and then they go right back to where they were because their body weight changed, but they didn't change, their character didn't change, their inner world didn't change, their soul didn't change, their heart didn't change, their emotional metabolism didn't change. You can't cheat the universe, my friends, first things first, the job of our weight loss clients, their practice is to learn to step into body love and body acceptance. Now, is it, it doesn't mean you don't wanna change it. I wanna change all kind of things, but it doesn't mean I have to hate the person myself in the meantime because I don't know how to do this or that because I can't hit the tennis ball. So, oh, let me just hate myself because I can't hit the tennis ball. That'll make me hit the tennis ball. No. Take a few lessons, have some fun, hit the ball, get some practice. So it's our job to support our clients in this understanding best overall strategy, loving ourselves into weight loss. That's it. And that is one of the big antidotes to shame. Okay, next my friends, here's what you're listening for. In the dynamic eating psychology checklist when it comes to weight, I want you to listen for this thing called perfectionism.
For many, many, many, many people, my friends, perfectionism is ground zero. That's where the action is. We worship perfectionism. Perfectionism, by the way, implies again, once I'm perfect, once I got the perfect weight, perfect body, I am above criticism. There's no more work to do. Ha ha, I'm eternally this weight, eternally this beautiful place. I can now escape all negative feelings, all harsh criticisms, even myself. I'm above it all. That's actually what's underneath perfectionism is I am now above all criticism yours or my own anyone's, especially self. And I'm unchangeable. There's no feelings, there's no fluctuation, there's no change, there's no life. It's all pristine. That'll save me perfectionism. The fact that we can hit the perfection zone is a toxic viral belief. It is nasty. It is virulent. It is a disease.
Can't say it anymore than that. Oh, actually, I can. Perfectionism will crush your soul if you have it. It's crushing your soul right now. That's bad news. The good news is you can turn it around. Starting now. Our perfectionism alienates ourself from ourself. It's definitely alienates others. It deregulates and pushes away the people closest to us. Perfectionists secretly hold others to impossible standards as well. Not just themselves. Always, always, always around the corner from perfectionism around food, around diet, around my weight is self-abuse. It's predictable. You can time your watch by it. Always feel free to prove me wrong. If you're being perfectionist about your diet, about looking a certain way, weighing a certain amount, there's gonna be some point where you're bashing yourself. How's that working? It doesn't. You gotta graduate from this virus. You gotta understand that you did not invent perfectionism. Perfectionism requires a continuous, underline the word continuous, please. Intellectual intervention with your client. I might talk about it and bring it up every single section session. When I see my client's perfectionist, I'm gonna do an intellectual intervention around it. Just like I started saying to you, Mr. And Mr. Client, you are looking about a perfect diet and the perfect weight and the perfect body. And you're thinking that when you have the perfect diet and the perfect weight and the perfect body, you're gonna have this perfect life and everything's gonna be great, and it's gonna solve all your problems. Name me one person that that's happened to in history. Name me anytime. Have you ever reached your, your perfect weight? Have you ever reached your target weight before? Oh, you have. What happened? Did it solve all your problems? You gained it back. Huh? What went down? What went on?
Many people have already hit their target weight at some point thinking it was gonna give them everything and it didn't.
Of all the viral beliefs we could have. Perfectionism is, um,
it's very pernicious. It's very seductive because you know something, it can actually make us more functional. It could actually, um, make us better at a lot of things. And who wouldn't wanna be perfect? You know, it's not like I'm trying to be the most imperfect person who would want to do that. I wanna be perfect at this and perfect at that, and perfect at whatever I do.
Once again, it is inhumane to self and is inhumane to others.
And I wanna show my client, this isn't working for you. You're unhappy. It is. And I'm gonna notice the places where their perfectionism leads to overeating or binge eating or emotional eating, or it leads to times when they go through intense, shameful episodes and experiences.
A, a person can only begin to let go of perfectionism once they have acknowledged that they indeed experience this and it doesn't work, and they're on board with growing out of it. Otherwise, perfectionists will continue their religion. It is a religion. And when I say it's a religion, meaning they have a church, they have an altar, they put perfectionism on the altar and they worship it like it's a God, and they believe in its infallibility.
That's not a good God to worship. It's not a good religion letting go of perfectionism. Perfectionism is a practice, my friends. It takes time. It's a commitment. So as a practitioner, I'm looking to help my clients see the damage that they're doing by living and thinking in this way. And I'm looking to gradually help my client adopt behaviors and invite them to be more human, more imperfect, more messy, more real, more authentic. You'll hear more about this, okay, my friends last on the dynamic eating psychology checklist, undigested life experience. What the heck does that mean? I love this topic. I'm gonna tell you why. Because all experience, anything you experience must on some level be metabolized. You have a conversation with somebody, whatever, that kind could have been powerful, amazing, wonderful. You metabolize it, you take it in, you digest it, you, you, you take the nutrition out of it. Wow, that was a great conversation. I wanna make sure I remember this. Oh, you know, when she said that, that really didn't work for me. So yeah, you excrete that. Um, go on a vacation, you experience it, you metabolize that experience, you digest it, you extract all the goodies from that vacation. You try to forget the nonsense that didn't work. IE you excrete that part. We're always metabolizing our life, meaning we're taking in experiences. You, you, you taste, you taste life. You chew on it. You take what you need from it. You excrete what you don't need. Some life events are far more easily digested than others. The experiences in our psyche that remain unprocessed, unmetabolized undigested invariably show up as symptom,
emotional and somatic.
Meaning, if I had an experience where, you know, he cheated on me, he left me, he stole my freaking money. Um, I can't, how did that happen? I can't believe it. Gosh, I hear stories about this. Um, and I haven't processed, I haven't digested that experience, understandably so. And now here I'm living with a knot in my stomach, a knot in my life. I don't want to go into a relationship anymore. I don't want to date. I don't wanna get involved. And, but I need love and I need connection, and I need intimacy. And I turn to food. Makes perfect sense.
That's the symptom. Overeat bingey emotionally,
because we're turning to food to help manage that unprocessed, undigested life experience. We'll often turn to food for that. It can manifest very simply. It can clearly manifest as a somatic symptom, as digestive upset. It's a post-traumatic stress, a stress that lives in the system post-traumatic stress. By the way, that's what post-traumatic stress is undigested life experience. Unprocessed life experience. We couldn't unwind it. So it stays in the system literally as a stressor that is waiting to de-stress itself.
So you and I with our clients, we're always, always listening for the undigested life experiences. I'm just listening in the back of my mind of my client. So the coaching relationship is here to help them digest a little better. So I'm, I'm always gonna bookmark. Oh wow, that's an undigested life experience for them. That's a big one. And I'm gonna see as I'm gathering up more information and assessing my client, and you'll hear as we get into, um, soon enough, some of the case stories. Um, you'll hear how this plays out. 'cause I will choose certain life experiences that, okay, let's, here's the compelling one I think we need to work on. So once again, we as practitioners are listening to our client's Beautiful story. Fall in love with your client's story. Notice where the energy is, where's the action your client, all of a sudden, where are they getting angry? Where are they getting depressed? Where does, where does the energy show up? 'cause that's, chances are where there's some interesting work to do. So listening for undigested life experience, once again, it's an art, it's a practice. It's a skill you develop over time. Begin to notice it with your friends, your family, your loved ones, first yourself.
We're all human and we all have some life experiences that just need a little bit more stomaching. We need to digest it and excrete it a little more. Ain't nothing wrong with that.
We're especially listening for this when working with a weight loss client. Because undigested life experience lives as a stressor in the body. Once again, you know the impact of the physiologic stress response upon weight, calorie burning and appetite regulation. It can be profound.
So we're introducing concepts. We're introducing thoughts distinctions for you to listen to. So some final thoughts, my friends in this part of our conversation. Everything on this dynamic eating psychology checklist that we've just spoken about is essentially an opportunity to learn. Get more curious about a place where we might look to for our client to grow most of these habit, their root, the stress response, emotional holding. You're gonna have stress response, sexual wounding, stress response, a burden around money, around work, stress response. Um, you know, a, a perfectionism, uh, you show me a perfectionist. I'll show you a person in a constant low level or mid-level or even high level at different points. Stress response. Everything on this checklist we've talked about you've seen can be looked at in a positive way. Meaning these are the doorways to transformation. They all have a good reason to exist. So we're not here to fix, we're here to explore.
We've been talking about how to gather story and information and what to listen for.
Uh, uh, very classic my friends. Very classic. You go to any practitioner, any good doctor, what do they do? They take a, his history. Notice the word story in history. We, they take a story. They hear your story, they hear your history. The better the taker of the history, the better the history taking, the better you understand a person's full, full story, the more you understand them, the more you can begin to put puzzle pieces together. And if you're a pure coach, the better you can make recommendations and educational ideas and distinctions. If you're a practitioner, um, a qualified practitioner to diagnose, then the better you can make a true diagnosis and treat your client because you've learned about their story. Don't jump the gun. Don't go marry a person after 20 minutes on the first date. 'cause you think you learned a lot. Go out on a bunch of dates. Get their story before you decide. This is the one. Get your client's story before you decide, oh, this is what I think or don't think, or, oh, I don't, I don't know what to do. If you don't know what to do. That's a good thing. It means you just gotta get more story. You gotta learn more. You gotta listen for more distinctions. You gotta trust that process. We're here to help our weight loss client and their highest goal. And in doing so, we create the best odds for our client to gradually over time find their natural sustainable weight. That's what this is about. Finding natural, true sustainable weight. Not jerking the body around to lose artificial weight that a person doesn't need to lose or to lose weight in a way where you're just starving a body and the waist gonna come back on. No, that's nonsense. It doesn't work. 60 years of dieting has shown us that we're diving deeper. I so appreciate you being willing to be a deep diver. You're good at holding your breath. You're good at being in the underworld. You are good at being in the inner world. You're good at really listening to people. You're getting good at that. And you're gonna see by and by as you move along, as you're seeing clients and you're practicing these principles, these things are gonna start to become second nature to you. I promise you that. My friends, lots more to come in this conversation is the end of wait part five. Next is wait part six. I can't wait. I'll see you on the other side.

PART 6

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in weight part six, and we are continuing our conversation about checklists, what to listen for when it comes to weight. And in this conversation we're going to be talking about soul lessons and weight. Now, let me say this, listening for soul lessons when it comes to working with our weight loss clients, for me, is a very powerful strategy. And these can be, the soul lessons can be extremely relevant and helpful or not, just like any distinction can be relevant and helpful or not. So this is simply yet another tool, another checklist that our mind is attuned to, to listen through as we're working with our weight loss clients. So our goal is not to make our client lose weight, but to help them express their greatest possible potential here in this life. And if weight loss is the result of this road, then hallelujah, we're so happy. And if it's not, then hallelujah. Something else needed to happen at this time. So yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. As always, you and I are doing our best to help our clients reach their natural weight. But we don't know what that is. Life knows what it is in any given time, in any given moment. So we're being humble, we're being open, and we're doing the best that we can. So the way we help our client move towards their natural weight is when we help them move towards their best self. How simple, how beautiful. So yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is about weight loss, but this is about far more than weight loss. So for our soul lessons checklist, when it comes to weight and its loss, here's the soul lessons we're gonna be breaking down and looking at. So let me just name them right now just to name them, and then we'll go through them. I'm gonna focus on agreement to be here. Number one, forgiveness. Number two, slowing up. Number three, reclaiming the archetypal feminine. Number four, reclaiming the archetypal masculine. Number five. Number six, embracing a positive spirituality or sense of religion. Number seven, coming from a deeper place of authenticity and truth. Number eight, healing our sexuality. And number nine, claiming our power. Whew. You know, right then and there, such a powerful list, such powerful lessons. Now remember once again, if the term soul lesson doesn't work for you, think larger life lessons, think bigger character lessons that one needs to learn in this life. Personally, I like the term soul, so I use it. But I want you to always, throughout this training and honestly throughout your life and your professional life, uh, never throw out the baby with the bath water. So be able to take words and manipulate them in your mind so you can ingest material in a way that works for you. That's really what I want you to do in this training. Oh, so important. Okay, let's dive in agreement to be here. I wanna remind you this, this soul lesson comes first my friends, because it might be one of the most important personal development, personal growth distinctions that any of us could ever learn regardless of weight. And this is perhaps the number one hidden driver. Perhaps not sure, but it might be the number one hidden driver behind so many eating challenges that people face. In other words, if you and I have not fully agreed to be here on a deeper level, if we haven't agreed to be here, um, meaning this is my life, this is my body, I'm a male, I'm a female, uh, I'm a person born in this year. These are my parents. This is the country, the place I was born into. This has been my circumstance. You don't have to like it, you don't have to love it. We're simply acknowledging that this has been my lot in life, and therefore I embrace it as best I can. And I agree to be here as fully as I can on planet earth, given the fact that hey, it's a, it's a strange place. People get sick, people get ill, people die. People have pain, people have suffering. We get hurt. Our feelings get hurt. People abandon us. Um, there's disease, there's war, there's, there's crazy nonsense politics. You know what I'm talking about? Not saying you have to like it, it's all about agreeing to be here on a deeper level. Because if we don't agree to be here, I am suggesting to you in a very strong way, if we don't agree to be here, it will be near impossible to truly transform not only our life challenges in general, but our eating challenges in specific, and in this case, our weight concerns.
Agreeing to be here is an ongoing choice throughout our lives. You know, there might have been times in your life where you didn't even realize it, but hey, life was good. I like this. I agree to be here. And then all of a sudden things get more difficult. And yeah, you're not gonna kill yourself necessarily, but yeah, just don't wanna be here. Just don't wanna do this. I don't like this. I don't agree to these rules. I don't agree to this situation. So what I'm saying is this is, um, this is a huge paradox to embrace as a human being, to embrace the fact that despite pain, nonsense, suffering, hurt, challenges, disease, death in this world, I agree to be here. I agree to the rules of planet Earth as best as a human being can. When we do that, I am suggesting to you, the more and more we do that, the more we do that everything changes.
Don't take my word for it, try it out.
So consider this for a second. How could we possibly be able to lose weight to shapeshift this body, to invite it into losing a bunch of pounds if we aren't fully here in this world?
How could you possibly sit in a classroom and the teachers up there teaching? How could you possibly learn anything if you haven't agreed to be here in the classroom and you're distracted and you're looking at your cell phone and you're doing this and you're doing that? Uh, if you're not present in any given situation, how can you possibly master it? If you're in a conversation and you haven't really agreed to be in that conversation, you don't really wanna be there. You won't benefit in any way, shape or form necessarily from that conversation because you're half there and you're half not.
If I'm half here on planet earth, it is very difficult for me to shape shift the body shape, shifting the body. IE losing weight is a big ask. It's a big request of the universe to do that sustainably and naturally in a way that works. It's just a difficult thing. It's not easy for us. How could life possibly cooperate with us life with a capital L? Excuse me. How could the universe cooperate us with us if we're not embracing our journey and our existence? Come on guys. You know, we have to meet life halfway. You have to step up. We can't just sit in our room expecting that everything's gonna be delivered to us on a platter. Why do I say that? Because if you've been alive long enough, you know that that's not gonna happen. Occasionally we get lucky, the doorbell rings and it's room service giving us the goodies. But in general, we gotta step up. We have to play by the rules of existence. And I think one of the rules of existence is if you exist, then by all means, do so. If you're on planet earth, by all means be here. If you have one foot out the door of life, then in a weird way, we have one foot out the door of our body and it just makes it more difficult.
You know, many people use losing weight
as kind of a coverup for being satisfied, or excuse me, dissatisfied with our existence. I don't like life. This is no good. I don't like who I am. I don't like what's going on. I don't like this world. But gosh, if I had this body, this weight, this shape, then everything would be better. So lemme just focus on that. Yeah, because everybody knows that when you have the perfect weight, woo, life gets so much better and you're just gonna get up in the morning and go, thank goodness I'm alive. Look at this beautiful, perfect body. Everything is being given to me. I've hit the jackpot once again. My friends look around you notice the people that you know that have the perfect body, perfect shape, perfect weight, they got where they want to go. Notice the times in your life when you did that. Did it give you the jackpot for the rest of your life? Does it give that other person the jackpot for the rest of their life? You know, it doesn't work like that. You have to remind yourself. You have to remind your client of that. We falsely believe that the right body or the right weight will make life worth living. And, and you know, there's a part of our mind that that truly sounds logical and sensible to,
but it's not truly putting first things first.
So when it comes to agreeing to be here again, this is a distinction you are listening for. I don't need you to do anything about it right away. You're listening to your clients, you're getting to know them, you're learning about them. I'll just like your dating and learning about anybody, we notice as practitioners, if we think our client is sleepwalking through life, resisting their own existence, disapproving of their own incarnation, you know, it, it's, it's the Buddhists love to say that life is, is is a little sour. Life is suffering. So that's one of the main tenants of that religion. And for many people, it's kind of true. Life has this tinge of sour to it. Life has this tinge of suffering. Why would we wanna be here? Look around you. It's not easy. So by the way, just so you know, if you or your client or anyone that you know has not agreed to be here, they have a damn good reason. In fact, they might have a damn hundred good reasons. So there's no shortcoming on your part or your client's part if they haven't agreed to be here. Because agreeing to be here is a powerful place to reach in the life of a human.
It's the spiritual and personal growth equivalent of, of, of, of being a, a millionaire many times over.
You access a certain wealth.
So again, I'm just noticing my client, I'm noticing the quality of their relationship with life and their relationship with their own existence.
And at some point when I feel I have a good connection with my client, when there's a flow, and maybe it's after 2, 3, 4, 5 sessions, whatever it is, uh, and maybe I've had a little bit of success for them with them because I've done a few little tweaks and maybe they have more energy. Maybe they have stopped binge eating or overeating or emotional eating as much. So there's trust and there's, there's, there's a relationship that's built up. Then I might bring it up in an honest, thoughtful, and conversational way.
I might ask them, I I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring up, you know, Hey, here's what I've noticed, here's what I've learned in my training. And I played with this with myself. You know, a lot of us haven't really agreed to be here on planet earth. Yeah, we do our life. We live our life. We don't really like our body. We don't really like our existence. We look back on our past and we go, Ugh, that sucked. That was terrible. That was awful. You know, agreeing to be here doesn't mean we have to love everything. Or even like everything. It just means, okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm alive. I only got x number of years left on planet Earth. Let's, let's just do the best we can. I'm in.
So, do me a favor, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, I would love for you to just kind of think about this, or if you're the kind of person, are you the kind of person that likes to journal? Oh, good. Great. So just journal. Like, have I agreed to be here?
Why would I not agree to be here? What would be some of the good reasons, the actual good reasons why a human would not like me, why a human would not wanna be on planet earth? And am I willing to begin to choose to be here despite all of life's pitfalls and problems and nonsense and suffering, so much of which I can't do anything about?
Do I finally choose life on planet earth for all that it is all that has been, and all that will be. So in a lot of ways, my friends, it's, it's really, we're just looking back on our life and we're kind of blessing it, saying, okay, yeah, wow, look at your life. That was hard, man. I had to overcome some difficulties. Wow, was that a challenging upbringing? Damn, how did I ever make it through that situation with this parent, those parents, this, that, what, whatever it is, whatever the complaint is,
at some point we gotta mature. We have to, to be successful in this world. So to reach one's natural weight in this world, in this world that doesn't support a body in all its health, you're not born onto a planet that gives you great nutrition from the start. You are not born into a world that gives you a plus true natural medical care from the start.
We're not born into a world of wonderful health and health practices and a clean environment and clean food and clean living. So it's not easy to have a, a healthy body. And b, our natural weight, given what we have to put up with all the junk food, all the stressors, all the nonsense, all the challenges that would put weight on a human being, that's not easy.
So simply what I'm saying is the more we put ourselves into the game of life, the more you stop sitting on the sidelines and go, okay, I'm here. I'm gonna do the best that I can. I'm suggesting that life starts to meet us in a higher place, and the potential to reach our natural weight becomes greater. So one last thing I wanna remind you about on this topic is that agreeing to be here is a practice. So on one level, yeah, you know, some people do have an epiphany and they wake up one morning or they're on a vacation somewhere or on the mountain type, or they do the vision quest and yeah, they have a breakthrough. And I agree to be here. And you might have those moments, we might have those moments, and then, you know, you wake up the next day and you don't feel so good, or there's been a challenge and we have to make it a practice. Okay? I agree to, to do this. I agree. And agreeing to be here means I agree to this body, this body, this body that I have as it is right now, doesn't mean you don't wanna change it. I'm fine with the fact that my client wants to change their body,
but if you wanna change your body, then for goodness sakes, you have to agree to have the one that you have right now, because that is the one you have right now. And if you disagree to the one you have right now, and you're against it and you're fighting it, you are an ineffective human being. You're going about the business of shape shifting all wrong because you're attacking self, you're putting yourself in a stress response. You are limiting your access to the higher wisdom of your own nervous system. It's literally a nonsensical strategy. I mean that it's illogical. You wanna shapeshift your body, great, be in it, look in the mirror and say, okay, this is my body right now. I'm gonna stop hating on it. Why? Because that is gonna put me on a stress response and that's gonna change my metabolism, my calorie burning capacity, my digestion, my assimilation, it's gonna change my appetite regulation. Why would I do that? Because I wanna move in a positive direction. Yeah, okay. I wanna change this body, change it from a place of empowering yourself. If you try to change it from the place called life sucks, but if I have a better body, then life is gonna be great,
then I'm gonna bet you're not gonna get where you wanna go sustainably, your client's not gonna get where they wanna go sustainably. And the work for you as a professional is gonna be frustrating because you might be doing everything right with your client, but their inner world has to be in alignment with getting the job done.
