MODULE 2

WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE

Section 7

Discover practical strategies for achieving incremental and steady success.

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PART 1

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Greetings, my friends. This is Mark David here, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. We are continuing our wonderful conversation about body image. Let's dive into some case studies. And as you know, another word for case studies is case stories. And as you know, human beings are a beautiful story. Each one of us is a beautiful story. That's what we have. Understanding your client's story means you can understand who they are. You can understand their heart, their mind, their soul, and their physiology. Sorry to say, for the people who have reduced humans to a mere collection of chemicals that were far more than chemistry. And for that reason, every client's story is unique and every client's story gives us an interesting window into who they are. So in this conversation, we will have, we're gonna go through about three case studies right now. And what I wanna say to you is I'm gonna skip some details on the, some of the super, super specifics just to keep track of the main aspects of the story that will help you begin to see how to work with each client as an individual. You'll see what I mean. Let's start out and have a conversation about Jackie. Jackie, female age 43 when I saw her. She's a nurse, married for 10 years, no kids. Has a great relationship with her husband, very dedicated exerciser. Uh, Jackie is petite. She's attractive. She has a certain charisma, very confident. Um, she has a very active social life. She's got some money. Stress in her life. It didn't feel like a lot, but it was present in our conversation. Uh, she, Jackie just has a very clear zest for life. You kind of get the impression that this lady's going for it. Uh, she came in to see me very, very, very specifically for digestive issues, bloating, indigestion, heartburn. Jackie has had a ton of medical intervention, nothing works. She's on supplements. She has seen a few natural practitioners. She's seen a chiropractor. She's seen a naturally oriented medical doctor and still no relief. Jackie is very committed to her health. She loves reading and learning about nutrition and natural healing, and she really wants to get her digestive issues handled. I am the kind of person she's seeing. Uh, she got a recommendation from a friend of a friend and I'm one of many practitioners, uh, in her history that she has seen to try to figure things out. By the way, when I say that, I love that. I love people who, they have a challenge, they have a problem. In this case, here's a human with a digestive issue. She's leaving no stone unturned. She's looking everywhere and in every way to help herself. And she's not giving up. I have a tremendous amount of respect for that. So at this time, my practice is focused largely on nutrition. A lot of people come in for nutrition work and I was more focused as a health coach and doing eating psychology work at the same time. So, and I really enjoy working with digestive issues because I've gone through them myself and I've learned a lot from my own body. Learned a lot from working with clients. So I'm a happy practitioner seeing Jackie. Here's some more details about Jackie. She eats fast. Ding, ding, ding. That's a good one for me. Jackie, definitely, as we'll see in a moment, skips meals. She is by her accounts an extremely healthy eater. Jackie's all about health. You'll also see in a moment, Jackie often substitutes coffee for breakfast or lunch. Jackie has also told me she is extremely hungry after exercise and she exercises very hungry and she exercises hard. Then she eats and then she has indigestion. So right now, wow, did I just, I got a lot of good information. She's a fast eater. She skips meals. She's very healthy, she's concerned about health. Very educated person. Often substitutes coffee for breakfast and lunch. Very hungry after exercise. Then she eats and then she has indigestion. Okay, check out her diet 7:00 AM breakfast. She either has just coffee, and that's about three or four days per week. Now I had a, you know, when I first started asking her about her diet, she would say, oh, well, it's different every day. Okay, so how is it different? Every day? Talk to me. Well, some days I just have coffee at breakfast and some days I eat these other things. Okay, how often? Just coffee. At breakfast. So you have to narrow down your client. So she, so she either has just coffee at breakfast, that's about three to four days a week. Or she has two egg whites plus coffee or a non-fat yogurt plus coffee, or some kind of protein bar plus coffee. And by the way, the coffee's a big mug. It's about two coffees, 10:00 AM She has a mid-morning snack. If there was no food at breakfast, I eat just coffee. Then she has a non-fat yogurt or a protein bar. If she did eat breakfast, then she has just coffee as her mid-morning snack. Are you following me here? And it's another big mug. Another two cups. It's interesting, 1:00 PM if she had no food at mid-morning, then she has some kind of salad with either an egg, one egg or small piece of fish, or small piece of chicken. If she had some food in mid-morning, then she might have a coffee or an energy drink at lunch. And that's about three days a week. Interesting.
Four o'clock, mid, mid-afternoon snack. She's extremely hungry. She has some fruit plus a protein bar, or again, a non-fat yogurt or a small smoothie drink. And she might have some tea or some coffee. And she does decaf in the late afternoon.
7:00 PM is dinner. She has a big salad with a small piece of fish or chicken. And when I say small, it's oftentimes no more than four ounces approximately, based on what I heard her say. Jackie drinks a lot of water and she takes a lot of supplements, bottom line.
So I hope you're seeing, hearing, and noticing from this diet that Jackie is really modulating, regulating, controlling, paying a hell of a lot of attention to her food intake when there's no food. She has coffee when there's no food. She essentially has caffeine. Interesting.
I wanna let you know, Jackie talks a lot about exercising. She's very focused on her cardio. She's focused on weights. She's doing some CrossFit, and she's got a workout schedule. So in a lot of ways, her life revolves around her workout schedule.
Her job as a nurse is actually part-time. Uh, but she makes decent money. She still has money, stress, and just interesting, I'm noticing that she puts a lot of energy into exercise like seven days a week. And in her word, she goes hard on the weekends. Um, so I'm thinking to myself, here's the lady who's drinking a lot of caffeine for her size. And she had said to me that she's just a naturally very energetic person. And she's, she's got a lot of energy. So I'm thinking, man, have you got a lot of energy? Why are you doing so much caffeine? And again, y'all know I got no problem with caffeine, but this is a tiny person who's doing a lot of caffeine. Also, as you've likely noticed when we looked at her diet, that she, she avoids dietary fat, egg whites, non-fat yogurt. There's no fat in her smoothies. So automatically, I know, I don't even have to ask. This is a person who has a toxic nutritional belief. Fat and food equals fat on my body. When I'm talking to somebody and doing a dietary intake and I hear non-fat, this non-fat, that non-fat, this non-fat that I'm thinking, you have been caught up in the toxic, nutritional, dietary belief called fat is bad.
Yeah, poor quality, fat is not good, good quality, fat is good.
Again, I'm noticing that exercise is everything in her life. It's her religion. Turns out her husband is an extremely adverti avid exerciser as well. She says that we are workout fiends. And it's very clear that's how they bond and share and make a life together. So they've got, they've got a good thing going. Uh, they don't have kids. They have their careers and they're just into their, they're into their exercise. Good for them. Just wanna show you that diet once more. For those of you who are looking at a screen right now,
low lowfat foods, she is meal skipping. And on top of that, she's eating fast.
And on top of that, she's probably, she's probably a little bit low protein for her size. Hard to know. Okay?
So as I'm talking to her, here's what's going on as well. Inside my mind, as I'm starting to put a few things together, I realize she really pushes hard with exercise. Here's a person who feels like, okay, I get this is your lifestyle. I, ah, my yellow caution light is just on upon further probing questions because my yellow caution light is on. They're like, Hey Jackie, you ever deal with weight issues? And she goes, no. And the way she said, no. I'm like, really? That's good. Good for you. 'cause gosh, so many of my clients, you know, they're coming to see me for weight loss. She says, Nope, nope. It's never been a problem for me. And her voice gets higher when she answers my questions about weight. And, and I keep going. I said, wow, you know, I can't imagine
you would be dealing with weight issues because whew, you exercise a lot. I said, where did you, where did you get that from? Where did you, where did you get inspired to really work out and take care of yourself like that? She said, well, you know, I've always been like that and I just wanna make sure that, you know, I'm not like my mom. And I hear that, and a little silent bell goes off in my head like a loud bell in my head that's silent. She doesn't wanna be like her mom. Tell me about your mom that you don't wanna be like, Hmm, despite the fact that we have half our parents', DNA, of course you're gonna be like your mother and your father in some way, shape or form. Come on people. Okay? So her mom is overweight. Her mom has dealt with weight issues for a long time. Her mom hates her body. Uh, her mom is very overweight. Her mom is diabetic, so she doesn't want to be like her mother. And as she told me, Jackie says, I've never been overweight. So honestly, my friends, in my mind, I'm thinking, wow, here's a person who is dedicated to not being like someone. And in a lot of ways to my mind right now, I'm concluding that her relationship with exercise is really being driven by, I don't wanna be like my mom. More specifically, I don't wanna be overweight.
I'm also beginning to think she is likely in stress induced digestive to stress due to over exercise. I shall repeat that again. My friends, I'm starting to believe that she is likely in stress induced digestive distress, digestive shutdown, stress induced digestive shutdown. That's due to her over exercise. Remember I said that when she comes home from intense exercise, she's very hungry, she eats and then she has digestive complaints.
That's interesting to me. What I want to say to you straight up right now, so you can get this, is that humans, some humans who have a bunch of stress for whatever reason come to a meal. The stress that you're carrying, hard to get rid of, eat your food experience, digestive shutdown or digestive distress. That could have been because of work. It could have been because of family.
It could be due to overexercise. Over exercising is a stressor for the body. I'm sorry, just this, there's a point where for you, for anyone, you exercise too much, that becomes a stressor. You can start to collapse your immune system a bit. You can get sick, you can overpower your digestive system, meaning you eat 30 minutes after exercise, even an hour after exercise for some people. And they're still in digestive distress because of over exercise. This is what I'm thinking.
So how do I understand this more moreand, we always ask a question. When a person is experiencing a particular complaint, they're overeating, they're binge eating, they're emotional eating, they experience fatigue, they experience digestive problems. I always wanna know, when don't you have that issue? When don't you overeat in your life? When don't you binge eat? When don't you have digestive issues? Okay, so here's her answer to my question. And even though we're talking about digestion here, you know, see how this ties in. Jackie has little to almost no digestive complaints when as she says, I don't exercise when I'm on vacation. This blew my mind. And she said, for several days after sex, I'm like, wow, you really pay attention to your body. You really notice things. Big smile on her face. Yes. So excuse me for asking, but how often do you have sex? Um, once per week. At most. She's, it's not a big thing for her.
Okay, so no digestive issues. When I don't exercise, I'm on vacation several days after sex. What does that tell you? My friends, when she doesn't exercise, she's in more of a relaxation response or she's not in stress-induced digestive shutdown. What happens when you're on vacation? You're in a more of a relaxation response, especially if you know how to take a good vacation. What happens for several days after sex for her? She's a little more relaxed. No digestive issues. Very interesting. Far as I'm concerned, I'm piecing these things together. Can I prove conclusively that it's the stress of exercise of life that's causing her digestion? Can I prove it conclusively in this moment? No. But man, that evidence is pointing in that direction. If I had a gun to my head and had bet my life on it, I wouldn't hesitate to say, yep, this is all fitting together. Just, just with a perfect, perfect puzzle piece. So I am clear she's over exercising. I am clear that her stress is causing her to have digestive issues. And I'm clear that whenever she's relaxing because of the conditions of life, not exercising, being on vacation several days after sex, whenever she drops into a parasympathetic nervous system, dominance or digestion's, fine, but it goes deeper. But first, here's my strategy. I'm already formulating my strategy in my mind. There's so many places to work, it's not even funny. So remember, she's a fast eater that by itself can cause digestive shutdown. So I know I'm gonna have her slow down with food. She's all over the map when it comes to her bio circadian nutrition. I eat her eating rhythm. I want to get her on regular meals. IEI want to make sure you have no coffee or caffeine only meals not okay.
I also will be wanting her to add in some healthy fat now out along for a session with her. And I decide in my mind, I'm going to give her a nice big plate because Jackie's got a lot of energy. Jackie is highly motivated. Jackie really wants to help herself. So I figure, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna do it all. Normally I might have somebody just slow down with food first. Maybe I should have done that with her, quite frankly, in retrospect. But this is a lady who just, just, just, she just eats a lot of life, you know, meaning she's working in an intense job. She doesn't tense ex exercise. She's, she's just engaged. Uh, so I figured, okay, we can, we can, we can work hard here. So I give her all these strategies. I asked her to slow down with food and I briefly explained why. I told her I wanted her on regular meals. I told her I didn't want her on caffeine only meals. And I said we had to start adding in a little bit of healthy fat. That means a full fat yogurt. That means the egg yolks and it means an olive oil based salad dressing. Or just put some olive oil on your salad, dressing on your salad. Okay? So I could see Jackie go into a silent panic about fat when I was casually, but firmly suggesting to her that the lack of EFAs can cause digestive upset, which you can. So we had to do some negotiating here, but it was really, really, really about exposing her fear of fat and her fear of weight gain. So just the fact that we're in this conversation, and she is, I could tell she's panicking just by the look on her face. I mean, she's, she's controlling herself, but I'm seeing my client now very, very clearly. So it almost doesn't matter to me if she complies or not, because she's in the light right now. Her fears are coming up. Okay? So bottom line, she comes back after two weeks, she has approximately 30% relief and she's really feeling a difference. And she said to me, but my digestion plateaued here.
She admitted having a very hard time adding fat to her diet. She didn't like it. And I will tell you that in the following session, I did a very strong intellectual intervention, um, around her relationship with dietary fat and her toxic nutritional belief here. First time I just said, Hey, you know, one of the signs of EFA deficiency is digestive distress. That could be a factor for you. That's not something you've explored. You've been low fat for a long time. So now I really got into the whole fear of fat, fear of body fat, the toxic nutritional belief that fat in food equals fat on my body.
'cause we really haven't gone into any part of her that's in her fear of body fat. 'cause I've been playing with her and focusing on the nutrition as I'm gathering information, learning about her mom, and I don't wanna be like my mom. So I haven't really gone there yet with her.
So what I'm now learning about Jackie, I mean I already know this, but I, by the second and third session, I'm very, I'm seeing how intensely she judges her body.
And it's becoming very clear in our conversation as I'm talking more about her, her mom, when she started exercising all this, that she pushes and punishes her body in the name of healthy exercise. I can see that. I asked her, I said, what would happen? What would happen if you gained a little weight? She had a shocked look on her face. Um, what would happen if you and your husband for a couple of weeks just didn't exercise? Like what would happen? And one of the first things she said to me when I asked her that question, she said that she was afraid her husband wouldn't love her if her body wasn't perfect. She didn't use the word love. It was, it was just something about her husband wouldn't like it if her body isn't perfect. Huh? Has he told you that? She said, no, but, but I know that. I'm like, huh, interesting. He's never said it, he's never even implied it, but she knows it. So this was starting to come out, as I mentioned in our second, third and fourth sessions, you know, I'm still working with her on tweaking her diet. I'm focusing on the nutrition because she's very left-brained. We're talking about each of her meals and what she puts in her smoothie. So I'm focusing on that because she's comfortable there, because she's very intellectual in her approach to nutrition and body and health.
And I'm gradually probing about the rest of life and letting her reveal herself slowly.
So what I wanna say to you, my friends, straight up is Jackie's digestive issues are ultimately driven by a negative body image.
Jackie's digestive issues are ultimately driven by a negative body image. No wonder doctors haven't been able to help her. No wonder digestive enzymes haven't been able to help her. No wonder all the supplements she's been taking haven't been able to help her because she hasn't gotten, and nobody has helped her get to the root of the cause of the challenge, which is an unhappy relationship with her body, which is driving her.
She has a fear of gaining weight. So if she has a fear of gaining weight, she's over exercising. The over exercising is causing stress induced digestive shutdown because she has a fear of gaining weight. She's skipping meals. Skipping meals by itself can lead to digestive challenges.
She's eating fast. Why? Chances are it's a habit, but the bottom line is food is the enemy. Get it over with fast. That will cause stress-induced digestive shutdown. On top of that, she's worried about gaining weight. That's the background tape program that's playing in her mind. Oh my God, can't be like my mother. Oh my god, can't gain weight. That is a constant stressor causing the body to create stress chemistry, which can cause the body to go into some degree of digestive shutdown.
On top of that, I've noticed that many people who substitute caffeine or coffee for meals end up having digestive issues. Just noticing that. So can you see her how her digestive issues, it's not just this digestive problem that comes outta nowhere now Sure. Does she probably have a a, um, disturbed gut microbiome? Absolutely. But giving her probiotics is not gonna help ultimately, because that's not what's driving her problem.
So for many, many, many of our clients, the nutritional and or exercise strategies that they do are actually driven by body image concerns. I don't care how much you exercise, everybody looks at her like, oh wow. You're, you're, you're, you're an example. We should follow you. You're amazing. You're so committed to taking care of your body. No, you're driven by fear, driven by, if I gain a pound, I will be no good, I will be unlovable. So it may look like people are doing all the right things, my friends, but they're ultimately coming from fear, lack of self-worth, and a distorted worldview that says, the look and shape and weight of my body is my true value. And if I gain any weight, I'm screwed. Therefore, let me take care of myself with intense exercise and really healthy eating. So on paper, she looks great, but she's a false positive. So ultimately for many of us, many of our health symptoms and metabolic concerns directly or originate from poor body image, unhappy relationship with the body, fear of gaining weight, mistrust of the body, which then drives us to do certain behaviors, food restriction, fat restriction, fast eating, intense exercise, meal, skipping, substituting caffeine for food. So it's your job as a practitioner to keep an eye out for this. You gotta notice this. It is more common than any of us might imagine. It kind of blows my mind how common it's, so you gotta keep an eye out for this. This is 1, 1, 1, 1 of the reasons there's a subset of humans out there who go from practitioner to practitioner and they never get where they want to go for their health issues or their weight issues. Because what's driving it at the core is self-hate self attack and fear of gaining weight or having the kind of body that I don't want, or having the kind of body that I don't want, and just hating on that body. Which then leads us to behaviors,
eating practices, exercise practices, lifestyle practices that actually end up harming us and causing secondary health challenges and those secondary health challenges. In, in this case for Jackie, her digestive issues are not a primary concern. Meaning her digestive issues are a side effect of I hate my body and I'm, I'm worried about gaining weight.
Now you might think she loves her body because she has the body she wants, but yes, she doesn't, she's not in her body, she's disembodied. There are people who are disembodied despite the fact that if you watch her move, she's kind of looks like she's in her body and she's an exerciser and she's an athlete. So her body is trained,
but there's a part of her that doesn't inhabit her body in a weird way. Her heart, her emotions, her soul is not inhabiting her body. What's inhabiting her body is her technique of exercise and her skill to exercise. And it's the person in her that wants to have a skinny body that's inhabiting her body. And the person who cares about a skinny body will do anything for that skinny body, including be an athlete, including be an intense exerciser, including be an intense meal and nutrition watcher.
But she doesn't actually enjoy her body.
When I made the connection for her, like, do you get why for several days after you have sex, you don't have digestive issues? Have you ever tried to figure that out? She goes, no, I just noticed that. And when I explained that to her, she turned red. She was actually embarrassed.
She was embarrassed that this experience was giving her pleasure and this pleasurable experience was actually good for her body because there's a part of her that is so disconnected from pleasure, she doesn't exercise for pleasure, she's not enjoying her body. When she exercises, she's doing something to her body. She doesn't actually enjoy food. She eats the right food that she thinks she should eat like a machine.
Can you get what I'm saying about this person, my friends? Can you feel it? Can you see it? Can you notice it?
So going deeper, the work that I ended up doing with this client is to help her see how she is driven by a fear of waking and a fear of body fat. That's the work, that's the turn I took with her. Our work became embracing the feminine. We talked about the feminine, what that means. We talked about how her approach to the body was extremely masculine. Nothing wrong with that. It's a polarity. She knows how to feed herself intellectually. She knows how to exercise herself intellectually. There's no joy, there's no celebration, there's no relaxation, there's no flow to it. There's no pleasure to it. I really worked with her on having honest dialogues with her husband about how they bond around, exercise, the good parts about that and the not so good parts for her. And I really wanted her to start to talk to her husband about the work we were doing and the insights we were having and where I think her digestive issues are coming from and the things she is starting to discover about herself. And I told her, I really want you to enroll your partner's support in loving you up and finding new ways to relate with each other other than just bonding over exercise. That was their main bonding. The work became decreasing her exercise intensity. When I said that it's, it's, I might as well have told her to cut off her arms and legs, the look on her face. But this was, this was me telling her, here's the work we're gonna be doing from here on fourth. This was by about the fifth session. We're gonna be decreasing your exercise intensity. We're gonna create a more nourishing relationship with food. That's the goal. Goal. And in that, I really want you to work on your relationship with your mom. It doesn't have to be directly with her,
but you're looking at your mom that she's this poor, unfortunate woman who's all broken because of her weight. And your mom's a lady, you know, she's a person. She has her stuff. I get it. We all have our stuff. We're so committed to not being like your mother.
We started having a conversation of the ways that she was similar to her mom. I said, in what ways are you similar to your mom? And she shook. She just shook her head like nothing. Like, well, just, I know you, you have different body types. I know you have different weight, but what ways are you similar?
That's a very hard question for her. And she didn't wanna look at that because really her mom was always insecure about her own weight. And now I'm explaining to my client, despite the fact that you have a thinner body than your mom, you're still insecure about your weight. So you're still living a life of insecurity. And I said, you're better than that. You're, you're a far more powerful woman than your insecurities. I mean, look at you. I mean, look at what you've done in life. Look at what you've accomplished. You have a great relationship. You have a great career. You, you have a supportive relationship. You're a smart lady. You help people and you make yourself small.
You're better than that.
So this is, this was, this was me really delivering some shocking information to my client and my friends. You know, something I gotta, it, it's, it's, again, this is a client who I was moving fast and deeper with
because this lady kind of moves fast
and I wanted to, I wanted to match her in a lot of ways. And that was a risky proposition because it could have been too much for her. And in a lot of ways it was too much for her. But she would go home after our session and she would actually integrate and she would be thinking about these things. So the work was actually working and we worked together for five months. About 13 sessions, touched upon all the key pieces that I just mentioned in general. Jackie was really caught by surprise at the level of work that we ended up doing together. She admitted all along the way how hard this was for her. And this woman was doing her best. Uh, very impressed. You know, after our work was complete, here's what I wanna say. Bottom line, this is a noticeably more relaxed person. She's more in her body. She's more present, far more radiant. I, I mean mean literally. Uh, looking at a different human being, it looked like somebody turned on the lights and the light was glowing from her. Uh, more open, just, just more open. She felt deeper as a person and honestly less in her princess mode, just felt like more of a woman. She was experiencing periods that would last for days of complete digestive relief, complete digestive relief, nothing. A hundred percent relief punctuated by periods of digestive symptoms. Here's what I wanna say to you. Her symptoms became a barometer of self-love. Her symptoms were a reminder of the ongoing work of self-love and transformation that she needed to do. So it's not like, okay, your digestive issue clear it's time to go home because her digestive issue isn't clear. Because she's a work in progress. So she's now working on herself and she's not there yet. She's still afraid to gain weight. She's still trying to be not like her mother.
