MODULE 2

WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE

Section 5

This is a “boilerplate” approach to working with weight loss clients that gives you a step-by-step way to proceed.

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PART 1

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Greetings once again, friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Let's talk about protocols for weight, how to approach a weight loss client so we can begin the work with them and proceed in our work with them in a good logical way. Now, let me give you some guiding thoughts. Here comes a weight loss client into your office, into your practice. And if you're a CNM over Skype or the phone, then here they are in your universe. Here's what you gotta know. Here's what you've heard me say. Here's what I wanna remind you of, that there is never, ever, ever, ever, ever a one size fits all approach to weight loss clients, simply because we're all unique and weight loss is very complex. And the point of this whole training is when it comes to weight loss, to really help us get that, to really help us understand it. So essentially, we have been looking at a whole new worldview, a whole new paradigm, a whole new understanding of looking at weight that far, far supersedes the calories in, calories out model, which is woefully inaccurate, outdated, unscientific, uh, and more to the point, it doesn't work From a practical standpoint, it hasn't worked, it doesn't work. Now, all this being said, there's no one size fits all approach. We're all beautifully unique. That being said, there's a lot of practitioners who are either new to the weight loss realm or they need a little help and guidance when it comes to, oh my goodness, where should I begin? What should I do first and how should I proceed? So these presentations on the protocols for weight are designed to help orient you. So it's a little bit of a paradox. I'm saying, okay, if you're really having a challenge here and you really don't know how to proceed with your client, here's a bit of a template that I feel will be very useful for you. It's a rough template. Um, this will also be helpful for a lot of practitioner who have already been working with weight and weight loss, but wanna go about things just with a little more guidance.
So again, this is all about you and I understanding the big picture of weight and then narrowing down our strategies to, as best we can skillfully address each client. So this is a set of sequential steps we're gonna be looking at. Again, I want you to use this rough sequence. If you simply want guidance around how to proceed, use this. If you feel uncertain or confused, use this to help you proceed a little more confidently with your weight loss clients. So think of this as a boilerplate approach. You can eventually learn to just look at each client uniquely what you're gonna be doing anyway. And, and that's the ultimate goal for practitioners because weight loss can mean so many different things for so many people, there are so many different entry points, so many different doorways. And again, when I say that, I gotta smile on my face. That's the beauty of weight, that's the beauty of this work. So use your handout, use the handout, you know, the intake questionnaire for weight loss, you know, as a great guide for starting out with weight loss clients. So always remember the intake process. That first session, that's your first date, that's your first handshake. And it's important. It is. Um, remember we mention, I always want you to feel free to take notes in your intake session, but I really want you to make sure that you connect with your client. You look them eye to eye. Think about it. If you go out on a first date with somebody and all of a sudden they're asking you questions, deep questions, good questions, interesting questions, and then you and, and they're asking you questions. And as you're answering, they take out a notepad and start writing down. Now, granted, you're a practitioner. You have every right to write down. You have every right to take notes. That's fine. It's usually expected. What I am saying to you though is I would love for you, I would love for you to do it a little different. Let's step outside the box, my friends. Let's connect with our weight loss clients, because you know what?
It's a sensitive place for them. They have a lot of concern. They have a lot of energy when it comes to their body and their weight. They have a lot of emotions. They have a lot going on inside them. They have been working hard to lose weight. They're coming to see you because their strategies haven't worked. Chances are they've been trying to lose weight for a while. Chances are they have had a lot of failure. Chances are they might have had some success and then they regained the weight. So all I'm saying to you is you're dealing with a human being. You, you know this, I'm telling you what you know, but I'm trying to emphasize it because we, the collective, we the professional, we, we just tend to, we tend to get into our heads. When we start to become a health coach or a practitioner or a helping healing medical professional of any kind, we start to think we are the clinical machine that needs to fix our client. And we forget to connect with them. And we forget that it's that connection that forms the basis of the relationship. Because on many levels, that's what your client needs to finally get to where they want to go. They need to feel like somebody's seeing them, listening to them, hearing them, and actually helping uncover some of the places where they haven't gone yet, where weight loss probably needs to happen. So you gotta let your client know by being present with them, listening to them, looking at them in the eye, letting them know, I'm a human. You're a human. We're here to work together. I want you to make the intake an enjoyable experience for both you and your client. And it's serious and it's light at the same time. You can do both. Practice that. Yeah, yeah. You're coming to see me. You are paying me money to help you shapeshift your body. That's a big ask. And most weight loss clients, I'm gonna say most of them are coming to see you with some emotion and some energy and a little bit of frustration hurt or pain or a lot of it. So that's why I want to take this relationship seriously. I wanna respect it. And at the same time, I want to help my client lighten up around it so we can begin to make this journey a happier one and a more interesting one, an easier one, a more uplifting one.
So with any new weight loss client, I want you to be open to all possibilities. You know, this clients will lose some of the weight, all of the weight, none of the weight. Maybe they'll gain a few pounds. Yep. Measure success not by pounds lost, but by the personal growth your client goes through. The transformation they go through, how much more they embody, how much more they mature, how they step into love and self-love how they begin to release toxic beliefs, how measure success by their increasing sense of freedom, of happiness, of lightness. Yeah. And you could measure success by pounds lost. But if you were just measuring success by pounds lost, and you asked most people, have you ever hit your target weight before? Most of them are gonna say yes. Was that successful? No, because it wasn't sustainable. Therefore, we're measuring success not quite in the most accurate way.
Sustainable weight loss comes truly reaching our natural weight in a sustainable way happens because we've done some good work. We've done the work that needed to be done. That work might be straight up nutritional. That work might be metabolic work. That work might be personal work, inner work, emotional work. It might be lifestyle work, it might be relational work. It might be work around food allergies. It might be work around de-stressing. It might be any combination of any of those.
Once again, you have to know if you are sitting here wanting exact ways to do exact things. So you could exactly help a client to lose an exact amount of weight and tell them exactly what they need to eat. Because this is exactly what science and God has ordained that they should eat every day at every meal. Um, you gotta just, just, you need to live on a different planet. I, I'm, I'm being honest with you, this is not that planet. This is not how it works. That's the issue. That's thinking is the challenge, because we're thinking there's some science behind this. And at this point there isn't. There is some science behind this. There is some psychology behind it. There is some lifestyle behind it. There's a lot of mystery behind it. And when we're humble enough to see that and to understand that and to know that, then we can go into this process called working with my weight loss client. We go into it as a journey. We go into it as an exploration. We go into it with our best intention. I know you wanna help your client. Great, let's go. Now, here's the big one, my friends. You gotta ask yourself, do I, me the practitioner, believe that this person truly has some weight to lose? If you're not sure, I want you to hold this question in your thoughts until an answer reveals itself. If it never reveals itself, fine, sometimes we not, we just, we're not sure. And that's okay. You can't know this. But what I am saying to you is over the years, as I've seen probably a thousand more plus weight loss clients, you know, I started to see patterns. I started to notice that there are humans who are truly trying to lose weight. And there's just no weight to lose. Literally, visually, you don't have weight to lose. Your brain is off. How do we know this happens to human humans in the extreme. A person with an anorexic mind and anorexic mentality, an anorexic brain state can weigh 80 pounds, be in a hospital bed and be dying and look in a mirror and think they have weight to lose. So there's a continuum of that. So that is the most intense example of how the human brain can get distorted enough in its function to convince us that we have weight to lose. Even though we go, we are going to die in a few days of emaciation of weight, loss of fat, loss of malnutrition, essentially. So I just wanna let you know that's the extreme example. And there are other humans who invent their perfection about the body. So I'm holding the question, does this person truly have weight to lose? Sometimes I'm very clear, here's a person sitting before me and it's a five pounder. You don't have weight to lose. Sometimes people wanna lose 10 pounds. And I'm looking at them and I'm thinking to myself from where for some people, 10 pounds is the number of their perfectionism. It's the number that keeps them in the incarnation, in the life, in the mind state, in the emotional state called I'm not good enough. I'm still not there. I'm not good enough. I'm not the real me. I can't live my life until 10 pounds are removed from my body, which I'm going to tell you, I'm gonna remind you. That's a form of insanity. Sure, somebody can wanna lose weight. I got no problem with anybody wanting to lose an amount of weight. But especially when we're in the 15 pound range or under, when one believes that this weight is what's holding me back from happiness and being the true me and being my real fully expressed happy, creative self, that's when there's an issue. Okay? So this is a challenge. Does this person truly have weight to lose? But I want you to ask that question. I want you to ask that question throughout your professional life. Anytime you're talking with somebody who's trying to lose weight. 'cause the only way you're gonna learn about that, and the only way life is gonna teach you and your practice is going to teach you, is you ask that question and then you work with the person and you see what happens. Here's the next piece, my client with any new weight loss client, this is so important. This is a writer downer. Notice your client's stress, fear, anxiety level around their weight.
Notice your weight loss clients stress, anxiety, fear level around their weight. What I want to say to you is, the higher that their stress, anxiety, fear level is, the more work they and you need to do to lower it.
Many people are in a silent or not so silent, freak out about their weight and body.
This itself is the disease you must address slowly, gradually, and with conviction throughout the course of your work together. I am not kidding you, my friends. You show me a person that is wanting to lose weight. I don't care how much, and they're freaked out about it, and it is driving them, and it is making them a little bonkers and crazy. And I will show you a person who cannot lose weight and will never lose it sustainably. I don't care who they've gone to and what they've done. In fact, the proof that their freak out doesn't work is that they're here to see you. So their freak out hasn't worked. You cannot help a human in freak out,
transform their life, transform their body, shapeshift their body, make educated dietary changes, emotional changes, lifestyle changes. Why? Because they're in freak out. Another way of saying freak out is intense stress response that has me running around, banging my head against the wall being ineffective because I think a lion is about to kill me. And the only thing that's happening is I'm upset about my body weight.
So what I'm trying to tell you is that your first move, first move in your head. When you see a client and they're coming to see you for weight loss, the first move in your head is, Hmm, mark said, that is very important for me to notice my client's stress, anxiety, fear, level around their weight. I want you to take an invisible temperature. How high is their heat around their weight loss noticing their languaging, their body, their their, their, their body language, their language language, their voice, how they talk, how they present themselves, what they say.
You know, it's, it's, let me relate this to a first date. Again. You ever have the experience, you go on a first date with somebody and they're so intensely needy and desperate to have a relationship or to get someone in bed that everything is this kind of stressed out. What do I gotta do to make this happen? And it just feels unpalatable because the person isn't actually present with you. What they're present to is, I want a relationship. I want a relationship. Or the person is, I wanna get this person in bed. I wanna get this person in bed. It, it's, it's, you don't even matter. What matters is them massaging their own freak out so they can relax.
It is that fear, that upset, that anxiety. That is the issue. It's not the weight.
You cannot help somebody lose weight if they are in a deep level anxiety state around their weight. It is. I am I am saying to you, it is emotionally, personally, and physiologically impossible to do that in a sustainable way. And the only people who can be in freak out about their weight and lose it in a sustainable way are the people who will then lose it in a sustainable way. And they'll continue to be in freak out about their weight. So their internal world, yeah, they've lost a weight, but in their internal world, they're in suffering. They're in misery. They don't like their body. They're constantly worried about food, worried about weight. They don't have pleasure in their life. They don't have enjoyment, they don't have fun. They have the body that they want, and they're still living with the enemy called, oh my God, I gotta control my food. I gotta control my appetite. I gotta control my pleasure, my diet, my body, my metabolism. I have to make sure I don't eat so much food and that's their life. And that's living in a prison. That's a false positive. I'm not okay with that. I will not pretend with that kind of person. Doesn't mean I'm gonna hit them over the head hard and say, oh my goodness, you're a false positive, my friends. You gotta go slow with people to invite them into consciousness and awareness. It's part of learning this work. We see where people are at. We see, oh wow, you're, you're in all this stress about your weight. So in my conversation with them, in my intake with them, I'm modeling for them how I want them to be. I'm giving them unconditional acceptance, unconditional regard. I'm being relaxed. I'm going slow. And gradually I'm going to introduce
practices, homework assignments that help them relax. And in that first session for my very freaked out client, you bet by the end of the session, I'm going to let them know about stress and weight loss. I'm going to give them the powerful scientific mind cookies about that so they can understand that they can potentially begin to get where they wanna go once they begin to change their inner world. Because who they are and how they're thinking and feeling about their weight is profoundly impacting their metabolism. So once again, I'm saying for you to prac, for you the practitioner, I want you to notice your client's stress and anxiety level, their fear level around their weight. And you bookmark that. Wow, this person's really in a lot of stress, anxiety, fear. That's my job as a practitioner to help them relax into the weight loss journey more. So you have to slowly invite them into that place, trick them into that place, baby, step them into that place, inspire them into that place, massage them into that place. That's where you learn to be an effective practitioner. That's the goal.
So also, in the back of your mind all the time, especially in your first session and your first few sessions, you're using the intake process. You're using the first few sessions, and every moment you work with your client, you're listening for their toxic nutritional beliefs. You're listening, food is the enemy. Fat in food equals fat on my body.
If only I was thin and had the body I want, then I will finally be the real me. Then I will finally come out. Then I'll finally be happy. But until then, I suck. And I'm unlovable toxic beliefs such as that. Because until we work with those, that is the software driving us
into unwanted behaviors, down a dead end street where we're not going to shapeshift the body, certainly not sustainably, because you cannot possibly get to your natural weight.
If you believe food is the enemy, it it, it, it is, it is completely. Um, it's illogical.
You can't find your way with having your natural health and your natural metabolism. If you and I and our clients cannot understand that food is food, food is our best friend, food is required for human life. Oxygen is required for human life. Nobody's walking around with the toxic belief. Oxygen is bad for me. I better not breathe. And subtly, silently every day they're trying to breathe more shallow so they don't breathe well. You, you're actually gonna affect your health if you do that. You're gonna be in a constant stress state. If you're not taking in enough oxygen because you're low level breathing,
if you believe food is the enemy, you cannot get where you want to go. I'm sorry. You cannot help your client get where they want to go. So once I notice my client's toxic nutritional beliefs, I know these are the places I'm gonna slowly work on.
So when I wanna, wanna suggest is at some point you'll be working with these, your client's, stress, anxiety, fear level in general, their stress, anxiety, fear, level around weight, which is driven by their toxic nutritional beliefs. So at some point you're gonna be working with those, with your clients. And in fact, you're always gonna be working with those in a subtle way, in an indirect way or a direct way.
Again, your weight loss client, chances are wants to lose weight yesterday, they're in stress, they're in self-judgment. Metabolically holds them back from weight loss. So in a first session, I want you to be willing, if really need be, then you gotta vibe this out. Intuit this, be willing to do an intellectual intervention with your client. A gentle one using stress, anxiety, fear, judgment as a fuel and a tool for weight loss. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, I notice that like a lot of people, you really wanna lose this weight yesterday. I get it. And, and just, you know, as I've been listening to you, I really get that you want to shapeshift your body in a way that works for you. I totally understand it. I'm also seeing that you have a pretty high stress level around your weight. I'm just saying you have a pretty high anxiety level around that. I understand it. Here's the challenge with that. The challenge is when you and I are in a stress response, here's what happens. So I'm gonna give them that information and then I'm gonna say, so the good news is, we can actually start to change your metabolism from the inside out as you begin to change your mind. So a chunk of the work that we're gonna do together, Mr. And Mrs. Client, when it comes to help you get where you wanna go, is to help you relax into the weight loss journey, to help you love yourself into the weight loss journey. Because when you're not relaxed into the weight loss journey, here's what's happening inside. Here's what happens to weight, to appetite regulation. Here's what happens to digestion, here's what happens to eating behaviors. Here's what happens to the higher cortical thinking in your brain.
So that's gonna be a big piece of our work.
You are framing it with your client, letting them know, hey, you're giving them a little spank and letting them know you are stress, fear, anxiety ain't working in your favor, and you're letting them know at the same time, when we start to shift, that you're gonna be able to finally set the stage to get where you wanna go in a sustainable way.
So again, your job is to slowly guide people into a new emotional state. You think it's gonna happen in one session? No two sessions, no, it, it's, it could take a lifetime, but you're planting seeds and you're moving along and your client will see hopefully the results of the little baby steps that you are taking to help them relax into their journey, to help them love themselves into their journey.
Your client wants to shape shift. If you want to help them shape shift, we have to be in the kind of journey where we are invoking the relaxation response, invoking awareness, invoking pleasure, invoking consciousness, invoking attentiveness. We are letting go of toxins. And the key toxins to let go of are not so much in the food, but they're in the mind. Self-hate, self-attack, self-judgment, constant negative self-talk. Those are toxic. Those create a chemistry,
those create a worldview. Those create a set of behaviors. Those create a brain state. Quite frankly, my friends that day in day out dumbs us down. You take a human and you constantly stress them out. You will make them a more ineffective human. You will make them a more unhappy human. You will make that human jittery and upset about just about anything. They're gonna be reactive to anything. They're gonna have a hair trigger to a lot of stuff because you're constantly stressing them.
Every single study, and I mean that that has ever been done on humans and animals when it comes to stressing them out versus putting them in a relaxing environment, will clearly show that stressed organisms will die sooner. They will have more disease, they will gain more weight, they will eat more food. You can see that with rats, mice, monkeys, dogs, humans and apes.
Okay? So with that, our basic approach is it's always easiest and often best to start with the most simple, doable user-friendly strategies first. Then build up to the more intricate, challenging, deeper personal stuff. So that means we start working first with some of the more simple mind-body nutrition distinctions. It means you always wanna start out slow and easy with most clients. When in doubt, slow and easy. When in doubt just one or two homework assignments after the first session.
Occasionally I will give a client more because they're just, they're just raring to go and they're the kind of person that, yeah, I can give them three or four homework assignments and they're gonna be so happy because they're achievers and they wanna do stuff. So I wanna match them a little bit. That's fine. So our approach with clients is also grounded in this. We're looking to create A a game plan that has the best potential to yield perhaps some immediate and noticeable benefits. Immediate and noticeable benefits. Again, this creates client buy-in again, it helps you, the practitioner gain confidence and momentum. Gives the client a sense of trust in the work. It sets up the client to be open for more challenging strategies in the future. Doesn't this make sense? My clients it it my friends. It's simple. I called you my clients. Very, very simple. Okay, so in the back of my mind, in the back of your mind as a protocol for weight, here's a first level strategy, huh? You're sitting with your weight loss client, you're not quite sure what to do. Okay? Here's two simple mind-body nutrition distinctions to pay attention to in the first session to see, huh, do I have some place to work here? Working with macronutrient balance, balance a protein, fat, and carbohydrate, and working with eating rhythm, bio circadian nutrition, when a person is eating what they're eating. So these are two simple places to work.
Not super easy, but they're easy enough. You can work in these realms as a first place or look to work in these realms. So you're checking based on the dietary intake that you did, you're listening, okay, what are they eating for? Breakfast, snacks, lunch snacks, dinner desserts? What are they eating and when are they eating? So that's what you're listening for. Okay? So balance means macronutrient balance. We're gonna work here only, only, only if it's clear that the client seems to be from your eyeball too low in essential fats and or too low in protein. And or another way to think that is that their diet seems to be high in poor quality carbohydrates. Or for some people it's way too high in protein only because they're on a high protein diet. I almost want you to not think about that one for a moment. Um, because on average your weight loss client, if their macronutrient balance is off, it is generally gonna be pointed towards too much poor quality carbs, not enough healthy protein and fat. Now, it is useful to work with macronutrient balance as a homework assignment at the end of the first session with your new weight loss client. If you've made sure to be aware of your client's secondary health complaints,
what else is going on with your health, Mr. Mrs Client? Digestion, mood fatigue, energy, sleep, brain fog.
That's because your secondary health complaints, your client's secondary health complaints can begin to clear up when an imbalance in macronutrients is addressed. It's just, we we're just looking for the quickest way to get a win. So of course, if you do this, if you tweak a person's macronutrient balance, then in the next session, Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, how you doing? What's up? Tell me what happened in this last week or two since I've seen you. How you been feeling? Did you notice any change in anything? Now if they had talked about fatigue, how, how, how is your energy level? How is your mood? How is your digestion? So you're gonna ask about their secondary health complaints in your follow-up session.
Continuing on macronutrient balance, you're gonna affirm with your client at the end of the first session, if you're gonna work here, Hey, I got an experiment. You wanna let your client know from the beginning, everything you do with them is an experiment. And you know something, you gotta be a happy scientist when you say the word experiment. Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, this is an experiment. We're gonna try tweaking your macronutrient balance just to see what happens.
