Episode 84 - Foundation for Lasting Weight Loss Part V

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 not what you might be expecting. It’s not about nutrition and it’s not about exercise. There are plenty of great resources out there, and frankly most of those of us who’ve struggled with our weight know plenty about nutrition and exercise but it doesn’t help. We keep on doing the things we know that we shouldn’t. Inside Out Weight Loss is about getting ourselves to do what we already know we should. But not from a place of willpower, 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 need to let you know there is a real risk of other areas of your life improving, of better relationships, more ease, more enjoyment in all of those other areas. So listen today and go back to the beginning starting at the prologue to hear the important foundational steps of this program.

Renee Stephens: Now go ahead and drop down inside to that place where real transformation occurs. It doesn’t happen at the surface level. It doesn’t even happen at the thought and plan level. Real transformation, the kind that we’re talking about, where we actually shift your motivation structure, happens deep down inside. So as you allow yourself to drop even further in, into yourself, allowing any distractions of the outside world to simply take you deeper, allowing any thoughts, random thoughts that may float past your consciousness, to simply drift you down inside. I walked into an office the other day and was immediately taken with a beautiful fragrance of the flowers that were in this office. Think for a moment of your favorite flower. Which one do you especially love? Is it a rose or a dalia? A lily or a snapdragon? A daisy or a sunflower? Or my personal favorite, the stargazer. See your favorite flower or flowers in your minds eye now, noticing their texture, their fragrance. Breathe it deep into you lungs and allow this flower to take you in, allowing yourself to go deep into that flower, noticing its color and the subtle variations in hue, the complex delicacy and the bold presentation. Imagine that you could go down deep into the very essence of that flower. Imagine that you could become the flower, you could become the fragrance, feeling the beauty of your petals, the joy in unfolding them as you bloom. And as the warmth of the sun warms you, the coolness of the rain or the morning dew nourishes you. And notice that all you need comes to you so easily and effortlessly. The rain brings the water, which you soak up through your roots in just the right amount. The sun provides nourishing light, and the bees come and take care of you, allowing you to grow and thrive. It all comes to you. It’s all there for you. Your needs are effortlessly met and your beauty blossoms and flourishes, as you do nothing overtly but simply be, exist. Now feel your roots and notice how they support you, how they bring you into the earth and give you stability and reach. Feel your own flower essence, your own strength and gentleness as your fragrance dances around you. And go ahead and set your intent for this episode, taking a moment to reflect on the experience or the outcome that you would most like to have; ease, joy, help, answers, whatever it is intended. And as you do so, send your support to others along this same journey, wherever they may be across space and time and feel their support come back to you magnified many, many times over.

