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Well, just the word 'diet' is super charged with all kinds of negative connotations.
I say 'nutrition plan' to my clients...you plan a vacation, you plan to build a house, we need to plan for better health.

I like to tell them about the 80/20 rule where you eat very well 80% of the time and allow for indulges 20% of the time. Usually one day of free eating a week.

The lovely thing about that is that when you eat well the majority of the time, if you start pigging out one day you won't be feeling so good afterwards. So you will naturally wean yourself off of the junk.

Also, the free eating day is not an exercise "off" day. It will be a day when there is intense exercise to kind of counterbalance the indulgence. There too if you are exercising you are less likely to ruin all of the good effort you have put in!

Of course I don't tell them all of that....I just let it happen!

I don't want to sound facetious but there could be a gap in the market for caffeine flavoured lettuce!

I always said you were sneaky!

STRATEGIC Chris! Not sneaky!

I have learned with experience that there are moments when one needs to save their breath and let others come to their own conclusions.
That sometimes has more impact.

Caffeine flavoured lettuce hunh? I think we may be onto something!

Surely you get more addicts / repeat buyers with lettuce flavoured caffeine?

May work... Feel alive with caffeine and have the goodness of lettuce or any other healthy product! I've tasted lettuce and decafeinated coffee, both tasted awful.

I love greens and coffee....Together would be somewhat interesting!

But wait! Chocolate has cafeine!

How about chocolate covered lettuce?!

We could build an EMPIRE!

You could be committed to an asylum.

John

Surely there must be someway of making these things taste nicer without making them unhealthy, what about strawberry flavoured vegetables?

I'd go with making something like tomoto ketchup from vegetables or is that going too far?

On a serious note I did hear / read/ dream up a story that childrens underdeveloped taste buds do not do a good job at making certain foods taste nice or their bodies accept certain stlyles of foods. Many adults have a determined and almost passionate hatred of one or more vegetables but the only thing that stops the adult enjoying them is the belief that it tastes bad when in reality they havnt tried it for many years. As we grow up our taste interpretation changes, looking at the progression of alcoholic drinks as people and their tastes mature, it is too consistent to be chance. Alco pops/ Cider, Lager, Beer, Spirits is a frequent/typical male progression as tastes change. Try giving a teenage binge drinker some real ale or give your grandad a WKD if you want to test this out!

Jon, the tastes and textures also vary depending on their preparation. You can steam, boil, grill, oven bake, fry, cream, mash etc almost all vegetables and get a different culinary experience with each.

As we grow our tastes in music, people, hobbies etc all change, it makes sense our desierable tastes do also.

Hmmmm....don't really believe that vegetable theory. My kids have always eaten vegetables as they were presented as part of our meals and not something they needed to tolerate. I have a plate of fresh raw veggies on the table before the meal as they are usually hungry and they eat them while the meal is being prepared.

I made sure to present everything as normal and just 'that way' so no negative beliefs/associations are created.

This was done very consciously with me as I understand that kids will follow our lead.
For example, if one of them broke a wax crayon instead of saying something like 'That's too bad' I would say 'Wow! Now you have two!'

Same goes for veggies and anything else. I have a 'three bites' rule. Even if it *looks* like you won't like it, you need to take three bites before being able to have something else.

I grew up with the 'clean your plate' mentality. There was no way that I was going to transmit that to my children.

How is the weight loss going?

I have a very crap joke for you all, I apologise in advance, but I have been chuckling away all afternoon over it.

It does show how many peoples actions are based on crazy inherited behaviour. It goes along the lines of...


A newlywed wife is preparing the food for her first family gathering and serves ham for the main course. The husband noticed the ends of the ham had been cut off and he asked why.

"That's the way my mother always did it," the young wife replied with a shrug.

He asked his wife's mother the same question and got the same answer,


"That's the way my mother did it."

So, looking along the table for the family member of the next generation he finally he asked the grandma why she cut the ends off the ham, she replied, "That's the only way I could get it into the pan."

x

Matt

Thanks Matt - it all seems to be going rather well. Two most noticable things are that I am sleeping so much better than before (and I slept well before) and I am not snoring any more (probably why I feel so more alive in the mornings). I only started snoring in the past 6 months or so, and this is something that has stopped, much to Laura's relief.

I'll be discussing the releationships between sleep, appetite and weight loss in a later entry.

