Episode 91 - Intent-ful Eating, Part II

Transcript

Renee Stephens: Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss. I’m your host Renee Stephens, and together we’re accessing and adjusting the control panel of your mind/body/spirit system, bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life. Inside Out Weight Loss is about changing the causes of your weight struggle, because everything that you do or don’t do, including overeating or under exercising, is caused by something. And if you try to change those behaviors without addressing what’s causing those behaviors, your results will be short lived and ultimately frustrating. Most diet programs tell you the right foods to eat and the right exercises to do to be healthy, slim and fit. And the good news is that we all have a really darn good understanding of what’s healthy and what’s not. Lets face it: who doesn’t know that broccoli is generally a better choice than a Big Mac. Now there may be subtleties to nutrition that you don’t understand. But you know what, it’s not absolutely necessary, because for all of the education and understanding that we’ve had about nutrition – and I dare say that people today probably know a whole heck of a lot more about nutrition than people did, say, 30, 40, 50 years ago when they were slimmer. Our education isn’t doing it. And I say this from personal experience because I had an encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition. I devoured every article, every bit of information I could on what the right foods were to eat, when to eat them and how to eat them. I counted calories, I was meticulous, I was obsessed. And through all of it, my overeating, my binge eating just got worse. Education didn’t do it. The question then becomes “What will do it? What can do it?” To make lasting changes in your relationship with food and ultimately in your relationship with your body, we must go beneath the surface. We must understand our motivation; what causes us to want to overeat in the first place? Now you may never have thought about this because overeating, the perception is that overeating is an indulgence, that it’s pleasurable. But come on, lets think about it. It may be pleasurable in the moment, but do you really like feeling bloated? Do you really like feeling heavy and lethargic? I don’t think so, I bet you don’t. So something’s going on to get you to on purpose make yourself feel heavy, lethargic, bloated and generally yucky. That’s where we go in Inside Out Weight Loss; we go beneath the surface to understand and from that place, from that deep place of understanding what’s really making you overeat, we go in and we simply change it. I say simply because the actual change is possible, and yet there’s a great deal of respect, of gratitude and appreciation that goes on in the process. This may be a lot to digest right now if you’re new to this show, but I encourage you to listen or even to go back and listen to the prologue and begin at the beginning where I share the foundational steps to this program. What are the results? Check out the reviews on iTunes and you’ll get a good idea. Or send me an email; I think I have a forty page file of listeners just like you emailing me to tell me how their lives have been transformed. What’s necessary to do this deep work of transformative change? First off, sit back and relax. That’s right. The deepest most powerful work happens when you are deeply relaxed and feeling good about yourself.

Renee Stephens: So take a breath in and allow yourself to drop down inside and become present with you, allowing yourself to go inside in that place that only you know, that place that is so familiar to you. Allow yourself to drop down into your body, noticing how much your body is doing in every moment. Imagine you can feel your breath go in through your lungs and that oxygen passed through the membrane of your lugns into your bloodstream, nourishing those blood cells with beautiful oxygen. And those blood cells are pumped by your heart. And they travel through every part of your body to every nook and cranny from the top of your head to the tips of your toes, that blood is constantly circulating, constant movement within your body; the breath, the heart, the blood.

Renee Stephens: On another level also constantly moving within your body is your system of digestion. Your stomach will be digesting whatever it is that you have eaten or drunk recently. It will be passing that food down into your intestines and your body will be extracting the necessary nutrients; that’s what happens in the intestines. The intestines have special bits that take out and extract special nutrients for special uses throughout your body. And all of this happens with an elimination process, constantly within your body - the heart, the blood, the lungs, the digestion – it’s all going on out of your conscious awareness. It’s extraordinary to think how many processes are going on and to know how difficult it is for modern science to replicate even the most simple of these. There are hormones being released, the endocrine system is working and keeping the levels at just the right level. How about taking a few moments to appreciate and thank your body for all that it does completely out of your conscious awareness, keeping you alive, allowing you then at even another level to listen to the sound of my voice, to understand the words that I’m saying, to make meaning of them, to apply them to your own life and perhaps make connections with things that make sense to you. All of this is happening simply as you’re listening to the sound of my voice and the words that I’m saying. There’s processing going on all the time. So lets just take that moment to appreciate our magnificent bodies. Now I know that there may be parts of your body that you are not in love with. There may be more of your body than you want there to be. And yet your body, your heart, your lungs treats all of you equally and does its darndest to nourish all of the tissue on your body. Every bit of it gets blood, every bit of it gets oxygen, every bit of it gets what it needs to be living tissue. There’s a wisdom there, an appreciation.