And she's also realizing that those strategies are harming her. She's realizing that I do live in suffering. I do live in a complete lack of confidence about my body. I do live in fear. So she's able to own that and admit that.
I wanna say a word about this. Few words about this word that I use. I said she was more radiant. Um, you know, oftentimes when we describe the feminine, we use the term radiant.
Have you ever noticed a 70 or an 80-year-old woman who's glowing and she's radiant? Do you ever notice a 70-year-old woman who's not glowing and is not radiant is very different.
When the feminine in us, and in particular when the feminine in a woman
is being turned on, the result is radiance. There's a, there's a glow. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is a special glove. So I'm always paying attention to the women that I come across who are radiant, are glowing. And I'm especially paying attention when I come across a woman in her fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, who's radiant because inevitably they're doing something right. Inevitably they're in their feminine. If it's a woman, 50 plus, she's in her queen hood and she's taking care of herself and she's nourishing herself. Soon as my client started to eat more fat, 'cause she was fat deficient, I could see the shine coming back, the radiance coming back. She was nutritionally deprived. As we relax into the feminine more, as women relax more into their feminine, the radiance can come out. It's a glow.
So when the work was finished, she wasn't perfect. She's a work in progress. But now she knows. Now she has a benchmark. Now she understands when she's doing things the right way for her. There's no digestive issues. As soon as she lapses into over exercise, as soon as she lapses into worry, as soon as she just falls off the horse and just starts thinking she's gonna gain weight, even though she doesn't digestive issues come back. Isn't that interesting? So she knows and now she has something to work with.
You know, so many of our relationships with clients end in a very natural way. So our relationship ended very naturally. We just knew we were done. She now has the tool she needed. So success again, doesn't mean absence of symptoms. My friends, oftentimes we need our symptoms. You've gotta get this. We need our symptoms to keep us honest and aware of how we're progressing and where we need to become more aware. Our symptoms keep us online in line.
Yeah, I don't know if drinking too much alcohol causes you a headache, then every time you drink alcohol, you get a headache. That's a good sign. You need that headache. 'cause the headache is giving you feedback. If you eat certain foods and they make you extremely tired, that's feedback. We need that symptom. She needs her digestive symptoms to tell her when she's moving in the wrong direction.
You know, another general lesson from this client is an ideal body guarantees us nothing by the way, in our work together. She slowly, she was decreasing some of her exercise intensity and didn't gain any weight. She was eating more fat. And I wanna say it looked like she was filling out a little bit more. To me, it could have just been that she looked better. But previously, my sense of her is she felt a little gaunt. You know what I'm saying? You know, diving into our client's story can help us discover the true root cause of their concerns. You know, sometimes it's a straight nutrition issue, my friend, sometimes it's a metabolic issue. It's a personal emotional concern. It's a soul lesson, it's a lifestyle imbalance, a swirl of any or all of these. That's what makes the work so beautiful. That's what makes us so beautiful. You know? And if you are the kind of person, I want to give a heads up here, this is a very important heads up. If you're the kind of of person that's going, oh, poor lady. She has this, you know, ideal body and she's still upset and still worried about gaining weight. Oh poor you. I wish I had that problem. If you say that to yourself, you need to push the pause button right now because this is an issue. This is an issue that I see particularly happens amongst women. You think men are competitive? Yeah, men are competitive, but more competitive on an outer level. Men will admit that they're competing in sports. They will admit that they're competing in business. Men get competitive. You see it come out, men got no problem. Most men have no problem being competitive. Men know that the business environment is competitive. Women compete with other women and they often compete around looks and body and shape and weight. And what happens is there's a lot of reverse weight hate going on where you have women with bigger bodies hating on women with thinner bodies. And what I wanna say to you is if you're one of those women, you gotta turn that around like right now. And I mean that. And I'm saying that as your mentor, your guide, your teacher. Because what are you doing? You're hating on women. What are you doing? You're hating on the feminine because you know what? All women have something in common. You're women. All men have something in common. We're men. Who are we to judge another person? What this is showing us is it doesn't matter what kind of body or weight or shape you have. Anorexic people die.
Are you gonna hate them for that? Oh, you poor anorexic person, you're dead. At least you were skinny. No, that just shows you it has nothing to do with weight or shape. We're human. We're souls. We are in this together. Body image is a negative body image is a nasty virus that will grip you at any body. It doesn't matter what your body weight or shape. Women who have the perfect bodies have their own set of problems because it has nothing to do with the body. And it has everything to do with our inner world.
So if you're hating on somebody because, oh, I wish I had your problem, if you had their problem, you would end up having the same problem. You think it's gonna be better.
And all you're doing is you're hating on your fellow human. You're hating on a fellow woman and you're not really understanding her.
And then we have princesses competing with princesses. We have queens competing with princesses, queens competing with queens, and the women are competing and the women are holding each other back. That's not good, good. That's not gonna advance us. So what I'm saying is you gotta be aware of reverse weight hate. Your job is to, as a person, I believe. But definitely as a practitioner, you gotta love on whoever comes into your office. You have to have the same unconditional regard as you do for somebody who's, doesn't matter what their body is or their age or their weight or their shape, are you gonna love or like some people more or respect some people more because of their body or their weight or their shape? Oh, I like a person with a bigger body better because the women who are thinner, I hate them and I'm jealous of them. No, you gotta grow up there. I think you see what I'm saying. Okay, so this is a really, really, really good client for me because I got to see also that I wanna be honest with people. I wanna do honest work. By the way, I didn't mention it here in the slides, but one of the big bonuses of my work with Jackie for Jackie, um, was that her husband, as soon as she started sharing with him about our work together, he just lit up. He was on board. 'cause he knew, he knew the truth of that. He could see it. Um, their relationship got so much better. They got so much closer. And in a lot of ways as a couple, they were a bit neutered, strangely enough, because they were each focused on their own body and their own self image. And as soon as the husband understood that their way of being in relationship wasn't always so healthy for Jackie, he wanted to change things, he wanted to ship things, he totally showed up. Um, what a beautiful thing. So I didn't just do digestive work with his clients. He came in for a digestive issue. Okay? Was her digestion changed and transformed? Absolutely. Okay. So she now knows what the challenge is. She now knows how to have days without digestive issues. She knows what to do, but it's not just digestion. Worked on her relationship with her mother. We worked on her core reason for doing all the things she does around health and exercise, which is fear. Her relationship got better, her relationship with herself got better. She matured as a person. That is a success.
And just so you know, the whole time with this client, I am being a combination in terms of my persona that I'm using with her. I am being her best friend. I'm in the best friend archetype with her. I'm also in the mentor guide archetype with her. And there's times when I'm in the strict parent with her, when I say strict parent, I mean clear parent. Jackie, you are way off course here.
So I'm bringing in those voices to work with this client, which, uh, worked, worked for her, worked for me. You have to learn how to bring out different voices that your client needs in order for them to hear you. I'm not speaking to her like some dissociated clinician who's got this big barrier between us. And I have a white coat on and I have a pad and I'm writing down everything she says. And I doesn't. And I don't look at her and I don't really question her and I don't understand her and her world. No, I wanna know everything about you. I'm gonna be talking to you like I'm your best friend because in a way I am. That's what you're paying me for. I'm gonna tell you things nobody else is willing to tell you or has the ability to tell you what
a great way to be in relationship. Okay, my friends, let's jump into another case study. And this has kind of been a, a whole different universe we're gonna talk about. Fred, I loved this client. Um, this is an unusual client, um, because he's a weight gainer. He wants to gain weight. What I will say to you is I'm seeing these cl I noticed that there's more and more of these clients coming to the table over the years. Um, definitely this is not a common client, the one who needs to gain weight. But I wanna mention this one just so you can hear it. And I wanna mention this one because this is a man and this is all about working with the masculine. So I'm gonna call him Fred, when I saw him. He's 34 years old. Fred is Canadian. Um, he's an independent filmmaker. He's also a cameraman. So he is in the film industry. Um, but he makes his own films and he's a cameraman for other people's films. And in essence, he spends the majority of his time as the camera person for others making films who are just more plugged in, more connected, have more money than he does. Um, Fred is extremely well spoken. He's very creative, very intellectual, uh, very inquisitive. He's soft spoken, a gentle soul, a really gentle soul. Good guy. He's, he's just so Canadian. He's so nice. Um, Fred is six foot one weighs 160 pounds. He presents as very slender, like really slender. Um, Fred wants to gain weight. He has tried everything and nothing works. And he's had every medical test that he could possibly have and he keeps getting from the doctors. Ain't nothing wrong with you. So Fred has tried eating as much as he could, doesn't gain weight. He's tried high carb diets, doesn't gain weight, tried high fats diet, no weight gain, all kinds of nutritional supplements that he's read about. No weight gain. Fred has done running, biking, swimming, no weight gain. So he feels absolutely lost about why this is happening to him. He's super willing and open to try anything. Uh, in terms of secondary complaints, Fred has no other health complaints. Nothing else is wrong. Um, I, I've had a number of male clients over the years who were weight gainers. I either looking to gain weight, um, one of my male clients who I don't go into because I worked with him on and off for many, many years. I was eventually successful with him. But quite frankly, my friends, we worked together for about six years on and off. Um, it's, it's, it's an interesting path and an interesting journey. But this client had success very fast and very early on. And you're gonna see how and why.
So let me give you some more info about Fred. In our conversation. I noticed that Fred will judge his body and often intensely. So I'm just taking notice about that. I am very interested in, you know, media and filmmaking. And so I naturally get a little bit more inquisitive in asking him about his work, his career, even though I wanna know about that anyway, because that's his work and he loves it. It's not just work for him, it's his craft. Um, despite the fact that it's, he describes to me all these great projects that he's worked on and all these filmmakers who want him on their set. So he is sought after. And at the same time he's very unconfident in his career despite his great talent. So I'm just noticing that, you know, we talked about women quite a bit. Uh, you're dating, are you married? Um, she's not dating anybody. Never been married. He had one semis significant relationship. And that was a while ago. And it just was an awful relationship. He's extremely unconfident with women. He just, he's just very unconfident. Uh, and he admits it. He just doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to say. He doesn't know how to meet women and he doesn't feel good about himself because he can't gain weight and he's so skinny. So that's even more unconfident.
Fred is very clear that when he gains weight, he's gonna have more confidence. And when he gains weight, he's gonna have more confidence in his career because he believes he's just walking around feeling just like he can't increase his body size despite the fact that he's tall. So he presents in his world as just not very competent, doesn't feel good about himself despite his talent and despite how sweet he's, so I'm noticing all these things.
So I'm gonna tell you straight up with this client, here's what I'm thinking right off the bat. I don't have to go very far. This is why we talk about masculine and feminine archetypes. This is why you work with the archetype, not just the person. So when I see this client, I think in terms of the masculine, we're gonna work with the masculine archetype. So the masculine archetype for a man in this case, he wants to have a more robust body. That's one aspect of the masculine. He wants to have a stronger body that's an aspect of the masculine.
So he's calling for the masculine in his life.
He needs more confidence. That's the masculine. So if he's not confident, if he doesn't feel good about himself, and if he doesn't have the ideal masculine body, then creating a masculine body is certainly a way to be more masculine. Like, doesn't that make sense? Okay, I'm not confident, I don't feel good about women. I don't feel good about my work. My body's really skinny. I can't gain weight. I need a more masculine body. So this is his thinking. I need a more masculine body. When I have this more masculine body, then I'm gonna be there. Now my friends, here's what I wanna say to you right now. So you get this, you can walk into, I don't know, a weightlifting gym. Just a classic weightlifting gym where there's a lot of men and there's a lot of very large muscular men who have the bodies of warriors. That doesn't mean they're masculine or that doesn't even mean they're in their masculine. They could have a masculine body. A woman can have the ideal typical feminine body, but that doesn't mean they're in their feminine. So there's a lot of men who have the masculine warrior body, but they're inwardly, they actually have a body image disorder inwardly. They actually have a self-image challenge. So there's many men who create a big body because they're extremely insecure, extremely unconfident.
And inside they're a little bit of a hysterical kind of cookie. They're a sensitive cookie. They're easily thrown off. They don't have a strong masculine presence despite the fact that they have a big masculine body. Have you ever met someone like that? Somebody you think, oh wow, you're big and strong. You must be confident and you're clear and you're present and you're, you know, not driven all over the place by your emotions and they don't distract you. And meanwhile that guy is, is just kind of a mess. So what I'm saying is that a masculine body doesn't guarantee you're gonna be more masculine.
Can hurt maybe, but it's not a guarantee. Okay? So here's the key strategy. Remember with body image we, we talk about achieving the end results. Now you want a more masculine body. Great. Why? Well, I'm gonna feel more masculine. Great. What does that mean? I'm gonna be more confident. I'm gonna be more honest. I'm gonna be more forthright. I'm gonna be more upfront. I'm gonna take more risks with women. 'cause I'm gonna feel better about myself. I'm gonna feel better at work. And, okay, great, love it. Let's achieve the end results. Now how can you be more the real you now? How could you be more confident now? How could you take more risks with women now? How can you be more confident at work and show up in your masculine more at work? Now see where I'm going with this, my friends. Why the hell would we wait to have a more masculine body to get him in his masculine? Let's do it now. Because when you start to invoke that archetype, which is the archetype he's hungering for, and you start to bring it into your life, then you create the conditions to have the best probability to shapeshift the body in the direction that you want. Because you're changing your character to match the kind of body that you want.
If he becomes stronger, more confident, more the real him, more authentic, more willing to be courageous with other people in his communication than he's becoming stronger, you are creating the character, the masculine character of the kind of body that you want.
Are there men out there who it doesn't matter how weak willed they are and how just insecure they are, who can go into a gym and create a huge body? Absolutely. Fred is not one of those guys. Are there women who can create a tiny feminine quote unquote skinny body? Sure. And there's plenty that can't. So that's just the luck of the draw. It makes no difference.
So I wanna make a postulation here by creating the end results now by working on invoking the masculine archetype, now we create the very conditions to help the body itself step into a more archetypal masculine shape, weight and metabolism.
That's what my client wants. That's what he says. He wants you. He says he wants a more masculine shape and weight. Great. You want a more masculine shape and weight, which means a more masculine metabolism. We have to get you more into the archetype. If you don't want that, then great, we don't work on it. So my friend says it's not about right or wrong, it's not about, oh all men should be like this. All women should be like that. No, this is what this person wants. So I'm listening to him and based on on what he wants, I'm going, okay, is this possible? And how do we get there? Can you see the thinking? I'm not saying all men should be this. Don't go there please. It's based on what people want.
If a woman comes to me and says, I want to lose weight, I will feel better about myself. I want that kind of body with that aspect of the feminine. There's all different kind males. The masculine occurs in all different kinds of weights and shapes and ages. So does the feminine. There's a plethora of body weights and shapes for the masculine and for the feminine. Many men want a more masculine archetypal body towards the warrior side. Many women want a more feminine
archetypal body, which is more towards kind of like the Venus aro side. Fine, that's what you want. Fine, I got it. Is it possible? And what do we gotta do to get there? Sometimes it's not possible. Sometimes it makes no sense if the person's not in their age appropriate archetype. So I'm working with my client in terms of how he presents itself. Now I hope you're thinking for the women who want the more classic Afro Venus
kind of feminine body, which is different from the grandmother archetype body,
which is different from the pregnant mother archetype body. You want that kind of body. You have to adopt the character of that body
and the character of that body means general got a lot of physical protection, muscle or body fat in your body to protect you from a lot of things.
To protect you from the world, to protect you from stress, to protect you from attackers, to protect you from the masculine, which is chances are gonna start to give you more attention. And if you can't manage that and you ain't comfortable with that, it's gonna be hard to maintain that character. Okay, back to Fred. So key masculine strategies for Fred.
Here's, I just invented this for him. Okay, what's the most masculine thing a dude can do for his body? It's weightlifting. Plain and simple. Ah, maybe it's CrossFit these days. Definitely join a weightlifting gym. Okay, we had talked, I haven't mentioned this to you about, um, he's working on a project right now. Okay, what's happening in your life? Oh, I got a project. Ed turns out his boss is kind of cheating him a little bit. The boss promised him one salary and after x number of weeks on the job, paid him at a lower salary and gave some bizarre excuse. Fred didn't really say anything 'cause he didn't wanna get fired from the project. Boss keeps on giving more and more work, isn't paying for the overtime hours and Fred keeps not saying anything. Pause on that. There's a previous project where the previous filmmaker where they still owe him money and he asks for it and they keep giving him excuses and it keeps not showing up.
So I wanna get him into his masculine. The masculine in us steps forward with courage. The masculine says what it wants and says what it means. The masculine in US handles business. I did this. You said you would give me that. You didn't give me that. You owe me that. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about how you're going to give me that. So I wanted him to confront his boss at his current project and give him the low down. We worked on a bullet point list. How much does this guy owe you? What did he promise you? What was the agreement? What does it state on your agreement sheet? I didn't write a contract, but they had, you know, just, just documents go back and forth.
Okay? You have to get current with your boss and you have to be willing to lose that job because you haven't said anything because you're afraid that you're gonna get fired. And everything you told me is that this boss so needs you on this project. It's not even funny. So you gotta step up, you gotta be a man. Okay? So there's people owe you money from your last job. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to call them up, find out when the money's coming. If they don't give you a straight answer, I want you to get a lawyer and have the lawyer send them a letter,
by the way, okay, I'm gonna get back to that in a second. Um, I wanted him to meet women. Like, like, like let's talk about ways to meet women. Long story short, he's always wanted to go on a single cruise. Long story short, he has some friends who's met, who have met people on singles cruises. So he really wants to go on a single cruise. Great. Go on a single cruise, like find it, put it on the calendar. Next thing is, Fred used the word backbone a number of times. I took extreme notice of that. And it's kind of funny because Fred is a, his body type is kind of bony. You can see his bones, his shoulders. He just, he is just like a bony guy. Um, and he said, you know, I just, I just really want to have more backbone. So, oh, that was one of the things he said, when I have a bigger body, I feel like I'm gonna just have more backbone. I'm like, great. Have more backbone now. And more backbone means dealing with his old boss or dealing with his old project and getting the money dealing with the current boss. So that is what we worked on pretty intensively.
The details, the masculine details. How much do they owe you? Okay, now we gotta get a lawyer's letter. That was a great process for him 'cause they still didn't give him the money from his old project. Soon as he fired, soon as a lawyer fired off a letter, he got the money. Interesting. So we kept asking the question in our work together, how can you be more in your masculine right now? And we applied this question to everything in his life that was calling for attention work, women exercise. We made it an interesting and fun challenge. I made this work fun. I said, dude, this is fun. You're going on a singles cruise. That's fun. You're collecting more money. That's fun. We looked at any place in his life where he felt afraid, where he was withholding, where he wasn't moving forward, you know, a little places. Uh, but it was all about helping him drop into a sense of power. Okay? Some results worked together for about four months. He was gaining muscle mass for the first time since his teens. So he gained eight pounds. Doesn't sound like a lot to you. Eight pounds of muscle on this guy was impressive, made a huge difference. His confidence increased dramatically. What I simply want to say to you was that the inner and outer work synergized, this is a guy who couldn't gain weight and he had weight lifted before. He just didn't like it that much. He didn't like going to gyms where people were weightlifting 'cause he didn't like being around all that masculine energy, being a skinny dude. Um, so he was doing the inner work of the masculine and the outer work of the masculine. So he was strengthening his masculine archetype. Woo, was this a success? Um, and that's after four months. And like I said, previous clients, men and women, uh, it can take a long time to unwind. I can't gain weight. It's, it's just, I don't know. For whatever reason, it's a hard one. Um, but this was a super successful client. I want you to see, can you see how we worked on the archetype?
And what was, where was life calling him? Where was that archetype? Where's the masculine archetype calling him?
We worked on inner masculine and outer masculine. The inner masculine, getting up his courage, taking care of business, speaking up, standing up for himself, taking deliberate steps in the masculine. Here is the legal letter. Here is the conversation I have with my current boss. I, and here is the email that I sent him detailing all the key points of the conversation and when I need that money, otherwise I have to go and get a different project and we'll have to handle the money in a legal way so his current boss got current with him. So those successes as a man helped him drop into his mask and archetype.
Some women need more of their mask and archetype. They need to have their boundaries. They need to say no. Some women need to handle their details better. You owe me this, you did this, this happened.
It's more direct confrontive handling business.
So that is Fred. I hope that one was useful for you, my friends. I loved working with this guy. Okay, I wanna jump into another case study now and let's talk about Patty. Another interesting one, Patty 41, when I saw her fitness instructor lives in San Francisco. Married, she has a 6-year-old girl. Uh, very deep lady, very thoughtful, very caring, very loving, very real, uh, very spiritual lady, very health conscious. Loves being a mother. Just loves being a mother. Uh, cannot talk enough about her daughter. Cannot talk enough about being a mother, um, uh, is very honest about feeling emotionally disconnected from her husband. Uh, she feels that they are staying together for the child. She says, and I believe her, that he, he's doesn't feel disconnected from her. She feels disconnected from him. She's not happy with him. She's not happy with the relationships. So she, she's staying together for, for the child.
He just wishes that she was happier. Um, so why is Patty coming to see me? She's coming to see me for weight gains, weight gain 12 pounds mostly around her midsection. Um, for a fitness instructor. This is beyond horrific. She is beside herself with upset and is completely embarrassed and just doesn't know what to do. She has to wear very, very different clothes in her exercise classes now, um, because she's a large around her midsection for a fitness instructor,
she said it almost looks like she's pregnant. So this is a phone client. Her secondary complaints include fatigue and she complains of intense fatigue, intense mood swings. She says she definitely has bloating after most meals and she's mildly depressed in her words. Um, Patty is very, very, very motivated to lose weight, but afraid she will need to go on some kind of very extreme diet as nothing else seems to work for her. So she's a fitness instructor and despite all the fitness that she does and everything that she knows about the body and all the ab work that she's doing for her abdominal weight gain, nothing changes. So I just want you to get that. I am dealing with a client who her house might as well be burning down. She is in an alarm response about her situation. Extremely unhappy. Okay, here's Patty's diet. I'm not gonna go into the details, but I basically wanna say she is mostly raw food and she's all vegan. So there's no meat products, there's no dairy products for breakfast. She has some kind of delicious fresh fruit salad. She has a light snack in the mid-morning. Usually again, it's some kind of smoothie. It's all raw. She makes her own nut milk from raw nuts. Uh, she eats all organic for lunch. She has a salad plus a nice avocado. And dinner is usually the same as lunch. So that's her diet. Everything's organic, everything's prepared at home. She grows her own sprouts. I told you she makes her own nut milk. So this is a person who is very, um, motivated around definitely being a vegan. And she has also told me that she is working towards a diet that's a hundred percent raw.
