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Four Articles on Weight Loss with Alchemy By David Quigley, founder and director of the Alchemy Institute, Santa Rosa, CA (Copied from www.alchemyinstitute.com with permission) True Secrets of Permanent Weight Loss: Part One Healing Infantile Eating Habits Over 65% of Americans are overweight. According to researchers, Americans are getting fatter at the rate of ten pounds per decade despite a weight loss industry that is costing billions every year. As a hypnotherapist and hypnosis trainer for twenty-five years, I’ve dedicated myself to finding a solution. It seems to me that our approach to weight needs to address the underlying causes of our eating habits, rather than simply adding more superficial strategies which are not producing for many of my clients the long term results they deserve. While many weight programs seem to work in the short run, they frequently lead to cycles of weight fluctuation. Even if I help a client lose fifty pounds now, do I want my client to still be counting calories, struggling with new diet plans, and obsessing about their weight ten years from now? Should I consider that a therapeutic success? No, I believe we can do better. Let’s deal with the sources of the problem. That’s what this series of articles will address. Most of us know friends whose lives do not revolve around their efforts to manage and control their eating. They just naturally seem to eat the types and the quantities of food that keep their bodies slender and energized. We will learn how to match our subconscious eating habits and metabolic patterns with theirs, so we can experience the freedom and energy they naturally enjoy. There are two primary elements of this challenge. First, there is the client’s tendency to eat too much of the wrong foods, and at the wrong time (eating at night, for example, is the wrong time because the body cannot effectively burn the foods you eat.) These eating habits are not simply random errors, easily correctable by education or self discipline. They are based on “emotional eating habits” we learned as children. We will learn to recognize these eating patterns and, more importantly, how to change these habits in the subconscious mind, so that our weight loss is easy and natural. A second and equally important element of these articles is to explore our metabolic programming to keep fat on the body. If you’ve ever wondered why your clients can’t seem to lose much weight even on the most rigorous of diet plans, if your friend gains back all that lost weight within months of losing it, if you can’t seem to eat a single croissant without wearing it around your waist, listen up. We will be addressing the causes of this metabolic programming to stay fat, and will learn to eliminate these subconscious programs. First, I’ll address some underlying causes of our inappropriate emotional eating habits. An “Emotional eating habit” is a way of using eating as a mood-altering behavior. This behavior is unrelated to the body’s natural hunger, and for many of us produces not only excessive body fat, but can lead to such proven health consequences as diabetes and heart disease. We’ll learn how with advanced techniques of hypnosis we can heal these patterns. The first of these emotional eating habits I call infantile eating. I ask my overweight clients these questions in our first interview.
Do you crave sweet foods or dairy products frequently, especially at night?
Do you feel a deep emptiness when you eat these foods, or a sense of grief, or despair?
Do you tend to wolf down meals without tasting them, craving the satiety of a full belly?
Do you experience dieting as a source of despair or a kind of self-punishment, an empty stomach that says nobody loves me? If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then infantile emotional eating habits may still be haunting your efforts to lose weight. Most of us have completely forgotten where these patterns began. But hypnotherapists have known for years. They know that as infants at our mother’s breast, or on the bottle in our lonely crib, we begin to develop the emotional eating habits of a lifetime. So the choice that our caregivers made–breast or lonely bottle–has enormous implications for a lifetime of overeating! Let’s examine the ideal experience of the infant at the breast. The infant sucks hard and works hard to get the milk, while experiencing lots of affection, cuddling and play with mother. The child is nourished in body and soul, while taking a long time to fill its stomach with the warm liquid that is synonymous with love. This ritual is especially important at night, so the baby can sleep through the night, or for at least a few hours, free of hunger. Bottle-fed babies, in contrast, when the caregiver ignores the child’s needs for attention, discover that it’s easy to guzzle the milk from the bottle. So this poor infant learns that the only way to experience nurturing is to wolf down the proffered meal as quickly as possible, trying hard to ignore his body’s feelings of loneliness and abandonment, until his tummy is so full that he can drift off to sleep. Filling up with food quickly, therefore, becomes a substitute for our basic needs for love and affection. So we learn very early to become “compulsive eaters," eating sweet foods, eating too fast, filling up too full, and eating at night or when we are lonely, depressed or sad. Some of my clients with this pattern protest, “I was nursed!” I inform them that their nursing experience was very likely troubled or too brief if they show all the signs of infantile emotional eating. It is highly unlikely that they received the two to five years of healthy nursing on demand characteristic of all primeval cultures. One client remembered after a bit of prodding: “My mother told me she was a heavy smoker when I was a baby. She said I became allergic to her milk, so she had to quit.” Problems like this are all too common among my overweight clients. Although only a skilled hypnotherapist can take us to the true memories of infancy, I have learned that