Episode 82 - The Foundation for Lasting Weight Loss, Part III

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 you life. On today’s show the ultimate calorie free self renewal strategy, and how shifting your view of yourself can slim your body.

Renee Stephens: Inside Out Weight Loss isn’t what you might be expecting. If you’re new to the show you’ll learn that it’s not about nutrition and it’s not about exercise. There are plenty of great resources out there, and frankly most of us who’ve struggled with our weight know plenty about nutrition and exercise. But knowing so much doesn’t help. We keep on doing the things that we know we shouldn’t. Inside Out Weight Loss is about getting ourselves to do what we already know that we should. But not from a place of willpower, not from a place of force, but rather from a place deep inside ourselves. Inside Out Weight Loss is about transforming our motivation so all of us actually prefers to take great care of ourselves by eating well and exercising. Imagine that. And along the way I should let you know there’s a serious risk of other areas of your life improving as well; of better relationships, more ease, more enjoyment in all those unrelated areas of your life. Listen today and go back to the beginning starting at the prologue. There are valuable tools and resources that you’ll find there.

Renee Stephens: Now go ahead and take a moment to become present with you, because when you are at present with ourselves, this is where all change is possible. This is where potential unfolds. Go ahead and let all of those cares of your day begin to drift away from you for these moments dedicated to you. Now take a deep breath, imagining that a beautiful white light enters with your inhale through the top of your head. And as you exhale the cares of the day drift even further away. Inhale and that light comes in and expands, almost as if it’s displacing those cares, those concerns, those thoughts, those worries until you feel yourself surrounded by a bubble, a field of whit light. What could that field be like for you? Imagine it could be a field of feeling good. A feeling completely okay with yourself in this moment. A field of contentment or connection. Connection to something greater, to some unseen force. And we could further imagine that that unseen force is peaceful is fulfilling, is blissful. And so what if this white light that comes in with each breath that you take and expands with each exhalation, what if it contained all of the possibility, all of the potential to create everything that you want in your life; a slim, fit, healthy body, abundant love, a true beautiful connection with a spouse or special person, fulfilling work, prosperity, income, spiritual connection. What if it contained the possibility to create all of that? And what if in this field that you are now in it’s simply waiting, just waiting for you to direct this beautiful energy with a clear relaxed intention? An intention that could take the form of a dream, of a wish, of a desire that you gently wish. Even of a prayer. Imagine that.

Renee Stephen: And go ahead and set your intention for this episode. Take that moment to reflect on what you’d like to experience. What’s the next step that you would like to take? What would serve your highest good, and that of those around you? And as you do that, imagine this beautiful field of white light, surrounding each and every listener to this show across space and time, to each and every member of the Yahoo group, of the Face Book group. And feel your affinity with them. Feel your connection to them. And imagine each of them getting exactly what they have dreamed of. And notice how the energy fields expand as you do that. And now turn back and notice what happens to your own positive energy field. And all those fields connecting and intensifying each other. And now you could even imagine these energy fields expanding. You could imagine each and every person who has not yet resolved their own weight struggle, breathing in their own beautiful field of white light, that brings peace, self acceptance, and perhaps even a path to achieving their own dreams. And now I imagine you to share my own vision of a world free of the weight struggle. Of every individual, of each and every person who desires to end their own struggle being able to. Imagine that. And further imagine that each of them, that each of us, discovers, develops and shares our abundant souls gifts. What a world that would be.

Renee Stephens: And come back and be fully present now. Man, I am such a dreamer aren’t I? Good gracious. I just love to dream about these things, and to do whatever I can, all that I can, to make them a reality. So lets talk some specifics about that path. Lets talk about that solid foundation that we have been talking about the last episode or two. We’ve been talking about having the right roots for weight loss, because if you try to change behavior without changing the causes of the behavior then the change will never last. Make sense? Behavior is a symptom of thoughts and beliefs. We’ve talked about so far that our behavior is driven by our thoughts, which are driven by our beliefs, specifically by beliefs that we have about ourselves especially and beliefs that we have about how the world works. And your homework was to identify your own limiting beliefs; beliefs about self worth, beliefs about deserving. I wonder what you came up with.