Okay, I got some questions. Patty. How long you been doing this diet? Okay, this diet, she decided to go raw. She heard a lecture and was very moved about a raw diet. So it started about two years ago. Previously she ate fish and chicken and some dairy, but she has been eating healthy for a long time. Okay, Ms. Patty, when approximately did this weight gain start? About, hmm, right around two years ago. Okay. And how about some of the symptoms? How about your fatigue, your mood swing, your depression? Turns out that those, she had some mood swings and a little bit of fatigue and a little bit of depression for a long time now, but it's definitely gotten worse in the last year or two.
So my friends right there, are you doing the math? Are you hearing and seeing the connections?
Two years ago, she began a very intense dietary experiment. Anytime you change your diet in a big radical way, that's an experiment. Let's try this and see what happens. So at the same time she began, her experiment is approximately, she can't pin it down, approximately when the weight gain came on, the dreaded nasty weight gain and approximately when her symptoms around depression and fatigue and mood swings really worsened.
Is this proof positive that her diet is causing all this stuff? No. But is it good inferential proof? You bet. Do I think that there's a connection? Absolutely. But I'm listening. So, you know, I explained to her about protein and fat deficiency and how that can show up as digestive issues, how that can show up as fatigue issues, how that could show up as mood issues and how that can show up is as waking or inability to lose weight.
I am understanding quite quickly that this is a person who I am not going to convince very well about her diet because she is very clear as I hear her talking, that her diet is the diet she wants to be on. She had told me before, I started asking questions about, you know, when did you gain the weight? When did you start this diet? Before that, she said, you know, I don't want to like change my diet. So when I heard that, I thought, yeah, nobody else wants to change their diet either. We wanna stay what we're on. If it seems to be working for us. Really what she's saying is she wants to stick with her vegan raw food diet and get to a hundred percent raw. I know I'm not gonna convince her otherwise. So I asked her to, we talked about her getting some blood work and talked about seeing a more natural doctor and just getting an update because she hasn't done that for a while. I expressed my concern that maybe, maybe your diet is influencing your health and your mood. Now, for those of you listening in, I wanna explain to you this is not, not, not an indictment about a vegan or raw food diet. I love me a vegan and I love me a raw food diet. I love it. I really do. It's just about getting clear about whether or not a particular nutritional approach is working for us. That's all. A lot of people get religious about their nutritional approach, whether it's eating junk food, whether it's eating a typical western diet,
whether it's eating paleo, ancestral, uh, vegan, vegetarian, whatever. People get, this is the best diet and maybe it is for, for you in your body and maybe it isn't. I don't care what the diet is. I only care about why you came to see me. You came to see me for a complaint. I'm going to do everything I can to help you with that complaint. This person, if I would've met her on the street and she's the healthiest, happiest lady and she's eating a hundred percent or raw food, a hundred percent vegan, big hug. I'm so happy for you. Great job. You've discovered something that works for you.
So as I'm doing a deeper dive with Patty and getting to know her in a few more sessions, what I start to learn is that she's got a perfection thing going on. For sure. How do I discover that? 'cause I'm asking her questions about her life. When did you first start doing any kind of dieting? Have you ever had a weight issue?
How's your relationship with your body? She's disconnected from her husband. What's happening with your sex life? So I'm going into all these places and what I'm gonna tell you is I quickly saw that her diet was driven by a desire for perfection. She wants to have great health. She wants to eat the perfect diet, and she has concluded that raw food is the, is the ideal diet. And she very clear to me. She says, I know this is the right diet for me and I know I want to get there. So she's driving. She's not a hundred percent raw, but that's, that's her thing. She wants to get there. Um, it turns out she's had a lifelong judgment about her body despite being very thin and fit for most of her life until recently. Um, this by the way, was very difficult for her to admit to me. I was asking and asking, and she had said to me, there's only one other person that knows about her relationship with her body. And that was a mentor that she had many years ago, kind of like a mentor therapist, kind of a person who, you know, she was, she's always been considered by the people in her environment, extremely attractive and desirable. And she's always hated her own body despite having the ideal body. She shared with us at, shared with me at some point in our work together, uh, that she does have a history of sexual abuse as a teen. And even though she has never had a weight gain, she started dieting soon after that. And just interesting sexually abuse as a teenager. And soon after that started dieting.
My psychological interpretation of that, by the way, is sexual abuse. It is an experience that the mind cannot comprehend. So she was 14 years old and she can't process it. You can't control your intense emotions around that. So what happens is we have a deep need to control. We have a deep need to manage that experience in a strange way. The aspect called, the thing called dieting is a system of control. I will eat this. I will not eat that. She just started controlling her diet.
To me, this is a symbolic way of gaining control over something in life. So it's diet becomes a symbolic playground of the psyche. The dieting, the control of diet is actually pointing somewhere else. It's pointing back to the sexual abuse. It's a symbolic placeholder. It's a symbolic bookmark.
So all of a sudden she's obsessed about food and controlling it and managing it and being healthy with it. So she's been disinterested in sex for a very long time and is extremely disinterested in her husband. She describes her husband. He's, she describes him as a good husband in many ways in terms of earning money, in terms of taking care of her, in terms of taking care of the child, in terms of being a good dad. Uh, she just thinks he's spiritually and emotionally disconnected. She sees them as being very different. She acknowledges that she thinks he is trying his absolute best and that he's a good person. She doesn't actually, he, he hasn't done anything bad in her eyes. She just says, I'm, I'm not interested in who he is. I was interested in who he is when we got married, but I've grown in a certain way and he hasn't. Um, so literally if you hear her describe him, he, he's just this great guy who she just has no connection with. Um, again, the more I talk to her, the more I hear her obsession with being a hundred percent raw. She, she uses the term a hundred percent raw quite a bit. And when I hear a hundred percent raw, I hear me being perfect. I hear perfectionism
because when we become perfect, then everything is better. Everything is healed. We're good. We will live forever. We have the perfect body, we have the perfect shape, and all the past is healed and taken care of. To me, she's a little bit haunted by her past and she hasn't gotten current yet.
So here's my assessment in my mind. So here's what I'm saying to myself in my head. This diet is harming her. Not only that the diet is actually revealing a deeper long held pain. The diet to me is pointing to you are trying to manage something in your psyche that cannot be managed by having any kind of perfect diet. So her diet itself is a symptom. It's a distraction from dealing with, to me, an ancient pain.
To me, her symptoms that she's experiencing, the weight gain around her midsection, the fatigue, the mood, the depression, it's all calling her into a deeper life healing.
I'm also realizing this is, this is a, this is not gonna be a simple client who I just manipulate her diet or find a food allergy. Um, this is a person who has a lot going on. So I have to take a deep breath and I have to understand that this is going to be, I need to play a longer game with this client. There's a lot of work to do.
So here's my strategy.
I wanna focus on what's very real right now in the moment. She is trying to get perfection in her world. I wanna focus on what's real, which is I wanna focus on her relationship. I wanna, I want her to start putting attention on that. Like, what are you guys doing? How do you think your relationship with your husband is impacting your daughter? Do you think she's noticing, not noticing? What does your husband think? You guys aren't having sex and you're a young couple. And what, what's, what's happening there? You know, what's your future? What do you want? What does he want? Is there any way to work on this relationship? She's kind of given up on it.
I also want her to focus more on being with the pain that's emerging from the past, which is sexual abuse. Every time we talk about it, she starts to cry.
I really wanted her to acknowledge where she is in her life right now. She's so focused on the future. When I eat raw, when I lose this weight, I want you to notice where you are right now, which is in intense body hate. You're in, you're intensely unhappy in your marriage and you're obsessed with eating a perfect diet.
So I laid this on the line with her. I said, listen, here's how I'm gonna be able to assist you in my universe. Do I want you to get rid of this weight around your midsection? Sure, here's what I think we gotta do about it. 'cause exercising it off ain't helping you. Your diet isn't helping you. Do you think being a hundred percent raw is gonna help you? And right now you're between 80 and 90% raw. Do you think that that other like 10 or 15% is gonna like, make the difference?
I let her know that I think
I did an intellectual intervention with her around her relationship with a raw diet. I made the connection with her about when the weight gain come on, when her symptoms got worse and like, did you notice that it was extremely hard for her to hear?
I let her know, you are making this diet into your religion. I think it's harming you. I wanna do an experiment. I want to get you on a few certain kinds of cooked foods just as an experiment and see how you feel. If it doesn't work, you could always go back. But your diet is not working. It is not working. In fact, if you look at the numbers, your problem started at the same time this diet started. Isn't that interesting?
So I'm gonna tell you in the big picture, we worked on and off for over four years. This is a long term client, very, very, very rewarding client for me and for her in that time, which is mostly in the first year I transitioned her to cook foods. We first started literally on cooked vegetable broth with nothing in it, just water, a watery broth with a vegetables, which eventually led to
meat broth, which eventually led to some meat soups, light, light, and some dairy. By the way, what I want to tell you is as soon as she started doing that, her mood improved, her energy level improved her brain fog, which she hadn't really mentioned, she just said, I'm just more clear. So everything improved for her except her weight loss. Um, in that four years, what I wanna say was after about year number two, uh, she
got breast cancer, she went into even deeper depression. Uh, and at some point after chemotherapy and just a lot of soul searching,
she was cleared of cancer. She was like a hundred percent clear. So there's a woman who got through breast cancer with chemotherapy. Um, and soon after that, her digestive and fatigue symptoms really diminished dramatically. What I noticed was after the cancer, she was far more in her queen. She had to come to grips with life and death. She had to be more in alignment with her husband. They really had to team up. She was clear during that time we would talk that she could not afford to die. Um, she was so committed to her daughter and she did not want her daughter growing up without her mom. So in that time of cancer, she actually was focusing less on her body, less on her diet in a strange way, less on herself and more on her daughter. More on, I have to save my life. It's, it's weird, you know, as I think of it now, the cancer was like a healing for her. It brought her and her husband closer.
It made her more committed to the relationship. And during that time, she just, all of a sudden it was less emphasis for her on weight and less emphasis for her on her perfectionism.
You know, this was a client who I was able to follow on a longer journey and experience the ups and downs of life with, you know, so it's not necessarily about getting your client to this great imperfect place. It's about being with whatever life presents to us. You know, here I am, I'm working with this client and trying to help her lose weight around her midsection and switching up her diet. And, and after two years she's, she has breast cancer.
And what's weird is up until she got breast cancer, her energy came back. Her mood came back. She was like, the lights were coming on.
You know, what started out as working with weight quickly became about her health, her perfectionism that was driving her diet and impacting her health, her past history of abuse that was driving her perfectionism. The past history of sexual abuse was driving her perfectionism. It's just what can happen to the human mind.
We were quickly dealing with, it started with weight. Her relationship that was suffering because she could not be fully present to it, she wasn't present to her relationship.
Her cancer was really causing her to confront her mortality. It just shifted her. It changed her as a person.
She actually had to make a choice for the first time to be here. So all of a sudden it wasn't about her weight, it was about, oh my God, I need to be here. I want to be here. And then a lot of ways her entire life was focused on escaping from here and not being here.
So this was a very powerful client. You know, by the time we finished working together, you know her,
Gosh, She lost, I can't even remember how much weight. It wasn't all the weight, it was at least half of it. It eventually subsided. She had a ton of bloating. Um, and that was a lot of her midsection weight. Yes, she had gained literal weight around the midsection. Um, but eventually her body weight got redistributed. And this was after the cancer. After the cancer. She, you know, her body shape was, you know, to her back to normal. Um, it's just interesting to notice, you know, she was now on approximately a half cooked, half raw diet. She was very, very, very, very light. She was mostly vegetarian with occasional meat and occasional dairy. But she was eating a diet that was more balanced for her. She wasn't focused on her perfectionism. And I think the cancer so confronted her with choosing to be here, that that superseded everything else in her life. And the reality was, in the time we worked together, she was a queen in training and she stepped into her queen hood.
So this was a, a just a beautiful, beautiful lesson for me. A beautiful opportunity to be with someone on their journey through the ups and downs and watch her get where she needed to go. And honestly, at some point we, there was, there's a reason why I forgot now and didn't even take notes. We stopped focusing on the weight because at some point the weight was completely unimportant. And it didn't even dawn on me at the time because we were so getting into the real stuff, her relationship. And then when she got ill, we got into her disease.
Okay, my friends, let's do another case study. One more for this conversation that we're in right now. And I wanna talk to you. Let's transition and talk about Casey Casey's a woman. Uh, when I saw her, she was 53 years old. She's in real estate sales. She's divorced and remarried, has two kids from a previous marriage. Those kids are now on their own. Casey is a funny, bubbly, smart life of the party type of lady. She's seeing me to lose weight. Casey is five seven. She weighs 190 pounds and she wants to lose about 50 pounds. Casey has no problem saying that she hates her body. She hates dieting, she dislikes exercise and she feels stuck. She eats moderately and she says she doesn't overeat and she feels like she puts on weight very easily. She says that a lot. She also says she can lose 20 pounds on a high protein diet, but she soon gains it right back.
Here's Casey's diet 7:00 AM breakfast. She has a healthy smoothie or she has some cottage cheese plus fruit, or she has a Greek yogurt plus fruit. She has some green tea, mid-morning, a piece of fruit or a protein bar, lunch salad plus chicken or a chicken sandwich. Or she eats out Asian food, which is usually some kind of chicken dish with veggies and rice. Mid-afternoon she does more green tea, piece of fruit or a piece of chocolate. Dinner is very kind of traditional. She has some kind of meat plus a veggie plus rice or pasta, small dessert, a little bit of ice cream, a small cookie. And she says like, I'm not tempted to overeat. I enjoy my diet, everything is great. She's into health and I'm looking at her diet and I'm going, okay, I don't have a lot of places to work here with you young lady
asking about her health, no thyroid issue, no blood sugar, insulin issue in the normal range. She's got no other presenting symptoms that are of any big deal to her. And I'm thinking, damn, what to do. There is no obvious place to work diet wise. Eating rhythm to me is fine. Macronutrient balance is fine. Quality of her food is fine. She actually is a slow eater. She's fine.
So, hmm, okay, here's what I know more details. Casey's inner world is consumed with her weight. She acknowledges the intensity of her self-hatred. And I say that because I noticed her self-hating language that was not confined to inside her head. She just kept complaining about her body and saying how much she hates it with a smile on her face. I just noticed that. I said, Hey, you're a person who is not afraid to admit how much you hate your own body. And she goes, yeah, tell 'em like it is. So she really wants to change it and she doesn't know how. So I decide in this first session, okay, I, there, there, there's no obvious places to work in the nutritional realm for me that, that, that jump out at me. So I decide, okay, I'm gonna work in the personal realm first, which is not necessarily the place where I would want to go first, but this is where I go first because that is what the option is. There's no other place that I could see. So the question is, are we gonna work in the personal realm? Where's the action? Where do we go?
Here's what I'm noticing
as Casey and I are talking about her work life as we're talking about her married life, as we're talking about her family life. 'cause remember I'm asking all these questions. Are you married? You have kids, oh, you used to be married and then you're divorced and then you're remarried. How did that old marriage go? Just listening to story. And as I'm listening to story, I keep hearing a theme and Casey said this at one point, like, people walk all over me and she says it with a little bit of an embarrassed smile. She knows herself. She complains that her husband, her brother, and her kids are often insensitive to her.
Casey, as I'm listening to her and she's describing her work life, how she relates with her husband. She's just a good person. She is a good girl, is how I want to describe her. Casey's like the good girl archetype. When she was saying to me some of the things that her kids do to her or say to her some of the things her husband says to her or how her brothers treat her. I remember saying at one point, man, I would be so angry. And her response was, I don't do anger. Interesting. I don't do anger. Casey doesn't like conflict.
She says to me, she often feels very taken advantage of at her job. In other words, somebody didn't do something. Hey Casey, would you do this for me? Okay, Casey, would you do this for me? Okay, Casey's not supposed to do that for them. That's their job. So Casey's a yes girl. She will always say yes. So people like her, I'm not saying this to her, this is kind of what I'm piecing together in my head. It's coming together pretty, pretty quickly. My friends, um, I'm dealing with a good girl. People walk all over her. I'm particularly noticing men, husband, men, brothers, men, kids, men at well, men and women at work. Um, she doesn't do anger, doing anger, doing conflict. That's the masculine in us willing to be with an intense emotion.
Doing conflict is also willing to work through and with an intense emotion
is a woman who's feeling taken advantage of. So I am noticing all this and I'm thinking, man, if I can get into this woman's head and just shift and change things, I would just make her stand up for herself. I would rewire her brain if I could do that. If I could rewire her brain, I would rewire her to the kind of person that you don't walk all over that stands up for herself. That doesn't feel like I'm a victim. That doesn't get taken advantage of for many people. My friends body image obsession can become a hiding place. It can become an escape. It can become a way to spend all our energy and avoid what is real. I wanna say that again. For many humans, body image obsession is a hiding place. It's an escape. It's in a way to, it's a way to spend our energy and avoid what's real. What's real is that Casey is living a life where she doesn't stand up for herself and is constantly the low woman on the totem pole in whatever ecosystem she's in, whatever ecosystem she's in, she's a people pleaser and she's the one who has to do all this, this stuff. So people like her and she ends up doing stuff that she resents doing.
I started to hear that a little bit, especially when she talks, talks about work. She's being a nice person, she's doing nice things for people. So you think I'm nice.
And meanwhile, what is she focused on? She focused on my body, my body, my body, my body, my body. I understand you wanna lose weight, I get it, but you know something, you know what's more important? You gotta look at your life. 'cause your life is outta balance. Your personal growth equation needs some work. We gotta work with you, not your body. Right now. You losing 50 pounds ain't gonna do anything other than you're losing a bunch of pounds. You're still gonna walk around being a human that everybody's walking all over. She's not even thinking I'm gonna be more strong and a and and less bullied or whatever when I lose weight. She doesn't even think that because she doesn't even realize that she's in a good girl archetype. She just thinks I'm gonna like myself better Life is gonna somehow be better when I lose weight because I'm this fat person and nobody likes fat people. So if I am less fat, I'm more lovable. She just wants to be lovable. She doesn't want people to love her. Like stop being so mean to me. Just love me.
So yes, Casey wants to lose weight and sometimes, if not, oftentimes in order to lose weight sustainably, we need to put weight loss aside, my friends completely and see what else is present. So I am completely clear that we are gonna completely put weight loss aside and deal with what is present in your life. What is life unfolding asking? Where is life calling my client?
Very easy life is calling her to stand up for herself and stop being a pushover and stop being a nice girl because you want people to like you because why? Well, because we want people to like us for sure, but in a lot of ways, on a deeper level, Casey is wanting to lose weight so she could finally have respect and power and a healthy sense of self. That's what's going on on a deeper level. But weight loss doesn't do that.
You gotta put first things first.
First things first is you step up.
People aren't gonna look at her and go, oh my God, you lost weight. I'm not gonna walk all over you anymore. It doesn't work like that. Um, you know, for many years Casey was the good little girl.
What do I have to do to get you to like me? So many people present as a mystery when it comes to losing weight. Meaning it's just not clear why their body holds onto excess weight. Casey was one of those for me. I I I'm not clear why your body's holding onto excess weight. So because I'm not clear because there's not a good nutritional metabolic place to start, then I'm gonna start in the personal and emotional domain. And when I look to start there, this is what jumps out like crazy. It screams off the page.
This is where life is calling you. And if I can work on the places with my client where life is calling her, then she has the best chance if she's stepping into her personal power to step into her metabolic power.
So here's the strategy with Casey. You gotta start standing up to yourself with your family. You gotta start standing up to yourself with your kids and with your husband. You have to let your voice be heard. You have to set boundaries. She's always getting her boundaries run over. When it comes to time, when it comes to doing things for people, when it comes to taking, she constantly takes care of everybody else's business. Husband, kids, people. She complains that her husband and her kids don't speak to her with respect.
I said this to her, this was an interesting line. I said, I need you to notice how you lie. She was shocked. She does not think of herself as a liar. I said, you kinda lie because you appear to be nice, but you really wanna smack people a lot of times, don't you? And when I said that, she smiled, it was a smile that just naturally came out. I said, you present as being nice when you're really angry and you don't wanna show your anger because you don't do conflict well. And I said, guess what? Join the club. Majority of humans are not taught how to do conflict and how to do anger. You are uncomfortable with conflict and anger. I understand that that's perfectly normal and perfectly reasonable and it's time to start embracing a little bit of conflict
because otherwise people are gonna walk all over you, which they do. And then you're gonna pretend to be nice and you're lying.
The lying part to her was really intense because she's so committed to her good girl, nice girl persona. And I'm basically calling her a liar. I didn't use the word lie, liar, because a liar is a thing. She is not a thing, she is lying. That's a behavior. So I'm focusing on her behavior that she lies by pretending to feel something she doesn't actually feel. So instead of getting angry, she gets nice and then she does things for people that she doesn't even wanna do.
I told her, you need to create more boundaries at work. You need to get into your masculine more. You need to say no, I want you to practice saying no. And I would, I'd make, make jokes with her. Let's say it together. Say no.
She has a hard time saying no to people because she's so committed to people liking her by being nice.
Okay, two months worth of work together, my friends. What's the result? First and foremost, not a pound lost. I laugh because two months is a long term, a long time to not lose any weight when you're working. We're a weight loss guy. She's working with me and I told her we're putting weight loss aside. I told her we're gonna focus on her personal world. I told her, listen, you've been trying to lose weight all these years, you haven't. Let's focus in a different direction and we're gonna put weight loss aside. And I told her we're gonna pick it up at some point now. But here's what I wanna say. During that time she had increased body awareness and increased sensitivity and we didn't even work on food. We were working on her being present with her emotions, with her husband, her kids, and the people at work. And noticing the stress level in her body, noticing the anger level in her body. After two months, I am talking to a more self-confident lady. Now I have never said a single word about her nice girl archetype in relation to being fat. Haven't said anything to her. But in this time, probably halfway through our work, she said to me, I think I need to be nice because I'm fat.
