Small Changes, Big Benefits
Fact 1 All human pain is linked to the word loss.
Fact 2 We cannot succeed at weight loss or losing weight.
So what do these two facts add up to? Loss is bad, gain is good. This may sound illogical but it’s true: if you want to become leaner, do not use the words ‘weight loss’ or ‘losing weight’.
Loss is one of the most negative words in our vocabulary because the strongest force in the human psyche is to try to get back everything we think we have lost. Clients will often tell me they have lost hope or lost faith or lost their enthusiasm. Some have even lost the will to live. Others describe losing their looks or losing their husband or wife or their freedom or jobs. ‘I lost the baby’ describes a miscarriage; ‘I lost it’ means you were not in control. We lost everything in the recession/flood /fire is another one. Companies can go out of business if they lose a client or contract.
Sports people hate to lose as, even in the Olympics, we don’t remember who comes second, hence Paula Radcliffe’s agony at the Olympics in Greece when she realised she would not win a gold medal. Teenagers describe those they don’t like as ‘Losers’ and even hold up their finger and thumb to make the letter ‘L’. It’s a form of great insult. When we describe someone as having lost the plot, lost their marbles or lost their mind it’s very negative and critical. I once worked with someone who through illness lost his hair, his hearing and his mobility, but when he lost his sight he also lost all his independence and then the will to live. Lossage is an insurance word for loss. Gamblers feel they must regain their loss and will stay in a casino all night losing even more money in an attempt to get back what they have lost.
When people feel they have lost their looks they will try to look the same as they did twenty years ago. Wearing the same styles they wore when they were at their very best makes them feel more in control of the loss. Relationships end when one partner loses their desire or respect for the other. If you keep referring to loss your psyche will try everything to regain what it thinks you have lost. For this reason it is very detrimental to focus on how much weight you have lost or want to lose.
I often ask my clients to list everything good about the word loss and everything negative about the word gain, and it’s a very short list. Apart from gaining weight, gain is a good word. We gain status, promotion, wisdom, a family, recognition, a degree, qualifications, skills, a pay rise, gifts, love and riches. It is not easy to find any good losses and negative gains – try it yourself, see if you can think of anything that’s good to lose then think of all the things that are so bad to lose. You can write them out yourself and you will be surprised at how few, if any, good losses there are. Your brain simply cannot accept that all loss is bad but, oh wait, there is one exception: losing weight is good. As far as your brain is concerned
all
loss is bad and gain is very good indeed. Don’t fight this fact, work with it and it will work for you.
I get my patients to replace loss with:
• I have let go of 10 pounds.
• I have reduced by half a stone.
• I have shed 10 pounds.
• I have dropped a dress size.
• I have taken off 6 kilos.
• I am dropping weight.
• I am shedding pounds.
• I am becoming leaner/lighter.
• I am becoming a size 12.
• I am becoming a smaller shape/size.
• I am getting back to the right size and weight for me.
Reduced, discarded, shed, let go, dropped, taken off, got off, eliminated and erased have less emotional attachment to them than the word loss. Find another word that works effectively for you and stop talking about losing weight. If you slip up occasionally don’t feel bad, just correct the statement with something that works.
Ownership
Fact 3 ‘My’ is an ownership word. ‘My’ is also another emotional word.
One of the most forceful rules of the mind is that it is reluctant to give up anything you prefix with ‘my’. The clients I work with who have the most severe illnesses and symptoms always talk about
my
headaches,
my
problems,
my
depression,
my
illness, even
my
cancer. The clients who come to see me to shed weight talk about
my
weight,
my
fat,
my
enormous appetite,
my
greed,
my
problems with food,
my
huge stomach,
my
constant hunger.