Does that make sense, my friends? Okay, next, let's go to the next soul lesson on this list. You've heard this one before and it's called forgiveness.
So here's what I'm asking myself. In the back of my mind, my friends, I'm asking myself, where might my client be living in unforgiveness?
That's what I'm asking. Now, let me give you a hint. For many people, it's often around their parents or holding our parents as unforgiven for this, that, and the other thing, chances are, if you're holding your parents as unforgiven, your client is doing that, they have a good reason. That's all good reason. I get it. Whatever it is. Good reason. Um, one of the people we tend to hold as Unforgiven is self, our own self. Many of us are living in a state where we haven't forgiven ourselves for, I don't know, fill in the blank. Um, having a body, having body fat, overeating, binge eating, having an eating challenge, being alive,
being imperfect.
You don't even have to have done anything wrong to be holding yourself in judgment.
Oftentimes when we're forgiving ourselves, we haven't even done anything wrong. And it's, it's the truth, but we have to forgive ourselves anyway. And sometimes, yeah, we have wronged others. Sometimes we have harmed self. Sometimes we haven't shown up in a good way in our life, and then we truly need to do some reckoning.
Oftentimes, the person that we're holding Unforgiven is an ex-partner for all the reasons and the good ones why we're mad and why that person should be in our psychic prison. Next, we all often tend to hold all men as Unforgiven or all women as Unforgiven. A lot of humans just have it in for men or have it in for women. We don't always realize that, that we've taken one of the sexes or both for some of us and made them wrong. Why? Because one person from that sex or two or three or four or five has harmed us or done us wrong. Therefore, all dogs bite. You follow what I'm saying? So when it comes to your client, it, it, it's forgiveness. When it comes to you, your client, forgiveness is for you. It's for your client. It's not necessarily for the person who has done the offense,
it's for the person themselves. Because when we live in unforgiveness, there's a place of unfinished business.
And there is often, not always, but often a place of stress, of holding.
It's not about making whatever the person did, right? Yes, you were right for doing this. Forgiveness is not that. It's just saying, okay, you're human. I'm human. That happened. Goodness knows why. And what in your life would've driven you to behave in that way? Act in that way. Humans go unconscious. We do, it's all about consciousness. It's all about being in the light or being in the dark. A lot of us live in darkness or parts of ourselves live in darkness, or parts of us have lived in certain kinds of darkness at different times in life. And we don't always do the right thing. So forgiveness, it's about timing. It's a journey, it's a dialogue. It's an ongoing exploration. It's a conversation. It's an act, I believe, of spiritual evolution that can, can profoundly impact our metabolism and profoundly impact our relationship with food. That's a bold statement. I just want you to hear that for a moment. Because if I am living day in and day out with the offense that was heaped upon me by the person that done me wrong, the person that cheated on me stole my money, harmed me, abused me, physically hurt me or overpowered me. If I am living with that person in the constant forefront of my mind, how dear you, this is awful. This is terrible. I can't believe you did this. That's what's on our screen. And understandably so. Nothing wrong with that.
That's a big challenge to live with. That's a big load to carry. That's a big stressor to hold. It's a big weight to carry.
Sometimes, sometimes my friends, I want you to hear this sometimes here, one of the keys to losing weight is to lighten up. One of the ways we need to lighten up is to unburden ourselves with all the people that live inside of us who have done us wrong.
I'm simply calling this an act of spiritual evolution or religious evolution or character growth. And I'm asking you to consider that for yourself first and foremost. Then notice it in the people around you that you know very well, and then begin to notice this in your clients.
So again, when you specifically focus on forgiveness and weight, what I'm suggesting to you is unforgiveness can, may, might hold us in a place of low level stress response, sympathetic nervous system dominance, and such a physiologic state can potentially lock us into a weight loss resistant metabolism. Because I'm holding on,
sometimes we hold on
understandably so, nothing wrong with that because it takes us a while to metabolize difficult experiences. They're not always easy to digest and assimilate and excrete from our system.
So my friends, really, where I'm going with all this is
what the yogis of old said, which is, mind is rarefied body and body is solidified mind, meaning mind and body exist on a continuum. So whatever's going on in my mind, my heart, my soul, my inner world is impacting my body. And vice versa, as we shift who we are as humans, there is a great potential that body can shift, metabolism can shift, chemistry can shift.
It's a journey. Forgiveness is a journey. It's all about timing. Don't worry about it so much. You don't have to forgive anyone. By the way, I just really want to be clear. I'm not saying that you, you, you can have certain people that you never forgive. It's, it's, it's fine. It's a choice that we choose and it's a choice that we choose because we believe it's a good choice to make. So if you are carrying around in a fence with you and you're like, I'm never gonna forgive that person, it's, I'm saying, that's fine. That's a choice. And that's okay. And when it comes to the topic of weight and weight loss, I'm noticing my client because I will tell you that I've noticed people who are deeply living in a state of reaction to their past, and they're carrying around excess weight and they truly wanna lose that weight. And they've truly done everything possible to lose it. They've dieted, they've exercised, they've done this, they've done that, and the weight comes right back on. Sometimes forgiveness is the place where the action is.
Is that for everybody? No. Might it be for 1% of the people? I don't know. Maybe might it be for 10%? Maybe. Might it be a factor in 20% of all weight loss people? Maybe might those numbers be completely off? Absolutely. But what I'm saying is, damn, do I notice this come up quite a bit?
And so I really want you to be clear. That doesn't mean, oh, if you're carrying, you're carrying extra weight, somebody's carrying extra weight. It means they haven't forgiven somebody. No, no, no, no, no. We're listening. If this is a factor. And the choice, the practice of forgiveness can be quite liberating for us personally and can be very liberating when it comes to expressing our natural metabolic state and reaching our natural weight. Personal power equals metabolic power.
You'll hear this topic by the way, come up further down the road when we start to talk about case stories, case studies and weight. Um, I'll, I'll dive into that more specifically for now. I want you to feel into this. I want you to try it on. Okay, my friends. Next. When it comes to soul lessons and weight, I wanna talk about going slow, slowing down, slowing up. So many people, and I mean this are unaware that their mind tends to move at an impossible to sustain speed as that everybody knows that. A lot of people, yes, a lot of people, our minds move at high speed. This often shows up as a life that's lived in kind of an out of balance, fast forward state. They're always kind of a step ahead of ourselves. The mind is a step ahead of itself. Do you know anybody like this? Somebody who's, who's like, their mind is just going too fast or their anxiety is pushing them a little bit too fast. Their fear is pushing them a little too fast. A lot of us can spend an entire life never knowing actually our own natural state of relaxation, peace, and happiness.
Now, you don't need to live in a perpetual state of slow and relaxation. I ain't saying that my friends. We simply need to know how to access it more and to live in it more. Because you and I have many different states that we go through. We have energy and then we get tired. We go to sleep at night, we get excited and we get a little bit depressed. You know, we fall in love, we fall out of it. Um, we feel very confident, we feel unconfident. Um, we feel courage. We feel afraid. We feel all different kinds of things. It's all good. It just so happens that we have more than one speed. So humans that are living a high speed life, and I especially see this with people who are climbing the ladder and or people who have a busy life, understandably so. They got a job, they got a family, they got a relationship, they have responsibilities, they have a lot of things to deal with. They have a lot to take care of. They're in school, they're juggling a lot, and they're moving fast. And there's not a lot of time for relaxation, peace, happiness, and slow. And we need to learn how to access that. Because what I wanna suggest to you is that that is a big, big, big part of our natural state.
And if we don't access that state enough,
then we don't know it and we don't have it. And the body will be living in a perpetual state of fast forward in high speed.
So when it comes to weight specifically, and it's loss, I I just straight up, many people are moving so fast that they're not present.
Meaning they're not present to food, they're not present to nourishment, they're not present to their own body. They're not present to how fast they're eating. Then they're not present to receiving pleasure from food. They're, they're not noticing the quality of, of their food and how it affects their body and their digestion. They're not present to how food is impacting their health. They're just not present to it. Why? Because they're moving too fast. That's all. That's all not a character judgment. When you are moving extra fast, people get addicted to that state. It is a state addiction because by the way, moving fast through life is kind of a bit of a rush.
As much as people do that and might say that they don't like it, there's a level where we get attached to it. We get a, we get hooked to it because you are producing some stress chemistry and stress. Chemistry jacks us up. We like the rush. There's nothing bad about that. The rush is fine. There's nothing bad about moving fast. There's nothing bad about stress.
All I'm saying is it becomes problematic when we live there. So there are many humans that have come into my practice who are trying to lose weight. And where I go very quickly is I'm looking at them and they are so high speed that they don't even realize how far it has taken them away from themself and their body.
How can you possibly effectively drive your car if you're trying to constantly go 80 miles an hour on a road that's rocky and bumpy or has a lot of turns? No, you gotta be, you gotta be in alignment with the road that you are on. Sometimes we gotta slow down my friends,
'cause that's what life is asking of us. So once again, you cannot possibly shape shift the body. You can't do it unless you occupy it with awareness, unless we inhabit it with thoughtfulness. It is as simple as that. Something is broken and you're fixing it for goodness sake. Your car is broken, you're fixing it. If you're moving it a hundred miles an hour, like, like how effective are you gonna be? If your computer is crashed and you're trying to address it and fix it and you're, and you're outta your body and you're moving so fast and you're multitasking, do you really think you're going to be effective? You gotta slow down, you gotta get methodical. You gotta be present. You gotta think, you gotta look. You gotta notice, oh, here's what happened to my computer. Oh, I was running all these different programs. Oh, and wow, look at this. I'm running outta memory. And wow, look at this. I have all these pro whatever. It's gotta slow down.
So my friends, I'm simply saying that oftentimes learning to change our life pace is the key. Oftentimes is the key to helping shapeshift, helping transform our body to its natural weight and metabolism.
Now, one of the reasons I harp on this is because people especially don't hear this, if they are indeed the ones who are constantly moving at the kind of miles per hour that they think is normal, but is not. So we often get attached to a speed that we think is normal. We get attached to a level of stress that we think is normal. We get attached to a level of operating our mind. I gotta do this, gotta do that. Gotta go here, gotta think about that, gotta worry about this. And we start to think that's normal.
Slowing down can be extremely confronting because once you slow down, wisdom comes through. Once you've slowed down, you will start to feel all the feelings that we avoid tend to show up.
A lot of the issues, the life events, the true deeper challenges, a lot of the wisdom of the universe that wants to come through us is finally heard. When we slow down the wisdom of the universe, my friends doesn't come through you. When you're running around like a maniac and you're multitasking and your mind is moving at a hundred miles an hour, this is why humans meditate. This is why we talk about mindfulness. This is why people do yoga. This is why people go on a vision quest. This is why people fast all the strategies. This is why people pray to you. Pray it like 150 miles an hour and you say all your prayers as fast as you can know. For goodness sakes, from when people pray, it's the one time they actually start to slow down their voice. Because we intuitively know higher power ain't necessarily gonna respond if you're speaking fast like a maniac.
There's something about slow that connects us.
It's a relaxation response. Yes, it's parasympathetic nervous system dominance, but relaxation response is also the place that humans enter. When we are experiencing faith, when we're experiencing trust, when we are coming from our wisdom, when we are coming from a place of love, when we are coming from a place of compassion, when we are coming from a place of acceptance, your body is relaxed, plain and simple. So I'm, I'm saying for many clients, this is the place where the work wants to happen. So you're learning how to notice this. And if I notice this with a client, I will bring it up, I will do an intellectual intervention, and then I'm gonna do all the little things, the little suggestions, learning how to slow down with food, learning how to pay attention, learning how to receive pleasure.
Simple things that people can practice every day because slowing down in one's life is a practice. Okay, let's move on to our next soul lesson distinction when it comes to weight and its loss, which is reclaiming the archetypal feminine. Here's what I simply wanna say about that. Media and culture, I believe have distorted our understanding of masculine and feminine energies. I believe these are timeless principles and energies found in both men and women. They're present in art, in music, in science, and psychology, in language, in culture. It's everywhere. There's men and women on this planet. That's how you got here. You got here through the mystical, magical combination of the masculine and feminine, somehow coming together and producing life. So there's a magic there. Don't get stuck in your political correctness, but we have to explore this for what it means for us. And what I am suggesting to you is that for a large amount of people, reclaiming what the feminine truly means for that individual, for that specific individual is freaking powerful.
'cause oftentimes the world neutralizes us. By feminine, I mean flowing, I mean emotions, I mean soft. I mean receptive. I want you to hear archetypal, I don't want you to hear just women. Men and women have masculine and feminine. Some women more feminine, more masculine, vice versa. For men, it's all different. So the feminine archetype, flowing emotions, soft, receptive, creative, nourishing, embodied, loving, non-linear in the moment, touch, pleasure, celebration. It's circular, it's change, it's sensual, it's unpredictable, it's chaotic, it's nature, it's the environment. It's not a reliance on numbers to detail things out. Now, in specific, when it comes to women, what I wanna say is many women have cast aside the feminine way of being, but in an unconscious way.
Yeah, just what I've noticed, cast it aside in an unknowing way. And for many women, now I'm gonna emphasize the women here for a moment, reclaiming their natural weight for many women, is this for everybody new, but for many, how many? I don't know. That's why we're listening to our client, because every person is different.
For many women, reclaiming their natural weight is all about reclaiming their, that woman's natural feminine. It looks different for each client. So what I'm asking myself when I'm looking at my female or male client, but I'm gonna emphasize female clients right now, where is my client locked into a masculine or left brain approach to food, to body, to weight, to work, to emotions, to life. Okay, well I have to eat this many amount of calories and I have to eat this much amount of food and I have to control myself with willpower. And I can't receive any pleasure from this food because if I receive pleasure, oh my God, I'm just gonna keep eating and I'm never gonna stop. That is a distorted, distorted, masculine approach to food. Now, the masculine approach ain't bad, it's just that when we distort it and overemphasize it, sure, yeah, of course you wanna pay attention to, to macronutrient balance, to how much vitamin C and vitamin D am I getting? Okay, great. But if you are gripped by calories, gripped by numbers, if you're gripped by the number on the scale and is driving you bonkers, then you need a feminine approach. Your client needs a more feminine approach to food, to body, and to life. So I'm asking myself in the back of my mind, how might my client benefit from more of an infusion of the feminine archetype into their personal world? Where does my client need to relax more into life? To feel more, feel themselves more, to flow a little bit more. Yeah. You know, some days you're gonna eat more breakfast, you know, 'cause you're hungry. Guess what? Some days you're hungry, you're at lunch. Trust yourself, trust your appetite. Appetite changes at every single meal, every moment, every day. That's the feminine, it's unknown. It's going to change.
So where does my client need to relax more into life? To feel more, to flow more, to let go of these rigorous numbers around weight. If I don't get down to 135 pounds, no one's gonna love me. I will never be happy. Really? What if you get down to 1 39, then you're gonna almost be happy. Okay, I understand. Where does my client need to nourish themselves more to get out of their heads more to stop comparing and competing. I'm calling comparing in competition in many ways, a very archetypal masculine, not male, but a very archetypal masculine component. What does my client need to feel more pleasure and joy in the body that they have right now? Because if you are waiting to experience life in a different body than you are technically disembodied, which means you're out of the feminine. Embodiment in many ways is feminine. The feminine is nature. It's the world, it's the earth. Mother nature, mother earth is the body.
This is a powerful distinction for many people. Yes, there will always be certain clients, and there's certain people who this is a hot button topic with, and it drives them bonkers because in my experience, they're stuck in a political correctness where we have to flatten masculine and feminine. And people don't understand the nature of archetype.
And if your client can't go there, then don't go there with them. Plain and simple. Don't force feed anybody.
And it's all about you learning how to introduce this topic. And again, I'm gonna say I don't introduce this topic to a client until I feel there's a connection, until I feel that there's a certain safety. Until I feel that there's a readiness to be in this conversation. Plain and simple. But what I'm suggesting to you, my friends, I'm just laying it out here, that I've just noticed over the years, and it, it, it, it, it breaks my heart. Like I've noticed over the years that there are so many females, women who have a challenging relationship with food and body who live in an inner world of hating their weight and hating their shape.
And once they learn to embrace their own feminine more and let go of some of the toxic masculine archetype that the world has taught them,
embracing the feminine for a woman means trusting your body.
A human cannot lose weight. I'm talking about women in this case, but I'll expand it to humans. But let me say women, but I mean humans. A woman cannot lose weight sustainably and reach her natural weight sustainably if she lives in distrust about her body. Why do I say that? Because I know that she will be in a constant low level stress response. It is no different than if you, for the rest of your life, were walking alongside as a person walking alongside you that you don't trust. Imagine 24 7. There's somebody walking right next to you that you don't trust. Can't trust them. In fact, that person might make you fat. Imagine that. Imagine that person for some reason you don't trust them because they have this magical power to make you fat or to make you not be able to lose weight. That's what it's like to walk with yourself through the world, not trusting your own body.
Now trust me, your body will at some point die. We know that throughout from all medical history, the body eventually dies. Most bodies at different points get sick. So yeah, we don't trust the body because it ain't gonna live forever. So we go into fear. The reality is bodies can be very trustable to be what they are. When you do your best to care for nourish, treat and address the body in a natural way with foods that work for it, an eating style that works for it, an exercise or movement style that works for it, we be with the body in a natural way and just trust that it can reach its natural weight. If you don't trust yourself for whatever reason,
you will never reach your natural potential, whatever it is. 'cause you don't trust yourself,
it's a shocking state of mind to be in. And you know, trust is earned. In actuality, we have to earn our own trust. But at the same time, sometimes we need to grant trust. You just need to choose to trust your body. It'll do the right thing as you treat it better
as you and I grow in the direction that we're supposed to grow. And as humans, as people. Okay, let's move on. Guess what? The next soul lesson is. Reclaiming the archetypal masculine. Now, once again, neither the masculine nor the feminine is good or bad, God or bad. I love that. Uh, there's simply the yin and yang of the universe. Two complimentary opposites. The masculine in this case is logical, linear, hard, strong, outward, one pointed, goal directed scientific intellect, mind purpose, boundaries, commitment, values, principles, numbers, proof, hierarchy, courage, fierceness.
Does that mean women can't be that? No, this is the archetypal. Archetypal masculine males and females all have some degree of masculine and feminine. In general, the males of the universe will tend to emphasize the masculine more. In general, the females of the universe will tend to emphasize the feminine more. While we contain both. What I wanna suggest to you, likewise with women, many men have cast aside the masculine as it has been highlighted in culture and media, you know, as patriarchy or less than as compared to the feminine. There's a lot of men and goodness, you know, in my private conversations with women friends, in my private conversations with women clients, I can't tell you how many times I've heard this. When women cut loose and be honest, I hear so many complaints about men and how men aren't stepping up and being men. They're not committed, they're not being responsible, they're not going for their goals. They're being too soft, they're not courageous, they're not showing up, they're disappearing.
Women don't always use this language. But oftentimes what they're saying is, my man who's, or this man in my life who should be acting like a king, he's acting like a boy. He's acting like a prince. Meaning he hasn't stepped into his age appropriate archetype.
I hear this complaint again and again and again, and I see it in a lot of my male clients. They have adopted the feminine, interestingly enough, because that's what they've been taught. There's a subtlety that goes on in culture of dissing the masculine.
Many men will then favor the feminine. And the way it shows up is they are not able to embrace a sense of purpose in their life. They're not able to embrace a sense of purpose and responsibility, and that will end up impacting their body.
Many men have simply not had a healthy experience of masculine energy and values and expression that it hasn't been modeled for them. They didn't get that. And consequently what happens is they're, they're just, they're just going freeform here. They're doing their best. So what I wanna say is, for many men, reclaiming their natural weight is all about reclaiming their natural masculine. And it looks different for every man.