Renee Stephens: I’ve been reading a new book lately, I’ve been reading David Kessler’s The End of Overeating and really enjoying his perspective. It seemed that David struggled with his weight his whole life and set off on a bit of a quest to figure out why it was such a darn struggle for him. After all, he’s a very highly accomplished guy, former chairman of the FDA and head of UCSF Medical School. You got to think that if smarts are going to solve the problem it would’ve done it for him because as we have been learning, thinking about the problem doesn’t get us anywhere. We don’t go to a deep enough level when we try to solve the problem simply with thought or education, knowledge, understanding, doesn’t do it. So Kessler, because of his own struggles, embarked on this journey to really understand what was going on and to attempt to resolve the problem for himself. Kessler talks about hyper palatable foods that are engineered with lost of sugar, fat and salt. And these foods are designed specifically to make us eat more and more of them. They’re designed to get us to overeat basically. And we find these foods wherever food has been designed, particularly in processed foods that we find at the grocery store and in meals that are served at chain restaurants. He gives some pretty scary examples of dishes at places like Chili’s or The Cheesecake Factory, where they get evermore creative layering fat on sugar on salt on fat and so on. And as you think about it I’m willing to bet that the foods that you find trigger foods are in fact high in at least one of these three, sugar, fat or salt and probably at least two. Now what Kessler makes me think about again is the fact that as a species we did not evolve eating these hyper palatable foods. We evolved eating foods that you find in nature in pretty darn close to their natural state. For tens of thousands of years and much, much longer than that if you trace our evolutionary history, we’ve been eating food in its natural state. As hunter/gatherers, even as agrarians, we just didn’t have time or access or the ability to layer these foods with sugar, fat and salt in the way that it’s done today. Because when you think about it it’s only in the last fifty or so years that we’ve come up with white flower, with hybrid foods, hybrid strains of wheat for example, genetically modified foods, and our crowning achievement, food science, which basically are foods that are designed to make us eat more of them and to last forever on a shelf. Kessler doesn’t mention some of the chemical accomplishments we have, such as so called natural flavors, which in theory are better than artificial flavors, but I’m not so sure about that, and they are even in packaged organic foods. So these flavorings are in the mix too, creating or contributing to hyper palatability. What does hyper palatability do to us? It makes our own tastebuds lazy. It’s like it screams at them making them deaf. Now we add to this mix really good marketing, a changing social structure in our society and voila, desire and compulsion are created and we’re caught defenseless, our self regulation mechanisms that have evolved over tens of thousands of years just can’t keep up. They’re woefully inadequate. Most of us just can’t handle it. So in a society of increasing sophistication and savvy and technological advancement, we’re ruled by our base desires and it’s killing us. So what’s a poor busy homosapian to do? And the answer is not to throw in the towel and go to the drive thru. You’ve got to know me better than that by now. We’re to go forward by consciously going back to what we know works, by giving our bodies and our systems a chance to use the mechanisms that do work so well. We’re to use our Darwinian instincts and model what works in those that are naturally slender today. And in order to do this we must first clear out our own emotional and mental clutter. We need to create a clear channel and solid foundation to reawaken these ancient behaviors, these ancient mechanisms of fullness and satiety that work so well when food is just food. It’s nourishment, it’s social connection. Specifically we get out of our own by resolving our own inner conflict. We see these hyper palatable foods in their real light. We see that they are dead. We see that they are like the emperor who has no clothes on. And we look at the beautiful colors of fruits and vegetables and the textures. And we slow down just enough to notice that we’re eating them, and we eat them with a sense of honoring our bodies, of taking great care of ourselves. Imagine if every time you sat down to eat a meal you said to yourself, “Oh, this is great because I really deserve the good stuff’, as you serve yourself healthy whole foods.

Renee Stephens: Today I want to talk to you about the final two levels in the foundation of lasting weight loss, and we’ll do that after the break. This is Renee Stephens and you’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss on Personal Life Media.

Renee Stephens: We’re back now. We’ve been talking about creating this solid foundation, because our behaviors, the way that we act are driven by our thoughts, which are in turn driven by our beliefs, which are in term driven by our identity. And so we think, “Oh my goodness, how far does this go? Where does it all end?” You’ll be happy to know that there are just two more levels left; the levels of soul and spirit. What is the guideline for our identity? How do we come up with that? What governs it? And the next level up is the level of the soul. Now you might be wondering, “You know, what actually is a soul?” And this question is clearly too big for me, but for the purposes of our discussion today lets just call it the bridge between ourselves in our bodies and something greater. We can think of our soul as a bridge between our isolated selves or what we perceive as our isolated selves, and something greater than ourselves, something eternal, timeless, something that has elements of us as individuals and also elements of the divine, of spirit source. I remember working with one of my very early clients. She was a binge eater, and I walked her through these seven levels, starting with the environment of her body that she felt was overweight and less healthy than it could be, moving up to her behavior of binge eating and the thoughts that cause that behavior, next to the beliefs that govern those thoughts and the identity. And then when we got to the soul level, it’s almost as if the light in her eyes changed. And she looked at me and she said, “There’s nothing wrong with my soul. My soul is good.” We took a final step up to the level of spirit and then turned around and walked back down, now with that knowledge, that realization deep in her very being that her soul is good, that this problem that had so dominated her life didn’t have anything to do with her soul. Her soul was good. And so with that understanding as she got to the levels of identity, of the roles that she plays in this society as wife and mother, etcetera, she knew now that underneath that – or above that or behind that – she was good. And then she got to the level of her beliefs, what she believes about herself, and she had all sorts of old limiting beliefs, but none of those mattered either because behind that all was a soul that was good and pure. And then she got to the level of her thoughts, the thoughts that she had on a daily basis, and they just really didn’t matter much because her beliefs and her identity and her soul were all good. And then she finally got to the level of behavior, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world to take great care of herself. And again at the level of body, body was a manifestation, a physical manifestation of this good soul, all good. And she walked off of that line of steps that we had been taking and left my office and her bingeing just disappeared, because she realized that at the level of her soul she’s good. Now that’s another way of saying that she had come to a place of unconditional self-acceptance, of accepting herself no matter what, because when we do, when we truly accept ourselves, when we forgive ourselves for the things that we do or think that we don’t like so much, when we stop beating up on ourselves and accept naturally, we have a strong urge, we desire, we prefer to treat ourselves really well, to take great care of ourselves. And so we seek out the things, we learn about the things – and this is where our education can help us – that are really good for us; healthy, unprocessed foods for example, exercise that gets our blood circulating, our bodies moving and reminds us that we are indeed alive, that we can move, that we’re in the game.

