Emotional Eating & a Way to Lose Weight head-cleaners' dr. j's shrink wrap, shrink-think | |
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Some brief and hopefully helpful thoughts on using Head-Cleaners hypnosis CDs (or tapes) to deal with a life long struggle with emotional-eating -related weight problems. | |
Eating & breathing & moisture, oh my!
Eating is as basic an issue in life as they come. Every body has systems set up to insure that there is an adequate suppy of nutrition -- that is, to insure that suffient food comes in -- just as there are systems that make sure enough water and oxygen come in. This is about as basic as you can get. These are basic, internal functions. They function without any direct means of real control through conscious intention. They are set up to keep the organism alive and tinkering with them, overriding them and adjusting them, is about as easy as taking out your own appendix -- and for the same reasons. Your body is set up to shut you down before letting you do things that mess with automatic life-sustaining mechanisms.
A friendly & patient perspective
Yes, some people lose weight under hostile circumstances. However, if you were to wager some money on whether you would be more likely to lose weight under the supervision of a friend or a prison guard, which do you think you would bet on?
If you had a friend struggling with his or her weight, would you think that it would be more likely to help if you a) were hostile, sabotaging and very negative in your comments or b) supportive, patient, encouraging?
Without much effort most people can see that berating comments, hostile attitudes, self-directed anger and self-loathing are very negative strategies in the quest for any kind of improvement. It's bad psychology. Impractical. Plus, since changing eating is a tinkering with such a basic life-support system, which attitude would you guess is more likely to get past inner, basic, automatic controls and reactions?
Be Mindful of Self-Talk
We are complicated critters, we humans. Be mindful that when you talk to yourself, you listen. In fact, we in general are complicated interweavings of all sorts of mental processes that can be very different and can even want different things at the same time. One of the big issues in all this is that there are parts of any person's mind that are very much affected by the self-talk going on in the "consciousness." When you talk to yourself, you listen. When you exaggerate, you might tend to believe those exaggerations in some areas of your mind even though you consciously know them to be exaggerations.
Basic rule of thumb: When you speak to yourself, expect that there are parts of your mind listening with the understanding of a child. DO NOT speak to yourself more harshly than you would speak to a child. (e.g., "I can't take it." "I am such a damn idiot." "I always screw everything up." "I am a worthless pig and I should just die.")
Recommended: If you had a friend trying to lose weight, you would recognize that treating her in a positive, supportive, encouraging and accepting way would be most practical and productive. An excellent measure of whether a tactic -- an attitude, a reaction, a type of self-talk, a type of self-denial -- would be helpful is to ask yourself if you would use it on your best friend in similar circumstances. You would in all likelihood tell a friend she will do fine, she looks fine even if she doesn't lose weight, she should maybe do this for health reasons but not go at it with such severity that it harms her health; you might suggest she approach the issue with an attitude that she is going to lose as much as she can but with a highest goal of maximum health and maximum happiness.
Practical, Positive Goals
As a general rule of thumb, it is a good idea to have deep, meaningful goals, not superficial goals or goals that come with complexities within complexities.
There are many complicating issues with regard to losing weight because you want to be sexier, more attractive. Though you may not be thinking of these as far as you can tell, sometimes we have more wisdom in our minds that we notice. Having a goal of losing a bunch of weight in order to look more sexual and sexually attractive is, for many people, very counter-productive. Sexuality is fleeting, anxiety provoking, complicated, frustrated and the core or some of life's biggest traumas and hurts.
You may think it sounds good to be slim and in a skimpy suit on the beach with people drooling at the thought of touching you. That sounds good. But that also comes with stalkers, sexual attacks, sexual jealousy and a lot of other very complicated crap. As a goal, being sexually attractive is generally short-sighted, simplistic, frightening and counter-productive.
Recommended. Work to maximize health and happiness, long term. Life is a tough bunch of challenges mixed with a wide variety of joys and ecstasies. Looking good is only a little thing. Have a goal -- a life long goal -- of being smarter and healthier and happier every year as compared to the year before.
Emotional eating.
Understand your emotional eating and try to not just stop eating when emotional -- also try to reduce the emotions that seem to stimulate eating. Also work on alternatives, when emotional, to eating. This can be accomplished with counseling, self-help books and hypnosis recordings or any number of other self-help efforts.