A new video entry today: A Hypnotherapist Publicly Loses Weight

i just had a thought about mirrors and food, what if eating in the mirror doubles the input to your brain that you are eating and makes you feel less hungry quicker... Maybe its partly that which helps you lose weight and not so much the change of context when eating in front of the mirror? I recall a study mckenna reffered to about blindfolding people and them eating significantly less than they usually do because they lost the urge to 'finish their meals'...

Hey Andrew,
I went to your website and saw that you tried Hoodia. I'm glad you stopped because these supplements can sometimes cause more harm than good. I think more for women than for men as our hormonal system is a little more complex.

I do have an open question... can NLP and hypnosis have an affect on our operating systems?

I am presently having a problem with any kind of carbs. We need them to function but my body seems to go straight to fat storage. I'm undergoing all kinds of tests right now --- the latest theory ---after the thyroid one was eliminiated--- is that my adrenals are messed so are not helping my hypothalamus regulate my cortisol levels.

I am not working out as I used to which was almost 2hrs a day -- but do walk / run a minimum of three times a week. I shouldn't be packing on the pounds.

So...is there anything *I* could do to fix this? I'm sure I will get help and answers at the PPT course but I'm trying to save my vanity!

Anyone....?

Isabelle

Don't you think it is inappropriate to work with female clients who've seen you naked?

What do you expect the female clients will do?

Hi Isabelle,

I am currently working with emotional eating issues in Second Life too and have been successful in helping people make the connection with past stress in their lives and its link to emotional eating. I use a process I developed from all my training to literally turn emotions around.. If you would like to come and visit me there perhaps we can sort this out for you, at least on the emotional level.

I would also like to point you in the direction of new research that I have been looking at in the area of stress and how it prevents fat from actually leaving the cells. His name is Shawn Talbot and is web is SHAWNTALBOTT.COM he has book out too on the topic which I need to buy and read myself.


Lipolysis was one area I studed in my Sports science degree and have maintained that stress really does make you fat... as well as dieting. I made the connection with the fact that inactive and overfat people do not have sufficiant adipose tissue blood flow in order for the 3 fatty acids that get mobilised to go anywhere.. so it gets shunted back into the adiposyte.. thus making the fat cell larger and this is compounded by the portal vien issues via the liver etc and implicated in metabolic syndrome x

But as you are active, I think that you may have enough blood flow to take away fatty acids released with cortisol stimulation - so the new research is now talking about what is happening on the inside of the cell in order to keep the fat from from being moblised - so I would look into the new research on something called HSD - as fitness specialist this should be easy for you to analyse and put some connections together.

For me.. its aobut switching off the stress response - NLP is great for that - as well as balancing your ph levels with an alkaline diet , but most of all to find the emotional route to the problem, so that it can be reversed using NLP.

Best wishes
Nina

I'd definetely go with balancing your ph levels with an appropriate diet. As soon as you've balanced your diet out towards your specific body and your specific needs you feel so good that it;s like it becomes a different ball game.

Some people heavily underestimate the effect of well balanced food choices and excercise has on your state of wellbeing.

As soon as your Ph levels are optimal you tend to feel a lot more energetic and relaxed and ofcoures stress causes your blood to go more acidic so there is that direct relationship which works both ways. Have less stress have better ph levels in your blood, have better ph levels in your blood feel less stressed.

I've noticed it makes it a lot easier when you're eating well, and another thing i'd look out for is the kind of foods you eat. Avoid the light products they tend to be full of aspartame and other harmfull ingredients which increase the acidic levels of your blood.

You say you specifically have troubles with carbs, well has this become a belief? If so then you can do changework on that.
Look at a sentence like 'why stress makes you fat' that's implying it does whilst there are lot's of stressed out folk who then forget to eat and lose weight and there's a myriad of other possibilities aswell.

Have fun!

Hi! Thank you Nina and Kate.

I eat very well however being a single parent with a business to run does have it's stresses.

One thing that is good is that I don't do emotional eating. I'm not a big fan of sugar either.

I will look into the acid / alkaline thing though. What would you suggest? I already eat many greens on a daily basis and have started taking extra liquid greens recently.

I think working on my stress response would be the most appropriate thing to do though. I am a pretty calm person but my life is anything but!

This is surely a cumulative result to all of the wonderful life training I have experienced!

Thanks again,

Isabelle