So where is my male client locked into a more feminine approach to food, to body, to weight, to work, to emotions, to life. Now granted, yes, some male clients are so in their masculine when it comes to food and they're just like, tell me what to eat. You know, sometimes honestly, if, if, if my client is so like that, if my male client, if that is truly his archetype, then that's what I'll do. I'll give him that and see if it works. Um, but I'm always gonna ask for my male client who I think has been adopting too much of the feminine and not enough of the masculine based on his presentation, based on what he's telling me, based on his complaints about life, based on his challenges in relationship, based on his challenges with work, based on the fact that he's telling me, I don't know who I am or what I want, or what my life is for. If I don't know as a male who I am, what I want or what my life is for, or why it's worth getting up in the morning, why the hell should I take care of my body? What's the point? Just drink a bunch of beers, eat a bunch of garbage, watch a bunch of tv, and there it is.
Unless the body has a higher reason to exist. So I'm asking in the back of my mind, where does my client, what does my male client need? A greater sense of purpose, a clear approach to life? Where does he need to make good decisions? Where does my male client, and again, this can be female as well, some females need more than masculine approach. But I'm not gonna harp on that here because numbers wise I don't see that as much. But I do see it. Where does my male client need to create better boundaries? To say no, to move through emotions and not get stuck. To have a plan to summon more courage, be more fierce, to take more chances, to be more responsible, more committed.
A lot of times for my male weight loss client who has been up and down and in and out and not getting where he needs to go, I put weight loss to the side. Once I see, wait a second, this is not an issue of weight. This isn't an issue of your life. Uh, of course you overeat. Of course you're binge eating. Of course you're emotionally eating 'cause you're not sure who you are and what you want to be. I understand. I get it. I've been there. And from that place, let's eat. 'cause that's gonna make me feel better. And it does. Makes perfect sense. So none of this is an indictment against men. 'cause this happens, men lose their way or they've never found it yet.
So what I'm asking you to do is to understand that yeah, men and women might be very different in this way. And in this case, I am suggesting to you, and I'm speaking to you as a man right now, that so many men
need to get on their path in order to be able to shape, shape their body. They need to bring the masculine into their life in order to be able to shapeshift their body. You're gonna see that in some of our case stories. Next my friends soul lessons when it comes to weight. Let's talk about embracing a positive spirituality. What does that mean? As a reminder, many of us have suffered from toxic experiences of religion, and consequently, we've thrown out the baby with the bath water. We can easily lose our connection to a higher power, to our spirituality, or to the positive teachings of whatever religion we were brought up in. Because for whatever reason, the religious system we were brought up in, maybe we had a bad person in there somewhere. We learned things that we didn't like. Somebody hit us, somebody abused us, whatever it is, we had a bad experience, and you throw out the baby with the bath water. Therefore, all religion is bad, therefore, spirituality is bad. Therefore, everything my religion has to say is bad. I don't care what religion you are brought up in, I'm gonna be willing to bet the chances are there's some darn good wisdom in there. There's some darn good things to practice if you're able to throw out all the toxicity that doesn't work for you.
So what I am suggesting once again is that we as humans, just as humans, I believe very strongly that we must come to terms with our own relationship to a higher power, to a greater intelligence, to a higher moral code. If you're an atheist, gotta come to terms with it.
If we don't come to terms with it, if we live in a meaningless universe, that is random. What I'm going to assert is that symptom and dissatisfaction are freaking predictable. And eating challenges can easily follow.
If I invent a world for you, and I tell you, okay, the world you live in, it sucks. It's meaningless. It's random stupid nonsense is gonna constantly happen. There's no rhyme or reason to it. The bad guys are always gonna win. There's nothing guiding us.
And somehow we just appeared here at a pure, just pure random molecules colliding with each other. Your life is essentially nothing. You're gonna die and it's all doesn't matter.
Ouch. Think for a moment about how awful that is. We gotta grapple with that. We gotta come to grips with that. If that's the universe I live in, you bet I'm gonna be looking for addictions. You bet I'm gonna be looking to food. You bet I'm gonna come up with an eating challeng or an eating disorder.
Because those things on one level, they reinforce our belief
that life is random and it's difficult and it's painful and it's meaningless. We will always look to create behaviors that reinforce our belief about the universe. So a meaningless random universe, which really means it's against us, will lead me to create behaviors, to enact behaviors that, yeah, are self-harming in some way, shape or form. And at the same time, those self-harming behaviors, if I listen to those behaviors, they have a wisdom in it. They're pointing to something, they're saying, Hey, look at your behavior. It's self-harming. It's painful. Hmm, why would I do a self-harming painful behavior? Ah, because I live in a random, meaningless universe. It makes perfect sense. So what I'm saying to you, my friends, is this is a fabulous, fabulous place of course to explore with yourself, but absolutely to explore with your client.
So when it comes to embracing a positive spirituality and weight, the bottom line is for many of us, not all many, it's easier to abandon our body and potentially gain weight if we believe in a stressful, meaningless universe where we are not loved and connected and guided by some kind of higher power. It's just, it's just easier to go in that direction. And in this state of mind, losing a bunch of pounds of body fat cannot possibly substitute for a connection to a higher power. Okay, well, the world sucks. Everything is meaningless. I'm never gonna get anything, you know, but gosh, at least if I had the perfect body, then I'll be okay. Really. We actually use weight loss, believe it or not, as a substitute for God. We use weight loss as a substitute for our higher power. That becomes our deity, that becomes our religion, and we worship it. When I say worship it, it's, it's on our altar 24 7, I gotta lose weight. I gotta lose weight. The scale becomes an altar for people. The refrigerator becomes this, this reverse altar. Just stay away from it. Um, we are literally using weight loss as a religion thinking, this will make me happy. This will bring everything together. No, your connection to a higher power, to a spirituality that works for you, to a religion that works for you, to a code that works for you, that's what's gonna get you connected. That's what's gonna do it for you. Not not losing a bunch of pounds of body fat. So what I'm suggesting to you, my friends, is that is our job as practitioners to be willing to be in this conversation. Why? Because you say you want to help people. Why? Because you say you want to help people with their eating challenges. I'm suggesting to you this is one big powerful way for many people to do that, to deliver on your promise, to deliver on your commitment. It's our job as practitioners to listen into our clients' complaints around their weight and see if maybe it has a connection to their relationship with spirituality, religion, a higher power.
So is my client living in alignment with the religion or faith or spirituality that they claim to believe in?
I'm gonna notice that I'm gonna ask about that. I I've got no, you know, my, my client need to explore a greater reality as a way to live more at peace with themselves and with more effectiveness and inspiration on planet Earth.
Sometimes my friends, we gotta put first things first.
Believe it or not, sometimes for some people, we can't shape shift the body
until we shift our belief about life in the world we live in.
That is what I've noticed. That is what I've experienced. Be willing to be in the conversation of religion and spirituality with your client. Make it fun. Hey, Mr. And miss client, what do you believe in? What's your religion? What's your spirituality? Notice what they say. Notice how strong or not they speak. Just notice, notice, notice. What were you brought up in? What did you used to believe? What do you believe in? Now? What do you think happens when you die? I'm just, I'm just wondering, why are you wondering? Well, I noticed that, you know, sometimes when we've been hurt by religion or where in reaction to religion or in reaction to a higher power or reaction to God, we throw out the baby with the bath water. And the world we live in is this meaningless, godless, higher powerless world that has no greater wisdom to it. And we believe our life is random and chaotic. And honestly, that's a big ass stressor. And with that kind of stressor in life, one can be living in a constant state of low level stress chemistry. You literally invent a biology based upon what you believe about the world and about the universe. That's how powerful we are. That's how powerful your mind is. That's how powerful your belief system is, excuse me. But all the people that, that are your heroes, they're goal directed, chances are, and they have strong beliefs about how the world works, and they follow those beliefs and they put those beliefs into action. Whatever those beliefs are, it doesn't even have to deal with spirituality, whether it's a sports hero, a business hero.
But what I'm suggesting to you is this is ground zero for some people. Or if it's not ground zero, man, is it an important factor? Okay, next, my friends Authenticity and truth as a soul lesson when it comes to weight. You know, let me remind you about this soul lesson, authenticity and truth. A lot of us humans are conditioned by the world. It's not your fault. Uh, we're conditioned by the world to avoid truth telling and to not express ourselves in an authentic way. Why? Because people might not like us. If you say how you really feel, if you show up how you really are, you know, what do they say? You know, the, the tall flowers are gonna stick out. And um, those are the ones that all get chopped down.
We watch some of our greatest heroes get assassinated. Uh, wow. They were truth telling. So what the world is giving us a message in a very subtle way, in an unconscious way, is, hey, if you speak the truth, and this is for a lot of our political or religious leaders who've been killed. The world does us. Yeah, here's what happens if you do that.
So consequently, and you know, we're taught to behave ourselves. We, we fear the consequences of what might happen if we speak the truth or if we express ourselves as we truly are. If we express what we truly feel, express what we truly believe, express our true spirituality, express our sexuality, express our spiritual beliefs, express our political whatever, it's,
if we say to our parents what we really think, you know, and it's true, sometimes you gotta gotta hold your tongue a little bit. I'm not saying we have to walk around, blabbering out, whatever we think we should say, but at the same time, there's a place, there's a field where authenticity and truth wants to be spoken.
There are certain places where you just can't speak the direct truth directly because it won't be heard. So the truth isn't the truth unless there's love and consciousness in it.
If there's love and consciousness, when you speak a truth, then that truth has the best ability to be heard.
If you speak a truth and it, it's not thoughtful, it doesn't have consciousness, it doesn't have awareness in it, it's not gonna be heard.
So you now think about your own life. Think about the times when you weren't being truthful, when you weren't saying what you really wanted to say. If we're doing that and we're biting our tongue and we're hiding ourselves, and we're living in fear of saying what we wanna say to our partner, our parent, our friend, whatever, it kind of ends up being a sense of a life half live, or a sense of being at war with ourself, with the other person. And when we're oftentimes holding back from saying who we are, what we want, what we believe, what we feel, when those things really need to come out, symptom health symptoms and unwanted habits such as eating challenges are predictable,
stated in another way, authenticity empowers us and it empowers our metabolism. And it really is true that the truth does set us free, my friends. It really does. So
think about a time in your life when you finally spoke up, when you finally said something you had been wanting to and wanting to, and you finally gathered the courage to be yourself, to show up how you wanted to show up, whatever that meant. Do you remember how empowering it was? Do you remember how you physically felt? Do you remember how it shifted your chemistry? That is what I am talking about when it comes to authenticity, truth, and weight. Remember, we're always here to listen to our clients' weight concerns, to see how it's speaking to us. You are listening in the back of your mind, you're listening for the messages that excess weight might have.
We're listening for how oftentimes people think. We believe that we must lose weight to be happy.
So for many people, energy is liberated. When we begin to speak and act in a more honest and real and authentic way, just be you. Let your voice come out. Let your voice be heard. Holding back our voice is a stressor. Is like holding back from using the ladies room or the men's room, my friends, as a stressor. Why would you do it?
And you know what happens with potent stressors and how they have a powerful impact on weight loss, metabolism, on appetite.
It's easy to use food to distract us
from speaking our truth. I mean, think about it. The the same place that truth comes out, that authenticity comes out through our voice, through our throat cha, through our mouth. That's the same place food goes in. Oftentimes, you and I, our clients, we use food to push down.
We use food to push down. We use food to push down. We use food to push down.
Oftentimes, not all the times for those who are bulimic,
they use food to push down, food to push down and pushing down and pushing down. I'm pushing down, I'm pushing down, I'm throwing this food down into my mouth, into my system, and then they symbolically act out, opening up the throat and speaking up by, by just vomiting it out. And that's a symbolic way of letting out energy, of letting out truth. No, this is not what I want to do. This food is not what I want.
What they really want us to express, what they really want us to, is to express feeling emotions, to scream, to be heard, to say something. Sometimes you don't even know what it iss, one aspect of bulimia. But anyway, it's easy to use food to distract us from our absolute fear of speaking the truth. Because chances are, if you're not speaking the truth and you're not being authentic, you have a darn good reason. Your client has a darn good reason. Because chances are at some point they said something, they spoke up, they were truthful, and they got punished, or they got slapped down, or they got overridden somehow. So oftentimes you and I are here to be coaches, cheerleaders, cheerleaders for our clients to step into their authentic self. Losing a bunch of pounds of body fat will never be a legitimate substitute for learning to use our voice and show up with authenticity and truth.
So I'm asking, does my weight loss client express themselves to the world? Are they connected to the power of their voice, to what they really wanna say? Are they holding back the truth? You know, I especially notice this. There's a certain subset of humans who wanna lose weight. Both men. I see this in both men and women. It's a weight loss archetype almost. I'm gonna call it the the good little fat girl and the good little fat boy. A lot of people who have gained weight and are carrying around excess weight because they have to deal with weight hate, and they have to deal with the weight hate of the world. And that is a godawful thing to have to deal with. We become, they become good boys and good girls, good fat boys and good girls. What do I have to do to make you feel good? What do I have to do to make you all like me? How do I have to perform? So they use inauthenticity and not speaking the truth. What they're really doing is, how do I make you like me? What do I have to do so that you feel good about me so that you don't weight hate me?
So there's a lot of people walking around with excess weight. That's what they've learned. Nothing wrong with that, that that, that is a protection mechanism. That is called a survival strategy because weight hate is a real thing. No human wants to be hated. So if a human has gained weight, male or female, they might notice, wow, if I'm just, if I'm just a good little boy and a good little girl and I do whatever you want, and I just be super nice and super obliging and just, and and, and just completely ignore myself and please you, then you're gonna like me. Oh wow, I don't have to deal with weight hate.
And then what happens is we aren't the real me. So that's a good survival strategy for a short period of time at a certain age in our life. And then it has to shift. So I listen for that with my clients.
Next, my friends, you've heard me speak this before, healing our sexuality. Once again, the world often teaches us that our sexuality is inherently tainted, bad, shameful. Um, you should look at it in a very specific way or it ought to be hidden. Here's what it is, here's what it isn't. We get a lot of negative messages around our sexuality, fill in the blanks, you know what they are. Sometimes we don't even realize how many negative messages we've gotten when we are wounded sexually. And that could be directly through abuse, direct sexual abuse, direct sexual harm, or it could be emotional abuse around our sexuality or the cultural abuse that we suffer, or the unconscious hurt that comes at us from the world, from other people through their words, through their thoughts, through their deeds. Um, when we're wounded in this way, symptom and unwanted habit and body image challenges and lifelong eating issues are predictable. These two are so connected. It is mind blowing. We gotta own that. You gotta get comfortable with this topic. And in fact, I'm saying for you as a person and as a practitioner, it is a victory to get comfortable exploring the topic of sexuality. First with self, with people closest to you and then with your clients. This is not a comfortable topic for you. You first talk to yourself about it, and then I want you to start to talk about the closest people to you that you can trust. It's like learning how to ride a bicycle. You've gotta learn how to be in this conversation and explore it for yourself with the closest people to you that you trust. And then to start to try it on with your clients. It's about learning to be in dialogue, to invite honesty, to welcome all emotions to the table. When it comes to sexuality. It's not about fixing anything ever, ever, ever. It's not about fixing anything. Oh, my client was abused. My client was this, my client was that. What do I do? It's not about you fixing, it's you being in conversation.
You're at the coffee shop in the corner with your friend and there's lovely music playing and you're in a sweet conversation around sexuality when it comes to sexuality and weight. Excess weight can, might be oftentimes is a function of protection. Excess weight can have the brilliant function of being a protection against sex, plain and simple, against sexual desirability, against sexual predators, against getting hurt in a similar way that I was hurt in the past. Because if I am big, if I'm obese, if I gain weight, my unconscious brain knows that I'm gonna be less of a sexual target for males and for females both. So in such, is this for everyone? Absolutely not. Is it for some people? You bet. I wish I knew the percentages. So in such cases, extra weight functions as a literal and scientific stress and protection adaptation, brilliant strategy.
And sometimes we have to unwind that and we need to begin to find our own sexual safety in this world. And it starts within the comfort of our own skin.
Now, some people have never been directly abused, but simply they experience shame or guilt or discomfort just around their own sexual energy. That's all. I meet a lot of people like that.
There's not a lot of healthy sexual development that's taught in this world. I just don't see it particularly in American culture. I can't speak for other cultures, but I can a little bit. I don't always see health. Um, regardless, there's a lot of humans walking around and we simply have shame or guilt or discomfort around our sexuality. And when that happens, it can lead to food as a substitute for sex itself, for orgasm itself, for sensuality itself, for touch itself, for physical intimate intimacy, or just for a sense of, oh, I like myself. You don't have to have sex to be sexually comfortable with oneself. So the sex act does not prove anything out for anybody. It's not about the act itself, though it can be. It's about one's relationship to one's own sexuality. If one is comfortable with one's sexuality in one's own skin, then one is not going to need to account for that to use food. So I can feel better about getting some pleasure, some intimacy, some ah, that feels good in my body.
So for many men and women, my friends, the road to weight loss is asking us to go through sexual terrain. So this is gonna come up in your connection with your client. You start to have this conversation about sex when there's comfortability in the relationship, when you feel like, okay, this might be a good time to introduce this conversation. If your client doesn't like it, then say, great. Okay, no worries. And you go somewhere else.
Lastly, my friends on the soul lesson checklist when it comes to weight, is claiming our power and our potential. This is a positive one. You know, the assumption here that I am making is that you and I come into this world with a destiny that's encoded within us. We come in with a potential that's designed to be actualized. We are an acorn. We have a blueprint for a beautiful, awesome, unique mighty oak tree.
When my attention goes to my eating issue, what should I eat? How am I gonna lose weight? I gotta weigh myself. Is this good? Is this bad? I shouldn't eat this. I should eat that. Oh my God, I can't believe I ate this. I can't believe I ate that. Oh my God, I'm hungry. What should I do? I don't want to eat. I should eat. I shouldn't eat. When that's our conversation that is dominating our inner world. It pulls us away from finding our true power. Our energy is diverted. I want you to hear this. You show me a human who is caught up and constantly worried and thinking about food, about their body, about food, body and health, about their weight, about their shape, about their body image, about losing the pounds. And I'll show you a person that's not growing. I'll show you a person who is not stepping into their personal development. They can't because their energy is being diverted. And the paradox is that eating challenge is there to let us know that our energy is being diverted and that we have to look at this eating challenge, not as if it's our God and this thing we have to constantly be thinking about and worrying about, but we have to begin to see it as a doorway to somewhere else. We have to be begin to see it as a teacher. We have to begin to see it as a place where life is asking us to grow.
So when I say food is a great teacher, when I say our relationship with food is a great teacher, when I say that our relationship with food is here to help us step into our power, this is what I'm talking.
So I'm always asking in the back of my mind, I'm looking at my client. I don't look at my client as you poor person. You have all this extra weight. Never. I don't look at my client, you poor person. You are stuck in this eating challenge. You binge eat, you overeat. Poor person. If you only didn't have this, then everything would be good. No, never think that. What I asked myself is, where, where does my client need to claim their power? What inner and outer potential in this human sitting in front of me is waiting to be fulfilled? What is inside this person's acorn?
What are the gifts? Where's life asking them to grow? So our job is to eavesdrop on the wisdom of life and listen for where our client needs to step into their potential. You follow that? Our job is to eavesdrop on the wisdom of life and listen for where our client needs to step into their potential. Their how beautiful is that? I mean, think about that. That's what I'm doing with my client. I'm not here to fix their eating issue. I'm here to help them unravel their acorn and in unraveling their acorn. Yeah, we're working with their eating challenge for sure. But their acorn is not their eating challenge. That's not, it is this tiny part of what's inside their acorn. The eating challenge is, is is pointing to their potential, their power, their gifts. So I'm asking the question of the universe on behalf of my client, what, what is this person's potential? I'm literally looking at them and scanning for this is what a coach does. Okay? Think of sports for a moment, my friends. What does a good coach do? A good coach looks at her or his athlete
and sees their potential and puts them in a position to succeed,
helps them develop their God-given inborn, genetic, however you wanna put it, talent so that they can flower and grow in their particular given activity. So you are being a life coach here on behalf of the wisdom of life. Your job, your number one job is to help your client express the content of their acorn.
And it just so happens that we do this through the vehicle of their relationship with food. And in this particular case, we're doing this through the vehicle of their relationship with weight.
What a beautiful thing. So as a reminder or just further thoughts, some of our additional soul lessons we're learning with weight. I'm not gonna dive into these, but for a lot of people, the soul lesson, a sub smaller soul lesson when it comes to weight, like a deeper lesson that people are here to learn. For some it's just patience. Uh, just simple as that. Look at your client. Notice the degree of I gotta lose this weight 20 years ago today. Yesterday. Now for some of us, until we learn patience, then we actually can't lose the weight.
Patience, by the way, does not exist in a stress response.
