MODULE 2

WEIGHT & BODY IMAGE

Section 8

These tools will enable you to work with a great number of clients who are in emotional suffering around weight and shape.

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PART 1

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Greetings. As always, my friends, Mark David here, founder of the institute. Let's talk about some simple strategies to help your client embody. What a good thing to do. It's time for some action. Now, as you know, we cannot fix body image because ultimately nothing is broken. But we can help people become more and more embodied. And as you know, embodiment is the key for healing a negative body image. That's just the way it is. Embodiment is the key to developing body wisdom, to feel the pleasure of life, to live more fully. And embodiment is the key. If a human being truly wants to shape shift their body to a natural and sustainable weight that is indeed possible for their body, then they have to be embodied. It is just the way it is. It's the way we're invented, it's the way we're created. It's the way the system works. So your task as a practitioner is to gradually Ali, invite and coach your client into their body. That's our job, my friends, remember, I really, really ask you to do this. Remember to think baby steps.
Remember to think you're inviting your client into self love.
Remember that you are proceeding slowly and steadily with your client. And when I say slow and steady, that will help your client step out of fast stress. Yesterday, I have to lose this weight and change my body so I can finally love myself and be the real me. Well, the chances are they've been trying to do that for a while, or chances are they're gonna do the same strategies for a long time and be unsuccessful because in order to be in the body, you have to enter it a little more slowly without the stress. So in other words, you are thinking a long game. I am playing a long game, meaning we're gonna do this Mr. And Mrs. Client, for as long as we need to.
I will take as long as it needs to take with a client. And yes, I want it to go as fast as possible. I want my client to get where they wanna go as fast as humanly possible. And I'm willing to let that be whatever. It's, when you're committed to a long game, it means you're committed to seeing your client through. When you're committed to a long game, you understand that there are no quick fixes in this realm.
You have to understand that just because somebody is freaked out and many people are about their weight and their shape and their body, they're not loving who they are and they want to change that immediately. And they believe that in order to change the self attack, the negative self-talk, the self self-hatred, the ways that they believe the world is judging them, in order to change, they they have to change their body and have to change it. Now we have to help our client understand a whole different approach and we have to slowly invite them into that approach. We have to seduce them into that approach. We have to ease them into it in a way that they imagine and think that we're giving them what they want, which we are.
On one level, yes, we're gonna work on weight loss, but we're gonna do it differently than you've ever done before.
Now as you know, many clients have to some degree checked out of their body and your job really simple, is to help them check back in.
So another way to say to all all of this is letting go of the fix. Being patient. You must learn to celebrate every small success, not only for you as a professional, but you must celebrate that success with your client. You must retrain your client to celebrate the small successes. They are so attached to only one kind of success. And that is the big lottery success called Tara. I've got the perfect body now. I won the lottery. I wanted to lose 90 pounds. I lost 90 pounds. I wanted to lose 40 pounds. I lost 40 pounds. That's what your client wants. They want the big lottery success or all the fireworks goes off and the parties happen and they're happy forever more. So what you're doing is you're training them and you're just celebrating every small success because every small success is worthy of celebration. Because embodiment takes time. Your client will often be resistant. Why? Because humans have resistance. Why? Because your client has been trying to lose weight so they can love their body and they haven't been able to. So that's why they're seeing you.
They will likely have resistance to any approach that is either a different from what they expect, or B, they think requires inner work or C requires a different kind of effort where they look in the mirror. This is all different ways of saying the same thing. So your client's gonna be resistant. Chances are I never fight my client's resistance. I welcome it. I smile at it.
As soon as you try to overpower your client's resistance, you lose them. You're in a fight and you don't need to be in a fight. Resistance for your client is futile. It doesn't get them anywhere. So you're welcoming their resistance. You're smiling and you're showing them a whole different way. So what I would love for you to do is to begin to see your client as you imagine they ought to be. And I don't just mean their perfect weight or their perfect body at all. I want you to see your client embodied. I want you to envision their beautiful, embodied self
perhaps at whatever weight they are right now. But I want you to envision them embodied, envision them happy and embodied because chances are the client you're speaking to is not happy and they've to some degree left the body. To some degree they are not in it. And remember, it's always for a good reason. Your client always has a great reason. So I want you to see your client as their future self. I don't want you to necessarily focus on some skinny self because I don't know that that's their future self, but I do know their future self for sure can be embodied in the body that they have right now.
Seeing your client embodied, it's like seeing it visualizing it is so key in many ways, I believe I'm just sharing my professional viewpoint right now. I believe that if we don't have a dream for our client, we me. If I don't have a dream for my client, a vision, a strong picture in my mind's eye, in my soul's perceptual field, then how can I truly guide them to a better place?
When I'm teaching my child how to walk, I know what walking looks like. I'm some part of me is envisioning them walking.
When I am working with a client who
'cause an unhappy body image, they don't like what they got, they don't like the physical form that they're in, they don't like their space suit.
I will envision them loving their space suit. I will envision them embodied. I'll envision them happy. I envision them empowered. I have a dream for my client because I know and I mean know beyond a shadow of a doubt, that as they start to embody success, As they start to embody wisdom, as they start to embody happiness, all those begin to happen. As my client starts to embody, brilliant insights happen. As my client starts to embody, they become healthier on a lot of levels. And as my client starts to embody, I know that now they have the best possible chance if their body is available to truly shapeshift that now they are in position to shapeshift. 'cause they're sitting in the car and the car's turned on
and they know to put their foot on the gas or their foot on the brake. They know how to operate it. They're inside, we're in. So it's your vision for your client, but really, really, really, really, really it's life's vision for them.
You want to see the embodied vision of where life is calling your client and then help them get there.
So yes, it's my vision for my client, but I'm also listening to life. I'm listening to the invisible. I'm listening to the higher wisdom of the universe.
My client wants to shape, shift their body. I know I can bet that a higher intelligence wants them in the body in order for them to get where they want to go. Another way of saying this, there's a higher power, a higher intelligence, a greater wisdom, a deeper code
that has a blueprint for us, a path for our client's healing and success. We as practitioners, we're accessing that blueprint, we're accessing that path. We're tuning into it, we're noticing it, and we're being stepped down transformers for a higher intelligence. And we're here to serve our clients in this way. So it's the wisdom that comes through us as a practitioner
as we're speaking to life with a capital L on behalf of our client.
Makes the work so much easier when you do it that way.
Let's return for a moment to what is embodiment.
Consider some of these words sensuous, present here. Aware, moving, sensing, thriving, tactile, physical in alignment. More fluid, more flowing, grounded, incarnated, palpable. People who look embodied seem to be at home in their body. They are comfortable there. They are occupying their physical form their home.
You don't have to be, you don't have to have the perfect body to embody. You don't have to have the healthiest body to embody. You could have a disease body and be in your body that happens to have a disease. You could be embodied and have a broken bone and you're embodied and you're feeling that experience.
Embodied means on a deeper level, my friends, we are choosing to be here. That's the So lesson embodied means I am choosing to be here and part of being here. Capital H, capital E, capital R, capital E on earth. Part of being here is being in a body. Sorry, but that's true. And part of being here and being in a body is very specifically being in the body that you are technically in right now.
People get sucked into this wishful thinking that they wanna be in a different body.
And oddly enough, that's a form of insanity.
Yes, you might wanna shapeshift your body. Okay, agree. Some of us want to shapeshift their body. Some of us can shapeshift our body,
but to do so, we must embody, we must choose the body that we're in now in order to shapeshift the body that we're in now.
I am all for my client. Shapeshifting your body. First things first, get in it.
Someone who is not embodied might be described as, I don't know, a person whose body is kind of a life support system for the head and the head is where all the action is. The head thinks the head talks, the head relates to other heads. Honestly. People who live in their head will often agree with you. If you ask them if this is what's true for them. Are you in your body? Do you live in your head? Some people will laugh. Yeah, my body is a life support system for my head. I get it. We do that. Many humans do that and we all do it for a good reason.
If you or anyone you know is in any way, shape or form, stepping outside the body, abandoning the body, dis embodying, there's always a good reason. Don't get down on yourself. Don't get down on your client. A person who is not embodied might be described as someone who takes no joy in movement or in stillness. Someone who thinks about how they feel more than they feel how they feel.
Embodiment is not an all or nothing experience. Well, I'm either in my body or I'm out. Nah, you, there's it's, it's a gradient. There's a gradation. Yeah. There's some people who are really in the body and there's some people who are really out of the body and there's everything else in between. For me and you, you just have to watch a, just watch an infant over the course from from birth till about goodness. 16, 17. You watch a human embodying, learning the ABCs and the basics of how to be in a body
in a way that works, in a way that they can self sustain and take care of self without self-harm. Yes, we don't touch the really hot fire, correct? We don't touch the really sharp knives on the blade.
Here's how you tie your shoes. Here's how you clean yourself. Here's how you brush your teeth. Here's how you throw the ball. Here's how you put on your clothes
and then all of a sudden you're 13 years old and here's how you start to feel as a sexual being. Here's how you slowly get to know that and feel comfortable about that. Here's how you start to experience your physical power.
Here's how you start to enjoy pleasure. We're learning how to be in a body.
The truth is it never stops if you pay attention.
And the truth is we have to pay attention to how we embody because we oftentimes don't embody in a way that's good for us because of how we've learned, because of what's happened. So embodiment is something we can learn to do at deeper and deeper levels.
You know, a woman who others might describe as radiant is embodied no matter what her age. Think of women that you could describe as radiant, I don't know, teens to nineties.
There's a sense of radiance. When a female human is embodied, they're here, they're present, they're glowing, they're happy to be here despite the age and despite whatever it is about the body. Because their soul is occupying the body, their soul is happy to be here. People might say she moves with a certain ease or carries herself in a certain way. A man who others might describe as being present is embodied once again, no matter what age, a man who is not present, a male who is not present is definitionally. I'm suggesting disembodied. Now. There are moments when we are more present than others. Therefore we are more embodied in those moments than others.
Now, does the same hold true for males and females or certain men? Radiant? Sure. Or women present? Sure. But I'm just talking about archetypal polarities in general and suggesting you notice this and try this on.
I met a young man once who, who called it old man strength. He accused there was a bunch of us fathers and we were horsing around and, and oh no, we were lifting weights with our younger teenage sons. And even though some of the younger teenage sons were far more muscular and large than their dads, we were out weightlifting these younger men. And one of the boys said, you're cheating. That's old man's strength. Old man's strength really is what men have learned to do, which is they can be so present in their body and so embodied that they summon a strength that goes beyond what we normally think of as strength. Embodiment is body wisdom. The more a human is embodied, the smarter is their body and their body wisdom. The more access they have, the more feedback they get, the more intelligent the body is to discern what works for it and what doesn't. Your body has a an absolute brilliance. That brilliance is happening all the time. Every second your body is functioning with an untold number of millions or billions of chemical reactions to keep you alive. Breathing blood, pumping food, digesting, seeing, tasting, hearing, smelling, sensing, fighting off dis disease, having an immune system thinking thoughts, nervous system. Transmission that happens practically at the speed of light. The body has a brilliant wisdom oftentimes that operates just on its own. There's another level of body wisdom that's not necessarily automatic, but it has. But we have access to consciousness. We start to understand, oh, you look at a kind of movement and you go, yeah, that would be good for me. You look at a food and you sense that would be good for me. You might look at an herb and sense that might be good for me. You can look at another person and go, he, she might be good for me. You're in an environment and all of a sudden you realize this environment is not good for me. Body wisdom is speaking. Body wisdom only speaks like that when we are inside the body. If you're not inside the body, there ain't no body wisdom that can speak so clearly.
That's why we like to embody so we can be smarter.
I've mentioned that one could be a very good athlete but not embodied another aspects of life, you know, so one can look like they're embodied, they're a great athlete, they're in their body, but honestly it doesn't necessarily mean anything. That's one aspect of embodiment and admirable for sure. But people who are great athletes might be disembodied around pleasure. They might be disembodied around food, around sex, around sensuality, around just being present and aware other than when they're in their sport.
Many people, I see this all the time, go to the gym and watch. People can be exercising but be rather disembodied. They just go on automatic pilot, they're on the exercise machine, they're watching a tv, they're talking to people. Yeah, they're moving their arms in their legs, but they're not really in their body. So eating challenges such as weight, worry, body image concerns, overeating, binge eating, emotional eating are all aspects acts of disembodiment.
Whenever we're doing something that we think is going against what we wish to do, somehow we're not in the body.
When you and I are in the body, we're at home. It doesn't mean we won't experience challenges around food or that we will be perfect all the time and at home, in the body all the time. It means that when we're in the body, we understand that the body is a home. We feel the body is home-based to return to.
When your body becomes more of a home, it means that you choose not to abandon the body for very long.
Let's talk again. I wanna remind you about abandoning the body. It's an interesting term, it's a little intense.
I'm calling this a form of disembodiment. So abandoning the body means we check out of the body because we don't feel safe because we're feeling too uncomfortable because we can't metabolize a certain life experience. We can't manage certain feelings. We have indeed experienced an outside harm or an insult that is difficult to process or we've simply checked out of the body because that's what we've been taught. That's what our parents or environment modeled for us or that's what the world seems to demand of us. There are certain work conditions that you kind of have to check outta your body in order to be in that work condition. There are people, you have to be around that in order to be around them you have to kind of disembody. There are certain experiences of harm, of insult, of physical harm, of emotional harm where we check out of the body because the pain is too much.
That is a form of coping and it makes perfect sense and it's legitimate and it's intelligent because the human being who disembody is doing the best they can in the moment to solve a challenge.
When your client comes to see you, you are helping them embody. You're understanding that it is easy to abandon the body in this world. Just in general. We sit for long hours, we're usually exposed at a young age to poor quality food. And one of our favorite forms of entertainment is to entertain ourselves watching other embodied people on the TV or the computer embody people who are singing. That's you gotta you, you wanna be a professional singer. You gotta embody your voice. Uh, so we watch the singers, the musicians wanna play music. You have to be embodied, you have to embody music, you wanna be an actor, you have to embody the role
where we watch what we think are pretty ham bodies are handsome bodies doing interesting, weird, strange things. That's how we entertain ourselves watching other people in their embodiment, which ain't bad except when that becomes our only experience of embodiment is watching others who are embodied.
One of the things we, I are seeing a lot around young men as more and more there's porn addiction and it can start at a young age. And by definition, when a young man gets addicted to porn, he is definitionally disembodied. He is out of his own body and he's getting pleasure visually, mentally by watching other bodies supposedly embodying and they're actually disembodied the people he's watching. It's fascinating. So embodiment practices, which we're gonna get into in a few moments, are especially recommended for obviously body image challenge clients, weight loss clients, any client who's looking at you and they are letting you know that they can't be the real me until I can't be the real me until I get rid of this digestive issue. I get rid of this food allergy. I can't be the real me until I get rid of this over reading binging. I can't be the real me until I eat a certain way. I can't be the real me until I weigh a certain whatever it is. I can't be the real me until
that's a form of disembodiment because you are planning your embodiment at a future time. But for now, I ain't there trying to get there. Chronic dieters, people who are dieting all the time, even if they're not trying to, they're, they're either trying to maintain their weight or lose weight.
That's a form of disembodiment 'cause they're not nourishing themselves with food. They're in their head about the nourishment process.
They don't eat, they don't nourish, they don't receive pleasure, they're not in a flow with food. They're in their head about food.
Embodiment practices are recommended for anyone with any eating or health concern that occurs to you as someone who needs to get more into, into their body and their bones and their cells and their muscles.
Embodiment is life disembodiment true? Pure 100% disembodiment equals death. You leave the body.
When you die, you fully disembody.
Many of us are living a life where we are partially disembodied. Obviously we're not dead, but disembodiment moves us in that direction. The place where the body, it no longer feels so much, it can't operate in the world.
The goal with embodiment practices is to help your client get here and to be here on earth in this life, in this world.
Now you never even have to talk to your client about the soul lesson called being here. Embodiment is that
practicing embodiment practices is really telling your client it's time to be here. It's starting now. The more present we are, the more metabolic power we can have. The more you could shapeshift your body, it is absolutely impossible for clients to achieve real lasting weight loss or shapeshifting or any kind of deep level healing. If we're not in the body, I'm sorry, that's just how it is.
Some clients have such some people, humans, we have such difficulty getting in the body because we don't like the one we have or we don't like. Where this body that we have right now is at in terms of its weight or its shape and its health.
So we curse the body and we hate it, which is a form of disembodiment. Self-Hate is a poison. Self attack is a poison. When you poison the body,
it eventually disembody with enough poison.
We're here to help people heal.
Okay, start here my friends. Level one, start here. Embodiment practices. How do you help your disembodied client embody? Very simple. We start with food, food, food, food, food, food. Our relationship with food.
And chances are, because of the work you're doing, you're seeing a lot of clients who are in some way, shape or form here to see you for some reason around their relationship with food. The key numeral uno way that you can help your client embody with baby steps slowly that yields by far and away the biggest bang for your buck. Nothing comes better, is to help your client who is a fast eater over time. No matter how long it takes to become a slow eater, which as you remember, doesn't just mean a speed slow eater really means present here, relaxed, pleasured, aware sensation, embracing food. But that's fine to start out with slow Mr. Ms Client Youi fast. Let's get it down to slow.
It'll silently confront them with their toxic nutritional beliefs. Food is the enemy.
It will help your client get present with the thing they think is the enemy that causes them to disembody.
Many of our weight loss clients and many of our body image challenge clients would love to learn how to not eat
'cause they think food is the problem. You are here to help your client do the opposite of what they've been trying to do, which is you are teaching them how to eat, not not eat.
Dieters are trying to learn how to not eat
everyone who's trying to lose weight. Not everyone, but significant amount of people are trying to learn how to not eat. How do I not have an appetite? How do I not have such a need for food? How do I lower the amount of food? And we do that because that's what we've been taught.
So you're teaching your client how to be an eater in this world, which for them is a tremendous challenge
and therefore you have a beautiful job because humans, we are so sensitive we can be. We have these interesting, unexpected, strange booboos. A booboo meaning I don't quite know how to nourish myself and feed myself in a way that works for me. It's kind of seemingly out of my control. I'm confused and I'm upset and I, I'm help. Great. So you're here to help your client. Help your client. Become a slow eater, help your client embodiment, practice relax with meals. Just relax. When do you, where do you eat your meals with who do you eat your meals? What time? How much time do you have for meals? What's the environment like? Okay, how do we recreate that? I don't think I need to go into all the details with you. You have to. You have to know how to do this. How do you create a relaxing, how do you help your client create a relaxing experience around meals, breathing exercises, creating the environment, music, preparation, beauty. Where are they eating? With whom are they eating? Are they taking enough time to eat?
Ask them to be present with the food. Help your client relax with meals. It might mean looking at where they're eating their meals and maybe they're eating at the office and wow, is there some place you can eat at work that is more relaxing? So you are looking for the details of how you can help your client with little baby steps. Create a more relaxed experience with food.
Number three of embodiment practices with food. We've talked about becoming a slow eater, becoming a relaxed eater. Help your client feel nourished by meals.
It's a hard one to explain sometimes, but you know, it's that warm, fuzzy good feeling. I'm taking care of myself. The simple act of nourishing ourselves is healing is nutritional. There's something sacred about it. Parents know this. Grandmas and grandpas know this. When they're nourishing, their grandchildren feels good.
Help your clients focus more on pleasure and joy with food.
Do they need to eat a dessert? Do they need to find a healthy pleasure?
What kind of meal or meals can they create during the week that gives them a sense of pleasure and joy and celebration?
Notice where your client is in deep fear of food. That's your task. Baby steps. You're inventing homework assignments along the ways to help your client receive pleasure from food, because food scientifically, inherently is pleasurable. Eating inherently is pleasurable as long as you're eating a food that you consider neutral to you or more than that.
Another embodiment practice with food, which is slightly more nutritional, but it doesn't it, it doesn't necessarily fall under the category of nutrition is to help them increase the quality of their meals because quality
is a PhD experience in the body.
Children don't necessarily know what a quality food is because their senses have not been educated, their mind has not been educated yet.
You can feed them the words junk food and if there's enough sugar in it, they love you.
Quality
is a form of intelligence. Recognizing quality is a form of intelligence. It's a form of wisdom.