So you are gonna let your client know using simple scientific mind cookies about why you're asking them to follow your dietary suggestion. So Mr. And Mrs. Client, you know, I noticed, I'm just noticing right now that every day for breakfast you eat breakfast, cereal and milk and you have some juice or you just have a donut and some coffee. And what I would like to do is I would like to actually put you on a bit more of a robust breakfast. And I know it sounds counterintuitive 'cause if I put you on more of a robust breakfast, that means you're eating more calories. And usually we think if I'm eating more calories, that means I'm gonna gain more weight. And if I gain more weight, that's awful. So that's what most people hear, understandably. So when somebody says to them, we're gonna give you a more robust breakfast, but by robust, I mean I wanna cut down on your carbohydrate only meals at breakfast. And we're just gonna experiment maybe for a month or so with having a breakfast higher in fat and higher in protein. Because what that's gonna do is it's going to stimulate metabolism starting in the morning. Think of your digestive metabolism. Think of your metabolism as a fire. Calorie burning is really, it's a, it's a heat producing process.
In the morning when you wake up, your calorie burning metabolism happens to be very low. Why? 'cause you've been laying in bed all night. You don't need to be burning calories. Calorie burning and digestive metabolism slowly starts to increase when we wake up. Now if your digestion is like a furnace, if your body is like a furnace, if you put in some very quick burning fuel, the fire's gonna go out very fast. If you put in some sustainable burning fuel of the right type, your fire will be sustained and it'll actually be a little higher. So believe it or not, even though I'm gonna ask you to eat what might look like more calories, what's going to happen is you are going to get the kind of nutrition that you likely need to stimulate your metabolism in a good way. So it's an experiment. So you're noticing what their breakfast is. So you have to understand in your universe, what's a carbohydrate only breakfast or a mostly carbohydrate only breakfast if it's centered on cereal, if it's centered on just toast and jam, if it's centered on bagel muffin cake, pancake waffle,
and I'm trying to get my client on something that is more dense in protein and fat consistently at breakfast, what does that mean? It can mean different things for different people. A smoothie that has healthy protein and healthy fat in it, that means a protein powder. That means almond butter, peanut butter, some kind of nut butter. That could mean a couple of tablespoons of flax oil in it as well. Uh, that could mean putting some yogurt in the smoothie. It could be a person who eats a full fat yogurt at breakfast with some fruit that's higher in protein and fat, including eggs at breakfast as the center of the meal,
including a smoked fish. Or I don't care if a person eats if they're willing to eat or, or they like to eat. You know, breakfast sausage. Have them buy a healthy organic free range kind of breakfast sausage. They sell that in in health food stores, even got it in the supermarkets now. So it's an experiment.
Some clients are on an extremely high protein diet, as I mentioned, and usually they're the kinds of people who are craving carbohydrates and then they're binging on carbohydrates. So with people, for the small percentage of people that you're seeing who are com, you're probably not gonna see many people, but I see them. So all I wanna say is people who are on an extremely high protein diet, Who are complaining about weight loss resistance and complaining that they're binging on carbs, you actually have to put them on more carbs so they don't binge on carbs, if that makes sense. Because they're so carb low, they're so low in carbohydrates that they're beginning to crave it and it's making them a little crazy. Okay? So this is an experiment. What's gonna happen is, now I don't care if somebody's eating cereal or breakfast fruit at breakfast, no breakfast. If they're eating a pure carbohydrate breakfast and they don't have a complaint, I'm not interested in changing their diet. So I want you to hear my friends, oh, you have to eat this way at breakfast every human. No, we're only making a shift based on a complaint. I hope that makes sense. We're only making changes based on the fact that your client has a complaint. So then we look at, okay, what's the place I can work with to address my client's complaint? It's an experiment. It either works or it doesn't.
You need to know this. I don't care what anyone says. There are no exact scientific proven formulas for how much fat protein or carbo carbohydrates any specific given person should have. That is a non-existent science. It is not a hard science. Yes, you can get online and Google, you know how much EFA should the average person have or the how much protein or how much carbohydrates, how much fiber, and you're gonna get ranges based on a certain sex and a certain age and a certain weight.
I honestly don't care. 'cause every human is different. So if you need hard and fast numbers, then you Google it. Um, but as soon as you or anyone ask the question, but exactly, no, no, no, exactly how many grams of fat, protein or carbs should I have each day? That's a sign that you either need to let this go or I'm gonna say you just need to do a different kind of work. The only time a human should get uber specific about this really is,
is if they're a very intense, specific kind of athlete or they're doing a very specific kind of intense athletic event. And it's usually fitness models who are trying to get off every ounce of body fat and lose every bunch of water from their body so they can have the best muscle tone. Really, you know that, that's the few one of the few groups I've found where you wanna get real intense around numbers, grams of fat and protein and carbs. Um, that's not my expertise. I don't work in this realm and no interest only because that's just not my client base. That's not who I wish to work with. If you wish to work with that group, then you gotta learn to do those specifics, which means you actually gotta practice it yourself. Chances are, so all numbers, numbers in this realm are guesstimates. Animals in nature do not count their macronutrient amounts. Ultimately, it's all about your clients' learning to access their own body wisdom. There's a naturalness that we have. And this takes time, it takes trust, it takes exploration, it takes curiosity. So here you are saying, Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, you are complaining about weight loss resistance. Huh? I noticed you eat a carbohydrate only breakfast, huh? I also noticed that you said you have brain fog in the morning. You're tired in the morning, you're moody. Got it? I might shift your macronutrient balance just at breakfast as a homework assignment after this first session as a place to begin. And then your client has an opportunity to see, oh, I make a nutritional change and a nutritional shift. Now let me see how I feel. Really that's all it is. You are educating a human how to notice their own body, my friends. It's honestly as simple as that. It's not easy, but it's simple. In principle, you are edu educating your client to be in contact with their body wisdom, the people who are where they want to be when it comes to natural body weight and natural health who didn't start out in that place and they had weight to lose and they had plenty of places to get healthier. The people have finally gotten there, learn how to listen to their own body. They learn how to trust their own body. They've learned more information about their own body because they were willing to experiment. That's what this is about.
So when my client comes to me and says, well, just tell me what to eat. Ah, you know, honestly not my ideal client, just tell me what to eat.
Yeah, okay. Sometimes there might be places where I can say, okay, then here's your diet.
Will that work sustainably for that person? I don't know.
Are there clients like that? You bet. Um, so you have to determine, 'cause a client could just say, just tell me what to eat. But are they eating in a relaxed environment? Are they eating fast? Are they eating slow? Are they receiving pleasure? Do they have tremendous stress in their life that is impacting what they do? So people who say, just tell me what to eat, are usually the people who think that it's just about the food. Now, sometimes for some people it is just about the food. So you have to determine, is this one of those people who is just about the food? That's a, that's a rare bunch my friends, I'm telling you.
So again, it's about you learning to access the wisdom of the universe. It's you learning to access the wisdom of your own experience. It's you learning to begin to listen to the body wisdom of your own client. In a lot of ways you and I are, are, are the surrogate intelligence, the surrogate brain. We are functioning as the body wisdom and the life wisdom for our client. 'cause that's what they're asking us to do. So, okay, so I have to start teaching them. I have to tune into their body, I have to look at their diet. I'm asking them questions, and then I'm using my own experience, my own training, my own wisdom, which is what you're doing to then make suggestions.
And then we try out those suggestions and we see if it works. Can you see my friends that this is trial and error, trial and success. That's what this is. That's what life is. That's what every medical nutritional strategy is. Let's try this and see what happens.
And if you have that approach, you cannot go wrong. Meaning, okay, we tried that, it didn't work. Great, let's cross that off the list. Let's try something else. Okay, that didn't work. Cross that off the list. Great. Good news. I love crossing things off the list because that means we're narrowing down the possibilities of what might work and that gives us the best chance of helping people get where they want to go. So I'm spending time with you talking to the fel talking about the philosophy behind what we're doing. Because if you don't have that down, then you are going to be like so many practitioners who are frustrated, who are unhappy, who are burnt out, who are not getting fed by the work that they're doing because they're thinking they have to get it right and getting it right means the person lose a bunch of body pounds. And if the person's not losing a bunch of body pounds, then I got it wrong.
Well, maybe the person doesn't need to lose weight. Maybe the weight will come off when it comes off according to the wisdom of the universe. Maybe the problem isn't that they have a bunch of body pounds. Maybe the challenge is how they nourish themselves. Maybe the challenge is their food allergies. Maybe the challenge is, okay, I have all this tremendous stress in my life over here that I haven't addressed and therefore I'm going to food to relieve me of that stress, which is a perfectly understandable strategy. But until that is made conscious, I'm going to continue to do that until I begin to learn to slowly master my inner world. So I am not living in an inner world of fear, anxiety, and stress. Until I learn how to do that, I am generating a chemistry that will not take me in the direction of my natural weight, my natural health, or my natural state of happiness. It's not that you gotta be happy all the time, it's just that you're not supposed to be stressed all the time. Okay? Um, so just lemme say about macronutrient balance, why I started here.
You know, I could have started on eating rhythm, I could have started on eating slow. Um, you know, there's gonna be certain clients, you have to sniff this out. Also, there's some clients I know, you know, first session I'm gonna just focus with them on being a slow eater. That's the homework assignment. 'cause I think that's enough for them. And I've sensed from my conversation with them, they're really concerned about me changing their diet and making them eat stuff right away. That's not gonna be good for them. Some people, I don't wanna make a dietary change until maybe the second or third session. Some people really want a dietary change. They'll tell you that with their energy. They'll tell you that directly or indirectly with their words. Um, you know, people say, Hey, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm open to any strategies you wanna give me. I've tried all different kinds of diets. I don't mind experimenting with things. I, in fact, I kind of enjoy it. If I hear my clients say that. I think, oh, you enjoy dietary changes that's interesting to you, huh? Then maybe given all these pieces, and here you are weight loss resistant, here you are wanting to lose weight. Here I am in a first session here I am listening to your secondary health complaints. And here I am thinking, oh, here's a place to work with your macronutrient balance at breakfast. And notice I won't look to change a person's macronutrient balance at three different meals after the first session. It's too much. I'm suggesting to you that that is too much for the average person and the average weight loss client. I want to bring people along slowly because most people are not educated and they're not embodied when it comes to how to nourish themselves and how to reach their sustainable weight. That's just what I've noticed. So for the average person, I'm not gonna overload them with a lot of things to do. This is the biggest, biggest, biggest beginner mistake of beginning practitioners. They hurl so much information at their client, they think I have to prove to my client and I know so many things, and you should be eating kale and you should be making sure you get enough vitamin D and enough magnesium because people are deficient in magnesium and you're throwing out so much information. It doesn't mean anything to people.
Baby steps, the right baby steps, okay? So what I wanna say with macronutrient balance is this is one of the most useful and impactful nutritional distinctions that exist in the realm of clinical and real world nutrition. In other words, you've heard me say this, that we could use only a few nutritional tools when it comes to working with the broadest amount of health issues and eating challenges and weight concerns. Tweaking macronutrient balance just might be right at the top along with food quality
and along with putting somebody on an elimination diet. Those are, those are, those are the my three best broad nutritional tools that if you use those three nutritional tools only if every health coach, every doctor, every practitioner who's working with people's food body and weight only use those three nutritional tools working with if need be macronutrient balance, working with, if need be the overall quality of the food in their diet, working with experimenting, if need be an elimination diet to see if there's any food allergies and sensitivities, and to just go on an elimination diet, which is gonna be cleansing for most people anyway, those three nutritional tools cover the most ground.
Now, there's all kinds of other things to do. There's all kinds of very specific nutritional testing a person can do to see, oh my goodness, I'm low in iron, I'm low in vitamin D, I'm low in this, I'm low in that. Great. That's a another level of specificity. That's not what this training is about. That's not what I'm here to teach. If you wanna learn that, go learn that. What I am delivering to you is how to have success with about 95% of the people who will show up in the average practice.
You can have a person who is, I'm gonna say this deficient in vitamin D and we're seeing a lot of those. And by the way, if you're deficient in vitamin D, that can, one of the symptoms is weight loss resistance.
And the person could have all kinds of other places to work in their diet. They might be fast eaters, they might have imbalance macronutrients, they might have poor quality food, they might have a couple of food allergies in there. They might have stress in their life that is causing them non caloric weight gain. That if you help them lean into that stress a little differently and relax into some of their challenges and give them more life tools, you can still help that person impact their weight in a positive way and shapeshift in a direction of where they want to go, even though they might have
a nutritional deficiency or two or three. You follow what I'm saying? So a lot of people think if they don't dive into their DNA and their blood chemistry, they're screwed somehow that they're not going to find the answer true. It is that there are some people who the answer is something very specific, but what I'm trying to tell you is that's a smaller percentage, a much, much smaller percentage. We are learning how to deal with the largest percentage. And if that small percentage of people who have a metabolic challenge that you can't handle shows up in your practice, you'll eventually figure that out. I figured it out. I figured that out after my fourth client who had had breast cancer and was treated with chemotherapy for breast cancer and had an intense weight gain and I can't help them lose the weight. I finally started doing my research. Oh my goodness, this is common for people in that realm. And simply put, I can't help you. I don't know what to do. I wish I did. So hallelujah. I try my best. You try your best. Um, we're not gonna solve everybody's problem. And once again, we are looking at strategies that will handle 95 plus percent of the average person that you will see in your practice.
By the way, I wanna remind you that the food industry and corporate driven science considers the concept of macronutrient balance a direct threat to their profits because they are cleaning up on mass producing poor quality carbohydrate foods, easy to grow, quick to grow. The governments is subsidizing all the corn, all the soy, all the wheat products, all the sugar that is driving
a mega industry that is feeding the planet in an unhealthy way. So they don't want you to know that high quality fat and high quality protein is what's gonna help you, the average person reach their natural weight because the average person has been hooked on the standard diet of poor quality carbohydrate foods at breakfast, lunch dinners and snacks, because those are cheap. Those are easily mass produced. The poor quality foods and the high quality protein in fat, quite honestly. They're more costly, they're more difficult to mass produce. You gotta be a little bit more artisan. By the way, again, the research on higher fat, higher protein diets when it comes to weight loss is clear and compelling. Okay? It's clear and compelling. Will you get conflicting research? Yes. What I am just trying to tell you from a read of the research, because A, you have to know how to read the research and B, you have to know how to read the culture of science. The culture of industry, industry and the profit motive will always look to protect itself and it will misdirect and it will lie. That's just the plain simple truth. How do I know? Because I worked for years in the food industry and there were different points where I was paid to be a liar, okay? So I know what they do. Um, not only is the research clear and compelling, but the real world evidence is overwhelming. When I say real world evidence, I'm talking about the people who work with this on a clinical level, seeing clients, seeing patients. You experiment with it and you notice, damn, this is pretty good. This works. Does that mean that high fat whole pro high protein diet works for everyone when it comes to weight loss? No, it doesn't. It just means it's a place that we consider looking to, if my client has a complaint about weight loss, if it looks like they have weight to lose, and if we notice, ah hmm, looks like this might be a good strategy for you, given your macronutrient balance that I am eyeballing just looking at your diet.
So again, we only use these strategies. These are not everyone should eat this way. This is how do I work with a human being who has a specific issue and a specific request? This is how we do it. So I hope you are getting this, my friends, because this is another beginner mistake that is very important to catch. You start to think that this is the way to eat for all humans. No the way to eat for all humans. We're not interested in that. We're interested right now in how do I work with my weight loss client? And it's always about experimenting with the probabilities. So macronutrient balance is a great bet and a great place to start. Not just for weight loss, but for people who complain of problems with appetite control, people who complain about overeating, about binge eating. You're gonna see that as we get into all our other conversations, people who complain about energy and mood and more. You can help clear that up. You can help begin to clear that up by helping somebody shift their macronutrient balance. It's amazing. It's simple.
So I hope you get that We're learning here that there are no nutritional absolutes. There is only what do I do with my client as an experiment to help them get where they want to go sustainably. So again, you and I are learning to be good detectives, good explorers. We're willing to experiment. We're inviting our client into that place. So when they leave after the first session, even though they might be a little nervous, I want my client to leave inspired because I told them, I, I really feel that I can help you get where you wanna go. Here's some of the places we're gonna work. Here's one or two homework assignments that I'm gonna give you. And you know, we're experimenting with this. We're gonna do things in a whole different way that you haven't done before. I'm excited to see where this work is gonna go for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client. That's my attitude. That's my approach. Not, oh my God, what if this doesn't work? What is my client gonna do to me? What's the world gonna think of me? That's where, that's where a lot of practitioners go. That's where I used to go. So we're modeling for our clients an inspiration. We're modeling for them. Here's how you be with your body. Here's how you embody, here's how you experiment. Here's how you have a healthy and empowered relationship with food and body. That's what you're doing for them. Okay, so we started out talking about a couple of key strategies. We just started talking about macronutrient balance next. In our next conversation, we're going to launch right into meal timing, IE bio circadian nutrition as a first step in a first session with your weight loss clients. And you'll hear all the next pieces and what to do in terms of first places to start when we're looking at protocols for weight. Good stuff, my friends. I'm glad we're on this journey together. Thank you. Thank you. Lots more to come.

PART 2

Autoscroll:

Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. Here we are in our conversation continuing about protocols for weight. And as you do recall, this conversation is all about what we can do first and then second, and then third and fourth. It's a rough approximation of protocols to follow if we want something that's a little bit more boilerplate, cookie cutter, or logically sequential. So we've already talked a little bit about macronutrient balance as a first level strategy At the end of a first session. Let's talk about eating rhythm. Now, for many, many people when it comes to weight sustainable long-term natural weight is oftentimes directly connected to meal timing or it's certainly a piece of the puzzle. Now this is a great place to tweak or adjust your client diet to help not only when it comes to finding natural weight, but eating rhythm in a big way. My friends, for many people can have a good impact on appetite. It can have a good impact for people who are dealing with over reading or binge eating. It could have a good impact on mood, on fatigue and on other concerns as well. Now, as in any strategy you're gonna give after a first session, working here will not yield quick weight loss. In fact, what I wanna say is nothing will necessarily yield quick weight loss. I don't believe in quick weight loss. I'm not interested in quick weight loss. I'm interested in natural weight loss that comes as a result of the things we do that are natural, nourishing, and sustainable to a human body. So it's not gonna yield quick weight, weight loss, but it can impact other concerns that we just mentioned that are often associated with a person's weight challenge. So once again, if you impact a client's secondary concern here such as overeating or binge eating, then you have created a success for them right off the bat, which means trust and confidence in the process. As with everything that you ever do with a client working with meal timing is an exploration, it's an experiment. And like all nutritional distinctions, it's not absolute. It is not useful for all people all the time. And at the same time, it's a good place to work and it's a good bet.
So again, I'm looking at this as a first level weight loss strategy. So when we say eating rhythm or meal timing or bio circadian nutrition, those are all words that are interchangeable for the same thing, which is simply holding that when we eat is often as important as what we eat. So here's some tips as to why you might choose to work with eating rhythm at the end of a first session. Like give your client a homework assignment here. I would consider using this strategy. If you notice that your client skips a lot of meals, I would consider working here. If your client has a very erratic eating schedule, I would consider working here If your client has a very late lunch and a late breakfast. I would also consider working here if your client has a large late dinner and or a large late evening snack or kind of second dinner, which a lot of people have.
So when you're working with a client here, you're always gonna affirm, Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, this is an experiment and you're gonna let your client know why you are doing this Using simple science. You are asking them to follow your dietary suggestions. You're gonna be aware of the client who seldom has a regular eating schedule and you wanna try to get them on a rhythm.
You're also gonna be aware of the client who travels a lot. And this is more for the bigger picture because you might have clients like that. People who travel a lot oftentimes are having challenges with meal style and lifestyle. So it's all about helping people get into a rhythm of healthy eating even when they're traveling that works for them.
So another way of saying all this is I want you to be aware of the client who overeats at specific times during the day. You're gonna just notice that because if a client is overeating, if they say I overeat at two or three or four o'clock, then chances are before that they were undereating. Chances are. So if I take a client who's complaining that they're overeating at three, four o'clock before dinner, a big snack, and I notice that they're undereating before that and I give them a more robust lunch and perhaps a more robust breakfast, that's obviously balanced in macronutrients. It is very common. It is a good bet that your client will notice very soon that their late afternoon overeating is subsiding and they will see that as a success. There's also, and we're gonna talk about this more in other conversations, there are clients who often eat no breakfast because they say they're not hungry at breakfast. And it's true, there's a subset of humans who just don't need to eat a breakfast. That's fine. You don't need to eat a breakfast, you only need to eat a breakfast if you need to eat a breakfast. Now there's a lot of no breakfast eaters who will come to see you and they have a weight loss challenge. So if you're a no breakfast eater and I notice that you are eating a lot of food late at night, it is predictable that you might not be hungry in the morning. So what's happening is because metabolic power, digestive power, calorie burning capacity is lower in the evening, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 o'clock at night, 1, 2, 3, and four in the morning.