Understanding and reducing emotional upsets that sabotage. Emotional upsets are a part of everyone's life. However, self-directed anger and self-loathing -- and the resulting self-sabotaging responses -- do not need to be a part of everyone's life. Getting upset and going to the gym or going for a walk -- or visiting a friend or reading -- need not involve eating. The problem here is self directed anger. As noted above, attitude is important. You would not expect a friend to get very far in improving health if every time she got upset, you berated her and then told her to eat. Yet this is basically what many people do to themselves -- many emotional eaters. Emotional eating becomes a sabotaging assault that soothes as it sabotages.
Understand and reduce emotional upsets in general. Of course, sabotage related or not, if you have less upsets and you feel generally happy, you are more likely to work to be healthy.
Develop alternative coping strategies -- alternatives to eating. Even if you stop engaging in self-loathing, you will still need any replacements for coping via eating. Upsets will always be part of life and to the extent that you have a habit of eating when upset, you need alternative coping strategies -- things you can do instead of eating. Exercise is, of course, a most satisfying alternative if you are lucky enough to be one of the people that can get into it. (Imagine, the more distress and upset you have, the more buff your body becomes.) It doesn't have to be exercise, though -- stamp collecting, bird watching, website development and a million other things make good potential coping ideas.
Recommended. Work on reducing emotional issues, stopping self-directed anger issues and developing alternative coping strategies WHILE you work on eating control.
Hypnosis CDs -wise.
Healthier eating. There are two recordings that focus on better, healthier eating. "Practical, Optimal Eating, Too" focuses on being more practical with your eating -- healthier and with a focus on a healtier body shape. "To Diet Down Right" focuses on adhearing to diet regimes and restrictions -- self control stuff and compliments the optimal eating recording with that additional focus on eating self-control and self-discipline.
Self-directed anger issues. "Self to Self Partnering" is a fundamentally important, practical, helpful hypnosis recording for anyone facing any big struggle like changing eating behaviors and attitudes, emotional coping strategies, personality traits and self image. Self focuses on making sure you are being supportive to yourself and not hostile (which, as noted above, can engender a lot of counter-productive complexities).
Cutting down internal feelings, eating cues and whatnot "Performance 2" and "Performance Perfected" foster confidence and reduce self-critical, self-conscious thinking while also reducing or eliminating hungers, urges, empty stomach feelings, etc.
Emotional issues, anxieties, guilt, stress, distress. To the extent that emotional eating is fueled by issues such as anxiousness, depressive feelings, problems with hopelessness, guilt, dread, negativity, confidence issues, etc., then there are several Head-Cl;eaners hypnosis CDs that might help. "Healing Tree 2" is a poignantly helpful recording focused on fostering the listener's sense of resiliency, hopefulness, perseverance and faith in him- or herself. It is helpful in diminishing anxiousness and depression, too. There are a variety of other CDs and tapes focused on a variety of other more specific issues that might drive emotional upsets. Look through the catalogue of Head-Cleaners hypnosis CDs and hypnosis tapes for resources to help with specific issues that might also drive eating. There are any number of combinations of CDs and tapes that can be very, very helpful in working to instill new attitudes and practical, optimal motivations for self-improvement -- with discounts for multiple purchases available.
A plan for "I can."
An attempt at simply reducing weight will generally result in increased weight. This is something everyone has heard a million times but it is worth repeating: if you want ot lose weight and keep it off, you need to make serious changes in lifestyle. This plan, below, is based on the idea that a person can do well to improve him or herself on an ongoing basis.
1. Pick a set of CDs that includes one or both of the eating/dieting recordings plus one, two, three, four, five or six more recordings that will address the issues you believe drive emotions and eating.
2. Listen to one a day, with days off if inconvenient to listen, until you get through your collection (your collection of two or whatever).
3. "Take off" three days (minimum), then begin listening -- again one a day -- your collection.
4. Go through this cycle or one a day and at least three days off three times -- three cycles -- and take (at least) a week off.
5. Stick to this program but allow yourself to take days, nights, weeks, months off from listening as it seems like a good idea.
6. When you find that you've stopped for a significant length of time and then you realize it has been awhile and you want to get back at it, start the same way -- at step one.
7. Keep in mind that your Goal is to be as healthy in your eating habits and your relationship with you habits as you can be. Your goal is happiness and health -- optimal, practical, productive, long term.
8. No matter how well you do, expect to go at this for a long time -- for a life time. Like an alcoholic, you consider yourself a recovering bad habit eater. But unlike an alcoholic, you will not be abstinent, you will be on a life long fine-tuning effort with the goal of doing better every year than you did the last.