Recognizing what is quality for the body takes practice. Okay, Mr or miss client, here's what you've been eating. Let's increase the quality of your meat. Let's increase the quality of your dairy. Let's increase the quality of your fruits and vegetables to organic. Let's, let's increase your quality of your juices to fresh juices from real fruits and vegetables.
And then your client slowly becomes educated. You've seen this. Chances are you used to eat a diet that wasn't as high quality as the diet you have now. Now your senses are educated, now your palate is educated, now your body is educated. Quality embodies us. Learning about quality helps us embody.
Now of course, every other nutritional strategy you do if you work with a client's macronutrient balance, honestly, my friends, when I work with a client's macronutrient balance, I'm not just tweaking their macronutrients, I'm just not tweaking their nutrition. I am changing their diet and I am expecting them to notice what happens.
You think chances are, if you've been trained as a nutritionist and trained as a dietician or trained as a medical profession, chances are the way you've been trained is tell somebody to do this or take that and then it'll be all better.
To a certain degree, that might be true, but that's like one 50th of the story.
Yes, I wanna give my client advice about what I think you might wanna include or disclude in your diet.
But then I want you to notice what happens. Embodiment, feel. What happens? Embodiment, tell me if any symptoms go away. That's embodiment. Noticing, Hey, I usually get a headache now I don't get a headache. This diet's better. I used to have less energy. You told me about this macronutrient tweak and now I have more energy. So that's a form of embodiment. Getting feedback from your body is a form of embodiment. Your client's body is getting smarter and as their body gets smarter, eventually they're gonna need you less and less. And that's a good thing because then you know you're doing your job. 'cause you and I can't stand by our client for the rest of eternity telling them, no, don't eat that. Yep, eat that. No, do that. No, don't do that. That's not our job. You are teaching a person to fish, not just constantly giving them a bunch of fish.
You know what I'm saying? That's an old, old saying from Daoism. So you're starting with food for simple embodiment practices. But I want you to see we're contexting this differently. I really want you to get it. I want you to get the ABCs of this work. I want you to get the simplicity of it. And people don't think this is the journey and they don't go on this journey by themselves because they're being sold a nasty bill of goods in the popular media about how to have the body you want by doing a bunch of nonsense.
And we have to do the basics of being a human being alive on planet earth and being in a body. So we start with food with our clients.
So again, each of these practices I just mentioned are indeed embodiment strategies. And the majority of your clients are gonna be disembodied about food in some way, shape, or form. When you hear somebody say, just tell me what to eat. Just gimme a diet, just tell me how many grams of fat and protein in carbs. What they are telling you is, I'm just embodied. I don't wanna figure this out. I don't wanna know about it. Just tell me what I should throw in my face and I will do it and hopefully get the result that I want.
Hmm. You know something. Just telling someone to do something doesn't generally do something.
The body of work that I've created
on one level largely came from working with clients early on, very early on in my career and giving them really good information and good strategies. Eat this and don't eat that. And it's true. If they would've just eat this and don't eat that, their problems likely would've been solved. And people come back to me and say, I, I know what you told me to eat. I know what you told me not to eat. I just couldn't do it.
So there's something else going on. You just can't tell someone what to eat and expect a victory. Are there instances when that happens? Sure. Are there people who have the kinds of food sensitivities and food allergies? And when you identify that and you say, eat this, don't eat that, and they do it and there's a big change, sure that happens. So I'm not saying there aren't exceptions to this rule, but what I'm saying is I want you to watch out because a lot of people just want, just tell me what to eat. And it's because they're confused and it's because nobody is helping them be in their body and learn how to understand for themselves.
So the idea is to teach your client ultimately, ultimately body wisdom, a connection, and a relationship with food that works for them. That'll be no different than, you know, somebody has a relationship issue and they come to see you and they say, well, just tell me what I should tell my husband. Just tell me what I should tell my wife. He said this, she said that. What should I say back? And then you tell them the words and they go home and they repeat it. Like, how silly would that be? No, you're a client. If they have relationship problem, maybe they need to learn some relationship skills, need to learn some new information, need to learn some new wisdom, and then start to practice that wisdom and notice what happens. We are in a dance with our environment. We're in a dance with food. We're in a dance with our relationship with food. You're teaching your client how to dance.
We're literally helping our clients learn the fundamentals of nourishing and nutrify their body so that they, they can begin to feel empowered to make choices that come from a deeper, wiser, more embodied place.
Please, my friends, do not underestimate the power and importance of these practices. These practices becoming a slow eater, relaxed eater, nourished eater, nourished by meals, receiving pleasure and joy with food, increasing the quality of your food. Don't underestimate it.
They are fundamental, fundamental to healing just about any eating concern that you're gonna see these practices, I'm gonna suggest literally impact, mind, heart, soul, and metabolism. And they create the foundation for long-term actual sustainable success and happiness.
I could care less about short-term success. I am not interested. Why? Because 99% of people who lose weight on a weight loss diet gain it back. That is a disgusting statistic. I don't like it. I object therefore because I object. I am looking to do something about that. This is me and you doing something about that dramatic level of unsuccess. And it is unsuccess. Not because there's anything wrong with people, not because people are lazy, not because people are dumb. Quite the opposite. People are motivated and they wanna do the right thing. We the world, the professional we, the scientific, we the psychological. We have been given out all the wrong messages about how to achieve success here
because it's a money game. It's a fame game. It's a biggest ego wins game. It's the look at me game. I am the guy who has it right, or the Gallo has it right? I'm sorry, I'm tired of all that nonsense. I'm too old for that.
You know, the practices we're talking about are not classically sexy, meaning they're not the latest cool nutrition breakthrough, whatever those really are. And they aren't quick fix methods. Everybody wants to know the latest diet and they want to jump on it or not. They wanna know the latest cool thing. I wanna know the latest cool thing quite frankly. But then I'm gonna look at it and I'm gonna examine it.
And at the same time I'm cool looking at the latest cool thing because I am doing practices that embody me on a daily level that help sustain me and truly nourish me and truly give nutritional value to my body.
So yeah, do all the latest cool nutrition stuff or stay up on it if you are doing the foundational pieces that actually work and actually will take a majority of humans where they truly want to go. Everybody's looking for elaborate fixes or quick fixes to their challenge around weight, around body image, around endless dieting, around their over reading and their binge eating. And it's oftentimes, it's so simple.
And I wanna remind you that because people constantly go for quick fixes that don't work, they spend years, if not decades, going from one quick fix to the next. So the quick fix is actually ends up being a slow road to nowhere. Whereas the slow fix, which is what I'm talking about, the slow fix practices presented here are actually the quickest path to success. I hope you could hear the sensibility in that a hundred quick fix strategies can occupy you for the next a hundred years and get you nowhere. The slow fix strategies are gonna get you there a hell of a lot faster.
But people get seduced.
So if you and I wanna have any chance, if your client wants to have a chance of shapeshifting the body in a truly and sustainable way, we're here to help our clients get in the body. We must inhabit it to operate it. We must embody ourselves to move it in the direction we'd like to go to change and transform it. Simple my friends. Okay, here's the next level of embodiment practices. And again, this is simple,
but this is where the action truly is for humans and it's around movement. And I really want you to change your client's exercise into movement. Now your client might be doing the kind of movement exercise, whatever you or they call it, that really truly works for them. They love to do it. I love my yoga class, I love my dance class, I love my my personal trainer. Whatever they do. If you can assess by you looking them in the eye and listening to them and picking up on the nuances and asking curiosity questions, if you could assess that what your client is doing, they love to do, they enjoy doing, they could smile when they're doing it or after they do it, hallelujah, then they're doing something good. And I'm making the distinction between exercise and movement. Exercise for many people, many people means this forced thing that I'm supposed to do. So I can have health, fitness, and most importantly lose weight or have the shape I want,
which is no different than, oh, I'm supposed to starve myself with food so I can have the looks, the weight, and the shape I want. No, you're not supposed to starve yourself with food, nor are you supposed to do exercise that is so anti your body, your mind and your heart and your soul. Such movement will never get any human where they want to go when it comes to shapeshifting, their body sustainably. So I want my client to let go of punishing exercise. Punishing exercise means they feel like they're, they're punishing themselves.
I have to do this. I'm supposed to do this. You my friends, as the practitioner need to learn how to sniff this out. Is my client exercising because they wanna exercise or are they punishing themselves for having body fat? Are they punishing themselves for eating food or having eaten food today or planning on eating food tomorrow?
Your client must at some point let go of punishing exercise. If they want to sustainably shape, shift the body. And if they wanna learn how to love their body, if you're doing punishing exercise, then you're not loving the body. So we are here to help our client embrace fun and joyous movement, plain and simple. Some kind of movement that brings some kind of fun and joy. Now, yes, let's split hairs a little bit here because this is important. There are various kinds of movement and exercise that don't necessarily feel fun and joyous and smile on my face in the moment. But there's an odd joy and excitement and turn on that we get from it and it's especially good when we're finished. We feel great. Sometimes we have to push ourselves to move the body. Sometimes we have to push ourselves in a way where we're moving, we're doing a certain kind of exercise or a certain kind of class. And we know that on the other side the benefit feels really good. I feel good about myself. I feel happy about myself. My body feels good even though I might have to recover. So I'm calling that good movement and good exercise.
But you gotta, you gotta watch your client to really see what that is and really see if
whatever movement and exercise they're doing, if it truly comes under the heading of yes, this is giving me some type of joy and truly felt pleasurable benefit at some point in the process. So movement means everything. And what what, what happens is people think exercise is limited to
running in machines and things that burn calories. So a lot of people have that. I'm not saying you have it or everyone has it, but a lot of people hear the term exercise and they go to a very specific place in their head. You might not go there, your client, chances are it goes there. So I'm just raising my hand and tell you people think differently. People think what they think about exercise. You gotta catch this. Somebody thinks exercise is about calorie burning things to do and they have not found a way to sustainably shapeshift their body and they're coming to see you and they don't love their body. You can do them a beautiful service by inviting them into movement and helping them step out of punishing exercise. So movement can mean any kind of dance whatsoever. I don't care what it is. It could be slow, it could be fast, anything in between. It could be yoga, Pilates, it could be walking, it could be hiking, it could be swimming, it could be a team sport, it could be a duo sport like tennis. I don't care what it is. Anything your client truly enjoys and celebrates in anything that helps them be in their body in a way that they go, yeah, I like that.
There are certain people who think walking has no value or dance has no value to them because it's not. Exercise is not calorie burning.
We have to get our clients into their body and enjoying the body. Chances are your body image challenge. Client doesn't enjoy their body. That's why they're challenged. They don't enjoy the body, they don't enjoy its look, its shape, its feel, it's whatever. They ain't enjoying it. So you know what you do? You slowly baby step, help them enjoy it. You help somebody enjoy their body by finding out what maybe possibly in this universe might give them some kind of joy.
Walking for certain people who can do nothing else or don't wanna do anything else, can actually bring some joy. It's a baby step. You're helping someone, em body.
We are achieving the end results in the beginning. People want the body that they want because they believe they will be happier and more joyful in their body. Makes perfect sense. And to get to a place where you're happy and enjoying your body, you start with being happy and enjoying your body. So you find the one thing, the two things, the 10 thing, whatever number it is, the tiniest things, even if it gives a smidgen of joy, that's a victory for your body. Image. Challenge client. I also want you to note that when we're talking about this topic of exercise,
many male clients, in order for them to be embodied, need to adopt a more masculine, hard, direct, challenging, pushing, forcing kind of exercise.
Just saying, for a male client that I intuit assess needs to be more near masculine. Oftentimes for the male psyche and the male body, a challenging exercise where they're going through the pain and going through the bump and the grind actually good for them.
Conversely, there are definitely males out there that need to do some, do some gentle stuff that gets them into their body in a different way. Do I have female clients that I want them to do more challenging exercise? Yeah, I've had them over the years.
But honestly, numbers wise, I take more women off of the hard challenging, masculine push for shove exercise than I do put them on it.
Because I find far too many women are adopting a masculine form of exercise and they form a masculine form of nutrition. The heroes exercise, the hero's nutrition, eat as little as possible and control my diet as masculine, push my body hard, masculine. Okay, great. Do that. If it works for you and you love it and enjoy it. But if my client is coming to see me and they have a complaint, then I'm going to look to tweak. So I want you to hear something I didn't say my way is right for all people all the time. I could care less about how anyone exercises or not. I really don't care. However, I care about my client. However, I care about my client's complaint. So my client comes in a complaint with a complaint, I wanna help them.
So some of these concepts I'm sharing with you when I say, yeah, I've had to take a lot of women clients off with a hard masculine form of exercise. It's 'cause they're living in a mindset that doesn't work for them. Let's experiment with a different mindset and a different way of being with your body in terms of movement, experiment. Underline that word and see what happens. That's it. That's what you're doing with your clients. I'm never saying this is the right way. Don't do it your way. Do it my way. No, hey, you've been doing it this way. You're trying to lose weight. Why are you trying to lose weight? 'cause you don't like your body. I get it. So I'm dealing with a body mis challenge client. They hate their body, they're going to the gym. They're disappointed. I'm not getting where I want to go. Great, let's mix it up. But the way I mix it up is I'm looking to help them find joy. Step number OneBody, joy embodies us. Smiling embodies us, pleasure embodies us. Your body image challenge. Client often has little joy or pleasure in things related to their body.
Any small success moves things forward and helps them embody such that over time the more they embody and find different ways to embody from different avenues. Movement, food, slowing down with food, personal care, music, whatever.
Things start to shift. Your client is more here. Connections start to get made. Metabolism can shift without changing anything you eat.
Far too many humans, my friends, have lost the innate joy of movement. It's sad. We are often conditioned, IE brainwashed to believe that looking good means feeling good. The truth is feeling good means feeling good. In other words, so many people want to feel good, but they believe in order to feel good, I have to look good. No, in order to feel good, you just have to feel good. And let's find ways for you to feel good other than the perfect body that you're gonna have, which will finally make you look good, which will then make you feel good. Do I want you to have the nice body? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But before we get there and on the way to get there and as a way to get there faster and as a way to get there. 'cause you haven't been able to get there sustainably yet. Let's try to do it in a sustainable way. So I'm telling you, staying in a body that looks good sustainably means you feel good in it and you're gonna wanna stay in that body
and you adopt methods to shapeshift your body that are actually sustainable.
We can powerfully help our clients embody by inviting them back into the kind of movement that feels a little bit like play.
And of course, by definition, moving the body means you gotta be in it. And being in the body for your client in this way is a, is it just a gift that keeps giving? Okay. It's simple. But I have had unbelievably profound success just by helping a person change from movement to exercise. And it's not just, it's not just a prescription. My friends, you've gotta understand, okay, Mr. I, I'm, I'm not saying this to my client. The following is what I'm not saying. Okay, Mr. And Mr. Client, you've been doing exercise. I need you to do movement. I want you to stop running on the treadmill and I want you to start dancing. Okay, great. Write that down on your list and make sure you do it. No, I'm explaining movement and exercise to them. Just as I've explained it to you. Have I convinced you? Have I gotten you a little bit inspired about wanting to be in your body in a different way? Does what I say ring true the way I've laid it out for you? That's how I wanna, that's how I want you to lay it out for your client.
It's really that simple.
So I'll say to my client, if every possible way you could possibly move or exercise burned the same huge amount of calories, what exercises or movement would you choose to do? If anything that you did burned a huge amount of calories, doesn't matter what it all burned, the same amount of calories, what would you do?
There's your golden ticket. That's your question. Whatever they say, have them do it. Whatever exercise they left out that they've been doing, tell them don't do that exercise anymore. As an experiment for a few months
now realize that many people have an aversion to movement or exercise that comes from a history of body shaming and exercise shaming and a past history of just a low consciousness approach to fitness that they were exposed to in school. So you need to be aware of that.
That's why I'm especially aware for clients who are a little shy about their body, they're timid about moving it. They're timid about exercise. You tell them to dance and they look at you with horror because how could their body dance? It's so horrible. I've had clients say that to me directly. His body's so ugly. Who wants to see it? Dance ouchies and lots of people who wanna see that body dance.
You are the one that has to cheerlead your client into a different way. It's all about exploring and negotiating with your client around the types of movement and exercise that feels like a yes for them.
And you can give your client a little bit of a scientific mind cookie around movement versus exercise. You know something Mr. And Mrs. Client, a lot of people, and you can, you can go and Google this. You can Google stress and exercise. See what you come up with. There are many humans who over exercise and over exercise can cause injury. We know this over exercise can also create a physiologic stress response that actually starts to reverse so many of the good benefits of exercise. 'cause when we over exercise and the body goes into stress chemistry, you're producing far more insulin and cortisol, which will signal the body, can signal the body to store weight and store fat and not build muscle. It can keep your body in stress induced digestive shutdown because of over exercise and effect digestion.
I mention in my book The Slowdown Diet, a case study of a client, several clients who were marathon runners and couldn't lose an ounce of weight training 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 miles a day, 15 on the weekends,
six, seven days a week running. And they can't lose a pound. And they're freaked.
And what was happening was their body was in a major stress response because they were stressing out their physiology. It's too much for them. So instead of the body losing weight, it was hanging on to weight.
And it doesn't make sense to their brain because their brain hasn't been trained in
a full understanding of science. Because our science tends to be very dumbed down. And science, let's say it in the positive, is a growing, evolving field. Always. And forevermore. People don't get that.
Whenever somebody says to me, if I'm talking about MINDBODY nutrition or eating psychology or introducing a concept, one of the hundreds of concepts that you've heard in this training and somebody says, well,
is there research on that? That's evidence-based, um, that proves exactly what you're talking about. And yeah, a lot of things there are, and a lot of things there aren't evidence-based medicine comes after we have a lot of evidence. But science is always progressing. And in order for science to advance, somebody's gotta be at the leading edge and say, okay, let's see if we can invent an airplane and fly in the air. So some guys gotta do that. Well, is there evidence that your contraption that you just built is gonna fly? And I would be like, no, there's not. But let's go. There's an experiment. We're scientists, we're trying this out.
So science advances, because we step into the unknown, we step into the wilderness.
That's a lot of what we're doing here. We're stepping into the unknown and we're stepping into the wilderness. Good for us. You're doing that with your client. You're inviting them to step into their unknown, okay?
Yet another strategy. Third level strategies for embodiment is anything and everything that your client will define as personal care. Now, once again, my friends, I wanna tell you that this might be a no brainer for you. You, you might be the kind of person that is so good at personal care that you might think, why are we talking about this? But what happens is, when a human begins to, when a human has been insulting their own body, talking negatively about it to self and others for a long enough time, there's ways that we don't personally care for ourselves. So any type of personal care is a form of embodiment and it's a victory. Any type of personal care is embodiment. You are caring for your personhood, you are caring for yourself. Any way to care for the body is embodiment. That's why with certain clients, I might give them a few supplements.
If I want 'em to have more essential fatty acids in the diet, yeah, I'll tell 'em to eat some more olive, olive oil or avocado. But I might give them an EFA supplement and not so much 'cause they need to take it in a supplement form. But it, it reminds them to do self-care. Some people get excited to take a supplement because it reminds them of self-care. It's, oh, I take this three times a day. So three times a day you're telling your brain, I'm caring for myself, I'm remembering my body. I'm doing something for me. That's an affirmation.
So personal care could mean encouraging your client to update their wardrobe and embrace new clothing. I do not allow the conversation. I mean, I'll listen to it, I'll hear it and I'll smile it away with my words. When a client tells me, oh, you know, I just wanna be able to fit into my clothes.
Well, you're wearing clothes right now. You're fitting into those and I get that you wanna fit into other clothes. Why don't you buy some clothes that you're gonna be excited to wear? Now I get that you wanna fit into your old clothes. Got it? Okay, I hear you heard that one before. Interesting. Get interesting new clothes. Now it has all kind of interesting new clothes to buy for anybody size. You've seen people do it. You've seen women do it especially. So encourage your client, especially women clients, to update their wardrobe and start embracing new clothing. Now what would you wear? You wanna wear more colorful stuff? Your old clothes is more sexy. Okay, so we can get some more sexy clothing now.
Hey, you know your client's gonna have an edge here. Find out what their edge is. Ask them to go shopping. Ask them, do you have a friend you can go shopping with? Who's good at this? Who's, who's just gonna love you in this process? 'cause I can't do that. Um, it's not my, it's not my style, it's not my skill. But I'm gonna look to resource my client's own resources. Do you have somebody? Oh yeah, I got the perfect friend for that. Great. Have a date. Help them dress you.