Never
use the word ‘my’ as a prefix to something you wish to be free of because this makes the mind accept something as belonging to you when it doesn’t. The mind finds it much harder to part with or change anything which you continue to refer to as ‘my’ or ‘mine’. Only prefix something with ‘my’ if you are proud of it and want to keep it. For instance, you can talk about
my
commitment to this programme,
my
determination,
my
enthusiasm,
my
fantastic progress, in the same way you talk about
my
children,
my
home. These are things you are happy and proud to own.
We have all seen small children fighting over a toy or even a chair they were sitting on while screaming ‘It’s
mine
’. Adults can get just as upset when someone takes
my
seat,
my
place,
my
newspaper. They become very territorial over something they think they own and your mind is doing the same thing all the time, you just may not have been aware of it before, and now you are it can only help you to succeed in reaching your ideal size and weight.
Your fat does not need to be yours. Does it belong to you? Do you call it mine? Do you want to own it forever, or is the real you underneath the fat? If you say, ‘It’s mine’ and I say, ‘I can take it off you it isn’t going to be yours any more’, you aren’t going to fight me for it, you’re going to say ‘Take it all, with pleasure, I don’t want it’. When I was a personal trainer I would often say to my clients, ‘We can get rid of the flab with this exercise programme’ and no one ever replied ‘It’s
my
flab and I need to keep it’. If a surgeon doing liposuction takes a handful of your flesh he might say, ‘I can take some of this fat away’. Your reply might be ‘Can’t you take all of it away?’ because you don’t want it. Who would argue with him and say ‘No, you can’t have it, it’s mine’. You are going to pay him a lot of money and endure some pain to have him take it away. You are not going to take the jars of removed fat home to keep because it’s yours and it belongs to you. This would be pointless. It is just as pointless and counterproductive to keep calling a habit you don’t want and a size you don’t want ‘mine’ while all the time longing to be free of it. If you don’t want it, if you don’t want to keep it or own it then constantly referring to it as ‘mine’ is giving your brain very confusing messages.
Therefore you must prefix anything you want to be free of with the word ‘the’ not the pronoun ‘mine’ or progressive adjective ‘my’. ‘The’ is a neutral word which is why women hate being called ‘the wife’ instead of
my
wife as it does not imply pride or connection, it’s just ambiguous. As soon as you talk about ‘the’ weight issue, ‘the’ excess weight, ‘the’ big stomach, ‘the’ pudding, you have no emotion attached to it and it becomes easier to become and stay free of it. Do not talk about ‘my fat legs’, ‘my big bum’, ‘this fat stomach of mine’, ‘my greed’, ‘my weight problem’, ‘my chocolate addiction’. Stop saying, ‘I love
my
chips’, ‘I need
my
biscuits’, ‘I have to have
my
puddings’.
If you slip up just correct yourself. You didn’t know better before and now that you do you are going to do better all the time.
Using the previous examples write out all the words you are going to use to replace ‘loss’. Next, taking note of how you refer to yourself, write out the words you are going to use instead of ‘my’ and ‘mine’.
The opposite of owning it and calling it ‘mine’ is shown by people who have no responsibility at all for the weight they have become. Many overweight people do not want to take responsibility for their excess weight and instead try miracle pills or diets, jaw wiring or stomach stapling. I was sent one client who, after having her jaw wired, was drinking twelve pints of milk a day. I noticed that she didn’t once use the word ‘I’ but always used ‘you’, for example, saying, ‘You can’t leave biscuits’, ‘You can’t not eat chips when they are on your plate’. ‘You have to eat when people cook for you’. ‘You can’t leave the last few sweets’. Eventually I said to her ‘Why do you keep saying “you”? I have no problem saying no to biscuits. Let’s just talk about you.’
I made her replace ‘you’ with ‘I’ and got her to see that by not associating with her behaviour she was not able to recover. As long as she was saying ‘you’ she wasn’t even talking about herself – she was talking about other people just like her. Saying ‘you’ makes the problem global instead of individual. Making it global is saying everyone does this so I am not at fault. It is making the whole world just like you so you don’t have to feel different or responsible. It was no different to saying, ‘One can’t say “no” to chocolate, or ‘One needs puddings to cheer up’.