Your digestive, metabolic and calorie burning capacity is lower in the late evening hours. So the food that you eat technically has more of a caloric value in the late evening hours than that same food eaten at, let's say your peak metabolic hours during the day, which is approximately 12 to one 30. So in the big picture for some clients I might look to coach them to stop eating so much food so late and start eating a breakfast that will often stimulate weight loss. But I wanna say, I'm just mentioning that here to look out for, I wouldn't do that as a first level weight loss strategy. So people who are eating a lot at like right before bed and then they complain, I am not hungry in the morning whatsoever, that takes a little longer to change. But I'm just saying that here, just as a heads up to be aware of that, um, you can ask a client to tweak that a little bit because some of your no breakfast eaters, that's the issue. The issue is they're eating a lot of food at night. And so consequently when they wake up in the morning, um, the hunger just isn't there. Okay, by looking at your client's eating rhythm, you are essentially thinking bigger. You are taking a nutritional snapshot photograph of their entire day and you're seeing things from a broader perspective. Everything is connected to everything my friends, what you do at one time during the day actually is connected to what you do at another time during the day. So when I understand my client's eating rhythm, I basically have a snapshot of their day. Now, to get even better at this, I'm also noticing just not a snapshot of my client's eating rhythm during the day, but throughout the week. Meaning, once again, does my client eat differently on weekends than they do during the week? Or do they eat differently on certain days relative to when they work, whether they're home, what their activities, their responsibilities are. There are some people whose eating rhythm, the time that they eat, what they eat, how many meals they eat during a day, it, it can change interestingly, depending on their style of living and their responsibilities.
Now, I'll even give you another one. It's also useful to notice a client's eating rhythm across an entire typical month because some people have odd travel schedules that have them eating very differently during certain weeks. I've had clients who half the month divorced parents half the month, one parent has the kids, the other half the month, the other parent has the kids. And guess what? Their eating is completely different in one half of the month than it is in another. So you're just learning to notice the nuances which are important. You have to understand your client's unique life, their unique lifestyle, and what is impacting their eating rhythm. Doesn't that make sense? That's why I love this work because everybody's different and you get to experiment with different people and discover what works for them.
Okay, let's move on from eating rhythm for a moment. Next strategy. And again, we're talking about first level strategies or potentially second level strategies. Now, you might not focus on macronutrient balance and eating rhythm as your clients' first homework. After a first session, you might choose to focus on the whole process of slowing down with food. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, are you a fast eater, a moderate eater, or a slow eater? If they are a slow eater, great, then focus on macronutrient balance. Focus on eating rhythm. Perhaps if they're a fast eater, their job at some point in life and the sooner the better is to learn how to become a slow eater. And as you know, slow doesn't mean speed alone. Slow means taking time. Slow means relaxing with food. Slow means being present with food. Slow means nourishing yourself with food. So these four terms, if you're looking at the slide right now, I have slow down, take time, relax with food, nourish these have a, each one of these has a slightly different flavor. So I will talk to my client eventually about each one of these.
And for many people, it's best to focus on the concept of slowing down first, because that by itself is a lot.
And I'm gonna talk about these as a clump so you can see how they're related. Slowing down, taking time, relaxing with food, nourishing. And as you know, my friends, this is a big one, learning how to slow down. It's a powerful first or second level strategy that you basically do all at once. So it's all a variation of the same thing. Yet as I said, the nuances are a bit different and that's why I am going to be spelling it out here with you. So the idea is with any human being, whatever their health condition is, whatever they're seeing you for. And in this case, wait, my client needs to step into a relaxation response with meals as much as humanly possible. That's the goal. Does it have to be every single meal for all of the rest of time? No, relax. None of us are perfect. We are looking at creating a relaxation response with meals as consistently as we can. Closely related to that is to have a more nourishing relationship with food. So food is actually not something I'm just getting through. It's not a nuisance to be done with. It's not something to get out of the way. It's something to engage. It's something to dance with, it's something to enjoy. It's something to embrace.
So when we slow down and when we stop the rush and when we get present, and when your client gives themselves more time for meals, when previously they weren't, something happens, their experience of food will change, their experience of their body will change, body wisdom will begin to take over. So you are essentially coaching your client to change their metabolism, their body chemistry, their calorie burning capacity, their digestion, basically using mind body strategies. That's what's happening. We are using mind where using simple mind MINDBODY strategies to impact our chemistry in a way that nothing else can.
Okay, let's break it down. Slowing down with food, asking your client to slow down with food for many, many, many people is the single biggest victory for nutritional metabolism. I kid you not,
I keep hitting this home because a lot of people just, it doesn't sink, it doesn't register, they don't get it. Or if you have an experienced it, you don't know what I'm saying. Now, slowing down with food, training yourself to become a slow eater takes time. It is a non-negotiable. It is something I will return to with my client in every single session. How did it go for you this last week or two? How was it when you came to eat your meals? Were you able to have a slow meal? Were you able to have any slow meals? What's the easiest meal for you to slow down with? What's the hardest meal for you to slow down with? So you're gonna be listening to nuances. You know, they have much easier time slowing down at breakfast 'cause they have more time. But lunches at work and there's more stress and dinner's at stress because I'm the one cooking. So you're just listening and then you're tweaking, you're listening and you're tweaking.
You are learning how to help your client take slow baby steps in the direction that you want to move them in. Slowing down with food. My friends confronts a lot of us with a high speed life. The high speed life that we live, that we did not invent, that the world invented for us. And we need to claim our body. We need to claim our life, we need to claim our health. We need to claim our time as best as we can. 'cause as far as we know, you only got one shot here in this world. So we wanna make it a good one. Slowing down is a personal, cultural, and soul victory. In many ways, that's why it's so hard, because it is a habit and a behavior that is difficult to change as habits and behaviors go. 'cause we just get accustomed to it. We get hooked on fast eating because it is a state addiction. Fast eating puts us in a certain mental, emotional, physical state that even though it doesn't benefit us in the long term, there's a shortened certain short term pleasure with it. We do it for a reason. It's a little bit of a rush. It feels good, it feels familiar, and it puts the body in a stress response. And for many people, we are addicted to certain kinds of stressors. And I use the word addicted, um, in quotes because it's not the same way of saying I'm addicted to alcohol or I'm addicted to, you know, drugs.
It is more addicted to a mental emotional state. We get addicted to certain stress states. Some people are just, they don't wanna be less anxious. They don't wanna be less fearful because it's so normal for them and it really gives them a bit of a rush. Stress chemistry can be a rush. It can feel good in a strange way. It motivates us. It gets us moving fast, it gets us thinking fast. And we think that's good and it is good when it's good,
but it's only really good for truly stressful situations or ties when we really, really, really need to be moving fast.
So your client is oftentimes slowing down. It is training their brain chemistry and body chemistry in a whole different direction. That's why this is so difficult on a deeper level. Many people have a long-term anxiety and fear of food often starting at a younger age. And this will live as a low level stress in the body. Food is the enemy, food is the enemy. Food makes me fat. It's an unprocessed ongoing fight or flight response that's triggered whenever we think about food or sit down to eat it. If I have a long-term anxiety or fear of food, if I have the long-term, toxic nutritional belief, food is the enemy that whenever I encounter the enemy, I'm gonna go into a stress response. Whenever I think about food, I will naturally go into stress. Whenever I sit down to food, I will naturally go into stress. So slowing down with food is actually asking the body to decommission this stress response. It's hard. It's asking the body to step into relaxation in a place where it normally doesn't do that.
This is a big change. And for 99% of people, it will naturally feel uncomfortable, if not impossible. Which is why I emphasize to you, and you are going to emphasize to your client, this is a practice.
I know you couldn't get it right the first time or the second time or the 22nd time. Fine. It's a practice. And the more you practice at ping pong, at mountain climbing, at swimming, at running, at the piano, at anything, the better you are going to get at it. So it's a practice and it's essential to healing just about any eating related challenge that you and I have ever heard of. And believe it or not, this is one of little paradoxical, one of the fastest ways, truly one of the fastest ways that you can help a client get where they want to go when it comes to finding their natural body weight. When it comes to managing their overeating, binge eating, emotional eating is to help them become a consistent slow eater, which means relaxed, pleasured, nourished and inspired.
And this is one of the reasons so many people fail at long-term sustainable weight loss. Because whatever strategies they've been doing that the world has taught them, that the books and the experts and the online universe has taught them, never gets to this key place where A, the body needs to be in its natural state of digestion, assimilation, calorie burning and natural appetite regulation, which is parasympathetic nervous system dominance. The relaxation response, it's a, you can't avoid that. That is the science of being a human being on earth. It is simple science, it's hard wiring. This is not my opinion. This is something you can start to read about as early as the 1930s. So we've known about this and we know more and more about this, but it's not put forth by the experts and by the professionals because you know, it takes people a while to catch up with how things work. We've been looking for so many quick fix methods that by looking for the quick fix methods, we have gone through decades and decades of ineffective approaches when it comes to our eating challenges.
And you, my friend, need to practice this with clients practice getting good at continuing to inspire them when they hit a wall with the slow eating thing.
And one of the ways we do this is by breaking it down a little more, such as coaching your client around time, coaching your client to reclaim time in their life and to take time with meals. So many, many of your clients, not all many, many of your weight loss clients will have a challenging relationship with time. Why? Because many humans have a challenging relationship with time. Why? Because simply, that's the world that we live in. You got a clock you gotta watch, you got your cell phone and it's telling you the time. And there's 24 hours in the day and there's a good chance that anywhere from you know, six to nine hours you're gonna be sleeping. And the other bunch of hours you're gonna be awake.
And we got a lot to do. And depending on who your client is and what they're about, they might have family, they might have a kid, they might have lots of kids, they might have a job, they might have a few jobs, they might have a lot of responsibilities that chug that pull at their time.
And what happens for many people is that meals and food and eating are squeezed into the schedule
and everything else has priority. So owning our time is a powerful act of health and self evolution. How do I create, if I need it, how do I create more time for meals? A little more time for meals, a little more time for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner. A little more time for the cooking experience. A little more time for the shopping experience.
This might mean your client needs to be coached up a little bit. Or you might have to have conversations with your client around other areas of life when it comes to time. 'cause what happens is a lot of people get sucked into work and they don't have time for food or meals at work. And when you really work with those clients, there's ways that they can create more time. Now, if they can't, they truly, truly can't, then hallelujah, they can't. But I find a lot of people who complain about their work situation, there's oftentimes you can buy a little more time. And sometimes buying a little more time for meals is big
time is all we have, my friends. And if your client is truly concerned about their weight, if they are truly wanting to reach their natural weight and they're taking three minutes at breakfast and eight minutes at lunch and 15 minutes at dinner, and the rest of the time they're worried about that weight, worried about body fat, exercising like crazy reading about this, that, and the other thing when it comes to nutrition, putting energy into this weight loss strategy, that weight loss strategy, hey, that time and energy is best put into the actual meal experience. Because when you have time,
you can create a relaxation response. You cannot create a relaxation response in five seconds. You need a little time in a stress response. The central nervous system, your brain literally speeds up time because in a true stress response, when the line is chasing you, you don't have enough time, you don't have much time, and the brain is telling you you don't have a lot of time. Everything you do counts in a stress response. Time is speeded up. So people who are living in a constant state of even low level self-chosen stress
are speeding up time in their brain. Why? Because cortisol, the main stress hormone, will literally change your internal clock. Cortisol shifts time perception. It's a brilliant strategy of the brain. So then you think you don't have enough time. No, I don't have enough time for this. I don't have enough time for that. Well, wait a second. When you start to relax, you start to reclaim your sense of time, you time shift, you create a whole different magic.
So in other words, it's a great idea to negotiate with your client the amount of time they take for meals. So all I'm looking to do, if I notice my client is speeding through every meal or most meals, or two outta three meals,
can they increase their time spent with a meal to a doable amount? So I always negotiate like honestly, how much time for breakfast, how much time for lunch? Can you increase breakfast to 15 minutes? Can you increase lunch to 30 minutes? Can you increase dinner to 40 minutes?
Even a little less? Whatever they can negotiate with you, that's doable for them. That's more than what they've been doing.
A lot of times you might have to work with your client to tweak where they eat their meals and with whom, because that often influences, you know, whether they can relax and take more time. So in other words, it's about quality time with meals. It's not just about sitting there and tapping your foot and looking at the clock. Because within that extra time you're looking to breathe, you're looking to relax, you're looking to eat your food, you're looking to enjoy yourself. You're looking to have a celebratory moment.
We're asking our clients to value the eating experience, not just fix it so they can lose weight. We have to bring humanity into this. We have to bring an art into this. A sense of, of creativity. Yes, I time myself and I took 12 minutes for breakfast. No, but did you pay attention? Did you enjoy it? Did you relax? Did you take a deep breath? Did you smile?
Most not all, but most weight loss clients, my friends, are trying to fight food.
Fighting equals stress response. Stress response equals sympathetic nervous system dominance, sympathetic nervous system dominance equals increased cortisol insulin with signals of body to store weight, store fat, not build muscle, deregulates appetite. And day in and day out, when those hormones are secreted in excess, can decreas decrease calorie burning capacity,
all from the simple toxic nutritional belief. Food is the enemy, eating is my enemy fat and food equals fat on my body. Food equals fat on my body, which means I will not be loved and I will never be okay, and I will never be the real meat. And that life sucks. That's how much power we give to food. So as you help your client learn how to befriend food, you change all that from the deepest level of a client's being
that my friends is what yields long term success when it comes to health weight over reading, binge eating, emotion eating, et cetera.
Clients are learning how to befriend food. They're learning that food is their best friend. They're learning how to relax with their best friend and not think that their best friend is their worst enemy. Simple in concept, challenging in the actual practice of it. But hey, that's what we're here to do. Shapeshifting the body is not easy. So we have to look for the places where the action is, because when we truly find the places where the action is, then we can start to create long-term sustainable success.
Ah, let's break down relaxing with food a little bit more here.
Again, I want you to give your clients the scientific mind cookies in a first session. If you're giving them this homework assignment, give your clients the scientific mind cookies around a relaxation response. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's what I've noticed about you. You got a busy active life and good for you. You, you have a lot on your plate, you're juggling a lot. Um, you have a lot of things that quite honestly put you in a lot of, lot of stress. Um, you have a busy schedule, you gotta deal with the kids, you gotta deal with work responsibilities, you gotta deal with home stuff. You're dealing with this, you're dealing with that. What I'm noticing is, you know, you did tell me you are a fast eater. And not only that, you don't take much time for meals. And not only that, your days have a lot of stress in them. Let me tell you what happens here in that state. When we're in the stress state, we're in a physiologic stress response, parasympathetic nervous system dominance. So, so that's the conversation. I'm gonna start with my client. Here's what's happening to your digestion. Here's what's happening to your calorie burning capacity. Here's what's happening to your appetite regulation simply by being in a physiologic stress response. Now, by the way, you're not the only person who does this. This is probably most people you and I know.
And our challenge is to create the opposite metabolic state when we eat as best we can. And that takes time. But what that does is it changes us from the inside out. It's gonna change how the brain regulates appetite in a natural way. It's gonna change how we digest and assimilate and calorie burn in a natural way.
So my friends, you could always use basic deep breathing practice or exercise before and during meals. If you haven't practiced some basic deep breathing, get online, learn about it, practice it for yourself. I just ask my clients oftentimes if, if I feel like giving them a technique, if that's gonna work for them, Hey, listen, whenever you can, before you actually start to eat your meal, sit down, close your eyes for a moment. If you can relax yourself in your chair, take five to 10 long, slow, deep breaths. In fact, if you're sitting with them in your office, do that with them. Do 10 long, slow, deep breaths with them. Have them close their eyes. Now, understand that there's a certain amount of people, if they've never done something like this before, it actually stresses them out a little bit. It's okay. The more they practice that, the more that will change over time. But essentially what happens when your client starts to learn how to do deeper breathing, it will slowly over time put them into a relaxation response, parasympathetic nervous system dominance with a meal.
So be committed to this being your long term challenge with clients long term, Mr. And Mrs. Client, we're gonna learn how to more and more master the art of relaxation with food that might mean deep breathing. That means taking more time. That means means slow eating. All of those will help you relax. That might mean changing your eating environment. All of those help us relax. But whenever you hear me say relax, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, I want you to also think that's a physiologic state. That's parasympathetic nervous system dominance. That is a hard wiring of all humans and actually all mammals. That's how we're designed to optimally digest, assimilate, and calorie burn
in the natural, parasympathetic nervous system. Dominance, relaxation, state. It's as simple as that. It is a, it's the science of the human body. It is the science of nutrition. It is the science of digestion all wrapped into one. And the reason why you don't hear about this so much is because you know the big companies can't make a lot of money from you relaxing. They'd rather have you stressed and buying their foods and buying their sugars and buying their drugs and buying all their products. That's gonna help you feel better about your nervous, anxious self.
So breathing is free, oxygen is free. Relaxing, your nervous system is free. There's no one who's gonna capitalize and make a lot of money on this in a big way.
So you short cutting all the nonsense that's out there and getting to the core, and this is a practice, Mr. And Mrs. Klein, it takes time.
So yes, relaxing with food is similar to slowing down. And we're using different languaging with our client to get across an important point. It's about helping our clients see that their experience of food has not been relaxing, how they tend to bring a lot of angst to the table. So again, I want you to think of your relationship with a client is kind of the same way you want them to eat. So you have to be slow and consistent and persistent with your client over time to help them reinvent and reimagine their relationship with food. Nobody can push a button and change somebody's relationship with food to be slow, relaxed, nourishing, and present.
It takes time. It is a retraining. It is a re-imagining. It's a reinvention. But you are changing your client's metabolism and their inner world, their psyche, their psychology, their operating system at the same time. And when you work on somebody's metabolism and their personal world at the same time, you give that human being the best chance to get where they want to go when it comes to their natural sustainable weight. That was another way of saying personal power equals metabolic power. So remember my friends, you gotta be patient and remind your client with encouragement and clarity that they're learning to be with food and body in a whole new way. You have to be a stickler for this. They're changing their metabolism by transforming their relationship with food. What a beautiful tool you have to work with clients. And trust me, this works my friend. So many good things happen. When your client starts to truly slow down and relax with food, they're gonna come back to you and they're gonna tell you, oh my goodness, this happened. That happened. I had this insight, I had this realization, and oh my goodness, you know, I started eating fast again and this happened and that happened. And they're gonna start to collate data, details, information. Their body's going to start to learn. They are creating a new baseline, a new benchmark for how they know they can feel.
And once they have the experience of, here's what happens when IE in a slow, relaxed, nervous state. Once they have that experience, you cannot forget it. Especially because you're gonna be reminding them,
my friends, you have to realize that your client forgets. We forget. We need to be reminding our client. You need to understand that you are holding your client's hand. Oftentimes when it comes to their relationship with food, that's fine. Because when it comes to our relationship with food, many of us, sure it's a little painful. We have some booboos around that. It's a hard place for us. It's a sensitive place for us. We become like sensitive children. And that's okay because usually it's at a younger age when the challenges first came up, our feelings were first hurt. Toxic beliefs first sunk into us.
Harms and offenses happen to us. And so in our relationship with food, we become childlike. We become young, we become fearful, we become sensitive about who we are and how we look. So I say this, so you know, to be Gentle with your client. So you understand that even though you're talking to a person who's 20 years old, 40 years old, 60 years old, 70 years old, you're oftentimes talking to a an 11 or a 12-year-old in terms of their ability to self-love and self-regulate. And that's okay. So nourishing with food. So this is, again, this is all sim. Similar relaxing with food, taking time with food, slowing down with food nourishing. Ultimately, I want to help my clients step into a nourishing relationship with food. That means receiving the food, enjoying the food, savoring the food.
No different than you would receive, enjoy and savor any experience that just feeds you and makes you feel good. Maybe certain music just makes you feel so good. Maybe certain people, maybe a sunny day, maybe an animal, whatever it is. Certain, certain things just make us feel warm and fuzzy all over. You can have that with food, maybe not at every single meal, but more consistently than not.
So I'm gonna be asking my client to monitor some of their negative thoughts while they eat, monitor it, notice it, just notice it and begin to practice some welcoming and nourishing thoughts. So I wanna say that any small step in this direction is a big step. It really is stated in another way. You are here to guide your client from a punishing relationship with food to a nourishing one. Again, this takes time.
That's not a bad thing.