Renee Stephens: And so with that appreciation I’d like you to come back and be fully present here with me now, as we go back and talk more about the power of intention where we started last week, discussing the experiments or the photographs – I shouldn’t say experiments, they’re photographs – of Masuto Emoto, who took pictures of crystallized water; in other words, ice crystals, water that had been imbued with different intentions. Serendipitously I just came across the results of some further research on the power of intention on water. It seems that Lynn McTaggart who wrote the book The Intention Experiment, McTaggart has created or brought together a community of people around the world who volunteered to participate in various scientific experiments on the power of intention. Well it seems that one of her most recent experiments in collaboration with various scientists was to determine the effects of intention on water. And so some very, very sensitive equipment was utilized to photograph the light imprint of water under various conditions. It seems that all living beings and water and other things emit a very, very low level of light simply by existing and this hypersensitive photographic equipment can actually take pictures of this light signature; it’s like a light fingerprint, that water and human beings have. So they took this light picture of water that was tap water, they took the light picture of stagnant water and they took a light picture of bottled water. And then McTaggart called on her community to imbue some of this water with an intention to replicate the light signature of the bottled water I think it was. And so this experiment went on under double blind controlled circumstances where the people giving the intention did not know which water sample it was, nor did McTaggart, nor did the researchers, and the photographs were taken afterwards. And lo and behold, the intention worked; the light signature of the water that was given the intention to match the light signature of the bottled water I think, well that water matched. Now I’m not sure I’m explaining this very well, and I’ve given a link on my blog to a detailed description of these experiments so that you can read for yourself exactly what the protocol was and see the pictures; that’s at personallifemedia.com/renee. So check that out and you will see how effective the intention was on water. So further research, further evidence – perhaps it’s not conclusive because Emoto after all was simply taking photographs – and yet it is highly suggestive of the power of intention.

Renee Stephens: Now when we come back from our break, which we’re about to take, we’ll go further into the power of your intention on transforming your body and your food. You’re listening to Personal Life Media. This is Renee Stephens, host of Inside Out Weight Loss.

Renee Stephens: We’re back now. Before the break we were talking about the incredible power of intention on water and how the recent research is showing us that in fact this isn’t just hocus pocus, this is real stuff that makes a real difference. So last week we talked about helping out the poor beleaguered burrito or whatever it is that you’re eating that you don’t feel so good about, by at least imbuing it with an intention of love and an intention for it to nourish your body. Now it’s a whole lot easier if we start out with food that already has a good vibe so to speak to it or more specifically a good light signature; that would probably be, that would tend to be food from the Farmers Market or food that’s organic. But we can’t always be perfect. So imagine what it would be like to imbue all of the food that you eat with a positive intention. I want to share with you an experience that one of the members of my current group program shared with me and the group, because it so demonstrates what I’m talking about here. This group member was a real on or off person; she was either really, really good about her eating or really, really bad with her eating. It was one way or the other. Highly, highly restrictive and disciplined or eating everything and anything in sight. Well, she joined my program and really gained a much deeper level of self acceptance by going through the guided journeys and doing the practices. And eventually she had this experience where she went out to eat and she said, “You know, I am just not going to restrict myself. I’m going to go out and have this incredibly indulgent food from one of the best restaurants around”, I think it was fish and chips and it was this renowned spot she was going to have these fish and chips. So she went out and she ate it because she gave herself full permission to do it, and guess what? She discovered all these years that she’s been restricting herself and held that up as the forbidden fruit that would be fabulous only if she could have it and it would be very bad if she did have it, so when she did have it she was busy thinking how bad she was. Well this time she had it allowing herself full permission, and discovered that she just doesn’t like it that much. Who knew! How about that? My goodness! And then it turns out that there were a bunch of the quote/unquote “forbidden foods” that she just doesn’t actually like. So as she becomes more and more in tune with her body she discovers that there are a lot of healthy foods, a lot of should eat foods that she actually enjoys and a lot of quote/unquote, “bad foods”, that given the chance she doesn’t enjoy them very much. Well what a surprise huh? Who knew that?