And I was so happy, I was so happy she came to that conclusion. 'cause for some reason I didn't wanna tell her I wasn't ready yet. Um, she went there
and that was a beautiful understanding and a beautiful realization. And I'm glad I hadn't said anything because when we discover something on our own that makes it even better. And here's what I wanna say about that, my friends, um,
she realized, and this is after one more month, how much of her life and her behavior was a compensation for the belief that she was too fat. So she grew up thinking, I'm too fat, I'm too fat, I'm too fat, I'm too fat. So if you're too fat, being nice
means people are gonna love you more. Oh, I just gotta be nice. People actually like me when I do stuff for them and when I bend over backwards to help people. So now you're being nice to the good little fat girl. So people love me now. So be nice and loved and fat get all mixed up together. So she has this identity. If I'm nice, I will be loved despite the fact that I'm fat. So fat nice and loved is this package deal. And that's what she presents to the world because she wants people to love her. Why does she want people to love her? Because, 'cause we all want people to love us. And she discovered early on that hey, guess what? We live in a world of weight hate. So it makes perfect freaking sense that she adopts the childlike strategy, the childhood strategy of, oh this doesn let me be nice. I don't have to deal with mean people 'cause let me do stuff for people. Let me bend over backwards for people and then they're not gonna weight hate me and life will be easier. So that's a smart strategy actually, my friends, this was such a powerful awareness for her and a complete change of direction from weight loss. So we were now in revelation time, you know, after approximately three months, she is getting it and it's big for her. I I, I mean, you know, imagine being 53 years old and you wake up and you realize, oh my goodness, I've been adopting this way of being that doesn't work for me for years. It's hard. So what I wanna say to you, my friends, about being nice, many people, many people, not all many people adopt a good girl or a good bo good boy persona regardless of body type or weight. We become good girls or good boys as a compensation for being judged for whatever, as a compensation for wanting people to love us.
Some people become good boys or good girls because they were not as smart or they were too smart or they were a little weird or they were not as good looking as all the other kids or not as good athletes. And let me just be a good boy or a good girl. So people like me, in this case, many people adopt a good boy or good girl persona as a compensation for being judged as fat. And since everybody hates on fat people, then we better be extra nice if we're fat. So we could find some way to be lovable. That's the child strategy in us and is a perfectly reasonable, intelligent, brilliant survival strategy if you do that. Congratulations. It worked for you when you were young. Doesn't work for you once you pass about age 18 or 19. This distinction is super important. You must learn that your client is right because they are, they are right for this behavior that is the perfect behavior because it was a survival strategy when they were young so they wouldn't get bludgeoned by the world. And once again, losing weight so we can feel better about who we are does not work when Casey does lose weight. She's just as insecure as she was to begin with. How do I know that? Because I asked her. Doing the deep work on self is so often what's called for my friends. And it's what people avoid because it's deeper work and it's hard. That's why people stay asleep. That's why it's easier for a lot of people to think, oh, I just need to lose this 50 pounds, then everybody's gonna respect me. No, she doesn't respect her. She's not acting respectable, she's not asking for it. She's not commanding it. It has nothing to do with weight. Our job, your job, my job as a practitioner is to do our best to inspire our clients in this direction when it seems like the best direction to take. The direction called let's do the deeper work.
Now what I wanna say is we're around month number three, kc. Once this realization was just on fire for her, she was getting it. She would come into some sessions just angry, which I was so happy for her. And she became admittedly and understandable, afraid of the work that she needed to do. And at some point, you know, right around like you know, almost into month four, she said she wanted to put the work on hold. And I totally got it. The work became a little too intense for her because she started seeing that this changes everything for her. She really needed to, said she needed to slow down because she had been not revealing her true self for years. And all of a sudden she was realizing that she's been inauthentic and she's a very different person than the person that she got to know in herself. She realizes how angry she is. She realizes how much she wants to yell at certain people. She realizes how she allows herself to be walked all over. She never resumed the work with me and I have no idea what happened for her. But the work was a success. Why is it a success? Because I helped her along on her journey.
What I've been able to help her more if I was a better practitioner at that time to further the work. Maybe I was in, I was loving the relationship. She really got afraid. I understand, I really understand. Uh, did I take it a little bit personally? Just a little? Just a little. So I really wanted to continue the work and I really wanted to help her lose some weight. But I was also clear that in order to help her lose the weight I had to help her gain life. And gaining life means looking at where life was calling her and life was calling her to step into her power and get rid of the good girl persona and see who else was there. She wasn't ready for that. Success is often a mystery, my friends. It is what it is. You have to celebrate the small successes. So she was now living in a whole new world. And that is a challenging world. Now. Life takes work. Sometimes it takes inner work.
Authenticity and truth are such powerful mess, powerful medicines.
I was speaking truthfully to her. I was asking her to speak truth. I was asking her to be more authentic in her life. That started to release a lot of power for her that started to open her up to a well of anger and words that were inside of her that she just wasn't ready for. Understand our dance with body image is on one level, the soul's journey to find the truth. What's the truth here? I'm unhappy with my body. What's the truth? What's the deeper truth? What's gonna truly help me be happier? What's gonna help me be here? Where's my body image pointing to my I hope these stories were useful for you. You know, I love a good story and that's why there's more. This was part one of our body image stories and case studies. Part two is coming up next, more stories, which I think will be helpful. We are all so interestingly human. So deliciously human. Celebrate your client. Celebrate the relationship. Celebrate the small successes. Treat every client as though they're your last client on earth and you wanna give them the best of the best of the best. You deserve to give your best. Your client deserves to receive your best. And then we let the chips fall where they may you try not to hit too hard, you take your clients along slowly.
Thanks my friends, and I'll see you on the other side.

PART 2

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Greetings once again, my friends. This is Mark David, founder of the Institute. Here we are continuing our conversation about body image case studies and stories. We're in part two of three, and in this conversation we are going to focus on one particular case study and really break it down a bit and go into some details simply because I think that might be useful. Let's dive in. I'm gonna talk about Tia and Tia was 26 when I saw her. So we're looking in a lot of ways at the princess archetype. Tia wants to lose 10 pounds. She's five foot six and weighs 132 pounds. Tia's originally from the west coast, now lives in New York City. She's a little stressed about her lifestyle, even though she loves New York. Big city's a little tough for her. She's feeling a lot of pressure to be skinnier. That's why she's coming to see me. She wants to lose the weight. She feels that pressure certainly comes from within, but she also believes there's pressure coming. One coming from everyone in New York City who expects her to be thin, whoever that might be. So Tia feels like so many humans, this invisible pressure from the outside, these voices that we often attribute to whoever, whatever we imagine it's coming from the outside. And it is. So Tia is an assistant manager in a very busy health food store. She's fascinated with food and fitness. She's an avid exerciser and essentially her life is food. Thinking about it, eating it, buying it for her store. She's a, she's like an assistant manager, so she buys the food, uh, and selling it to customers. So that's her life cycle. Tia also secondarily complains of a weak digestion, on and off bloating. And she does binge eat a number of times during the week. Tia will definitely consider herself in terms of fast, moderate, or slow. She's a fast eater. She's pretty much in a quandary because she feels she knows so much. She keeps telling me, I know so much about food and so much about nutrition and so much about fitness, but she can't lose any weight.
Now, I don't want to stop right there. That's a lot of people that I've come across. People who have educated themselves, people who are doing what they believe and what the world believes is everything, right? So on paper, according to her, so far, she's doing everything right and she can't seem to lose the weight, and that's extremely frustrating for people and understandably so. So I'm dealing with a young woman who's extremely frustrated. She wants to lose 10 pounds. She couldn't be any more educated than she is right now, or can she? So let's dive right into her diet, just so you get a sense of what it is. Breakfast, she has a healthy protein smoothie with just a bunch of super food ingredients for a snack. She has either a yogurt or an energy bar at the store. Everything's organic for her. Uh, for lunch, she has a big salad with either tofu or Tempe or some fish. Plus she has a fresh juice for a snack in the late afternoon. She has some sort of natural energy drink at the store. Uh, she has a piece of organic fruit for dinner, five days per week. She eats out with friends either at a health food restaurant or a Japanese restaurant. Two days per week. She does a simple dinner at home of home cooked chicken or fish with some vegetables. Doesn't eat any carbs. I can tell you that her eating rhythm is fine. Uh, her diet looks fine quite honestly. Here's a person, great diet. She's exercising a bunch. She tells me that she pretty much enjoys exercise, which I, I'm not so sure about, but either way, she's into it. She's into fitness. Um, so there's really no obvious place here for weight loss when it comes to diet. I don't have any true dietary tweaks for her, quite frankly. Uh, and I'm not sure nor can anyone be truly sure that she has 10 pounds to lose. So I'm gonna tell you, as I'm sitting in my office looking at the human being in front of me, and I know what 10 pounds of fat looks like, I know how much it is. There's a person who's five foot six and she weighs 132 pounds. For her to lose 10 pounds to my mind will make her very skinny. I actually don't think she even knows what 10 pounds looks like. But those are my thoughts. I haven't said this yet, but this is what is very clearly going through my mind.
The need to lose weight and change. Her body is clearly occupying a significant amount of her waking state. Tia is very verbal. Um, she is excited to be talking with me. She's excited to be talking with somebody who is enthused about nutrition and the body and weight like I am. So she, she's being very honest and upfront. This is a client who is truly wanting to help herself. So she's very open to sharing. Now, I'm also thinking in the back of my mind during this first session, and it honestly, after 20 or 30 minutes, I start to think to myself that Tia uses her interest in health in part to mask her perfectionism around weight.
If you're telling me that you are five six and you weigh 132 pounds and you want to lose 10 pounds, I am going to, in my mind, without saying anything first, consider that we are dealing with a human amongst the many humans who have caught the virus of a specific number that's gonna make everything okay. IE the number of pounds I'm gonna weigh or the number of pounds I'm gonna lose. And it is very clear to me that like many women and men, this young lady is convinced and I mean convinced that she's absolutely right and factually correct, that her weight must come off in order for the universe to be in harmony. So when she speaks about losing this 10 pounds, it's no different than saying, you know, I got this big huge splinter sticking outta my hand and this needs to be pulled out, otherwise it can get infected. Now that's factually correct. You got a big huge splinter sticking outta your hand. Yeah, we gotta get that out. That's a fact. She talks about her weight loss like it's a fact. This weight factually must come off. The sun must come up every day and the sun will go down every day. That that's a fact. We can all bank on. She's banking on this as a fact. My friends, you need to start to notice, I believe the subtleties that people display when it comes to how they talk about food and how they talk about body. And in this conversation, how they talk about weight.
In many ways, we're learning about body image and weight at the same time, because those two are very much married and attached at the hip, so to speak.
Many people need to, in my mind, become a body image client. Even though they're a weight loss client, she's not coming to see me for body image issues.
Few people will really come to see you for body image issues. Yeah, I get a handful over the years who say, yeah, I hate my body. I wanna learn to love my body. I don't necessarily wanna lose the weight, I'm just tired. But in general, nobody's gonna come to you and say, I have a body image issue. I just want to fix my body image. I don't care about my weight, I don't care about my shape. You're not gonna hear that. Generally speaking, that's gonna be a rare client. So you have to think in your mind, I am dealing with somebody who needs to dive into body image more. I'm not announcing that to a client. I'm reframing this client as I'm speaking to her in a first session. I'm reframing her as you are no longer a weight loss client to me. You are a human who has some interesting challenges around her body image. And that's how I want to relate with you. Am I open to the universe of possibilities that this human can possibly u lose some weight? Sure. But that is such a teeny, tiny little goal and is so insignificant in the scheme of things because humans do this. Humans across the board, particularly women, have caught the virus of the perfect body or the right body, the body that I am considering perfect for me, the weight I am considering, perfect for me, the number that I am considering perfect for me. So this is what lives inside Tia. So what I am telling you is you have to think in the back of your mind, is my particular client, is my particular weight loss client or any client that is coming to see me for binge eating, overeating, emotional eating, challenging relationship with food, whatever it is a health condition. Is there some work in the realm of my client's relationship with their body? Is there, is there work that needs to be done there?
And all my alert lights are coming on with this client. Your alert lights will come on more and more as you practice this work more and more.
So here's my approach.
I'm clear in my first session what my approach is. As I've gotten to know her as I've listened to her, I'm getting that my approach for this young lady, particularly because her diet's great, particularly because her exercise is fine, particularly because she's young and healthy, particularly because she's a princess. And particularly because quite frankly, on the visuals of me looking at her, I am assessing that this human does not really have a lot of weight to lose, if any. And I mean that, isn't that an interesting assessment? Because on the one hand, I've said to you previously, we don't know how much anyone should weigh. And the truth is we don't.
On another level, what happens is people are, so many people are so obsessed with the idea of being thin. That to my mind it is far easier for somebody who is trained for somebody who is observant, for somebody who is practiced in looking for someone who is interested in learning to look and notice and starts to notice bodies and starts to notice over the years when people say, oh, here's how much weight I wanna lose. And she doesn't pass the eyeball test. So yeah, there's an eyeball test. You know, you could look at a person and tell if they're really tired, they don't say anything, they haven't mentioned anything. You can look, you can see, you can see if a person comes into your office and they're particularly nervous or agitated, you could see if a person comes into your office, they're particularly excited. We read people, you can tell if a person comes into your office and they're not looking so healthy. You can tell if a person looks real vibrant in the same way. I'm asking you to learn the eyeball test. When it comes to people saying, I wanna lose X amount of weight, you gotta really look at their body as best you can and think to yourself from where. Okay, so I wanna completely defocus on losing the weight. That's what I'm thinking as she's talking. I want to help her grow out of her toxic nutritional belief that is very evident to me now. She's so focused on being thin and losing this weight, that it is clear to me that she is trying to get somewhere. She's trying to hit a goal. And that goal is not just weight loss. That goal is somebody she believes she's gonna be when I am thin, when I lose this weight, when I have the body I want, then I'm gonna be happy, then I'm gonna be the real me, et cetera.
She doesn't even notice this. Now granted, she's talking to me about weight loss, but she has already acknowledged to me that this is on her mind all the time. It's especially on her mind because she's got an intelligent mind and she studies this topic
and she's hit a dead end in her scientific experiment called I'm eating the best foods and I'm doing the best exercise and I can't lose weight. So essentially she's in a constant silent conversation around weight loss.
So I want to help her penetrate through that conversation because her mind is literally gripped by an alien conversation. I'm calling it an alien conversation. Yes, it's her conversation with her herself. But it's like somebody put this conversation in her head and it goes and it goes and it goes
and it takes over our mind. My job is to help her embody. She does a lot of talking about her body. She does a lot of talking about her nutrition. She does a lot of lot of talking about her weight and her exercise. At some point, there's nothing to talk about. I mean, really, it's like, live your life, embody, be here, be present.
I'm also thinking in the back of my mind, here is a young woman who is, when I inquire of the universe, where is life calling her? To me, life is calling her to step into her feminine in a more evolved way, whatever that might mean for her. We are constantly growing and transforming
unless we aren't.
That's our, I want to say that's our natural state. Our natural state is to grow and transform. Our natural state is to become more and more aware. We learn about our environment. You get older, you see things, you get wiser. You have problems when you're young and gradually you learn how to solve them. You learn how to not waste your energy. So we grow and mature as we get older. That's, that's just our natural state. And many people for different reasons. The pause button gets pushed on growth because of upbringing, environment and whatever it is about our life that has us asleep. So when I asked the universe on behalf of my client, on behalf of Tia, where is life calling? Her? Life is calling her to step into her feminine in the next step of maturity, whatever that means for her. But I could see she's a princess trying to make it perfect on one level. That's part of the archetype of the princess. Specificity. Actually. Specificity is about the feminine. Feminine, believe it or not. Loves to be specific in specific. The feminine loves to be specific about itself. Feminine loves to be specific about what works for it, what doesn't, what tastes, what pleasures, what kind of stimuli.
That's a good thing. The young feminine will easily lapse into perfectionism that perfectionism can live in us and when it's not addressed, we can carry that perfectionism into our queen age or our queen in training age.
So I wanna help her take the next step. So this is all what I'm thinking in my mind.
And in the last, you know, 30 or so minutes of the first session, because I've assessed my client, this is a first session. I am clear about how I wish to work.
I am clear that I am dealing with a client that I am older and wiser than, and therefore I will be in a very clear mentoring role. So I have an intellectual intervention with her. Uh, and I told her with a strong sense of conviction that I believe your inability to lose weight. Okay? So you're trying to lose weight, Tia, and I gotta tell you, congratulations. You are doing everything right for your health. You're eating a great diet. You're surrounding yourself in New York City with a great environment, working in a great health food store. You're around people interested in health. You're in a healthy culture. You know, you are making some great choices. And I am so impressed by that. You know, I, I definitely admire that in a young person. Notice how I'm making her, right? I am elevating her before I'm gonna tell her, here's kind of what you're doing, not so correct. Okay? So I'm very impressed with how you're conducting yourself and how you are going about making sure that you reach your natural and sustainable weight. And I'm also noticing that despite everything that you do, that's good. I mean really good. I got no place to work with you in your diet. I really don't. Honestly, I don't have a lot of places to work with you with your exercise. So because you have a great diet and great exercise, and you're not losing weight, I gotta tell you, here's where I go in my head and, and I've been doing this a while. Where I go is I wonder, just wondering, is this a message from the universe for you that you need to take a different approach in general?
Now, I wanna pause my friends for one moment in this intellectual intervention, which I'm gonna get right back to. I've also learned about her that, that she's definitely a more cosmic, universal spiritual kind of gal. So she told me she's into yoga and she's into different religions and studying different religions. So for me to say, Hey, you're doing everything right, congratulations. Good for you. And when a human's doing everything right and they're not getting what they want, sometimes that could be a message from the universe. I'm calling upon her religious belief system to help prove my point. You know, this could be a message from the universe that you need to take a different approach in general. So based on that, based on my read of people and based on me tuning into you, I think to myself, 'cause I I meet a lot of people, I bet I would bet a gazillion dollars to you that someday when you are 50 years old, and if you look back on this time right now and you see a picture of yourself and you remembered how badly you wanted to lose 10 pounds, you might think that you were crazy to believe that you had to lose 10 pounds right away in order to be happy. And that was the most important thing in your life.
And notice what I just did, my friends, when I said that I paused and I was silent because I said it with conviction. I'm futurizing for her. I'm making a powerful point and I want her to absorb it. 'cause I ain't kidding when I say that. I am not kidding you that I have heard without questioning people. I have heard so many women share with me over the years. God, I can't believe I look back at myself at a picture when I was 15 years old, 18 years old, 22 years old, I can't believe I, I was trying to lose weight. I thought I was fat.
I've had young women in their thirties tell me this about when they were in their teens, that they're shocked when they look back on their teenage pictures because they remember how fat they thought they were and they were actually skinny.
So on some level, the feminine mind knows this, especially now that she's about 26, she kind of knows this. So I said, listen,
maybe you can lose weight, maybe you can't. I don't know. You're doing everything right and you haven't lost the weight. So my approach is that for now, we need to push the pause button on weight loss. And I want you to lose the need to lose the weight.
And I really want you to focus on you becoming yourself more. Because for a lot of people, shape shifting to their natural body comes when they become more of their true self. That's what I've noticed. There might be some places where we can work you and I, around your life, around your lifestyle, around what's going on for you and your inner world. There might be some places we can work that if we can help you become the person that you're meant to be, we give your metabolism a better chance to become what it's meant to be.
Now, my friends, I normally wouldn't necessarily say that to a client in a first session, but again, I'm assessing this client. She is smart, she's into it. She's a bit of a cosmic girl, and she's into nutrition and into health. What she's doing doesn't work. And I am telling her, her, here's the direction I wanna go in. She's, she's that kind of girl in my assessment.
So Tia said she was really interested and willing to work together. For some reason, a part of me didn't believe her. Uh, 'cause she sort of acknowledged flatly, uh, there, there, there was just a mono, she just became monotone a little bit. Um, I think part of her was caught like a deer in headlights. She really wanted to see me. She really wanted to work with me. Um, she had read my first book, so she believes in me, but doesn't quite believe in what I'm saying, but I'm kind of a last resort for her. That's what I'm thinking in the back of my mind. And I, I really was getting towards the end of the session like, wow, you need firm and clear guidance. Now, by the way, my friends, any human in their teens and twenties needs some firm and clear guidance. I mean that most people in their teens and twenties that I meet need some very firm and clear guidance. Why? It's not an easy world. The more we've been around, the more you've been around a corner a few times, the more you know, especially the more you know about health and the more you know about food and weight and uh, the psychology of eating and people's relationship with food, the more you know. So I'm just adopting a very strong mentor archetype with her. A very strong teacher archetype. I, I'm being aware in myself, what are the ingredients that will help this relationship work? Part of your success, my friends, is you have to stop being one person. 'cause you're not one person anyway. You're a whole bunch of different people. If you're a man listening to this right now, you're a friend. You might be a brother to someone. You might, you're definitely a son to someone. Maybe you're a father, maybe you're an athlete. Maybe you're a professional in whatever realm you are in. Maybe you're a student. Maybe there's parts of you that are a jerk. Maybe you're a prince, maybe you're a king. Maybe you're a lover. Maybe you're a magician. You have the warrior in you, you have the scientists. So we got all these different archetypes in us.
We ain't one person, we're a crowd. And yes, there's the one me that is the witness consciousness above all else.
What happens is when we come into a session as a professional, we tend to adopt one voice. And that one voice usually for professionals, tends to be the disembodied expert. That's the worst possible voice, at least in this realm. Uh, not a useful voice where dealing with people, not disembodied humans.
So with each client, I'm noticing what archetype I might need to emphasize coming from me. So I'm dealing with a princess. So I'm going to be a strong teacher. I am going to be a strong mentor. I am going to be coming from my king, which is what I'll be doing anyway, because that's my natural archetype, right then and there. I'm putting on an energy field that's invisible, yet it is felt. But that will come out through my voice, through my words, through my intonation, and it will infuse the conversation.
So it's my mentor archetype talking to her princess archetype. What a perfect combination because the young people, the princess and the princesses need a good king or queen. Now, this isn't to say that if you're a princess, you can't be coaching a queen.
Any archetype can coach any archetype. You just have to take advantage of it. And you've heard me say this before, you know, if you are a prince or a princess, if you're of that age and archetype and you're working with somebody who's clearly a king or queen age, I always reference it. I always name it. At some point I say, listen, you know, I'm one of the young ones and you're one of the older ones. Archetypally. I consider myself a prince. And you're a king. And you know, the reality is you're older than me. Chances are you're wiser than me. You've been around the corner more, you have more life experience. And I defer to that for sure. At the same time, this is my work. This is what I do. I love it. And I have good distinctions here. I have good training here. And you know this, when you were young at some point there were certain things that you realized that your generation brought in as a gift for the older generation. So I know my generation, we have our gifts that we bring in to the older ones. So I just wanna acknowledge that. So I'll say that if I am, you know, I I, I used to say that in my prince years when I was working with somebody older than me. It's a great way to level the playing field. And your client, if you're a younger person, your older client will love that. It helps them relax. It takes them outta judgment, uh, pretty quickly. Okay, so here's the first homework assignment at the end of the first session. Okay, Tia, I got a journaling exercise for you. I want you to write down who you would be, how life would be different, what you'd feel like, how people will respond differently to you, the things you would do and everything, and anything that would describe the new you. Who's lost 10 pounds. In other words, what's the ultimate benefit? What's the payoff? I want you to be as specific and detailed as possible, and I want you to be real and honest.
