Episode 90 - Intent-ful Eating, Part I

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 deep roots of your weight struggle, from a very deep place inside. We begin each show by taking a few moments to become present and aware and awake with ourselves, acknowledging the fact that we have come here because there is something very important that we want, something that although we may have been trying for years to end our struggle, although we may have been fighting with ourselves for decades of our lives, just think for a moment about the amount of time that you spend in that inner dialogue, in inner criticism, in being unhappy with yourself in the struggle. And even though we may have struggled for years and decades, for so long, perhaps we can barely even remember not struggling, we still search. We still have something that tells us “Yes, it’s possible.” It’s possible to be the way we want to be. It’s possible to be healthy. It’s possible to be naturally slender. What’s naturally slender? Naturally slender is being slender in a way that is easy and feels natural for you. You’ll know that you’re naturally slender because it will seem even easier than being overweight ever was. And that’s what we teach here at Inside Out Weight Loss; that I don’t care how much extra weight you have, I don’t care how long you’ve been struggling. I have had clients in their 60’s and 70’s who have never been successful in the past finally make those changes, watch the weight come melting off, but even more importantly open up to the rest of their lives.

Renee Stephens: Now urban lore or our culture tells us that “Hey, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. So and so’s not going to change because they’re too old”, and I say hogwash. We are going to change. If we have a sincere desire, which I’m guessing that maybe, maybe, maybe you have because you’ve shown up here, if we have a sincere desire and the appropriate tools, that yes, change is possible. At any age, for anybody. One of the saddest things for me is to meet someone or to know of someone who has given up trying because they don’t think that it’s possible. Let me ask you this question; if you know, absolutely knew it were possible to have what you want – to be slim, to be naturally slender – if you knew a hundred percent that that were possible for you, how much would you want it? What would you be willing to invest in that if you knew that it were possible? How much would it be worth to you? And more importantly, what would the benefits be in your life? You can begin thinking about those benefits, the, say the first tier of benefits, which are well you’ll feel more comfortable in your clothes, you’ll feel like you look better in your clothes; perhaps your clothes will be more comfortable or you can buy clothes in the cute boutique that you want to shop in. Maybe you’ll good in swimsuit. Maybe you’ll feel good at your reunion or that wedding or social event. Maybe you’ll have more stamina to play with your kids or be able to climb the stairs easily. But lets look beyond that. Lets look at the second tier of benefits, ‘cause these ones start to get really interesting. Maybe you’ll allow yourself to attract that relationship that you’ve long been wanting or allow yourself to improve your current relationship. What about your confidence level? Tell me, are you being paid what a confident you would be worth in the business world? Are you as successful as a more confident you could be? Are you present to life, to your friends? Hey, I just had a thought; you know, this economic downturn has gone on long enough as far as I’m concerned. What if we were all feeling more confident, more optimistic about life, I wonder what would happen to the economy overall. Perhaps there would be more jobs created, more productivity, more investment, because we feel confident, we feel good, we feel optimistic, so maybe ending your struggle is your contribution to the economic turnaround. Maybe it’s not as farfetched as it seems. I certainly know on a microcosm level, at the level of an individual, more confidence, feeling better about ourselves attracts more and better opportunities. You getting the idea here about what Inside Out Weight Loss is all about? It’s way more than what you might’ve thought, way more than just those few pounds… which come off, that’s fantastic; I get emails from people all the time saying how much they’ve lost. In fact one came in on the blog today, which is at personallifemedia.com/renee, as a comment to my post on Can Your Body Image Be Too Good, and I think she’s lost 50 pounds with another 36 to go. Fantastic! Since listening to Inside Out Weight Loss. And the best part is that all sorts of areas in her life have been going better. I am just saying “Yes” to that.

Renee Stephens: Now it’s time to drop even further inside, to be present to you, to that commitment, that desire, that dream that you have, of looking and feeling your healthy best, vibrant, alive, radiant. And with that you in mind, with that commitment in mind, or perhaps it’s just a glimmer of a dream that you have dared to dream for just this moment now, allow yourself to settle into that dream, to settle into you. Both you in the present moment and the you in the present moment that has that dream, who sees that glimmer, who knows that possibility. Sink down even further into your present experience into this moment. You can ride the wave of your breath inside; your breath connecting the outside world with the deepest inner you. Simply acknowledging that you’re here for you. Making this commitment and setting your intention to create the body that is slim and fit and healthy in a way that’s way easier than its ever been before. Perhaps that’s a dream and perhaps it can also be your reality. It is the reality for so many who’ve been listening to this podcast just as you are now. Allow yourself to discover that potential within you. Claim it. Welcome it. Be it. And share your intention for this episode and for your journey of Inside Out Weight Loss.

