Episode 80 - The Foundation for Lasting Weight Loss

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. A special welcome to new listeners to this show. Inside Out Weight Loss is not your typical diet podcast. In fact we talked little about what you should do. You probably know that all too well already. I certainly did. Instead Inside Out Weight Loss is about getting you to do what you already know that you should, but from a different place. It’s rediscovering your body’s inner wisdom so that you actually not only want to eat well and exercise, you genuinely prefer to. Imagine that. I really don’t care where you’re coming from, how long you’ve been suffering, how long you’ve been struggling with your weight, it could’ve been your entire lifetime or only a recent development in your life. It doesn’t matter for the principles of Inside Out Weight Loss to work for you. Whether you’ve tried everything on the block a few times only to be back at square one again or worse, or you’re lucky enough to find this approach when you’re fairly new to the weight struggle. Inside Out Weight Loss will work for you by undermining the specific mentality, the specific mindset of the struggle. Because it turns out there’s a whole system of thinking, a system of beliefs that in fact our epidemic in our society that caused the weight struggle to be a struggle in the first place. By listening to Inside Out Weight Loss and practicing the principles it contains, you will undermine and eventually completely release that old mindset that’s been keeping you away from the body and the life of your dreams. I encourage you to listen to the balance of today’s show, and also it’s very important to go back to the beginning starting with a prologue to hear the foundational concepts that are so important to this program. Also you’ll get many, many times more out of this program than you put in, but you must put in to get out. There’s a thriving Yahoo group associated with Inside Out Weight Loss, you’ll find a link at personallifemedia.com/renee, r-e-n-e-e, where you can join fellow journiers to support and be supported. Now please take note, this is not a collective bellyache group at all; it’s a decidedly positive upbeat place where people share what’s working for them and ask for support from the group. So once again, to new listeners and to veteran listeners, welcome aboard.

Renee Stephens: And as we begin to drop deeper into this episode of Inside Out Weight Loss I’d like you to drop down inside. I’d like you to begin by becoming present with yourself. Take a few moments, a mini spa moment within your day, to allow the cares of the day, the things that you’re in the middle of, the things that you’re doing and will do and have done and haven’t done and don’t want to do and want to do, allow all of those things to begin to fade away into the distance, knowing that at any time you can always go back to them. But for now you can just let them go. They’ll be just fine for a few moments while you become more and more present with your current experience. Go ahead now and notice your thoughts. Notice that you have thoughts, lots and lots of them, all the time. It’s a variable parade of thoughts all day across your mind, up and down and side to side, they come, they go, sometimes they stay, sometimes they leave, but always eventually they pass right on by. And simply notice that. Sometimes our thoughts jump around. The Buddhists call it monkey mind, from topic to topic. And other times they go further and further into a specific thought or idea, and just notice that.

Renee Stephens: As you’re listening to the sound of my voice you may have only focus on what I’m saying or you may notice other thoughts coming and going, going and coming. And simply allow that to happen. And as you notice that I’d like you to actually notice that you’re noticing your thoughts. That’s right. You are noticing that you’re noticing your thoughts. You can step back and notice that there’s somebody there paying attention to his or her thoughts. Now from this place you may also notice that when you’re noticing your thoughts or when someone is noticing their thoughts that there is a noticer of thoughts, and there are the thoughts which are being noticed. Two parties to that venture; the noticer and the noticed. They’re two parts. They’re different. The noticer is not the noticed and the noticed is not the noticer. In other words you have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts. Did you catch that? You are the person who has thoughts. Sometimes you have many, many, many of them. Sometimes you have less of them. At times they go quickly and at times they go very, very slowly. At times they fade off into the distance, all of these thoughts that you have. Now it’s very interesting to notice this, isn’t it? That you have thoughts that in fact are not your thoughts. You’re something that is independent of those thoughts. Now similarly notice for a moment that you have a body. You have a head, you have a torso, you have arms and legs most likely, you have a spine, you have a belly, you have a heart. You have all of these things, standard equipment for each and every human being. You have a body. So notice that there is someone who’s noticing that she or he has a body. Therefore there’s the noticer and the body that’s being noticed, and therefore we know that you have a body but are not your body. The body’s kind of easy to notice because it’s so physical. Now we have thoughts, but we’re not our thoughts. We could even think of where are our thoughts? Where do they live? Do they live in a particular part of the brain? Could we dissect a brain and find a thought within there? Well no. A surgeon goes in to do brain surgery he doesn’t or she doesn’t find a specific thought. What the surgeon finds is brain tissue. It’s not the same thing as the thoughts. Similarly if a surgeon were to go into your body, the surgeon would find a body, a body that has certain physiological properties. If we were to measure those physiological properties we would get numbers and measurements for all sorts of things that would change. They would change, for example, based on your emotional state. So if you were excite your heart would beat faster and your blood would pump more quickly through your veins and certain hormones would be released and others would not be released, if you were excited, and if you were sad things would move more slowly for example. So the surgeon could see those things, the doctor could take measurements of those things, and yet there’s no place that we could see the emotions either. But somehow we all acknowledge and accept that we have emotions. And again, you have emotions, but you are not your emotions. There’s someone there, there’s something there, there’s some awareness or consciousness there that has emotions and a body and thoughts, and somehow that is you.