Renee Stephens: I was working with a client earlier this week who has a belief – or had a belief prior to our session – that giving to others means depleting herself. That’s how it was for her, and that’s how it was when she thought about it for her father. In fact, her father was a bit of an energy vampire. Trying to please him really depleted her. And likewise, when he tried to give to others it depleted him. So here she is, she finds herself with a visit from her niece. And tragically her 13 year old niece has recently lost her mother. So she’s feeling very, very needy and she needs my client, she wants my client a lot to the tune of maybe an hour a day and almost 24/7 when she comes out on a visit. So after a recent visit from this niece to my client, my client was feeling utterly depleted, completely sucked dry, and all she could think of was, “I want to drink and I want to eat” when she was finally on her own again. Why? Because her energy was so low she was looking for the best substitution she had, the best coping mechanism, the best way that she could think of to renew that energy. And food and wine seemed like the closest thing that she could get to renewing herself. So I asked her, “Well how does that stuff work for you?” And she said, “Well it’s okay in the moment, but overall it really doesn’t do it. I desperately want it to fulfill me, I want it to renew me, but it isn’t happening.” So I said, “What would be renewing for you?” And she couldn’t really come up with the answer, so I said, “Well just imagine that you had something that was really renewing and you felt renewed, you felt fulfilled.” And she did that and she liked how that felt quite a bit. So I asked her where that felt like it came from, that renewal, that fulfillment. And it seemed to come from somewhere outside of her, something greater than she is. And it reminded me of when I first started to work with clients. When I first started to work with clients I had this epiphany that you may know about, I’ve talked about before, especially in the prologue, that this in fact was my life’s work. It was my life’s work to help end the weight struggle, to work with people using these extraordinary tools that I had discovered and had begun to adapt to helping other people. So I’m out there doing it; I’ve got clients, I’m doing it, and lo and behold I become depleted. I’m helping clients and I’m sinking. In fact I started to have some food issues again. Ikes! I can’t exactly be the helper of other people if I’ve got my own stuff going on. That wasn’t going to work. So I put myself on a crash course to figure out how the heck I could renew myself while helping others.

Renee Stephens: And I want to tell you more about how I did that and how my client learned to do that right after the break. You’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss on Personal Life Media. This is your host Renee Stephens and we’ll be right back.

Renee Stephens: We’re back now. Before the break we were talking about how when I first started working with clients I found myself completely depleted and had to go on a crash course to teach myself to learn how to renew as I helped. I talked to therapists, I talked to other coaches and hynotherapists. I talked to mentors. And I actually got my mentor to design a course on the topic. And what I figure out was that in order for me to help others I needed to be hooked up, I needed to be plugged in, connected to some greater source, something greater than me. I need to imagine some kind of energy source greater than myself so that I’d become a conduit of an infinitely renewable constant source of energy, of juice. And I’ll be quite frank here, for me this is spirit. I have got to be plugged in. And when I did plug myself in everything shifted. I would now go through a day of working with clients and feel energized at the end of the day as opposed to depleted. It was a hundred and eighty degrees different from the way that it used to be. Every time that I would work with a client I would get buzzed, I would feel great at the end of it all, I’d feel fantastic. And this was the answer for me. So I asked my client where her renewal might be coming from. And for her she calls it I think her higher self. Or spirit or something greater than she is, and when she imagines herself plugged in, then all of a sudden the way that she gives is completely different. So I asked her, I said, “Well what about your niece? Is your niece plugged in to her own source?”, and she said, “Well gosh no, that’s why she’s looking to me for it. But the problem is that she never gets enough that way and I just get bled dry basically.” Because her niece, she said, really hasn’t had an opportunity to see someone model that. So now we did a redo on the interaction with her niece where we imagined, where her client imagined herself being plugged in, being hooked up, renewing herself, taking great care of herself and interacting with her niece. And fascinatingly now she feels that she has more to give. In other words, when she set some boundaries for herself, when she prioritizes feeling renewed as she goes, feeling connected for herself, she naturally sets some boundaries. She says, “Okay, well I need a little time to myself. Why don’t you go and do this for a couple hours? I’ll be with you at this time.” She set some boundaries for herself so when she is with her niece, when she does want to give to somebody, she has so much more to give. And what’s absent from the interaction is the resentment, the squirming around trying to get away because you just can’t wait to have some time on your own. The craving for renewal. So what’s her new belief? Probably something along the lines of, “When I take great care of myself I have more to give.” And there may even be some companion beliefs, like, “The more connected I am to the spirit, to my higher self, to God, to source, the better I feel.” So interesting how big an impact beliefs can have.