I don't know how much time it's gonna take. You don't know how much time it's gonna take. No one knows how much time it's gonna take. But if you're committed to coaching and cheerleading and mentoring your client in this realm, then you are giving them great value because you cannot help any human being. And I mean this, reach a sustainable, happy, natural weight. You cannot help any human being who is complaining of overeating, binge eating, emotional eating, and just having a painful relationship with food. You can't help them until they begin to experience food in a nourishing way
in order to experience food in a nourishing way. One practices that
So many weight loss clients, again, are in pain and suffering about this fundamental necessity of human existence. Food for the weight loss client is looking like the enemy, and we don't tend to look at enemies as nourishing. So this is a big task and it's a crucial one to consistently coach our client into feeling good with food
and they don't feel good with food. So all the little baby steps that we take help move them in that direction. Asking somebody just, even if you focused on them, just eating slow,
this will gradually move them in that direction. The nourishment part comes, I feel nourished with food that comes as we begin to slow down. That comes as we begin to receive sensations with food. When we're present to the food. You can't feel nourished by something unless you're present to it. If certain people nourish you, if a certain pet nourishes you, if a certain place nourishes you, certain music, you have to give it your time and attention. You have to listen to the music, you have to listen to the person. You have to be with the animal. So nourishment is in many ways about time and presence. You know, one thing you could do is you could ask your client, Hey, have you ever had a nourished, just a nourishing experience of food, of eating? What was that like? What did it look like? What are the conditions for you that help you feel warm and fuzzy about food and play with your client? This is a little NLP kind of trick, neurolinguistic programming trick. This is a psychological tool, you can call it that, where you ask a person, I'm asking my client to enter into a certain state, a nourishing state with food. Now, sometimes that's hard to explain to a person. So I'm gonna ask them if they've had that experience at any point, because chances are there was some point when their guard was down and food wasn't the enemy and they just had a good experience of a meal. Or maybe that happened for a few weeks out of their life, or a few years or months out of their life. What did that feel like for you? So when your client can access in their memory those sensations, you are helping them prove your point through their experience.
I wanna say that again because this is important. I really want you to get that. I wanna help my client have a nourishing relationship with food. And they clearly don't. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client can, can you think of a time, can you think of a meal, a time in your life, a day, a week, a month when just food was nourishing? There's like a certain memory come to mind. Let's talk about that. What happened? What was the environment? What did it feel like? Where were you? Who were you? Who were you with? What were you eating? What room, what place? What state? What was going on in your life? Got it. That's what we're looking for to have on a regular basis. So it might not mean that you are in that exact same environment with those exact same people, but that's the feeling. That's the sensations we're looking for. So when your client can remember, oh, I remember what it's like to feel good with food, they are accessing those sensations with their memory. They're to a certain degree, feeling those sensations in the present moment as you're talking about it with them. And you're actually proving to their left brain your point via their experience. So I'm not just proving the point through me talking about science, I'm proving my point because they've actually experienced that before. This is important. I'm always looking for places and we're deviating from the conversation a little bit, but this is good right now. I'm always looking for places with a client where I can prove my point with their experience. Because when you do that, you are helping them embrace the very thing that you're asking them to do. So I'm gonna explore in little ways with my client how to create a nourishing environment, and I'm gonna invite them into helping me to determine what that looks like for them. So always, always, always, or often, often, often, it's important for you and I to invite our client into creating solutions for themselves to partner with us. Well, I don't know how to create a nourishing relationship with food. Well, let's talk about the times that that did happen. Let's talk about the details. What was happening. That might be a hard conversation for your client. It might be an easy one, I don't know. But everybody's different. So I'm gonna encourage my client to always dig a little bit deeper, to find their suggestions, their answers, rather than me do all the work. And I'm happy to do the work when my client clearly hits a dead end, they hit a wall, they don't know what to do.
So yeah, I'm gonna deliver the information. I'm not gonna torture my client, but at the same time, I don't mind making my client feel a little comfortable and saying, okay, what else can you do? Just think even if it's the tiniest, littlest, silliest thing, what else can you do to create a nourishing, relaxed experience of a meal or a snack? You'd be surprised what people come up with that you might not have come up with them, but they come up with for themselves because they know them better than you know them. They actually, here's the thing. The best nutritionist, and believe it or not, I mean This, I actually mean this. The best nutritionist for any person is ultimately that person. You are your greatest nutritionist. Your client is their greatest nutritionist. Now they need to be trained. You and I need to be trained how to be our best nutritionist. That doesn't mean, hey, I read books, I read articles, I read studies. I learn things. I incorporate things. I talk to experts. I ask my knowledgeable friends about nutrition. I might even ask them personal questions for me and my health and my nutrition. That doesn't mean I'm a bad nutritionist. A good nutritionist, hey, talks to other experts.
A good doctor, a good scientist, talks to their peers, talks to their elders, and learns things. But ultimately your client lives in their own body. So they're the ones that know it best. And when we empower our client
to learn about their own body, what we're really doing with them is we're helping them increase their body wisdom iq, their nutritional iq,
their body intelligence iq. And that builds on itself. That's a good thing. And as you know, a nourishing relationship with food is really about creating a more nourishing relationship with life. Genders are, if we can nourish ourselves with food, it's hard to oftentimes nourish ourselves in other places. How we do one thing is how we do another. It all impacts each other. Okay, my friends, we're still gonna be talking about protocols for weight. There's much more on this topic. I hope you're enjoying it. So this is the end of protocols for weight, part two. Part three is next. We're gonna get into some more juicy details about a rough cookie cutter, boilerplate approach to working with a client. If you really need some direction here, how to start with your average weight loss client. Okay, my friends, more to come and I'm gonna see you on the other side.

PART 3

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Greetings, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute. Here we are continuing our conversation and protocols for weight. We've been talking about some first and second level strategies to do. We've mentioned macronutrient balance. We have mentioned bio circadian, nutrition and meal timing. We've talked about first and second level strategies such as slowing down with food, relaxing, nourishing, and being aware and taking more time in the eating experience. If you've done some of those and you are ready for some next level strategies, I'll call them third level strategies, here's a list that we're gonna talk about right now. Receiving pleasure with food, adopting movement, as opposed to exercise embodiment practices and body wisdom slash intuitive eating. So I'm gonna break these down. Once again, this is a next set of strategies that we do after we've done some of the first and second level strategies. In other words, you know, I probably wouldn't start out with a new weight loss client with any of these that I'm mentioning right now. Pleasure, movement and embodiment practices, body wisdom, intuitive eating. It's not time yet. None of these are necessarily going to yield an immediate impact. They are strategies that I'm simply suggesting to you from my experience, is what you want to work on after you've been with your client for a little while. Once there's momentum, once there's buy-in, once there's confidence in the relationship to work on some of these other pieces that yes, can certainly yield a result, but they don't have necessarily the same immediate impact. They don't grab the left brain in the same way. Uh, the scientific mind, the logical linear mind that you and your client, that your client needs to have, um, satisfied. So I'm always looking to satisfy the part of my client's brain, which is perfectly logical and legitimate and reasonable, looking to satisfy the part of their brain that needs things to make sense, that needs something that's strategic. And that sounds like it can help their quote unquote metabolism. It can help their chemistry. The kinds of tweaks that are more nutritionally science-based, or mind-body science-based. So these are strategies that I'm gonna call a little more softer, which doesn't mean that they're not useful and powerful, they just come at a later time in the work. So as you can see, these are really about landing a little more deeply into the body. So after more of a focus on the food and the eating experience, we're now looking to expand our client's awareness beyond food.
Because the reality is, when it comes to
a weight loss client, there's a portion of the work that is indeed beyond food. We always have to bring in the body at some point because the food is the food. It's out there. It's not me, and the body is the body. That's me. That's my experience. That's where the chemistry is happening. That's where the thinking is happening. That's where the feeling is happening. That's where we live with our past. That's where we live with our hopes for the future. That's where we live with our limiting beliefs about who we are and what we can be. So at some point, we have to
help our clients focus or refocus that when it comes to achieving, finding, experiencing their natural, real, honest to goodness, sustainable weight, whatever that is for them, it requires a certain attention to the body. And it's all about landing in the body, my friends, you don't need to go to the moon. You don't need to land on another planet. Quite honestly, it's probably not as interesting as landing in your own body. Not as important. It's all about you and me and our clients landing in the body. And for a lot of people, this is a difficult concept to understand landing in the body. It, it, it doesn't always make sense. Well, aren't I in my body? Aren't I here? The reality is, as human beings, there ain't nothing wrong here. As human beings, it is difficult in this world to embody because of all the pain, the suffering, the challenging, the illness, the sickness, and just the simple fact of life on planet earth. Look at any organism. Look at any species, you know, there's issues. It's not easy in nature. Something's always trying to attack you. Something's always trying to eat you. The food supplied disappears. You gotta hunt, you gotta gather. For humans, we have to deal with a lot when it comes to living on planet earth and being in the body. We get tired, we get hurt, we get sick, we get diseased, we get confused. So there's a lot of people simply walking around a little bit, a little bit or a lot or somewhere in between. Disconnected a bit dissociated and kind of living in an out-of-body experience. That's why I always find it fascinating. People are trying to have an out-of-body experience. I highly recommend that we focus on an in the body experience as opposed to getting out of it. You can get outta your body every night when you go to sleep. Um, spend the rest of your day trying to get in the body, because as long as you're alive, that's where the action is at. When you die, you'll have all kinds of opportunities to not be in your body. Hopefully, you know, I'm being a little bit facetious here, but I'm also being a little bit honest. So for a lot of us, we're existing as if the body is just a life support system for the head, for the brain, and for a lot of our weight loss clients, we need to invite them back in. And it's an invitation is a slow process. It's a kind of like a rebirth into the world, into life. For many, many, many, many people, my friends, they're getting into their bodies and into their, how do I say? Into their hunger, into their taste, into their awareness of food, into their relationship with food, into how they nourish themselves with food. They're getting into it in a healthier way. Working with you for the first time ever.
Here's the reality. You know, a lot of us don't get educated about being in a body fully until we get older and until we have opportunities. Oh, I started exercising. Oh, I, you know, started going to see a massage therapist and acupuncturist, a chiropractor. I started understanding food and nutrition better. Oh wow. I changed my diet. I feel better. So we're learning as we go along. It's totally fine. You are helping your client learn as they go along. You are not fixing them, you're educating them. We're always in school, my friends. We're always in the school of life. When a client comes in to see you, when a client comes in to work with you, you're the teacher on one level, they're in your classroom now, but you're really in the school of life. So in that classroom that you are orchestrating, you are the mentor, you are the coach, you're the practitioner, you're the guide, you're whatever kind of professional you already are, and you're conducting that experience.
So again, landing in the body, it's a slow, gradual process that takes some time, my friends, it takes attention. And I'm gonna use the word practice again. It is a practice.
I don't want you to ever think, ever. Not even for a second. You ask your client to do something, you ask them, I don't know, to relax with a meal, to slow down with a meal to receive pleasure from a meal. And then they come back and say, yeah, I tried it. I can't do it. You know what that's like. That's like a kid saying, yeah, you know, I went to school today and I try to read. I can't do it. I'm done with that nonsense. Sorry my friends. You wanna make it in this world. Really, the fundamental is you gotta know how to read to some degree. You wanna be alive on planet earth and be in the system and be in your body and have a life where you're mildly productive and you're mildly happy. You gotta know how to read. So you gotta practice that. And it might be difficult. You might be dyslexic, you might not have a good teacher, you might not have the best textbooks, whatever it is. But we gotta practice till we get there. Practice. It's a practice. It's a practice. So you cannot let your client go. Yes, I'm a 5-year-old. I try to learn how to read in school today. I can't do it. I'm done with this mom, I'm done with this dad. None of this reading nonsense. Let's do something else. Give me a pill. Maybe that'll help me learn how to read. No. Getting in our body is a practice. And I'm gonna suggest to you that it's a non-negotiable strategy when it comes to healing our relationship with food and reaching our natural weight. I wanna remind you again, if we want to shape shift the body, if you want to change it in terms of reaching its natural weight, then you gotta be in it. Gotta be in that car to make the car go. So what I wanna say to you, even if you're confused by this concept, I want you to be grappling with it. I want you to be asking questions about it. Ask questions of, I don't know, fellow students. Fellow professionals, friends. Friends who are in their body, ask us, Hey, I'm not sure what does this mean.
That is how important this is in your job. One of your jobs is you have to get more and more skillful at looking at a human, any human, and noticing are they in their body? And to what degree are they in? And to what degree in what places might they be out of their body. You know, there's certain places you and I jump out of the body. We especially will jump out of the body, so to speak. I'm talking kind of energetically, we'll jump out of the body when something's not comfortable for us. Certain situations, for some people, eating is not comfortable because food is the enemy. So they literally disappear when they eat and they wonder why they overeat. They wonder why they binge eat. They wonder why they emotionally eat. They're kind of not there. A part of them is there, but a part of them is checked out because food is problematic. Food scares me, food stresses me. So it's understandable. We're not fully present for some people, gosh, talking about money and finances is very uncomfortable. It's very stressful. So as soon as they're in that conversation, part of them checks out. Some people are not comfortable with emotional intimacy. And if you're in relationship with your husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, somebody close to you, and you bring up a conversation where your boundary might've been crossed or your feelings might've been hurt. And if that person is not comfortable talking about intimacy, they're gonna check out and checking out. Looks like a diversion. A deflection. It looks like they put up a block. It looks like they put up a roadblock. It looks like a part of them. Literally just evacuates the premises.
For some people, it's sexuality, sex. For them it's uncomfortable. It's strange. It's weird. What do I do? There's a lot of people who check out in that experience because it's a stressful experience. And this is, all of this is understandable
because as human beings, we're learning how to be in a body. We haven't really been taught in a very educated, wise, systematic, learned way, how to have a nourishing relationship with food, how to have, how to have a nourishing relationship with our sensuality, sexuality. We haven't always been taught how to explore who I am
as a male, as a female in this world. What's this body for? What's my life? For we, we don't really learn these things. We kind of figure it out on the fly, hopefully. Okay, so let's talk about pleasure. It's an interesting concept to bring up with your client. So when it feels like it's time, and you've noticed, you've noticed because now you've learned, you've been in conversation with your client and you've seen, you've assessed, you've determined in your opinion, huh? My client has a little bit of trouble when it comes to pleasure with food because they're constantly battling food, fighting food, trying to limit food. Yeah, they say they like food and they might eat this food, that food every once in a while, but they're kind of in a battle with it. So I wanna focus with my client on receiving pleasure with food. At the same time. I'm always thinking in the back of my mind, pleasure with food equals pleasure with life.
A lot of clients, they're receiving pleasure with food really also means, you know, some clients, yeah, they're turning to food for pleasure, but they're relying on food for pleasure and they're not spreading out the pleasure in the rest of their life. So I wanna do a pleasure inventory with my client. It's so simple, my friends. It's, it's a fun experience to do. You have your client go home. Write down all the places in your life where you feel pleasure with persons, places, experiences, thoughts, feelings, foods, activities, TV shows, movies, music, anything you could think of on the face of the universe, the planet. Like what gives you pleasure, any of it, all of it. Persons, places, people, things, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, foods, exercises, any kind of experience. Anything. Anything, anything. And then you're gonna go over that list with your client
and you're gonna ask them as well. You know, rate the ones that you do every day. Rate the ones that you do once a week. Rate the ones that you do less than once a week.
Your job is to go over that inventory and begin to coach your client into regular, daily, weekly, simple pleasure practices.
You might need to coach them to eat a small dessert with their dinner every day. And slow down and enjoy it and receive it. And just like take it in. What do you love to eat? Do you ever really give yourself over to the experience and just enjoy it for enjoyment sake?
Where else in life do you really receive pleasure? And do you give yourself that experience? 'cause a lot of people do what gives them pleasure, but they're not present when they do it.
If you're taking a walk, if you're petting your cat, if you're with your dog, are you really surrendering to that experience?
So part of receiving pleasure with food, remember, pleasure catalyzes the relaxation response, pleasure catalyzes, parasympathetic nervous system dominance. So pleasure is not just some simple frivolous thing. You as well as every organism on the planet is programmed at the most primitive level to seek pleasure and avoid pain. If you do not get the pleasure you seek from food, you will continually hunger for more.
So when you eat food, you might as well enjoy it. When your client eat, eats food, they might as well enjoy it. When you train someone to begin to receive pleasure, you are training them to relax because pleasure catalyzes the relaxation response. And when we relax, what happens? We are in the optimum state of digestion, assimilation, calorie burning and natural appetite regulation, yeehaw. And you can say that to your client when you start talking about pleasure. Notice how I just snuck it in there? Notice how it makes pleasure seem more cool and interesting. Hey, not only am I getting pleasure 'cause pleasure feels good, but I'm also scientifically changing my metabolism and shifting it in the direction where I can't go wrong.
Now, of course, you know, there's always the person that raises their hand and saying, wow, if you're saying pleasure is good, then I can just eat and eat and eat and eat and eat. And I could never stop. Because you're saying pleasure catalyzes metabolism. Sure. And I'm also saying water is good for you. But I'm not saying jump in a lake and drown yourself 'cause you drank so much water. Excuse me. But there's a duh here.
So pleasure and wisdom go hand in hand.
Life and wisdom goes hand in hand. Yes, just because something is good in small or moderate amounts doesn't mean it's good in overwhelming amounts. So that's a simplistic argument. It's a little bit silly. And you have to make sure to smack it down really quick when your client says that. Um, so this is such a great part of your experience with a client. Like, like, is this really so awful when you work with pleasure with a client? So you wanna make the process fun, you wanna, you wanna make sure they're laughing and smiling a little bit When you're in this conversation and you wanna negotiate with them, what are the pleasures you can do every day? Some clients really need to experience more pleasure with food in the moment. And what does that mean? Of course, in order to experience pleasure, my friends, you have to be present. You have to be aware. You gotta be slowing down. You have to be in your body and experiencing sensation. If you're disappeared from the body so outta here's an out body experience, sleep. You're not in your body, you're not present in your body, it's okay. Something else takes over.
A lot of times what happens is we're doing something pleasurable, but we're not present to it. And if you're not present to it, you might as well be asleep. So you're not getting the sensation, therefore, you're disembodied. When you allow yourself to experience sensation, you embody. It's just really that simple. And when you embody something good happens,
you are helping your client land on planet earth. And the more they embody, the more they experience their own body, the more they become a master of their own body. They become more educated about their own body. And that experience of pleasure, of sensation will begin to teach your client. They will learn certain things. Oh, you know, this experience is really pleasurable, but when I do it too much, it becomes unpleasurable. I mean, think about it, your favorite food that gives you the most pleasure. You eat it, you enjoy it, you get pleasure from it. Now if you ate 20 pounds of it, you would get sick to your stomach, you'd vomit, and you'd probably never wanna eat that food again.
So we're learning how to be in relationship with pleasure. It's very specific. So many things give us pleasure, but in a certain amount there's certain people that give you a lot of pleasure, but if you hang out with them for more than an hour or a day or three days, they start to get on your nerves pleasurable for an hour. You know, a lot of people say that about family or parents or certain friends, that it's, you're good to go for a certain amount of time.
So that's what this is about. It's experimenting, it's exploring. Your client is exploring their relationship with pleasure. They're, they're like a kid again, and they're learning about their body. So it's your job to make this interesting to them. It's your job to be inspiring them as best you can.
Okay? It has talk some more, another third level weight loss strategy. Movement. Movement, movement, movement as opposed to exercise. So you can only go here if you've been working with your client and you've noticed, huh, my client, you know, he exercises at the gym, he's on the treadmill, he's on the bicycle, or she's out there jogging. And I wonder, hmm, hmm, hmm if that's what they really wanna do. Or you might notice your client who doesn't do any kind of movement or exercise, maybe they've told you they don't like it, maybe they've told you they don't wanna do it. So right now, my friends, this conversation that we're having about movement is for people who can move. Because you will occasionally have a client where a lot of movement's not an option for them because of their size, because of their weight, because of their health, because of their knees.
So, well, actually, let's cover that first. If you are with a client who's very, very limited, your job is to help them do anything that helps them embody via movement. So what I wanna say is, there's a lot of people who will complain, I'm too big, my knees hurt too much to exercise. You know, a lot of those people can swim, quite honestly. You put 'em in water and there they go. So it's seeing if you can find something that they can do. A lot of people, you put them in a gentle yoga class where they can begin to feel and experience their body. Gentle yoga, easy yoga. And those classes exist, all different kinds of yoga. Some, a lot of yogas are power yoga, hot yoga, and you gotta be a pretzel and an athlete. And there's people doing yoga classes who are dedicated to just helping others get in their body. It doesn't matter how old, how limited you are, what you look like, what you feel like, let's do it. So for a lot of people who are limited, gentle yoga can work, swimming can work, you can have them sit in a chair and do movement exercises with a chair. There's all kinds of great kundalini yoga exercises a person can do in a chair with their upper body, with their arms, with their neck, and with their breathing.