Renee Stephens: Now with your awareness of your awareness I’d like you to take a moment and go ahead and set your intent for this episode. Take a moment to reflect on the experience that you would like to have today. What’s the next step for you? Go ahead and invite it in now. Today I’d like to talk to you about creating that beautiful solid foundation for easy weight loss, because so often we simply try to change our behavior and become frustrated when it doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work? Because the foundation is not there. So lets go ahead and take a break now to support our sponsors, and when we come back we’ll go deeper inside the foundation that is the core and the key to making your journey easy, pleasurable and joyful. This is Inside Out Weight Loss and I’m your host Renee Stephens. You’re listening to personallifemedia.com.

Renee Stephen: We’re back now. I get quite a few emails from listeners asking me questions, and one that I read today said, “Can you help me with exercise motivation? I’ve done it all. I’ve tried going in the morning, I’ve tried going in the evening, I’ve joined a gym nearby where I live or where I work and nothing happens. No matter what I do I just can’t seem to get myself to go.” You know, that reminds me of my first job in high school was at a gym. I just was so excited to work at a gym, and one of the things that I did for $3.25 an hour plus something like half a percent commission on sales, is I sold memberships. Now back in those days we were allowed to sell lifetime memberships, which cost something like five or six hundred dollars, seemed to be a lot of money. Well after selling these memberships for a few months I came to be able to figure out right there at the moment of selling the membership who was going to actually use the gym and who wasn’t. And I knew for certain that the people who came in in their street clothes and joined, they did nothing but join, they joined, they gave me their credit card, signed up, signed on the dotted line and walked away, that I would likely never see those people again. On the other hand, the people who came in their workout gear and signed up and got a workout that very day, now those people were much more likely to become regular visitors to the gym, especially if they let me take them through a full sample workout and set up a program for them, because alas, back in those days there was not such thing as a personal trainer, we did it for anybody who joined the gym. And mind you, I was 16 and didn’t have any formal training either, but most of my people survived, I’m happy to say, at least the ones I know about. So what those people who would come in and sign up and spend their money but never show up lacked was a good foundation to their motivation. Gosh, that’s beginning to sound like a rap song; the foundation to the motivation… Remind me never to be a rap singer. Anyway, they didn’t have it. So when I get other questions from listeners, often they’re about specific behavior changes that they’re finding challenging. “I just can’t stop bingeing. I just can’t stop eating those afternoon treats. Once I get going I can’t stop”, etcetera, etcetera. And the advice is always the same. We must start from a place of inner alignment.

Renee Stephens: In other words, if you are in a struggle, any kind of struggle really, but lets talk specifically of course about a weight struggle. If you’re in a weight struggle what that tells us is that there are two parties. There is the part of you that is the struggler and there is the part of you that is being struggled with, and interestingly enough they are both parts of you. In other words, you’re in conflict. Part of you really wants to be slim and fit and healthy, oh yeah, go to the gym, wear the great bathing suit, be toned and trim at your body’s absolute best. Sounds truly delicious, doesn’t it? And there’s another part of you that says, “Hold the phone. No way, Jose. I don’t want to do that. Absolutely not. I’m getting something out of being overweight. I’m getting something out of overeating. I’m getting something out of carrying extra weight on my body. There’s a reason that I’m overweight in the first place”, because if there weren’t a reason you wouldn’t be overweight. So if with this struggle raging on inside of you, you say, “Okay, I’m going to go on the South Beach Diet”, “I’m going to go on the Hawaii Diet”, that sounds like a good one, doesn’t it? It’s funny, my listener Tim in, I believe he’s in New South Wales, Australia, wrote me and he calls the Inside Out Weight Loss program the North Shore Diet. I quite like that one. In any event, you say, “Alright, that’s it. From now on no more sweets. No more carbs, absolutely not, none of those, and I will only eat a protein when combined with a green vegetable under a full moon.” And you have your resolve, your willpower. You are so ready to go because you have had it with yourself. This time you are going to change, and you’re going to do it. And you make it for the first 15 minutes, you’re doing great, by the first hour and fifteen minutes your resolve is beginning to wane and by the second hour and fifteen minutes your teetering on the edge, and by hour three or day three or week three or whatever it is, off you go. It’s over, so that you then beat yourself up again. “How could I do that? Oh my god.” Well of course it’s over so soon, because if one side wins the other is losing. You’ve got a win-lose proposition going on. You are not in inner alignment. It’s like you’re in a rowboat and one side’s rowing forward and the other side is rowing in the opposite direction and you’re going around in circles, exhausting yourself in the meantime.