I wanna encourage my clients more specifically around beauty care, especially healthy products. What else can you do for beauty care? What else can you do for healthy products? Are there any healthy beauty care services you can afford to do? Do you you get a manicure? Do you get a pedicure? Do you get a massage? Do you get a facial? Do you have a friend who could do that for you that you can exchange?
I wanna encourage my client around a style change.
Or people think they're gonna be more fabulous when they look a different way. Great. Be more fabulous. Now what can you do with your hair? Do you have somebody that can that can play there style change with your hair style change, with makeup style change, with accessories? So I'm always gonna ask my client, who in your world do you know that can do that? Or who in your world do you know you can ask for? Who can help you do that? If my client doesn't feel good about doing that on their own.
So I'm always looking to encourage my client around personal care to do something different, whatever that might mean. Do you take baths? Yes, I love baths, but I don't take them. Great. Okay, so how can they create a ritual around that? Candles, oils, you know the drill.
Can they create a ritual around bath, candle oils? Music, I found a lot of people are getting into essential oils. It's a great place to play. Just play. Play with different fragrances, natural fragrances. Go for it. That's body care. That's enjoying your body, that's loving your body, that's playing with one of your senses. Hallelujah. What a good thing. Baby steps my friends. You're helping your clients slowly learn how to love their body, which is gonna make them wanna be in it. And the more they're in it, the more they can shape shift it.
So think of it this way, A negative body image is kind of an act of unlove. Personal care is self-love and personal care. Is a practice something I want my client to do regularly? Something a bit new, something doable for them that they could agree to. Mr and Mr. Client, is there something you've been wanting to do in terms of your body, in terms of cosmetics, in terms of body care products, in terms of body care service, something you've been wanting to do that you can do but you've just been putting it off?
Just see what your client comes up with.
I also want you to remember to acknowledge the good things that your client already is doing when it comes to self-care. Make sure you juice them up about that. And this is a fun and playful conversation. You always have to figure out how to make any session a little fun and playful. Okay, I take that back. There's certain sessions, they're just not necessarily gonna be fun and playful because that's not what it's meant to be. But embodiment practices, ah, you gotta make it fun and playful. You gotta joke around. You have to make it interesting. You have to make sure your client's smiling because this is fun. It is playful. That's the whole point. Fun, playful, pleasurable, loving. Make the conversation be that
you know, some other third level strategies. Talk about lifestyle. You wanna poke around and understand your client's waking and sleeping patterns. There might be things you can do there. Some people don't have a good morning ritual and they start out their day stressing themselves out by turning on CNN in the morning. Or they'll look at their email first thing and it disembodies them. So for clients that don't have a morning ritual that they enjoy, uh, you can encourage that. So ask 'em about their morning ritual. Do you have a morning ritual that you love, like some tea that you can make yourself a nice herbal tea or a way to make your breakfast that just feels like a ritual. Music to put on a place where you sit music that you like. What is it that would make for you for a beautiful morning ritual? That's an embodiment practice. What would make for a beautiful evening ritual? What kind of music would you play? How would you transition into the sleep state in a way where you're not stressing yourself out? So you're not looking at all your emails before bed, or you're not watching the war on terror before bed, or you're not watching a horror movie. Like understand your client's rituals around waking and sleeping and see if you can help them create something fun. Pleasurable is your client taking rest periods during the day. This is great for the busier stressed client that needs to just take one or two 15 minute rest periods each day. So much research on that. Two 15 minute rest periods are enough to reset mood, enough to reset attention span cognition, memory retention, a sense of refreshness lying down for 15 minutes, eyes closed, doing some breathing but not sleeping.
Notice how your client uses their electronic and media stimulation.
Some people get so attached to their little gizmos that it kind of disembody them. Lifestyle for your client means encouraging time in nature.
Where are your power spots? Just places you love to go. You feel rejuvenated or just so beautiful for you. You just love it. Other embodiment practices are where somebody's doing something to you. If your client can afford it, what can they afford? Where somebody does something to them. Massage, chiropractic, acupuncture.
Anything of that ilk where your client's being passive.
And I'm always looking to, to notice where my client can enlist. Support buddies around health and embodiment. Oh, so who are your support buddies? You can go out into nature with, you can go to your power spot with. Who are your support buddies that can recommend good practitioners in the area for you for massage?
That sort of thing. Let's just highlight nature for a moment in part because I'm very partial here and in part because I think it's a great healer. I think it's a profound and underestimated embodiment. Practice it. Embodiment practice, which is simply time in nature without the need to exercise or burn calories, time in nature without the need to exercise or burn calories. If you wanna be in nature and exercise and burn calories, great, I got no problem with that. But also time in nature where you are communing, enjoying, noticing, sensing, breathing, walking, taking in the energy, relaxing into the natural world, getting the visuals, experiencing the beauty of nature disappearing for a little bit. I'll ask my client, when was the last time you really enjoyed being in nature? What works for you? What would make you happy in this way? In this realm? Remember my friends, the body comes from nature and reconnecting with nature is reconnecting with the body. It truly, truly works.
Can you see my friends? That it's not about you, the practitioner doing all the work. It's about you helping your client resource themselves and create a way of living where they access outside resources that support them in having a healthy relationship with their body and their world. You're helping your client resource themselves and collect all their outside resources, persons, places, et cetera. Having a happy and more loving relationship with one's body on a lot of levels is about re-parenting ourselves. So you are re-parenting your client. You're, you're teaching your client how to be in their body. It's as simple as that. You are a parent raising a child. And and I say that affectionately, being in a body, learning how to be in a body is in many ways, starting from square one. That's okay. I mean, really that's okay because so many people need that because they have so much upset and hurt and trauma about their body. They have taken in so many negative messages. They have been bombarded with weight hate. They have been bombarded by mean or dumb people and their comments, they are being bombarded by media images.
Harmful things have been said to them.
So it's very sensitive for them to wanna be in their body because their body has been a source of pain. Why would you want to go in there? So you and I are the loving parents that help them re repair, that help them, that help reparent them. And at the same time, I'm teaching my client how to reparent themselves. You've heard me talk about, and this is, this is, how do I say this? This is psychology that goes right to the core. Someday I would love to teach a psychology course that just sums up the best of what psychology has to offer in like, like 10 presentations, greatest hits. If we were doing psychology's greatest hitch, this is one of them. You as a practitioner, number one, are re-parenting your client. Take that job on in a very sweet way. You're not gonna say that necessarily though you can, but make sure you do it in a way that lands and that your client can smile about that. Um, so as you are reparenting them and being a loving adult,
here's how you be in your body. Yeah, okay, we're gonna slow down with food, okay? We're gonna, yeah, you can buy some new clothes even though you haven't lost the weight yet. That's okay, Tanya, you you're gonna like it. You gotta try it. And then your client's gonna take that on. They're gonna take on slow eating. So they're reparenting themselves. And I will say to a client, I will say, listen, you know, you've told me this. You didn't have the world's greatest upbringing around your body, your people in your early environment. The parents didn't quite get that one right, did they? They didn't know how to do that. The people around you didn't know how to see that and help you. So in that aspect of your life, yeah, you weren't parented really well around food in your body and loving your body. And so now that you are fill in the blank, 25 years old, 30 years old, 35, 40, 45, 50, 65, now that you are, say your client's age, an adult, a 25-year-old adult, a 45 year adult, you are gonna be your ideal parent. You're gonna put that mama and papa right inside your head and you're gonna give good loving advice to yourself. I'm doing my best to do that with you and doing my best to tell you the things that I think are really gonna help and serve you. So you can embody more. So you can start to love your body because then that's gonna help your body relax and go into parasympathetic nervous system dominance. The physiologic relaxation response, which will then put you in the ideal place to actually shapeshift your body in a sustainable and natural way.
So you're teaching your client how to reparent themselves. They're learning how to give themselves something they didn't quite get enough of early on and let your client know that that's what they're taking on. So what you're telling your client, this is a technique. When you say this to them, you're learning how to reparent yourself. Your mother didn't do this, this and this. Your dad do, didn't do that, that and that. Now you're gonna do that for you.
And when you do that, you speak to yourself kindly about food, about your body. 'cause you didn't get enough of that when you were young. So now we give it to you. Now that's part of my job as as your coach, and as part of your job as being your own best friend.
So you're talking to the part of your client that is young, it's okay, it works.
My friends growing, IM maturing into body love. And body confidence is actually a radical act in this world. It's going against the grain. Why is that? It's because much of our advertising and media programming points us towards where we are not okay? It's all telling you where you're not, okay. You're not lovable where you don't have the right look, you don't have the right shape. So we are literally programmed towards self dissatisfaction, which makes you a consumer. I'm just telling you how industry works and how it's been working. You know, since 1920s, 1930s,
you are being advertised at in a way that moves you towards self dissatisfaction. You don't know that it's happening to you, but you are being made to feel not good about yourself by the images and the words and the scenarios and the videos and the commercials that are being hurled at you. So once again, if you are, your client finds it virtually impossible to love your body, given all the negative messages you're surrounded by, you are right and your client is right. It is virtually impossible because we've inherited and absorbed and caught a viral belief that's bigger than any one person. And that's why we're doing this. That's why we're banning together, you and me right now, to support one another, to help each other, to uplift the people who need some love and guidance here.
So when your client says it's impossible, you tell them you're damn straight. It's impossible for any one person, but not for two of us. And quite frankly, there's more than two of us talking a better game right now. So that's how we, that's how we overcome this, and that's how we transform ourselves. And then you're gonna be able to help people do that just by virtue of who you are is what I say to my client. So there's something inherently sacred, my friends, about helping another human to embody more and to love their body more. So let's not take this lightly and while at the same time you wanna bring lightness to it and you wanna bring In the light, you wanna bring in more consciousness here. Because for so many people, this is the healing that they need and that they crave. And this is a soul victory to learn how to love the body.
If we don't learn how to love the body, our journey will be a very unhappy one for a long time to come. That is not our birthright. Our birthright is so, so much more. So I really want you to get as something special. It's sacred. It's an honor to help another human being love their body more, which means to embody more.
So we have a beautiful opportunity. Embrace it. Know that it's a good thing. Ask questions of the universe. Tap into your intuition. Notice your client's journey. Embrace it, love it unconditionally. Accept them no matter who they are and what they look like. Celebrate their journey. Help them learn to see the gold in their journey, in their story, in their life. Help them learn to take the muck of their journey and turn it into fertilizer. Turn it into nutrition that they can grow from.
Okay, my friends, there's more to come and gosh, that was simple strategies for embodiment. Part one, part two is coming right up. It's around the corner. Thank you as always, and I'll see you on the other side.

PART 2

Autoscroll:

Greeting once again, friends, Mark David here, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating. We are in a conversation called Simple Strategies for embodiment, part two of three. You know, I've been thinking how
helping another human being when it comes to body image.
Forgive me if I've already said this to you, but on a certain level, this is so hard to do, and the reason why it's so hard to help another human with this thing called having a happier body image is because from the beginning, as a human being on earth, for so many of us, the cards are stacked against us. We've gotten so many negative messages, and you've seen, you've known people, whether you've been through this yourself, go through this yourself. We can be tortured around our relationship with our body. It can be a very intense booo. It is hard to transcend because it feels so, so, so, so real. So on the one hand, I'm acknowledging how hard this is, and on another hand, what I wanna tell you is, and remind you, is again, the road is simple to understand, not necessarily easy to walk down.
And I think this is an important distinction because we, the collective, we can be so hungry to have a happy relationship with our body, and therefore, we believe that to have a happy relationship with my body, my body has to change,
which then makes us more miserable and in suffering, because that doesn't quite work for the vast majority of people.
So the road is simple, it isn't complex. And once you understand that the road is simple, as I've been doing my best to share with you, then embodiment, helping someone embody, helping someone to love their body more, accept it more, and inhabit it more in a good way. You have to think of it as a long game. You have to think of it as this is gonna take time.
You are helping to raise a human being
in a sense from the very beginning.
So you and I have to be patient as practitioners, and we have to learn how to invite patients with our clients to create a space around that.
One of the reasons why this is challenging as a professional is because if you are a coach, if you are a practitioner, if you are any kind of medical professional listening in right now, you wanna get somewhere, you wanna fix something. And quite honestly, the sooner we fix people, quote unquote, the sooner we help them have more energy, the sooner we help them have a better digestion, have a better mood, the sooner we help them have less weight, the happier they are.
Having a happy body image is not something that changes overnight.
And the challenge is, we have you and I in this work, we have so many people coming to us, and they're not coming to us saying, I hate my body. I can't stand it. That's really not why they're coming to us in their mind, they're coming to us to lose weight.
They're coming to us to stop over eating, stop binge eating, stop emotionally eating.
So they have this, in a sense, a surface goal in mind, but on a deeper level somewhere they know, yeah, and I wanna lose weight because I wanna feel better about myself.
So what happens is the typical practitioner will focus on the smaller goal. You want to lose weight. Got it. You want to stop overeating. Got it.
And for sure, I wanna help my clients stop over reading or binge eating or emotional eating. Absolutely. But what I'm saying is, I want you to have your eye on what is my client's relationship with their body?
Because you're gonna use everything we're learning around body image to slowly, steadily, consistently invite your client into embodiment. Because as you do that, everything that we're dealing with, everything, all of it, whether it's an eating challenge or a literal health challenge, all this becomes easier to transform
as we have the kind of relationship with our body where we don't abandon it, where we inhabit it, where we explore it, where we get to know it, where we dare. I say even delight in the experience where we find it interesting, where we find it an exploration.
Most humans are not taught to relate to their body in that way. And hence our epidemic around eating challenges and health issues.
I'm always fascinated, fascinated, fascinated, fascinated. When I watch people who are consistently eating a junk food diet, they're just eating the worst foods, and they have all kinds of health issues,
and they can't make the connection, they don't notice that after they drink two Mountain Dews, that they've got a migraine. I've known people like this, many people like this. I literally, they've worked for me, they've worked around me. I've seen them every day.
And I literally read their body better than they read their own body.
I had someone who worked for me, and he was constantly dealing with migraines, and I could tell you exactly when he was gonna get a migraine, he would say, you know, they just, they come and go, they're unpredictable. But after I got to know him for a while and watch his eating habits, I could see
when he was drinking enough Mountain Dew and skipping lunch and just having a bunch of poor quality chips or sugary foods, an hour or two later, he'd have a migraine and have to go home. You can't see that. You can't make that connection. And the reality is, we don't, oftentimes
because of a relationship with our body where we haven't truly been taught to inhabit it.
So this is a long game.
And at the same time, yes, I want you to help your client get where they want to go as quickly as possible. But what I'm saying to you is that when you can embrace the paradox here, that this is a long game to help somebody embody, and you know that you want to help them clear up things as soon as you can. When you hold that paradox, what I am trying to explain is that your job becomes easier. You can be more effective.
Being able to hold such a paradox is wisdom, and it's a certain kind of power now. Okay, let's, let's dive into some specifics here. You know, oftentimes it's helpful to visit when it comes to embodiment some of the places in our lives where for good reason wasn't easy for us to embody. And one of the more complex and challenging places for humans to successfully embody is around our sexuality. We brought up this topic before, it's not new to you, but you know, throughout the training, I'm gonna circle back to it again and again because I just wanna keep reminding you that this is important. And even though this is not a training in sexuality, I don't know honestly great ones that you can just jump in online and really learn about this. Um, there's not a lot of great bodies of work that I find are useful here. So it's a, it's a challenging place to work,
but on another level, it's a little bit easier than we think. And the reason why it's easier than we think is because it's not a place to fix. Once again, it is a place to grow. It is a place to explore. It is a place to educate. It is a place to converse about, to have conversations that matter. So what I'm saying to you right now is that for you to be effective in this realm, even if you don't have professional training here, is to begin to train yourself to become a professional conversationalist.
Because sometimes we just need to talk and sometimes we just need to have somebody listen to us. And sometimes we need to hear ourselves talk. And there are certain topics that you and I, we just need to explore as opposed to find the correct answer.
Now, sexuality and embodiment, let's play a little more here.
One of the places where the rubber meets the road when it comes to our relationship with our own sexuality is actually puberty. Puberty is a time when you know, the body powerfully morphs into a sexual entity, a reproductive creature. It the, the, the body, body and being, um, body and heart morph into this potent experience of quite overwhelming desire.
You are humans are in a hormonal flood, a mind-body, heart, soul, flood of sensation and information during puberty, which is an extremely imprint, vulnerable time. Humans are very vulnerable at this point for new ways of thinking, new ways of being. That's what imprint vulnerable means. Certain times in life, we're very open, vulnerable to new inputs, to new conditioning, new programming, new understanding.
So when we go through this important life transition called puberty, you may wish to remember your own puberty for a moment. It's generally not facilitated well by our elders, our teachers, our family, our society, our parents.
It is a crazy time and nobody tells us about it. Oftentimes for many people, Hey, here's what you're going through. Here's how to navigate this. Here's what this is all about. Oh, we're kind of thrown to the wolves. You just sort of go through it,
and it can be a shocking experience to the young mind and the young body because all of a sudden, uh,
everything's changing and we are sexual beings. It can be embarrassing, it can be overwhelming, it can be overpowering. We're driven in a whole different way. The body is literally changing.
Girls are watching their bodies morph before their own eyes. Their peers are watching their bodies morph.
When you add in the fact that we're getting confusing messages from media and perhaps religion and perhaps family around our sense of our sexuality, our sexual identity, puberty can be a time when we just check out of the body as a way to be safe. We compartmentalize our sexuality as a way to be safe,
or we take on beliefs about our sexuality that keep us unsafe.
Boys might take on the belief of their sexuality that they have to conquer, have to go out and conquer and go out and get a notch on your belt. That's what the young princes are taught. The young princesses are taught to, on the one hand, protect yourself, but on the other hand, they're given the message that you need to be a s**t and a porn star,
and you need to do whatever you wanna do. And you can have your own conquests,
but then you're told not to be a s**t. But then you're, if you watch the images, you watch the videos, there's so much promiscuity.
And I believe deep down inside, there's a part of us that knows even at a young age that this is an important time. Something is happening. There is a power that is being released.
So many times we are here to help kind of have some do overs, kind of reparent ourselves, reeducate ourselves. It might be helpful for you to
revisit your puberty.
It's never too late to heal an, elevate a sexuality. And I mean, never. It's never too late. I don't care how old a person is, you know, as a,
as an exercise for you to do, do some journaling. Uh, what do you remember about puberty? What, what, what did you go through? What happened? What were you thinking? What were you experiencing? What was your sense of your body before, during, and after? How was the world around you, the adult world helping you, not helping you? Can you remember what that experience was like for you going through puberty? Just journal as much as you can about it and just notice what you see and notice what you learn. Notice if there are any connections between what you went through, then around your maturation into a sexual being, what you went through then when you were 12, 13, 14 ish, and kind of who you are now in relation to your sexuality. There may not be any connections that you see. That's fine. We're exploring, we're playing.
I'm not asking you to do any kind of weird, you have to. People get so afraid of psychology. My own mind, my own experience. No, it's your story. It's your movie. And we're talking about the story. We're talking about the movie. Hey, what happened for you? What was that like for you? What was your experience back then? And how does that influencer connect with your experience? Now, if anything, what do you notice? So this is a conversation between two adults, my friends, healing sexuality, embodying our sexuality more can mean for you as a professional conversation, conversation with your client.
Hey, what was that like for you? What was your experience? Tell me more. Can you say more? Wow, that's intense. Wow. I'm sorry that happened for you. Wow, that's amazing. I wish that would've happened for me. Oh, interesting. Oh, healing sexuality can mean just starting to become aware.
Starting to become honest, becoming more curious. Hey, what else? I kind of go, and people will tend to go in the same loop around their sexuality. They're gonna stay in the same zip code in their mind around who they are as a sexual being
until there's some stimulation for them to think otherwise.
A life event, something that happens, a new experience that changes them, hopefully for the better or conversation or an exploration. So with my client, I'm always looking to be in conversation. I'm always looking to bring them my client, invite them into awareness about their sexuality, invite them into curiosity. I want to information gather. I want to hear storytelling.
It's about helping your client. Remember, that's why I asked you to talk about, write about journal, about puberty. Remember, sometimes it's good to remember things from the past and oh, yeah, huh, that's interesting. Let's draw a connection into the future. There's nothing wrong with that.