Renee Stephens: I’d like to start today by asking this question; can we transform our food? Can we transform our bodies? Well certainly we can change our bodies, we can go on a diet and lose weight and the body will look differently than it did before. But can we transform our bodies? Make them healthier? Transform them in some important way and can we transform the food that we eat? The answer may surprise you. And we’ll get to it after this short break to support our sponsors. This is Renee Stephens and you’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss on Personal Life Media.

Renee Stephen: We’re back now. Before the break we were asking that question, can we transform our food? I want to bring your attention to some experiments that were done or some photographs that were taken by a guy named Masuto Emoto out of Japan. And Imoto had this idea about water, and I discovered him because one day several years ago I was walking through San Francisco International Airport, where there are often exhibits by artists or museum type exhibits; they’re quite interesting as you walk to your gate in the airport. And there were these pictures of various crystals of water. And I didn’t really understand what it was, there was such a dramatic variation, until later when I read about his experiments, and what he did was he would take water, this plain old water, and he would crystallize it by freezing it, create ice crystals of the water. And then he would photograph with a microscopic photography, the crystals that were formed by freezing the water. And he would imbue the water, he and his team would imbue the water with different intentions to see if the crystals looked any differently with different intentions. So he played around with it and he played rock music to the water and then he froze it and took a photograph of the crystal, and he played classical music and he sent messages of love and hate to the water and photographed the crystals that formed with those differing intentions. Now because I’m telling you this you can probably guess what happened. You think all those crystals looked the same? No. They were dramatically different. Some of them barely looked like crystals at all. And others looked like beautiful, magnificent in fact, perfectly formed snowflake crystals; symmetrical, just stunning in their individuality and their beauty. And so you can imagine which ones looked better. And it turns out that the ones that were played heavy metal music – now I’m not saying which type of heavy metal music or which band – but they didn’t look so good some of them. Not saying all heavy metal music – I happen to like some of it – but some men didn’t look so good, as did the crystals that were formed with a feeling of hatred. But the crystals that were imbued with love, with love, the water that was imbued with love before it was frozen, those crystals were magnificent, stunning. They were dramatically different than the ones that were imbued with more negative emotions or negative intentions. Now Emoto looks at this and he thinks, “Well gosh, you know, water’s really important. We must put love into our water all over the world”, and I think he’s on a bit of a mission to do that. And I looked at it and I thought, “Well gosh, if we can transform water through our intention in this way, what could we do to our food?”

Renee Stephens: So I want you to think for a moment; what do you think the intention is in your average fast food hamburger, okay? So we’re thinking about, lets take a Big Mac and we’re thinking about the cows that were raised to create this hamburger. Probably not the life of luxury in cow land, what do you think? I’m thinking pretty unpleasant. And then you think about the people involved in handling that meat and what might be going on for them, and then you think about the people in the fast food restaurant who are preparing that food for your, to serve it to you and how they might be feeling, what might be going on for them, and what kind of energetic imprint this Big Mac might have by the time you get it. It can’t be pretty most of the time, can it? Now on the other hand, you think about food that was prepared lovingly. You know how people always say, “Oh well mom’s apple pie was the best” or “

Mom

’s lasagna” or “

Mom

’s meatloaf” or whatever it was that mom made was the very, very best. Well what is this secret ingredient that mom puts into her food? Probably love. Now I’m no top chef, but I do really enjoy when my family enjoys the food that I cook, so I prepare it with an intention to bring them joy. So what if love is the secret flavor enhancer? If mom’s food is comfort food, could that secret ingredient that makes it comfort food be love? Only we get confused later in our lives and we think, “Oh well it must be the meatloaf” or “It must be the greasy”, something or other. Well no, it’s not. And we keep on trying to get that feeling of love, that feeling of comfort from the food, but it just doesn’t quite do it. It comes close, but it isn’t quite there because the secret ingredient is missing. Now this could all be hocus pocus, and I could be just saying things that happened to sound kind of good. But, you know, there’s a book out there called The Intention Experiment by Lynn McTaggart, and in the book McTaggart, who is a journalist by training, goes and reviews all of the research on the power of intention that was available at the time of writing the book. And she found some pretty amazing results; things like fruit flies living longer and multiplying faster and being healthier when an intention of health was put into the environment that they were being raised in. I think that science is just beginning to understand the phenomena of intention, the real scientific phenomena of intention. And I think in time – ten, twenty, thirty years time – we’ll have a much, much better understanding of it scientifically and be able perhaps even to measure it. But for now science isn’t all the way there; we certainly have these hints and these experiments that are telling us that there’s something going on, and Emoto’s got pictures of it.