That's the homework assignment, my friend. Is it journaling exercise? And you know how I say it. Hey, listen, I got a journaling exercise for you. Are you the kind of person that would journal? Oh yeah, I love journaling. Great. Here's the exercise. Now, somebody said, I hate journaling. I would say, okay, well you willing to do this? No. Okay, then I want you to think about this. Would you record an audio about it and talk into your cell phone? You know, you negotiate with a client. Second homework assignment I gave her. I said, you mentioned you were a fast eater. Here's the only nutritional piece I actually want to do with you right now is I want you to become a slow eater. I want you to relax with meals. I want you to take more time. When you eat before you eat, ideally you're into yoga. You know what this is about. I want you to take five to 10 long slow, deep breaths before eating anything. And I want you to just enjoy your food more and smile when you eat. I gave her the very quick, two minute, one minute really explanation about, Hey, here's what happens when you're a fast eater. Explain the stress response. Explain what happens when you step into parasympathetic nervous system dominance with a meal. So I gave her all the simple science, the simple scientific mind cookies to help her convince her left brain. She was fascinated with this concept completely new to her. So as you could see, just notice I gave her a piece of left brain quote unquote homework and a piece of right brain homework in a lot of ways. Um, believe it or not, actually, they're both kind of left brain and right brains when you're writing down that, that engages the left brain. But the reality is, if it's a creative piece, you're doing both becoming a slow eater. That's that you have to do something that's very low left brain, but at the same time, it's right brain in that she needs to embody, she needs to breathe. So I'm giving her one exercise that's simply about journaling things onto the paper, writing from her head and from her being. Um, the other thing is just something practical with meals. Okay? And she was interested in both these homework assignments and agreed to do them. Okay? She comes back one week later, she's clearly awkward. Hey, how did it go, Tia? Let's talk. Tell me about the homework assignment. She's kind of awkward and slightly embarrassed when we talked about the slow eating because she couldn't do it very well. And you know, she said like, she's basically so accustomed to being successful in eating a good diet and doing good exercise that she can't believe she failed at something so simple. She's really surprised at herself. Like it's so simple, she couldn't do it. Um, so what do I do? I I make her right. You make your client right? I really appreciate you working on this. I really appreciate you giving it an effort. You know, something doesn't surprise me. Why this is probably the most difficult assignment, a person with my kind of training in eating psychology and MINDBODY nutrition. This is the most difficult assignment you can give to most people. It sounds easy, but it's not because it's a deeply ingrained habit. There's nothing wrong with you. There's absolutely nothing wrong with you. It's very habitual and it's hard to break this habit. And to break this habit takes practice. Just like anything else you've ever done that you've gotten good at, has taken practice. The first time you started learning about nutrition, you knew nothing but you practiced. You read, you explored, you had conversations, you went to classes, you took courses, practice.
So we talked about the homework that she wrote and she got into it. And she was truly convinced that her life would indeed be better when she loses weight. So she had a great list of here's what life is gonna be like, and it's all some version of, you know, she's gonna be the real her. And she was very clear that the biggest bonus, she didn't use those terms. That the biggest bonus for her when she loses weight is that, you know, she's gonna just be more attractive to men. And she said, you know, and, and this was hard for her to say, but I'm really glad she owned it. Uh, very impressed actually. She says that she feels that a 10 pound weight loss will put her into a completely different class of attraction.
She said she thinks it'll, it'll, it'll just put her into a completely different realm of how many men would be interested in her.
I, I, I could have been one of the first times I've heard a female clients say that to me. Um, so I was, I was just surprised, like, wow, you are an honest human. Um, 'cause that's true for her. Uh, quite frankly, it's true for a lot of women.
They want to be in the place where they want to be. They want to have, I love you, I adore you. You're beautiful. Here's all the attention we've noticed you. So the young princess archetype wants to be seen and noticed and given the feedback from the outside of praise, you're wonderful. We see you, you're beautiful, you're break. We approve Eventually when the princess mind receives approval enough, particularly from her core environment, the people who love her and surround her parents, family, teachers, mentors, guides. When the princess mind gets that Feedback enough, you're loved, you're accepted. Eventually. That's what she takes in. That's what she believes. And that's what she operates from. I've met women like that who got that at a very young age. And they, they're empowered at a young age. 'cause eventually that message comes inside and they could be in their twenties and up and love what they've got,
even though it's not perfect Hollywood. Okay? So I'm dealing with an honest client, I love it.
So in the second session, we're still in the second session here, I continue to be very upfront with her. So I said to her, I gave her a little lecture, and in fact I said to her, I'm gonna give you a lecture about men right now. And this is me being your older brother telling you about men. And what I wanna say to you is, majority of men, and I mean a majority of men can care less if you lose 10 pounds.
The majority of men, because I understand men, and I understand heterosexual men are not going to look at you and then say, huh, if only that girl could lose 10 pounds, then I would be attracted to her, then I would date her.
I told her, I've been around thousands of men in my life. I've been around all kinds of locker rooms, I've been around all kind of guy talk. You seldom hear that. Just you will seldom hear that. Will you hear it? Sure. But it's the exception. And it's not the rule you, and especially for you, for me, as a man looking at your body, I'm gonna tell you, men are not gonna look at you and say, if only she would lose 10 pounds. So what I'm trying to tell you, Ms. Klein, is that in a lot of ways, what I think is your fixation on weight and maybe even health, might be a little bit of a man repellent.
And what I mean by that is you are putting so much energy into losing weight. You're putting so much energy into thinking about your body, worrying about your body, thinking about your diet, thinking about the exercise. You're putting far more energy into that than finding a man.
I don't know about you, but the places I put my energy are the places where things happen. And the places where I don't put my energy is usually where things don't happen.
Now, my friends, I wanna pause for a second and tell you something. You will meet a lot of people. And in this case I'm gonna talk about women. And I'm gonna talk about women in the heterosexual universe.
Women in the heterosexual universe who are challenged around weight and body image can give so much attention there. Even though they want a relationship, even though they think this is gonna get me the relationship. What happens is they're more in relationship with weight loss. They're more in relationship with my body image and losing this weight. And this isn't good enough that that's what they're in relationship with. There's no room for a guy. And I'm calling that a subtle psychic, invisible form of man repellent men in the heterosexual universe are attracted to a woman who is embodied, who's in her body, who's loving her body, who enjoys her body. That's what's attractive to the masculine mind. Somebody who's not in their body and not enjoying their body, that's not a great advertisement for a man who's looking for a woman who's in her feminine. In her feminine means embodied means she's in her body, she's there, she likes it, she enjoys it.
Men consciously or unconsciously know if she enjoys her body, chances are I will have the opportunity too, because that's her vibe, that's her energy.
So she's basically a tightly closed bud about her physical form.
So after I said that to her, so I, so I really want you to look for this in your clients, and it feel free to, when you make an intellectual intervention to point that out, you're trying to attract a man. But I know this is not your intention, but what you're doing is you're actually spraying on some men repellent. So to that point, cha, exceptional client, she shared with me that she's gone on four first dates in the last year, and none of the guys asked her out on a second date. And she assumed it was about her weight.
Fascinating. And I actually, I I, I thought that was so like, how did you, how did you get that? So I asked her how she got that information. I just assumed because she's so convinced that if she loses weight, she will be attractive. And what's fascinating to me is I started breaking it down with her. I said, okay, were any of these guys before your first date, had they seen you before they asked you out on a date? Oh yeah. So how did you come up with that? So did they decide on the first date, oh, nevermind, you need to lose 10 pounds. They've seen you before. They've looked at you, they wanted to go out on a date with you. I don't think it's about your weight.
So understandably, she got pretty uncomfortable talking about her dating life because now we had to work on something that's more than just about her weight, and we had to talk about her. So this catalyzed a great conversation about, you know, the masculine and feminine.
Now my friends, why is this so important? And, and, and you know this, you know this because so many people, their relationship to their body and their body image and what they want the body to be is because we want to be loved by people on the outside. We want the guys to like us, the girls, to like us, the whoever's to like us, wanna be attractive. So our relationship with our body is tied up into relationships. Here's what men want. Here's what women want, and here's what I have to do to get it. And we go off on all these weird tangents and we go into these strange neighborhoods in our mind that actually don't make any sense. And until somebody helps us see that, notice that shine a light on it, question it. We're looking for love in all the wrong places.
So I find, you know, I wanna make up a number right now. I would say that at some point in my practice,
as I started understanding people more, at some point in my practice, I would say about 70% of my clients,
we get into the conversation in a significant way about relationship. Whether it's their relationship with their husband and wife, their boyfriend, their girlfriend, their fiance, or their lack of relationship, their desire to meet someone, their dating, at least 70% of my clients, because it's so connected and people get stuck. No, I wanna lose the weight. So you go to a practitioner, it's like, okay, what do we have to do to help you lose 10 pounds? Well, the person can lose 10 pounds. What kind of professional is that? That looks at a bro say, oh, you wanna lose a hundred pounds and you weigh 132. That's what it sounds like to me. She might've said, I want, she could've as easily said to me, I wanna lose a hundred pounds and weigh 32 pounds. That that's what to my mind her saying, I wanna lose 10 pounds eventually. Sounds like it's that crazy.
But that's where we go because we want love, understandable. That's what the world has taught us. That's what the world is teaching the feminine mind. It is teaching the feminine mind that here's what you need to get the love. So she's just following her programming. And what I am doing is I am helping to
reprogram, reeducate, help her unlearn, help her detoxify of toxic beliefs.
So truth and wisdom and authenticity and realness and wisdom can start to come out.
Okay, Tia, here's your homework. This is the homework I give her at the end of the first session. I want you to write a complete and exhaustive autobiography of your relationship life, your dating life, and your sex life, a complete and exhaustive autobiography, your relationship life, your dating life, and your sex life. I want you to be real. I want you to be honest. I want you to tell the truth. And I want you to write this as if no one's gonna read this. I'm not gonna be reading this. But what I will do is when you come back next time, I'm gonna ask you to share any insights that came up for you, any connections you made, any thoughts that came up for you, any questions that emerged. So I'm gonna ask you about your experience and I'm gonna ask you to share any insights, details, thoughts, feelings that just stood out for you that you feel are relevant. I want this autobiography to be very detailed. So that's something you can do. Of course. Great.
Now, clearly I asked her to do this exercise because I thought there was something here for her. So this is, I'm inventing homework assignments on the fly with every single client. You have to learn how to do this.
I was noticing her discomfort around the topic of relationship. That's totally understandable. She's young, she's still looking. She hasn't been in a significant relationship. This is a great topic because it plugs into the young princess mind for sure. The young princess archetype, because I hope you're getting that. Her relationship with her body right now is being driven by her relationship with the opposite sex. Her relationship with wanting to have a relationship.
I also asked her to continue to work on relaxed, low pleasured eating and to really give it her best shot and to let her know that this is a long-term project. And it doesn't matter how often she's unsuccessful, I'm just looking for each week. If she could have 1% success, 5% success, to slowly take little baby steps in getting more successful with that. So I really focus on that. I want you to hear how I focus on that. Why? I'm gonna remind you why. Because somewhere inside of her, I don't care how healthy she eats somewhere inside of her, I guarantee you, I will bet my life on it. She's got the toxic nutritional belief. Food is the enemy. Why? 'cause food makes you fat. She's trying to control her diet. So she loses weight and it ain't working
to her mind, to the human mind. Okay, well, so I'm doing something wrong with food. It's, it's about the food. So for her to slow down with food, she has to get truly comfortable with food and her relationship with it. She's not in a relaxed relationship with food. Eating fast is in part a side effect of not having a relaxed, pleasured, nourishing relationship with food and body.
It's also a function of habits. Some people have a wonderful relationship with their body and they just have the habit of eating fast. So I know people who love their body, they're doing great, and they have a habit of fast eating. Okay? So I want you to know that some people, there's not a toxic belief in there, they just have the habit that they learned from their environment because it's a common habit. But as I can help her relax into food, what she's doing is she's embodying more and she's confronting her own stress around eating and she's having to grapple with it. So I'm asking her to do work, good work, the kind of work that builds upon itself. And one day you get a paycheck. That's what work is my friends. It's one definition. Anyway, okay, third session.
Tia comes back seeing her once a week. As with any session with a client, we discuss, Hey, how did your week go? Let's talk about the homework. So remember she did the autobiography, relationship dating sex. Tia mentioned that one of the things that stood out for her about the dating relationship, sex autobiography, was that she always has felt in competition with her sister. Huh? Who would've guessed her older sister is, was considered the sexy one. And by far, um, and the older sister. Older sister was the one who was destined to succeed in just about everything. Girl is beautiful, smart, uh, out there and just that kind of gal. So Tia is younger sister, and she feels that she has to live up to her sister's perfection. And she especially feels that she's always been in competition because she's around people and parents and friends and humans and the guys. And everybody's always raving about her older sister. Nobody raved about her. Woo. As she's sharing this with me, it's a tearful revelation. Now, I want you to say, I, I want you to know my friends, that when I see this and witness it, I know we just got to a very interesting place. I'm not trying to take away somebody's emotions or tears. That's a moment of insight. That's a moment of deep honesty. That's a moment where a person taps into a boo boo. We have boo boos in there. It's okay. It's part of being alive. Some stuff just ain't easy. If I was in her shoes, I would be probably the same person she is.
I could totally understand. I can put myself in my client's shoes. You gotta learn how to do this. Put yourself in her shoes. Ouch. That's gotta hurt here. She's a young princess growing up and everybody's complimenting her older sister, telling her how beautiful she is.
And t is not getting the love, even though she's an attractive girl. Okay? So I definitely spent time acknowledging how hard this must have been.
So hopefully you understand my friends, that when a client drops into a a tearful moment, I want to acknowledge them. I wanna slow down time, I wanna give them space, and I wanna make them right for their tears because she is from there. I said, you know, Tia, in a way you're still energetically living in your parents' house with your sister. I know you live alone here in New York City, but you are energetically still living in your parents' house and you're with your sister. So you are functioning as if you are still that young girl living with your sister. That's your world.
And it seems like you never feel good enough because your sister lives in your head as an eternal comparison. So your sister literally in there, she occupies your head, she occupies a big part of your brain, and your sister's got a big sign that she's holding in your brain that says, compare yourself to me and come up short. So that's what's always happening. You're comparing yourself to your sister and you're coming up short.
I'm just explaining to you, miss client, that that's what's going on in your psyche. And it is perfectly understandable that that's what would be going on because that's what you've learned. Anybody else in your shoes would likely be in the same situation. So your job, whether you know it or not, is you have to start to graduate from living in your parents' house and living with your sister. Most importantly, because you don't live with them anymore. And you are individuating. That means you're becoming your own person, independent of your family of origin. Of course, they're still your parents, of course your sister's still your sister. But now you are becoming the you who you really are without those people in your environment telling you who you should be, how you should feel, what you should believe, powerful conversation. So basically, I'm essentially telling her it's time to change this pattern. And I'm letting her know this is a conscious choice to step outta living in your parents' house with your sister. It's a conscious choice. You have to choose to do that. And it's a con, it's a continuous practice because in your mind, that's where you live. I understand. And this is a choice that comes from a deep place inside you. It comes from your soul. It's like a soul choice.
Tia loves when I use those words 'cause she's a spiritual girl and she appreciates that coming from her health coach.
So I am always trying to talk with my clients in a way where things land. It's as simple as that.
So the entire thrust of Tia's, constant efforts at weight loss and shapeshifting, her body was driven from fear, lack, and a deep wound of not being enough. Her unconscious belief was that she could equal her sister once she attained some arbitrary amount of weight loss that would make Tia's sense of, of her, of herself, tears, inner sense of lack. It's gonna magically disappear when you get to 122 pounds. Wow. Isn't life cool like that? All you have to do is lose this specific amount of body fat that you just invent in your mind. And all that nasty stuff from your upbringing just disappears. Wow, how cool is that?
How crazy is that? That's what people do. That's what we humans do. I'm telling you, we do that, you do that. I've done it in our various ways. This is what women often do. It's what men often do. Invent a number of pounds that you worship like a religion. And we use our ideal weight, ideal weight as a substitute for actually working on self. We're looking for the solution where it's not. We're putting our effort to digging for gold in a place where the, where the sign says, ain't no gold here, but we're digging anyway. So this is a mistake in perception and one that we as practitioners are here to help our clients grow out of. Isn't as simple as that. It's not easy, but I'm telling you, this is simple. It ain't that complicated in terms of the inner architecture of what's happening in so many people's minds. I just need to hit this arbitrary number of pounds lost that I choose and then all this inner sense of lack and me not feeling good about myself, it's gonna disappear. Now, she's not even thinking this consciously, but deep down inside beneath her awareness, she's busy thinking, I will be equal, if not better, than my sister when I lose this amount of weight. And of course, everyone knows, as soon as I lose this amount of weight and I'm better than my sister, oh finally I win. Finally, I'm loved and accepted. Everybody's gonna know that somehow. And I'm gonna get the guy. That's what a part of her brain is telling her.
Okay? So in the third session, we focused on what life would be like if she let go of the need to be her sister.
What would life be like if you weren't in competition with your sister?
Tia was at the edge of her seat. She was riveted and extremely uncomfortable.
When you noticed your client being uncomfortable, feel free to acknowledge it. Hey, you know something, Tia, if you're feeling uncomfortable, you're in exactly the right place. Because discomfort is usually what happens when we're at the edge of something good, of some good growth.
This is truly uncomfortable. There's an uncomfortable conversation because it's difficult and it's hard and it takes work and it takes inner work and it takes us calling on places in us that we haven't called on before. And I truly believe I have a ton of confidence in you because you are, you have demonstrated to me that you're a pretty remarkable young woman and you can do this.
So I'm mentoring her, I'm coaching her, I'm cheerleading her. I'm acknowledging her discomfort. Now, I will do this. I'm especially doing this with a princess. But quite frankly, you're gonna do this with any person, any client, any woman. I don't care of any age group who's dealing with this kind of challenge in their inner psyche. Because oftentimes you're dealing with a woman of queen age, but whose thought process and whose inner world is functioning as if she's a princess. So talk to the princess in her.
I'm acknowledging her discomfort. I'm owning that. It makes perfect sense. And you ought to be uncomfortable for good reason because you're at the precipice. You're at the edge of something good and you can do this.
And I said, you know, you might be uncomfortable for a week or two or three or more, I don't know, because you are changing something big. And when you start to shift this, you're gonna step into your power like never before. You're gonna be a different person.
So I was very clear with her that this is important work that we're doing.
So her homework at the end of the third session was to journal every night before bed Journal. A couple of reasons why you choose your own self and your body. I choose my body because I choose me because, and then I want you to journal. I'm letting go of choosing my sister's life and my sister's body because
this is Tia just becoming herself. She's been trying to live in her sister's body in a weird way. I'm trying to help her live in her body. It's a much easier body to live in. 'cause that's the one she has very hard to live in. Somebody else's body, very hard to live in an imaginary body. Ouch. I don't know anyone who can do that.
Let's get in your body. Let's live in your body. That's doable, that's interesting. And that's where the action is. So you see why I invented that homework assignment? You see how that homework assignment makes sense? Now, I've never given somebody that homework assignment up until this client. I had never had a client like this share with me. Oh my God, I've just been trying to be like my sister and have her body. I'm like, wow, that's cool. That's interesting. I haven't seen that before is what I was saying to myself. So what I'm telling you is I'm just explaining to you my process, my journey, my inner world. As a practitioner, I'm inventing homework assignments based on what my client presents with. So, because this is such a juicy situation, okay, how do I invent a homework assignment that helps her take a step forward in relationship with her sister in this way? Great homework assignment journal before bedtime. Bedtime is a great time because you're letting go of the day. You're relaxed, you're gonna be asleep soon. Write down why you choose your body, why you choose yourself, why you're letting go of choosing your sister's body. Why you're letting go of choosing your sister's life.
Juicy stuff, right? Okay, here's the fourth session. Tia comes in, she looks brighter, she looks lighter. I'm telling you, she lightened up. She was just, I, I just, she was lighter, like literally in her body. You could see it, I could see it. Um, but at the same time, she's more grounded, if that makes sense. Um, to my mind, she'd clearly been able to tap into a deeper part of herself. She told me, Hey, how did the last week go? That was a very powerful session we had last time. Like, what happened for you? What came up? So that's what I say towards the beginning of this session, after we schmooze a little bit, you know, get settled in what happened in this last week. What came up for you? You just gimme the weather report to you. She said she cried almost every night that she was journaling. She said she didn't realize how much this was running her life and impacting her. She had no idea. Isn't that cool? I had no idea this was running her life either. It came out because of a homework assignment that she did and that I asked her, what came up for you? And she identified that my friends, can you see how you are not fixing your freaking client? That you are in a relationship with them. You're in a partnership with them and you are doing your work and your client does their work. And she would, she did her work. I did my work. She did her work. She also acknowledged love her honesty. She also acknowledged that a part of her didn't wanna let go of being her sister. She a part of her just really wants to be her sister. 'cause her sister is so wonderful. Okay, great. Like, good for you for acknowledging that.
Of course, a part of her doesn't wanna let go because all of her has been trying to be her sister for so long. So it's not gonna be easy. She owned that. Choosing herself, felt like she was choosing someone less than, wow,
why would I choose me if I'm less than her?
Isn't that juicy?
And we just had a moment of silence when she said that because it was so powerful.
And I acknowledged that makes perfect sense because to your childlike mind when you were a child, that's how a child perceives the world.
These people are bigger than me, better than me, stronger than me, more beautiful than me, more wonderful than me. If only I could be like them. We model after other humans. That's how humans learn. You imitate every creature in nature, at least in the mammalian kingdom imitates similar creatures. The older creatures, the parents, the siblings around it. It's just how it goes. So I said to her, that strategy was useful when you were young. Of course you wanna be the good things that your sister represents and now you're getting older and it's time to explore what being you is like. Because chances are being you is not choosing someone less than chances are.
So you see how I worked out and say, no, don't feel that way, she's feeling that way. I'm not gonna tell her not to feel that way. I'm gonna acknowledge that she's feeling that way and then I'm gonna suggest, you know, and she knows it. Of course she knows it, but I'm saying it in such a way that she could hear it. You know, acknowledging that that choice to want to be her sister came from a child's mind. People really have to get this. We have to learn how to make our journey right, because otherwise she's gonna not forgive herself. Oh my God, how stupid is that for me to spend my whole life trying to be somebody else? No, it's not dumb. It's how the human mind works. You wanna model after the person you wanna model after. And if we get stuck there
and somehow we're not taught to choose ourself, then there's a challenge. But you know something, Tia, you're not the only person who's trying to be someone else or trying to have someone else's body.
Everybody's trying to have a, so many people are trying to have a different body, you know, that
people wish they were a famous this or a famous that or whatever. Like, you're not the first person here. So this is very human, and I get why that happened for you. Okay, so at the end of the fourth session, here's the homework assignment.