You don't have to be a psychologist who draw connections. You just have to be a smart human who's interested.
Healing our sexuality can mean starting to feel what we feel. What do you feel about you? How do you feel about you? How do you feel about your relationship now? Your relationship then this sexual relationship, that sexual relationship, how does any particular experience feel for you? How does it feel for you to be in the sex act? How does it feel for you? What?
It's you learning how to listen to your client? Just listen. It's helping our clients own their desires. Once again, owning a desire, I wanna keep mentioning this to you. Doesn't mean we must, should, or ought to make a desire come true. There are certain things that will live in us as fantasy, as desires that are just in the imaginal realm. That's okay. Imagination is beautiful. It's powerful. Sometimes we need to give our imagination, breathing room
sometimes what we imagine and what we desire, yeah, it becomes a reality. But the most important thing is when we allow desire, breathing room, and we own it, and we feel it, we are embodying healing. Sexuality means making room for our humanity. You know, this is a confusing topic, my goodness. It's a challenge for a lot of people. It means being willing to be uncertain. Okay, I don't know where this is going. I don't know who I am as a sexual being. This is an exploration. I'm afraid I want this. I don't want that. Ugh, I'm in a situation where she wants this, he wants that. They want this. That's not me. I can't do that. I don't want, ugh, what do I do? Yeah, what do you do? Do? I don't know. But at least let's name it and be in that uncertainty at the same time, making room for the potential for clarity to come through at the same time, making room to experiment. Okay? Experimentation can mean actual experimentation in the bedroom. It can mean experimentation just in your own mind. It can be an experimentation in how you talk
to other humans that you're drawn to, attracted to. How do you be around them? How do you notice yourself? How do you stay present in your own body? So once again, my friends, of course, the more you can do these things with yourself, the more you can help facilitate these with your client, you will attract people.
Chances are that you can work with, we will attract people who are here to teach us how to be a better professional. How to be a better practitioner. I am always amazed at the people that we attract, the clients that we attract. So often, they're so perfect for us. We're perfect for them. Perfect in terms of how we can help them, perfect. In terms of how they can help teach us, perfect. In terms of how they push us a little bit to our edge, perfect for how they are asking us to grow, simply by the fact of how they're showing up and what they're presenting with.
So I'm suggesting that it's your job if you choose, and I would love for you to choose, yes, to begin to get more and more comfortable and cozy with this topic. Comfortable and cozy means talk. First and foremost. Talk, talk, talk, conversation, starting the conversation with the people closest to you that you can trust, that you feel good about, that can listen to you, that can hear you.
Where you can begin to tell your story,
the story of what happened. Then the story of what's going on now,
it's not again, about fixing anything. It's about just we are a story that's changing and evolving and growing.
What has happened, I believe, in the world, is the world has made sexuality excessively complicated.
There's a lot of confusion.
It ought not be that confusing.
So part of our job is to help ourselves, help our clients find the place where their relationship with their own sexuality, whatever that is, can begin to become enjoyable, interesting, empowering, juicy,
because the energy that lives inside of us, what we call sexual energy, you know, in so many different traditions, particularly the yogic traditions, the tantric traditions, they'll talk about how sexual energy, yes, on one level, it's this base energy called let's procreate and make a baby,
and two humans get together, each having a sex drive and, and it's procreation. It's continuing the species. It's this personal hormonal explosion and experience. Yeah, it's that. But sexual energy, when it's not being aimed at the act of sex is energy. It's energy that animates us. It's energy that gives us power. It's energy that gives us juice. It's energy that makes us smile. It's energy that makes us happy. It's energy that animates us.
You could be exploring your sexuality in a deep way without ever having sex. Or you could explore it with having sex or a combination of both.
It's how that energy lives inside of us at any given moment. Is it uplifting us or is it pulling us down?
It pulls us down when we have judgment around it, when we have self-judgment around it, it pulls us down. When we are fighting against it, it pulls us down. When we have shame around it, it pulls us down. When we have been hurt by this energy by another or by others in our world, our sexual energy pulls us down. When we have adopted toxic beliefs from the world
that somehow make our relationship with our own sexuality wrong.
The good news is, as we detoxify from a lot of the shame, when we detoxify from the false belief that my sexuality is somehow bad, wrong, not okay, not good enough, not lovable.
When we detoxify of that, there's a power that's released and there's a sense of embodiment that happens that
kind of makes life more worth living.
So as a fourth level strategy, meaning when I'm working with embodiment with a client, I always start with food. Then I start with personal care, you know? Then I move into more lifestyle practices and exercise practices. Sexuality is a place that I go not at the beginning with a client, unless it's so self-evident that that's where we go soon. And the client is willing, and you're willing, and everybody's willing to be in that conversation because it's up. This is a place I go when there's more connection and more trust built up. And once again, I'll have my client write a sexual autobiography,
and that becomes a place to talk. It might take them weeks to write it, that's okay. But I want them to be exhaustive. I promise you it's the first time they've ever done that. And I promise you it is 99.9% certain that this is the first time they've ever dove into their sexuality in this way with another human being.
You're not fixing them, you're not figuring it out. You're having a conversation that matters. You're saying to another human being, your client, your patient. Hey, go and inventory your own experience. Go and write some stories about you and then tell me what you think. Tell me what that experience was like for you.
So what we're doing is we're taking sexuality out of the dark, out of the, no, we can't talk about this. We're taking it out of the therapeutic realm, because as soon as we put it in the therapeutic realm exclusively, that means, oh, well, there's obviously something wrong with you. And usually when people think there's something wrong with them around their sexuality, they are imagining everybody else out there has it, right? Or most other people have it, right? Like, I'm the loser in this department. Everybody else is having fun. Just look on social media. They're all happy. And all the actors and the actresses, they're happy. They're all going out and dating glamorous others.
We have so many, so much nonsense in our heads about what we see out there in the media and how we've been taught.
You've gotta bring it into the realm of conversation.
That's where it belongs. Sexuality belongs in the streets. When I say belongs in the street, I mean, it doesn't belong in an ivory tower.
Everybody's doing it, particularly your parents did it. That's how you got here. If you have kids, that's how they got here. That might be enough. Okay? Sex is just for getting people here. That's fine. Um, but, but there's more to it than that.
When you can
impact a person's belief about their sexuality, okay? If you wanna, if you wanna control a group of humans, control their sexuality.
When you wanna liberate a group of humans, have them get in contact with their own sexuality in a way that's honest and authentic for them.
So sexual energy is very strong. It's very powerful. How do we know this? Because sexual energy can create life. Sexual energy is magic. Sexual energies can create some of the deepest pleasure sexual energy when used in a negative way, such as in rape, can harm a human being for the rest of their life and damage them.
Sexual energy can span the gamut of the greatest, of the great sexual energy can give you a sexually transmitted disease and kill you. So all I'm saying is it's a realm of power, my friends. It's a realm of power. So let's, let's talk. So I want you to encourage your client to explore a more authentic, honest, and playful sexual conversation and connection with their partner
as a way to help them embody many of your clients. My friends are holding a winning lottery ticket in their pocket, and they haven't cashed it in. What do I mean by that? What I mean is many of your clients who have a challenging relationship with food, a challenging relationship with their body, an unhappy body image, I don't let my body in order for me to let my body, it has to look like this. Consequently, if you are not loving your body because it looks like this, you don't like its weight or shape, there is a very good chance that we will close off sexuality to some degree.
Many people will do this despite the fact that they're in relationship, despite the fact that they're married, and despite the fact that their partner loves them and loves their body.
Quite honestly, I particularly see this with a lot of my women clients who are challenged around their body image, who have come to see me for weight issues.
They believe they cannot enjoy their body until they lose weight.
Their partner loves them. Their partner is attracted to them, and there is their opportunity to explore
the pleasure of their own body and explore the pleasure of sexual connection. But they don't, because there's this wall, and the wall is actually paper thin. The wall feels to them like it's made out of brick. But here's your opportunity. You got someone who loves you. They love your body more than you love your body. That's okay. If my client has someone that loves their body more than my client loves their own body, you bet I'm gonna encourage my client to take advantage of that situation.
How can you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, allow your partner into your life more? How could you play more? What would that look like?
How could you let go more? What would an ideal date night be for you? What would be the conditions that would make it even a little bit safe for you? How much wine do you need to drink?
What restaurant do you need to go to first? What music do you have to put on? What conversation do you need to have with your partner to set this all up? So you can go to your playful edge?
Now, you might be the first person to ever say this to your client. Your client might go through decades
of partnership and marriage, and they're holding a winning lottery ticket. IE. They have an opportunity to embody and embody through pleasure and embody through sexuality, and embody through sensuality, embody through their feminine, through their masculine, through both play with that energy, which will help them be a happier person on planet earth and begin to tap into their personal power. They might have that opportunity and never take advantage of it, because they just don't know any better. So that's why you are here to be in conversation. So I'm encouraging dating for single clients who are waiting to lose weight and waiting to shapeshift their body so they can be desirable to the opposite sex, so they can finally get the guy, get to girl. No, I am encouraging dating for all single clients who say they want a relationship. If you, Mr. And Mrs. Client, say you want a relationship and you're not dating, and you're not dating because of your weight, you bet my friends, Ugh, you bet. I am going to be gently sweetly, consistently, persistently at some point on my client about it's time.
Am I seem like the most horrible thing for them. But look around you, my friends. Look around you go outside, go anywhere. You'll see people of all shapes and sizes loving on their partners of all shapes and sizes. You really need to notice that your client really needs to notice that what happens to the human who is single, who wants partnership, but they're not going for it because they're not good enough. IE my body's not good enough, my billboard's not good enough.
What happens is they have this concept in their mind that I need to be attractive to all humans. And then once I'm attracted attractive to all humans, which means this body, this shape, then I have the best chance. No, you don't need to be attractive to all humans. You need to be attractive to the one human who you're gonna end up in relationship with. How many, how many guys or girls do you want? Okay. If you want six guys or six girls, whatever it is, great, go for it. Most people, most people that I come across, they're just looking for one. You just have to find one. You don't have to find a hundred. You don't have to find a thousand. People think that they have to be attractive to thousands of people. You just have to be attracted to one, one person. That's all. That's all you need, maybe two or three. Fine.
And we need to let go of, I'm suggesting your single client needs to let go of waiting for that day because now you're asking them to step out into the world and love themselves now. And guess what? The person that wants to date you and love on you with your body like this, means that they truly wanna date you and truly wanna love on you. If you weigh more, if you weigh less whatever.
So we can do diet your brains out and exercise your brains out. How many times have I seen this? Ask around, ask people that you know, notice people that you know who went on the extreme diet and exercise things so they can lose weight and get the guy, especially see this with women
and they end up not really getting the person they want
because they're so focused on the advertisement
and they're not even focused on, I want somebody that wants me, me as a human, not me as this particular body that everybody says I'm supposed to have. Okay? For women clients, I want you to at some point ask them what helps you feel most in your feminine? Once you've been in a conversation around masculine and feminine archetypes, what helps you feel most in your feminine? Whatever they say, encourage them to do it. That might be a journaling exercise for them at some point. What helps you be most in your feminine? Whatever that means for you, miss client, and then encourage them to do whatever that is for male clients. I'm gonna ask them, what helps you feel most in your masculine? This is after we've explained polarities to them. And then I'm gonna encourage them to do that.
Of course, if you encounter a client who has an intense past history of sexual abuse,
and if you don't feel comfortable being in relationship with that client, then I would definitely
ask you to invite the conversation of considering counseling.
Counseling for sexual abuse. There are people who are doing that. There're experts in it, and it's great. So that's your out. That's always your out. If you feel, oh my God, I just stepped in some intense territory, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to deal with this, great. Then just suggest to your client, Hey, would you like me to help you find somebody who can work with you around sexual abuse? You help get online and find someone you ask around. You set them on that.
So that's always your safe place to go If you encounter a client that you start to feel, okay, my client seems to want this, or I'm just not comfortable there. So you have to, you have to judge that. You have to assess that. Don't ask me, please. Well, how do I know? How could I tell you how you know? I don't know. You'll know when you get there. You know when that client shows up. You know when you feel, oh my God, I'm so over my head,
because your client is presenting a story for you and it's too much for you. It's too intense for you. You don't know where to go with that. So you either close off that conversation or you recommend your client get help. It's as simple as that. Don't worry about it. You're not going to hurt yourself and you're not going to hurt your client.
You know, oftentimes a simple act of making sexuality, a conversation between practitioner and client is a huge breakthrough. Just having conversation. You are being a professional friend. You're being a provisional girl, friend, boy, friend. You're being a professional, older brother, older sister. It is never, ever, ever, ever about you having to fix your client's sexuality. There's no such thing.
Unless you are a clinician trained in this way. Yeah. Then you have all kinds of interesting distinctions to work with. And people who are trained in this field, yes, they know how to get in there in a very therapeutic way. Most humans in this world are not seeing a professional who is trained in therapeutic interventions around sexuality. Most humans don't do that. So does that mean we should never explore the topic of sexuality? Quite the opposite. No. We should be talking about it as much as possible. And then if somebody wants extra help, hallelujah.
So you might begin to look and see what the resources are in your own area or in your client's area, just in case.
You also might wish, if this is an interesting topic for you, for you to do further research in this realm, for you to start exploring, okay, what are the books I wanna read? How do I want to educate myself here?
Okay. You know, once I'm in this process with my client around embodiment, another real simple strategy tool assignment.
Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Client, what helps you feel more in your body and happy to be here? A A, anything being around certain people, going to certain places, things that you do, things that you own. Thoughts, feelings, experience, activity, anything. What helps you feel just in your body more and happy to be here?
Have them journal that. Bring in that list and go over it with them and find out what they can do once a day, three times a week, once a month, actually begin to break it down with them and start to schedule in those practices that they say, this helps me feel in my body and happy to be here. 'cause you're not gonna know until you ask your client. You're asking your client to mine their own experience to excavate their own life. You are training your client to be with themselves. You are training your client to embody by first asking the question, Hey, Mr. And Mr. Client, ask yourself as a method to help you embody what helps you feel in your body and happy to be here. So you're training your client to think along those, along those lines. That is giving somebody a huge gift. It might not sound like a lot to you,
but I promise you my friends, there are so many clients that you are going to see, especially those who come to see you for weight,
who are waiting for the day. That never comes perfect body to be in my body. No, we embody now, now, now, now, now, now. And your client's not gonna wanna do that necessarily because they have been holding the religious belief. They've been worshiping the belief called, when I have this body, then I can embody. When I have this perfect body, then I can embody. When I have this perfect weight, then I can embody.
And the reason why your client believes that is because that's what the world has taught them. That's how they have been conditioned by their environment. So, not that we're bad, it's not that your client's bad. This is our conditioning based on how the world raises us.
So you are helping retrain your client. You are helping reparent your client, reeducate your client.
You're helping them in the place. Chances are they never really had conversation. How do you be in your body in a way that works for you? What do you like? What do you enjoy? What makes you happy to be here? Great, let's do that. How often can you do that? With whom can you do that?
People like to swim. People like to walk. People like to dance. People like to go to this concert that helps me be in my body. There are certain people that your client that you hang out with that you just feel you wanna be in your body more. You wanna do things, you wanna go on adventures.
I'm always looking to help my client go into their own life experience. You're not here to fix your client. You're here to help them access their resources, their internal resources and the resources that are already in their life, the people around them.
I am always encouraging my clients who have the time, who have the energy, and who have the ability slash money to help them find classes that help them embody. There's so many different kinds of yoga classes these days, and yoga classes can be a revelation for those who haven't tried it. And you wanna be careful with a client. You don't wanna take a client who hasn't been in their body much and they're very sensitive and they're very concerned and they're maybe feeling clumsy. You don't wanna put them in an advanced hot yoga class. No, there's so many gentle yoga classes. There's so many yoga classes that are more literally therapeutic yoga. Um, dance classes can be a breakthrough for those who have been wishing they could do it, but choose not to because of their weight.
I asked my client, are there any classes in your area where you live that, that you've even been curious about that are somehow around movement, dance, yoga, anything that would just make you feel good about being in your body?
And I'm always gonna make sure that my client doesn't take the kind of classes once again, that's gonna make them feel more upset. So if it's not a body positive experience in terms of the people around them, if it's not fun, then chances are I don't want my client doing it. So what I want you to see here, what I want you to get is that there's a lot of people who you have to gently urge them in this direction because they're not going to go there. You are asking someone to slowly embody.
Many of our clients have been out of their body for a long time. They've been abandoned from their body to some degree for a long time, always for good reason.
So what I'm trying to say is, getting back in is, is big. Getting back in is serious business, really. Another way of saying that is getting back in needs to be, how to say you're like a midwife. It's a gentle experience. You have to be gentle with your client. You have to understand that you are gently urging them, pushing them, moving them, inviting them in a whole new direction. For them, it's a whole new consciousness. You're asking them to do the opposite of what they've been wanting to do. They've been wanting to have the body, which they have the perfect body. Then this body's gonna make me happy. Then I'm gonna be in my body, do all these great things. It's a false promise. It's a false belief. It doesn't happen. Be that person now that you wanna be, when you have that ideal body, that's what's gonna help you. If you really wanna shape shift your body. Great, let's get in.
Okay, other strategies for embodiment? Um, this may come as a surprise to some of you, um, but feng shui is a big one.
Feng shui. It, it's, i, I don't see this written enough around feng shui, but it can really help create a metabolic shift, uh, when you transform the energetics of your living space and your workspace. Uh, for those of you unfamiliar with feng shui, it's, it's really an ancient Chinese art of placement. Geo man. How one arranges one in one's environment, um, in a way that creates maximum space energy movement.
You know, if your client can afford it, help them find a local expert. Um, other than that, you know, it, it's, they can begin. I'm always noticing for my client, I'm always gonna ask them at some point about their living environment. I wanna know if they live in clutter and a mess. If my client lives in clutter and mess and they're a weight loss client and they're a client and or they're a client who is body image challenged, at some point I'm gonna ask them to clean up their living environment. Because our living environment is as is an extension of our body. When we create an environment that's more clean, that's more organized, that has less junk in it, that doesn't have stuff in it that we don't use, that we don't need. A lot of people just accumulate a lot of stuff and the stuff is everywhere. Now, here you are trying to lose weight that you don't need. Great. Let's lose weight that we don't need. Start with the easy stuff. Your home. Get rid of all those old magazines you ain't reading. Get rid of all the books that you will never read. If you haven't used something that's in your house in 10 years, do you really need it? Do you really need all that stuff?
I promise you, if you've never done this, if you clean out, if you just do a clean out, it's gonna be a revelation. You will feel lighter. Your body will feel lighter. I have done this with so many weight loss clients. I have them in a, if they, if they live in a cluttered environment and they co and they're junk collectors or they just, they, they just keep storing and storing and storing, and you do a clean out, you feel lighter sometimes. We simply just need to rearrange the furniture, like literally in metaphorically in our lives. So everything influences everything else. Our environment is an extension of us.
Embodying in one's body is similar to embodying in one's environment. Are you actually inhabiting your environment, your home, your apartment in a way where energy circulates? It does a lot of junk. Energy's not circulating, just energy sitting there, just sucking energy.
I'm probably not, I I'm not a feng shui expert. So my language here isn't necessarily to, um, educated and elevated only to say, I wanna bring this up because I've noticed how important it is for people.
And it's a form of growth. It's a form of artistry.
There's an art to being in one's body. It's not just a science. Eat those. Don't eat that. These are the good foods. These are the bad foods. Yeah, there's a science to that. But eating and nutrition is as much of an art as it is a science. It's a dance. We're dancing with the energy of our body, with the changing needs of the body. The body changes needs during different times of the day. Different seasons, different environments that we're in when we're in different social situations, different climates, different times in our life, the body goes through its own changes that are unique to each body. So as we learn to listen, as we learn to notice that, we start to see that we're in a dance with the body. We're in a dance with the environment. And that's an art. That's a dance.
And when you learn how to dance in that way, there's a freedom.
When we truly dance, there's a freedom. So when we're literally dancing and you're enjoying it, there's a freedom there. When we're dancing with our environment, with our home environment, being in it in a way that allows us expression, something good happens.
So remember this, oftentimes, clients who have removed their body from the world need some handholding to choose to get back in.