Renee Stephens: So lets go the next step here, and think about what it does to your body to bring in the Big Mac that has all of that kind of yucky energy associated with it. It can’t be good, can it? Indigestion, no wonder it doesn’t sit so well in the body, huh? Yuck! Now what do you think your body would say if there were some food that were lovingly prepared by you? Do you think that we could make a substantial difference in the quality of our health and our enjoyment of our food if we took a moment before eating to imbue the food with appreciation and gratitude that is there to nourish us and love, so that eating then became an act of self love, an act of honoring ourselves and truly nourishing ourselves? So often times people will do this when they go on a dramatic weight loss program or a dramatic overhaul of their nutrition. For example, nutrition therapy is often a part of alternative cancer treatments and in fact can be very powerful. Well what happens? People pull out all the stops and they put a lot of energy into getting high quality food that has been grown under wonderful conditions, fresh fruits and vegetables, really healthy stuff. And then they’re putting into their bodies, each time they eat it they are affirming their choice for life. They are affirming that they want to live and they want to do the best for their bodies. And so these nutrition therapies can be effective for cancer. So what I am suggesting is that as important as the actual biochemical properties of the food we’re eating is the intention that we put into it. So lets look at it this way; say you go and you want to eat some kind of sweet, you know. I like to go to the coffee bar, they have a whole array of sweets at the coffee bar. So say you eat one of those and you have a lot of guilt around it. Every minute you’re eating it you’re just feeling guilty, before you’ve even finished the darn thing, and certainly while you’re digesting, you’ve finished it and now, “Oh my god, I shouldn’t have. That was so bad. I’m just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad”, self hatred starts to happen, it’s hard to digest; oh my god, not very nice, huh? Versus, you say, “You know, I’m hungry right now and I’m really going to enjoy this”, and so you eat it with an intention to satisfy your hunger, to have an enjoyable experience and you tell your body, “Take what you like and expel the rest, get rid of the rest easily. This is to nourish you. And I’m just going to indulge in sheer enjoyment.” And I bet that interesting things would start to change if whenever you ate anything, you ate like that especially, the quote/unquote “bad stuff”, what do you suppose would happen? I’d like you to try that out. I want you to take the worst thing that you eat – and don’t go out of your way to eat something bad – but take something that might not be ideal or even the wonderful stuff that you eat and just take that moment before you eat it to imagine your heart opening and sort of surrounding it in a feeling of love and well being. And so then as you eat it you bring it into your body with an intention of nourishment, intention of taking great care of yourself. Do this with a lifesaver. Do this with whatever it is that goes into your body - the water that you drink, the beverages, the food – just make a practice of that, make a commitment to make that practice for three days and see what happens. On the next episode of Inside Out Weight Loss I’ll tell you what happened to one of the members of my group program when she did this, the surprising results that she had.

Renee Stephens: As you can tell, that brings us to the end of our show today, and I want to thank you for being present. Hey, how about setting an intention for the next episode of Inside Out Weight Loss right now, set an intention for where it is you’d like to be by the time the next episode goes live. And if you want to know when that next episode goes live the minute that it does - because with iTunes you can get unsubscribed for a variety of reasons without knowing it - go to personallifemedia.com/signup, s-i-g-n-u-p, and register for free email notifications that will tell you the moment that the episode goes live. That’s personallifemedia.com/signup. Hey, is there something that’s been bugging you? An issue that you’re struggling with that you don’t know how to resolve? I would love to help you. Call 206-350-5333, that’s 206-350-5333, and let me know, leave a message and I may play your question or comment on the air. I love to do this. It’s great to have another voice on the air, so let me coach you through your issue to a breakthrough. 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.