Patients and stress response are mutually exclusive. In order to experience patients, one must be in a relaxation response. One must literally take a deep breath. Patience is a sole quality. It's a human quality. It cannot be reduced to anything more. And what I'm suggesting to you is the physiologic foundation of patients that must be present is relaxation. Response is parasympathetic nervous system dominance.
But in order to reach that, one must notice, oh, look at me, how much energy I'm putting into losing weight. I have to lose, I have to lose and I have to lose it. We have to step out of the childlike mode of short term needs must be fulfilled. I have to have the ice cream cone now. Gotta have a, now mommy, I'm sorry, but weight loss might take time
and it might not come in the way you think it's needs to come or through the means that you think it needs to come.
Can you notice where your client's being impatient?
I've seen that so often. And equally, my friends, I've seen so many clients who weight gain and inability to lose it is teaching them humility. Is this for every person? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Some BBAs just had nothing to do with it. And for some people, I've especially seen this in my superpower, high achieving clients who are used to coming out on top on everything that they do. They're just successful, they're successful humans,
and they might even have been a little bit arrogant about their success. And all of a sudden weight gain comes and they're freaking out and they hire the best people. I've had so many clients like this who have the wherewithal and the means to hire the best doctors, the best medical testing, the best fitness people, and they work hard to lose weight and they can't. How many times have I heard a client say, this is the one place in my life. If I can only conquer this, then I'm, I'm good. I've conquered my career. I've conquered the money thing. I have a good relationship. If only I can conquer this weight thing. As soon as my client says that to me, tip hint, soon as your client says that to you, where I think in the back of my mind, humility.
'cause this is a place where life is telling you, you are not immortal. You are not all powerful. And humility is a virtue, my friends.
It's something that we need to learn between us and us, between us and our own heart, between us and a higher power. It's a surrender to life.
Surrender doesn't mean giving up. Surrender means being humble in the face of something we cannot overcome. It's noticing where life is delivering to us. A bigger lesson where life is looking at us, the wisdom of life, the wisdom of the universe. A higher power, a greater wisdom is telling us, okay, you got a lesson to learn here and we're gonna deliver it through weight.
I've had clients who just needed to learn how to be humble before anything changed.
I mentioned trust before. Some people just need to learn how to trust. They need to learn how to let go of weight loss. This happens, especially, especially, and you're gonna learn this soon as we start to get into protocols for weight. Um, you know, a lot of people have spent decades trying to lose weight or get to the body that they want, and they've been dieting forever. And sometimes we need to literally let go of weight loss and let go of dieting and dieting consciousness and live life and trust. Trust, trust, trust. Pure trust. Trusting the body, trusting life, trusting our journey. Trusting that I might lose weight or I might not lose weight, but whatever happens will be the best for me.
That spiritual growth, that's a soul lesson
because if you don't trust, then you are living in untrust and then you are living in your fighting the wisdom of the universe. And as far as I can tell, the wisdom of the universe always wins.
What do they say? Father? Time is undefeated. Always wins. Meaning life will always claim us with its wisdom.
Surrender. Sometimes we need to just get down on our hands and knees energetically inside of ourselves and go, I give up with this because we are so humans get so caught up in our own nonsense, particularly when it comes to weight loss. I, I just, I can't believe how many people I have seen just, just go into the worst possible places that a human can go in their own mind. And you've seen this, chances are with yourself, with clients. If you see clients or with people that you know, go into awful places, right? I gotta lose this weight, I gotta lose this weight. And sometimes we just need to surrender. Just give it to God. Give it to a higher power. Give it to life. Give it to the earth. Give it to great spirit. What whatever the heck your words are that you need to use, that your client needs to use to get this.
I've watched so many people on their deathbed and you know, in their death time and their time leading up to death, you know, at some point they surrender. They stop fighting their illness. Maybe they'll live, maybe they won't. Maybe the chemotherapy's gonna work, maybe it won't. But oftentimes that's a huge place to reach. And I've seen it. It's an enlightening place. I've watched parents go there. I've watched grandparents go there. I've watched friends go there. I've watched relatives go there. It's a beautiful place to get to. You just give it up because you're fighting and fighting and fighting a battle that doesn't need to be fought. We can't. It's a bigger surrender.
So my friends, to wrap up this conversation, listening for soul lessons when it comes to weight loss, it's kind of a more advanced strategy, yet often a necessary one when it comes to success with weight. And as is often the case, when you and I and our clients aren't learning our soul lessons, the body will be living in some degree of stress, fear, anxiety, lack,
sympathetic nervous system dominance, physiologic stress response, and everything that that means for metabolism. Who we are creates our chemistry. Yes, we focus on food. Yes, we focus on exercise. Yes, we focus on meal timing. Yes, we focus on nutrition, but that ain't enough for many people, especially when it comes to weight.
So by learning the significant life soul, bigger lessons that you and I and our clients came here to learn, we become the person by and by gradually that we're most meant to be. And when we become the person that we're meant to be, the body has the best chance to become what it's meant to be. Personal power equals metabolic power. The two are so beautifully, closely related. Does it work perfectly every time? No. But wow, is it a great formula to live by and to practice? You bet it is. I really appreciate you going on this ride with me. I really appreciate you being willing to be in what I consider a more edgy conversation and a more deeper conversation. As always, take what works for you, leave behind what doesn't work for you. This is the end of wait, part six, part seven is next. Thanks again my friends. I look forward to seeing you next. On the other side.

PART 7

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Greetings once again, my friends, this is Mark David. Here we are in our conversation about weight part seven. We have been looking and listening and learning about different checklists to have in the back of our minds when it comes to weight and its loss. And now we're going to look at a checklist that I am going to call collective distinctions.
Well, let me explain to you what I think I mean by collective distinctions. You and I and all human beings, we are such delicious, wonderful creatures of our environment. That's the way it is. And oftentimes, weight is a collective issue that personalizes in individuals. Meaning if you look around and you notice that so much of the world seems to be dealing with weight challenge, weight loss globally is a $500 billion a year industry. According to all the statistics that you hear, for goodness, just about any country on the planet, it seems like weight is increasing. It seems like obesity is increasing. That's not an individual problem. That's why I say weight is often a, it's, it's inherently, it's essentially a collective challenge. So many people have it, but it personalizes in individuals. Can you see that distinction? The reason why I think this is important is that when you and I as practitioners can help our clients see and understand the larger energies of the world, the collective energies that impact them, our clients can literally relax more. And you know what that means? Relaxing into our challenges begins to provoke more of a relaxation response, which puts us in the best probability curve for potential weight loss or reaching our natural weight. And at the very least, it's important for you and I, the coach, the counselor, the healer, the practitioner, to see our clients. In a strange way, each client is not merely this one person but their representatives of the collective. And what I wanna tell you is, this is a subtle distinction, but it's to me, a powerful counseling secret. I believe it will help you be more effective and successful with your client. It's gonna help you be more wise, it's gonna help you relax into your job more. You can't fix a global issue.
So when it comes to weight, we're dealing with a global challenge. We're dealing with a collective challenge. I'm using those terms interchangeably, a global collective challenge that personalizes in individuals. So in an odd way, when I'm working with an individual, there's a part of me that's speaking to the collective. I'm speaking to a bigger voice that's out there. Yes, I'm speaking to my client, yes, I'm learning how to communicate into their listening so they can hear me better.
And at the same time, I'm understanding that this is a global issue and that there's a way we can speak to the person and speak to the collective at the same time. So we're gonna look at different factors now. And here's the checklist. We're gonna look at different factors that I'm pulling out, and I'm sure there are many more from the collective that influence this thing called weight. I'm gonna list them for you now, and then I'm gonna break each one down individually. First we're gonna talk about inheritance, which is really genetic inheritance and psychic inheritance. We're gonna talk about this thing I call being a point person in the field. We're gonna talk about the collective distinction called cultural speed, cultural excess. Number five, we're gonna talk about collective disconnection from nature, from body, from nourishment. Number six, we're gonna talk about banishment of ancestors, elders, and soul. And number seven, we'll look at collective karma. So again, these are all distinctions to have floating somewhere in the back of your mind. You're not gonna be able to remember all these and unnecessarily say, oh, these are the seven distinctions. However, these concepts are gonna start to land for you. And you'll notice over time, you're gonna start to listen through them. So once again, I don't want you to get lost in memorizing these. I want you to absorb these concepts. I want you to soak them into your cells, into your brain and let them land where they do. Okay? The first distinction on this checklist of collective distinctions is what we inherit genetic and psychically. So indeed, you know this, uh uh, uh, the world has been talking about genetics for so long and oh, okay, you're born with blue eyes, you're born with brown eyes. You're born a female, you're born a male. You're born with this color, skin, that color skin. You are born with the gene for alcoholism. You're born with the gene for, I don't know, being a great musician or being creative. So there's a lot that we inherit genetically that you know, focuses on what we look like, how we show up in our phenotype. We also inherit epigenetically. So likely you've heard the term epigenetics. Epigenetics is a very welcome term and a welcomed concept because for so long we have had a very limited view of genetics and it has really hurt our understanding of humanity. So epigenetics means above and beyond the DNA. It means that you and I inherit certain factors via our lifestyle, the lifestyle of our parents. Great grandparents is all the way back. And so, so we're inheriting through lifestyle, through emotions that have been expressed through experiences, through stress, through story, through the personal journeys of those who came before us. So often it's said that genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger,
genetics loads the gun environment pulls the trigger, meaning, yeah, you are born potentially with a gene, let's say maybe for diabetes, maybe for alcoholism, but it doesn't mean that gene will express itself. This is, oh, so important my friends. You'll say, oh, people are born with a gene for breast cancer. Yeah, maybe. But it's all about environment, lifestyle, diet environment pulls the trigger, genetics loads the gun. Okay, you got this gene, will it express that? Depends, depends on who you are, what you eat, what you think, what you feel, what you believe, your surroundings, what you're exposed to. The stresses, the stories. So in other words, most of us are not completely controlled by what we think is DNA fate.
We have a heck of a lot of say in how our DNA expresses itself. Another way to say that we inherit genetically and epigenetically, genetically and psychically as well, is that you and I are often the continuation of our parents' journey or the continuation of our parents' journey. I'm always noticing this. So when I'm talking to my client, when I'm learning about them, when I'm discovering their story, when I'm falling in love with their story, yeah, at some point I want to know about their parents. Are they still alive? What's your relationship with your parents? Do you live near them? Do you see them? Tell me about you and your parents, Mr. And Mrs. Client, because we're the continuation of our parents. Your parents were the continuation of their parents. And more so we are the improvement, the advancement, kind of like the cleanup crew for the generations that came before us. You are the progeny of your parents. Grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents. There's a chain, there's,
there's a flow of humanity of DNA. And I'm speaking to you more from a psychic, spiritual, religious, big picture perspective. And noticing that. Notice where you are, the continuation of your own parents' journey.
Notice the time in your life when you realize, gosh, I'm a little smarter than my parents. I'm a little more hip than my parents. I come in, my generation comes in with a whole new oomph to add to the equation that my parents' generation didn't have. Well, that's what your parents were busy thinking when they were your age. When your parents were young, they looked at their parents and said, wow, you know, we're the advancement, we're the improvement. We're bringing in new stuff. And it's true. And as not to say that we become obsolete when the next generation takes over. It's, it's, each generation has its gifts. As we get older, we become more wise. There's a wisdom there in our, and the young people bring in more. So you, your client are the continuation of their parents' journey. That's where I often want to notice, oh, tell me about your mom's relationship with food and body or your dad's. Did they have weight issues? How was their experience of their body and their weight?
I'm just gathering information and noticing if there's connection. So specifically questions to consider about your client. How is your client the continuation, the evolution, the advancement of their parent or parents?
How is your client here to be an improvement of their family lineage?
What is your client here to help heal and transform in their family lineage?
How are they here to have a healthier relationship with food, body and self as compared to their parents?
You know, some of your clients, they're gonna complain, oh yeah, my mother, my, you know, she had an awful relationship with food. She was constantly worrying about her way constantly and, and, and still does. And I go, great, lucky you. Because you are here to have a healthier relationship with food and body. You are here to be an improvement and advancement on your parents. So instead of blaming them because your mom, your dad, they have a good reason. All kinds of good reasons for their challenges with food and body and health and their relationship with weight.
It's never about blame my friends. It's always about our wise understanding. It's all about our compassion and understanding. It's all about us being able to take the high road to take a higher point of view.
You know, when I look at my own lineage, um, my dad hardly ever saw his dad when he was growing up. 'cause my dad's dad, my grandfather, you know, during the depression years, he would travel long distances for work. They were immigrants. My grandparents were immigrants. They were extremely poor. My dad never saw his dad. And when I was growing up, I probably saw my dad, I would say, you know, once or twice a week on the weekends. 'cause he worked so hard and he worked such long hours. So by the time he came home, I was fast asleep. By the time I woke up, he was gone for work. And my dad tried his best to be more present to his children and give them what they needed from their dad. And I remember growing up thinking, man, I wish I had more time with my dad. I wish I saw my dad more. So here I am and I'm a dad and I'm giving my son even more time and I can be more present, just this advancement, just noticing the little places where, oh, I can step forward. Not, oh, my dad never spent time with me. You know, so, so there's one aspect of it. But you know, oftentimes when we begin to see how we are here to be an improvement on our family lineage, even if it has nothing to do with weight and body, when we grow as humans, when we grow as people, when we grow in character and in soul, the body has its best chance to reach its potential. So we're going for the biggest goal, my client reaching their best potential in life. Because when I help them reach their, who cares about a bunch of body pounds, you know, at the end of the day, the weight is not the problem.
The problem oftentimes is something more interesting. It's more human than a bunch of pounds of body fat. Oftentimes it's a number of different things that we're working on to become our best self, our most natural self, our most most integrated self. And as we move towards that, something interesting happens in our life, something happens in our mind, in our heart, in our soul, and in our body. I'm trying to tell you my friends', weight goes deeper for so, so, so, so many people. Yeah, for some people it's about cleaning up their diet, cleaning up food allergies. For some people it's about eating healthier food, getting out there and moving.
That's for X number of people, for a lot of other humans, we have to look elsewhere in the weight loss equation. This is a fascinating place to look. Okay, next, let's talk about being a point person in the field. What the heck does that mean? A point person in the field? So here's what I wanna say. Our disease, our symptom, our challenge, whatever it is you're facing in this case, weight doesn't necessarily belong exclusively to the person who has it. Meaning I gotta be walking around saying, I gotta lose a hundred pounds. I gotta lose a hundred pounds. And when I'm walking around saying I have to lose a hundred pounds or 50 pounds, it's my pounds. It's on my body, it's my weight. This is my diabetes, this is my cancer. And what I'm saying is, sure, it is my diabetes, it is my cancer, it is my extra weight, it is my binge eating, it is my overeating. But a lot of times it doesn't actually belong to me. Oftentimes our symptoms, and in this case we'll talk about weight, but it could be anything that we're talking about in this training. Oftentimes it's a shared phenomenon. These, these symptoms wait lands in us, it vocalizes in us.
We then become the point person in our world, our family, our community, our friend group, our soul tribe and more. In other words, our diseases are shared. It doesn't happen in isolation. Our eating challenges do not belong to one person alone. I'm gonna say eight times outta 10. They are here in response to and for the world and the world around us. What do I mean? Uh, I used to work with a lot of young people and oftentimes parents will bring in their young kid and, and you know, parents, their weight is fine, their body is fine, they're fit, they're in shape. And here's their kid. And the kid is 50, 60, 70, 80 pounds overweight and the parent is freaked out, fix my kid. Does the extra weight belong to the kid? I don't even work with the children. First thing, I work with the parents' first thing. I might work with the parents three or four times before I ever speak to the child because it's not the child's weight. Usually there's something going on in the household. Usually there's something going on in that child's environment. Usually there's something going on with that child in school. That child and their friends, that child in some type of hardship, trauma, difficult experience, difficult to process, upbringing, things that the parent or parents are doing that aren't working. And then all of a sudden this kid is overeating and overeating and overeating to try to regulate itself. And we go, oh, my child has a problem. My child has all this extra weight. No, it's shared. Doesn't belong to the kid. It's landing in the kid. But then we point our fingers at that person. Another example where, you know, you might be a point person in the field when it comes to weight. You know, I see this happen a lot where one person in the family is the breadwinner and they're under a lot of pressure. And they might be doing a lot of the parenting as well. Maybe it's a single mom or dad. Maybe the other partner is sick, maybe the other partner just can't contribute financially. And here's one person working really hard, long hours, a lot of stress, and they gain weight and they don't have time for self care and they don't have the energy for self care. And they're feeling so overwhelmed with the load that they're carrying and they gain weight. And that's a shared phenomenon.
Is their partner truly showing up for them? Is there something that has to happen in their financial life, in their work life, in their relationship where that person can feel more supported, feel more secure?
So I'm gonna look at the family system, I'm gonna look at the relationship to see, okay, wow, I get it. You're under a lot of pressure. You're under a lot of stress. If I was in your situation, yeah, I might gain a bunch of weight also, if I had to carry what you are carrying,
you know, oftentimes we grow up in a household and the emotions, um, are not dealt with. Communication doesn't happen. There's no authenticity. There's a lot that gets swept under the rug. There might be just anger that's not being dealt with. There might be issues that are not being dealt with. You know, your parents, one of the parents might be cheating on the other and they know it, they don't know it, but the energy's in the field and all of a sudden somebody finds themselves gaining weight. Maybe it's the kid because the kid is just picking up on the tension. The kid is just picking up on the energy. And then that kid grows up to be a 20, 30, 40-year-old and still is carrying that tension inside them. They're a point person in the field. They're carrying the weight of unprocessed emotions and experience within their family system.
You know, sometimes we're just carrying the weight of the world. The world's not an easy place. And people, some people look around and they go, oh my God, there's so much pain and suffering and harm going on. And we truly feel, we truly feel for others. We truly feel for life. And it's a hard time regulating all that. And we eat. And then we think we have a personal problem where the reality is we're just picking up on the energy of the world. And we might turn to food to help soothe ourselves, or we might be under so much stress, which will create a physiology. And on top of that, we turn to food.
So all I'm trying to say is we gotta remove this. Oh, you're a fat person. You are at fault. There's something wrong with you.
I think we need to have a bigger view, my friends, because weight is not a personal issue. It's not just you have it or your client has it, or one person has it. Millions and millions and millions and millions of people around the globe are dealing with excess weight or dealing with the fact that they think they have excess weight. That's not an individual phenomenon, that's a collective phenomenon. Oftentimes we are the point person in our family or the point person in our social system. You could be a point person for men, for women, for children, because you carry the energy for that. A lot of us are sensitive beings. And one of the ways we deal with our sensitivity is we put on a lot of weight to protect us. Does that everybody? No, but for a lot of people, yes.
And then we blame the person and we judge them for being fat. And meanwhile, what they are is excessively sensitive, exquisitely sensitive to the pain and the suffering and the nuances of the world.
We have to begin to respect
people who come to us with a weight challenge.
So some questions that I'm considering, these are the questions I am asking the universe on behalf of my client. I'm wondering in the back of my mind, how is my client's food or body challenge a shared one? How might might their weight be a shared challenge? Who might they be carrying the weight for? For what reason might they be carrying weight for a parent, for a partner, for a child, for someone who hurt them, for their workplace, for the world?
Can you see the possibilities here, my friends? It's endless. It, it's unique. Each person is unique. You are learning how to be a seer. You are learning how to put your X-ray glasses on and see things in a different way. See weight through fresh eyes. It's, it's not an individual challenge. Yes it is, but no, it's not paradox. It's both, I love you, I hate you, my life is great. And then God, my life sucks. Paradox, yes, my client comes to see me. My client truly gains 75 pounds. My client truly can have approximately 75 pounds to lose. It's their 75 pounds. It's on their body. Yes, it's theirs, but there's a darn good chance in some way it's shared
with a partner, with a child, with their parents, family, someone who hurt them, someone who they don't have good communication with. They're carrying stress and intensity heaped upon them in the workplace. And they can't do anything about it. 'cause this is my livelihood and I gotta carry this weight happens to a lot of people.
When we can begin to see that and make those connections, and I will make these connections. When I start to see that emerging, I will then, you know, and this is when you get comfortable with a client. When, when there's a familiarity, you know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's what I've been noticing. You know, I've been noticing you're the breadwinner for your family, and you've told me that, wow, you got a lot of stress on you, and your company has been downsizing people right and left and laying people off right and left. And if you lose your job, your family loses its livelihood. Your kids lose their college, you know, education, that's a lot of stress. You're carrying a lot of stress around that. And in a lot of ways, you're carrying a lot of weight. And in a lot of ways, if I was you, yeah, I would be turning to food.