Renee Stephens: So what I want to talk about today, what I want to start talking about today is where the heck this behavior comes from. Every behavior has roots to it. In other words, every behavior has things that happen behind the scenes that then cause our behavior. So before we do something we invariably have a thought to do it. Now that thought – let me give you a caveat here, because you may say, “Gosh, I do it and I have no awareness whatsoever that I’m doing it”, it just happens. Doesn’t matter. All that means is that your thoughts are so quick, they’re happening so darn quickly that you’re completely unaware of them consciously, but they’re still there. In fact, one way to talk about the subconscious mind is to say that it’s the kind of thoughts that we have that happen so quickly we’re not aware of them. So behind every behavior is a thought. A thought, by the way, could be something that you say to yourself, it could be an image that flashes in your minds eye, or it could be a feeling that you have in your body, some kind of physical feeling. Those are all thoughts, different types of thoughts – visual, auditory and kinesthetic thoughts. So let me give you an example. If you are in the middle of the afternoon, you’re doing your work and you’re bored, you have a moment of boredom, “Oh, this is so dull” or even a moment of “Ugh, I don’t really want to do what I have to do next.” An image might pop up in your mind of the office goodies. Pop, there it is. Or you might say to yourself, “Ugh, I, you know, I could really use a snack right now.” And that’s so appealing compared to the dreariness of the boredom or the distaste that you have, so to speak, for the work, that the next thing you know you’re up out of your chair and it’s a hand to mouth situation. So what gets you to take that behavior? The thought that pops in your mind that this would be more appealing, there’s actually an evaluation that goes on that getting up to have a snack is more appealing than staying and enduring this unpleasant experience that you’re having. If you want to change that behavior of getting up to have a snack in the middle of the afternoon, especially if you’re not hungry, and you just make an edict with yourself - “That’s it, no more snacks in the afternoon” – where does that leave you? That leaves you with the yucky feeling of boredom or distaste for the next task that you have to do. Ugh, it leaves you in a pretty crummy place. Well human beings being what we are, we really don’t like to feel lousy, do we? We like to feel good. So the good feeling one is always going to win out. After a while your resolve is going to wither, it’s going to fall apart and the next thing you know you’ll be right back at it. So it’s kind of like if you have an apple tree and you want to grow oranges, you really, really, really, really want to grow oranges, so you take all the apples off of the tree, you give the apple tree orange fertilizer and maybe you even uproot the darn thing and put it in an orange orchard, and still it keeps producing apples. Well maybe in fact if you’re mean enough to it it’ll stop producing fruit all together, but it’s never going to produce oranges is it, because it is an apple tree, it has the roots of an apple tree, it has the trunk of an apple tree, it is wired to create apples. If you want an orange tree you need to begin with an orange seed. You need to have a root system that is an orange tree root system, you need to have a trunk that is an orange tree trunk, and when you have a trunk and an orange tree root system, then lo and behold, give yourself water and light and take good care of yourself, you will eventually produce oranges.

Renee Stephens: So that’s what we’re doing here at Inside Out Weight Loss. We are changing you so that you can produce a naturally slender existence. We are giving you a naturally slender root system, a naturally slender trunk, a naturally slender DNA. Actually technically you already have that, we’re just reawakening that, but we are creating those naturally slender roots within you so that the behavior becomes easy. So your behavior, should you choose to accept it, should you choose to go deeper and faster into this journey, is to start to notice those thoughts that precede your behaviors that you want to change. So if it’s the afternoon snack, what are the thoughts, is there an image that you flash across your mind? I have a client right now who when I asked her to imagine herself as a naturally slender person, she said, “I can’t do that because whenever I think of myself I see this chubby, almost obese person, an image of myself in my minds eye. That’s what I see, that’s my self-image.” So we first had to change that self-image so that she could then have the behaviors, we had to change some of her root system, so that she could then easily have the behaviors of a naturally slender person. So your homework, you’re going to keep a little journal of your thoughts that precede the behaviors that you don’t like, the ones that you want to change, the overeating behaviors. Now you can do this at the moment or you can also do it later in the day, I would do it within the same day as soon after as possible to jog your memory. But you just want to put yourself in that situation again and remember your thought sequence, remember any images that flashed on the movie screen of your mind, remember any things you said to yourself or the way that you felt and take a note of it. And of course we’ll go further in the next episode of Inside Out Weight Loss.

Renee Stephens: That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. By the way, if you choose to email me and ask me a question, it is highly likely that I’m going to recommend that you purchase my download called Sabotage Self Sabotage because it is a very powerful guided journey that creates a beautiful foundation for lasting change. It resolves that inner conflict and brings you into that place of inner alignment. There’s a link available at my blog at personallifemedia.com/renee on the right hand margin. And I would like to let you know that I do have something really good cooking for you. I have an information product, a guided program called Binge Free Forever that will be available in the Fall of 2009. If you’d like to make sure you find out about when this product is available as soon as it is, go to my website, mindforbody.com, m-i-n-d, f-o-r, b-o-d-y, and register there so you’ll get an email notification when it becomes available. 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 soul’s gifts. Join me as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves. Take good care.