So Kundalini yoga is another great one because there's all kinds of exercises you could do. So you could either look it up, you can find them a Kundalini yoga teacher in their area. So you have to get a little bit creative here with your client who can't move. And if they can't move, then they can't move. And movement's not an option. So you work in other places. Okay, next, you have a lot of people who are, they've been burned by the world of movement and exercise. They have been shamed potentially, or from a young age, they've been given a view of exercise by the world that has them wanna run the other way. Um, and uh, I'm a firm believer that there are many people who have been mildly traumatized and or turned off from exercise based on early experiences of being in gym class somewhere early experiences of being in a team sport. So a lot of times when you're young, you get thrown into the wrong class, the wrong sport, and it doesn't work for you. And we throw out the baby with the bath water. So there's a lot of people who have been turned off, and you have to find with them what they might like because they're busy thinking. Your client who's been turned off to exercise is thinking inside their own brain. Uh, you know, I can't, walking is not exercise. Gentle yoga is not exercise. Dance is not exercise. Swimming is not exercise. Getting on my bike and doing a gentle bike ride isn't exercise. What I wanna say is, if you are moving, it's exercise, it, any kind of movement, any is better than none. And what I'm telling you from a metabolic standpoint, and this is going to fly in the face of everything you've ever heard about movement and exercise and weight and calorie burning. For my client who's not exercising, I don't care what they do, as long as they move in a way that they enjoy y because they're getting in their body. And when you get in your body, there's a magical X factor that happens that scientifically we are not able to describe. But I have seen it a million times. I have felt it in my own life. I've watched people do this. I have helped people lose all. I have helped a lot of people lose a lot of weight
that is walking, that was their exercise. Walking, gentle bike riding, gentle swimming, gentle yoga classes, dancing, ballroom dancing,
free dancing, and, and not, you know, sweating like a crazy person. It's getting in the body and being in the affirmation called it, hello world, it's me. I'm alive, I'm here, I'm in my body. And you know something, all bodies move.
Everything in the animal kingdom, the mammalian kingdom
in the fishes, in the lizards, in the amphibians, in the single celled organisms, they all moving. We gotta move. Yeah, there's some creatures that don't do a lot of movement. Humans ain't one of those. We have to do some. And the key for your weight loss client is to have them do movement that they can look you in the eye and say, yeah, that feels good. That sounds good to me.
So for non exercises, I want to have them do any kind of movement that feels good. These are the ones who've been turned off to exercise. Now, you will also get a small subset of clients who
they just don't like to move. You know, it's not a question of severe limitation.
It's not even, it's, it's just a question of, eh, I don't wanna do it. They have a certain inertia when it comes to movement. What I'm noticing is for that level of client, I want them to do something on a regular basis. Regular can mean three, four times a week. I want to explore, explore, experiment with them, a kind of movement that they try, let's try this. Okay, that didn't work. Let's try that. Okay, that didn't work. Let's try this. I want you to find something that works for that group of people. Just sometimes, again, walking. Now, they're not gonna think walking does it, but if I can get my client who's doing nothing in terms of moving or exercise to walk every day for 20 or 30 minutes or more, that's huge.
And then you know something, or they come back and tell me that they like it, I'm gonna go, great. Are there any particular places you really love to walk? Any places out in nature that really inspire you? And you know, something and, and maybe they're gonna go to a nice nature spot. You're trying to get them to have a good experience of life. That's what you're doing. Because when you start to get your client to have a better experience of life based on their work with you, because now they're walking and now they're outside, and now they're doing what's natural to the body, all of a sudden they're gonna start to breathe more. In fact, I might ask my client that I've had clients who that's what I do with them. Just walk. Just walk. Okay, your knees are in pain. How long could you walk? 10 minutes. Great, 10 minutes, breathe. You're asking your client to inhabit their body because chances are they've been out of it and you're inviting them back in. Now you have your other subset of clients who are, they exercise and they're happy to do so. Well, I'm not gonna say they're happy to do so. You have your clients who are exercisers, who are motivated because they wanna lose weight and they know fitness is good, and they know they should be fit. They ought to be fit, they wanna be fit. And they are especially using some type of exercise or fitness so they can calorie burn.
Okay? Makes sense. They want a calorie burn. Now what I'm noticing is, and what I want you to notice is,
is your client doing movement and exercise and running and jogging and whatever it is they're doing? And I usually, I want you to keep your eyes on the intense exercises. Oh yeah. I go to the gym every day for an hour and a half and I do aerobics, and I want you to listen for that person who's coming from their head. I want you to listen to that person who's doing what they think they're supposed to do.
Now, we're only changing that person if they're coming to you with a complaint. I have had, I can't, uh, you know, I wish I can go back in time and actually keep track in statistics. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of clients over the years who are doing exercise that they simply don't like, and they're doing it regularly and they're doing it religiously, and they have weight loss resistance.
Okay? So for the regular exercisers who have weight loss resistance and who I have asserted that they don't really like the movement that they're doing, how do I know that? Because I've asked them, let me ask you a question, Mr. And Mrs. Client. So you go to the gym five days a week, you're working out for 90 minutes. You do your aerobic class, you do your step class, whatever it is. If everything burned the same amount of calories and and burned a lot, what kind of movement would you do? Like, what would you enjoy most? And you listen to that list and you ask your client to start going and doing that. I want to eliminate exercise that my client truly does not enjoy. Now granted, there are certain exercises that we do that, yeah, there's a little bit of push and a little bit of force and a little bit of shove. And it's not easy, but we do it because there's a part of us that enjoys it. And there's a part of us that loves how we feel afterwards. So that's okay. So I'm not talking that every single aspect of every moment of the exercise has to be enjoyable, but there's people who, that's all that they do. They're doing exercise simply for the result of this is gonna burn calories. That's the only reason why they're in it. And if that's what they're doing and they're weight loss resistant, I'm taking my client off of that strategy.
Is that making sense, my friends? So this is very simple. This is very simple. But I'm gonna tell you something. You can make a big difference in your client's life. You could blow people's minds when a, their weight loss resistance, they're coming to see you, you start working on this, you take them off of exercise that they don't like, and you put them on movement that they do like, and you watch what happens. You give it a month or two. It's an experiment. Let's see what happens. If this doesn't work, you can go back to all that exercise that you can stand and punish yourself from now until the cows come home. Okay, next, embodiment practices. So I want you to refer to the various presentations and notes on this topic. So this is all about all the little ways, my friends, that you help your client get back into their body. Now you're simply helping your client to enjoy life. You are helping your client love their body from the inside out. And embodiment practice. It could be mirror work that you do with your client. Mirror work is always pretty powerful. You gotta practice it on your own. First. And embodiment practice might mean you ask your client, maybe they have a friend they could exchange massage with because they're not getting touch, or if they can afford it, they get regular touch that they pay for. For some people that helps them get back into their body.
For some people embodiment practice might be that they take a dance class,
it could be a yoga class, it could be that they learn breathing exercises and embodiment practice could be that they just spend time in nature. You don't even have to move much. You can find your spot where you sit and you look and you breathe, and maybe you take off your shoes and your socks and you feel the ground under your feet.
You are looking for ways to notice or invent that you can help your client land in their body just a little bit more.
You know, for some people it's listening to music more, but listening to music in a way that helps them embody it. So maybe it means they take five or 10 minutes at night and play their favorite music and dance by themselves and just move For some people, creating that kind of intimacy is very powerful.
For a lot of men that I've worked with, um,
I might put them on the embodiment practice called weightlifting. There's just a part of them that needs that masculine energy of push and force and work a little harder and build up resistance. Resistance training. There's a lot of men who have softened because they've learned how to be gentle and they're trying to get back into their body and they don't realize that for them it might be some of the masculine energy that gets them in their body. For some women, they need to be in that masculine energy and need to be grabbing weights and feeling their own strength. So for many people, weightlifting is a great embodiment practice, especially for somebody who hasn't been doing that and who is not more in their muscles, you know, in, in different embodiment systems. Uh, you know, they say that some people are more in their muscles. Some people are more in their bony structure structure. Some people are more in their nervous system. Uh, it's an interesting one. So anyway, so it's learning how to help your clients in ways other than food to step into their body. Because you know something, oftentimes that's where the action is. That's where the work is.
Okay? Body wisdom slash intuitive eating. I'm kind of slamming those terms together. I'm really focusing on the intuitive slash instinctive eating part. So when I am saying intuitive eating right now, I'm not necessarily thinking of any official definition of intuitive eating. I'm not thinking of a system to systematize intuitive eating at this stage of the game is counterintuitive. It's, it's going against what I'm looking for. Um, so when I say intuitive eating, it's all about tuning into one's inner guidance when it comes to food. This is a game. This is play, this is exploration. Many people are interested in this. Many people are ready for this. Many people want to do this. Many people are afraid of this, and it's just not for them at this time. So you have to learn how to notice that and assess that in your client based on what you know about them and based on what they've said. If they're the kind of client that's come to see you and they've really been on it with you about telling them what to eat and when, and all of a sudden you're noticing after two, three months, four months of work that wow, they started to mention to you. Yeah, you know, there was one day I just felt like I just wasn't that hungry and I skipped this meal and that meal, and I felt okay. Or there was one day that all of a sudden I started craving, you know, strawberries and I was eating strawberries, and it felt so good. And I haven't had, you know, you're just listening for your client and what they say. So again, it's often best to do this exploration with clients who express interest.
And it's also best to do this when your client is in a better place. This is a little more advanced in terms of a client has to be able to relax with their choices. If they're still steeped in the toxic nutritional belief that food is the enemy. If they're a fast eater, no, this isn't gonna work. Intuitive eating, they're not ready for that.
This is why you just can't. So intuitive eating is such a great strategy, but you just can't take this strategy and say, because it's so great, I'm gonna apply this to everybody. Client has to be ready for it. They have to be, they've had to have some wins. They have to be a little bit more embodied. They have to have an interest. What is intuitive eating? Ask yourself, tune in. What's my body calling for at this meal, at this snack? What would nourish me? What would feel good if my body was a genius? What would it be asking to eat right now? And then you listen for the answer and then you go for it. And then afterwards you ask yourself, okay, I just ate that meal. How do I feel? How do I feel now? How do I feel an hour later? How do I feel two hours later? You are noticing, is there a connection between what I ate then and how I feel now? And you're gathering information? Oh yeah. You know, I tuned into my intuition and it said I should just eat the blueberry pie and the apple pie and the cheesecake and not and, and not stop. Yep. That's what my intuition said. And I do that, and now I feel sick to my stomach. Got it. So that wasn't really my intuition. Hmm. Okay. There's a nice lesson.
So a lot of times we get our quote unquote intuitive hits or insights, and then you gotta test it out with life and see if it works. It's just building a muscle. You're gonna be wrong. Your client's gonna be wrong, and then they're gonna be right, and they're gonna be various shades of color in between.
So it's learning to be with the body as a living, growing, expanding organism that is constantly gathering data and giving feedback. Your body is always giving feedback. It is us learning how to listen to that feedback and read the feedback in our own body.
The more you can listen to feedback and read the feedback of your own body, what I want to suggest to you is the more you will have the ability, if you practice it to listen to the feedback of someone else's body, the degree that you can tune into someone else's body is the degree that you have practiced tuning into your own. So it's an experiment
that's part of the beauty of this work. You're working on yourself, you are learning to help others. And the better you get with you, the easier it is to work with others.
So again, it's you practicing your intuitive eating, you noticing the foods you're drawn to, the foods you're attracted to, the foods you are, quote unquote craving.
You listen to your body's intuitions about what to eat. You try it out, you see what happened. There's no right or wrong here. If you wanna beat yourself up, if you ate something intuitively and you got sick, feel free to beat yourself up. Um, but that's not useful. It's just information. It's learning how to go, oh, I'm a scientist. I tried that experiment, Yoko, I don't feel so good. Better not do that again.
So my friends were learning that when you go into self-rejection, when your client goes into self-rejection, self-attack, self-blame, self-hate, we're learning to shorten the amount of time that we live there for ourselves. And then our client lives there. Many people are living in self attack and self blame around food and body. They live there for a lifetime. So a lifetime is a long time in the universe of things. I work with a client, I wanna get them to, okay, let's not you attack yourself in terms of food and body for your entire life. Let's, let's start to turn that around. You're 30 years old, you're 20 years old, you're 40 years old. Let's turn that around now. So you've only spent a partial amount of your lifetime
attacking self, hating self when it comes to food and body.
In fact, let's go from, you know, you overeat, you bingey, maybe you gain five pounds, you can hate yourself for a year. Let's cut that down to a month of self-hate, or let's cut it down to a week. So gradually all we're doing is we're inviting our client into consciousness more and more when it comes to their self attack, their self blame, their self-hate, or the way they check out of their body. Because usually when people have a, what they consider a failure, they overate, they binge ate, they emotionally ate, okay, well if I do that now I'm gonna just trash myself or screw it, or I can't do this. And that's a form of asleep. That's a form of unconsciousness to say, okay, well I'm trying to learn how to read. I can't learn how to read. Screw it, I'm just gonna throw out my textbooks. I'm never gonna go to school again. No, you dust yourself off. When you fall down, you get back up and you go, okay, I'm starting over again. I'm learning. I'm a beginner here. That's what we're doing for self. That's certainly what we're doing with our clients. We're trying to shorten the amount of time that they stay in unconsciousness, darkness, self-rejection, self-hate. So if you emotionally ate, I want you to self reject for a minute and then stop. Great, just for a minute. Done over, learn your lesson.
So it's shortening the amount of time when you shorten the amount of time you are
creating a great success. Okay? Mm-Hmm. Let's move into a fourth level strategy. You've worked on some of these.
Now, again, my friends, this is a cookie cutter approach. I'm not saying this is what you do with every client. I'm saying this is what you do if you don't know what to do, and you're so unclear, uncertain. I'm saying, okay, here's, here's a logical sequence. For some people, this fourth level strategy I might do in a second session, I might do as a first level strategy.
But I'm saying, if you're new to this and you're uncertain, then you wait a while. Because when you're gonna work with archetypes, that's fourth level strategy. I'm gonna suggest working with the archetypes is a fourth level strategy. By now, if your client's with you, you've created a connection, you have some successes, they're wanting to work with you, and they're open and interested in what you have to say. So that's when I might start the conversations of Princess Queen or Prince King. So this is a great, great, great, great, great first foray into your client's personal and inner world. Now, I'm gonna say for women, this is one of the most powerful psychological distinctions you can work with. This is particularly an intellectual intervention for women that don't fully understand themselves or where they are at. Few things you can do with a female client can be such a huge game changer. And when you go into the conversation of Princess and Queen, it's an ongoing conversation. So this conversation looks like, you know, for your woman who is a queen in training 40 to 49 or queen age 50 and above, you're gonna notice, is she stepping into her queen hood or is she still being in princess mode in some way, shape, or form? You're going to explain the archetypes, you're going to present it in an interesting and fun way. And then you're gonna let her know that you're being, you've been observing her, and as you've been getting to know her, you're seeing the place where, and hey, by the way, miss client, you know, this is a lot of women in our world, they're a queen in training, or they're of Queen's age, and they're still trying to be a princess.
Powerful distinction. Or if you're working with a princess age client, you're identifying them. You're saying, Hey, you know something, you're still in your princess stage. And, and by princess we don't mean a negative term. This is your eventual destiny as a queen. And right now you're a princess princess. And when we're in the princess stage, there's, there's some upheaval, there's a lot of uncertainty, and there's a lot of shifting, and there's a lot of changing. And generally, when we're in the princess stage, we are learning how to resource ourselves. We're learning how to find self approval from the inside. But when we're an early princess, like, you know, zero to 20, we're naturally looking for love and acceptance from the outside. Because as children, that's what we're taught. Our parents say, good girl, good boy, bad girl, bad boy. So the world outside of us is telling us if we're good or bad, and we're trying to listen to what the world tells us. The challenge is, the world isn't always giving us good information. The challenge is images, internet, social media, movies, magazines, they're often telling us to look and have a certain weight that is impossible.
And then we think I'm a good girl. If I look like that, I'm a bad girl if I don't. So you have to learn Miss Princess, that, hmm, we haven't been given the best information from the world,
and it might take you a little time, but how do we learn to love what we got right now? How do you learn to be in this body that you have right now? That's a difficult one. I get it.
But that's your job, and it's gonna take time. But you can get there. You can get there to a place of self-love. You can get to a place where you learn how to feed your body and nourish yourself in a good way. You can get to the place where you can start to reach your natural weight,
but in order to do that, you can't punish yourself. Because here's what happens. When we punish our self attack, we go into stress response. So you see where I'm taking this conversation. So you're identifying for your client, you're saying, okay, here's the archetypal stage you're at in terms of, you know, the way I've learned to look at these things. And I'm not saying this is absolute, but this is can be a pretty powerful distinction for you, miss client. Okay? For men, I especially focus, you know, there's a darn good chance you're not gonna have a lot of young male clients. You're not gonna have a lot of teenage male clients. You're not gonna have a lot of male clients in their twenties, though you might. Um, but the work with, um, the Prince King is especially, especially more powerful for men who are in the king in training or of King Age who haven't fully stepped into their king hood. It's useful for young men to let them know that they have to step into consciousness. And you're in your ki you're in your print stage, but there's a lower prince and there's a more mature and evolved prince. The lower prince is in it for himself. He's selfish. He wants what he wants, he wants more this, more to have more money, more et cetera. And he just wants to keep accumulating and accumulating. And he is not necessarily noticing what other people feel. He might not notice even what he's feeling.
We're asking men when we're talking about archetypes to consciously mature and be responsible for their destiny. That's one of the best things you can do for your male client and for your very masculine centered female client asking them to consciously mature and be responsible for their destiny. It's about inviting men to reach their highest potential based on how you present the archetype to them.
It's that simple. It's a conversation. You talk about what it is to be a king for a man of king's age, you're taking care of your kingdom. A king doesn't sit on his throne and say, oh, am I okay? I really don't feel like, you know, taking care of myself today. Oh, you know, I just want to just go eat and go sit and watch tv. Are you gonna follow that king? Or are you gonna follow a king who has an idea, who has a plan, who has a destiny, who has a bigger vision for his kingdom, for his life, for the people around him, for the world around him?
Men will intuitively understand what you're saying when you're in that conversation with them. And you can be a young person saying that to an older man, that's fine. Like, Hey, I know this might sound, I, I always, if ever I'm working with an older client, especially when I was younger, I was seeing clients when I was in my early twenties and I'd be working with people in their forties and fifties. I actually learned from a young age, listen, I know I'm younger than you and I know you have more life experience and you're wiser than me in a lot of ways. And us young people often see things that you guys don't. So I'm just raising my hand and saying, based on what I've learned, here's what I see might be going on for you.
So right then and there, you've helped condition your clients listening so they could better hear you. I am not necessarily going to instantly listen to the wise advice of a person who's much younger than me, but when they frame it that, Hey, I know you are older than me and you've had more life experience and you're wiser in so many different ways, and you know, you know what? Know what it was like when you were young. You could see things that the adult world didn't always notice. So I'm just raising my hand as your practitioner and saying, here's what I see. Whew. It's such a great strategy.
So when you're working with the royal archetypes, it's just a series of conversations that matter with your client. You're not fixing or ting someone. You're mentoring them. You're being in a conversation. You're learning how to listen to your client. You're learning how to read them. You're learning to see where they are at in their life and call them into a higher place. We're always looking to call our clients into a higher place, my friends, where is light calling my client? Question number four, the most important question you can ask the universe on behalf of your client, that you can ask the wisdom of the universe on behalf of your client. Where's live calling them? So you're explaining the archetypes and you're asking them what it could look like. If they're more in their king, their queen, or their evolved prince, or they evolved princess, how would they act? What would you do? How would you feel different inside? How would you show up differently in the world?
Okay, here's the next level. Weight loss strategy. Fifth level. You've worked in some of these other places and you're thinking, okay, I'm new at this. I don't know what to do next. Hey, notice the key areas in life where a person can de-stress. So you've asked the four questions, what's stressing my client? What's their biggest stress, biggest fear in life?
So some of the key areas in life that you are listening for can be primary relationship, the person's family of origin, the person's relationship with work and money. I'm saying these are three particular areas for the average person that chances are the average person that you meet is gonna have some stress in this neighborhood, primary relationship, family of origin, work, and money.