So to me, you are. You are just not some poor, ignorant person who's carrying around a bunch of body pounds. Your extra weight makes sense in a weird way, you're carrying it for your family. Can you see that Mr. And Mrs. Client, when you tell a person that, and if it's true for them and they make the connection, I promise you, I promise you, there's an inner relaxation. There's a bit of inner growth, there's an inner aha when c connections getting made by themselves are healing. Well, what am I gonna do about that in the moment? You know, there, there might not be a practical thing to do, but it will help your client with the self attack, the self-judgment.
It will help them grow in character. To actually see, oh yes, this extra weight actually makes sense. I'm not being blamed for it. I'm not being attacked for it. My practitioner's not blaming me or attacking me, or looking at me like I'm sympathetic creature, huh? Maybe I can be more generous with myself and my situation. And in that place, all of a sudden it becomes easier to make little tweaks.
And you're gonna start to learn how to do that with your clients. But you have to learn how to listen from this place for don't start to go into, okay, okay, I see what my client is doing and what they're carrying away for. Then what do I do? Then you keep listening. Don't get ahead of yourself. Just first things first. Start to notice those differences. Because as you start to notice them, then you're going to slowly learn how to make tweaks. Especially when you start to present this to your client and you see your client goes, oh yeah, you are right?
How does that feel for you? When you hear that Mr. And Mrs. Client? Like, what happens for you inside? Where do you go with that? My friends? This is an exploration. You're not fixing anyone. It's not your job to push the buttons and make the person lose the weight. It's not what this is about. The goal is not weight loss. I know that's hard for you to believe. This is a paradox. The goal is your client being the best possible human that they are meant to be. Because when that happens, they have the best possible chance to reach their natural weight and their natural health. So we're reverse engineering weight loss. The issue the person has is not a bunch of extra pounds. That's a symptom of whatever else is going on in their life. Which once again, it could be related to what we're talking about being a point person in the field. It could be related to how they eat. It could be related to the fact that they're chronically dieting and food restricting in their fat, restricting. It could be a squirrel of these. Every person is unique.
So you have to first learn how to see clients. Listen for that uniqueness. And you're gonna learn on the job with these distinctions.
I love this one point person in the field. This relates to any eating challenge, any health challenge. My dad had cancer, he had a brain tumor and every, and you think, well, my dad has a brain tumor. And that brain tumor belonged to me. It belonged to my sister, it belonged to my mother, it belonged to all my family. And we took it on. And that brain tumor healed everybody. It actually healed my dad in so many ways. It brought him out. It brought us all into relationship.
Ahuh. When we're a Point person in the field, that also means that we have a power because things have vocalized in us and what we're carrying, what we're being a point person for, has a significance.
So all of a sudden, it wasn't just my dad and his brain tumor, it was okay, now we're being authentic. Now we're being real. Now we're in communication. Now my heart is opening. Now I'm talking to my dad for the first time in a hundred years and learning about who he is in his life. And that brain tumor, it eventually killed him after four years, but it healed him. It healed us. It healed my relationship with him, my mothers, my sisters, so, so much beautiful work got done.
Our eating challenge can join us with the people closest to us. Once we see how it's shared. Once we see, gosh, how can I include the people around me in a way that's real, in a way that's authentic?
Okay, my friends. Next. In our collective distinctions checklist, here's the thing. You've heard me talking about eating fast. You've talked, you've heard me talk about eating without awareness. You've heard me talk about how eating quickly is a stressor for the body. And there's a lot of people who eat fast. So we're working on that because the eating fast also has some deep emotional connections. For many people, IE, food is the enemy. When you eat fast, you are getting through the enemy quickly. Nobody wants to sit for hours and hours with the enemy. You wanna deal with the enemy and get it over with. Well, the reality is, you don't move fast because you invented fast. You move fast. You didn't invent that. Can't take credit for it. We move fast. You move fast. Your client moves fast because the world moves fast in a lot of countries, in a lot of cultures, not everywhere. So, but I'm speaking, the world seems to be moving faster and faster. Our media moves fast, our TV moves fast. Your internet connection moves fast. The amount of information that comes across your screen, it's fast.
It's a lot of fast ex, you know, expected in in the workplace, in your life. You gotta drop off the kids, pick 'em up, go here, go there, do this, do that. Handle your bills. Handle work. Handle the meals, handle the cooking, handle the cleaning. Put in this to bed. Go. There's a lot. So you are not in stress because you are in stress. You live in a world that has a lot of stress. Turn on the news. Tell me that you don't live in a world that has a lot of stress. You do. We do. Just saying. Just saying. Just saying. Just saying. So our metabolism, your metabolism, my metabolism in, in large part is regulated by the environment of the world. Remember, we, you and me, we regulate each other's metabolism. If you and I get together right now and I'm all happy and I'm excited and I'm inspired, and if you're a little low energy and low mood, and I'm all excited and happy and inspired, you're gonna, you're gonna feel that you're gonna pick it up. You're gonna, wow, okay, this guy's inspired. Well, I'm feeling a little inspired too. If you come to my party and you've been in a bad mood, and all of a sudden you step into a party in a room full of partying, people, you, yeah, yeah, you're gonna feel good. You walk into a room full of sleeping, tired, bored outta their noodle people, you're gonna feel a little sleepy, tired and bored. We regulate each other's metabolism. The environment, the world you live in, like it or not, no matter how good you are, and you're good in a lot of ways, the world still regulates your metabolism in ways that we know, in ways that we don't know. So the good news is world is moving fast. You and I are here to be culture changers. You and I are here to reclaim our birthright. To live in a world that creates the conditions for healing and growth and sanity and soul. And for a life well lived. You gotta complain about the world. I certainly do. I got a lot of complaints about the world. I don't like a lot of what I see, but I do my best instead of moaning and groaning all day. Okay? How do I create a different world? How do I help my, the people in my world, my family, my friends, my loved ones, my clients, my students? How do I help us create the world that a lot of us wanna live in? Starts at home. It starts in the comfort of your own brain, your own being, your own mind. It's how you talk to yourself. The world doesn't always talk nice to you and me and the people around you. The way you change that is you don't be mean to yourself. You notice your inner chatter because your inner chatter is doing far more damage to you than the outer chatter of the world towards you. The outer chatter of the world is kind of the template for us to then have the kind of inner chatter where we're a self attacking. You didn't, your client didn't invent self attacking thoughts, self-limiting thoughts, self hating thoughts. I'm no good. I'm not enough, I'm worthless. I don't have the right body. I'm unlovable, I'm ugly, I'm fat. I'm this, I'm that. You didn't invent that your client didn't invent that we inherited from the world. And we're here to be culture changers. And that starts in the comfort of your own mind. So what I'm saying is, we are here collectively to reclaim slow, to reclaim time.
Remember in the stress response, cortisol, the hormone cortisol speeds up time perception right now, in this moment, in this very moment, uh, if you're nice and relaxed and I take a hypodermic needle filled with cortisol and I put it in your body, within less than a couple of minutes, you're gonna be, oh my God. Oh my God. Like, why are we sitting here wasting time? What are we gonna do next? I got all these things I need to do. You're gonna start to think time is running out. And that's a good thing. Why? Why does cortisol speed up time perception? Remember cortisol, main stress hormone, the lion is chasing you. You don't have a lot of time. The stress response is telling you, dude, girlfriend, guys, you're being chased by a lion. Nature knows you got less than a couple of minutes. Something's gonna happen. That line is going to eat you, or you're gonna get away, or you're gonna overcome it. So your brain needs to be thinking, I'm running outta time. I'm running outta time. I gotta make quick decisions. So when we are in stress, your brain naturally goes, it ought to go to running outta time. Now, there's no lion chasing us right now, or right now, or right now. And a lot of us are walking around thinking, oh my God, there's not enough time. We're running outta time because of the background stress that we live in. So all I'm saying is I'm noticing for my clients that we are here to reclaim time and to reclaim slow. It's not just for my individual clients. This is what we are facing as a collective. That's why I'm saying to you, when I'm talking to my client about slowing down in life and reclaiming time a little bit, taking a little more time for their meals, I'm talking to the rest of the collective. That's what we need to do, is to reclaim time. The healthiest cultures that I have visited around the globe, they claim time. They take time for meals, they take time for relaxation. They have longer vacations built into their social and political system.
They have a certain way that they have claimed time and slow. So some questions I'm considering in the back of my mind, how is my client hypnotized by and conditioned to a cultural speed that simply doesn't work for them? My friends, you've gotta notice this. 'cause there's a lot of your clients that are out of their body. They are out of their mind. They're trying to lose weight, but they're not in their body and they're not present because they're moving too fast and they're moving too fast. Not because there's something wrong with them, but they have been conditioned by the cultural speed of the world. I just want you to notice your clients' miles per hour. How fast are they moving in their brain, in their energy, in their nervous system, in their life? How can they slow down at work a little? How can they slow down in their home life? How can they slow down with others? How can they slow down with food? How can they reclaim time for themselves?
Because oftentimes you help a client do that and all of a sudden they have insights. They have realizations. Why? Because they relaxed a little bit. And what happens when you relax a little bit? You step out of the survival based thinking brain, the primitive brain, the reptilian brain, and all of a sudden you're into higher cortical thinking and wisdom and understanding and connection.
It's why humans meditate. That's why humans relax. That's why humans go on vision quest. They leave behind experiences and sensations and conditions and do this and do that. And we simply leave ourselves open to input because that's where wisdom often comes through. So I'm looking to see where's my client? How can I help my client dial down their speed a little bit, my friends, this is very underrated. I'm telling you right now, if you have a weight loss client and you're the kind of client that's like, uh, a little stressed out, moving too fast and beside themselves, oh my God, I gotta lose this weight like a hundred years ago. And their life, they're a little bit disembodied because of their speed and their frequency. I want you to notice that your job is to help them even slow down by a mile an hour, two miles an hour. Any baby step helps. I'm telling you. Okay, next on the collective distinction checklist, closely related to cultural speed in a lot of ways is cultural excess.
I wish it wasn't true, but oftentimes many of us, many of us, not all, many of us are brought up in environments that often promote excess, that often promote too much, too much food, too much stimulation, too many expectations. I, you know, honestly, you could even, you can go to a lot of places on the planet right now, and even when there's not a lot of wealth, there's always a lot of junk food around. Junk food is now ubiquitous. I've been spending a lot of time in Mexico, and obesity rate is on the rise in Mexico. And I've noticed since I started traveling to Mexico many moons ago, all of a sudden, everywhere I go, it, it's just a ton of junk food. And so many people in Mexico are moving away from their traditional diet. And the big corporations are coming in, they know exactly what they're doing, and they're getting the younger generation hooked on food that has no value, that has no nutritional value, too much food, and always, Always, always with too much food. There's always too much stimulation. That stimulation means sugar. That stimulation means energy, drinks, and alcohol. I'm not saying those are bad, but in excess they are. We get too much stimulation with taste and more foods and more sugars and more snacks and more this and more that. And then the advertising is stimulating you. And the media is a constant. People don't get how much their electronic world, your cell phone and everything that you're exposed to electronically in terms of media, is stimulating the heck out of us. So we're often conditioned and don't even realize it to be excessive, to want more from a very young age. I want more taste on my tongue. When you are eating junk food from a young age, I am sorry to say, you are eating food that is engineered to mess with your mind, to mess with your physiology, to mess with your brain, to get you hooked. So you want more. And, and that feeling of wanting more, I want more on my tongue, starts to take us over.
And this helps us understand the way that our clients get pulled into eating challenges that reflect excess overeating, binge eating too much food and appetite that seems out of control. The world is teaching us that you, your client, did not invent overeating or binge eating. I'm sorry. You cannot take credit for that. You and your client have no right. I will often say it like this because hey, you have no right to think that you're the only person who has this. Guess what? Millions of people across the globe deal with overeating, deal with bingeing, deal with emotional eating, deal with feeling like their appetite's outta control. You have no right to think that you are the only person. In other words, you're not alone. In other words, it's not just you. In other words, you don't need to shame yourself so much. In other words, you don't need to feel so guilty because guess what? There's a gazillion of us. Join the club. Let's help each other. Let's solve this together. That's where I'm coming from.
Stop all this nasty blame, this nasty judgment that is coming at us as overeaters, as binge eaters, as people dealing with excess weight. We have hate coming at us, blame and judgment coming at us. And then what do we do? We interject that, we ingest that. We take it inside of us, and we believe it's true and we hurl it at ourselves. That is unacceptable. I don't like it. I'm gonna make sure that I'm gonna work with my client on that piece. I really want them to see you have inherited an excess that was taught to you by the world. So we're gonna ship that. We're gonna gonna change that. We're gonna reeducate ourselves because you have grown up in a world that has stacked the odds against you when it comes to being a healthy eater. Because you have been fed food, chances are from a young age that's been hooking you, that has grabbed your chemistry. I don't like to use the word addiction because that's a loaded term, but the foods that are invented that are mass produced, grab our chemistry. They grab the mind.
So some questions to consider my friends, as your speaking with your client, can you see your client, not as someone who has a problem, but as a human being who's trying their best and who is dramatically impacted by a world of excess?
Feel for your client. Have compassion for them. Don't blame them. Can you see your clients' weight concerns, not just as a personal challenge around their shortcomings, but as a predictable challenge of being born into a world that does not make it easy for us to live into our natural weight.
The world isn't designed for your natural weight, just isn't. I wish it was different. That's why I do this work. Let's create the world, starting in our own mind, starting in our own home, starting in our own style of living, starting in our own kitchen. Now again, this might be a subtle distinction, but when we get it and hold it, that by itself makes the journey for the client and the practitioner, it makes it more honest. It makes it more human, it makes it more real. It makes it more humane.
Can you see my friends, how these collective distinctions are impacting us? Can you see how we're not trying to fix people? We're trying to grow. We're trying to evolve ourselves. We're trying to look at our environment and, and be clear. Look at your environment and say, oh, no wonder I have such a hard time with this. Stop banging your head against the wall. That's what I'm gonna to Everything that I'm saying to you, I will say to my client exactly how I'm saying it, you use your own style, but I will not let my client get away very long. I'm not gonna let them get away with self attack and self-judgment. And woe is me around my weight because you know something, look around you. You ain't the only one. We, we have a difficult, we have a difficult finding our natural health and our natural weight in this world because the odds are stacked against us. So that's why we get together. That's why we do this work. That's why you're coming to see me, Mr. And Mrs. Client. Client. So we could unwind this and we could begin to change the culture starting with us, starting with me and you starting in your own life. What a good thing. Okay, next distinction on the collective distinctions checklist is
our disconnection from nature, which is another way of saying our disconnection from the body, which is another way of saying our disconnection from nourishment. So some of you're gonna get this really easily and it will make sense to you. Others will not. Um, because some of us have grown in, you know, in and around nature, and we have a connection with nature. Uh, there's many people I meet to good people, great people, wise people, amazing people, and they've been city people all their life. They, they just don't get nature. So simply what I wanna say is this, far too many people silently and unknowingly suffer from NDD Nature Deficit Disorder.
I made that term up many moons ago. And it turns out other people made it up too. And some people consider it a real thing. I consider it real interesting how good ideas they, they sprout up at the same time all over the place. Nature Deficit Disorder. I believe that's real. What I mean by that is we have forgotten our naturalness. We have forgotten in a very intrinsic level our relationship to the sun and to air and to breathing our sense of real food, our sense of clean water, our sense of what truly nourishes the body, our sense of relaxing in the natural world, and letting the natural world heal us, move us, speak to us, breathe us, regenerate us, my friends. Every human being, every human being has a natural wisdom about the body and actually about the natural world that has been, to some degree, conditioned out of us by life, on planet Earth, not blaming anybody. It's not about blame. It's how we've evolved. And consequently, we lose trust. Underline that word highlighted in yellow. We lose trust in our body.
We don't have direct access to our own body wisdom. So there's people walking around, so many weight loss clients, so many clients concerned about their weight. They don't trust their body. If you can't trust your body, if your client can't trust their body, then you're sleeping with the enemy. You're sleeping with somebody that can't trust Jesus. How does that feel? Imagine if I put a person next to you And say, okay, here's a person that you don't trust that you could look me in the eye and say, I don't trust this person. And in fact, they're not trustworthy. And you gotta be with them all the time. There's no fun in that. Trust me. And that's what happens when we lose trust in our own body. We're living in that relationship and we get used to it. We don't even realize it reclaiming our trust of the world, of the body, of the naturalness, of the body, of the body's ability to heal, of the body's ability to find its right place. Just to start to trust a little more is a huge victory. And my friends, it takes time, takes time. They're gonna teach this overnight to a client. I'm just noticing my client's relationship with life. Hey, what do you do? Where do you vacation? Where do you go?
What's fun for you? What gives you pleasure? I'm noticing I'm listening for their relationship with the natural world. Do they spend time outdoors? Do they walk? Do they hike? Do they get some sun? Do they get some air? Are they totally a city guy or a city girl? And they're just disconnected from all that? There are clients, I ask them to get outside and just go on the grass and walk barefoot and do nothing for 20 minutes. But put your face in the sun and breathe.
Something happens. Nature heals. I'm, I'm gonna say it straight up. Nature heals. The sun heals the ocean heals clean water, heals breathing, clean air heals being in the silence of nature heals. Nature doesn't lie. It's not trying to get over on you. It's not trying to mess with your mind. There's all kinds of X factors when you take a walk in the woods, when you go to whatever natural environment or power spot speaks to you, something good happens. Sometimes this is just a nice ingredient to offer your client because you're giving them something. You're reminding them of something that they can now take into the rest of their life. That is gold. It's a peace, it's a piece of the weight puzzle. A peace that helps us get closer and closer to our own naturalness. That gets us closer and closer to, oh, if you can start to trust nature a little bit more and trust your connectedness to it, then you can actually start to trust your own body a little bit more.
It's a good thing. A lot of my clients know this, but they've forgotten this. And I'm here to remind them. They know it. As soon as I tell them they get it, they know it. And they just needed me to cheerlead them and inspire them to get outside. That's what you and I do for our clients. Sometimes you're not fixing them, you're inspiring them in certain directions. Go try this. Do this. Report to me. You know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, as soon as I talked about you getting outside and walking and taking your shoes off, you know, on a nice country trail or by a lake or by a stream, you're, you know, your face lit up, you're noticing your client. When you introduce these kinds of things, it's a huge victory to start to reclaim that. So some of the questions you're asking in the back of your mind, would a stronger connection to the natural world benefit my client? You're asking this of the universe. How can I help and inspire them in this direction? It's different for every client. I'm not gonna give you a list of here's how you help your client get out in nature. You figure that out. You're smart. You don't need me to do that. Gotta notice the person is different for everyone. Some people like to walk, some people like to hike, some people like to water. Some people like the lake, some people like whatever. You figure it out from what your client has told you and you work with the individual. You know how to do that. You know how to speak to individual people and assess individual people. You gotta get better at this. This is not a cookie cutter approach. So you're gonna ask yourself, ask the universe on the behalf of your client, what are the simple and doable practices that they might be able to employ in their lives to receive the benefits of the healing power of the natural world? Plain and simple. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, when can you spend more time out in nature? Can you do it once a day? Oh God, no. Can you do it once a week? Yeah. Can you do it twice a week? Yeah. Can you do it three times a week? Oh, no, no. So you negotiate with your client. Everything is a negotiation with your client. And you have to notice when you see, oh, my client just said yes and I, and, and I'm always gonna push a little more. And once I hit their no, I'm like, okay, I hold there. Okay? This is doable for you. You can, you can get outside twice a week and get a little nature time. Beautiful. I'm so happy for you.
You negotiate with your client. You see what the sweet spot is for them. You see how we're serving people. You see how we're helping others. You're not just looking to attack their body pounds for goodness sake. You can force anyone just about to lose weight. And you'll still have a miserable person who doesn't trust their body, who's disconnected from the world. If you starve them and you exercise their brains out, can you, can you Hear how silly that is? If it's a person that's eating fast, doesn't trust their body, they've abandoned their body, they're disconnected from food, they're disconnected from nature, they're moving too fast. That's the problem. Not a bunch of pounds of body fat.