Literally, your client who is body image challenged, who is judging their own body, who has experienced weight hate from the outside, they're afraid to come out and play. And they believe they can only come out and play until this body changes. You must understand the sensitivity of this. You must understand the gentleness that's often needed for us as professionals to be with our client. Our clients need to be encouraged and reminded constantly that they cannot wait until they lose weight to inhabit and love their body. I'm gonna remind them constantly. Constantly. Why? Because they're constantly saying the opposite of that.
It's very simple, my friend. Your client is constantly getting messages from the outside that you are not lovable as you are. This body isn't lovable as it is. Why? Because they're watching tv. They're on the internet. They're reading magazines. They're watching music videos. They're seeing all the images, and it's all the beautiful people who are having all the fun and they're all young and skinny and muscular and pretty or whatever. So they're getting a constant message. You ain't enough. And once you look like this, then you're enough.
Well, I'm gonna give them the opposite message. Very gently, very sweetly.
'cause in a lot of ways, that's the problem in the first place. Problem in the first place is that we're waiting for some, and the time is now to be in the body. The body is now. Life is fired at you. Point blank. There is no future to the body. The body lives in the now. It's always in the now.
It's always for my client. What can we do today to help you be in your body?
This is your client's best hope of being able to make a shapeshift. I mean that. I truly want to help my clients shapeshift. If they truly wanna do that and they truly can, great. Let's do our best to get there. Ain't easy all the time, but let's do the tried and true methods. Worst case scenario, your client gets into their body, they start loving their body more. They start embodying more. They start getting into their sensuality, their sexuality. They get into movement that they enjoy. They get into nature that they enjoy. They get into more things that they enjoy. They're loving their body more. Worst case scenario, they don't lose any weight and they're happier. Okay, that's not so bad. Got a happier human being. Best case scenario, your client gets that. They get more embodiment and they start to shape shift. Great. Either way, success. I want you to hear that. I really want you to get that.
'cause if you really get it, you really hear it. That makes you more powerful as a practitioner,
because you're not attached to an outcome. There are outcomes that I would like for my client to have, but I'm never attached to that outcome. Yes, I want my client to get where they want to go. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But I'm not attached like they are. Nor do I believe what they're believing. They're believing. If I don't make this shape shift, if I don't have this change in my body weight and shape, I'm screwed forevermore and I'll never be the real me. That's what they're believing in some way, shape, or form.
I don't believe that for a moment. Not even a moment. So that's the space I'm holding for them.
And within that space, transformation is quite possible.
Okay? One of the great embodiment strategies in all of human history is play, watch, children play. It's all they're doing is they're playing. And playing is irreducible. Play is irreducible. If you study biology, if you study evolutionary biology and you hear what all the experts say about why do animals play, why do lion cubs play? Why do dolphins play? And you know, you'll hear well. The play is, is is practice for hunting and practice for being able to defend yourself. Yeah, sure. But what the smart ones will also tell you is that play as a phenomenon in nature, in the animal kingdom is irreducible, meaning it's something we just do because we are alive on earth. We play. Animals pop out of the womb and they play. Puppies pop out of the womb, and they're just happy to be here. Kittens pop out of the womb. They're just happy to be here. Let's play. That's perhaps the purest form of embodiment, pure, because it brings back to us the innocence that we had as children.
It's important to reclaim our innocence.
It's important to maintain the part of us that has innocence. Now, the world is hard. Stuff happens. People could be mean. Bad stuff goes down, and we can still maintain a certain innocence and wonder and awe about the world play will do that. Ask your client, how do you like to play? What makes you feel like a kid? What makes your body feel fun to be in? What? What's what's play for you? What makes you feel playful?
Have them inventory that. Ask them on the spot and then encourage them to get going.
If they don't have an answer for you, I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Okay, great. I get it. I want you to go home and I want you to think about how can I have more play in my life? What would be playful for me? What would feel good? What would help me feel like a kid?
When we've been intensely worrying about wade and body image, we lose our capacity to play.
Watch an infant. Watch young children. They're not running around worrying about their body as they're playing. Oh my God, is she looking at me? Is he looking at me? Does he think I have fat on my calves or my waist or my thighs? They could care less. It's not even a thought in existence for a child.
Play makes us happy to be here. Play embodies us.
What I'm going to say is, especially for the feminine women, take note.
Men who have a strong feminine take note.
Play is perhaps
one of the aspects for the feminine that helps the feminine reach its potential. The most when it comes to embodiment is just when the feminine can have a sense of play.
IE being playful. Do you know any men or women in your life who are just their playful human beings? It's more playful. In any given moment, they might be playful with you make a joke. They just turn things into play. Who in your life, in the present or in the past would you consider a playful person? What was good about them and their playfulness? What did you enjoy about that? How did they enjoy themselves? Is there anyone that you can think of Mr. And Mrs. Client in your life that's just a playful person that you can emulate a little bit more? What would that look like? What would that mean for you, Mr. And Mrs. Client Play means different things to different people.
Your client might not have an answer because play might not be a part of their life. For some people, play means sports. For some people, play means simply how they are playful in social situations and conversations with how they joke, with how they kid people. For some people play can mean dance. For some people, play can mean being outside in nature and taking off your shoes. For me, it means throwing a frisbee. What makes you feel playful? For some people, it means just getting naked and having fun.
For some people, it means, means being playful with their meal. For goodness sakes, that's fine.
Play for the feminine is extremely liberating.
In fact, I would suggest to you that it's a sign that a person, a woman, is
stepping into embodiment in a very beautiful and wonderful way. When we can begin to feel playful about our life, playful about our moment, playful being in a body,
when we judge the body, we don't want to come out and play.
Now again, this might sound like something simple, but for many clients, this has been a deeply tearful conversation.
I don't play anymore. I don't have fun anymore. I get it because you've been so worried about your body and so serious about it. Okay? What's gonna happen when you have the perfect body? You're gonna probably feel more playful. Great. Let's play now. I have seen you have seen people of all body sizes and all body shapes and weights. Be playful. Prove to yourself by noticing people in your environment that you don't have to be a certain weight or shape in order to have fun.
You know, some clients are gonna come to you with, but does it burn calories? That's what they wanna know. You know, when a client feels attached to any kind of exercise or movement or play based solely on how many calories it burns, you know, you wanna make sure you give them an intellectual course correction.
You wanna make sure that you explain to them that if you're so sure that exercise that's designed to burn calories is the royal road for you to lose weight and feel better for your better about yourself, then how come after all the exercising you've done in the past and after all these years, you still haven't gotten where you want to go? Do you think you have to push yourself harder? You think you have to have to have more pain in order to get what you want? So we're gonna experiment. This is just an experiment. We're gonna bring fun back into the equation. Maybe even a little bit of happiness because life is short. My friends, we're gonna try something new to help you get where you wanna go. 'cause a lot of times when we are trying to force the body into weight loss by doing things that we don't enjoy, that don't have fun, that don't have play, because we think I'm doing the right thing, because it burns calories. Part of what's happening is we're living in stress. We're being driven by stress. We're being driven by anxiety and fear and push and force. And that can create a chemistry, that can create a metabolism. It can create the kind of chemistry and the kind of metabolism that actually takes us in the opposite direction of where we want to go. When you and I, Mr. Ms client, when we step into joy, when we step into fun, when we step into pleasure, you know what happens? We create parasympathetic nervous system dominance. We create the optimum state of digestion, of assimilation and of day in, day out, calorie burning. We give a signal to our heart and soul that I'm happy to be here. And when I'm happy to be here,
the body can start to feel safer. We can feel safer when we feel safe and we truly feel like we wish to be here and we truly begin to enjoy ourselves here. There's a magic that happens. There's a switch that gets switched on somehow, and in my experience, that helps us have the best chance to actually get where we wanna go When it comes to shape, shifting the body.
So when need be, you always wanna bring in the simple science of stress versus relaxation, chemistry. You wanna say it in a way that uplifts your client and inspires them.
Also, find to spank your client a little bit. When you see them going off on a tangent, you are the mentor, you are the guide, you are the practitioner. So the goal is embodiment for your client. That is your goal. As a practitioner, I wanna help my client embody. I wanna help my client embody.
Weight loss is a side effect of embodiment. Our natural weight. Natural weight is a side effect of embodiment.
Another way to say that is our natural weight is the byproduct of naturally living inside our body. When we energetically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually abandon the body a little bit, that's not natural. It's not natural to be in your head all day and disappear from your body and hate your body and judge your body. That's not natural. It's not our natural state. Yeah, we gotta work. Yeah, you gotta sit down. Yeah. There's times when you're not gonna be in your body, but then you return here and there in moments, in places and times in the time that you have to move to walk, to relax, to be with yourself, to exercise, to move.
The more we are simply focused on, I must get rid of body pounds. I must get rid of pounds of fat. The more you focus on that in a strange way, the more we disembody.
So weight loss is a side effect of embodiment.
Natural weight is a side effect of embodiment. To me, this is a very important and powerful perceptual shift that you must have in order for your work with clients to be A effective B, enjoyable, C, interesting D lasting.
You have to let go of the quick fix.
You have to slowly seduce your client into letting go of the quick fix.
You never hit people over the head unless they truly need to be hit over the head. Sometimes people need to be slapped around. You have to learn how to discern that.
You may assume that your clients need to be taken step by step by step. Yes, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I want to help you lose weight,
and the way we're gonna help you lose weight sustainably
is to do something different than you've done before. So we're not going to wait for you to have the perfect body to actually start being in your body and having the experience that you want. Once you have your ideal body, we're gonna start to have that experience. Now that creates a mindset, that creates a metabolic shift, that creates an experience that I would love for you to have. So you can see how well it works. And the reason why I think you should try this, Mr. And Mrs. Client, is because your way, your strategies that you've done before haven't worked. That's why you're here. I always tell my clients, I always let them know that I am not always, but for a lot of clients, I will say to them, you know, my approach is I like to be successful.
I like to be successful with my clients. I don't do this work so I can quote unquote fail. I don't do this work so I can have unhappy clients. I do this work so I can see a shift in people. I do this work because I know how powerful it's,
and therefore I'm going to give you suggestions and ideas that are likely different from what you've tried.
And they're different from what you've tried. Because so many of the experts are all doing the same version of a strategy for weight loss, which is eat less or exercise more. Eat this, don't eat that. You've done it. It hasn't worked. We're doing something different. That's the good news. You're inviting your client into your way.
It's okay if they're a little concerned. It's okay if they're a little afraid. You have to show up in your confidence. Fake it if you have to. I mean that,
you know. So here we are. It's not easy to be on planet earth. We disembody, we check out when we check out a little bit, a lot from the body, whatever degree we check out from the body, it is therefore natural when we're not fully inhabiting the body. When we don't know how to regulate it and manage it because we've checked out, it's easy to gain weight. It's easy to gain weight via an unregulated appetite. It's easy to gain weight because we're numbing out with food. For many of us, it's easy to gain weight because we're trying to fill up with food and experience some kind of pleasure because we've disembodied from our sexuality, from our joy, from our play. So we're looking for something. It's easy when we've checked out of the body to eat because that keeps us distracted in a way from why we disembodied in the first place. So we'll eat to distract ourselves. We'll eat to stimulate ourselves. We'll eat to fill the void. Will people will eat to protest their existence? Screw it. Life sucks. This all sucks. I hate this. I hate that this didn't work. That didn't work. I can't believe my lot in life. I'm gonna just eat.
Some people they don't eat as a way to protest existence. The extreme form of that, as you know, is called anorexia.
So the psyche, the mind, we'll use eating as a symbolic playground to play out, to demonstrate, to show us, hey, something's up, something's going on.
As we begin to inhabit the body more, we learn how to regulate it. When it comes to food,
you are helping your client discover reasons why they can be happy to be here. It's less about the weight You're helping your client discover reasons why they can be happy to be here.
Chances are, chances are not for everybody. Chances are your client arrived at the challenging situation around their weight because in some way, shape or form, they're not happy to be here.
And the reason why they're not happy to be here is always a good reason. The reasons why they're not happy to be here. They've got good legitimate reasons. It's not easy to be here. They've had difficulty, they've had challenges. You know the story. All the things that can happen to a human being that aren't pleasant. Your client has a good reason. So on one level, you are here not to help a human lose a bunch of pounds of body fat. You are here to help a human discover or rediscover their basic birthright, which is happy to be here. Then get our little puppies, pop it out the womb. They're happy to be here. You are cheerleading your client to be in the game of life's kind of what you're doing. We're cheerleading our clients to step into the game of life. Okay? You've been hurt by the game of life. You've been hurt by life. I get it. Okay, time to get back in time to figure out how we can do this in a good way. So you can, you can have some joy here. And I know you think you're gonna have the joy when your body is perfect, but you know something that ain't true.
How do I know that's not true? Because you told me that you did reach your target weight at such and such a time.
And then what happened? It came back. Why it wasn't sustainable. Why? Because we didn't change. Body shifted body can potentially shift. That doesn't mean we have changed. That doesn't mean we have learned to nourish ourselves in a truly sustainable way, nourish ourselves with food, nourish ourselves with a good way of being in the world, such that the body reaches its natural weight in shape. So this is about the game of life. It's not about the game of weight, but your client is coming to see you. And we're using the doorway called wait to help them step into the game of life.
So if we've soured on life and it's been a hard road, if the world hasn't been so easy on us, if we have never felt at home or safe in this world, then we naturally and understandably have not fully agreed to be here. I get it from this place. I'm going to remind you. Checking out of the body makes perfect sense.
Not knowing how to regulate the body makes perfect sense because we've checked out from it.
If someone is extreme in their bulimia in a way they've checked out from life, they haven't learned how to be in a body in a way that sustains them and nourishes them,
bulimia becomes a doorway for them. A sacred symptom to let them know, yo, something's up.
Chances are we need to learn how to embody all the energy we have, all the feelings that we have, all the anger that we have, all the frustration, the confusion, the hurt, the pain, all the unspoken words they want to come out. That's embodiment, speaking the truth. Here's me, I'm in pain, I'm in suffering. What's going on in this world? What's going on with you people that's being authentic.
A lot of us simply have frustration about the world and the world doesn't seem to get any better. So we go into symptom, an unwanted relationship with food. We go into self attack with food. We go into self attack of the body because we take in the offense that seems to be coming at us from the world and we take it on as our own.
All I'm saying is at some point we need to choose to get back into the body.
If we don't choose to get back into the body consciously, I'm making this choice even though it's not easy, even though I don't quite know how to do it. Once again, it's like learning a foreign language. You might not know how to speak French, but you can choose to learn. And you know in the back of your mind that if you choose to learn French, you can find the right programs, the right class, the right teacher, the right app to learn that language.
At some point we must choose to get back into the body. Otherwise all our attempts at sustainable shape shifting will eventually fail. And you cannot partially check back in or partially agree to be here and expect an easy natural and sustainable weight shift. So the idea is we're going in, we're getting back in.
It's learning how to make friends with one's body. So this is what you're helping your client do. Learning how to make friends with the body, learning how to occupy it, learning to inhabit it slowly with baby steps. Learning how to love it even though it's not perfect, even though it has pain, even though it it, it doesn't look the way I want it to look. That's called growing up. That's called maturing. That is called becoming. If you're young, a mature prince or princess, if you're older stepping into your king or queen around the body,
stop being so spoiled. Mr. Or Mrs. Client can't have everything you want. Uh, just I didn't make up that rule. Trust me, that comes with life. You cannot have everything you want
and you can have certain things in a very powerful and successful way. And when it comes to your body, the thing you can be assured that you can have is a great experience of it. Once you learn how to occupy it and once you learn to agree to be here and once you start to embody and do all the little practices that help you slowly with baby steps, love your body. As you do that, the body then becomes a good place to live. And as you do that, metabolism changes in a good way. How do I know that? Because I've seen it a million times. First things first, my friends, we cannot bully life into making us look different. So we can then agree to be here. That's your rule. That's your client's rule. It's not life's rule. So in a lot of ways, you're helping your client grow up. I mean that we can get spoiled about what we want. I want this, I want that. I wanna be like him. I wanna be like her. Okay, what else can we finish that part of existence right now? I want, I want, I want and start actually having what we have and owning what we have.
You can spend all day saying, I don't want this apartment. I want a house. I want a house. I want a house. And meanwhile, every day you're cursing your apartment. So every day you wake up, you curse where you live and then you go out to work and you come home and you curse where you live because you want a house. You want a house. Well, okay, I get you want a house, relax, let it go. Live in your apartment, own your apartment, take care of your apartment, love your apartment. You know what starts to happen. You start to appreciate what you have.
You start to be grateful and thankful for what you have. Some people don't have apartments to as lucky as you.
Humility, appreciating what we have, being thankful for what we have agreeing to be here is a spiritual act. And it requires spiritual growth on our part.
Spiritual growth oftentimes means we humble ourselves to what is.
We stop and we look at what do I have? Am I thankful for what I have? And your client will. Almondine be very honest, I am not thankful for this body. I do not like this body. It sucks. And I will look at them and I will say, I know exactly what you mean. I've been there and I didn't find health, actual health. I didn't find actual happiness. And I didn't find my actual natural metabolism until I let that go as best I could and started to inhabit what I have right now. Appreciate what I have right now. Work with what I have right now, right now, right now, right now. That's where it all starts.
So I'm calling that spiritual growth. You can call it character growth.
I will say that to a client,
especially a client who is a religious person, especially a client who I think is old enough to understand that or mature enough to understand it's time to be grateful for what you have. Time to be thankful.
It is hard, I believe, for the universe to
give us what we want. I want, I want if we don't start out from appreciation of what we have. Isn't that true? Haven't you noticed that about life?
Same with the body on the most practical level, my friends, you must be very consistent with your client about follow up and accountability. Make your client accountable to their various embodiment assignments. Meaning okay, you give them their homework assignment, you've negotiated. They agree yes, this is something I can do. Yes, I wanna do write my sexual autobiography. Yes, I am going to start eating slower. Yes, I am going to take walks three times a week, uh, in nature with my dog. Great. Come in next session. Okay, how did it go last week? You have to know the homework assignment that you gave to your client. You check in with them. How was that for you? Oh, I didn't do this. I didn't do that. I didn't do this. I didn't do that. Got it. I don't know. Let's talk. Any reason I was too busy. I was too this. I was too that. Got it. Okay. I understand that. I get busy. You get busy, we get busy. We gotta push the reset button on this Mr. And miss client.
'cause you said that you want to shapeshift your body.
I've offered to you that we need to get you in your body. We need to get you in the car in order to help you make the car go where you wanted to go. So we're gonna push the reset button and we're gonna make sure that we get to do these things that you really put effort into this 'cause your client will be resistant.
What do you think Mr. And Mr. Client would help you actually do the things that you say you want to do? What would help you? Is there somebody in your life who can be an accountability buddy that can ask you every day what would help you? What would help you stick to your assignment? You could ask that. So you're gonna check in with each session. You're gonna applaud all their efforts and successes no matter how small.
I'll even say to a client, you know, I appreciate you being honest with me. 'cause you could have lied about the fact that you didn't do any of the practices and assignments you said you're gonna do. And I really appreciate that you showed up in this session and you didn't just bolt and never show up again. That says to me that even though this is hard for you to do that you're still willing. So I really appreciate that. So I'm gonna turn anything into a success.
Encourage them when they report how hard it was for them. It is hard for your client. It wasn't hard. They would be doing this on their own. They wouldn't need you. They help them be in their body. I'm always gonna urge my client to do just a little more and a little more and a little more. I am going to be a good cheerleader. I'm going to be a good spiritual guide for my client. Why? That's interesting to me. I enjoy that. If that's interesting to you and you enjoy that, I highly suggest you do it. You have to make this fun for you. I mean that, yes, there are times when the work is intense. Yes, there's times that it's deep when it's intense, it's intense when it's deep, when it's it's deep. But overall, this work has to be enjoyable for you.
So you have to be lighter, you have to be a cheerleader, you have to be a good coach. You have to be a good inspire because when you're doing that, you are being expansive. And when you are being expansive, your client can more easily step into that expansiveness with you.
So you are helping your client embody by modeling for them.