Now, might this be irrelevant to your weight loss client? Absolutely, a hundred percent. You have to determine that. Why? Because you've gotten to know your client right now. You know them. You've been working with them, you've been checking in with them every session. You've been getting updates, every session about life unfolding. So you have an idea if they're married or if they're in a relationship or they're not in a relationship. You have an idea who the most important people are in that person's life. Hopefully you have a little bit of an idea about their family of origin, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, the key people who are close to them. And hopefully you have a sense of work and money for them. Like, like what is their relationship with money? Is there money, stress? Is there work stress, both, et cetera. Okay. So what I wanna say is when you start to work with your client in de-stressing in the key areas of life. Now when I say de-stress, we're talking about remember, stress is fine, stress is good, stress is okay. Every human being has stress. Most human beings have some amount of stress every day. We're talking about places where we can turn down the heat on the stress. Some of us haven't learned how to manage our stress in the best way in the key areas of life. We're learning, we're learning, we're learning, we're learning. Some of us have a lot of self-chosen stress. The amount of stress that we're feeling, um, can be toned down as we grow and become more aware and more conscious. So as you learn to work with this, I wanna suggest this puts you in the realm of a health coach who is pretty skilled as a life coach. So really what you're learning in this training, you're not learning how to be a health coach. You're learning how to be a life coach. And part of life is health.
Part of health is looking at your life. You're making connections between a client's nutritional status and the primary domains of their life.
So work, money, career, parents, family, relationship, and others. These are all potent drivers. They can be potent drivers of our unwanted eating habits. It can be a potent driver of our metabolism. Because if I'm living in intense stress about my relationship challenge that I haven't really worked with, if I'm still holding a parent is unforgiven, if I am just all up in a knot around money, then I'm creating a kind of stress that might be driving me to go to food for stress relief,
or I might be creating the kind of stress chemistry that is impacting my appetite regulation and my calorie burning capacity and my digestion. And when you impact digestion, you are impacting your health on every level imaginable. So my friends, this level of work with a client is a significant part of what we do in this work. What you're learning and a place where you will continue to practice in and excel as a way to be truly effective and successful with your clients.
So I hope you're getting that at some point in your professional practice. I want you to be able to be good at assessing a person after 2, 3, 4 sessions and understanding what stresses them out. You know, in the little ways. What's the list of things in general that stress my client out and what's their biggest life stressors? And at some point, you're gonna cycle to their biggest life stressors to see
How you can work with that in a way that helps your client relax into life more, relax into their body more,
and to see what are the connections, if any, between this part of my client's life and their relationship with food. Because oftentimes we will make our relationship with food important. So here's what I want you to get. Relationship with food becomes more important to the mind when we have stressors and other places of life that, that we can't manage or deal with. So I have relationship stresses. I have work, stress and money. Stress and stress about my parents. I just can't handle it. I don't know what to do. It's freaking intense. Aha. The mind says, the unconscious mind says, but I know I can't control that. What can I control? I can control food. So lemme just focus on food. So food becomes a symbolic playground of the psyche where we play out a lot of our dramas around food as a strange substitute for actually working on my relationship, actually working on my relationship with work and money, actually working on my relationship with my parents. It's easy for us to transpose that onto food. The mind will do that unconsciously.
That's why people have certain people have symbolic behaviors that we call obsessive somebody who obsessively washes their hands. I think there's something wrong with them. Well, actually, what their mind is doing, what the psyche is doing is it's finding a place that they can control. Damn, I can't control these crazy worlds, this crazy life, all this crazy nonsense, but I can wash my hands whenever I want to and I can wash off just bacteria and dirt and I can make these hands clean because whoof, this is a crazy world and it's, and it's causing me all this nonsense, but I'm gonna symbolically just wash my hands clean of it and I'm gonna do it 20 times a day or 50 times a day or what, whatever. It's every unwanted behavior, every behavior, every symptom. It has a brilliant reason rooted somewhere in psychology or biology or both. When we become more obsessed about food, oftentimes what's happening is there's other life areas that need our attention.
But because we're not good in those life areas, we're not comfortable there. We haven't been trained or taught or educated, or we don't have help or love or support. The symbolic nature of the psyche turns us into the neighborhood called food control your food, control your calories, control your exercise. Have a perfect body that's gonna make everything okay, can fix your relationship, can fix all this other crazy nonsense. But damn, if you have a perfect body that that, that's gonna make everything okay.
Now, if you don't feel comfortable and willing to be in such conversations, my friends, about anything you're learning in this training, then don't worry and don't engage your client in this way. Then just begin by engaging your client in the ways that you feel good about now, there might be places where you wanna engage your client, you're a little nervous, you're a little uncomfortable, but you know it's gonna be right for you to have a conversation with your client and ask them about sexuality and their sex life.
For a lot of people, that's the hard conversation. For a lot of practitioners, for a lot of practitioner, the hard conversation is to talk about religion and spirituality. Both of those conversations, I promise you, used to be the most difficult conversations for me to have with another human being. I, I just say the way I was brought up and taught. You don't poke around and inquire about a person's religion or spirituality, especially if you don't know them really well, and you certainly don't inquire about their sexuality, their sex, their sex life, and how's it going for you? Once I started getting comfortable in those realms, it's almost ridiculous how easy it's become. More to the point, it's fascinating at how rich those areas are that I am learning with my clients.
Oftentimes, it's the places we don't go with our clients where the action is, because the world has taught us not to go there.
And the places where the action is, are the places where the action is. And that's really what we're looking for. The action with your client when they're overeating and emotional eating and binge eating and dealing with weight loss resistant. The action isn't exclusively with food. That's what your weight loss client thinks, because that's what the world tells them and that's what they've been taught. And it kind of makes sense.
But for a lot of clients, not all the action is somewhere else. So let me state it in another way. I'm gonna boil down psychology into the simplest of terms, which most of psychology would kind of hate, but I think this is very useful. One way, one lens, one approach into understanding psychology in the most simplest of ways is that at any given time in the life of a human, there are certain key areas that are calling for our attention. Specifically calling for our attention and growth and learning.
I'm gonna say that again for every human being, this is a writer downer, my friends. And if you start to practice this and play with this, I guarantee you, you're gonna see that I'm hitting the target here for any human at any given time in life, the workshop of life is teaching them something. It's asking them to focus on a particular area or areas That are of utmost important for that person at that time in life. Something's up for them at that time in life, whatever it is.
Parenting, family, kids, money, work, sex, religion, God, food, food, allergies, exercise, learning to be angry, learning to be non angry, learning to focus more, learning to have more fun, learning to be more respons. It is spots. There's a gazillion different things.
You are learning how to notice on behalf of your client. Where's the action? Where is life calling my client? What is life asking my client to learn about right now? Where are they at in the school of life?
That's a big ass question. It's a beautiful question. It's a powerful question. I'm saying. Ultimately, I want you to be able to go there. And if you're not comfortable, you have plenty of other places to work to be effective and to be the most effective practitioner you can be. I'm asking you to get comfortable here and start exploring these realms, my friends, this is life. And a good place to start would be to engage. You know, if you are really uncomfortable with some of these personal domains that we're talking about here, then work. You should work with an experienced practitioner yourself, where you're the client and they can help you explore these dimensions. So one of the great ways to learn this work, if you can afford to do so, is to be in your own relationship with a coach or a practitioner where somebody is mentoring you, guiding you, supporting you, coaching you in these areas. So you could see what it's like and you could see what it feels like.
What a good thing. Ooh, la la. Okay, so let's talk about primary relationship for a moment. So primary relationship, as you remember, means your spouse, Significant other, whatever that means, whoever is the key relationship in your client's life. Now, for some people, a small percentage, their key relationship, believe it or not, is a boss. They're single, they don't have a lot of family. They work closely. Like their job is everything. And their boss is the person. They're always around. And every session, I'm talking about that person's boss with them, because that's their primary relationship, that's fine. Sometimes it could be a single parent. Their primary relationship is with their child. I've had clients who their primary relationship is just with their best friend. It doesn't matter. There's no judgment. Your primary relationship should be this, this, that, or the other thing. Who's your client's primary? You know, sometimes the primary relationship is with a person in their head. I mean that it's with the person they divorced two years ago, or even 10 years ago.
So if a person truly doesn't have a primary relationship, chances are there's a primary relationship in their head that they're still working on. Sometimes it's a pet.
So the bottom line, here's what I wanna say to you, and I know you know this, but let me just spell it out. Relationships have tremendous power. Relationships have tremendous power. If you just think of loving romantic partnerships, most people are either in a significant relationship, they're wanting a significant relationship, they're recovering from a significant relationship, they're trying to position themselves to be in a significant relationship, even if they're not ready yet, we're in somehow in relationship with a significant relationship, whether we're in a significant relationship or not. And if we're choosing to be consciously single, oftentimes for a lot, for a lot of people, that's by itself difficult because we're so programmed at a very deep cellular level to be in relationship. My point, relationships just have a lot of power. My friends and power is good. We love power. So we're looking at the power domains of a human's life. And we're understanding that
if in this powerful domain called significant relationship, I'm having a powerful challenge with my partner, there's disconnection. There's not a lot of love, there's not communication, there's unprocessed, undigested experience, there's hurt, there's something going on that's not being managed or addressed. I know that that will affect my client's metabolism. It can, and I know that can affect my client's relationship with food, their eating habits, their metabolism. Everything is a darn good chance.
Oftentimes, my friends, oftentimes a client's food or health challenges are the direct result of relationship dynamics. And if it's not the direct result of relationship dynamics, relationship dynamics are a factor to some degree. So personal power equals metabolic power. As we become the person, we're more and more meant to be in this world, our body has the best chance of becoming what it's meant to be. So what I'm saying is, for my client who is trying to lose weight and they're weight loss resistant, and we are doing all these things and we're getting some decent results here, and there's a little bit of movement, my client's feeling better. Maybe they've lost some weight, maybe they haven't. Maybe secondary health complaints have cleared up and now I'm ready for a fifth level weight loss strategy. And I'm like, okay, let's start to get into more of the personal dimensions of my client's life. Relationship is a place I wanna look at because if I can help my client be in better relationship with their relationship, help them with relationship tools, help them with understanding, you're not trying to fix your client's messed up relationship. You are trying to give them insight, support, help, coaching that will help them get clearer about how they are being in relationship and how they can take responsibility, what they can do to further the action. Because when you help a person grow in that realm, how can it not impact their health in a good way? Come on. You know this, when you're feeling garbage about your relationship, you feel like garbage. You don't feel good. A relationship challenge can make you feel stressed out. It can make you feel depressed. It can make you feel miserable. It can make you want to turn to food.
When something starts to heal, when something gets better, you're hopeful, you're inspired, you got a little more energy, you're more willing to take care of yourself. You see what I'm saying? Everything connects to everything else. So the relationship might not be the thing, but it's a thing. It's all connected. So what I'm saying to you, my friends, is even though it might not seem connected, when you start to work in this realm, it has to impact your client's metabolism. It will in some way, shape, or form impact their relationship with food, their body image, their outlook on life.
Here's the thing, everybody thinks that when you look good, you're gonna feel better, look good, feel better. Okay, exercise, diet. Ah, I lost 20 pounds, I look good. Now I feel better For many people, that's true, no problem. But here's what I wanna say, the opposite is true as well. It's a paradox. When you feel good, when you feel good, I don't care what you look like, when you feel good, I don't care how much you weigh. When you feel good and you look in the mirror, you're actually gonna look a little better to yourself. Think about this. Think about any given day that you wake up to the world on a day that for some reason you wake up and you just feel good. For whatever reason, I don't know what happened. You wake up, you feel good. I promise you, you look in the mirror that day, you, you look good. You think you look good.
Now, if you wake up hating yourself, you're depressed. Ugh. Yeah. And you look in the mirror, you don't look so good.
When we feel good, we tend to look good, literally. And emotionally, it's kind of like magic.
So as a client, as a person begins to feel better and better about who they are and better about their life, body image naturally shifts. Yes, you'll actually love the body more that you have right now. Yes, you can still want to change it, but we're changing the body from a place of self-love more and more rather than self-hate, self-attack, self-rejection, et cetera.
So you're gonna identify your primary, your client's primary relationship. You're gonna determine as best you can, what are the key stressors or challenges in that relationship? You're gonna wonder how might this be impacting their eating or their metabolism? And you're gonna coach them in the ways that you know how. So this isn't a relationship training. I actually have one of those online. Um, this is a place where you have to use your own tools that you've learned along the way, or you have to do more reading. If you wanna learn more about this because it's fun. This is part of your continuing education. But what I wanna say is, I don't care how old you are, you have some accumulated wisdom about relationship. You don't have to be a relationship expert, my friends, to be giving people relationship advice. Why do I say that? I will bet a hundred thousand dollars that chances are you have given relationship advice to a friend, a best friend,
somebody younger than you, your kid, a loved one, whoever. Chances are you've been sitting down with somebody at dinner or you've been on the phone with a friend who's calling you up and yaking about their relationship, and you gave some relationship advice. Do you not give your friend or your child relationship advice because you're not an expert? No. A lot of what we learn about relationship, we learn from the front lines. You learn from being a human being on planet earth, being in relationship. A lot of what we learn about relationship, we learn from observing relationships, not just your own, but the people around you. So you're learning how to observe more and notice connections.
It's a great place for you to engage as a practitioner. Use the wisdom, my friends, that you already have. And if you don't feel confident, then this is a place where you can do more reading or more studying.
Okay, let's talk about family of origin.
Now, I'm not gonna work on family of origin with a client in a first session, second session, third session, generally speaking. So unless you're an advanced practitioner and you just, you're just good at this, this is not something I bring up in general until I know that my client has a comfort level with me and I have a comfort level with them. And I know that we can get into some potentially murky waters with confidence. So family of origin definitely means parents. For many people, it also means their siblings. For many people, it means the primary adults in their early life. You know, my family of origin was definitely my parents, but it was equally in a strange way, my grandparents. And it was equally my uncles and my sisters and my cousins.
And for most people, for most people, the most important people in their family of origin will be their parents. Unless they're adopted. Unless a parent wasn't present, unless a grandparent or somebody else raised them. You know what I'm saying? So very simply put, our early family life tells us so much about who we are, why we are, and where we need to go. It's a juicy, juicy, juicy place. So a lot of people go, oh my God, I don't want to talk about a person's family because I could really mess them up. Okay, a couple of things. If you're afraid to go somewhere, don't go there. If you're that afraid, just there's no worries. Don't go there. Don't go there. Don't make yourself crazy. But I also wanna say, don't think you can mess up somebody. I I I have yet to hear of a person suing somebody, their friend, their loved one, their coach, because they said something about their parents that messed them up. If you are that afraid of speaking wisdom to a person, if you are that afraid of having a conversation, don't have it.
It's as simple as that. And this is a juicy place. You don't have to be a psychologist to talk about your parents, to talk about someone else's parents. A lot of what we're doing is where storytelling, we're listening, we're witnessing. You are first and foremost a witness. You are here to witness your client's journey. We, you and me and most human beings do not really get the value with a capital V-A-L-U-E-D, immense value of witnessing, of witnessing ourselves, of witnessing the life of another. How many times have you or your friend, you're, you're just, you're talking to your best friend and you just need to like vent. Just need to vent. Oftentimes venting is not a good accurate word to describe what we're doing. Oftentimes, yeah, a lot of people just vent and they blow off energy and they complain. But a lot of times when we're talking about, oh my God, here's what's happening with my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my husband, my wife, my kid, my parents we're being witnessed. Our friend is hearing our struggle. Our friend is hearing our pain. And when my friend hears me, you know what? I'm not alone. I'm not isolated. I feel like I'm joined with the rest of the universe. Someone knows I'm not alone.
The act of being witnessed is by itself healing.
So when my client is able, the the, the first dozen times a client told me a story about a past history of sexual abuse, which was something I was profoundly uncomfortable with.
What I realized was, and I wasn't doing anything, the story was just coming out and I realized what I was doing. I was being a witness. I go, wow, wow. Oh my god, that happened to you. I'm so sorry. And that's when you started overeating and that's when you started turning to food. And that's when the weight started to come on. Oh, makes sense. Wow. So right there, that by itself is healing.
Can you do more stuff with that? Sure. But you can literally stop right there. You've witnessed your a person's story. If we needed a professional or a psychologist or a psychoanalyst or a psychiatrist to witness our most difficult challenges, nobody would ever get anything done. 'cause there ain't enough of those people to go around.
So who do we tell? We tell our best friends. We tell the people we're close with or we tell no one.
So sometimes speaking, telling our story. So this is for anything your client says to you. If you don't know what to do, then be a witness. If your client happens to volunteer something, and this happens to a lot of practitioners, they're not ready for it. And all of a sudden the client starts talking about intense things about their life. And if you're sitting there sitting freaking out, you ain't doing your job. If you're freaking out, and forgive me for saying this, you have to, you have to mature. You have to grow up your job. And I mean this, and I say this affectionately, if your client says something about their life and their journey, they're not attacking you. They're just telling you, yeah, here's what happened to me, my family of origin. Here's what happened to me at work. Here's what happened to me with my sexuality, whatever it was. And you're freaking out. You're not doing your job. Your job is to be able to witness your client. Your job is to be able to breathe into life and relax with your client and witness them and go, I see you. Wow. And to take in their story without you going into your reaction. Because now it's about you. Because things happen, my friends, bad things happen. Good things happen. All kinds of things happen. Welcome to the world. We are learning how to be with people. Sometimes our weight challenges are connected to things that have happened that have been challenging in the past.
It's fine. That's humanity. Is that everybody with a eating challenge? Absolutely not. Is that some people? Absolutely, yes. Is that a piece of information I wanna know about my weight loss client? You bet. Do I have to then know how to fix them? No. At the very least, I'm saying learn how to witness people and see where the conversation goes. Be a friend in that moment. If you think you need to be a therapist and you don't have that training, you will fall on your face in that moment. What I'm saying to you is you be a friend and you deliver wisdom from your life.
And if you're so beside yourself that you don't know what to do, then maybe you suggest that that person goes and sees someone else who is better equipped to listen to their story and help them digest and assimilated better. So in a lot of ways, my friends, especially when it comes to family of origin, lemme get to the punchline here with family of origin, much of the work with family of origin is about making peace with where we come from, making peace with where we come from and evolving beyond where we come from. We come from where we come from. We have to evolve beyond that. So if you came from a dysfunctional household, an unconscious household, a mother who did this, a father who did that, parents who didn't do this, or who did do that, or should have done this or should have done that, I get it. I get it. And at some point we have to grow beyond that. We have to mature beyond that. We have to transform beyond that and not hold our past hostage or the people in it. Because when we hold our past hostage and the people in it, we cannot advance.
I'm stating that as a universal fact.
I'm, I'm postulating that. Try it on. See if that's true for you. See if that's true in your life experience. See if that's true in the people you've noticed around you. I will say it again. If we can't move beyond the challenging part of our origins to the best of our ability, our family of origin, everything that we don't like that happened, take out the list, write down the list. Everything that happened to me and my family of origin that sucked. That was no good, that I wish was better. Chances are every complaint that you or your client has is a hundred percent accurate or damn close to it. Chances are. And as we are able to grow beyond that, make peace with it, step out of our parents' house, step out of the place where we were born, then we're free to reinvent our life more and more and more. So that's the punchline there.
So you're gonna simply be asking questions and listen to the answers about your clients, their parents, their upbringing, their relationship with their parents. Have you forgiven your parents? You, you're noticing their level of anger or resentment or fear towards their parents is never about blame. I'm not gonna blame people in their life is about understanding. Parents are a powerful impact on our lives. The ultimate goal is to get that our parents were humans just like us. They were children at some point just like us. They might have suffered challenges and abuses that we don't know about that could have been similar or worse than ours.
Again, when we're no longer living in reaction to our parents, we are more free and we can heal like never before. Now this is a process. This is a journey. You will meet some people who like, I don't talk to my parents, nor will I.
And for certain people that's exactly where they need to be. So you have to gauge your client. It's a journey, it's a process. Sometimes we have to create a boundary and separation before we can do something else. For some people that's that's where they go. For some people, their journey is, nope, not gonna be working with my parents here. I'm not gonna be forgiving them. I am moving on with my life. It's not a conversation I want to be in. Somebody says that to me. I respect it. Why? Because that might literally be their journey. So I am making a generalization when I talk about family of origin because I believe that a majority of people need to make peace in some way, shape or form directly or indirectly with where they come from. And there's a small percentage of people who making peace means creating a boundary
and creating separation. And they're not gonna talk to their parent. And that's what it is for them. So I'm gonna respect that. I might poke and prod a little bit and see if, okay, is there any, is there any wiggle room here? And if there's not, then I'm respecting my client's journey. Everyone's different. So I've said something and I'm saying, is a generalization that I believe in my experience works for most human beings? Are there going to be exceptions to the rule? You bet, absolutely. And it's a journey and it changes.
Let's talk about work and money for a little bit.
I'm gonna call these a package deal most of the time. Most of the time for, for people generally stress around work and stress around money are usually connected and can have a profound influence on our stress and relaxation. Physiology, you know this, they can have a profound influence on our eating habits and our eating style relative to our work schedule, our work life, the culture at our work, the expectations of our work and where we are in the sort of food chain on the ladder of where we work. How much power do we have? How much freedom do we have to create the environment that would best suit us?