Okay, my friends next on this checklist, another distinction, we're getting into it a little bit more cosmic, spiritual, subtle realm here. I'm gonna call it the banishment of ancestors, elders, and soul. I'm gonna just spend a few brief moments on this because I do believe it's important. Far too many of us have forgotten our past. We don't know where we came from. We've lost the connection to those who came before us. We don't have access to our lineage. And oftentimes, oftentimes, oftentimes, when you start to connect with where you came from, you learn a little bit more about your parents that you didn't know before. You learn a little bit more about your grandparents, you'll learn a little bit more about the old country, where they came from, or where your great grandparents came from. You learn about some of what their challenges were. Oftentimes when we do that, we connect to an unseen power. We connect to a support and a ground and an inspiration. Much of it is about honoring those who came before us. No matter what they did wrong, no matter what their deficiencies were, guess what? You probably have it far better off than they did. We have to learn in some way, shape, or form to honor the ones who came before us, because we're continuing the circle of life. They were continuing the circle of life. We don't know how hard they had it in their world. When we honor the ones that came before us, guess what? It increases the possibility that the ones who come after you, your kids, the younger generation, will be able to honor you. What goes around comes around, my friend. It is imperative. I believe that a lot of us heal our relationship to the elders of the world to age and to what I'm gonna call the tyranny of eternal youth, American culture, which is now being exported globally. So I know America the best, but I'm also smart enough to see that our culture is being exported more and more, which is not a good thing. I don't approve. We value youth, we value the Es and the princesses, and we devalue age. The elderly, the elders older you get, the more disposable you are in the workplace in any place, just about. And it's in imperative that we heal our relationship to that. And part of that is beginning to respect the elders in our own lineage. Understanding That, that they did it their best understanding some of what they had to go through to get where they are, to give birth to your parents, to give birth to you. Just understanding the story a little bit more.
Understanding the people who came before you and the environment you live. Who, who are the native populations before you showed up, where you live,
where did your relatives come from? What country? What's that place about?
Who are the elders that you're in contact with that you honor?
So some of the questions I'm asking,
how can my client have a stronger connection to their own lineage? And how might it serve them? I'm just wondering who are the grandparents or elders that they have a deeper link to? Oftentimes I'll ask my client that, that, that question. Are there any any elders in your family that you're especially connected to? Yeah, you know, I am really connected to, and all of a sudden they start talking about a grandparent that they just have a synergy, a simpatico with. And there's something there. What is it about that person
who are the elders in their life right now? And or how can they invite this kind of relationship more into their personal world?
You know, sometimes we don't have wise people in our world and we have to invite them in. Older people in our world who can give us a different kind of love, a different kind of mentoring, a different kind of energy.
I'm also wondering, is my client, depending on their age, imagining their own elder years, and who they want to be in the future? That's especially important once we hit 50 plus. I'm not worried about my 20-year-old client thinking about their elder years, but I'm certainly have my eye on my 50-year-old client thinking about their elder years.
It's just a way to do little subtle ships
because once we start to embrace that, once our older queen and king age clients start to embrace their elder years more, just think about it. Look about, look around it, plan on it. There's a, a reckoning that happens. There's a relaxation that happens.
Oftentimes there's a relaxation around our weight that happens.
So ancestors, elders and weight, everything is connected. My friends, this is something that just enriches us when we're if, if you want to create a human being who has issues, if you wanna create a human being who is emotionally, personally, and psychologically disconnected in some way, shape or form, disconnect them from their past.
Let them somehow hide their parents and their grand, hide their whole lineage from them so they have no idea where the hell they came from. You're gonna have more of a confused human. When we don't know where we come from, when we start to strengthen those connections, just a little good things happen. Okay, my friends last on this list of collective distinctions. I'm gonna just call it collective karma. Just, just have your eyes and ears open for this. You know, my assumption and, and, and this is just my own personal, spiritual, religious belief, uh, my personal, spiritual, religious belief, and I'm not saying this has to be your belief, I'm just putting this out there, is that the world has its own lessons, its own journey, its own karma. We as earthlings, we're weirdly tied together. I mean, let's face it, we are all part of the Earth show. It's an interesting show. It's an interesting TV show. It's been going on for a while. I think it's good and it's necessary and it's healthy to be aware of the big picture, to consider it, and to remember that our individual challenges around food and body and weight and life, it's part of a larger story. Don't take it so personally. Don't take it so personally. And yes, it is personal, but don't take it that personally. We cannot fully comprehend these things. The karma of the world, the, the lessons that the world has to learn. But it's useful to remember that the world is learning its lessons. So we can see our clients and their challenges. We can see ourself and our challenges through a more complete, uh, and compassionate lens. Does that make sense? My friends?
A la la some final thoughts.
You know, understanding the big picture of the world always helps us understand the smaller picture of our own individual life and the life of our client. We tend to be self-blaming creatures, many of us. And this in and of itself is a dis-ease and it's best treated with a good dose of wisdom. So take responsibility, yes, for your weight, your eating challenge. Yes, take responsibility, meaning it's up to you to respond to that, to take this on, to be responsible for it. But that doesn't mean self-blame and self attack. Soon as we go into self-blame and self attack, we are going into an inefficient strategy to actually lose actual weight. So that's the practicality of it. You wanna make more money? Don't bang your head against the wall. Don't spend your day blaming yourself for not having enough. Don't spend your day looking in the mirror going, you don't have enough money, you don't have enough. No, no. Take responsibility. What can I do? Hmm. Self blame and self attack doesn't further the action, it holds you back. It wastes your time and energy. Granted, we go there because the world teaches us that we inherited that from the world. We didn't invent it. It's a virus. But we can mount our own conscious immune response to that virus and begin to notice when we go into self blame and self attack and slowly begin to just say no. Quite literally, excess weight in the belief that we need to weigh some specific and perfect amount is a collective challenge that personalizes within us. I have worked with hundreds and hundreds of people. It's the same conversation. Everybody's different. I gotta weigh this amount and this is the exact amount I have to weigh. This is the exact amount I have to lose. Like, really? Gosh, how do you know so much about the human body? How do you know so much about the human science of exactly how much a human should weigh? Where did you learn such brilliant wisdom? It's like we've inherited this weird concept that we know exactly what it is and exactly how it has to, and, and, and if this doesn't happen, then we can't be happy. So that's a collective issue that personalizes us inside of it personalizes within each one of us. Okay, in closing, my friends, as a reminder, we're always looking to be clear about redefining success. I mean this, if you get this, you can begin to be more successful. Truly, you will have a successful heir about you in your work, because you will be more successful when you redefine success when it comes to working with this thing called weight loss.
I'm gonna redefine success for you right now. Again, I'm reminding you of this, and I'm gonna remind you again because you're gonna forget. Success can mean when it comes to weight. When it comes to weight. Success can mean our client loses all the weight they set out to lose ta-da. Does that happen? Yeah. Does that happen a lot? Ah, I don't know. Success can mean our client loses some of the weight, and that's truly what the success is, because that's what they're supposed to lose, and whatever number they have that they're so sure of, like, really? How do you scientifically know that? It's a bunch of nonsense. I'm telling you right now, it's a bunch of nonsense. So success can mean our client loses some of the weight. They wanted to lose 50 pounds, they lost 35 Success.
Success, believe it or not, can mean our client loses none of the weight. I have had this happen with many clients. How do I know it was successful? Because they told me so because they look me in the eye and I could see it anyway. They didn't need to tell me. But I've had so many clients say to me, I am a better person because of our work together. I love myself more. I'm in my body more. I'm enjoying my body more. I'm enjoying my sex life more. I'm enjoying moving more. I love myself more. Is there a part of me that still wants to lose weight? Absolutely. But I'm happy with myself. I'm happier than I've ever been, and this isn't driving me and making me crazy anymore, and I feel like I'm free, and yeah, I would love to lose the weight, but right now, I feel so good.
Now, if you're trying to lose weight, I know that, that, I know that that scares you,
but that's redefining success because success can often look like that. Success can mean our client loses the need to lose whatever amount of pounds they think they need to lose. I've had this happen with a lot of five pounders, 99 point, 99% of my five pounders. I need to lose five pounds. Even a lot of my 10 pounders, I, I look at them, I'm like, where are you gonna lose 10 pounds from the successes that they lose the need to lose that weight because they were steeped in nonsense perfectionism, that, that, that that's their religion and they are robbing their valuable life force from themselves, from their creativity, from their loved ones, from their children, from their partner, because they give more value and they're more in relationship with, I gotta lose five pounds. I gotta lose 10 pounds. I gotta have this perfect body right here. In this way, ouchies success can mean our client learns to love their body more. They grow, they mature, they step into a more powerful place. They get their priorities straight. They become more conscious. So much more.
This is why with every single weight client, whatever success I see happens, I tweak their diet, they didn't lose any weight, but all of a sudden they say, yeah, you know, but I have more energy success. I point that out to them. We are moving in the right direction. Mr. And Mrs. Klein, that's a success. I need you, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, to see those successes and to celebrate those successes because you wanna know something. If you and I don't celebrate our true successes, how do you think we're gonna invite more success in? You're cheating life. You're cheating the universe. You keep getting success and you keep kicking it to the curb. 'cause you don't notice it selfish. It's being selfish with yourself. It's being selfish with life. It's being selfish with a higher power. It's being selfish with the wisdom of the universe. We are here to help our client celebrate the small successes. Mr. Ms. Klein, I really want you to notice that that's a small success. It's not the big one you want, but I promise you if you learn to celebrate the small successes, 'cause everybody wants to win the lottery. The lottery means I win the $50 million. The lottery means I lose the 50 pounds. Boom, it's off. Gone done. I woke up this morning and all the weight was gone. That's the lottery that everybody's trying to win and it don't happen like that. I'm sorry to say. Small baby steps. If you the practitioner begin to embrace, I mean this is really important my friends, you begin to embrace the paradox called, yes, of course. I want my client to get where they wanna go as fast as possible. I really mean that. I want my client to get where they want to go as fast as possible, and at the same time, I am willing to go as slow as we need to go, and I am willing for this to take as long as it needs to take. It might only need to take two months. It might mean to take two years. Doesn't matter to me because life has its timing. Life has its wisdom that is far smarter than you and is far smarter than your client, and it is far smarter than any nonsense weight loss diet, weight loss book. Do this, do that. Push yourself, shove yourself, limit yourself with, that's it's a bunch of nonsense, takes time. It takes time for the human body to shape shift
sustainably because it takes time for us as humans to change, to mature, to grow, to do the things that we need to do to reach our natural health and our natural weight. We need to become more of our best self. What a beautiful journey. What a beautiful process. My friends, this is the end of wait part seven. Wait part eight. Nice rhyme is next. I really appreciate your time, your energy, your attention. You've been great. Lots more to come, my friends.

PART 8

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Greeting once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating Your Guide on this journey. Here we are in weight part eight, and we've been looking at checklists when it comes to weight. And now this is one of my favorite topics when it comes to a checklist, when it comes to weight, which is the archetype checklist. And for our purposes here, when I say archetypes that we're gonna be looking at, are the princess, the queen, the prince and the king. Now, I want you to remember that an archetype is a timeless form, a timeless energy. These are the structures of human existence and the human psyche. There are all kinds of different archetypes. Princess, queen, king, prince, there's warrior, magician, lover who are saint sinner, victim, hero, mother, father, son, daughter, inner child, teenager, hero, heroine. Uh, there's a million of them. There's the b***h, there's the jerk, there's the a*****e. These are literally all archetypes. They're, when you say it, we have a sense of understanding what we're talking about. And as I've mentioned before, when we begin to work with archetypes, when you begin to think archetypally, you are stepping into what I would just call the advanced realm, the PhD realm of how to work with another human, how to work with a client, how to help people move forward in their life, and in this case, when it comes to their relationship with food and with body, and with health. So I'm gonna offer you, we're gonna talk about each of these in relationship to weight. We're gonna talk about princess in relationship to weight queen, in relationship to weight Prince, in relationship to Weight King in relationship to weight. I'm gonna define each of these archetypes again to a certain degree, and we're gonna see how we can make connections that will be useful for you, the practitioner, and therefore be useful to your client. Okay, let's start with the princess. Now, when it comes to weight, it's really important to think in terms of treating the archetype, not just the individual person. So when I'm working with a young woman of princess age, yes, I'm of course, of course, of course, of course. I'm working with the very specific, unique individual human sitting in front of me, this particular person. And at the same time, I'm working with the archetype. I'm understanding that for any young woman of princess age, she will be operating in and operated by the princess archetype. So I can understand on a deeper level how the psyche functions. So in general, in general, in the big picture, the princess archetype is from approximately zero to 30, zero to 20. I'm going to call that early princess, the early princess. And those are more the formative and rocky years.
21 to 29, I'm going to be calling middle princess. Let's call these the rocky, yet self-discovery years.
I'm going to call age 30 to 39 late princess. And this is all about claiming selfhood years. That's stepping into a truly mature princess, my friends. It is so deeply important that we respect this archetype and understand it for exactly what it is and what it isn't. Okay. And remember, princess is not a pejorative, negative, insulting kind of term. Now, I just wanna call attention for a moment that I said zero to 20 for is early princess. I call that the rocky in the formative years. What I want to suggest to you, that is in many nations across the globe right now, um, our young women are starting out with a tremendous disadvantage because we are hurling at them much difficulty, much confusion, um, much distortion about what it means to be a young girl.
Unless you really pay attention, I'm gonna be straight up with you. Unless you really pay attention, you're not gonna get it. And when I say pay attention, I mean pay attention to what's going on in the media. I mean, pay attention to what's going on on social media. I mean, pay attention to what's going on in the past 60, 70 years in terms of the images and the stories and the Disney portrayals and the movie star and the rockstar portrayals of how we are presenting our young women. We are presenting them as objects. We are objectifying them, we're objectifying them sexually. We are, we're sexualizing them very early and very young, and we're showing them an ideal of body type and beauty. And we're telling them that this is what you need and this is what's lovable. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to any human being that our young women, that girls four years, between four years and six years old, almost half of them are already saying, I'm on a diet. Do you know how horrific that is? That is unacceptable.
We have the same age group of girls already knowing what body part they want to change. Where do they pick this up? By the way, they're getting it from the world, they're getting it from media. They're getting it from the older princesses and queens around them. So this is what they're absorbing, and they absorb it quick. You have to remember that a young mind is a sponge. The young mind is deeply observant. Young people are brilliant observers. They are poor interpreters, but they will observe this is what the world wants from me. So it is completely understandable that we are training our young women to have a disordered, dysfunctional, disrespectful relationship with food and body. It is confusing to them. So I'm stating right off the bat that these are rocky, informative years. I don't want you to expect, so working with young people is a specialty that's not part of this training, but I want you to understand them. Really, most of what you're learning in this training applies to approximately, approximately 18 years and older. Working with y you know, much younger is again, it's a deep specialty. And I just want you to understand that if you are the kind of person that works with young people expecting transformational breakthroughs where the person is changing for life, uh, it, it is not really what we're looking for in the zero to 20 stage, because it's by nature. It's a time of discovery and growth. And by nature, because we're dealing with a difficult world, um, a lot of the catch up begins to happen hopefully in Middle Princess. When a girl is 21 to 29, uh, age 21 is often a time, traditionally when it's set in different, different systems that the soul, the spirit, the ego starts to really land in the body. The person gets here, starts to become aware in a whole new way. So 21 to 29, the middle princess stage is the beginning of self-discovery. It's a time when a young woman can begin to self-reflect in a whole different way, begin to understand her world in a whole different way. The age of approximately 28 to 30 is a time when we transition. So all the research on life stages has really picked out this time in approximately 28 to 30 where there's a shift.
And that shift is really stepping into a whole different awareness. So 30 to 39 is when a princess begins, is ready in my experience in this world, to really start to claim herself, to really begin to look back on her life and begin to say, okay, here's the suitcase I've been carrying. What's the baggage? What's the nonsense? What works here? What doesn't? What do I want to hang onto? What do I want to get rid of? What helps me? What hinders me? What helps me flower and grow? What pulls me down? 30 to 39 is an excellent time for a princess to do that. 21 to 29, yes, you can get work done. The twenties are a rocky time mixed in with a fabulous dose of self-discovery and a hunger for truth and a hunger for learning. So again, zero to 20 early princess a girl is subject to the conditioning and to the impact of her environment. Parents, school friends, family, media, music, advertising, we will be imprinted. You've gone through it, I've gone through it. All of us have been imprinted in those early years. I want to say about the feminine in us, in all of us, men and women, and in particular in actual females. And I will say this to the grave, that the females of the species are fantastically, interestingly, unusually susceptible to any and all negative messages about food, body and weight.
Are some men extremely susceptible to that? Absolutely. But I'm saying in general, making a generalization, the female of the human species, in my observation and the observation of others is fantastically susceptible to negative messages about food, body, and weight.
Think in terms, my friends of the old archetypes where the young princess, you know, she gets a bite of the poison apple, or she touches the poisonous needle, or a spell is put on her what that's saying and she falls asleep and can't be woken up. What that fairytale is saying is that the princess is fantastically susceptible to poison. And that poison is not just physical. My friends, we're talking, we're talking psychological poison. We're talking emotional poison. We're talking soul poison. When you take a young person, and in this case we're talking about a young woman and you poison her with this is the perfection of how you're supposed to look, this is the image of what you need to look like. So you can be lovable so you can be accepted. So you can have all the goodies in life. You are literally sending them into a bad stupor. And you see this around you. And if you're a woman, you know, chances are that this has happened to you. And if you've been able to avoid that, and if these experiences didn't land you, you are one of the lucky ones. However you got there, you consider yourself fortunate. So in general, you know, if you're thinking, if you have a young child or you know people with the young children, we gotta protect them as much as possible. Protection, protection, protection. The young princess needs a tremendous amount of protection against the poison of the world. The evil intent, the misleading energies. So you have to manage their social media, you have to manage the websites that they go to. You have to manage the movies that they watch, the TV shows that they watch, and you have to talk to them.
You have to educate them about their world from a young age they won't fully understand, but you start to educate them from a young age, five, six years old, they'll start to hear it. They'll slowly start to get it. Our young princesses, we throw, you know, they go to school, they get on the bus, you take 'em to school, and all of a sudden they're out of your environment. It's difficult. So our young women are seldom receiving such protections. So you give them as much as you can. You talk it out constantly letting them know, here's what the world is doing. Look at these images. This isn't what real people look like. This is not what you need to look like to be loved. You know something, you're lovable who you are.
If you wanna know some of how we work with our young people. But you know, if you're a parent, you gotta protect your kid anyway from anything. Every animal species does that. It protects its young. We need to not only protect our young from physical harm, we need to protect them from psychic harm and the psychic harm that we're dealing with. Quite frankly, it's pretty intense.
So an early princess, zero to 20 must be fed food with an excess of praise.
Positive praise is food for the early princess.
It's as simple as that. Your beautiful, beautiful, you're wonderful. That's great, that's wonderful. Look how special you are in that age. The young princess needs archetypally. This is part of her essence. She needs to receive upliftment from outside of herself because why? Because she's still a growing, developing, being in this world. She doesn't know who she is unless someone tells her. So when she is told you are wonderful, you are lovable. I love you just like this. That's the message that goes in. If she's not getting those messages of praise from parents, from the loved ones who are taking care of her and guiding her, if she's not getting that kind of information into her mind, that kind of praise, then she will take information from elsewhere and she'll take it from school. She'll take it from her peer group. And oftentimes peer group is very harsh. She'll take it from the media, and the media will always reflect back to the young princesses, you are not enough. And that's why they all struggle with food and body.
I think for an early princess, it's best to teach her how to nourish herself with good food, just from a young age, how to love herself with movement, how to enjoy moving her body. I want to say to you that between zero and 20, focusing for a young princess, focusing on weight loss alone, okay, we have to help you lose weight can can be very hurtful and unsuccessful. Focusing on weight loss alone, we have to help you lose weight. You're overweight, you need to lose weight. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. It's all about focusing on food that nourishes you. Food that's good for you. It's focusing on helping her embody. How does she love to move? Not exercise to lose weight, dance, walking, swimming, biking, whatever she naturally loves to do. We gotta teach that to our young ones and our young princesses early on as best we can. We have to stabilize our emotional and social environment. That's asking a lot, but parents have to be bulldogs about that, especially in this day and age. So it's all about helping her with healthy, nourishing food, with good nutrition while not slamming home. This weight loss thing,
you can help somebody lose weight. You can help a young person lose weight without constantly saying the word weight and without making it like weight loss is the goal.
You know something young lady, lady, everybody has their natural weight. Everybody has their natural body and it changes. And the way you have your natural weight in your natural body is we do the healthiest things we can for the body. And then the body finds exactly where it's supposed to be. So we're gonna make sure you have the kind of food that helps you be healthy, that helps you be beautiful, and that helps you feel good
and that tastes good for you. And we're gonna figure that out.
While not making her wrong for who she is and what she looks like, you'll find the way you are. And yeah, maybe weight will come off,
but it's giving them the message that you're lovable who you are. And yeah, we're gonna help the body be healthier and find its natural place. We're not sure what that is, but let's experiment. Let's explore with, that's a lot different than your fat. You gotta lose weight, okay, 21 to 29 middle princess. I call these the rocky and self-discovery years. This is a time if you have a client in this age group, um, it's a time to really help a young person in this age group stand by herself to not abandon herself.
Other people might talk bad words to you. You have to learn how to not talk bad words to yourself. You know, even if you do something against your own wishes, even if you binge eat,
you still have to love yourself.