Renee Stephens: Now we’re going to ask that same question again; if our behavior… Well lets start at the beginning; if our body is affected by our behavior and our behavior is affected by our thoughts and our thoughts are affected by our beliefs, what affects our beliefs? What determines what our beliefs are? What are the guidelines do we have for beliefs that we will hold? And by the way, we will get to the top of this pyramid or this ladder that we’re climbing up that starts with the effects that it has and continues with the actions, the thoughts and the beliefs. So what determines our beliefs? In fact our identity determines our beliefs. Our identity provides the guidelines for the beliefs that we will hold. So change your identity, change how you see yourself and you will necessarily shift your beliefs. What do I mean by identity? What I mean by identity is what you say when you start a sentence with “I am”. Think about it relative to your weight. Do you think, “I am a naturally slender person”? Or “I am a chubby person.” “I’m a big person.” And if you were to write down in your journal the phrase “I am” and then everything that you can think of to put after it, like, “I am athletic” or “I am clumsy.” “I am smart”, “I am kind”, “I am thoughtful”, and all of those not so flattering ones that we often think about ourselves; “I’m grumpy”, “I’m a slow learner”, “I’m a curmudgeon”, “I’m a success”, “I’m a failure.” Brainstorm, think about all of the things that you think about your own identity.

Renee Stephens: Another client of mine said, “Well, you know, I’m just a big girl. I’ve always been big. My parents were big, and I’ve been big as long as I can remember, so that’s just who I am. I’m a chubby person. I’ve always been fairly smart and people have always liked me, but one way that I’ve known that I’m different is that I’ve always been the chubby one.” And so she said, “It’s hard for me to believe that I could ever be anything different.” You see how this works? She couldn’t believe that she could ever be anything different, and if she doesn’t believe she could ever be naturally slender, then it’s going to be very difficult for her to ever be naturally slender. So we had to address her identity. She had to make a shift at the identity level. We did some emotional freedom techniques, some EFT, some tapping around that. And we tapped on phrases like, “Even though I’ve always been chubby and always will be, I’m letting that go. I’m choosing to allow myself to be naturally slender.” By the way if you’re not familiar with EFT, I believe it was episodes 41, something like that where I did a multi part series on the emotional freedom technique and you can go back and listen to those episodes and learn the technique. And after we had finished this tapping, after we had finished releasing those limiting constraints that she had around her identity, she said, “Well, you know, now that I think about it, my parents actually were both slim their entire lives until they were in their mid 20’s. So they weren’t born overweight. It was something that they became when they were in their mid 20’s. So therefore, being overweight isn’t necessarily genetic in my family. In fact, they became overweight when I was very young, and I seemed to learn my relationship to food, I’ve seemed to learn my behaviors from them.” And then she though further and she realized that she had aunts and uncles who were also very slim, aunts and uncles and grandparents who were slim. In fact, most of her family was slim, now that she thought about it. Do you remember how I said that beliefs, especially limiting beliefs, are things that we believe in spite of evidence to the contrary? She couldn’t even be aware, she wasn’t even aware of the evidence to the contrary of her belief that she was destined to be a chubby person until we released that old identity, we brought some doubt into it, we opened it up, and she started gathering evidence realizing that in fact there was nothing saying that it was genetic, that it was predestined, and everything to say that it was simply behaviors that she had learned from her parents, behaviors that really belonged to her parents, not hers. Well that’s a relief isn’t it, because if you’ve learned those behaviors, well you can learn other behaviors too. You’re obviously good at learning behaviors. So if you find that you have an identity that is limiting you in some way, something about your ability to change, your ability to be naturally slender, then you will want to write down all of those identity statements that have been limiting you. Do a brainstorm, write the good and the bad, and then begin to question those beliefs. Take the ones that are really emotionally charged, that really seem to be boxing you in, and start looking for writing down evidence about why they might not be true, why they might be completely false. Now that alone may be enough to really shift your identity. And if you’ve learned the emotional freedom technique you can do some tapping on your own or with one of your support buddies to release that constraining identity. We’ll call it a limiting identity. And I’m telling you, once you walk all the way up and down this ladder, this pyramid of changing your thoughts, your beliefs, your identity and the two levels that have yet to be discussed, that we’re about to present in the next episodes, you will have an amazing foundation for easy natural pleasurable weight loss. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Renee Stephens: That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. If you’d like to get up to the minute news about when the latest episode of Inside Out Weight Loss goes live, go to personallifemedia.com/signup and register for your free email notification. That way if you get accidentally unsubscribed you’ll be sure to know to go and grab the latest episode. And I know I’ve mentioned this before but I will say it again, that my Sabotage Self Sabotage guided journey, available on my website and through a link at the blog, personallifemedia.com/renee, r-e-n-e-e, is a journey that will affect all of these levels that we’ve been talking about. It can shift even the identity, the belief, the thought and the behavior levels creating that amazing foundation for the naturally slender you. 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.