So oftentimes we have certain core beliefs about work and money that have a powerful grip on our psyche and our metabolism. But here I'm just looking to focus on with my client,
how can I help them more relax into their work and money challenges. So I'm not trying to help my client make more money. I'm not trying to help my client have a better job, even though if those two come up and I have some something to contribute in that realm, fine. So everything depends personally for you as the practitioner on your comfort and experience in this realm. But at the very least, what I'm asking you to do is notice based on the questioning that you've asked your client, you wanna know about their work schedule, their work life, their career, their work environment, what their work environment is when it comes to food. You wanna know about their relationship with money.
Is money a major stress in their life? Are they in a profound kind of battle with their partner around money? Um, so I just wanna notice that. I just wanna see what is the temperature, the level of stress, fear, anxiety, worry, concern in this realm. So I'm noticing that in seeing what kind of connections I could make. So you want the details and the complexity of your client's relationship with work and money. You're interviewing them. And you could even preface a deeper conversation. Like if you wanna ask your client more questions about work and money, hey, you know, I would love to ask you more questions about, about your job and work for you and your career. And I wanna get an idea more of your relationship with money. You know, part of that is some of the work I do. I'm looking for key stressors in a person's life because you know, we've already been in this conversation about stress and relaxation, physiology, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system dominance and how that affects our metabolism, our calorie burning metabolism, our digestive metabolism, how it affects our assimilation, how it affects our natural appetite regulations. So, you know, sometimes I'm wanting to understand these things.
So you're simply looking to make connections. And once you make connections, you're looking to coach your client into a more enlightened way of being in relationship with work and money.
And again, this is never something I'm gonna do in the beginning, three or four sessions with a client for most clients, for most clients. Now if I see that my client's whole life is about work and they don't have kids and they're not in a relationship and it's work, work, work, work, work, and their work life is clearly impacting their eating schedule, their eating rhythm, their food quality, their stress state around eating, then yes, I'm gonna start looking at that in the first few sessions.
If I notice that, that, that, that, that is the essence of my client's life. And I'm gonna tell you, I've had clients like that. I've had clients who work is their life, work is their partner, work is their marriage, their career is everything. Their career is their child. There's nothing wrong with that. That's who they are. Great. Okay, so we're gonna focus there. So I'm giving you the exception to the rule right now so you can notice that. And on average, this is something I go to after I focused on the mind-body nutrition realm, the eating realm, the food realm. Okay, my friends, I hope this was a useful conversation for you and there is more to come. We have been talking about protocols for weight. We've been in part three. I've got another part for you, part four coming up. We're gonna continue the conversation. I am looking forward to it. I hope you are. I hope this is helpful. And I'll see you on the other side.

PART 4

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Greeting once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. We've been in a conversation about some protocols to work with weight, a sequence to play with. This is part four of four, and we're finishing up this general approach to working with a weight loss client. And I want you to remember that in truth, anything goes, you and I, we have to use our intuition. Intuition is good. No two weight loss clients are the same. No 100 of them are the same. In other words, we are profoundly and beautifully unique. And when in doubt and with just about any client, you're always gonna start with what feels to you like the easiest place for you and them to work first. And those are the places where you are guesstimating. Have the best chance to see a short-term success. Remember, you're always committed to your client's highest goal, their greatest self-expression on earth, not their smaller goals, not just losing a bunch of pounds of body fat. Losing the fat is a side effect of us stepping into our potential, our personal potential, our metabolic potential, a natural and sustainable way of being with our body and being with life. Focus on your client's highest goals, my friends. And the magic of life takes over like never before. And that's what gives people the best opportunity to get where they wanna go. You know this by now, okay? We've been looking at different levels of strategy. So the next set of strategies to use, I'm just calling it a six level weight loss strategy, is to work with sexuality, sensuality slash polarity.
Again, this is not for every practitioner, start to explore this realm more deeply in your own life. If you are not comfortable here, how do you start to explore this realm in your own life? Talk to your friends, your boyfriends, your girlfriends, your loved ones. Talk to people that you can have honest and open conversations with. Read some books. Get the juices flowing in this realm for yourself. Write your own sexuality. Autobiography, an autobiography of you from the time you can. First remember up to present time, your relationship with your own sexuality. First time you ever kissed, the first time you ever jumped in bed with someone. The good times, the hard times, the challenging times, the openings, the breakthroughs, the pains, all of it, all the partners, all the hopes, all the dreams. What's your biography? What's a sequence of that? It's interesting to do that because then you can see it for yourself just in the writing of it. That is therapeutic, that is educational. And that's gonna better equip you to working with your own clients in this very powerful domain. So at the very least, you and I as practitioners must be aware of the interplay of our relationship with sexuality and our relationship with food and body. Uh, you can scarcely separate them. Our core beliefs and fears and boo boos, wounds and successes around this thing called our sexuality profoundly impacts our health and metabolism. I mean that, by the way, this doesn't mean you have to be having all kinds of sex and be this sexual person, your relationship with your sexuality. You could be celibate and have an amazing relationship with your own sexuality. That's a way to be in relationship with one's sexuality. Um, so it, it's, it's let go of what you think that has to look like. It could look like anything. As long as our relationship with food and body is made more conscious, we're looking at it. We're putting the light of consciousness on it. Does this work? Is this sustainable? Is this a reflection of me? Is this what I want? Truly ask that about food and body. We ask that around sexuality. Where am I at? What works? What doesn't? What phase of life am I in? What am I learning? What are the challenges here?
You know, when we shut down our sexuality, when we avoid it, when we push it to the side, when we sweep it under the rug, for whatever reason, our relationship with food often suffers, often.
So healing some of our fears and shames and withholds in this realm creates a healthier relationship with food and body. In my experience, at the very least, I am interested for you to discover at some point if your weight loss client or your body image challenge client has a past history of sexual abuse.
And I want you to make the connections. And if you want to open this up with your client. Now, again, this is not something I'm gonna start with. First and foremost, I'm putting this at the end of things because for most people who come to see you for weight loss, this is not a typical direction that they think you're gonna go. So go to all the other places first. You know, part of of this, my friend, is that
we have a relationship with our clients. And the best way to make that relationship work is if it's a true relationship. Meaning it's growing, it's evolving, it's changing, it's uplifting for both parties.
Growing, evolving, and changing means food can. And if we let it, most often will, the conversation around food and body will most often take us in all kinds of fascinating directions and areas and rabbit holes and interesting terrains with our client if we let it. So what I'm saying is this is one of those places where the relationship between you and your client I and can grow and evolve. Because now you have something else to talk about that is potentially extremely relevant to them. Extremely so, a good place to start with your client. If you notice you bring up the topic and you notice there's energy there, you notice there's connection there.
It's a great place to start with to have your client right there. Sexuality, autobiography. Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I just want you to start from the beginning, from your earliest memories of having a sexual impulse. What was it like for you as a tiny kid? When did you first notice that you had sexual body parts? When did you first get turned on? Who were you first attracted to first? Boyfriends, girlfriends, experiences, hardships, sufferings, pains, triumphs, great experiences. What happened in your sexuality in this relationship? That relationship? Go through 'em all up to present day.
Be as detailed as you like Mr. And Mrs. Client. And this is all about you being able to read your own book a little bit and, and your client might need to take a few weeks or more to do this.
I promise you. I have never done this with a client and it hasn't in some way blown their mind. I haven't even told them anything. They're just writing down their own story. They're collecting the details of their own life and putting it in one document. Now you can tell them and that, you know, this is not something I read. This is something for you. But what I'm going to ask you is once you've written it, I want you to read it and I want you to tell me about your experience writing it and reading it. I want you to take some bullet point notes, Mr. And Mrs. Kle, and tell me what came up for you when you were writing this. What came up for you when you were reading this? Did you notice anything, any insights, any aha moments, any surprises? Any places where you noticed there was some surprising pain, anger, hurt, resentment, any fond memories that came outta nowhere that really caught your attention? Anything, what, what stood out for you? Any connections that you made.
I promise you this is, this can then be a conversation for another five or 25 sessions. I mean it, depending on how good a conversationalist you are and obviously how interested your client is in this realm. But there's so much goodness that can come out of this and that can be connected to your client's relationship with food and body. Because they are going to begin to see that they're eating challenges, not just about food. They are going to begin to see that there's places in life that are connected to food and eating and weight and dieting that might be surprising for them.
And in this world, sexuality is simply a place that we, strangely enough, don't really go with good conversation, with good insight, with good listening, with good openness.
The conversation I've noticed around sexuality from a more evolved place is still, it's, it's, I don't know what happened to the sexual revolution in the sixties. I don't see it. I don't see us healthier in this area. Okay, a little healthier in terms of information out there. But what I still see amongst my client population and the people I've worked with is I still see people who have a, when they have a challenging relationship with food and body, that there is so often a connection to my sexuality and whatever that means to me, who I am as a sexual being, how I am as a sexual be.
And it makes perfect sense. 'cause sexuality is confusing or as confusing as what do I eat? We, we don't get good training and information from the beginning.
You know, working with sexuality just doesn't mean the sex act because ultimately it's about sensuality. How does your client move? How does your client dress? How do they eat? How do they dance? How do they drive? How do they touch and talk and sing? So yes, your client has an actual sex life and that's a piece of the puzzle for sure.
You know, how is your actual sex life? Where is it? Is it where you'd like it to be? Where do you wanna go with that? What's your hope?
This thing called sensuality is learning how to enjoy one's sensual, sexual nature in any given moment. So sensuality by itself is self-Fulfilling again is how you move, how you walk, how you be with your own body.
It's an appetite regulator. When one is pleased with one's sensual self sitting at a meal, eating is a sensual experience. You are using the senses is where that word comes from, my friends. When we are engaging our senses in a full way, where we're celebrating our senses, something good happens. Particularly with food. Many humans have a hard time celebrating the senses with food. We have a hard time celebrating the senses with sexuality. So our sensuality, when you work on it in one area, it tends to impact other areas of life as well. How could it not? You know, in the times in your life when you're feeling good about your sex life, you might feel different. You might move different. There's just an internal sense of self that shifts that change. There's a self-fulfilling experience when you feel charged and nourished by your sexuality or by a sexual relationship.
Once again, far too many people believe they must look a certain way or weigh a certain amount to have a rewarding sex life. This is a massively toxic belief. It especially finds a home in the minds and in the bodies of women.
I'm just, I see it. You tell me something different. Women are especially conditioned in this way. I find gay men are very conditioned in this way. IE the gay male mind tends to have a strong, solid feminine understanding as a strong feminine polarity. Um, and when people believe that I can't be loved and have a rewarding sex life until I look a specific way, um, eventually we make the connection that, oh, I can change my body through diet and exercise. Now I can be loved. Now I could be acceptable in the realm of sexuality because I got this tool, diet and exercise. I could starve myself. I could diet myself. I could shortchange myself with food. I could not eat food. I could exercise like crazy. And that's going to help me love my body more by starving myself and doing intense exercise that I don't like. Hmm, talk about a little bit of a conundrum there, isn't it?
What I'm gonna tell you is anytime I've seen any human go down this path, it just leads to more upset, more misery, more self-rejection. And we're looking to create love in all the wrong places. Quite frankly, you ain't gonna find love that way. If you are reducing your body to the source of love, who's gonna show up? Who are you gonna draw to you? Who are you gonna attract? You might as well say, don't pay attention to me. Don't pay attention to my heart, my mind, my soul, and who I am. Look at me. I just lost 12 pounds. I'm your sex object. Love me. No, we're advertising our bodies as what is the lovable part of us.
Now, that's an interesting conundrum. That's an interesting toxic belief. Many humans have it, and it starts at a young age, my friend. So what often happens for many people is food, yes, can become a symbolic substitute for sex, for desire, for intimacy. Meaning, hey, I'm not, I don't got the intimacy I want. I don't got the sexuality I want. I don't have the closeness I want with another human being. Let's eat. And my friends, I wanna tell you, that's not an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I wouldn't take that away from somebody. And the only time I would really look to work with that is if it becomes problematic for someone, which it might be for your weight loss client. It might be, I'm not saying it is. I'm saying for some people food becomes substitute sex to the point where we're overdoing it a bit. It is not about, oh my God, I'm using food for substitute sex. Let me stop. Just don't eat the food. Don't pick it up. No, it's not how we do it. Continue to use food for substitute sex. And in the meantime, let's talk about sex. Let's talk about you. Let's talk about what's up. Are you dating? Are you what? Are you getting any kind of touch? Are you getting any kind of massage? What is the hurt? What is the fear? What's the challenge here? What happened? What are your hopes? What are your desires?
You do have some hopes. You do have desires. It seems like, oh, something might be stopping you. Okay, let's talk about that. So these are some interesting conversations to have with a client because it could lead to conversations around dating. It could lead to conversations around you being a dating coach,
helping your client take baby steps in that direction.
For many people, many people, I've especially noticed this with a lot of women, they have a fear call. The fear is inside their mind. It's a little, little recording that runs. And the fear is, I'm not gonna stop eating. If I start eating that I'm not gonna stop eating. If I start eating that I'm not gonna stop. Eating is a big fear. And that fear is actually a code word, code term for I'm a afraid of pleasure and I'm afraid that I don't know how to manage pleasure.
I'm afraid of my own body and its impulses. Now my friends, that's a legitimate fear. Okay, fine with that. But we gotta explore that. We have to examine that because if it goes unexplored and unexamined, that fear is running us. And the fear that I won't stop eating has an underneath to it. It has a more important foundation, which is, it's a fear of pleasure and it is a mistrust of the body, one's own body. So ultimately we need to learn to trust the body. Trusting the body doesn't mean it's gonna be your perfect body. That's not trust. Trusting the body doesn't mean it'll never feel pain or never get sick or never be irritated or never have problems. No, trusting the body means trusting the body. This is my body. My body has a healing capacity. My body is the body I've been given by life. There's a reason there's something for me to learn from this. The body has a built in brilliance to it. It has a nutritional process. It has nutritional needs, it needs food. I trust that the body has desires. The body desires pleasure, it desires to procreate. Let's trust that desire just in a basic way. Okay, it makes sense, I get it. Body needs to eat. The body needs to procreate.
There's a lot of things that happen to the body. You know, you break your arm, chances are when they put it in a cast, you trust that it's gonna heal.
A lot of people have a ton of distrust about the body because it's just been such a painful place for them. So they can't trust it. Makes perfect sense. So my work with a client is to slowly help them trust their body more. And one of the ways you help a client slowly trust their body more is you just push the edge just a little.
Okay? So you're afraid that if you have a little dessert, you're not gonna wanna stop eating. Let's Try that. Let's see if you could eat it nice and slow and enjoy it. Lemme know what happens if you end up eating the whole thing. Okay, we'll talk. And by the way, I wanna tell you for my clients, I've done this a lot of times in the past. Um, you know, people really have this fear. I won't stop. I won't stop if I start eating the ice cream. I'm like, okay, here's what I wanna say to you. Eventually you'll stop. Eventually you will stop and you will feel awful and you will feel sick.
Now, for somebody who's never truly gone to distance, it's never truly gone to distance, that might be a strategy I give them that's a little more advanced, my friends. You gotta be willing to let your client be in a lot of discomfort and gorge themselves because I trust you. If they've never gone there before, after they do it that one time, they won't do it again. It's so painful and so irritating to just eat like two gallons of ice cream. It's sickening. And there are people who do that on a regular basis, and they're bulimic. That's a different story. So I'm not suggesting this for a bulimic.
Check out this formula. Food equals hunger, equals desire equals pleasure, equals sex. I'm saying to the metaphoric mind on a certain level, these are all similar food, hunger, desire, pleasure, sex. Many of them are interchangeable. Sexuality and eating are very similar. You're using all 5 cent senses. You are, you are merging with something outside of you. When you eat, you are merging with food. Food is not you. You are interpenetrating food. You're taking it into your body. Sex is the same thing. You're interpenetrating with another human being. You're taking them inside you. They're going inside you vice versa, versa. Vice, whatever it is. So to the metaphoric mind, these have connections. Hunger is desire. Yeah, I desire things in life. I desire nicer art in my house. I hunger for things. I hunger for food. I hunger for more connection, hunger for food, desire for more things in life. They're connected. Pleasure is a, is a theme that runs through all of these. So I'm saying when you look at this equation, food equals hunger, equals desire, equals pleasure, equals sex. When you pinch at one end of the equation, the other end of the equation tends for a lot of people to get pinched as well.
Not for everybody, but for certain people when there's a lot of contraction, fear, anxiety, distrust around sex one's sexuality, one's sexual nature,
that's easily translated into one's experience of food. Likewise, if one has a lot of challenge around, what do I eat? Oh my God. Oh, food is the enemy, food is this. Food is that. We often pinch the sexuality into the equation and we get confused there. So it's interesting. We have many humans who are confused. And I say this affectionately, many humans walking around on the planet who are confused about their bodily desires. You and I desire food and we desire sensuality, sexuality, intimacy. And we're confused about that. We get upset about that. We get, oh my God. And when we get confused about that, we're easily kind of knocked out of our center. We can easily just kind of fall off the horse. Oh my God, I hate this. I can't believe it. Oh my God. Oh, oh my god, this is terrible. Oh my God, self rejection.
Or Oh my God, that person's attracted to me. Or Oh my God, I'm attracted to that person. Or, oh my God, I'm so ashamed of my desire for this person. Whatever. It's, it just throws us off.
We're learning how to trust. So this process is baby steps with your client, learning how to trust their hunger for food. You have an appetite. It's okay. You're wired that way. Let's explore that. Appetite for food. Let's play with it. You're wired for pleasure. Let's explore that. What gives you pleasure in life? Anything you're wired for that. And yes, you're wired for this thing called sexuality. But again, we get so confused because we are taught, particularly women, that this is your value. Your value is in the body billboard, that you have to have the right advertisement on it so you can get love.
Now, another way to look at all this, my friends, is that stress, anxiety, fear around and judgment around sexuality is stress, anxiety, fear and stress. Anxiety and fear. Definitionally means some degree of stress response, physiologic stress response, which can for some people lead to weight gain or inability to lose it.
I have met people quite a lot who are walking around with just tremendous anxiety and stress and confusion and upset around their sexuality, their sexual identity, or their sexual past, or the way they've been sexually harmed or abused. And it's all understandable, it's all understandable. It all makes sense. And anyone who is in stress, anxiety, and fear around their sexuality, you must remember, has a damn freaking good reason or reasons. And it can lead to the stress response. It will on some level. And we're walking around with that low level chemistry for perhaps a long time. Another way to say that is sexual wounding of any kind, direct or indirect sexual wounding equals stress response equals potential weight gain or potential inability to lose it.
Is that true for all people? All the time? No. But it is for many people. So we're just looking out for it. We're accounting for it, we're holding space for it because it's very possible.
I wanna do a good job with my clients.
I'm here to help them in their goal. I'm certainly here to help them in their larger goal. And quite frankly, of course, I wanna help them in their smaller goal to lose weight. So for me, I will leave no stone unturned. That's it. I'm truly here to help you lose weight. I'm gonna keep going here and here and trying different places until we start to unravel and unwind this thing in a good way.
Oftentimes, I'm very successful there, my friends, there are clients. You could do every single freaking thing, right? You could do all kinds of great work. I mean it, I've had clients, I've done amazing work with them and they don't lose weight.
And right now, I wish you could see my face. It's smiling because you're probably thinking, oh, well that's a b***h that, oh, that sucks. That's terrible. And yeah, there's a part of me that says that. And there's a part of us that has to account for the wisdom of life and celebrate the success that we do have. So I'm just being honest with you. I do not want to be another human being that says, do this, do this, do this, and you're gonna lose weight. That is a, that is an awful conversation. It's an awful conversation. It's untrue, it's inauthentic, it's a lie.
It doesn't lead anywhere good. Weight loss is ultimately a mystery. And within that mystery, we're gonna do the damn best that we can to help our clients get where they want to go. So we're gonna explore all the options that we know to explore with a client who's willing to go there.
And in the worst case scenario, they don't lose any weight and they have a better relationship with sex, sexuality. Maybe they find a great partner because they finally lightened up.
Okay, let's talk about the soul from sexuality to soul lessons. So I'm saying this might be something that I do after sexuality, maybe before. Remember my friends, You might have somebody that you get into the sexuality conversation in session number two or three because it just happens. They brought it up, it exploded onto the scene. You're gonna let life guide you. You're gonna let the wisdom of life guide, you're gonna let the wisdom of the relationship, the relationship between you and your client is magic. It has a magic to it. If you're stressed out and freaked out and worried about fixing your client and making them better and making sure they lose all the weight and you're gonna be stressed and you're gonna miss the magic because the magic don't happen when we're all freaking out and we're upset and we're anxious and we're trying to fix another human being, which you can't even fix yourself 'cause nobody's broken. Anyway. So with that being said, so lessons. So along with sexuality, I wanna say these are some of the last places or final frontiers for the average practitioner. If you're just starting out, some of the last places to go with clients, and again, best to go here. Once you've established good rapport, you've established some history, of course, it's always great to explore the soul lessons in your own life first to grapple with them a little bit. So what are the key soul lessons for you in your life? Go back over the soul lessons that we described earlier, earlier on in the training. And those are not all the soul lessons. You might have a soul lesson that's unique to you
that you're inventing in your life because that's your, that's your journey. So it's different for different people.