I always give the analogy, young people always understand this. Imagine you had a baby and imagine your baby was learning how to walk. You've heard me say this. If the baby falls down, you don't smack the kid. You're learning how to eat. You're learning how to nourish yourself with food. You're learning how to have a good relationship with food and body. You're not totally there yet. That's okay. Lots of girls are struggling too. So many girls in this world are struggling. The world makes it very difficult for a young woman like you. And I'll tell her exactly why, exactly what I've been telling you. Look at the media. Everybody's comparing each other. You can get on social media and find girls who are supporting other girls and being anorexic girls teaching other girls how to be bulimic. Girls teaching other girls is fine to just trash your body and eat junk food. And it doesn't matter. There's a lot of nonsense going on. And it's all about teaching young women very clearly. This is about you loving yourself. Of course you want other people to love you. I get it. You gotta love you too. This is you learning how to be responsible for yourself because this is the body you have when you feed it good food
that's gonna, that's gonna help you into the future. But right now, when you attack yourself, that's where things go wrong. So you're doing your best. I am not looking to have ultra success with a princess between 21 and 29. I am looking to coach her to stand by her, to support her, to mentor her, to let her know I'm her advocate, to give her unconditional positive regard. And she needs to get the message from you, the practitioner, that there is nothing else she needs to do for you to love her better, like her, better respect her more, or think she's more beautiful. She wants to lose weight. Fine, she has weight to lose. Fine. But you are different from the rest of the world because you are not giving her the message. Yeah, you know, you do have to lose weight. And when you do lose this weight, you will be a better person. You will be more lovable. You will not be such a a, a lazy slob or whatever the person is thinking. You will not be such a willpower weekly. I no, you give a young woman in this age group unconditional positive regard. You gotta be beaming that there ought to be no part of you thinking when you lose weight, then you're gonna be better. Not at all. She's better now. She's more lovable now. She's gotta get that now. It's hard. It's hard for a person to get that, uh, a young woman to get that at that age. And planting seeds, planting seeds, planting seeds. This is also a time when a young woman can actually learn about the toxic beliefs that the world has given her that's holding her back. Girls in their twenties are uber smart. They're clever when you explain things to them, when you reflect the world back to them, they get it. You have to let her know this is not your fault. The weight challenge you're dealing with is not your fault. Perhaps she was raised on junk food. She got attached. It addicts the mind. You talk about how foods are engineered to hook the brain. This is not your fault.
There's a lot of stress that's been put on you to look a certain way.
And then all the young women start to believe that. And all the young women are having a challenging relationship with food. Of course, you're struggling. It makes perfect sense. So are millions of other girls. So to let her know she's not alone. And this is a time also that I would, at the same time, in a strange way, defocus on food and focus for a middle princess, 21 to 29 on what she loves to do. What are her interests? What are her passions, her interests and her passion should not be weight loss. Her interests and her passion. And the main thing that occupies her mind, even though this is what's occupying her mind. Weight loss, weight loss, weight loss, perfect body, perfect body, perfect body. You have to help her tap into what enthuses her. What lights her up. Is it art? Is it dance? Is it music? Is it sports? Is it some kind of career? Is it some kind of study? Is it some kind of media? Like what is it? Is it working with animals, children, adults, elderly? I don't care. You need to discover with her what that is. And that's what you focus on because then you are helping that young woman have something that nourishes her and something that inspires her that will slowly start to starve her self attack. So I want you to be really, really clear. If you're working with the princess in this age group, success here is not capital NOT. Uh, it's not about pounds lost. You are planting seeds that will sprout when they do. If you, the practitioner, are super focused on how much weight did she lose, how much weight did she lose, how much weight did she lose? That's my measure of success. You are doing more harm than good. I'm not kidding you when I say that. I know what it's, it's. Chances are you're thinking, no, you gotta help these girls lose weight to feel better about themselves. No, you have to help girls feel better about themselves that will begin to help them find their natural weight and shape. You gotta put first things first. So if you are thinking pounds lost equals success, then you are buying into all the nonsense because you can. Okay, pounds lost equals success. Tie her hands behind her back, lock her up in your basement and starve her
and she'll lose the weight. Is that a success? No, that's nonsense. But that's what you're thinking when you're thinking, oh, that's what's gonna give success. No, success is when she starts to claim her power. When she starts to know herself, when she starts to see the world around her, when she starts to stand by herself and not abandon herself, you track where does she check out? Where does she start to self-abuse? You learn those places where she goes to through exquisite questioning,
where does she check out? Where does she abandon herself? And then you start to look for ways where she can call someone. In those moments, you look for ways where, huh, have you ever had a success in not harming yourself or not binging? What did that look like? What were the circumstances? So you're looking for gentle ways where she can support herself, but in general, you are affirming that who she is is inherently lovable. And you know something young lady, the weight is gonna come off when it does. Nobody can guarantee it. If I could just weigh my magic wand and make you lose the weight, I would do that.
But I know that the weight is gonna come off when it's ready to come off. And right now you are learning how to have a healthy relationship with your body. That's what's gonna help you find your natural correct weight when you start to have a good relationship with your body. So then you're gonna look for ways to help her find self-love and self-respect. Remember embodiment practices. How does she love to move?
What helps her be in her body in a way that brings her joy? And what are the other parts of life again that light her up? What are her interests and her passions? Okay, working with the princess archetype, the late princess 30 to 39, this is claiming selfhood years. This is where you as a practitioner start to push the pedal to the metal. This is where you are looking at that young woman, and you're starting to see that around the corner from this young woman is a queen in training. 40 to 49 is queen in training. So this is a time when things can start to come together around owning one's power and, and claiming one, uh, owning one's body and claiming one's personal power. More and more weight loss here is about gaining life, stepping into her potential, noting where your client is needing to grow in her life. Where's life calling my client? How's it asking her to grow? What does she need to step into?
How does she, how is she being in relationship with her partner? If she has a partner with whoever her partner is? If it's a marriage partner, what does she want? Where is she going? Does she want children? Does she wanna be a mother? What career is important to her, if any? How does she see her life unfolding? So we're asking bigger, more beautiful questions because she's ready for them.
You are using whatever strategies you've learned from all your checklists and that you will continue to learn. Remember, personal power equals metabolic power. This is a time where, uh, princess is ready to claim herself like never before. And as she does that, she can step into her metabolic potential. It is just the way life works, my friends. Um, so you're dealing with a young adult here and you need to trust and hold that she can step into her power. Even if it doesn't look like she is, you're holding that space for her. You are holding that vision for her.
A lot of times, my friends, that's the best we can do because your princess client might continue to binge. She might continue to struggle with her body, but all the while, if you're sitting there going, oh my God, I can't help my client. Oh my God, she hasn't lost weight. Oh my God, she still binge eats. Then you're making it about you,
you're making it about me, me, me, and is not about your client because you know something, you me, none of us know the wisdom of the universe or the timing of the universe on these kinds of things. We just don't. There's a wisdom and a flow to life. If you look at your own life, if you look at the life of people that you know around you, there's a wisdom and a flow that goes beyond our intelligence.
So it's your job to always, always, always hold a space of exquisite possibility. And you are looking at this person as if, okay, here's a trick. It's a bit of a shamanic trick. It's a counseling trick. It's a great trick that a parent does that a mentor does, that a wise man or wise woman does, is you constantly see the person that you're working with right now, even though they're not in their power and they're not in their glory, you see them in that place. You look at them and you see the content of their acorn. You see the big, brilliant, beautiful oak in their acorn. So when you're looking at them, you got an acorn in front of you. But you see the oak tree
when you do that. You are silently, subtly and powerfully calling that person, that client into their oak tree. You're calling them into their potential. You're holding that space. You might be the only person doing that in their life. You are not wavering. I I do not waver when I'm with a client in seeing them in their potential. I'm not thinking, oh, you're never gonna get where you want to go. I'm thinking, okay, I can actually see you when you become your oak tree. I got it. I'm holding that vision for you and here we are right now. So you're holding the vision of what that person can be while seeing, okay, here's who you are right now. If you can do that with every client, you have an amazing superpower and you can do that. So start with the loved ones around you. Practice that for the people you care about.
Okay, my friends, let's start talking about the queen archetype. A woman is a queen in training from age 40 to 49. She's a queen from approximately age 50 onwards. By the way, these numbers are not exact, but I'm giving you my experience of roughs and approximates based on my observation. This doesn't come from any system, that doesn't come from any books. This comes from my experience, my postulation, my belief, um, my head. So this archetype is where a woman is compelled to come to peace with life, with her body, her perfectionism, the toxic belief she has inherited from the world. The queen archetype is when she is no longer a princess and must, must self-initiate herself into a whole new place. A queen ascends her throne. You don't get it from FedEx in the mail and open it up and, oh, here's my throne. Let's put it over here. No, you ascend it. You climb a bunch of stairs, you make a little bit of effort. You ascend the throne, you choose to do it.
You take stock of your life. You look in the mirror and you go, this is me. This is life. This is the circle of life, not a princess anymore.
Queen. Holding on to being a princess is in many ways at the root of a majority of challenges around food and body that women face.
I wanna say that again. Queens who are not stepping into their queen hood and hanging onto being a princess, is at the very root. It's the root of so many eating challenges that so many women face stated in the positive. If you are a queen in training 40 to 49, and especially if you're a woman 50 onwards and you begin to claim your queen hood, you'll be on the freaking fast track to healing your relationship with food and body in a big way and stepping into your power and actually starting to get the things you want in life. And I don't mean a perfect body.
So a queen ascends her throne. She chooses her throne.
She charts her course to take her throne. It's there. Your throne is there. You don't have to go find it. It's right there. It's inside yourself.
A queen owns her power. Remember, a queen does not sit on her throne obsessing about her body to her subjects. Hello you all. Hello my subjects. Do I look okay? Do I need to lose weight? Is my belly a little too fat? Will you love me better if I lose this weight?
You wouldn't follow that queen. Nor should you.
A queen doesn't try to be a princess. A queen is not hungry for anyone's approval. Quite the opposite. A queen delivers approval. She gives approval. Who does a queen approval of? She approves of everyone in her queendom. Of course, if somebody's misbehaving or if they're off track, queen says something. But a queen basically approves of the people in her queendom. She particularly approves of the young women in her queendom. She particularly knows that it's the young women who particularly need her guidance, her help, her love her unconditional acceptance.
Because the queen knows how hard it is for the feminine in this world to have a healthy journey because the cards are stacked against them. The odds are stacked against them. So a clean alum, a queen claims her power, her authority, her wisdom, her worth.
She's not beholden to anyone's opinion of her weight or herself.
Soon as you hit queen age, soon as you hit that 40, you're a queen In training. Start training. Start loving what you got. I don't care what it is. I don't care how much you weigh, what you look like. If you ain't loving it, if you're not loving yourself into transformation or change, fine. You can wanna lose weight. You wanna lose weight, fine. You have weight to, you truly have weight to lose. Fine, no problem. Good for you. You're the queen.
It's fine for a queen to say what she wants, but don't be hating yourself to get there. That's a young unevolved. Immature hasn't yet learned about life princess strategy that is destined to fail. Why? Because you've been doing it. Your client's been doing it and it hasn't worked. And that's why they're here to see you. A queen gives, she nourishes others. She's not looking. Oh, what can I do for me, me, me, me, me. Yeah, a queen has to take care of herself for sure. But a queen's basic move is she's giving, she's nourishing. She's sharing, she's empowering others. She's approving of others. She commands respect because she respects herself.
Young women love older women who love and respect themselves. A queen truly understands that approval truly comes from within.
What a great thing. What a great place to reach. It's beautiful. But if you're a woman of queen and training age or queen age, if you've looked around, what you've noticed is you've been conditioned. Ain't by the way, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're a queen in training or a woman of queen age and you're hanging on to princess, I need you to know something. This ain't your fault. This is how you've been taught. This is how you've been conditioned. This is how you've been programmed. You ain't the only one you did not invent. Oh, I think I'll be a queen. But really try to hang on to be a princess. You have been taught that from a young, young age. You don't know differently because the world keeps telling you no, you gotta be a queen to be, uh, gotta be a princess, to be loved and accepted.
Remember the mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest of them all? When you're that kind of queen and you're competing with the young ones and you're gonna poison snow white 'cause she's prettier than you, you poison your queendom, you poison everyone. That's a bad queen. A bad queen is competing with her daughter, is competing with the younger women who she's supposed to be educating and mentoring. Hm. Women in our world are often taught to compete with one another. We gotta change that. Change that in your own world. Change it in your own life, okay? For a woman of queen's, age or queen in training around weight, here's what I'm wondering, my friends, you gotta really be asking this question. Big time, big time, big time. You're not always gonna know the answer. If you're new at this, does this woman truly need to lose weight? So this is first what you're, you're you're asking the universe. You're asking the hidden intelligence of life. Does this person truly need to lose weight?
'cause there's a lot of people out there thinking they do. Does this person truly need to lose weight? Now, if this is a person who has been working for a long time and trying to lose weight and trying to lose weight and trying to lose weight, and they haven't been able to lose weight, you know something, you might have some good ideas, but one of the strategies you have to think about,
and you're gonna have to use your best intuition and guessing, huh? Maybe instead of doing new weight loss strategies for this person who really wants to lose weight, one of your strategies is for your client to go on a no diet. Diet. You're gonna be hearing more about this, but essentially it's a period of time where you let go of weight loss. You call freaking time out. You get out of that mentality because chances are you've been in there 20, 30, 40 years. How's that working for you? It's time to completely get that out of the mind. Don't worry. Only gonna do no dieting and stepping outta dieting consciousness for two months.
I'll negotiating my client. I shoot for three first. If they're really scared, I go, okay, two, I want to get their buy-in. It's a negotiation for two months. I I don't want you to weigh yourself. I don't want you to eat diet foods. I don't want you to worry about losing weight. I want you to not touch the scale. I don't want you to see, just want you to pretend that this is, this is your body. You are not trying to change it. Just like live in your body. Like take the freaking pressure off yourself and stop the weight loss outta control train that's in your mind that is torturing you and silently torturing the people around you. By the way, the way I'm talking to you right now is the way I will talk to a client. I don't mess around. I'm coming from love. I'm coming from care. If you, if I sound a little outraged I am, I'll say to my client, you know, if I sound a little outraged, I am. I'm not outraged of you. I'm outraged of the world
that you and I have been born into that seems to cultivate this kind of experience. You're a beautiful, wonderful, powerful woman. You should be sitting on your throne right now. And instead you've been worried about five pound, 20 pound, 30 pound, 40 pounds for your entire life. Time for something else. We'll get back to weight loss in a few months actually talking about it. But I need you, you, your way hasn't worked. I need you to hang with me for a while and play with this is playing Mrs. Client. This is playing Mrs. Queen. We're playing, we're experimenting, we're exploring. We're gonna have a little fun here. Imagine all the pressure that's gonna be off you. If you don't have to weigh yourself and worry about this and worry about that, don't worry, we'll pick this up in two months. And I promise you could worry as much as you want. More so than ever, you better believe once we get into weight loss and start doing stuff, I'm gonna let my queen in training or my queen know. We gotta do this from a place of love and acceptance. You're gonna have to love yourself into this journey and all the little things that we do. All the little tweaks in a person's life
to constantly check in. Are you loving yourself and to shapeshifting your body? Or are you hating yourself? 'cause if you're hating yourself into doing it, it ain't working. If you're doing exercise that you despise, it ain't working. If you're not moving in a way that you love, what you're doing doesn't work. If you are eating food that you find unacceptable and unpalatable because it's a diet food and a diet strategy and you're not feeling nourished by food, then you're working against yourself
and you bet I'm gonna point out, if I see that my queen or queen in training is living in perfectionism and still looking for the ideal body that's gonna make everything in her life, okay, how do you do that? Hey Mrs. Queen, you wanna lose 35 pounds? Can, can you just tell me? So that would put you at what? What's the target weight it's gonna put you at, oh, 145. When was the last time you weighed 145? Oh, that was nine years ago. Seven years ago, two years ago, 12 year, whatever. What happened Was your life perfect? Did everything change? Yeah, chances are she might have been high a little bit, but that's a state high. And that state high quickly goes away.
So I wanna prove to my queen that you have in your ideal body didn't work for you when you had it. And if you never had it and you believe it will, do you know anyone who has the ideal body and you're still upset and miserable and unhappy or some famous person who was beautiful and committed suicide? What happened? They were beautiful. They had the ideal body and all the Hollywood goodies.
I wanna be very direct with my queen and tell them it's time to let go of the nonsense and claim your power and be a queen. A queen is dignified and self-respecting and a woman who's happy to be here. When you tell that to a woman who's a queen in training and of queen age, I'm telling you my friend, she gets it. She gets it. Women are smart
and the world has been dumbing them down with this nonsense. And as soon as you give them a different message and oh my goodness, you break the spell. The spell was been put on them by the world. The poison was put in their system at a young age. Consciousness wakes us up. All of us.
Okay, my friends, let's talk about the prince archetype. This is a great one. So once again, when it comes to weight, it's important to think in terms of treating the archetype, not just the individual person. So the prince archetype is, is from approximately zero to 30 years old for a young man,
zero to 20 or so. We're gonna call early Prince. Similar to early princess, it's the formative and rocky years, 21 to 29. The twenties are rocky, twenties are more rocky than we realize, but they're also a time of great self-discovery. 30 to 39 is late Prince starting to claim selfhood truly starting to feel his power in the world, his worth in the world, his path in the world. It is so important to respect the prince archetype and to understand it for what it is and what it isn't. Because when you're talking to a young man,
zero to 20, 21 to 29, 30 to 39, when you understand the archetype that you're talking to, it just makes it easier. It's no different when you're talking to a 5-year-old. That's what you're talking to. You don't talk to a 5-year-old. Same when you talk to a 55-year-old, right? It's obvious here we're just, we're just getting more granular, we're getting more specific. Okay, so let's talk about the early prince, the formative and rocky years. Just as with a young girl, a boy zero to 20 is subject to, can't help it. To the conditioning and impact of his environment. Parents, school friends, family media, music, advertising, just like with a woman, he is susceptible to any and all negative messages about food, body weight and manhood.
Are young boys as susceptible to the females around this? No, I don't believe so. That's my opinion. That doesn't mean they're still not susceptible, that doesn't mean it's still not harmful and damaging.
'cause it is. A young man in this age group needs very positive messages about being a young man and about being a male. If he's identifying. And, and by the way, in my conversation to you, I am coming from what I know, I am a heterosexual male. I understand the heterosexual universe best. So by the way, that's what I'm talking about. If you are of a different orientation, you have to take this and translate it into your understanding so you can work with the people you wanna work with. So if I'm excluding you in any way, it is not because I am dismissive of you in any way, shape or form. I am simply staying with my authority in what I know, in what I believe, in what I have the most experience with and confidence in. So I just want you to understand that if you have a different sexual orientation, you need to take this information because you are the expert in your orientation. You need to translate that into your realm. I, I trust you can do that. You have the smarts to do it. Okay? So a young man needs positive messages about what is a young man anyway. So you have to understand that a young male has an abundance of physical energy. Do females have that? Yes, there is a particular physicality to the young male that society tends to be afraid of when they don't get to express their physical energy. IE you sit 'em in a chair all day long, they go crazy, okay? Uh, and when they start to get a little bit hyper, we think there's something wrong with them. No males need to exert physical energy. They need to move that energy. Uh, once a young man hits puberty, you know, for girls and boys, they need to be educated. They need mentors who can talk to them about their sexuality. Who can let them know that this is crazy. Who can let them know that this is okay? Who can let them know that this is good? So young boys, young girls in this age group, once they hit 13, it is so great to be, and they're gonna be completely uncomfortable in this conversation. It doesn't matter. You have to deliver positive messages to them about what they're going through. And you have to let, in this case a boy know you are becoming a sexually mature young man at some point now you know you're gonna be able to make a baby if you wanted to, which I highly advise against. But this energy that's happening, it's chemically changing your body and it's a really good thing and it's gonna put a lot of energy inside you. This is a time when a young man needs to learn guidelines, rules, moral and ethical teaching and lessons about the consequences for his actions in many different traditions and religious traditions. It is said that the young women matures ethically faster than a young man. In my experience, I believe this is true, that a young woman will mature ethically
and in character and in her moral development faster than a young boy of similar age.
People that rule the world know this. They know they can take a young man and give him a gun and tell 'em to do things that are immoral.
A young man can easily be turned to the dark side from a young age. They are susceptible to that because they're, their moral development needs a whole different kind of cultivation in my belief system, in my experience. And I'm not the first guy to say that at all. So, guidelines, rules, principles, consequences for his actions. If you're the kind kind of person who looks around today and is not happy with how you see the men of the world treating the women of the world, this is where it starts. It starts young.