if my client shows the symptoms I’ve described, they probably have this conditioning. The body does not lie. By taking our clients back to infancy in a hypnotic trance, we hypnotherapists help them experience and understand all the pain and hurt that the body has been running from all these years, running to food. But far more important, they’ll have the chance to experience through hypnotic suggestion, as that infant, the real love and nurturing that comes from an ideal mother. We implant these blissful experiences in the subconscious mind. We embed these suggestions in the mouth, the stomach, the heart of the client. Then we implant these blissful bodily feelings into those times, usually at night, when the client is craving sweets or feeling that familiar ache of loneliness. Every act of eating can be infused with these happy feelings. Our clients can then experience the sheer joy of eating slowly, chewing thoroughly and eating much less while enjoying eating far more…the way properly raised humans are supposed to enjoy eating. Or they may discover that they aren’t really hungry and simply close the refrigerator, perhaps choosing a hypnotic nap in the arms of their inner mother instead for a few minutes. In just a few sessions, lifelong habits can be changed, as the client learns to access this mother/child bond on their own. Other addictive patterns, notably cigarette and drug cravings, can also be reduced or eliminated through this technology. Food allergies also will vanish sometimes, as food assumes different roles in our emotional lives. One hypnotherapist described this technique to me as a “Radical new approach.” Radical, yes, because no other hypnosis school in America teaches these techniques. But this methodology is based on Sigmund Freud’s “oral complex," one of the important foundations of psychoanalysis for the last one hundred years. My belief is that while Freud brilliantly described the nature of this fixation, his own life-long addiction to smoking demonstrated that insight alone is not enough to break the patterns of the oral complex. To the extent that nearly our entire society suffers this complex because of modern parenting strategies, more must be done. The evidence is within our bodies here in America. Through hypnosis therapy, an answer is available. True Secrets of Permanent Weight Loss: Part Two Learn To Express Feelings for Permanent Weight Loss In the first article in our weight loss series, we learned about “emotional eating habits”, those eating behaviors that are related to emotional longings rather than the body’s real need for nutrition. The first thing we explored was the infantile programming to overeat created by the common practice of bottle feeding when accompanied by parental neglect. We learned how to heal these traumas from infancy and thus permanently change these habits. In this article, I will address the use of food to suppress emotions, in other words, stuffing one’s feelings with food. Many of us were raised in families where the expression of feelings was discouraged or even punished. Such phrases as “Shut up or I’ll give you something to cry about!” or “Children should be seen and not heard,” represent extreme but regrettably common examples. More frequently however we find the parent who is simply too busy and stressed to listen to their children’s feelings and needs. Sometimes children discover on their own that eating some food can help them suppress their anger and tears. Sometimes they are programmed by their parents to eat in this dysfunctional way. A child cries with pain, or needing some attention, and even a well-meaning mother will shove a bottle into the child’s mouth or give her a cookie to silence her. It doesn’t take long for the child to learn this life-long eating habit. The solution is to return the client in trance to the time he or she first learned to stuff their feelings with food. Then we can bring in the resource of the client’s adult self to encourage the child to express their feelings. As a therapist I will often need to encourage my client to express their feelings, anger, tears, etc. in a loud voice. “That’s good! You tell them! You deserve to be heard!” are all expressions I frequently use. Then we use the empowered adult self along with, if necessary, the presence of a new inner parent to respond lovingly and approvingly to the child’s expression of feeling. Then we help the child experience the incomparable joy of their needs being met. The client is encouraged to feel in their bodies the fulfillment of these experiences. Finally, we bring this newly developed skill of expressing feelings into the client’s present life and present communications, sometimes through assertiveness training, sometimes through mental rehearsals. In effect, we are training the client’s subconscious mind to express feelings safely and confidently. Here’s an example. Sarah (not her real name) is 50 lbs. overweight and reports that stuffing her feelings is a problem. Her subconscious mind takes us to a memory of her and her mother in the kitchen. She’s crying about a broken toy, and feeling neglected by Mom who’s on the phone. Mom hands her a cookie along with a look that clearly implies she is not to be disturbed. While this kind of daily neglect rarely gets the media attention of sexual or violent abuse incidents, it is these supposedly mundane events which, repeated often enough, produce the syndrome we’re describing in many of my clients. Our therapeutic intervention begins with bringing in the client’s adult self. The adult self tells mother that she is making a big mistake. I encourage her to loudly express her anger. Mom is immediately remorseful. Then we ask her child to express her tears again, which she does out loud. Then, we gently instruct Mom in how to listen to her child’s needs and respond to them (If Mother were less warmly responsive it might have been necessary to release her and replace her with a new mother in the client’s inner world. This would not significantly affect the adult Sarah’s relationship with her present time mother, but simply provide