Oftentimes, we can only help a client go as far in this realm as we have gone.
So you're gonna go over the list of soul lessons. See, imagine which ones are relevant for your client. If you can't figure it out for yourself, me not interested in you asking your client, it's gonna be hard for you to work in this realm if you are not intuiting, grasping, getting a sense,
a majority of clients will have the soul lesson called agreeing to be here. It's the most common one I see across the board for humans. It's the most common one I see across the board for humans who are dealing with body image challenge and weight challenge. I don't want to be here with this body. I don't want to be here with this weight. I don't want to be here with these looks. But usually deeper than that, quite frankly, is I don't wanna be here. And then it's easier to pin it on the weight and pin it on the shape and pin it on the body because that gives us, oh ball, just let me change the weight and change the shape and change the body. And they don't wanna be here. Nope.
In order to agree to be here, you have to agree to be here. You gotta start with where you are. You can't agree to be here When I'm rich, when I'm perfectly healthy, when I'm perfectly health happy, when I have the perfect partner, then I'll agree to be here. Okay, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. You're smarter than that. You know better than that. You're more mature than that.
I want you to notice how your client's soul lessons have likely, perhaps maybe impacted their relationship with food, their health, their metabolism. See if you can see a connection, a soul lesson in the person is something you're tuning into on a deeper level. And one of the ways you train yourself is again, look at the list of soul lessons from module one, and then I want you to start noticing the people that you know best. That's how you learn about this work. You observe and study the people that you know best friends, family, loved ones.
Oh yeah, that person. This is what Digital life. Oh yeah, that person, this. So then you kind of get a feel for it. You might notice certain similarities of people who have a particular soul lesson. It becomes a skill more and more as you notice the people that you know well and what you think their soul lessons are.
So I'm always training myself and I'm always training myself because I'm just observing humans. I don't just observe the humans in my client session. I'm observing any human that I'm around. It just happens naturally, especially when it comes to
discerning, assessing, intuiting about their body, intuiting about their life. I'm always tracking the people closest to me as best I can because that's a way to gather the most information. And of course I'm tracking myself. You will learn so much by learning about yourself. And of course remind yourself that your client is not you.
Let's talk about food allergies. I put food allergies last here for the most part when it comes to working with clients. Now, the reason why I put food allergies last is not because I think you should work with them last. I'm saying that for a lot of people,
this is a place I don't always go early because they're not ready for It. I have seen practitioners work with food allergies too soon. Now sure enough, there are people who will come to you and say, I think I have food allergies. I think I have food sensitivities in that case. Great, let's work with it. Your weight loss client comes to see you in the first session. They go, you know, I have a friend who saw somebody who said they were allergic to this, that the other thing, and they took them off this, that, the other thing. And that person lost a lot of weight. And so it really got me thinking about food allergies. Wow. Is that something you would like to explore Mr. And Mrs. Client? Yeah. I'm really intrigued by that. Good. Okay.
So now I know my client is open for that. So I might work with, I will work with my client earlier on in the relationship on that because they've given me permission. They've said so, but I'm tracking my client before I work with food allergies. Let me, I'll, I'm gonna work up to why. Okay, first and foremost, food allergies or food sensitivities can have a profound influence on weight. I don't know how else to say it. Food allergies and food sensitivities can have an absolute, absolute profound influence on weight or not. But oftentimes it's profound. So you're gonna need to guesstimate or intuitive what point to do this work with your client. Now if you're seeing strong indications of a food allergy, then you can begin this work a little earlier on if you get the sense that your client seems ready and willing. You've heard me say before, in general, the elimination diet is the best strategy and the gold standard for this round as opposed to food allergy testing. If you wanna absolutely do testing, yes, you can really help determine a gluten sensitivity. You can determine a dairy sensitivity. The gold standard above and beyond anything else is to just eliminate those foods for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and watch what happens. That's the best. You know, some clients are just absolutely great candidates to work with this diet. Um, others, if there's resistance, I don't wanna do it until they're ready. It plain and simple.
Food allergies can cause a lot of bloating, my friend. It can cause a lot of water weight, particularly around the midsection. And people think they have a belly and they got water weight. Now here's what I wanna say. This is important. Before you start working with food allergies, here's my suggestion, and I mean this, and this is where I see a lot of smart people nutritionists who specialize in allergies. Here's where they go wrong. In general, I believe it's best to first work with eating rhythm, perhaps with macronutrient balance, but definitely slow eating and de-stressing with food before the elimination diet. Before I put my client on an elimination diet, I want them to be on the road to being a slow eater. I want them to be practicing slow eating. I wanna make sure that their eating rhythm is good. They're not meal skipping, they're not eating the bulk of their calories late at night. And I wanna make sure I touched on macronutrient balance with them. If it was off for them, why? Because if I start eliminating dairy and gluten and soy and eggs
before I've helped that person with their eating rhythm, then many of their secondary symptoms can still remain because they're gonna put them on an elimination diet and they're not gonna be really eating in a timely way with their body. They've been eating a ton of food at night and skipping breakfast and trying to eat a small lunch so they could lose weight if their macronutrient balance is off because they have the toxic nutritional belief that fat and food equals fat on my body. That low amount of fat might be impacting that subclinical or clinical fat deficiency can be impacting your client's energy. It could be impacting their mood. It could be impacting their cognition, their skin health, their hair health. It could be impacting their digestion. It could be impacting their elimination. So what's gonna happen is when you put them on the elimination diet, you're not gonna get fully accurate results because the elimination diet might be working for them. But your client is still gonna have all these symptoms and they won't actually get the benefit of the elimination diet because you haven't done first things first. First things first. You have to make sure your client is not deficient in essential fats. First things first, you have to make sure your client isn't eating in a stressed state. 'cause if they're constantly eating in a stressed state and they're eating fast, they're going to have, and then you put them on elimination diet, you're not helping their digestion, their digestion is still off. It is still functioning at a far lower level of efficiency. And what happens is a lot of people, because they're eating under stress, this is a write or down, or people who eat under stress, that stress will often lower immunity. Stress does lower our immune capacity. What happens is you can be more allergic to a food that you are normally allergic to. You can be more allergic to it when you're in a constant state of stress when you eat it.
So all I'm saying is once you've eliminated the stressor or are called super fast eating,
what's gonna happen is your client will have more natural appetite regulation. Your client will have more access to body wisdom. Your client will be sensing their body more. They'll be getting feedback from their body more because they're in a relaxation response, which is where such information flows during a relaxation response. You put them on an elimination diet, they have to really be discerning and listening to their body. You can't be listening to your body effectively if you're consistently a fast eater. It, it, it just, it's counterintuitive. It doesn't work.
It, it is illogical. So I hope you're getting this with your client that you suspect might have food allergies. I'm gonna make sure their eating room is good and it's in place. Their macronutrient balance is in place. They've started the process of learning how to become a slow, relaxed eater and they're able to de-stress somewhat with food so they know what that experience is like.
Also, it's kind of good maybe to have work with some of the key toxic nutritional beliefs as well. So your client is more relaxed around food.
I've had great success with the elimination diet once my client was more relaxed around food because oh wow, we're gonna try something new. Great. You start with an elimination diet right off the bat. People are in their fears and their concerns and it's another diet and you haven't helped them have a more nourishing relationship with food yet.
Am I making sense my friends?
So the bottom line I have seen over the years through my own trial and error that an elimination diet is far less effective. I just won't do it until I've helped my client in these other realms or I've begun to help them in these other realms. Now, the only time I'll make an exception is if someone is in so much pain and so much suffering. And I'm convinced that they might have a gluten sensitivity.
I've had some clients like this over the years. They were in such bad shape, literally, and everything at was screaming gluten sensitivity to me. Um, so I'm not gonna wait three months for that. I'm not gonna wait two months. I'm not gonna wait one month. I might raise my hand right away with some of those clients. Um, I have actually lost a client who I was convinced that Celiac's disease, he, he was just classic. He didn't want hear it. Absolutely, positively didn't wanna hear it. And I, I, I said to him, all, all this is, is two weeks of you not eating the following foods. Two weeks outta your life. You're in constant misery. You're in constant suffering. He has doubled over three or four hours a day right after he eats a meal with gluten in it. Only time he's not doubled over is when the meal doesn't have gluten. I could see that 'cause I asked him all the right questions and wouldn't do it. Didn't want to go there. You know, people are who people are. He's got more lessons to learn in life. It happens. I've had a few people like that actually come to think of it. So that's why for certain people, you know, we wanna bring 'em along slow unless it's somebody you think is in the most crazy amount of pain and you wanna help them. And you have experience in this realm and you're really suspecting gluten problem.
So we've been focusing on gluten. You've heard me say the main food allergens that I see the most change with in humans are gluten, soy, dairy, corn to a lesser extent, eggs, gluten, soy, dairy, and corn. For many people can create abdominal bloating. Eliminating these and hence eliminating bloating is often a very welcome revelation for people who thought that their belly bloating was actually body fat. It wasn't fat, it was bloating by the way, I also wanna point out, you gotta make sure you catch this, there's a subset of human beings, small subset, but I've seen a lot of them. Why? Because more and more people are becoming vegetarians. More and more people are getting into raw foods. And more and more people are changing their diet in such a fashion where they're eating a lot of raw foods, particularly raw fruits and raw veggies. What I wanna say to you is that there are many humans who do not do well with a lot of raw fruits and vegetables in their system. Believe it or not, digesting a lot of raw fruits and veggies for many people takes a stronger digestion than digesting the same raw fruits and veggies that are cooked. Cooking is a form of predigestion. When you cook something, you are, you are rendering it more digestible. Ask your piece of broccoli if that's true. Eat raw broccoli, eat cooked broccoli. Tell me which is more digestible. So all I'm saying is there are people who go on a raw food diet or a high percentage of raw foods in their diet and it's a revelation and it's wonderful and it's great. Hallelujah. Great job. Good for you. There are many people who go on that same diet and all of a sudden they have digestive issues. All of a sudden they have bloating and all of a sudden they're in a little distress and they actually don't make the connection. And what that is, is it is the difficulty in digesting for certain people certain kinds of fiber. Fiber is not the same across all foods. The fiber in your apple is different from the fiber in your pear, which is different from the fiber in a piece of wheat, which is different from the fiber in a rice, which is different from the fiber in a a, ve it. It's all different. Every single food. The fiber is literally different in shape and structure
and in some of what that fiber does in the body. So my point is, it's all individual. It's an experiment. Let's eat this and see what happens. Oh wow, you're experiencing bloating. Hmm, let's look at your diet. Huh? You eat a lot of raw foods, huh? How long have you been doing this? Huh? When did your bloating start? Huh? Your bloating started right when you changed your diet. Huh?
It's not a judgment against anybody's diet, it's just trying to cha trace somebody's symptom, unwanted symptom relative to what they eat when they eat, when they started eating that way. So when you're reacting to raw fruits and vegetables, by the way, that is not an allergy at all. That is simply the body saying here's what I can handle and here's what I can't. In my experience with that,
some further thoughts, my friends, you know, remember with a weight loss client, when you start out, if you're new to this realm with your weight loss client, remember you're gonna focus on the four questions. What's stressing my client on a day-to-day basis. What are the main stressors in their life? What's their biggest stress, their biggest fear, their biggest, biggest, anxiety, stress, fear. What's most important to my client? And the biggest question of them all? Where is life calling my client? Where's the wisdom of the universe calling my client? Where's a higher power calling my client?
Remember, you don't need all the answers, but you keep asking the questions until you hear them.
Remember that the four questions and their answers can really in a very simple way, guide the course of your relationship with your client. 'cause you're always gonna be looking to work with their smaller stressors. You'll eventually be looking to work with their bigger stressors. And you're always asking the question, where's life calling my client?
Where's life calling my client helps you also understand what their soul lessons are. Oh, life is calling my client to be more embodied.
For many people, learning how to be in their body in a good way for them is a soul lesson.
Sometimes life is calling your client to just finally be here. Just agree to be here. Life hasn't been easy for you. Life has been hard for you. Of course you don't wanna be here. It's been challenging.
So the four questions are always your place to return to. Always. I, I'm asking myself honestly, my friends in every session, I'm always asking at some point, where's life calling my client? What's next for them? Sometimes it's simple things. Life is calling my client to be more honest in their relationship. Uh, simple but not easy, but simple life is calling my client to slow down. Life is calling my client to stop fighting food. Life is calling my client to embrace
a spirituality that works for them. Could be anything my friends life is calling my client to just start eating better quality food and stop being so resistant to joining the club.
Some people are so anti healthy eating,
they wear it like a badge of honor. It's like, okay, fine. But if you're coming to see me and you've got complaints and I think the quality of your food is affecting your weight issue, but I'm gonna raise my hand for sure.
You know, within the first four sessions with a weight loss client, I want you to really be thinking about their toxic nutritional beliefs and see what you can identify. At some point, at some point when you've identified a toxic nutritional belief, I want you to do an intellectual intervention. I want you to bring it up. Hey Mr. And Mrs. Client, I've noticed something about you that I've noticed about a lot of other people too. And we all have our, we're all unique obviously. But what I've noticed about you is that you seem to have this belief that when I am finally losing this weight, then I'm gonna be the real me. Then I'm gonna, everything's gonna be great and I'm gonna finally be happy.
Is that true for you? Yeah. Yeah. It kind of is. Here's what I wanna say about that. So you're doing a toxic nutritional belief intervention at some point because that's the foundation of the work in so many ways, is changing some of the core beliefs that are moving us in the wrong direction. Because that toxic belief that when I have the right body, then I'm gonna be happy means your client will be in a constant state of not happy and a constant state of not being the real them. How could you have your real body if you're not being the real you? That's impossible.
How could you have your real metabolism if you're not being the real you? Now, food is the enemy. Fat and food is the enemy.
More exercise, less food equals less weight. Yeah, that's one I might handle really quick. If I notice that in a first session I'm gonna do a, I'm gonna do an intellectual intervention around that. Well, I know I, I can't eat more fat in my diet, I'm gonna gain weight.
That's one you have to correct right away because otherwise your client will be in fear of fat.
So intervening nutritional, intellectual intervention with your client's, toxic nutritional beliefs I have found dramatically turbocharges the rate of success that you will have with your client. In other words, it's gonna save you a tremendous amount of time and energy.
I wanna remind you again my friends. Toxic nutritional beliefs are at the root of a significant number of health issues and eating issues.
Your client is walking around thinking food is the enemy. If they're thinking appetite is my enemy, they might as well be walking around thinking, breathing is my enemy. Literally. You gotta correct that. Appetite is the enemy. I'm correcting that. Fat is the fat and food equals fat on my body. Therefore fat and food is my enemy. I'm correcting those within the first two sessions easily. 'cause that's gonna hold back to work.
And I'm on it with a client and I correct them with clarity, with certainty and with a smile on my face.
Within the first four sessions with a weight loss client consider beginning to work on improving their food quality.
Sometimes it takes a little time before a client is ready to make such changes. But at some point with your weight loss client, you gotta put 'em on more quality food. There's a way where I believe
for many weight loss clients who are not eating poor quality food, their DNA needs a whole new conversation with the environment. Their DNA, their genetics needs to be bathed in the kind of food that humans have essentially evolved with. What I'm saying is, at some point your client needs to eat food that is more natural to the food chain, that is more nutrient dense, that is more grown in accordance with natural law, with nature. So again, for some clients you, you have to gauge them and see, don't make a ton of changes really fast. Make small changes. Please especially regulate the use of, you know, a lot of poor quality, sugary foods, poor quality fats, poor quality meat and dairy, excess alcohol, excess poor quality alcohol, all the refined carbohydrates, all the soft drinks, all the poor quality chips and artificial sweeteners. All the things that are not real. I don't have to tell you what those are. You should know those by now.
You wanna notice what your client eats. You wanna work with them in their dietary universe. So if they're very clear that they're a meat eater, great. I wanna get them eating healthier meats. If they're clear that they're a vegetarian, great. I wanna make sure that they're not doing a lot of junk food. Vegetarian food, when I first became a vegetarian, it it there, there was, yeah, all the vegetarians were just not eating meat and they eat a lot of junk food, but it's not meat, but it's junk food.
So, and not all people do that, but a lot of clients need some education. You're gonna definitely get clients who need education around nutrition, but what you really wanna do is inspire them around good nutrition. That's what's important. My friends, you don't wanna just tell somebody, eat this, don't eat that. You want to inspire them always into a better way of eating.
Your job as a coach is to help uplift someone. You're inviting them into greater possibility. And that greater possibility is all about who they are and who they can be. This is all an experiment, Mr. And Mrs. Client. But lemme tell you something, this is a great experiment. That's why you're paying me the big bucks is what I'll say to somebody because I love this work. I love doing this. I'm committed to helping you. If I can help you, I feel good about myself, you feel good about yourself, everybody's happy. But sometimes along the way we gotta do a little work. And sometimes that work is not always easy. Sometimes the work is fun.
So there's no single cookie cutter way to work with weight loss as you now know my friends. And at the same time, the flow we've been talking about in the last four conversations is a good suggestion. It applies to a good percentage of people. But always remember that weight loss is an art first and a science second. It's a dance, it's an exploration. If it was a pure mathematical science, then we'd all be happy. 'cause it's just a bunch of math. The calories in, calories out model is old science. It's inadequate, it's an embarrassment and it doesn't work. And people need to get caught up with that. So always be willing to be in the unknown with your client. Be in the uncertainty because that's where you will be. Because we are in the unknown and we are an uncertainty with any weight loss client because we don't know what's gonna do it for them.
So this is your ongoing practice, my friends, embracing uncertainty and embracing it with a smile and being willing to go on this journey with your client.
And if your client's truly not a match for you, then they're not a match for you. It's okay. You've had people in your life who weren't a match for you, friends who actually weren't a good match for you, or supposed friends or partners or situations. Yeah, okay? Not everybody's a match.
And I believe that whoever shows up in your practice always has something to teach you and you have something to offer them. So it's your job to discover what that is. Your client's always here to teach you. Yes, I've had clients who I refer out right at the end of the session. It's like, you're not the right client for, I'm not the right guy for you, but I think I know somebody good for you. Great. What goes around comes around. It's it's, don't worry about losing the money my friends, it'll come back to you. Trust it. Trust the whole journey. Trust the whole process because life is gonna teach you in that way. Let every client teach you.
Don't be pushed over by your clients emotional hurry about the weight loss. Don't let their emotions around their weight regulate your emotions. That's a right or downer. Don't let your clients' emotions around their weight regulate your emotions. Because chances are their emotions around their weight is they're upset and they wanna lose it right away. And they're paying you and you have to help them do this. So like, oh my God, I can't do this, I can't do that. You have to tell me to do this. You have to tell me to do that. And all of a sudden, if you let them regulate your emotions, you're gonna be like that. Oh, my client said this, my client said that. No, you're the one driving the car. They're in the backseat.
Take a deep breath, relax, learn to help your client relax into their journey. That's not easy, but you have to do it by modeling for them the very emotional state that you want them to be in. So you have to learn how to relax even though your client is not relaxed.
I don't know. Think of places in life where you have to be relaxed even though the other person's not relaxed with your kids. If you're a parent and you have kids, you know there's a lot of things your kids at different point are now relaxed about. But you have to be relaxed in order to teach them something, in order to help them with something.
If you have a dog, if you have a pet, if you're not relaxed, well guess what? They ain't gonna be relaxed. If you're training your pet, they're not gonna be relaxed. If you're not gonna be relaxed,
if you come into a first date and you just can't relax at all, yeah, chances are the other person's gonna be a little bit unlaxed.
So you are regulating the emotional metabolism in the relationship, which means you have to regulate your own emotions and you're not always gonna be relaxed. That's okay. You're gonna be nervous, you're gonna be anxious, that's fine. You're human. We're all human. So if you're nervous, that's okay. And you're gonna learn to breathe through that. Gonna train yourself in each session. Just keep breathing, just relax. You're gonna be okay.
Great work my friends. There's lots more to come. We're gonna dive into a bunch of conversations about body image, which is also connected to weight. The two go so hand in hand. Can't wait to dive into that. Um, body image is just a fabulous place to work. It's an interesting place. It's as challenging to work with body image as it is to work with weight. But you're gonna get some great distinctions, some great strategies, some great understandings.
Good work. Once again, glad we're on this journey together. I shall see you as always on the other side.

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