Renee Stephens: So take a moment now to stand at the level of your own soul. Can you feel your soul? What if you could? What if you could be the presence looking out through your eyes, the awareness that moves your arms and legs? And if you could take a step even beyond that to the final level, the level of spirit, the level of source, God if you will, or even your higher self, it’s an easy step from the level of soul, from the bridge and from this place you could look at your own precious creation that is you and simply notice what that is like, looking at your own precious marvelous creation that is this being, that is you. And you could step then back in to the soul, now with this new perspective and understanding, this new feeling to you. And you could step in to this level of soul and be yourself, be spirit and soul in one. And all of this you bring now to the level of identity, and your identity takes on new meaning. There’s a new understanding that you have, perhaps a new flexibility to your identity, realizing that in a lifetime there are many roles that you play, even in a single day, and they are just that, roles that you play. And so with all of this you step into the level of your beliefs, the beliefs that you have to take care of yourself in an exquisite way, to honor yourself, to take really the very best care of yourself. Because of course you deserve it. And you step forward again to that level of thoughts. The thoughts all shift now because you understand what your essence really is, what you really are part of, and the behaviors of eating well and exercising and taking great care of yourself comes so naturally, so that the result, the environment that you live in, the body that you live in is healthy and fit and slim. And this is the kind of understanding, the kind of knowing that is the foundation for lasting weight loss. Once you have visited these levels of soul and spirit and you are aligned up and down this pyramid, shifting behaviors becomes very easy. A few pre-dos and re-dos, a little structure that you enjoy anyway, a learning mind, a focus on learning and improving. And the shifts happen beautifully, easily. They take, they sprout roots and grow because the soil that you have created is so fertile.

Renee Stephens: What I’d like you to do as homework is actually to write down what it is that you want, I know you know that because we’ve talked about it before. So you write what you want, state it in the positive, and then you go through each of these levels; the level of behaviors that you would have if you had what you want. And then the level of thoughts that you would think if you had what you want, and the level of beliefs that you would believe, and the identity that you would have, and the soul and the spirit that you would have if you had what you want. Now if I had any ability on, with PowerPoint or any kind of way to draw this for you and post it I would, but I am not so good at that stuff. And I want you to walk up the pyramid and back down. Just as I did with that client of mine I described. Taking yourself through all of the levels, from the bottom to the top, from the top to the bottom. I’ll post these levels on the blog, and I’d be very interested, I’d love in fact, to hear your comments. The blog of course is at personallifemedia.com/renee, and there you’ll find links to the thriving Yahoo group of people supporting and being supported, as well as to the guided journeys available for sale on my site.

Renee Stephens: That brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. 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.