One of the ways we embody is we have fun with it. We cheer ourselves on, we follow a higher calling to embody. We know on some level it's good for us. So you're modeling that for your client. You're being inspiring about it. You're not being negative about it. You gotta do this If you wanna lose weight, no,
not only is this gonna give you the best chance to shapeshift your body in the direction where you want it to go. It's gonna actually feel good. It's gonna be more and more fun as you go along. It's gonna make you feel better about your body. It's gonna make you feel better in your body. Looking to inspire my client once again, you may not realize. So you have to, you have to read your client. You can't read your own life. You have to truly read your client. You may not realize, 'cause this might not be an issue for you, that you client is very afraid to enjoy their own body. That your client has shame about their body. You have to learn how to notice that. You may not realize that your client wants to run away when you ask them to embody and start to love their body in little ways. Now, I want you to notice that
when you notice that, I want you to smile inside yourself.
I want you to think I am dealing with a scared child no matter what age your client is, because they are afraid. And the reason why they abandoned their body in this way or that way is because of fear, is because of hurt, is because of stress, is because of shock, is because of trauma, is because they've had an experience that wasn't so digestible.
So your client has a good reason that they want to run away. When you ask them to embody your words, your way of presenting things, your demeanor, your energy, your face, your smile is what communicates to your client. It's safe. This is okay.
Please realize this could be the hardest thing in the world for them to love and enjoy and have fun in their own body as it is right now. That's the hardest thing for them. And they want it more. More than anything. That's why they're coming to see you. That's why they wanna lose weight and that's why that they want to have the body that they want to have because they are convinced me on a shadow of a doubt that when I have this body, I will finally be happy. So they want to be happy. They really do. They want to be in their body. They really do. They just don't know what that means. They think they know what it means, but they don't.
So I want you to notice when your client is in fear or embarrassment around their body, and I want you to gently encourage them.
I want you in that moment when you see your client in fear or embarrassment or shame about their body, I want you to imagine that they're your 3-year-old child and you're just going to love them up with your energy and your words and your smile and your demeanor. You're gonna gently encourage them. You're always gonna acknowledge their fear and let them know it makes total sense.
You're gonna let them know that so many humans have a difficult time being in the body. You, Mr. And miss client, you're doing some amazing work right now. This is difficult work, but it's beautiful work. It's the good work and it's the work that's actually going to truly help you get where you say you want to go.
You gotta inspire your client in that direction. Otherwise they're gonna go back out into the world and continue to hate themselves and continue to diet themselves and starve themselves and exercise themselves and judge themselves and compare themselves and always come out unhappy. And maybe they'll do extreme enough things to lose weight and then the weight will come back on because they don't know how to lose sustainably because they haven't had the inner shift, the inner character change.
My friends, we are all learning together how to be here and nourish ourselves and find our natural and rightful weight and shape and celebrate what we have. So many of us are learning that. I don't wanna say all of us, but a lot of people are learning that it's okay, let's do it. Let's explore. Let's discover this. Let's cheerlead each other on. Let's, let's find that out. Understanding that it's gonna be hard and understanding that it's gonna be fun as well. Kind of like life. It's got its hard moments, it's got its fun moments.
So you are helping your clients step into a maturity in relationship to their body. You are being their midwife. You are helping them be born again into a new body. You are helping them slowly get back in. You are asking them to take baby steps. And when they take those baby steps, you are cheering them on and going, congratulations. I know that wasn't easy. So you have to remember to play in your mind with personas, with archetypes. You have to understand and notice that your client, despite the fact that he or she might be rich and successful and brilliant and powerful and have lots of money and own this or own that, who whoever they are, chances are when it comes to body image, 'cause that's what we're talking about. They're a kid and they're scared. Great. So that's who you're talking to.
So then you step into your good parent, your loving parent, your loving mother, your loving father, your loving older brother or sister, whatever it is that you then talk from that place. You speak from a certain archetype and you speak to a certain archetype.
So indeed, my friends, there's an archetype, there's a blueprint of an individual who is alive on planet earth and they're just afraid to be in their body because they're afraid for all the good reasons. And they haven't perhaps ever fully been in their body and now they're an adult of some age and you are helping them get back in. So there's, that's a blueprint. There's a lot of people like that. So what I've been trying to say when I say we take baby steps is because it's the baby steps that help us embody.
So you're speaking to the innocence in a person, you're speaking to the part of them that's innocent and a little afraid and needs encouragement, want you to hear that. And in that same session, at some point, if they switch into their adult and you're talking about this and talking about that, then boom, you might switch into a different voice. So you're noticing that, okay, so this was a little bit of a twist and turn in this conversation.
I hope it was helpful for you. I hope you are gathering more insights, more information, more details.
I'm trying to present to you really the deeper strategies. And I'm not just talking about techniques. Okay, Mr. Mrem, do this, do that. The deeper understanding of where it comes from, because when you come from that place with your client, they get it, they feel it. You're communicating to them. That's the beauty of this relationship that you have with your client. And of course you're remembering that you don't have to be perfect because we teach what we need to learn. That's why I teach this 'cause I'm still learning it at my ripe young age of whatever I am. So my friends, thank you as always and we got more. This was part two of simple strategies for embodiment. We got part three coming up next, I will see you on the other side.

PART 3

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Screens. Once again, my friends, Mark David here, founder of the Institute of the Psychology of Eating Your Guide. On this journey that we are on together, we will now finish up our bigger conversation around weight and body image. And this is part three of three for simple strategies for embodiment. Let's wrap up a little here and see if we can come up with some interesting and new distinctions.
My friends, when it comes to embodiment, sometimes we have to look at letting go of what is in the way.
So when it comes to embodiment and being happy to be here in body, heart, and soul, sometimes we need to let go of habits that are obstructing us. Habits and practices that you know, might seem useful, but actually take us away from a sense of soul safety and peace. People don't always realize what they're doing that has taken 'em in the wrong direction, or it's taking them in the opposite direction of where they say they want to go. Yet, another way of saying this is many people who are longing to shapeshift the body because we have said that one of the keys to shapeshift the body is to embody. And many people are doing practices that are kind of anti embodiment practices,
anti embodiment practices. One of those for many people is the scale. Do I have a problem ultimately with a scale when it comes to people who wanna lose weight? No. But in general, do I see people misuse the scale? Absolutely. A scale cannot tell you. It cannot tell any human being how they should feel, yet many people use the scale for that reason. In general and in specific, I would love to see you help your body image challenge client, the person who thinks my body needs to change. Ultimately, in order for me to love myself, people who are a little uptight, stressed out, caught up in the toxic viral belief that when I am at my perfect weight or perfect shape, that I'm gonna be happy. And if those people are weighing themselves every day, I would like them to get off of the scale completely.
I would love to see the majority of my weight loss clients let go of the scale for as long as they possibly can. Now, if somebody truly wants to, wants to, wants to weigh themselves once a week or once every few weeks, fine. I still would like to see people get away from the scale. If you have a person who is weighing themselves once a day or more, it is absolutely time for them to let go of the scale because they are being gripped. It's an anti em embodiment practice. It's looking at a number on a scale, a number on a tiny, little silly, lifeless, soulless, heartless machine looking at the machine as if it's gonna tell us what we should think and feel. I'm calling the scale for a majority of humans, an anti embodiment practice. If your client has never been without the scale for two or three months, I highly suggest that they let go. I really do. I especially want a lot of my weight loss clients to let go of the scale if they can, for the first few months of our work together. That's my ideal. We're gonna cycle back to that in a little bit and you'll see why I am really interested in my clients letting go of television shows that are low consciousness or invite comparison.
You know, there's a lot of nonsense television. There's a lot of television that is constantly hurling images of, you know, America's Next great model, miss Universe, miss World, miss whatever. Uh, you name it. There are so many shows, particularly reality TV shows that are hitting our senses with images that don't match, that don't fit. I would love to see my clients go on a media free diet, the kind of media that
shows humans acting foolishly or shows humans who are obsessed with body and weight and shape. You could ask your clients what their, what they watch, how much media they consume, how much television they consume. And by this I mean movies as well. By this I mean videos as well.
Anything that they can let go of that invites comparison or just shows us women and men acting in the lowest common denominator. I know there's a lot of comedy shows on, I know there's a lot of comedy cartoons on, and I observe a lot of these shows and I'm shocked. I really am shocked at how low a bar they're setting for who we are as humans. So I would love for you to keep your eye on that with your client because you're not just taking them away from imagery, which by itself is a major victory. You're not just taking them away from toxic imagery. But it's also so much of our media is immersing us in a worldview that has no soul. It has no heart. It is sarcastic. Um, it's not real.
It doesn't advance us. You know what I'm talking about? Okay? Same reason I want my clients to let go of reading material that glorifies glamor, fame, skinny, perfect, you name it. Whatever those magazines are, if they have a LA or magazine, if they have people magazine, let go, let go of the gossip. No more gossip. Let go of Hollywood. Let go of following the actors and the actresses and the famous people. And the beautiful people. Anything that's showing you that, let it go. Go on a diet. Let it go for six months. See how it changes your life. See how it shows you how unimportant that group of humans actually are. I get it. I get it. I get it. We follow the beautiful people. The beautiful people are hurled at us. We are told who we should think is important. We are told who we should wish to emulate. We are told who we should give our attention to.
And oftentimes what we're putting our attention to, especially the famous and the glamorous people who we glorify for their acting or their singing or their beauty, let it go. See what happens. See what happens to your body. See what happens to your brain. See what happens to your soul. See what happens to your heart. See how interesting it is? It's an experiment. Mr. And Mrs. Client, that's all we're doing. We're letting go of that. Especially useful for women, my friends. I want my client, especially the young people, to let go of music that diminishes women, men, boys, girls, and the human spirit, which is a lot of it.
Mr. Mrs. Client, are you listening to the lyrics of the music and the musicians and the bands and the personas that you follow?
If they diminish men, if they diminish women, let it go for a while. Listen to something else that is people positive, that's men and women positive. That's uplifting. That doesn't objectify humans,
that doesn't use the kinda language that pulls us down.
We have allowed the music that we consume to hit a low common denominator. It's shocking to me. This is not a moralistic thing. It it's about consciousness. It's about intelligence. It's about us detoxifying from nonsense.
I want my client to let go of any product to buy. Let go of buying any product that has the word diet on it. If it's diet coke, diet Pepsi, diet soda diet, soft drink, diet, ice cream, diet, whatever. Kill it. Throw it out. Don't ever buy it again. 'cause chances are, if it says diet on the aint good for you, chances are it's got something weird, strange, artificial, unnatural to the human body
and it's being promoted and sold by people who don't want you to have the body you want. Otherwise, their product is useless and it ain't going anywhere. It's not gonna go off the shelves. If diet products worked, the diet product industry would be outta business. Think about it, my friends. That is simple math. That is simple economics,
I know not of a single diet product that you can get in a supermarket that is truly dedicated and committed to you reaching your natural and sustainable weight and being a happy human being. Those products are prey on your unhappiness.
I want my client to let go of social interactions that invite us into dieting, consciousness and any kind of victimhood around body and weight. Friends, groups, people, situations where dieting and victimhood around body and weight get emphasized.
If your best friend or friends tend to go there, invite them someplace else. Tell them you are trying an experiment. I'd love for you to join me for two or three months. Let's just not talk about our weight. We're not gonna talk about dieting, we're not gonna talk about how awful it is. We're not gonna talk about limiting this and limiting that and low calorie this and low fat that we're gonna just live our lives and we're gonna pay attention to everything else in life that's important to us.
Two months with your friends. See if you could do that. Of course, let go of any social media or online destination that does not uplift. I mean that even for my clients who are consuming media such as CNN or USA today, there is so much nonsense. Every day humans wake up
and we look to the media to give us our talking points for the day. What do you talk about? What do your friends talk about? What do the people at work talk about? We talk about what we see on TV and hear in the news that the media tells us is important. So we are constantly in reaction to the idiocy and the nonsense that various people, various politicians, various experts, are telling us in the media,
if something important is going on in the world, I promise you, you will know about it and you will hear about it. The bottom line is, my friends, that
we get addicted to how the world is talking to us, to how the media talks to us about how we should imagine and think about our world.
What I have noticed is most media, particularly around news and a lot of social media and a lot of online destinations cause people to go into stress, anxiety, fear, anger and reaction.
The bottom line is, you can have a better life by creating a better life. Create the world you want to create. Stop reacting to the world that is being shown to you on the media,
which is oftentimes meant to inflame us. It is meant to stress us, and it is meant to fight with each other and separate each other from each other because it's always an us versus them. It's a Republican versus a Democrat. It's this race versus that race. It's men versus women. It's straight versus gay. It's this versus that. We're always being divided.
We don't realize it. Let's change that.
Okay, next, my friends understand that when it comes to
some of these anti embodiment practices that I would like to see my client let go of, you have to remember that everything is a negotiation with your client. You can't just say to your client, I want you to let go of all of this and all of that, and they just sort of look at you and shake their head. You always want to say, Hey, you know, I would love to see you let go of the scale. And I want you to explain to them why you want them to let go of the scale. I want you to explain to them how that doesn't really help you understand how you actually feel in your body, in your own experience. You're letting a machine determine how you should feel about your day. If you gained a pound or lost a pound, every human will gain a pound or lose a pound on any given day at any given meal.
Your machine is inaccurate as are all machines, particularly scales, unless they're multiple thousands of dollars and they're calibrated just so. So we're gonna experiment and we're gonna just let go of the scale and we're gonna see what that's like and let you learn to feel your body and experience your body. I would love to see you let go of the scale for three months. Is that doable for you Mr. And Mr. Alein? Oh my God, it's three months. It's too long. I can't, okay, how about two months?
And they're still shaking their head no. Okay, you can definitely do it for a month. Yes, I can do that for a month. Okay, great. One month. So you just negotiated with your client. When you do a negotiation, they feel like they've won because you've worked with them. Now notice I push my client just a little, but it's a negotiation because you want your client to agree. Whenever you ask your client to do something, you ask them, is this doable for you? I want you to eat more fat. Is this doable for you in this amount? You're letting them know, this is not forever. This is an exploration. You are wanting me to help you do something that you haven't been able to do, which is shapeshift, change your body, lose weight sustainably. Great. So in order to do things in a different way, IE to get a different result, we have to do it in a different way. So this is what I'm asking you to do. So I can help you do what I know best that I know can work. So this is an exploration. So as practitioners, my friends, we're offering advice. We're offering opinions, wisdom, information as coaches and seeing what lands, what sticks with our clients. We are looking to introduce consciousness to help our clients wake up, see what works for them, see what doesn't work for them, and embrace the kind of practices and, and, and, and activities that they do during their day. Habits, behaviors that truly support them. A lot of times when we disembodied, when we're not connected to the body, we also don't notice a lot of things that are impacting us in a negative way. Particular how the world speaks to us. Once again through TVs, movies, media, online universe. So you're always advocating for your clients higher good. Always, always, always, always, always. You're inviting your client into a different universe, my friends, and when I say you're inviting them into a different universe, you're inviting them into a universe where the body becomes their friends. You're inviting them into the A universe where their body becomes safer. You're inviting them into a universe where they take baby steps to the degree that they could slowly get comfortable being here, here on earth here in a body.
The way people are hooked, attached, dare I say, addicted to the media that they watch, that stresses them, that inflames them, and that attempts to grab their brain at the lowest common denominator. People think that's normal.
Do not let the media dictate to you what you should be thinking or speaking about or believing about yourself. It's not useful. Okay? You know when it comes to men and embodiment and especially for men, clients who you think, okay, I'm dealing with a client who's disembodied a bit
for my men clients, any exercise that they're drawn to doing I want them to do. I don't care what it is. A lot of times men who have disembodied, they stop taking care of themselves from a personal grooming standpoint to any great degree. How can you encourage them to do more body care, more grooming? How can you encourage them around their wardrobe? These are baby steps
with your male client who is disembodied. And I want you to always understand your clients as best you can. I want you to understand your client's relationship to his own sexuality because chances are a man who is disembodied in his body and he's here with you trying to lose weight. He's oftentimes dealing with a disembodiment from his own sexuality. And unbeknownst to a lot of women, a lot of men, particularly single men or even men in relationship who are disconnected from their body to disconnected from their sexuality, will turn to pornography. So I want you to know about this. I want you to know if your client, if your male client is a consumer of pornography, because if he is, at some point I am going to invite him to go on a pornography free diet because men will often use that to stimulate themselves and give them a sense of sensation and aliveness. That is, it's kind of like eating a lot of junk food. Pornography for a man is junk food for the mind and for the brain and for his relationship with his own sexuality. So I'm being very straight up with you here. It doesn't work. Yes, can one use porn in a good way? For sure. But in general, I don't see many people doing it once again, especially for your client who is a man who is coming to see you for weight challenges and you are trying to help him embody, understand that pornography is powerful anti embodiment media.
See if you can get your male client into nature
in any way, shape, or form, a man can get into nature that'll help him. He for everything. When it comes to a man who has disembodied as he must have a purpose, all these other things ultimately won't help a whole heck of a lot unless he starts exploring his reason to be alive. So that's, that's the target you're trying to hit. And these other pieces can support that because the reality is if he's not moving whatsoever, if he's given up on self-care, if he's dissociating through pornography, if he's disconnected from nature, is a little bit harder to explore purpose and find it. So we're looking for ways to support him in creating the kind of environment that will help him find himself.
I want you to know that until, I'm gonna say this straight up until a man has a bonafide reason to be alive, he will not be so keen on embodying. It just ain't gonna happen.
Especially for women. When it comes to women in embodiment. Encourage anything that celebrates them. Anything. Anything. I don't care what it is. Anything where they feel celebrated, anything where they feel a sense of joy.
I want you to encourage your women, clients of all age, princess and queen, age, to associate with women who are good support systems or good role models in terms of having a loving relationship with food and body. Who are your friends, miss client who you think have a decent relationship with food and body, maybe even a good one. Can you spend more time with them, talk to them more, interview them, ask them questions, ask them to be your support buddy.
Talk to your girlfriends and see how you can all support each other in having a different conversation. Excuse me about food and body. Encourage your women clients to find their own unique style.
What would you say your style is? Miss client, just your style in general. How would you, how would you describe your style? If I'd never seen you before and were talking on the phone, like what's your style? Explore that with them. What would you like your style to be if you were tweaking your style, elevating it, changing it, morphing it, what would it be? Independent of any kind of weight change, independent of your actual body changing. Tell me about you and style. So encourage 'em to find their unique style. Always look to encourage your female client to adopt some kind of dance. If they truly have let go of embodiment and if they are hungry for embodiment. Encourage any kind of dance for the sake of dance.
And there's so many places where there are classes that happen in free dance where it's not about comparison, it's not about people checking each other out necessarily. It is just about enjoying movement for movements sake, enjoying the dance.
You know, when it comes to helping clients with embodiments sometimes, sometimes we as practitioners need to let go. And what I specifically mean is let go of our client getting somewhere fast or getting somewhere soon, or even getting somewhere specific.
For a lot of clients, they have to slog through. For some clients, they have to slog through the mud for a little bit. It's just hard for them to get going.
They're coming to see you. Especially people who have really stepped out of their body,
especially people who are having trouble getting in.
It could take them a little while to even get everything that we're talking about here to get like embodiment. What do you mean? Why do I have to do, I just wanna lose weight. So clients are not going to always rise to the occasion soon enough. They may resist, they may falter, they might decide not to work hard, they might give up.
And what I say is I want you to consider this part of your it's consider this part of your professional training. This is your training, okay, here I am with a client who has just given up.
So this is part of your learning journey as a practitioner because every client is here to educate us.
When my client gives up
or they're faltering hard, you know what I do? You know what I say? I say, listen, Mr. And Mrs. Client, here's what I wanna say to you. This is where the action is. This is not about you and weight. I know you think it's about you and weight. I know you wanna lose weight. I want to help you lose weight in a lot of ways. This is about you learning how to stand by yourself. This is you learning how to advocate for yourself. This is you learning how to stop abandoning yourself
to stop giving up. That's what this is about. And we're talking about weight. If it wasn't weight, it would be something else in your life that would show up, that would challenge you to stop abandoning yourself and to stop giving up about the world.
This is you claiming you. This is you choosing life.
This is you choosing to be here. We got one shot as far as we can tell. Maybe we have more, but I don't know.
So I'll lay it on the line with a client. I wanna see you succeed. This is hard work. You getting back into your body is hard work. That's why people don't do it. And the reason why this is hard work is because when we step out of the body,
we do it for a good reason. Because it was kind of hard to be in in the first place.