Another way people disassociate is to refer to themselves as big, for example, ‘We are big people so we can’t really exercise’, or ‘I am a big person so I need more food’, or ‘I come from a big family’. If you are overweight it can be very painful and you certainly don’t need more pain but you do need to take responsibility for the words you use to talk to and about yourself. Don’t disassociate and talk about what other people do. Let’s just make this all about you.
More on Words
The words you use in front of words can dramatically increase and decrease the intensity of your statement. For example, ‘I am successful’ is more intense when you say ‘I am incredibly successful’ or ‘constantly successful’. ‘I love eating like this’ is stronger when you say ‘I always love eating like this’. ‘This eating plan is so easy’ is easier still when you say ‘this eating plan is so amazingly easy’. Equally, chips become less appealing if you say ‘fatty, oily, greasy, lardy chips floating in an oil slick’. Swear words are naturally used to increase the intensity of descriptions so use this to your advantage: ‘I look fantastic’ is more intense when you say ‘I look fan-bloody-tastic’, and ‘I look so damn amazing’ is more powerful than just amazing.
Avoid words like ‘try’, ‘hope’, ‘wish’ or ‘dream’: ‘I am trying to stay on the diet’, ‘I wish I could be a size 12’, ‘I dream of being thinner’, ‘I hope I succeed this time’. These words convince your mind that you have no power or ability to make it happen and that you are depending on some external force to make it work. You are wishing, hoping and dreaming of it working because it is beyond your ability to pull it off.
When you replace the above words with ‘I
know
’, ‘I
can
’, ‘I
will
’, ‘I
am
’ you immediately move into a ‘take charge and succeed’ mentality. Put those words into your statements so they read like this: ‘I will stay on this diet’, ‘I absolutely definitely will be a size 12’, ‘I can be thinner’, ‘I know I will succeed’, and ‘I am making it work for me’.
One Last Word – Enough!
I am ‘enough’ is the most powerful word of all and my absolute favourite. I’ll show you just how important this word is, and then how to go about using it for its maximum impact.
I had been working with people with eating issues for several years and was very struck by the fact that they could never seem to get enough to eat and never felt they were enough in themselves as people either. It wasn’t hard to make a connection and the connection became clearer with every overweight person I saw for therapy.
Overeating generally stems from an inner feeling of lacking something and emptiness. One of my clients described it to me as a feeling of being hollow inside. Therefore we need more food and more material things to compensate for the lack we feel and to fill the void within us. Instead of filling that void with food and purchases you need to understand that the void exists only in your mind and you have the power to close it forever. The unconscious need to be physically bigger, to be substantial to stand out and be noticed often stems from feeling insignificant in childhood. Many of my clients have become physically bigger than they ever wanted to be because when they were little they felt insignificant or small.
When you know and believe you are enough you don’t need more.
When you feel and believe you are not enough you will always want more.
A few years ago I worked with Richard, a very successful actor who kept gaining weight and losing out on acting roles because of it. During hypnosis it emerged that Richard’s father would eat a full cooked dinner every night while his son had beans on toast at the same table. His father always had nicer food than him and much more of it. Richard was never offered any of his father’s food. The family had little spare money and, as the breadwinner and a manual labourer, Richard’s father felt he was entitled to eat hearty meals while his son was not. This scenario was played out over and over. At Sunday lunch his father had the biggest helping and any second helpings were always given to the father. I asked him ‘Did your father ever give you any leftovers?’ He replied ‘There rarely were any but if there were he would sooner give them to the dog than me.’ The message Richard picked up by being given inferior food or smaller amounts was that he was not good enough and that even the dog was more worthy than him.
In my experience when people feel they are not enough they go into a mental state of ‘lack’ and just cannot get enough. Often this manifests itself by them never feeling they have had enough to eat, always wanting more food, worrying that the food will run out, eating like there is no tomorrow and doing it all again a few hours later.