Now, I've given this homework assignment before, but it feels time. I ask her to do a desire inventory,
write down everything, persons, places, thoughts, feelings, experiences, things, whatever possibly comes to your mind that you desire.
Uh, and it doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to make sense. It could be you desire your own planet to rule over, if that's truly your desire. I want you to write it down. I don't want you to worry about how out there it is, how crazy it is. I'm not asking for fantasies, which is a little different. I'm asking for things that you actually desire that's present for you. And I want you to worry about problem solving these desires and getting them. I simply want you to do an inventory of what's in your body and your being and your heart and your soul about what you desire. My friends, I want her to own her desires. I want her to acknowledge them. I want her to see them on paper. That's the whole point of this.
And by the way, the next step is to look at each desire on that list and feel what it would feel like in your body to have that desire in your life.
So I told her that once you write this down, I want you to look at each one after the list is finished. And just imagine, pretend, pretend that you had that desire fulfilled. What would that feel like in your body?
In other words, my friends, I'm asking her to relax into owning the desire and feeling what it would feel like to have the desire, feel what it feels like in your body to acknowledge this desire to own, this desire, to have the desire and to love the desire. Now, you might be thinking, huh, and what I wanna say to you about this exercise is that it's a very powerful exercise for the feminine,
because oftentimes we have desires and we make our desires wrong. Oftentimes we have desires and we don't even realize we have them. And the secret is we're not gonna get all our desires. But the key is to start to own the energy of desire. Because when you're owning the energy of desire, we embody more.
If you are desiring a relationship, let's say, but you're kind of like pretending you don't, and you're pushing it down, you're kind of, you're gonna be a little weird. You're gonna be going against your own nature. You're gonna be going against yourself. It's kind of like, I don't know, being tired, but pushing yourself or it, it's, it's, we're being incongruent when we truly desire something, but we're somehow trying to pretend we don't because we're uncomfortable about that desire.
So I want her to start tapping into her feminine. I'm putting the term desire underneath the heading called the feminine. That doesn't mean only females have desires, it's the feminine in us, because we're dealing with archetypes. We all have masculine and feminine archetype in us.
So for men, they have desires. I'm putting that under the feminine, particularly when women get in contact with desires, own them, feel them, embody them. Something interesting happens.
Okay, I'm gonna start to fast track this a little bit. In her fifth and sixth sessions, um, desire was a very illuminating topic for her. She had never really been in this conversation. And I'm gonna tell you, for a lot of people, this is very new and eye-opening. Turns out her biggest desire was for a long-term relationship.
And this was a real tough one for her because she acknowledged to me that she's not ready to get married, but I really want to experience a deep loving connection that's more long-term, but not necessarily a marriage. But in her mind, those two, didn't she, that, that didn't make sense?
And I said to her, I understand why that doesn't make sense to you, and that's your desire. And honestly, I, I just my opinion as you say that it makes perfect sense. When I was your age, I wanted the same thing. I wasn't ready to get married, but at some point, I wanted a longer term relationship. That's perfectly reasonable. That makes total sense. But my friends, I want you to notice something. She discovered something about herself. We are discovering this process, this relationship. What your job in part is to help your clients step into self-awareness and self-discovery. It's as simple as that.
Self-awareness and self-discovery. It's as simple as that.
She found a place, a desire in her that was really strong, but she was pushing down because it doesn't make sense. And what was fascinating was as we were talking about this, and as she said it out loud, and as I made that desire right, right before my eyes, you could see her completely relaxed. And I swear to you, she shapeshift before my eyes.
She was safe to feel her desire and to own it. And what I wanna say to you, my friends, is that this by itself is a powerful form of embodiment. Oh, this is me. Desire lives in the body.
Once we're in contact with our desires, then we make them right. And we're not trying to problem solve them in my head and just feel them in the body.
That's just a different experience for most people that they haven't had before. I'm calling this a tool. I'm calling this a technique. I'm calling this an embodiment technique, but it's more than an embodiment technique. It is a transformational personal growth technique.
It's actually a very powerful moment in our session. It was literally, you could see the room light up.
So we talked about what kind of guy she was interested in. We talked about what do you bring? You know, she was okay, I want this, I want this, I want that. Great. What do you bring to the table in a relationship? It was a great conversation. We talked about her fears about being in relationship. We talked about her excitement. Let's just, just talk about it doesn't, we're not trying to problem solve anything. Great. Here's your desire, let's run with it.
We made the powerful connection together that because she hadn't chosen herself and was choosing her sister, how could a man possibly choose her?
Do you follow that? Both of us. I don't know how it came out, but we got to this place that
because she hadn't chosen herself and was choosing her sister silently, unconsciously, how could a man possibly choose her? So she came to the conclusion. We came to the conclusion that attracting a man who would choose her could more readily happen if she chooses herself.
It's kind of like saying, if you hate yourself, it, it, it's a lot easier to find someone who's gonna love on you.
If you respect yourself, it's easier to find someone who respects you. Because if you date someone who doesn't respect you, you're gonna, you're gonna cross 'em off the list really quick. There's a little bit of the law of attraction.
We resonate who we are and what we are, and that tends to draw to us whatever it is we need to attract to learn about ourselves.
Isn't this an interesting conversation that I'm finding myself in with my client? We're not even talking about weight loss. We're not even talking about, you know, eating less fat and doing more abdominal exercises. Ouch. Okay, session seven and eight, I asked her, we were working on continuously practicing choosing herself. What does that look like? Make it a mantra, moment to moment. I gave her journaling exercises. Keep writing down what would it look like to choose yourself? And what she learned was choosing herself meant choosing her body. It meant being very specific about choosing her face, choosing her shape, choosing her past, choosing her future, choosing her entire journey. She, she was fascinated by this whole conversation. So she was in a constant practice that choosing herself meant the constant practice of noticing when you're not choosing yourself. Okay, Tia, when don't you choose yourself? Hmm. Let's see. I don't choose myself. When I'm comparing myself to other people, obviously comparing herself to her sister. I'm not choosing myself when I'm thinking thoughts about how my body's not okay when I'm self rejecting or self punishing.
So at this time, I asked her to get back into dating, whether it was online. Um, she's got a good social circle. Previously, she had some friends fix her up on some dates. I said, Hey, just get back into it. And don't look at it like you have to find a perfect guy on the first date. Just, just get some practice date, a bunch of guys. And I asked her to do one simple practice on every date. I made this up on every date. I want you to silently say to yourself as you're hanging out with the guy, I choose me as you're looking at him talking, just say to yourself, I choose me.
She smiled. She thought it was funny. Therefore, that probably means it's a good idea. Some people like that sort of thing. If you would've looked at me and said, that's the silliest thing I've ever heard of, I would've said, then don't do it. Just an idea. Um, but it felt right. And at this point, we're in a, we, my client and I were in a bit of a flow together. There's a connection. There's a simpatico, there's an understanding. This happens with clients, or it can
sessions nine through 12. We, she went out on some dates. So we discussed her dates. We talked about men, we talked about relationship. She was feeling very different in this new way of engaging men. Um, she was more in herself and less in her nervousness. And she realized that she needed to date a number of men and practice feeling comfortable on first and second dates. And she was enjoying this experience.
She was literally practicing dating and practicing, being comfortable and practicing being in her body and practicing being present.
At some point, at this point in our work, she remarked that she said this. I mean, I just, to me this was obvious, but it occurred to her one day that, um, she had become far more defocused on food than ever before. Literally in her private time, she was just not focused on food. Um, she said it kind of snuck up on me. Now, to my mind, it's very natural. She wasn't trying not to think of food. The reason why she's defocused on food, IE defocused on food and weight is because we're focusing on what's real for her and what's true and what matters
and the rest of her life that's most important and up. I didn't say, okay, you need to stop thinking about food. Just force yourself whenever you think about food and wait, just stop. Just say, no, no, never went there. Let's just talk about everything else that matters. And you'll watch the food conversation in your head and the wake conversation slowly die. A meaningful death. During sessions nine through 12, we got back to food just a little bit, but I, I wanted her to focus on receiving more pleasure with food, focus on pleasure and nourished eating.
So you're seeing, you know, we covered a bunch of different turf, but there's more.
Up to session 15. Our work was complete. We've been together for six months, uh, in sessions. 13, 14, maybe. We spent a little time on movement versus exercise. I touched upon that topic with her. It was a very useful conversation because there was a part of her that was doing exercise from the place of changing my body, so people will love me, that kind kind of thing. So we got into her enjoying movement more. In that time, we also got into the pleasure conversation, like, what else gives you pleasure in life other than food?
We talked about how she could let go of control more. So we got into the control conversation. We also spent some time discussing how she could expand her circle of women friends to include those who were more women positive, because there was an undertone of competition amongst her and some of her friends that she became aware of. And I said that, that makes perfect sense because there was an undertone of competition between you and your sister. So your self-chosen sisters, IE your girlfriends, it makes sense that you would repeat the same pattern that you imprinted because that's what you know. So it's either you evolve those relationships or you create others. That was actually a very juicy conversation. And we talked about her having honest conversations. Ah, yes, this was, this was the last several sessions. Talked about her getting conversation with her sister, the famous sister, and sharing with her sister about the work we've been doing and sharing with her sister about the self-rejection that she'd been carrying all these years. So I wanna make a long story short there. That was some juicy conversations. Um, it turned out that her sister and her had a very tearful and beautiful conversation. And it was a very powerful breakthrough for both of them. IE authenticity, she was being real. 'cause her sister and her have a lot of love, but there's always been this barrier between them. This was the barrier and neither of them were conscious of it. And finally when it got named, they could just hug it out and go, oh my goodness. Wow. The sister totally got it and totally understood it and, and just felt so bad for her younger sister. That's what the older sister came forth with. You know, she just, she, she was so sorry that she wasn't aware of this and didn't understand it and didn't realize it. And I'm the older sister and all that sort of thing. And this brought them closer and that helped Tia even individuate more and more a plus work, I gotta say. Um, okay, some final results. We're gonna start to wrap up here. Tia had been waiting for some future far off time to engage with men. She had been waiting for that same time to love her body into the future when I loses 10 pounds now Tia's choosing herself. We didn't change anything about her diet or her body. Nothing changed. She didn't lose any weight. She didn't need to lose weight. Once she put weight loss on hold, a deeper wisdom emerged. This whole conversation that we've just been in the whole flow of six months with Tia emerged because, hey, let's put weight loss on hold for a while. We could always come back to it. It's always gonna be there. Don't worry. Just putting it on hold. Doing that allows life to come through.
By the way, I hope you remember at the very beginning she had complained of digestion and bloating. This was dramatically improved. Why? Because she's a more relaxed eater, a more relaxed person, more in her feminine, and she's eating slower. She also had been binge eating.
Binge eating was mostly gone. And the binge eating was just all about, it was symbolic of the emotional turmoil in her world about I'm not getting the result that I want. Um, it was letting go of control. It was the control of I have to control my body weight. She's just living a more authentic life. She's in a flow. She's not trying to shapeshift a body that doesn't need to be shape shifted. Was she a hundred percent binge eating free? No, but she was, you know, down to like once every couple of weeks. She's a young girl. She's going through stuff. She's living in a city. She bingeing eats every once in a while, not a big deal. We got to where we got to because I was committed to her highest goal, her fullest self-expression as a human being here on planet Earth. I wasn't committed to some arbitrary amount of weight loss. Not even close. Okay, my friends, let's wrap up with some final lessons to consider Healing. Body image is oftentimes about focusing on the things that matter most to us.
Healing body image is all about tapping into pleasure, owning our desires, and getting to the core of what we truly want. Doing that is a powerful and enjoyable act of embodiment.
So when it comes to body image, there's nothing that's broken. We're not fixing brokenness. I didn't go to you. Oh my God, I I didn't say about Tia. You're broken. You're broken. No, I never think broken. I think we're just accessing the truth of who we are. We're diving deep into our essence. Let's start to express the real you. Let's have conversations that matter. Who are you? What do you want in life? What do you desire? What's really going on?
When we realize that we're not trying to fix something that's broken, we slowly begin to realize that we're lovable and we're essentially okay. And we don't need to change our body to be the real me
where Tia got to. Did she get there? A hundred percent? No. It's, it's, it's a long time. But she got to the place where in order to be the real me, I just need to be the real me Being the real me means I simply be the real me now as best I can. I practice being the real me for her. The real me was coming sometime in the future with a specific amount of weight loss. We started to achieve the end results in the beginning. Let's be the real you. Now,
the last place most body image challenged clients will look for healing and transformation is within. That's just the truth because we've been conditioned. Change the body, change the theology of these body fat. No, that's not where the action is. So our job, your job, my job as practitioners is to do the best we can to guide our clients there. This was a wonderful, successful client experience. I enjoyed my client. She did the work. She was a great client. But I wanna show you what's possible. I really wanted to show you what's possible with someone in six months of work. Um, you know, there's people that can go, she could have gone a whole lifetime comparing herself to her sister. No, I'm not kidding. So you and I have the opportunity to do some beautiful work.
I'm grateful to have been able to do this work with her.
I'm grateful to be doing this work with you and talking to you about some of the things that excite me and I'm passionate about and I know best that I think can really further the action for you as a professional and for the clients that you work with, and maybe even for you as a person. My friends, we got one more section on case studies coming up in part three. This was body Image case Studies, part two. Can't wait to see you on the other side. Thanks.

PART 3

Autoscroll:

Greeting once again, friends, Mark David here, founder of the institute. We are in our conversation continuing our conversation around some case studies stories when it comes to body image. This is part three of three. I have a couple of case stories for you, which I think you might find useful. So my friends, let's dive right in. Let's talk about Bernadette. Bernadette, when I saw her, was 36 years old. She's a health coach. She's five foot five. She's 145 pounds, and Bernadette wants to lose 20 pounds. So this is a weight loss client, Bernadette is very friendly. She's bright well-spoken, her health practice, her health coaching practice, I should say kind of waxes and wanes. Uh, she wants it to be more consistent in terms of client amount. She wants to make more money. She seems to feel somewhat ashamed about her lack of financial success. Interesting how she started focusing on that. Uh, in our session, um, she went in that direction. She feels most comfortable at 125 pounds is what she tells me. She can seem to lose any weight and she does not enjoy dieting anymore. Dieting for her means eating a lot less. She also doesn't want to exercise as hard as she used to. So previously she's been able to maintain a certain weight by exercising very hard and she just can't go there anymore. So I'm dealing with a human being who is pretty frustrated. She considers her diet to be very healthy and she's understandably confused about why she can't lose weight. She feels a bit lost and she acknowledges that she also has a bit of shame because she's a health coach and feels that she's gotta have the perfect body for her clients or the right body, or if she can't lose this weight, somehow she loses all her credibility as a professional, despite the fact that her clients like her very much. It feels to me like she's reaching a boiling point in her life. That's kind of what I got the impression of as I'm sitting talking to Bernadette, she feels like she's about to boil over. She's just broken up from a three year relationship. Uh, and so that's another piece of information. Secondary health complaints, occasional constipation and bloating, but not for her, a huge issue.
So a little bit more information about Bernadette. I mentioned that she mentioned that her clients love working with her. So she feels very good about that. She feels empowered and forgets about her weight when she's helping others. I ask this question, or I, I say that because I asked her, you know, how often do you think about your weight? And she said virtually all the time. And I said, when don't you think about your weight? And she says, well, when I'm just working in my practice and I'm in a session and I'm helping people, which makes perfect sense. She also forgets about her weight when she's dancing. Isn't it interesting? So she forgets about her inner torture 'cause she's thinking about her weight all the time. Let's just acknowledge that she forgets about that when she's dancing. IE she's embodied and she's not in her head or she's serving others, giving her gift, doing her work in the world. IE she's not in her head. She's in her being, she's in her body. She's embodying her gift. It is very kind present and obvious to me that she has a lot of sadness and shame about her. It just feels like, like there's a bit of a gray cloud that she carries. Um, Bernadette is the kind of person who, as she's talking to me, she goes in and out of realizing she's attractive and powerful and has value in the world. Uh, she forgets for long bouts of time. She hates herself. She hates her body. Something will happen. She'll feel good about herself and she remembers that she's okay and she doesn't have to torture herself. So Bernadette is really in a lot of ways, struggling with holding a sense of self-acceptance and self-love. She goes there and she forgets and she goes there and she forgets. I just wanna say that's a lot of us. The idea my friends with your client, with you, with your loved ones, with anyone, is for us to, when we go into the periods of forgetting that we're lovable, forgetting that we're okay as who we are, forgetting that we're people who have a right to exist in this world and we have some value to offer. Forgetting that, you know, our body is okay as it is. The idea is to spend less time in the forgetfulness, less and less and less. So instead of going there for years, we go there for months and then instead of forgetting for months, we forget for weeks. And instead of forgetting for weeks, it's just days. And then from days to hours or minutes, that's what it's all about. It's not about loving yourself a thousand percent perfectly for the rest of all time because there's things that always throw us off. We gotta relax. So Bernadette, let's talk about our diet for a moment. She says she needs to eat six or seven smaller meals per day. She loves Food, she loves preparing food. She doesn't like to go hungry. She drinks a lot of herbal tea and water throughout the day. So at breakfast at 6:00 AM she makes herself a healthy smoothie with all kinds of healthy ingredients. I'm not gonna go into that. She has a mid-morning snack at nine 30. She has a couple of hard boiled eggs with a small slice of whole grain bread at lunch. She makes herself a really nice salad at 2:00 PM with fish or chicken. She does her own homemade dressing. She has a snack at 4:00 PM maybe an organic yogurt plus some fruit for dinner. She has some cooked vegetables, um, plus some kind of grain, usually rice, a brown rice, and it's a small portion. She makes sure to tell me that she has a small snack of either a tiny bit of frozen yogurt or, and or piece of raw chocolate, you know, late in the evening before bed. So that's her diet. Nah, not a lot of places for me to work with her.
Now here's what I'm noticing. In the first session, Bernadette loves to talk about food in her diet and she was eager to know if I had any dietary suggestions to help her lose weight. And honestly, in looking at her diet, I said that there was really nothing I would do different to stimulate weight loss. And honestly, there wasn't. Uh, she is really present and clear about her desire to lose weight and she clearly believes I will love myself more. I get that I'm not really happy with myself and I know when I lose the weight I'm gonna be happy with myself. So she's right up front with that. And I'm touched by her honesty and her vulnerability as well because she is not liking herself and she readily will say that. Uh, Bernadette also told me that fast, moderate or slow, she's a fast eater. So you can probably guess what her first, or at least one of her first homework assignments is. So, you know, for a person who wants to lose 20 pounds, again, the diet that she presented with the fact that she doesn't want to eat less food, which I'm totally on board with, there's really no place to cut down her food. There's no place to cut down her food. There's really nothing that interesting to tweak even. So I'm wondering, you know, what else other than helping her slow down with eating is going to happen.
So at the end of the first session, I explained that I want to have at least eight sessions with her. At least I explained That I'm gonna look at places other than diet to help her with weight because there's not a lot of places to work with her diet. And she likely knows that because she's been trying to work with her diet and she hasn't gotten where she wants to go. And I said, you know, you're a smart lady, you're a knowledgeable health coach, and there's nothing really to do in terms of tweaking your nutrition. I of course let her know that her eventual goal is to become a slow eater. And she, you know, I explained all the science behind that and she was a little nervous about that. She did tell me she tried to become a slow eater once and it wasn't successful as an additional homework assignment. Here my friends was my bit of an illumination. I remember I told you she presents as somebody who I just felt was just really boiling over, even though she's not saying that, um, she had just broken up from a three year relationship. So as you likely know, as we know, you know, if you just break up from a long-term relationship, that's not easy. There's probably a little bit of recovery time, there's probably a lot of recovery time, there's probably a lot of mourning, there's probably a lot of upset. There's a lot that happens. We go through things when we break up from a significant relationship. So I asked her to write the story of your last relationship that she just broke up from. I I just wanted to be the story. Like what's the story? And include all the successes, the failures, the reasons why it didn't work. Give me the gimme the timeline. When did you meet? How did it happen? What did you see in each other? What did you love about each other? What didn't you love so much? What were the challenges? And ultimately what happened that the relationship didn't last?
So why do I go here? Well, I go here because that seemed to be when I asked the four questions, what's stressing my client, obviously her weight on a minor level, what's stressing her is this relationship breakup. And my sense is what's her biggest fear or stress? I kind of think it's around relationship, at least it is right now.
So I wanna explore that and I wanna see if there's anything useful in juicy there. So this is my guess. This is my intuition. This is me tuning into my client and seeing if I can find a place to work that can yield a bang for the buck.
Okay? So Bernadette comes back in a week later. She spent a majority of the session kind of feeling a lot of disappointment and sadness. And that's because we just jumped in. Hey, Mrs. Client, how did it go for you this last week? How was the homework assignment? How was it around slow eating? How was it to write the story of your last relationship? So she was obviously coming in feeling, well, not obviously, but she was coming and feeling sad and disappointment. She shared with me that she was the one who initiated the breakup with her ex. And the reason she initiated the breakup with her ex was he wanted to stay together, but he, and he was very, he was comfortable in the relationship and she was not because she wanted a long-term commitment. And he was very clear that he did not want to do that. But he wanted to be in the relationship, but he wasn't willing to commit long-term. She had said, we don't even have to be married. I just need your long-term commitment. So my sense is, as she's speaking with me, I don't think she has really fully owned and felt yet how much this really is hurting her, how much this whole experience is painful for her. She gets that it's painful and I think it's a matter of degree. I think she did what she needed to do, and there's just a backlog of feeling. And as she's talking to my mind, what I'm noticing and what I always wanna say to you, when your client is sharing their story, my friends, you have to understand that it's important for people to be witnessed in telling their story. Be witnessed in talking about their journey, especially in this case, the challenging and the difficult parts. You don't have to fix it. Oh, they're there. You don't have to feel bad. No, you are not here to fix your client's story. You're here to witness, you're here to listen. Because witnessing by itself is healing. Having somebody witness her and her pain and her upset and really being present for that
was actually big for her. Um, she even said to me that she was glad that I wasn't judging her. And I asked her, what, what would I be judging you for? And she said, well, the guy I was with basically didn't want me. And I thought that was interesting. That's pretty painful. The person that she's with to her mind is basically saying, I don't want you, even though he wants to continue being in relationship with her, he's saying, he's essentially saying, I don't wanna do this necessarily long term. And in her mind, she's hearing, I don't want you totally understandable to his mind. He's not saying that to her mind. That's what she's saying. And she did what she needed to do.
So here's what I wanna say. Back to this thing called relationship. Oftentimes our current relationship or our series of relationships will somehow reflect the relationship that our parents had.