So this is about you choosing you and you choosing to stand by yourself. I wish I could make that choice for you. I say yes, go for it. But you have to make that choice for you. So you're laying it on the line with your client.
I have had such moments with many clients over the years. I'm always asking myself, how is my client a reflection of me? How is my client experience? How's my experience with this client asking me to grow? Sometimes you just gotta lay it on the line with a client. This is their life. This is your last session ever on planet earth. What would you say to a human being who's in front of you, who's just like, I can't do this. I don't wanna do this. It is too hard. I just want a pill to lose weight. Mr. And miss client, this is challenging work and that's why you hired me. 'cause I'm here to be your coach. I'm here to walk with you along this journey so you have a professional good friend in me cheering you on here, but I can't do it for you. You have to step up
and I might even send my client home and say, okay, you really think about it.
Are you ready to be on planet Earth? Are you, are you really ready to be here? And start nourishing yourself
and start treating yourself well and start advocating for yourself and start doing the baby steps that can help you get where you want to go. You might not be ready, I think you are, but if you don't think you are, then you're not.
And there it is. And that's your offering to your client.
And if your client comes back to you and says yes, or if they say yes in the moment, then you've just done something wonderful with them.
You've helped them step over a precipice where they likely normally just kind of fall down down.
People have a hard time sometimes you have to coach them through. You have to cheerlead them through. And part of that means having an honest conversation with them, laying it on the line, being real.
If it's a client in their forties, fifties, sixties, and more, let them know life is short.
If it's a young person, I tell them, listen, you're in your young years, you're never gonna have these again. Let's do the best we can to make these years better for you.
Let's talk about some client, common client objections. Part of what we constantly need to do as practitioners is handle our client's objections. Many of our client's objections are silent, in which case it's hard to handle those. And there's a number of common client objections that I've heard over the years that are worth naming that the client themselves will often name. So here you are, you're working with your weight loss client and you're doing all this great stuff and they're doing their little embodiment practices. They're eating slow, they're doing this, they're doing that. They're being good boys and good girls. And then they come back to you at some point and say, but I did everything you said and I'm still not losing weight.
Ah, if I can get about 20 bucks for every time I've heard that, I have a lot of money, but I did everything you said and I'm still not losing weight. So wanna, here's what I wanna say to you. When a client says this to me, I think, wow, we've hit a sweet spot. I think, wow, we've hit an interesting place. I think, wow, this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where I can truly help my client in a whole different way. And I'm gonna say to you that this is one complaint that tends to scare the best of practitioners.
And this, my friends, is a very tender and interesting and uncomfortable place where healing and transformation can happen. So when a client comes to you with this, but I've done everything you've said and I'm still not losing weight, this is an inflection point. This is a, this is, this is a fork in the road.
And what I wanna say is that there's a soul lesson here before I tell you how I deal with this. This is a soul lesson and the soul lesson here for your client is about letting go of the goal. The soul lesson here is about loving oneself no matter what. The soul lesson here is letting go of conditions, most specifically letting go of conditional love. Your client might as well be saying, I still don't love myself. I did everything you say and I still don't love myself because I'm not losing weight.
The soul lesson here is digging deeper to find a soul lesson. That's the lesson we gotta dig deeper over here. We have to find the lesson that life is asking us to learn. So I'm very clear, I am ultra clear that my client's soul lesson here is to love oneself no matter what. I am very clear that my client's soul lesson here is to relax into unconditional love for self.
That's it. I mean, really that is it. Chances are if your client can reach that place, they're ready to graduate. They've learned a lesson when your client says, but I did everything you said and I'm still not losing weight. That is the child in us complaining. Now of course this is understandable. They're doing everything you said and you're still not losing weight.
I will let my client know, Mr. And Mrs. Client, this is a journey. Tell me again, how long have you been dieting and trying to lose weight? When was the first time you started dieting? When was the first time again? So you wanna repeat that number back to them because it's usually some lengthy number of years. Mr. And Mr. Client, you've been trying to do this for a long time.
Weight loss is a mystery. There are lessons to be learned along the way.
Life is going to work on its own timing. You are going to have to step into your adulthood. You are gonna have to step into your inner king, your inner queen, your mature princess, your mature prince, and understand that instant gratification is not always forthcoming.
Remember, when you're a kid, you want what you want when you want it. Kids would eat all the sugar in the world if you give it to them. I just want sugar. Well, I'm sorry that's gonna give you immediate gratification, but long term doesn't work for you. Oftentimes we grow up into adulthood and we still maintain this desire for immediate gratification. I get that you wanna lose weight. I totally understand. And now we gotta take a deep breath and now you have to begin again. Imagine we're beginning the relationship right now. Imagine this is your first session because I think Mr. And Ms client, this is the lesson you're learning. You're learning how to stand by yourself because when you say, I did everything you said, I'm not losing weight.
Part of what you need to lose is the absolute need to lose weight. So you can love yourself. I get that you're gonna like yourself more,
but there's a lesson here that wants to be learned, which is you loving yourself without all these conditions. Oh, I'm gonna love myself when I'm perfect on this. I'm that life is asking you to be patient. That's a deeper lesson.
If I know my client's religion, God is asking you to be patient. Jesus is asking you to be more patient. Does everybody get exactly what they want, when they want it? There's a higher plan here. I'm gonna say that to my religious client.
I just wanna mention a quote from a client. This is verbatim. Uh, it relates to this. So this is after our work together. She said to me, if I had lost the weight and had the skinny body I wanted to have for all these years, she says, I would've been a shallow b***h. I would've been one of those girls. I can't stand. I would've looked, I would not have looked deeper into my life or gone on a spiritual search. I would've probably married a really rich guy who I didn't really love and who probably didn't really love me. And even though I know all this, I still want to be skinny.
She's a very funny lady, but very serious at the same time, able to laugh at herself sometimes our weight is here to teach us a deeper lesson. She owned it. She said, if I had lost the weight and had the skinny body I wanted to have for all these years, I would've been a shallow b***h. This is a woman in her late forties talking to me.
I wouldn't have looked deeper into my life or gone on a spiritual search.
Sometimes we have to look deeper, my friends,
and this isn't this whole show, this life isn't just for our entertainment. It's not always easy. The weight loss thing is a challenge for many humans. And yes, I am glad you did everything that we've been talking about, but there's more that you haven't done yet.
So you have done everything that I've asked. Thank you. I you, you've been really putting in effort. Congratulations. I really appreciate you. I mean that. But there's more things that I want want you to do that you haven't done yet. And one of those key things is, is to learn how to stand by yourself and love yourself no matter what. And here's an opportunity because you know something, if it wasn't weight, it would be something else where you would figure out, well, I can't love myself because can't love myself because I haven't lost the weight. That's essentially what's being said here.
Would you tell that to your little kid? Would you tell that to an infant? Sorry, can't really love you because you haven't lost the baby fat. That's what it sounds like. Mr. And Mrs. Client.
So my friends, it's your job not to react here. It's your job as always to hold your client's largest goal. It's your job to be positive and trust in your client's journey despite their discomfort and protest.
I have almost zero discomfort when my client is in discomfort. I'm not going there. I'm not buying into their discomfort and their protest.
And trust me, I've had to learn that. And you might have to learn that. Well, I'm doing everything you're saying and I'm now losing weight. It's been eight sessions and I'm not losing weight. Okay? And how long have you been trying to lose weight?
Okay, well this work is a journey. And if you need instant gratification, then the best thing I could suggest is I tie you up in the basement, hands behind your back, no food. Keep you down there for a couple of weeks. Yeah, you'll probably lose weight. Will it be sustainably? I doubt it. Will that be uncomfortable? Eh? Probably not. But yeah, at least you'll lose the weight.
This is your opportunity, Mr. And Mrs. Client, to get with the program of life and stop trying to make life conform to your humble demands because it isn't.
It's not that I'm doing anything wrong with you. We are taking a whole different approach. Your body will do what it does. This is a journey. Everything we're doing is an exploration. I'm giving you the best tools that I have from an approach that can work for a lot of people. We don't know what will happen. We don't know how much money any human being will make when they invest. We don't know where we're gonna be a year from now. We don't know what life, what a higher power, what the wisdom of the universe has in store for you and your journey around weight loss. And we're gonna take all the necessary next steps.
This is probably Mr. And Mrs. Client a good life lesson for you.
How to deal with your discomfort because this is pretty uncomfortable. You're doing all these things and you're not getting what you want.
The things I've been asking you to do to slow down with food, to eat higher quality food, to change your meal timing so it works more with your natural metabolism. These are all strategies that long-term are gonna help you in terms of your health. In terms of your energy. Chances are in terms of your longevity, in terms of your vitality, they're long-term practices that no matter how much weight you lose or don't lose, they will still benefit you. I think life is asking you to step up and step into your queen hood, your king hood, your adulthood, more weight loss is what it is. It's a mystery. If there was a certainty and a science behind it than anyone and everyone would lose exactly amount, the exact amount of weight that they wanna lose whenever they wanna lose it.
In a lot of ways. Mr. And Mrs. Client, this is about you learning, I believe, how to deal with disappointment
because we get disappointed when we don't get what we want. I get it. Trust me, I'm the first in line. If I don't get what I want, I'm disappointed. And then I have to always look at life. I have to look at myself in the mirror. I have to pray. I have to talk to God. I have to talk to Jesus. I have to talk to a higher power. I have to talk to my smart friends
and try to understand who I, who am I? What am I learning here? Because they're always learning. There's a lesson in here and I have a suspicion. As you learn those lessons, you're gonna be able to move forward. Part of the lesson is to let go, is to let go of the goal and to just start to live your life. And that's what we're doing. We're doing practices that help you have a better relationship with food that can take you into sustainable health into the future that can give you the best chance of reaching your natural weight. But you have to let life unfold. You have to let the mystery of the body do its thing.
It's clearly not listening to your timing. I get it. I get you want it to be different. As long as you're gonna be living in extreme complaint about that, my guess is you're gonna feel stuck and you're gonna be stuck. So you gotta dig a little deeper. Yeah, I get you're disappointed. I really get that. So this is you learning how to deal with disappointment. And you know something my friends, here's what I would do. I'd send my client home and I would ask them to do a disappointment inventory. I want you to do a disappointment, inventory, everything you could think of throughout your life that has been a disappointment for you. Experiences, relationships, jobs, money, body travel, anything that you remember, disappointment,
just inventory it, write it down.
I also want you to journal a bit about how you deal with disappointment. What do you do to help yourself Metabolize disappointment.
That's a powerful conversation to have with a client. This is a powerful moment.
I'm giving you all kinds of keys here. This is a conversation you might wanna re-listen to a few times because this objection is gonna come up. And I want you to be locked and loaded for it because this is where you want a lot of your clients to be. Why? Because that's where they are. You are trusting the journey. You are trusting that this wall that they hit and this they're uncomfortable when they're telling you this. They're at their boiling point perhaps when they're telling you this. And this is the exact thing that they need to learn in their life. It's not about weight, my friends. It's dealing with disappointment.
It's all about dealing with immediate gratification. It's stepping into adulthood. It's learning how to stand by ourselves and not abandon ourselves even though we're not getting what we want when we want it.
It's learning how to be a king. It's learning how to be a queen. Here's what life is giving me. It's learning how to love the body you have without conditions and actually let go of the goal. Your body knows the goal you want. God knows the goal you want. I know the goal. You want everybody that you've told knows the goal you want. The goal you want is known by the universe. You don't have to say it again. You wanna lose weight. I get it. The world gets it. The invisibles get it. The angels get it. Whatever you believe in gets it. Okay, great. Now your job is to do all the things that truly work. Let's keep working on this journey and taking the next tweaks and the next steps.
And I want you to see if you can take a deep breath and let go of your timing and just let go for once. Because honestly, until you do that, you're gonna go B, B, B, B, B. But I want it now, but it's not happening.
That might be the very thing that's getting in your way, Mr. And Mrs. Client.
Sometimes the best strategy for weight loss is to fully, and I mean fully surrender the need for weight loss. People don't wanna hear that, but it works.
It's a soul lesson and will never make sense to the mind or to the ego. So I'll tell people, this is a spiritual lesson, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I gotta say this to you. I know you wanna lose weight. I want to help you get where you want to go. That's what I'm doing. But here's the strange thing. If weight loss is the most important thing in your life, then your life compass is off. You are moving in the wrong direction.
I get it's important for you, that's fine. But right now it's the most important thing for you. That's what I'm getting. It really is the most important thing for you. It's kind of your religion.
You can give weight loss that's due, make it important. But don't make it the ruler of your world. Don't make it your God. Don't make it your religion. Don't make it the ruler of your palace
because you got more important things to do in life. And I get this is important and we continue to work on it.
But there is a part of you that is so convinced of the necessity of this that I believe it is getting in your way of getting where you wanna go. I, I mean, have you ever had Mr. And Mr. Klein an experience in your life where you were so clear that you needed something exactly how you needed it in the exact way, A person, a situation, a job, a relationship, and you were just so on it about this has to be just like this. And then later on you learned your lesson and you matured and you realized that you were putting a lot of energy into something that you were so certain about and it really wasn't. So has that ever happened for you or anybody that you know, a best friend, a loved one, somebody you know is so convinced that they need something, that they've gotta have it, this kind of partner, this kind of situation, this amount of money. And you're sitting there listening to them, listening to them going, yeah, I get you want that. But it's not. It's not do or die. You're making weight loss do or die.
I believe that's a soul lesson. I believe that's a deeper spiritual lesson. I believe that's a religious lesson.
And I believe we're talking more than weight right now.
This is about how you are doing your life.
So yeah, you can give up, you can stop, we can stop the work. And then you're gonna just go on another diet and you're gonna do the same thing you've been doing and you're gonna start to read more books. And then you're gonna continue to be a nutrition refugee. And notice how this person says this and that person says that,
and your whole life, your self value is gonna be about when I lose his weight, then I'm okay. But until then, I'm not okay. And I'm not the real me.
It's time to be the real you, independent of how much you weigh and fine to keep working on shape, shifting the body.
Now, my friends, everything I'm saying to you that I would like you to consider saying to your client, it will be hard for them to understand because you are speaking into their darkness. You are speaking into their unconsciousness.
You are speaking into their biggest fear.
You are in an awesome freaking place with them. This is where the action is.
You might be very uncomfortable having this conversation. I love having this conversa. I I I love it because it's where the rubber meets the road. It is, it is the place, it's where the action is because it's giving your client the opportunity to step up and to grow up.
But I did everything you said and I didn't get the perfect guy or the perfect girl. I did everything you said and I didn't make all this money. I did everything you said and I didn't win the prize. I did everything you say and I didn't get into that school or whatever. Okay, got it. It's okay. We don't always get what we want.
You're still alive, you're still here. And there's some lessons to learn.
I'm convinced my take on planet Earth is that when we learn the lessons that are been put in front of us, somehow we get to graduate a little more. I don't know what graduation's gonna look like for you, but I do know that it's time for you
to step into more unconditional love. You're loving yourself with such conditions and you're waiting to be the real you be the real. You now start loving your body. Now I know you say you've been doing that, but this protest, I get it, I understand it, it's perfectly reasonable. And we gotta push the reset button and pretend we're starting over again.
And this time you don't abandon yourself. And this time you see, how is this asking me to grow as a person? You gotta grapple with that one. Mr. And Mr. Alein, how is this really asking me to grow as a person? So everything that I've just said to you, Mr. And Mr. Klein, that's a lot. I've been saying a lot to you Mr. And Mr. Klein, how is all this landing for you? What are you taking out of everything I'm saying to you? So that's what I would ask my client, my friends, after I do an intellectual invention intervention, how, how does everything I'm saying land for you? And let them speak and see what they say.
So the bottom is, bottom line is when your client says, I do what you said about letting go of, okay, there's a good one. This is a slightly different one instead of, but I did everything you said and I'm still not losing weight. Some clients will say to me, I did what you said about letting go of losing weight and I still haven't lost the weight. So it is an easy one, my friends. It is quite easy. Well, you didn't really let go.
You didn't really let go. That disappointment is understandable and and if you really let go, we wouldn't be in this conversation. I get that you wanna lose weight. I really do. And it's the same conversation my friends. You gotta call your client into their maturity. You have to call your client into their age appropriate archetype. Their king hood, their queen hood,
even if they're a queen or a king in training. Hey, you're, you're a queen in training. It's time to start stepping into your queen. I get you're disappointed.
What if this was the body that you were gonna have for the rest of your life? What if we knew that a hundred percent? What if the heavens opened up and all the angels came and said, sweetheart, d, the body you're gonna have for the rest of your life. What would you do? Would you b***h? Would you moan? Would you groan? Would you complain? Would you kill yourself? Like what would you do?
Can you step into your power in the body you're in right now
and proceed with your life? Can you take all the energy that you keep putting into, I wanna lose weight, I wanna lose weight, I wanna lose weight. Where would you put that energy into? What else can you do with that energy that that is useful?
Your life is far more than about weight loss. I get you wanna shape, shift your body.
When you've truly let go, then you've let go.
So once again, I'm gonna ask my client, we need to push the reset button.
Letting go means you just let go. I get your disappointed and their same client, you give them their disappointment, inventory, homework, assignment, my friends, once again, this is about us maturing, stepping into our adulthood, stepping into our king hood, our queen hood.
So when somebody says, well, I let go of weight loss and I still haven't lost of weight, they haven't let go.
Okay, my friends, here's, here's a big one. Here's a big one that is likely the most challenging thing you're gonna face with a weight loss client. So let's, let's dive in. I did what you said and I gained weight.
Your client did what you said and they gained weight. And that happens. You take a client who's been starving themselves, they've been calorically restricting, they've been macronutrient imbalance, you have them eating a little more food. You particularly have them eating some more healthy fats, some more protein, they can gain weight. This can happen. Have I had, have I had this happen over the years? Definitely I would say oof. You know, upwards of 20 or 30 times.
So here's what I wanna say to you about this. People can gain weight when doing the right things for a number of different reasons. Okay? First, we're gonna go through the physiology of this. I'm, again, I'm asserting people will indeed gain weight when doing the right things for weight loss for a number of different reasons. Okay? Sometimes the body grabs onto more weight when we've been starving it with low calorie or low fat or low protein diets. It's a natural reaction. Some bodies, they are. So the way the survival response works for some bodies, because the person has been chronically dieting so much that as soon as the body senses food and its senses that it's not on a desert island anymore, he just wants to hold onto that food even more. So the body is actually still in a starvation response, gets a little bit of food and it just wants to pack it on because the body hasn't gotten the signal yet. You can relax. You are not on a desert island anymore.
That's one reason. Yet another reason is your client has continued to live in a deep stress state. So they're doing what you're saying and they're freaked out. They're freaked out that they have to eat more fat, eat more protein. They're freaked out that they have to eat something at breakfast. They're freaked out that they can't skip meals. They're freaked. They're freaked. They're freaked. Maybe even more so than they're usually freaked out because what you're telling them to do, it sounds so anti-scientific and such a weight gainer that they have more stress and then that stress becomes a self-fulfilling metabolic prophecy. They've simply created a bigger stress response with which to create more weight loss, weight loss resistance and weight gain, stress induced. So that happens. Here's another thing that happens. And this is especially so for your client who was macronutrient, I balanced and you've given them more protein.
Sometimes what happens is clients who've had a little bit of muscle wasting IE, they don't have enough muscle on their body for what their body wants because they haven't been eating enough protein because they've been in dieting consciousness. They will eat protein and their body will grab it and will create muscle weight gain.
They will create muscle weight gain.
So not all this is on your slide right now. This makes perfect sense. Why does it make perfect sense? Muscle is your calorie burning tissue. When you start to make a good nutritional course correction from a person who's had some type of muscle wasting, not enough muscle tissue because they've been missing the key macronutrient protein, which is the building block of muscle tissue. As soon as the body senses protein, it goes, oh my God, let's build some muscle. And then what happens? You gain weight,
wait another month and you'll start to lose it. Why? Because you've just gained calorie burning tissue.
It is very common. So you want more muscle weight, you actually want more muscle weight. But at the beginning you're gonna literally, the body is gonna pack on as much muscle as it can. And for a lot of people, especially people who have like a hundred pounds to lose, what will be happening is they're weighing themselves. They have a hundred pounds to lose. They start eating more protein and their body's gonna put on muscle. They're not gonna notice it.