Renee Stephens: Now I’m not saying that this is going to be perfect, that your natural tastes are going to be always for kelp and granola, because that’s probably not going to happen. But I am saying that if you just relax about it, the food that is perhaps not perfect for you could actually be fine for you, especially if you come at it with an attitude of reverence, an attitude of appreciation and gratitude. So many cultures and religious traditions have a brief ritual of giving gratitude before a meal, of holding hands, of saying grace. In the United States that tends to happen once a year on Thanksgiving. I would rather that you choose your very, very favorite indulge food – lets just say it’s chocolate cake, that seems to be the one I love to use. So you take your very favorite indulgence food and rather than never eat it, I would much rather that you eat it in a state of reverence and appreciation, that you savor every morsel of it and you allow yourself full appreciation of the sensory experience of eating the cake; the taste, the texture, the smell, the way that it feels in your stomach. Appreciate it all. It’s much better than being uptight about it. I heard a term some years ago called ‘ortharexic’, and ortharexic is a term to describe someone who is so uptight about what he or she eats that they’re actually unhealthy. They have extreme restrictive diets. I once knew a guy who had been a sproutataria. A sproutatarian is someone who eats nothing but sprouts, like alfalfa sprouts, only sprouted foods and that was his entire diet for a while until he gave me some unwelcome detail on what was actually happening to his body as it was sort of deteriorating as he was living. It was not pretty, believe me. So an ortharexic is someone who’s so uptight that they’re actually unhealthier than a person who has perhaps a less technically healthy diet. So, and if you think cross culturally of cultures where people really do savor and enjoy and appreciate their food and take time over their food, you will discover I suspect that those cultures do not tend to have a lot of obese people. They don’t tend to have a lot of weight problems, until they start to depart from their traditions slowing down and appreciating and enjoy their food and move to more of a fast food culture, a drive-thru culture. So where fast food goes, where the drive-thru goes, so goes obesity. Think about it. I like to use the example of the French. The French, the traditional French culture loves food. They take great care in selecting the right ingredients on a daily basis, of getting the best food and making seasonal favorites. Each region will have it’s specialty, its specialty cheese or food that they create and is appreciated throughout the region and known throughout the country. The French take a long time over their meals. They’ll have multiple courses, ending most meals with a course of cheese for goodness sakes, and yet they’re slim. French who eat like this are slim. Because they are taking that time and appreciation with their food. The Spanish actually are very much the same way. They’ll have multiple small courses of food. Japanese, same thing; artistically designed, beautifully presented food of high quality ingredients eaten in a state of appreciation. Now Americans, we eat in the car, we eat while walking down the street, we eat while exercising. Alright, that’s endurance athletes, but… Have I mentioned how little enjoyment I get out of food that I’ve eaten while training for a marathon – I only did one. And all those goos and drinks, boy that was low enjoyment calories if ever there were low enjoyment calories. I am a water girl now. Water while exercising, calories when I can appreciate them. So we eat while watching TV, all the time we do this. We eat when we’re in the movie theatre. I remember when I went to Spain as a student and I went to the movies and they didn’t have popcorn. I was absolutely distraught. I felt like I needed a refund. Who can go to the movie theatre without popcorn? But alas, they didn’t do popcorn in movie theatres at that time in Spain – I don’t know if it’s changed, someone will update me on that, I’m sure. But Americans, we love that. And of course, movie theatre popcorn in the states is calorie dense. In other words, it’s Thanksgiving dinner in a bucket.

Renee Stephens: So we’re almost out of time today, and next episode I’m going to take you on a guided journey to imbue your eating experience with ritual and appreciation. In the meantime I’d like you to start thinking of your eating ritual. Have we talked about ritual? I’ve got a lot to say about ritual as a matter of fact, because it’s really important. I want you to start thinking about what you can do in just a moment, only take a few moments for this, before you eat to bring a sense of appreciation to the experience of eating. I want you to enjoy your food more. That’s the crazy thing about this program; the whole idea is to bring more pleasure into your life and lose weight at the same time. Whose idea was that? Just crazy, huh? Anyway, we are out of time for today, but remember next episode I’m going to take you on that guided journey, to automate, to imbue your eating experiences with gratitude and appreciation, and the intention for health and nourishment to your body.

Renee Stephens: That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. P.S., I have posted a blog entry with links to the Lynn McTaggart research experiment and to the Emoto water pictures on my blog, which is at personallifemedia.com/renee, r-e-n-e-e. Personallifemedia.com/renee. And if you visit, leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think. By the way, you can find me on Face Book these days; just search for my name, Renee Stephens, and ask to be my friend. There’s also an official Inside Out Weight Loss group on Face Book that you can join as well. By the way I’d love to hear what you have to say. Call 206-350-5333, let me know what’s going on for you, your situation. I may play your question or comment on the air and give you free coaching. Ooh la la! This is your host Renee Stephens, and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet, enabling you to develop and share your abundant souls gifts. Join me as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves. Take good care.