Okay, I'm gonna jump to someplace interesting here. We will often unconsciously live out significant aspects of how our parents related to one another. Does that make sense? So,
and we'll do that in the positive and the negative. We will often reflect what was good about our parents' relationship in our current or previous relationships. And we'll often show up with, we'll create relationships, we'll attract relationships that have a lot of the challenges perhaps that our parents' relationship had. And I just mention these things to Bernadette just mentioned it, and it was a great conversation started because she explained that her mother had been divorced twice and had another long-term relationship that wasn't a marriage that ended in a breakup. And in each case, the mom complained that the man wasn't committed. Isn't that interesting? One of her husbands had cheated, one had supposedly cheated, nobody was sure, and another wasn't committed to financial stability. So he was very unreliable in that way, um, and wasn't committed to kind of holding the relationship. So based on that, although that's interesting, let's explore more. So I gave her a homework assignment, okay, Ms. Bernadette Journal about your mom's relationship with men and how they may be similar to your relationships with men. Just see what you see there. See what you notice.
Okay? She had also told me, by the way, that she had focused on slow eating wasn't easy for her. And that's kind of typical. So I asked her to just continue working with that. So here we are in the third session, Bernadette comes and she's had some nice openings and insights.
She had never really thought of the connections that were being made between her mom's experience of men and her experience of men. And what was really fascinating was, you know, when we talk about food and diet and her weight, she talks faster. She's kind of in her head and she's sort of stressed out. When we talk about her relationships, her mother, her mom's relationships, she actually slows down. She becomes more relaxed and she becomes more thoughtful.
And that happens even more. So when we talk about loving relationship and talk about the good parts of relationship, she just, she just morphs and transforms. So I'm noticing that there's a lot of sweet energy there.
I'm noticing that the conversation of relationship actually relaxes her. Not that she doesn't have pain and upset about the relationship, she just broke up from what I'm saying is when she talks about it, that's healing for her. When she talks about it, she calms down in part because she needs to, she's hungry too. She might even be starving to talk about this. Here's another interesting thing she said to me that occurred to her as she was doing this journaling about her mom and her mom's relationship. She said, you know, here's her mom complaining that the men in her mom's life were weren't committed. Here's my client, Bernadette, just having initiated the breakup of a relationship because the guy wasn't quote unquote committed. She is now made the connection. She said a number of her boyfriends over the years used to complain to her that she didn't trust men. And she always thought that that was not true. And now she realizes that they were right. She's really getting, I don't trust men. Why? Because her mother clearly didn't trust men. And her mother clearly said that, stated that owned that is happy to say it, happy to have said it. Her mother has all kinds of proof of why men shouldn't be trusted. IE one of her husbands cheated and another one, they're pretty sure she cheated. He cheated. So Bernadette's boyfriends were right. She didn't trust men. And understandable, that's what she was taught. That's what she absorbed from her environment. So, and it's fascinating because as she was sharing this with me, she was feeling very guilty and ashamed. Um, part of her was guilty and ashamed because she realizes that somehow perhaps she's played a part in her relationship. Challenges. And you know, sometimes we have a realization, we have an insight about ourselves where we see where we were a little bit of sleep and it's easy to go into self-rejection or blame or guilt or shame, blaming self. And sometimes we just have to see, okay, we're learning, we're we're growing. I can see how you might feel ashamed and guilty, but you're learning you didn't know any better. So we, we kind of hung out there for a little bit. So we focused on seeing the wisdom in why she didn't trust men. And it's because that's the model she grew up with. That was her mother's experience. And that's what she absorbed as a child and a teenager. She always thought that there was something wrong with her because her heartfelt closed, this is my client. Um, and now she was able to find a little more compassion for herself because the heart closes for good reasons. We talked about that. The only reason a person as a closed heart or maintains a closed heart is because it's likely been hurt at some point. So that was a very tearful relief for her because she's realizing there's nothing wrong with her and everything right with her and my friends. This was a way for her. I said this to her, I said, now you can start to love and accept yourself on a deeper level.
She's been in relationship with men, but she's been half in and half out because she hasn't trusted men once again. For understandable reasons. She's always sensed her heart was a little bit closed and now she knows why.
Now what I wanna mention to you at this point is that when we don't accept ourselves around food and body, I don't like my body. I don't like my body. I need to change my body. I'm not happy with my body. It's almost always a little bit of a smoke screen. It's a symbolic playing out of somewhere else in life where we aren't accepting some other parts of ourselves, some other aspect of life.
Usually when we're fixated on, I don't love my body, I don't love my body, I don't love my body. It's our symbolic mind saying there's something else I'm not quite resolved around that I'm not happy with about myself.
She hasn't been happy with herself around relationships. She hasn't been happy with herself around her heart. She hasn't been happy with herself around men. And in a lot of ways she didn't quite have the language for that. She thought it was about them exclusively. Is this making sense my friends?
So here's a homework assignment I gave her at the end of the third session. I said, I want you to write a letter of forgiveness to yourself for protecting your own heart. So I'm inventing this homework assignment on the fly. Chances are I'd never given that homework assignment. Write a letter of forgiveness to yourself for protecting your heart. Why? Because that's what's happening. She's needing to forgive herself for protecting her own heart, for seeing how she was right? I'm asking her to make herself right because she was right. Correct? That was the right thing to do. I also asked her to write honest letters to all the men in your mother's life and tell them in these letters exactly how you feel right now or felt back then and anything and everything you wanna say to them. And these are letters that are not meant to be sent. Therefore you to write it out and get it out and see what's in there for you, my friends, these are very simple ways, simple tools, simple personal life coaching tools
to help a person digest a past experience. That's all. This isn't deep psychotherapy, this isn't deep. You know, you have to get in there and understand. You're asking your client to do some work, write some letters, you're not gonna send them. And when you come back in next session, we're gonna talk about it. You're gonna tell me how was that experience for you? So I'm inventing these homework assignments in response to where I feel Bernadette was at and where life was calling her.
Life is calling her to get current with herself. Life is calling her to see some of the places in her relationship life where she's not fully present to the dynamics that are going on.
Life is asking her to mature a bit when it comes to relationship. And in order to do that, we're just kind of looking a little bit at the past and seeing who we are and where we came from.
To my mind, life was also calling her to heal her relationship with men and with the masculine.
I think this is big. I think this is important. I think a lot of people need to do this. I think a lot of men and women of any sexual orientation, I don't care what it is, there's a lot of men who need to heal their relationship with men need to heal their relationship with women, all men, all women. Same for women. There's a lot of women who need to heal their relationship with men and with women.
How often have you met a woman who will say, oh, I don't trust women. I don't like women. I don't trust women. Whenever a woman tells me that, what I immediately go to in the back of my mind is, you got a healing to do. 'cause you got bit, you got hurt, you got harmed by the feminine, by the women of the world. And guess what? You're a woman. So if you can't trust other women, you can't trust yourself. Actually, vice versa. For men, men say, I don't trust men. And there's oftentimes a lot of men you'll meet who just a lot of their friends are women and not men, because they trust women more than men. It's a lot of women who have more men, friends. 'cause they don't trust women. All the different permutations. All I'm saying is I meet a heck of a lot of humans who have some resolution to do around their relationship with the masculine, the feminine, or all the men or all the women.
And that's very clear to me for Bernadette. I I I just see it as clear as day.
And it's not bad. This is just part of life on planet earth. This is what we do. This is what we're here for. We're here to learn. We're here to grow. You and I, all of us, our clients, we're in the workshop of life. It's okay. It's not like she did something wrong. No, this is her journey. This is her upbringing. This is her beautiful story. This is her wonderful movie. And now we're going over it and looking at it and continuing to write a more conscious and better script into the future. That's what we're doing. We're re storying.
So in the fourth conversation, there was a fourth session. There was lots of conversation about her homework. She made all kinds of connection between her mistrust of men and how she has walked through life.
She's walked through life very mistrustful and always scoping men out, making them jump through all these hoops in her mind. And that's a constant thing in her head of protecting herself from men while at the same time wanting a man while at the same time protecting herself from men while at the same time wanting a man. And by the way, at this point we haven't, we virtually stopped talking about weight. Uh, I'd hardly talk about it. And she's been fully engaged. She hasn't been sitting around thinking, when are we gonna talk about my weight? She's literally, honestly forgotten. Why is she forgotten for the most part? Or why is, why is she now off to the races around relationship? Because we're actually talking about what's most important to her. Quite frankly, weight is not what's most important to her. She didn't believe that when she came to me in the first session. She might not admit that in this moment, but she's acting as if weight is not the most important thing. And a conversation around relationship is the most important thing, which quite frankly it is.
Now, I suggested to her that as long as she couldn't drop her drop into as long as she was mistrustful of men,
which means the masculine, there's every possibility that your career might continue to be challenged. Money would be a challenge. 'cause that's the masculine in us money and career masculine. And that that's what she was really concerned about. I said, you know, relax into one. You often relax into the other. It's, it's oftentimes how we're invisibly or mystically wired. Now, quite frankly, I don't know if that's true, but it's how my mind operates. Oftentimes, the way we relate, relate to men is the way we relate to all things under the masculine archetype. The way we relate with women is oftentimes how we will relate with all things or many things under the feminine archetype.
She was mistrustful of men. She was mistrustful of her own career. She was mistrustful of her ability to make money and just noticing the connection.
So her homework assignment in the fourth session, I asked her to, you know, she's in contact with her mom. Her and her mom are close. I just asked her to talk to your mom about what you're learning, just like whatever you feel comfortable with, just start the conversation.
I asked her to ask her mom to fill in some of the blanks that my client's unsure of in terms of her mom's past relationship. I'm not gonna go into it. My, my client had some questions. Oh, I wasn't sure how my mom really felt about this one or that one. So just ask her, ask her the questions you wanna know. She wanted to know if her mom really left this one or if he left her. Like ask, just ask. Like, like get the truth. Like let let the conversation flow. It's important for you. So ask your mom if she doesn't want to answer, she won't answer.
I asked her to do some journaling about how you are here to go further and deeper in relationship than perhaps your mother could.
She found that interesting. She asked me why. I asked her to journal about that journal about how you are here, Mrs. Client, to go further and deeper in relationship than your mother could. I said to her, oftentimes we're afraid to surpass our same sex parent. Women are afraid to surpass their mothers. Men are sur afraid to surpass their fathers because we somehow believe that's a disrespect. And this will hold us back without us even knowing it. Surpassing a parent or what we think is surpassing a parent or growing beyond what they did or were able to do is a gift to them actually, even if our parent doesn't think that it is a gift to them, we have to hold that. Otherwise, we're artificially holding ourselves back thinking that we're doing our parent a favor by us staying small. No, your mom had her challenges for understandable reasons. Chances are your mom was an improvement on her mother, your grandmother, and chances are you're an improvement on your mother. It's okay. That's how life works.
To the unconscious mind, surpassing our parent can, can mean that we don't love them. Does everybody feel that way? No. Do a lot of people, yes. Life will often task us with finishing the unfinished work of our parents. That's just how it is. My friends life will often task us with finishing the unfinished work of our parents.
It's okay. I believe that's what my client's doing. She's learning how to further the action in her relationships than her mother could. And my client's coming up with some great understandings and some great realizations and some great insights. So she's already doing it, which is kind of why I asked her to talk to her mom about what you're learning. Just share it. See what happens.
Okay, in the fifth session, there was a lot of talk about her homework. Obviously everything was very enlightening to her. And Bernadette is loving the exploration. She is loving it. She is, she didn't say this, but uh, she's almost beside herself. She can't talk enough about everything we're talking about. Uh, she's extremely, she has a very willing client and, and you know, a willing client is a pleasure. We are not talking about weight loss anymore, my friends, because we quickly, I quickly discovered with my client, that ain't where the action is really.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, well, that's impossible. Well, the only reason you'd be thinking that is because if your primary concern is to lose weight and you truly think that that's what's gonna do it for you, maybe all I'm saying is this happens quite a bit.
You speak to a human who is committed, determined, dare I say, even a little bit of obsessed, which this client has been about her body and her weight and everything. Body and weight means to her.
And it turns out the action is really someplace else because we use body image. Oh, I gotta change my body, I gotta change my body. That becomes an unconscious symbolic placeholder for where the action really is. And once you put your attention to real where the action really is, Bernadette realizes is where the action is.
She realized that she felt guilty, but didn't know it around wanting to be happier in relationship than her mother was. So what a beautiful noticing. What a beautiful understanding. She said. I didn't know this, but I was feeling guilty even at the times when I was happy in my relationship. I didn't wanna share that with my mother because my mother is in constant complaint about men and her past relationships. So for the mom's daughter to be saying, hi, I've got a great relationship right now. My relationship's going wonderful, my client feels guilty.
She also realized from some of the letter writing that she had a lot of anger towards men in her mom's past for not giving her mom what the mom wanted. So she's angry at a lot of the men.
Bernadette finds it difficult to express anger to men is what she also brought up in this session.
So we're learning a lot and we're just following things. We're being curious. We're noticing what coming up, what's coming up from the homework assignments.
And I'm noticing that she doesn't even bring up the topic of weight. I've been waiting for it.
She's off to the races with relationship. Okay? So I gave her some, invented some homework assignments. In the fifth session. Write a list of everything you are angry about in your past relationship. Remember she said, I don't do anger. Well, what are you angry about? Your ex four? I also asked her to write a list of five key non-negotiable things that you want in your next long-term relationship. Things that you absolutely have to have, must, must, must, must have. If you can't think of five, that's fine.
I also asked her to do a desire inventory. Write down everything in life that you desire. I don't want you to problem solve how you will get these desires. Like what is it in your heart of hearts truly that you desire in life? And especially in relationship? What do you desire? Now, I'm not saying that you're gonna ever get this. I'm not saying that you're entitled to get it. I'm not saying that you won't get it. I'm just saying that a lot of us have some deep desires in there. What are yours? I want you to inventory yourself really dive deep and see what they are for you. And be honest, I gave her another homework assignment. Usually I don't give so many homework assignments, but this is a client who is going for it. She can't get enough. She's ravenous. So I'm gonna give her more. And I invented this in the moment. Check it out. I said, Hey, I want you to write down everything that you are angry at me for. And she giggled when I said this. She thought I was kidding. I I said no. I said, I want you to write down anything and everything that you're angry at me for now, we've only been together five sessions. She actually got uncomfortable. I told her it was okay. And I wanted her to practice being angry at a man who's not gonna run away or get angry back at her. I said, it's okay. We're playing here. We're practicing. We're practicing with you being able to resource your anger with a man. And I'm a safe guy. You could do that with. So I want you to see if there's anything you're angry at me for and write it down and then we'll talk about it. Very uncomfortable for her, which means I'm on the right track, by the way, my friends. You see how we get creative? You see how we get inventive? We, I meaning me and you, you have be an artist. It's is okay? You have to summon the part of your artist's soul that invents on the fly in a lot of ways. This is play. You are playing. And and I say that, you know, not in a negative sense. You're, you're, you're playing within the relationship. You are creating within the relationship. You're inventing within the relationship. Sometimes I invent homework assignments that fall flat. That's okay. None of us are perfect at all.
And oftentimes there's always something useful. Okay? Sessions number six or seven. Once again, we focused on the previous homework assignments. We spent at least 30 minutes in session six talking about her anger at me. And what she was angry about is like she keeps sending me emails and asking me things about what was said in the session. And I answer very briefly in a sentence or two. Uh, so she was angry at me because her emails are long and my emails are a sentence or two. So we spent some time dialoguing this and clearing it up. And it was very, very enlightening for her because she hadn't said anything to me. And I explained to her where I was coming from. I said to her that I don't like to write long emails. I said, I'm a one or two or three sentence email guy. And that's just my style. I'm not avoiding you, I'm just simply answering your question. And whenever I answer your question, I also say, let's talk about this in our next session. So I'm not gonna go and give you a long explanation via email because that's not me. And quite frankly, I'm not gonna take 30 minutes or an hour to write a long, thoughtful response because that's not part of our arrangement. So that's kind of unfair for you to want that of me unless you're paying for that time. So I was not saying that, or I I was not writing you short emails because I disrespect you whatsoever. And, and we cleared it up and she thought, she understood where I was coming from. I understood where she was coming from. I apologize for the fact that I wasn't, you know, trying to hurt you or disregard you or not considering your questions. I was just being me. And we got on the same page. So that was very instructional for her.
Um, she, we also had a conversation, you know, while she felt angry that her ex would not commit to her, she told me that she was able to see her part, the side of her that was still protecting. She said to me, because she was not fully available because she didn't trust men, it kind of made a little sense to her that it would be harder for her ex to commit to her.
That to me was a wow of a realization because in her mind, men don't commit.
Well, if you're a man, would you commit to someone who is constantly broadcasting? I don't trust men. I don't trust men. More specifically, I don't trust you, Mr. Partner. I don't trust you. I don't trust you. I don't trust you. Ah, that's not so fun. Now, did the ex realize that consciously, I don't know, maybe not, doesn't matter. He never said it to her. But there's always two things going on in our relationship. No matter how right I am in my relationship about how I feel, my partner is the wrong one. It always takes two to tango. There's always something going on on either side. There's always another aspect to the story that's useful for everyone.
So because Bernadette was not fully available, how could the masculine choose her, which is what she wanted above all else, when we don't fully accept ourselves or choose ourselves or are open to the opposite polarity, then that polarity cannot fully show up. In other words, when we don't fully choose
ourselves as a man, how could a woman choose me? If you don't choose yourself as a woman, how can a man choose you or whatever your sexual orientation is? If you're not choosing you, how could someone else choose you?
Right? That's a little bit of the law of attraction in its in its most simple form.
Choose you first as best you can, as best you can. That's what we're trying to do as best you can. When we're heating on our body, which is our own physical form, which is our own being, huh? It's harder for us to be chosen because we're broadcasting. I don't choose myself. That's our silent advertisement. Better than that. Any human is better than that.
We always wanna be rescued. Well, if I don't choose me, I want someone who fully chooses me. Woo. That puts a lot of pressure on the other person. Not fair. So in our eighth and ninth sessions, we focused on desire, her deepest wishes. You know, it took her about three sessions to be able to express her desire less from her head and more just kind of own them, express it from her body. Desire lives in the body. The more we can own our desire. Desire might mean my deepest desire is I want a long-term relationship. My deepest desire. I want kids. My deepest desire is I want to go live in another country. My deepest desire is that I want to have a better relationship with my mother and father. My deepest desire is to have a close relationship with my children. My deepest desire is to, is to finally enjoy my body. People have desires, sometimes they're very specific, but they're deep expressing. A desire doesn't mean and we're going to go and get it, or one even, or that even if that desire's possible. But what I'm saying, I I want you to get this distinction. The more you can own a desire in an embodied way, the more we actually relax,
the more we can potentially draw it to us. And the more we can simply let it go in, let it go. If life chooses not to give it to us, believe it or not, owning a desire and circulating it and making it right and breathing it into your body,
especially when we've been not owning it and not been aware of it, or pushing it away or pushing it down because we don't know how to get it or we don't think we deserve it. Once you own it, you give it breath, you give it oxygen, you give it a little life, you give it space. And from there, life will do its thing.
Owning desires, tapping into the power of the archetypal feminine in a lot of ways, you know, back to her career, back to money. That was a, you know, a daily stressor for her in terms of what's stressing her out. Um, you know, at this point for her to have more success and money, it was less about getting more success and more money and more about, in a lot of ways stepping into her feminine more fully. And this for her meant desire.
Sometimes you clean up one area in life and other areas start to get cleaned up, even though they don't necessarily feel like they are related.
You know, in sessions 10 through 12th, we focused on the feminine mode of creation, which means, you know, as time, feminine mode of creation is a little bit more relaxing and surrendering into receiving the masculine mode of creation. Now, the masculine and feminine modes exist within all males, all females. Some of us emphasize one more than the other masculine mode of creation is this is my goal and now I'm gonna take the steps to go and get it. You have a goal, you shoot for the target and you do all the things to help you get your goal. Masculine mode of creation, feminine mode of creation. We get in touch with what we want and we spend some time relaxing into that and surrendering into that and receiving it as opposed to going out and forcing the universe to comply to our demand. So we get it. This is a different approach. Some of us need to be doing one more than the other. At any given time, have you ever had the experience where you want something, you want something, you want something, you're doing everything to get it and you can't get it. And finally you just give up, ah, screw it. And then, and then soon after you actually truly give up, you get it. That's what I'm saying, giving up, which is not really giving up. It's surrendering, it's letting go. Oftentimes that's what is needed, my friends, oftentimes what's needed is, hey, you gotta get a goal and you have to do the practical focus steps to get it. Oftentimes that is what's needed. It's kind of learning to figure it out for ourselves. So we focused on what it means for her to relax and surrender and receive. And we looked at practical ways to do that. Um, I asked her to, you know, focus on her friendships more, ask for help, ask for your girlfriends, especially for more communication, for more check-in time. Um, she was the kind of person who felt like if she asks something of her girlfriend, Hey, can you, can you just listen to me? I'm having trouble. She feels like then she has to give them something in return right away. She always feels like if she doesn't do something right away, then it's not equal. And that's very sweet, but it actually often takes her out of herself. Um, we focused also on her walking around with the feeling in her body of being willing to receive whenever she was around. Interesting men, she gets her chance to re meet interesting men. So she's in the mix in her life, in her social world. And I said, instead of walking around with, I don't trust men, I don't trust men, which was her previous kind of story, what would it be like to walk around going, huh, I'm willing to meet someone interesting. I'm willing to meet someone who's different. I'm willing to receive from the masculine as opposed to just protect myself from it. You notice a distinction. So here I am, I'm being a dating coach for her. I'm being a relationship coach. I'm being a, here's how you relate to men. Coach still not talking about weight.
And in this time we also talked about her working with a business coach to help her with very specific and practical details of growing her business. IE the more masculine approach. So yeah, I'm asking her, let's do both at the same time. I want you to start to relax and receive around men when it comes to your business. I want you to actually get more masculine and get some masculine help.
She, for her, some people love this way of talking masculine and feminine. She was really into it. So great, let's keep, let's keep pushing the pedal to the metal there. Let's keep that conversation going because it's useful for her.
So Bernadette and I continued to meet once per month for the next five months.
And that was just natural at some point. We didn't need to be meeting once a week or every other week. We just needed to check in monthly. So we're inventing the relationship as it goes along. We're negotiating as it goes along. As you're doing this work, you start to have a feel for it. That's the way I prefer to work, as opposed to, you must see me once a week or once every two weeks. Yes, at the beginning I wanna see a client once a week for at least the first four sessions. For a lot of clients it's once a week for the first eight sessions, but for a lot of clients it's once a week for the first four sessions and then every other week you have to sense what your client needs. So our work lasted a total of 11 months. In our once per month meetings, we focused on a discussion of what I call life unfolding. Meaning, hey, let's talk about what happened this past few weeks since we saw each other. What's going on? What's going on with you? What's going on with food? What's going on with what's going on inside your head? What's going on with men? You know, this is a fancy way to say that. Coaching and counseling is very powerful when we simply be with our client around whatever is happening in their life. Because that's what a lot of people need. They need a mentor, they need a guide, they need a coach. They need someone to witness their journey and give them insight and input and be a professional best friend.