They literally won't notice it. They won't feel it. They won't notice it. But that's what's happening. Yet, another thing that happens is we'll often exchange fat and muscle tissue. So personal, actually lose body fat and gain muscle weight and they can gain more muscle than they've lost fat. So it's a net weight gain. Once again, this is ultimately good as muscle tissue is your primary 90, probably 8% of your calorie burning tissue throughout the body. That's where the action is.
Once again, sometimes the sheer stress, anxiety, fear of including more healthy fat and protein when these have been deficient, will stimulate weight gain or even holding onto water weight. When people go into various levels of stress response, some people extra stress, they're not gonna put on body fat. They're gonna literally hang onto water. Um, and if they have enough weight on their body, they might not notice that the extra weight that they've gained is water weight. Some people know when they're bloated, face gets a little puffy, the fingers or whatever. Um, so I hope you're seeing the underlying metabolic reasons of why this can happen and why when you do the right thing. Doing the right thing here means when you have a weight loss client who is clearly starving themselves, they're eating, they've been eating low calorie, they're low in essential fats and or low in protein and or they're meal skipping. Any combination of that.
Now what I'm gonna tell you is the majority of weight loss clients, when you course correct macronutrient balance, when you course correct meal timing, when you course correct intense caloric restriction, the majority of weight loss clients, I'm gonna say it's at least 95% of them are
gonna lose weight
or, or they'll be neutral. Nothing will happen. Their body's just gonna be changing, but not weight wise before your eyes. So majority of people, when you make the tweaks, they're gonna go in a good direction or it's gonna look like they're going nowhere.
Small percentage of people, whatever that is for whatever reason. Because all humans are different. And there's a bell curve when they start doing the right thing, they're going to gain weight for the reasons I told you. The body is still in a survival response. It senses key nutrients that it needs, it grabs onto weight because it thinks it's on a desert island and it had a momentary reprieve. Let me store this stuff with body fat 'cause I'm gonna be starving again tomorrow 'cause we've been starving the body. So you have to let that play out. It takes time.
Once again, the other reason is the body will gain necessary muscle weight because the body needs muscle weight because it wants muscle weight. The body is following its own genius plan. But if the person's weighing this, they're going, oh s**t, I gained weight. And meanwhile, what they've gained is the most valuable weight they could possibly gain, which is muscle tissue, which which is gonna start to burn calories. They will literally be increasing their metabolic rate because they have more muscle tissue. It's what they want. Or they've exchanged fat and muscle and it's a net muscle weight gain.
Or they're simply just so freaking stressed out that they're causing more stress induced weight gain.
So the bottom line here, my friends, when people say, I did what you said and I gained weight, I want you to know that when we do what's truly right for the body, the body will eventually come around. It takes time. People who have artificially calorie or fat or protein restricted for many years, they're gonna have an imbalance metabolism and it may take more time than the average client for certain people to reach more balance. So lesson here, you don't want to have to deal with this nonsense, which is intense sometimes, but it's, it's interesting. So the bottom line here is, this is why I think it is imperative. One reason to have weight loss clients let go of the scale completely for the first few months at least. Especially if they are long-term food restrictors especially.
Yeah, especially if they're long-term dieters and especially if their stress level is super high.
Okay, Mr. And Mrs. Client, I want you to let go weighing yourself for at least two months. I just want you to, but you can't leave the scale in the bathroom or in the bedroom. You have to actually put it in a box, put it in a bag, bury it 12 feet under the ground, okay? You're not gonna bury it 12 feet under the ground. I want you to stick it in your basement somewhere weird where you can't, you're not gonna want to get to it because my friends, your clients who are not weighing themselves, there's a 98% chance they ain't gonna know when they've gained two or three or four or five pounds. I mean that. They're not gonna know. And the body will eventually take care of itself. And the reality is, if they're paying attention without looking at the scale and they're paying attention to the work that you are doing with them, they're gonna notice that when they shift their macronutrient balance, they might have more energy, they might feel better, they might have less mood issues during the day. They might have sharper, sharper brain cognition and memory and attentiveness.
But if they're focused on the number on the scale and they see the number on the scale, change, they're gonna freak on you because their worst nightmare has just happened. So you gotta talk your client off of the cliff
and no, it is a cliff. When your client comes in with this, they're freaking out.
So they're only doing this because they weigh themselves. So it's your job. That's why I'm telling you, I want my clients to take away the scale. As soon as this happened to me, about three or four times, I realize, okay, best thing to do is have them take away the scale. Because I'd rather avoid this conversation honestly. I'd just rather avoid it and let the client move through things and let them, let metabolism do what it needs to do. It'll eventually find its rightful place as you're helping your client eat better quality food, better macronutrient balance, eat slower, stop calorie restricting, stop denying the body, stop starving it, and putting it into a starvation response. The body needs to unwind. They're doing the right thing for the, maybe the first time in their life, and some bodies are gonna grab onto weight. Okay? So you gotta talk them off the cliff and explain to them, Mr. Mr. Alein, here's what's going on. You have been punishing your body for so long through low calorie eating. You have been deficient in macronutrients for so long that right now your metabolism is learning how to write itself. So what I will do then, my friends, is to explain to my client the pieces that I just explained to you. Here's what's going on. Mr. And Mrs. Client, my best bet of what's happening is this. And this is very common. What's happening for you is that we put you on and, and you say this to your client. If it's true, if you tweak their macronutrient balance and they're eating more protein,
you let them know you've put on muscle weight. That's chances are best probability of what's happened. You've put on muscle weight. What will happen, because you've been low in protein, your body has been lower in muscle, it has been hungry for muscle tissue, but you have not been giving your body the raw materials that it needs to build muscle tissue, which is protein. Muscle tissue is the tissue in your body that burns calories. You want more muscle. I want more muscle if I want to have my best metabolism when it comes to calorie burning metabolism. So what will happen is your body is writing itself. It is grabbing the protein and building muscle tissue as fast as possible. Therefore, it looks like an initial weight gain. However, over time, your metabolism will then rebalance and you'll start to use that muscle tissue that you've just built to actually burn calories and slowly reclaim your natural metabolism. You have distorted your metabolism based on how you've been starving your body.
I am helping you reclaim your metabolism
on top of that, in a weird way, Mr. Mrs. Client, here's your biggest fear and we're gonna confront it head on. Your biggest fear is that you're gonna gain weight. Not only do you wanna lose weight, you certainly don't want to gain weight. So this is your opportunity to learn how to trust your body. That's the, that, that, that is really, to me, the biggest bottom line lesson here. You have to trust that when you do the right thing for your body, that your body will eventually come around. You know what it's like, Mr. Mr. Client. It's like having a splinter. Imagine you had a big splinter in your hand and it's hurting you and is bleeding and is getting infected. What do you have to do? You have to pull out the splinter. You know what happens though? And you got a big splinter in your hand. When you start to pull out that splinter, it's even more pain than just leaving the splinter in, in the 20 seconds it takes to pull out that splinter. It's even more pain. So what do you do? Stop pulling out the splinter. Aha.
Lead the splinter in. That's what you're doing. If you're gonna go back to low calorie eating and low fat eating and low protein eating, which hasn't gotten you where you wanna go, you know, I'm sorry you gained three pounds, two pounds, one pound, five pounds. I'm sorry, from the standpoint that it's upset you. But you gotta learn to trust your body. You, you have to learn to trust your journey. You have to learn that if you do the right things for yourself, even though it's uncomfortable, even though it's a little painful, you gotta learn how to endure a little bit. You gotta pull that splinter out. We're pulling out a splinter right now, and it hurts a little more.
Now, if your client can't hang with you, they won't hang with you. Have I had a client leave me around that? Yes, maybe two or three till I learn what to do till I learned. Because you learn. So you explain to your client that they've gained muscle tissue. You also explain to them there's a good chance you've lost fat tissue. That's a good thing. And you've explain, and you've exchanged muscle and fat tissue. So you've lost some fat, you've gained some muscle, but you've had a net muscle weight gain, which similar to just gaining muscle weight, you're gaining calorie burning tissue, which is what you need, which will then give the body what it needs to come around. You know what it's like Mr. And Mr. Client, we talk about the splinter. It's also similar to, you know, let's say somebody's outta shape and they wanna start running and they wanna run a marathon and they haven't run in since they were a kid and they're 40 or 50 years old.
And you know something, the first day you go out running, it's the most nasty. I've done this before. It's nasty. It's torturous. Everything hurts and there's nothing fun about it. And you can't believe that you're doing this and you can't believe how irritating it is. And it's the worst feeling in the world. But then when you get out the next day and run a little bit more, and the next day and the next day, eventually your body adapts and your body adjusts, and all of a sudden that which is unbelievably painful on your joints and your legs and your lungs, it starts to shift.
So you're in discomfort right now. I need you to step up. I need you to step up and put on your big girl pants. I need you to step up and put on your big boy pants
and not drop into
the kind of response that has you run away in fear about pulling out a splinter that's infecting you.
You've punished your body a long time. It is now time to learn how to trust your body. This is an opportunity, this is an opportunity for you to learn how to trust your body.
And that's why I didn't want you using the scale. Remember we talked about that? If you indeed talked about that with your client, 'cause I want you to listen to your body wisdom right now. I am being the voice for your body wisdom.
So my friends, I will talk to my client like that.
I will not let them
drop into their biggest fear without saying something. I eat all the things I've just said. 'cause that's your client's biggest fear. You see, I eat food, I eat more food. You see, you see, I have to eat this minimal amount of food. No, you don't. I know you think you do, but you don't. And hang around a little bit longer and trust and relax and you'll see.
So this is a great conversation. I actually hope you get this opportunity, um, just to test your own metal, so to speak, um, and to see what it's like. I've learned what I've learned because I've had very powerful and difficult and intense client experiences and client moments.
Okay, my friends, here's another client objection. But if I don't lose the weight, then how can I help others lose weight? I need to be a good coach and make this work again, but I'm not losing weight and, and, and I'm trying to learn how to help others lose weight. So I need to be a good coach and, and make this work. I need to lose this weight. How come I'm not losing the weight? Because I wanna be a coach for weight loss.
Now, this happens a lot. Many health practitioners get into the business to get into the business of l coaching so they could lose weight or shapeshift their own body. And, and it's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that. We teach what we need to learn. Here's the challenge though.
What often happens is people, or sometimes happens, people are using my personal need to lose weight as a professional excuse.
They're putting up this professional front of
kind of short cutting and cheating life. We're using this noble reason, but I'm trying to help others. I'm here to help others lose weight. And so how come I'm not losing weight? So we're bargaining with the universe about why we should lose weight because we're being so altruistic. It's not just for me, it's for other people, and it's for my business and it's for my income. How am I gonna make money? How am I gonna have my business? Well, don't have this business then. And I really mean that. Don't make your weight loss
and your income dependent on each other. You cannot. You must not. Do not stop, please, as best you can. Do not tie personal weight loss to your income or your professional success.
So what I'm saying is, if you truly believe, well, I can't coach or counsel people around weight loss, if I have all this weight on my body, then then fine, then that's right. Then don't coach and counsel them in another way. IE not weight loss,
but don't set up the conundrum. It's not a, it's not fair to you. It's not fair to life, it's not fair to anyone and it doesn't work like that. You know, I wanna be a financial advisor and I'm investing all my money and I, I, I keep losing it. I have to make millions of dollars if I'm gonna help people make millions of dollars. That's kind of what it sounds like. Uh, no, no, it's not how life works. You can't invent a noble reason like that.
I get that. You wanna lose weight, that's fine. Then let's focus on you losing weight. Then let's, let's work on you. You work on you and focus on you. That's totally legitimate.
And if you get where you wanna go and you get inspired to help others around weight lost than hallelujah, that's great. But don't make those two
tied together so much that that's what occupies your brain all the time. I have to lose this weight for my professional success and for my income. And so I can do this work.
The reality is, my friends, people come in all sizes and ages and shapes and there's a set of clients for just about everyone. We can't be all things to all people. So it's all about being honest with ourselves about the kind of work we truly, the the work we truly want to do, who we truly want to serve, and what our best gifts are when it comes to helping others.
Yeah, there's a subset of people who wanna lose weight, who will not go to someone or don't want to see someone who they think is carrying around extra weight that's totally legitimate. There's also a subset of people who have body image issues or they have health issues or they overeat or they binge eat and they need help from somebody that they feel comfortable with. And many people appreciate and prefer a coach or a practitioner who's real, who's human, who's down to earth, who's not perfect in looks and fitness and health habits, and they're immortal and they're doing everything right and they're glamorous and they're fabulous. So there's plenty of ways you can help people with overeating, with binge eating, with emotional eating,
with digestion, with mood, with health habits,
even if you're not at your perfect weight.
But don't make your profession and your weight loss equal to each other.
There's way too much pressure. It's not how the universe works. And you have to really recalibrate yourself and really see who you want to serve and what your best gifts are. So that's the inquiry that you need to go on and ask yourself.
I hope that was helpful. Here's another objection that comes up. So the previous objection is, is a coach objection. It's not the client objection. Here's another client objection. But my doctor said I need to lose this weight. This is a health issue. So your client's not losing the weight. My doctor said I need to lose the weight. This is a health issue. I've heard this a million times. It still drives me a little crazy. I gotta say because 19 outta 20 times when somebody says this to me, it's disingenuous. They don't know it. It's a disingenuous statement. They could care less about, of course they care about health,
but they wanna lose weight. Let's be honest, you wanna lose weight.
If you're so concerned about your health, then how come you haven't been practicing health over the years? And I'm not even referring to your weight.
A lot of people, all of a sudden their health becomes important when the doctor says you need to lose the weight for your health. But meanwhile, they haven't put any attention on their health, really haven't put attention on good nutrition. They haven't put attention on moving their body in a good way. They haven't put attention on a lot of good health practices.
So for that client, there's a number of options. Yep, I get that. That's what your doctor said. And I get that you wanna lose weight. So what exactly is the health issue? Help me out here. What exactly is the health issue? Did was your doctor specific with you? So I want you to just get your client to really see if they know what they're talking about. No, he just said it's a health issue and that I can get diabetes or heart disease. Okay, got it. Here's what I would love for you to do. I would love for you to get the book called Health at Every Size. I'd like you to read it. And if you don't wanna get the book at health at every size and read it, let me just explain to you very briefly the key pieces of the book. The book compiles all the research on health and weight, and it turns out there's a huge body of work and body of evidence and scientific studies that dispels the scientific myth that being fat automatically means being unhealthy. That extra body fat, according to what the experts say, automatic automatically, automatically means being unhealthy. So Mr. Ms Client, the truth is, yes, there are indeed those who can benefit from losing weight for health reasons. There are people who are fat and unhealthy. There are people who are fat and very healthy. There are people who are slender and very unhealthy. There are people who are slender and healthy and there's everything else in between.
So what I'm trying to tell you, if you don't wanna buy the book and read it, you can also Google the term obesity paradox. Just go home and Google it and see what you come up with. So all I'm trying to say to you is, I get you wanna lose weight, I want to help you lose the weight. I'm here to help you lose the weight. We're gonna lose the weight by doing the things that we know work for a body sustainably. So we're going, so we're doing things different from how you've normally done them. I get that you are wanting to lose the weight to be healthy,
but I don't want you to put extra stress on yourself around this because we simply don't know what the future holds for you. So yes, might this make you healthier? Sure. Might it not make a difference if you lose weight when it comes to your health? Sure, there are plenty of slender people who are dying every day who have all kinds of health issues. If you don't know them, just visit a hospital.
So weight loss, weight gain is never necessarily a guarantee of anything. And we are proceeding to help you reach your natural weight.
So the reason why I'm focusing on this, my friends, is that
Ula la I want you to be alert to discovering is your client truly about being healthy when it comes to weight loss, right? Like, is this really, do they really care about their health or are they using this healthy strategy to mask doing the deeper work? Because all of a sudden they feel like, okay, I have to be healthy, tell me to do healthy things. But meanwhile, oftentimes we use this healthy thing as a mask, as a deterrent from doing the deeper work that has to be done. So there's a fine line here is all I'm saying. Yes, it is so true. Many people benefit from being motivated by a medical doctor in this way, and many people use this to avoid getting to the root cause of why the weight is there in the first place. They think if the doctor says this is a health issue, then somehow my weight has to come off through healthy things, the right diet or the right supplements, which might be what that person needs. But the weight gain might have all kinds of connections to stress and to relationship and to sexuality and to meaning and to purpose and to issues at work and in life, which you don't normally think of as health.
You see what I'm saying? So it actually is a, it's um, it's a misdirection.
And if my client keeps coming back, I'm not losing any weight. This is gonna affect my health. Oh no,
your client is using the health as a mask. So I just need you to notice when a client is coming up with this kind of comment. So yes, do healthy things for your health, and if your client is avoiding with you work that you know needs to be done in other places, then this is your opportunity to let them know that this is not just about using vitamins and herbs to help somebody with their health,
that they have to look at their emotional health or their soul's health. If indeed that's where you see the work needs to go. So I'm just, I'm just raising my hand here and letting you know that this comes up.
And it is a hard one because people feel they're so empowered when their doctor says, you need to do this for your health.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they go into this intense stress. So your job is to help your client de-stress. Their job is to de-stress themselves around health. The worst thing you could do for your health, Mr. Mr. Ms. Klein is be stressed out about your health. You're fine right now. You're okay. You're not dying. Here you are, you're up and about. It's time to trust your body. It's time to trust life. If you're going to stress into weight loss, here's what happens. If you're going to relax into weight loss, here's what happens. So if your client is using health reasons to stress themselves out and to stress you out, don't let them bully you. You're stressing yourself out about getting healthy. Let me tell you why Mr. And Mrs. Client, that actually takes you in the opposite direction of where you wanna go. And then you explain some final thoughts, my friends, we have one body in this life and it moves through many changes, many incarnations. Have you noticed if we don't honor love on occupy and respect the body we have right now, suffering is generally predictable.
Life is short. My friends, the body's not gonna be here too long.
That's why we're doing this work. Might as well love what you got. Now. Might as well love the body no matter where it's going or what it's doing. Could you get annoyed at it? Sure. Do you have your moments where you want it to change? Absolutely. Do you put efforts into making it change and transform in the direction you want it to go? Absolutely. But love it there. Attacking the body is a collective disease. It's not one person's fault or shortcoming. And it takes a collective effort to overcome such a damaging viral belief,
embodiment, body love, healing body image is a beautiful victory and has untold gifts that keep on giving my friends it's baby steps.
You gotta get used to baby steps. Be a good parent for yourself. Be a good parent for your client. For those of you that are actually parents and you've raised babies, baby steps, you're not pushing your baby to learn how to run and jump over things when they're three months old. That ain't what's happening. Baby steps.
What a powerful conversation. What a useful conversation.
As always, if there's any things that you've heard me say that don't work for you, throw them out. As always, if there's things that capture your attention or your imagination, consider them. If there's something or things that I say that push you to your edge or that make you a little bit edgy or uncomfortable, then that's usually a sign. There's something to grapple with, something to look at, something to listen to, something to learn on your journey. That's a good thing.
As we do this work, as we learn this work, we're working on self oftentimes. So be gentle with you. Be understanding practice having you as your own client. Meaning do your best to unconditionally accept yourself even if you wish to transform. When change and shape shift your own body. How can you do that from a place of exploration? How can you do that from a place of love? How can you let go of your conditions around love and have a bit more unconditional love for self? How can you stand by yourself? How can we not abandon ourselves?
How can we inspire ourselves to change our internal conversation?
That's so much of what this is about.
And the reality is we're working on all levels. Yes, we're working on metabolism and we're working on our inner world as well when need be. Sometimes one is more needed than the other. More about the food. Sometimes it's more about the inner work. Sometimes it's a combination of everything.
It's a journey. We're stepping into the unknown. I really appreciate you being willing to step into the unknown with me. So this is the end of our conversation on weight and body image. And as we get into, you know, further conversations about binge eating, overeating, uh, we're gonna be getting into understanding how to do intakes more. Next, how to understand macronutrient balance even more, uh, will be returning to weight and body image in different ways, uh, with different clients. They'll show up in other challenges for sure. Um, and not all your clients will be dealing with weight. We've started here with weight and body image because that's ground zero for a majority of people right now. Um, and your practice, your clientele will be focused on what you choose to focus on, but you'll learn how to catch a lot based on what you've learned. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for us, and I'll see you on the other side, my friends.

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