So if you're a parent, you gotta teach 'em young. If you are the coach or the counselor or the mentor of a parent, this is what you tell the parent about their young male rules, guidelines, consequences, teachings. Here is how we be as humans. Here is your job. Here is what you need to know about being a young man, being the best young man that you could possibly be.
Uh, let me say something else about this. A young man in this age group who is looking to lose weight, um, I am focused on his character development. I am focused and character development can mean responsibility. It really depends on what's going on and why the weight seems to be there. Um, but I'm not looking for weight loss per se.
I am looking for what lessons does this young man need to learn about his life? Where is he at? What does he need to learn about being self-responsible? What does he need to learn about how he regulates his emotions with food? What does he need to learn about how to better care for himself? What does he need to learn about? Or what kind of support does he need
in feeling loved, feeling protected, feeling seen? Oftentimes young boys in this age, if they are not seen and not understood and they don't have an adult who is tracking them, they can go in any bad direction. So they need someone tracking them. Okay? 21 to 29, the middle princess, middle prince, excuse me, Rocky and self-discovery years. Okay? This is a time when it's very clear. Your young man needs to be responsible for his body to understand, hey, these are the rules and guidelines about health and nutrition. Let's just be straight up young man. You are becoming a young man. This is your time. You get to choose what kinda life you have. You wanna waste it. That's up to you. You wanna be healthy. That's in large part up to you. You wanna learn to step into excellence. That's up to you. When you have a healthy body, when you have a strong body, when you have a clear body, when you have a well-nourished body, you have the best chance of stepping into your power, your personal power, your metabolic power, your strength, your brain power, your smarts. You could be more successful.
Weight loss in this age group in part is about understanding the nature of his own body and taking responsibility for his body. And okay, really time for you to step up. 'cause you're older now. You've been around the corner, you see what's going on. It is a crazy world. You and I, we need to be the best people we can be. You need to be the best person you can be. So you need to track for that young man. If he's your client, how can he step into his power more? Forget about weight for a moment. This is a time when he needs to learn. I'll have a conversation about short-term satisfaction versus long-term benefits. You know, young man, when you and I were young, when we were little babies, we were all about short term satisfaction. Look at a baby, they scream their little heads off 'cause they're hungry. You give 'em food, they stop screaming me and you are like that. We want what we want when we want it. And we don't care about the long term repercussions.
And as you become an adult, you have to think forward into the future. You have to think, how does the thing I do right now affect me tomorrow, next month and next year and for the rest of my life? 'cause you make one wrong move. You can, you can be in trouble in this world. So yeah, you and I like short-term satisfaction when it comes to junk food, when it comes to drugs, when it comes to being promiscuous. But are there long-term benefits to that? Or are there long-term drawbacks for that?
It's time to learn about the toxic beliefs that the world has given him. You have to notice what those are for him. This is a time when a young man you gotta work on. Forget about weight as the main goal. Weight is not the main goal. If he has weight to lose, great. But he has to learn how to focus his energy. Is he focusing his energy? Is he focusing his power? Does he have structure? Does he have a place to put his energy? Is he wandering around? He needs a structure, some kind of structure. He needs school, he needs a job. He needs an environment that gives him structure so he can start to channel his energy. Or he needs structures outside of his typical work structure or school structure that can help him find his power channel his energy, something that enthusiasm lights him up. So success in this age group is not about pounds loss. You are planting seeds that will sprout when they do. If you are focused for this young man on weight loss, weight loss, weight loss alone, if that is your goal, then you are being selfish and egotistical. And if that's really your most important goal is to just make sure he loses the pounds and get him outta your life, then tie him up in your basement and starve him and then he'll lose the weight and you will have accomplished what you wanted to accomplish. And he will promptly gain the weight right back. You know, I'm playing with you. You know, I'm being a little, little facetious, but I'm also being serious at the same time. At how strangely goal directed. We get a, we worship weight loss like it's a God and it's not a God. It's not the end all and be all. Weight loss is a side effect of you and I stepping into who we are as human beings and what truly sustains and supports us in terms of our body and in terms of who we are as a human being. Again, weight loss is a side effect of you and I stepping into the kind of style of living and eating and taking care of oneself. It's a side effect of you and I becoming the person that we're meant to be.
When we step into true good self nourishment on a practical level, and when we step into more and more of who we are meant to be becoming our oak tree from that acorn, weight loss is a side effect. It happens. Okay, 30 to 39 is late prince. This is claiming self for years. This is a time when things come together around owning one's body and claiming one's personal power. Again, weight loss here is about gaining life. Stepping into his potential. Who are you? What do you wanna be in this world? What do you wanna accomplish? Who do you wanna be with? Are you in a relationship? Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend, boyfriend? Like what is it for you? What is important to you?
Work Do you want do in this world? How do you want to help people? How do you want to contribute? How do you want to conduct yourself? Who is the man that you wanna be? In other words, you're asking life on behalf of your late prince client. Where are you calling my client life? Where's a higher power? Calling him?
So you're treating him like any other adult. You're using all the strategies from your checklist. But again, you are focused not just on weight loss alone. So of course you're gonna focus on all the things you need to focus on. Eating rhythm, eating speed. You're gonna look at um, you know, food quality. You're gonna look at food allergies, you're gonna look at stress, you're gonna look at all that stuff. But you are helping him as best you can. Become the person he's meant, the person he's meant to be. Oh, so important, my friends. And this is a time when you can confront a young man directly. He's a late prince. This is the time, okay? A man is a king in training from 40 to 49. He ain't a king in that stage, but he might be coming real close or not. He's a king from age 50 onwards. Again, these are approximates, but I pretty much stand by these. Um, so a king, it's where a man stops. Being a boy stops being a prince. He stops reacting to the world, stops being a rebel. He stops being apathetic, he stops complaining, and he's charting his course. He's charting his destiny. A man 40 to 49 and especially 50 onwards, must self-initiate himself into a whole new place. Nobody's gonna carry him at this point. He has to realize that it is me who ascends my throne. This is a time for him to have a clear moral code. He identifies how he chooses to be in the world. This is a time to claim his talents, his gifts, and his purpose. A man can no longer act like a victim of life. Time is of the essence. Here you are at the halfway point. You want to do things better than you've done them. You wanna step into your power. If you see your man age 40 to 49 or age 50 and upwards, and he's reactive, he feels like a victim. He doesn't know who he is, what he wants, but he wants to lose weight.
I'm not interested in helping him lose weight. Quite frankly, I could care less. Do you think I'm gonna be happier to take a man who's 50 years old and he is apathetic about life. He doesn't know who he wants to be and where he wants to go, but he wants to lose 40 pounds that I'm gonna focus on. Okay, let's get to the gym. No, I'm interested in him stepping into his power before he dies. I'm interested in him stepping into his king hood before he dies because I know when a man steps into his king, when a woman steps into her queen, the world's gonna be a better place. 'cause then we got more kings and queens walking around doing good s**t in the world. We need good kings and good queens in the world. That's who's running the world. When we have bad kings and bad queens or bad princes, or bad princess is running the world, we in trouble. So when a human steps into their royalty, when a man steps into his king hood, we can start to relax more. A good king look around you, my friends. There's a lot of bad kings in this world.
That's not good for us, is it? Um, so am I interested in a bad king or a depressed king losing weight? Not really. I'm interested in that king stepping into his king hood and his power. Weight loss will be a function of that. It'll be a side effect of that. So yeah, I am willing to work on the strategy of weight loss, but it's in the bigger context of you, Mr. Client. Here's what we gotta work on with you.
So I'm telling you, if you're gonna work with a man in this age group, when it comes to comes to weight, you wanna have your eye on this. Is he being a good king in his life?
You could ask him, what does it mean for you, Mr. 52-year-old client to be a king? But he doesn't have an answer. Tell him. King serves as kingdom. A king knows who he is. A king follows a higher king, a higher code. A king is here to serve others. A king is here to give his gift. A king is here to steward the world. A king is here to leave the world a better place. A king is serving his kingdom by uplifting the people around him, by uplifting the young ones around him. A king isn't playing just to accumulate for himself. A king is above all else fair. A king is above all else responsible. A king is above all else, courageous enough to stand for what is good and right in the world.
That's how your client's gonna lose weight
if he's being a bad king, if he's just staying in his apathy and he doesn't know any better, it's, it's, yeah, you might help him lose weight and he'll come right back on.
'cause there's no reason for him to have a healthy body. There's no reason for him to take care of his body. A king needs a purpose and a reason. He has to find that you can raise your hand.
So my friends, a king owns his power. He doesn't sit on his throne and watch TV all day. He doesn't hide from the world. He doesn't let bad habits rule his life. He doesn't let apathy, anger, depression, or confusion rule his life. A king claims his kingdom cares for those in his kingdom, takes full responsibility for everything that occurs in his world. He takes care of his body for the good of his kingdom. That means his children. That means his loved ones. That means the people closest to him. That means whatever he serves, he does not abandon his body because his body is here to survey higher purpose. Otherwise, he will either ignore it or he will use his body For selfishness, IE just gimme pleasure. Just gimme what I want. Bad king, bad kings play the game to accumulate more stuff, more money, more goods, more resources, more power. So a king is serving good king serves, guides, others. Empowers commands respect because he respects himself, understands he has a mission and a purpose to fulfill. And he cares for his weight and health from that place. I'll say this straight up to my king.
If it resonates for him, great. If it doesn't, then you have a choice. Do I still wanna work with his client and help him lose weight? You might want to. That's totally fine. I got no problem with that. But I am not going to spend time, and you've heard me say this, I've had many men of king's age come to see me and say, I need you to motivate me. And I laugh whenever they say that. 'cause I say, there's no way I'm gonna do that. You know what you need? You need to be inspired. I'm not gonna stand over here and go, come on, you can exercise. Come on. You could not eat that food. Come on. You could have willpower. That's a bunch of nonsense. That's meaningless in the scheme of life. That is absolutely meaningless and not how I wanna spend my time. I wanna make the world a better pace place. I don't wanna take somebody who is disembodied because he's not stepping into his king hood and try to shapeshift his body. So, so what? So now he's an apathetic person who has a body that he thinks he's, he's gonna like, well, he hasn't been able to lose weight to begin with. There's a reason for that. We are here to help people step into their greatness, whatever that means for them.
So very specifically for a man of king's age or king in training around weight, I'll ask him, you know, do you have a reason to be alive? Like, what's your purpose here? Who needs you? Mr. King, who, who do you serve? I will ask directly, who and what do you support and stand for? Like, why should you even be alive? Do you answer to a higher power or a higher code? Like, do you have a religion that you answer to, like, like a spirituality that you answer to you? You could ask that question. If he doesn't, he doesn't. Maybe he needs it. What does it even mean for you, sir, to be a man in this world, to be a king in this world? Can you do your weight loss journey from a place of self-respect and self-empowerment? 'cause you're not respecting yourself right now. Is it even possible for you to see your body as a vessel for a greater good? You're planting seed, this is fine.
You know, it is a little bit harder to call a king into his power, in my experience, than it is to call a queen into hers. I don't know why. I think in part of it, it, it's, it's not that men are bad. Um, but when men are conditioned in this world to take on the definition of what a man is supposed to be, a lot of men have their power taken away from them at a young age. They are, you know, men are, uh, women are often sex objects. Men are often success objects. The world tells you through the media that you're a valuable man. If you're famous, you're a valuable man. If you have a lot of money, you're a valuable man. If you're an entertainer, you're a valuable man. If you're an athlete. Otherwise, you go to work at a boring job. Otherwise, you're a loser. Otherwise, you're not at the top, otherwise, you're not a real king. So when a man believes that, which most men often, which many men do, because that's how they've been trained, of course you're gonna be apathetic and depressed. Of course, you're not gonna like yourself. Of course, you're going disrespect yourself with food.
It's hard for a man to step into his power in this world because it's not laid out for him In that way. A king truly has to do a lot of interesting work to ascend his throne.
My friends working with the archetypes, I wanna remind you, puts you in the realm of powerful practitioners. And, and you're seeing some of these distinctions are, they're, they're simple, they're straightforward, they're easily understood. Once they are explained. Most people, I'm going to tell you resonate when they hear about the archetypes. I told you, women will especially have their worlds rocked. If the distinctions of king, I mean, I'm sorry, of queen and princess indeed applies to them, and men will start to wake up consistently. I've seen this. When you invite them, if they're a king in training or if they're king age, they're gonna hear you. When you start to talk about king hood, um, you know, and you gotta do that from a powerful place. You gotta do that from a clear place. You see how when I explain this, I'm confident. Um, and you do the best you can and you as the practitioner can start to experiment with this. You, you don't have to be perfect right off the bat. This is why it's a practice. Why your professional practice is a practice. You're practicing this. I have practiced these things the first time I, you know, said to a woman talking about her queen, stepping into her queen. I mean, I was, I was shaking. I was so afraid, like, how dare I say this? Like, oh my God, is she gonna smack me? Am I gonna lose all my clients? And you know, I knew it was right and I had to move past my fear.
So you and I are learning how to call people into their best self.
One of the ways to call people into their best self is to call them into the best part of their archetype.
Women know what a queen is. Men know what a king is. You have to explain to them a little pieces, princes and princesses. There are good. There's prince and princess scholars, prince and princess athletes. There are prince and princesses who, who serve in a beautiful way. They've embraced their royalty. They follow a good code.
So we're calling our s and princesses into their royalty.
Let's talk about false positives again, false positives. It's a body or lifestyle that looks good on the outside, but is driven by false beliefs, inner dissatisfaction, fear, poor self image, and does not change a person's emotional or soul state for the better.
I just wanna remind you, you gotta look out for this. Women as false positives can look, uh, false positives. You know, a woman is doing intense exercise. She does yoga. She controls her diet. She has the thin body, the right weight, whatever that is. She does intensive self care. But inwardly, she's miserable. She's unhappy, she's driven by fear. She doesn't like herself. She's worried about this, that the other thing. And she lives in worry and stress and upset. She's not enjoying, she doesn't have pleasure from it. Menace falls, positives. It can look like intense exercise. A very fit body, a very muscular body from hours in the gym, a very controlled diet. And they're, that's their life. They're obsessed about their body. Like, okay, so what's your good looking body for? What's all this energy for? What's all this strength for what's all this health for? As is especially, especially especially for men and women of queen or king in training age and king and queen age. Young people get into their bodies, you know, oftentimes, and they get into the intense exercise and the intense this and that. Um, I'm just saying, especially heads up when someone is a king or queen in training, or they are king of or queen age, and there falls positive time to change.
So false positives has the right body, but it's kind of created from the wrong place. You know what I'm saying? If it's a prince or princess doing it, I might subtly say something. I might say, you know, you've got what you want. It looks like you got the body you want, but it doesn't totally look like you're fully enjoying it. It doesn't look like you're celebrating it or relaxing into it. What would that mean for you? So it's more of a conversation.
Remember, false positives are an ego high. It has a drug-like effect. Look, I'm fit. I got the body I want. And that by itself is like a drug. But in an odd way, that person is kind of disembodied. They're in their body in a strictly physical way, but they're not really in, they're not inhabiting their body. They're kind of inhabiting their perfectionism around their body.
It's often false Positives are often just a clever escape from truly stepping into our feminine, our masculine, our king hood, our queen hood.
You need to learn how to see through them. You need to learn how to alert your client to see some of the shallowness in some of their goals.
You have to learn how to notice people who get high from a false positive weight loss. A lot of people get high from a false positive weight loss. They had a false positive weight loss once before. You know, I I, I meet women a lot who, yeah, well, I ran a marathon and it was so great and I lost all this weight and I felt so good. And they talk about how high they were,
and they wanna get back to that high again. It's kind of like somebody saying, yeah, and I, and I did all these drugs and I did this cocaine, and I did this, and I did that, and I felt so high. I just wanna get back to that. Like, okay, you can. And so, you know, a lot of people will do the intense weight loss for a wedding, and it, and it, and it might give them a high, the, the marathon, the fasting, the intense dieting. Some people really get off on that. It, it gives them a state addiction. So you have to remember that excess weight always has a deeper wisdom to it always. And our job is to listen to it on behalf of our clients. You are listening to their weight. You are learning to decode what that weight is asking them to learn. That's your job. And you have to remember that it's a journey. And you didn't invent this journey. You don't know what your client's journey is. It's your job to join in on that journey, to facilitate that journey, to cheer them on that journey, to notice the quality of that journey, to notice the essence of that journey,
to notice when you might be asked to do something very specific with them, for them on that journey.
What a beautiful job to have.
Okay, my friends, final reminders for now. Few reminders for now. Remember, we truly don't know how much anyone ought to weigh. That's the truth. That's reality. That's fact. Remember that weight loss is always our smallest goal for you, the practitioner. That's why I want you to hold it. My friends. Don't make the mistake. You're not trying to tell your client, okay, first session, you wanna lose weight. The way I work is weight loss is actually your smaller goal. Your bigger goal is to be the best person that you're supposed to be in this world. Don't do that. This is all for you right now. You don't make a reveal like that until you are, until you've established a working relationship with your client, until you have a connection, until they start to understand better how you work.
So you're slowly inviting them in. You're being a Trojan horse. You are titrating. Titrating means you're delivering wisdom slowly. You're not hitting them with, okay, you know, uh, I don't wanna say it again. You, you, you can't hit people with consciousness hard over the head. They won't hear it. That is not an effective strategy. You don't have to reveal to a person, oh, I'm not gonna focus on your weight loss because I know we need to focus on other places. No, your client needs to know that. You know, Mr. Mrs. Client, I really want to help you get where you want to go. I truly want to help you get where you want to go. And I think I can help you. I'm pretty confident I will not work with a weight loss client unless they hear me say that at the end of a first session. Why? Because I truly believe I can help them. Notice how I said, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I can help you get where you wanna go. I really think I can. I didn't say to them, I can help you lose 75 pounds. I never say that. I will always say, I can help you get where you want to go. Because ultimately, I believe where a person wants to go is to be happier and to be their fullest self-expression. And I know that if a person is happier and stepping into their truest self-expression, that they have the best chance to reach their metabolic potential and their natural weight.
So I'm being honest and a little crafty, but that's okay because I'm good with the universe. I will never promise weight loss to anyone. It's a bad promise. I've done it. I know many people who have done it and who do that, and it's just not a good job. I'm telling you. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's an awful job. Um, so you and I know for yourself, weight loss is our smaller goal. Yeah, there might be a moment where you share that with a client, but your intuition has to strongly say that. And it has to be after you've been working with your client a little bit. The larger goal we always work towards with our client is helping them be the high express, highest expression of who they can be in this world. You're not gonna tell them you're doing that in the first session. You're gonna sound like an alien.
I have been sounding to you like somewhat of an alien as I've been telling you these things, but because we are in some sort of synergy and you're in this training and you're open, you're, and you're trying on these concepts and you're going, oh yeah. Right? Oh, huh, that might make sense. Hmm.
So you have to understand that we are taking our client along slowly.
Reaching our natural weight is always a function of putting first things first. Yeah. And first things first often means, okay, let's listen to the body. Let's listen to weight. And, and sometimes weight is saying, wow, look at this food I'm eating. Look at these dietary corrections. We need to make, we need to slow down. We need to look at food allergies. We need to look at macronutrient balance. Sure.
And there might be other places to work as well in terms of a person stepping into their greatest potential. Part of stepping into your greatest potential is literally learning how to manage and regulate your body and nourish it and feed it in a way that actually works, that takes smarts, that takes commitment.
My friends, we have such a wonderful job.
And if you're already seeing clients, my guess is you're starting to see things differently. And your clients might be noticing this. Um, if you are new to this and you will be starting out seeing clients, then just remember, you're still in the learning phase. You're still absorbing. You're not here to fix people right now. You're absorbing material, you're learning, you're taking a lot of new on. And this is a lot. We're going into some pretty intense concepts and intense learning. And I'm asking a lot of you in terms of seeing things from a different perspective and really considering it. Um, but I'm very strong in my belief. I'm very strong in my experience. And this is, you know, my offering to the world. Uh, this is my legacy. This is my way of saying, you know, here's how I wanna make the world a better place. And I'm very, very, very willing to go into some of the dark places around what, where the nutrition profession and the psychology profession and the helping professions have been lacking in. Um, doesn't always make me a popular guy. And at the same time, uh, the older I get, the less that matters to me. That's such a good thing. My friends. Lots more to come. That's the end of wait part eight. And we're gonna get into yet another one of my favorite topics, the four questions. Hmm. This is gonna be such a good you, you're gonna love the four questions. Uh, it's a great practitioner strategy, uh, to learn to really turbocharge the work. So that's what's next and that's gonna be in three parts. Thank you and I really mean that. Thank you for hanging in there and being with me and grappling with these concepts and being open. I so appreciate you, my friends. See you on the other side.

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