Consider that my friends. The assumption here is that, That life is the great teacher and life is the great workshop. Not that, oh, my client is broken and I'm here to fix you. No, the workshop is always happening for you and me. The workshop is always happening for our client. It's great to have somebody, particularly when we need it, who can be there for us and witness our workshop. That we could talk about our workshop. IE my relationship, IE my relationship to my body image.
So the agenda is to always help my clients ground the key principles we've been working on.
So I'm still talking about slow eating months later. I'm still talking about masculine and feminine. I'm still talking about her relationship with men and how's it going and my friends. This is one of the great ways to context the role of a coach and of the coaching relationship
because it is not a therapeutic relationship. Oh, you have digestive issues, I fix your digestive issues, your digestive issue is gone, and then I never see you again. That, that's, that's fine if that's your profession or how you want to be with people, that's one way to be with people in this work. One of the ways we can be with people is to mentor, guide and coach them with life unfolding based on where their relationship with food and body. Where that doorway leads us to the doorway called Food and body. The doorway called weight loss that Bernadette came to see me for. That doorway led to all kinds of great places. Her relationship with men, her relationship with her mother, her relationship with the men in her mother's life, and what she learned from her mom, her relationship with her past relationship and how she's managing that experience. So we went to some great places.
Now I have no idea if Bernadette truly needs to lose weight, she wants to. I have been helping Bernadette embody remember embodiment is the royal road to healing body image. Now, she didn't come to see me for, hey, my body image sucks. She came to see me for I wanna lose weight so I can love my body more. When I hear that, even though she didn't say those specific words, she said, I wanna lose weight. And she did say, 'cause I wanna love my body more, in which case I love my life more. I hear in my mind, body image, client, will she lose weight? Maybe. But I'm never focused on that small goal. So I'm helping her embody more how through contacting her desire, through slowing down with food, through feeling her feelings, feeling her anger, noticing her heart, noticing how it was closed, noticing how it's ready to open, noticing how she closes down around men. She disembodies around the masculine.
Why would the masculine want to stay with her if she's checking out? So embodiment heals body image. And from this place, she began to note, she started noticing that, I'm gonna call it her obsession with weight had dramatically shifted. So the conversation, she brought it up and jokingly at one point, um, she said, you know, we haven't talked about weight. It's really funny. I said, yeah, it is funny. Um, she acknowledged she still wants to lose weight, but it really isn't first and foremost on her mind because now she's putting first things first. She wanted love and commitment in her life
and she was clear that it wasn't about her weight. 'cause honestly, her last relationship guy didn't care about her weight. Her, her man was happy with it. So she couldn't go to, I can't get a man because I need to lose weight. She wanted to lose weight to feel better about herself, more so than I need to do this to attract a man.
Was that in there probably that I need to lose this to attract a man. But it it, it didn't seem to be huge for her.
You know, oftentimes clients such as Bernadette believe they will have what they want in terms of a loving relationship when they lose weight and feel good about their body. In reality, though, it's kind of the reverse, my friends, strangely enough, when we feel better about the body,
we feel better about the body. When we are able to feel our feelings and speak what's true for us, I wanna say that again. A lot of us start to feel better about our body. When we start to feel better about our life. When we start to get real, when we start to check in with our body, which is where our feelings live, we start to check in with our body, which is where the truth lives. For us. We actually love our body more because we're expressing desire that lives in the body. We're expressing authenticity that lives in the body. We love the body more when we feel it's desire and own those desires without having to get them in the moment.
Yes, Bernadette wants to still lose weight and sometimes the hidden wisdom of life has a different agenda for us. I can't control it. I can't make life make it want you to lose weight. I mean that it's always our job as a practitioner to do our best to listen to the wisdom of life on behalf of our clients. I wasn't going to join her in her belief that she could only be happy when she loses the weight that she, she says she needs, needs to lose. I don't believe it. And nor is it true and nor did it prove to be true.
So some final thoughts about Bernadette compared to when we started after 11 months, I am looking at a human being. A woman who has fantastically more confident, she's more grounded, far more self-aware and self-understanding because she had more of the masculine in herself,
her feminine is now safer to come out and play. Both the outer masculine and the inner masculine can ground the feminine in us.
Likewise, both the outer and inner feminine can allow the masculine in us to flourish. We're playing with polarities. We looked at the places in her life where she needed to be in different relationship with the masculine on an outer and inner level and a different relationship with the feminine. She was in a different relationship with her mother. There was so much more understanding there, so much more spaciousness there, so much more communication there. So much more forgiveness there
and dealing with a human being who has just matured.
Bottom line is Bernadette did not lose any weight in our work together. But she noticed. Here's something interesting, and this has happened to me many times in my practice, um, where my client won't lose weight, but their shape will change. She said she felt more firmed and toned. Um, she was very surprised. She said she likes her body more. Now what I believe happened, um, is that she probably exchanged, she didn't lose any weight. She probably exchanged some fat weight for muscle weight. Um, now that can happen, by the way, when a client corrects their macronutrient balance, which was not something we focused on with her. But oftentimes somebody could change their macronutrient balance. They won't lose any weight, but their shape will change. Uh, very important because if they were low in protein and they started eating more protein and their body was hungry for more muscle tissue, they put on muscle tissue. Muscle tissue will make us look firmer and more toned.
So many humans will exchange fat for muscle, won't lose any weight. I've had one client go down two sizes, two dress sizes without losing a single ounce of weight. 'cause she just exchanged fat for muscle and her shape completely changed. Um, this can also happen when we let go of a lot of stress. Stress can cause fat deposition or inability to lose fat. Stress will also can also signal the body to not build muscle. So my sense is that that's likely what happened for her. She had an internal, she shift, she shifted her inner world and she had a shapeshift. So this was the total surprise. Um, honestly, my friends, I didn't personally notice it that much. I noticed it in her face. Um, but the faces of my clients will often change based on our work. Uh, but, but she was liking herself more once again, admitted that she still wanted to lose weight, but it wasn't a big deal. It was like somebody saying, yeah, you know, I still wanna make X amount of money, but I'm fine. You know, I felt that when we started, Bernadette was kind of like a scared girl. She was a scared young princess. And we completed, she felt like a very mature princess, like a woman who had stepped into her journey and onto a path of love and empowerment. And again, because I was not bought into her need to lose weight, I modeled for her a new possibility that she could step into. And I consider this a very big success.
Once again, we don't measure success by how many pounds a person loses. We measure success by measuring success.
And in this case, this was a very successful relationship. We must, must, must, must learn how to redefine success in this realm. Otherwise, we, along with our clients, will stay in the very shallow part of awareness.
If my client came in and I was simply committed to her losing 20 pounds, and I could have made her eat a super high protein diet and asked her to do more exercise, and who knows what I would've done to focus more on nutrition, less food, more exercise, and she never would've grown as a person, I would've stressed her out more. She would've been stressed more. She probably wouldn't have lost any weight and we would've never gotten into the areas that are most important for her. So I ended up with a client who is now feeling empowered around men, hopeful around men. I didn't say this, but she was going out on a number of dates and just feeling good about herself. She's feeling good about herself, good about her body, good about her future, empowered about herself, and empowered about her future.
And that's what life had in store. If life wanted her to lose weight, that's what life would've done.
We just have to breathe that in and step into our royalty step into a bigger place of consciousness and notice what life is asking of us and what it's teaching us and what it's offering us.
Okay, my friends, let's do one final case story. And this one is a bit of an unusual one. I was, I wasn't sure if I should include this case story or not, because it's, um, it's very atypical. You're not gonna see a client like this. But I somehow felt it, it was very important for me as a professional. It taught me a lot. And I think this particular client is very symbolic of what is going on in the world when it comes to bodies and body image and weight and beauty and body fat. So this is a case study of a woman, I'm gonna call her. Kay Kay is a well-known supermodel. She's 22 years old. She's pretty tall. She's extremely pale in her complexion. She's a very slender, her quote unquote, people asked me to, I got a ton of calls asking me to jump through all these different hoops to meet with her at specific times. And it's bottom line is she wasn't a typical client. Like three or four people from her world had to talk to me first, which I found very annoying. Um, so either way,
um, Kate was very reserved at first. She had heard about me through my books and my work at Canyon Ranch. Her people had kind of, you know, checked me out and approved whatever that all means. And Kate is coming to see me to lose the famous five pounds. Um, Kate presents as very desperate about her weight. She's not pulling any punches. She's not holding back. She is very, very, very upfront about what's going on for her. I she is heavily into her career. Um, it's everything to her. It's her life. And she readily admits that she has a tremendous amount of pressure to be thin, a tremendous amount of pressure to lose weight. And she says that she was told by, you know, she calls it, you know, her people, I call it her handlers, the people handling her. So she's told by her handlers that she needed to lose more weight. And, you know, I was wondering about this. I'm wondering if, if that was true or if that's her talking. Um, but I don't wanna say anything yet. 'cause we're just getting to know each other. Um, okay. Katie, you have any other health complaints? Just so I could know. Um, she laughed when I asked the question. Um, she has awful digestion. It just hurts when she eats anything. Uh, she gets a little bloated. Um, but it just, her eating food hurts for her. She's extremely tired. She has a lot of fatigue. She's constipated. Uh, she takes laxatives and she has a lot of difficulty sleeping, and she is expecting to come out of this session with a diet.
Okie dokie. It's an interesting client. So for me, this is a very uncommon person who exemplifies an extremely common phenomenon. And it's the body image wounded princess and the toxic belief that my body is my soul value. And it must be perfect according to these arbitrary rules of perfection. So I'm now dealing with a human who makes millions of dollars to be this perfect quote unquote perfect princess. Um, I, I am, as I'm talking to her, I'm realizing that so many young women wanna be this person. They want to be this girl who I'm talking to. They want to have what she has. They want to get the adoration that seems to come her way. And yet what most don't realize is that there's a fantastically dark underbelly to what this young princess has. She's fatigued, she's tired, she's kind of looks depressed. She looks extremely unhealthy. She's pale. She looks like she's gonna fall over and collapse. Uh, and she's freaked out about her body. She can't sleep. She's not a happy girl. Um, straight up, Kay lives in a tremendous amount of suffering. She feels very isolated despite her fame and fortune and attention. And nevertheless, she feels trapped in it all. We talked about it. She talks about how it's extremely competitive, how her fellow models are. None of them are friends, uh, because they're all extremely competitive with, with each other, even though they are friendly and they spend a lot of time together and they talk to each other and they share information and they tell stories. None of 'em trust each other. Um, and she feels trapped. And this is her lot in life according to her. And this is what she needs to do. And she wants to lose weight, and she's waiting for the diet. Okay, more information. She presents as extremely mistrustful. I can understand that. Um, many famous people do. You know, at first she didn't have a single positive word to say about her work. Um, I am imagining that when she came to see me, she was in a little bit of breakdown, meaning coming into my office was her opportunity to just kind cut loose a little bit and complain. Um, I think she felt a little safe with me for that. Um, and I told her, you know, everything is strictly confidential. I tell nothing to no one about our session. Not anyone. Um, kay is also a very heavy smoker. She's extremely nervous and fidgety. She asked if she could smoke a cigarette in my office office. I told her no, that the whole entire building was a non-smoking building. Um, she kept repeating to me that there must be something I could do or change in her diet because she wasn't eating much at all and she couldn't lose weight. Um, you know, before I got into things, I asked if, if at some point I could speak to her people, quote unquote, um, I said, you know, I was concerned about them wanting her to lose weight and what they were expecting, and, you know, can I just have a conversation with them? And she was very clear that I was out of the question. Okay. I tried. So some more observations as I'm sitting to her, I'm really struck by how poor her health looks. I I'm truly struck, uh, and I'm not happy about it. I also, I'm looking at her and I can't imagine that this person's a supermodel. She kind of looked plain, um, definitely gaunt and unhealthy, um, but very plain looking. Kay was wearing like a summary dress that actually exposed her arms and her calf muscles. And as I'm just observing her, my assessment is that she's borderline anorexic. Could I say she's anorexic? Ooh, she's close. But you know, there's a term that a lot of us use. We'll call it borderline anorexic. Maybe yes, maybe no. But wow, is it close?
I was imagining she had more health issues, but I didn't want to go there too much because she didn't wanna go there. And it's not why she's coming to see me. And I knew that it would be fruitless for me to say, oh, well, maybe we should work on your health more. She wasn't really caring about her health, quite frankly. Even when she was sharing about her secondary symptoms, she wanted to an answer the question and just get through it. So I can talk about her diet.
Here's her diet cigarettes throughout the day, breakfast 7:00 AM she has coffee plus a tiny bowl of cereal with non-fat milk. She has a snack at 10:00 AM coffee plus a small apple. I have never heard a human being use the term small apple. Uh, lunch is at 2:00 PM ish. She has a coffee plus non-fat yogurt plus an orange at 5:00 PM She has a diet Coke plus a few pieces of non-fat cheese. I can't stand non-fat cheese. Personally, I wish nobody even made it. It's, it's, it's awful. Um, dinner is very late, usually 10:00 PM She has a bowl of cereal at home, or she'll have a small slice of pizza, or she'll have a half a sandwich, some kind of meat sandwich for dessert. She just has hard sucking candy. Occasionally she'll have some vodka in the evenings when she needs to relax and unwind. That might be two times a week. So as you can see, this is a diet for a very tiny person.
So honestly, once I hear her diet and I'm looking at her, it doesn't take me long because I've been doing this a while, to say to myself, I don't say any of this to her. I'm thinking to myself, you have protein malnourishment. You are clearly essential fatty acid deficient. You are clearly calorically deficient. You have muscle wasting. You're kind of addicted to cigarettes. You're likely addicted to caffeine. She has extreme fear of fat and food. She's not eating any fat, and she obviously has a fear of food. She has a toxic nutritional belief, understandably so, food is the enemy.
So I'm not thinking this, I mean, I'm thinking this. I'm not quite saying it yet. Um, I asked her to be honest with me around other symptoms. I explained at some point my nutritional and metabolic diagnosis. And I told her, you know, I wouldn't judge her if she had any other health complaints. But I, I, at some point, I just got real honest with her because I realized I could not stay in integrity with myself unless I told her, Hey, here's what's going on for you. So in what I just told you, I said it to her very gently. I said, quite honestly, from a, from a medical perspective, you're protein malnourished. You're deficient in essential fats. I explained to her that fat is not evil. That we call it EFAs essential fatty acids for a reason.
I talked about that. She has muscle wasting. I said, you're pumping up your energy with caffeine because you don't have enough food in your body, and you are lacking in macronutrients and you're lacking with in protein. I didn't talk about her fear of fat or fear of food.
She says she has to drink coffee for energy. She also, when I mentioned that, you know, you're using coffee for energy, she then admitted that she sometimes has more coffee than she told me she has. When I said protein malnourishment, she asked me what that meant. I started mentioning some of the symptoms, fatigue, irritability, bloating. I said, for some people with protein malnourishment, uh, hair starts to fall out. Loss of hair. When I said that her, her eyes got really big. She admitted that her hair was starting to fall out. And oh, I also said, in a round essential fatty acid deficiency. She asked what that looks like. I gave her the symptoms. I also mentioned, you know, women can lose their period. She told me she has no period and hasn't had it for a year. Um, so all of a sudden she's starting to get that I know what I'm talking about.
And from that perspective. So she relaxed more. I watched her relax with me, um, because she knew I was smart and I wasn't judging her, and I was caring about her. I'm literally sitting there caring about this other human. I could give a damn about her losing five pounds. I could give a damn about the fact that she's a supermodel. I don't care if she's a supermodel, a super supermodel, a not so supermodel. It doesn't matter to me. I, it truly doesn't matter. I just see a human being who is in absolute distress.
So I told her, listen, you don't have any weight to lose. I said, literally. And I had a piece of, I had a pound of, you know, fake body fat in my office. I showed her what it looked like. I said, you wanna lose five of these? I said, can you show me where on your body you're gonna lose five of these pounds of body fat?
So I told her she actually had a few pounds of muscle to gain. I said, if she gained a few pounds of muscle, she would be a hell of a lot more healthier. And she would, and, and she'd look fine. That didn't go over well. Um, and then I asked her, I said, I really want you to be honest with me. Are your people really telling you to lose five pounds? Or is this you telling you to lose five pounds? Um, she said, I'm being honest with you. Uh, this is what I was told. So I have to believe her at this point. Even though I'm SI, I'm still unsure. I, I can't believe somebody would look at her and tell her she needed to lose five pounds. She was truly, to me, borderline anorexic, and it would demolish her health if she lost any more weight. Um, so I told her, listen, straight up, I decide I'm gonna be super honest with her at this point and not hold back. So I told Kay, listen, you know, I'm gonna just speak to you as if I was your older brother. Forget about anything else. Um, you need to regain your health. And I'm really concerned for you. I don't, I told you, you have no weight to lose. You couldn't possibly eat anything less. What could I take away from your diet? Like, you tell me what I could take away from your diet. You're gonna, you're gonna be so hungry. And she kept firing back at me like, this is my profession. This is what I do for a living. And it's very demanding. I said, I know it's demanding. Um, and I said, I care more about you than your profession. Really, when I said that, when I spoke those words, she loosened up even more. Um, and she actually acknowledged that she appreciated what I was saying because everybody in her universe, including her family, everybody is supporting her in doing what she's doing because she's rich and famous. Um, when I said that I cared more about her than her profession, she smiled for the first time in our session. And actually, it was the first time I noticed, oh, you're, you're, you're beautiful when you smile. Um, she really morphed before my eyes in that moment. Um, it it, it proves to me that we look as good as we feel. You know, she finally told me after a lot of discussion about her health, um, and me talking about being very concerned about where she was headed physically. Um, she said, listen, I, I really, she was very appreciative of me. And she said she still wants to lose five pounds. And she said to me that it didn't sound like I was the right person to help her. Um, and I told her, you're right. I said, I'm the right person to help you get healthy. And I'm the right person to help you rise above the nonsense that the people around you are demanding of you. And I get that you wanna do your career, it makes sense to me. Um, I just really can't help you lose weight. And it was a very sweet and bittersweet ending to the relationship. Um, 'cause I wanted to help and I totally understand why she didn't want my help, makes perfect sense. And such is a person who represents the extreme perfectionism, the extreme images that we put out in our culture. She's the representative of that. And she's saying to me, I will be willing to sacrifice my body and my health and my life for this ideal because she's caught up in it.
I understand how she's caught up in it because she's being adored and worshiped even though she's kind of dying.
So my friends, we had only one session together. That was it. I imagine it would've been great for my resume to have a high paying supermodel client for a long period of time. So my ego was a little disappointed. She actually walked away a little disappointed about not getting what she wanted. I was aware of that. Um, I remember thinking to myself, she looked a little bit disembodied as she left my office. She really wasn't in her body. Um, and at the same time, she felt honored and seen and cared for. So I was glad about that. I was glad that a part of me got through. I always believed that when we speak the truth with love and consciousness, that that truth is always heard. And I was a person making a stand for you are more important than your profession and what you represent. And all these people adoring you for stupid nonsense. I couldn't care less. And I said that from a, from a true, honest, loving, caring place as a fellow human being. And I feel like she got that. And I was looking her at her like a casualty in the bizarre war on women's bodies and souls. This is a person who speaks for so many women, and especially for so many young women. Of course, I was extremely willing to lose a client. I am super clear, extremely willing to lose a client because I'm committed to her high as good. So I'm staying in integrity with myself, integrity with the universe as far as I can tell. And I learned a lot.
Some lessons that we keep learning. Working with body image means that you and I, the practitioner, we must let go of the belief that a healthy and happy body image is dependent on having the body that I want. It ain't having the body that I want, has nothing to do with having a healthy body image. Being in our body, loving our body, loving the journey of being in our body, taking baby steps to get into the body, being in our pleasure, our sensation, our awareness, our desires. Having a nourishing relationship with food, doing some kind of movement that makes us wanna smile and celebrate life. That heals body image, not having the body that I want. And then someday I'm gonna wake up and go, oh, now I'm happy.
Working with body image oftentimes means discovering the key places in life where our clients might be feeling a little bit un whole.
And from there, we invite our client back into their true wholeness. The first client that I mentioned in this conversation, Bernadette, she was focused on losing 20 pounds in a big way. And there were places where she was not feeling whole. She was not feeling whole in relationships. She was not feeling whole in relationship to men in relationship to her mother. That's the places we ended up looking at.
And life was inviting her into wholeness. There. Let's explore, let's get curious. And it worked. It worked for her soul. Did it work to shapeshift her body? No, but that's okay. We need to be okay with what life delivers. Might she lose weight at some other point in life when the wisdom of life says yes? Now it's time. Absolutely. That could definitely happen. We don't know the timing. Sometimes the body is just teaching us to love the body that we have now and inhabit the body that we have now and be on the journey with the body that we have. Now. At the very least, we have to start out that way. If you can't love the body you have now, you're actually not gonna be able to love the body you have in the future. If you can't be in the body you have now, you're not gonna be able to be in the body you have in the future. In fact, even if you achieve the body that you want, but you haven't achieved it through means of embodiment, true embodiment, you're gonna gain the weight right back because you haven't learned to be in the body in a way that truly works for you.
So for practitioners working with Body image, remember my friends, it's a journey that doesn't have an end.
We're always looking for ways to be in good relationship with the body. You know, you get older, you get into your fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. It's a whole different journey with body and body image. So you gotta let go of goals. You gotta let go of your need. You as a practitioner, your need to look good and to have the success that you think is going to make everyone love you. And you gotta focus on your client's highest goal and your highest good. And do that in a way where you gradually bring that along, where you bring them along. So my last client, Kay, the supermodel, who I spoke of, and of course that's not a real name. Um, I knew I had to deliver everything in one session. There was no time to slowly bring her along. I had a state right up front, here's what's going on, here's my view. Um, for Bernadette, we brought her along slowly and I did say to her, we're gonna focus on weight loss by not focusing on weight loss for a little bit so she can understand that. But we're focusing on weight loss by not focusing on weight loss. So I'm, I'm easing somebody into this strategy. I'm not trying to take weight loss off the table because for some people that's gonna be too dramatic. So you have to, my friends, learn how to seduce your clients slowly into your way of working. Invite them slowly into your way of working,
be committed to your client's highest goal and their highest good. And from that place, true Success is born, my friends. I hope this conversation was helpful for you. That's the end of our case stories. Now we're gonna start to dive into some, some strategies for embodiment. Simple Strategies for embodiment. Part one is next. I appreciate you. I appreciate us being on this journey together. Lots more to come, my friends.

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