a symbolic new resource for the child of the past.) We then embed this new resource in the client’s body and memory, with words like “Now breathe in that wonderful feeling as Mommy holds you. And now she’s looking at your broken toy, and promises she’ll get you a new one soon. Now she’s going into your room and helping you find another toy to play with. Breathe in this wonderful feeling. Notice how wonderful it is to let Mom know how you are feeling. This is how she knows to take care of you.” These words are called “counter-programming suggestions” and are essential to re-enforce new core beliefs and behaviors. Now we link this new resource to every time she feels an uncomfortable feeling in her present life. “Now every time you have an unpleasant feeling, the kind that made you want to eat, we remember how safe it is now to tell your husband or children how you feel.” I then walk Sarah through a quick rehearsal of expressing this feeling to her husband. I may even advise her on the best ways to express her feelings to him in a style that he finds it easy to respond to. We’ll also follow through in our rehearsal to see that her needs are being met afterwards in some way. I can give her more help in her skills of emotional expression. “Perhaps instead of blaming him we could just tell him how this behavior makes you feel?” I persist in this rehearsal until her communication is comfortable, and it works to get her needs met. While shouting and crying may be a useful part of the client’s therapy, opening up the channels of emotional expression, it isn’t so useful in our daily family lives. Instead the client needs to develop adult communication skills, which in many cases have never been properly developed. We re-program half a dozen similar memories provided by Sarah’s subconscious mind in this way. This includes both repeated rescue missions for her child of the past and lots of mental rehearsals of her new communication skills in her adult life. After only four hours of therapy, and two weeks later, Sarah reports. Not only is she eating far less, she is finding her relationships are changing in dramatic and wonderful ways. Her experiences of victimization and powerlessness are disappearing, and love and intimacy are growing in her family. And she is losing weight. She tells me however, that the other changes in her life are much more important to her than the lost weight. She is already beginning a life that is no longer ruled by her weight issues. I find it typical of my work with weight issues that many other aspects of the client’s life change dramatically for the better as we work, because we are addressing core problems, of which weight per se is only one symptom. True Secrets of Permanent Weight Loss: Part Three Weight Loss Through Creative Expression In our last article about the emotional eating habits that keep us overweight we discussed the subconscious programming that causes us to stuff our feelings with food. In this article, we will explore another common pattern among overweight people: the use of food to substitute for creative expression. Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of humanistic psychology, is often credited with describing creativity as a basic human need comparable to the needs for food and shelter, in his theory of the hierarchy of needs. Although his theory remains controversial, I have experienced with many clients that this need appears to be very real. Children, we notice, are constantly involved, if given the opportunity, in creative play. We adults, however, have frequently learned to suppress our creative instincts, and all too often, to substitute eating for creativity. Here’s a questionnaire to determine if this is a pattern you or a friend has experienced.
Do you find yourself eating out of sheer boredom? Do you watch two or more hours of television per day?
Do you lack an exciting hobby or creative interest?
Do you put down your occasional experiments in creative expression as amateurish or a waste of time?
Do you often eat snacks while reading or watching television when you are not truly hungry? If you answered any of these questions in the affirmative then you may suffer this type of programming. Chances are that this programming began in childhood, when our caregivers, instead of encouraging our creativity, suppressed this essential self-expression with harsh criticism, neglect, or even ridicule. While these experiences may have long ago passed out of our conscious recollection, the subconscious mind does not forget. So these programs can continue to strangle our creativity throughout our lives. The solution? Through hypnosis therapy we can use simple instructions to access these memories in the subconscious mind and rescue the child from these events. Then we provide that inner child with new experiences of being loved and supported for their creative expression by an inner family or by the client’s adult self. For example, Bob (not his real name) finds eating in front of the television in the early evening a bad eating habit he wishes to change. He can’t remember ever having a hobby. We descend in a light trance to the first time his creativity was made wrong. He discovers a memory in which as a small boy he is ridiculed by some neighborhood boys for his drawings, which they label as “silly and girlish.” Feeling intensely ashamed, he determines to stifle these expressions. Our first task is to rescue this boy from these boys and let his adult self and the therapist assure him that his drawing ability is a wonderful gift. We then insert the counter-programming suggestion that his drawings are an expression of his “manliness and courage.” This will help erase the core belief implanted by these boys. Next we take his drawings to his parents in hopes of winning their approval for his art. I ask if his parents would like to hang his pictures on the fridge. Their response is cool, since mother is obsessed with her own pain and dad is a “busy” alcoholic. In this case, my client took great pleasure in firing his father. Then he addressed his mother with a tearful appeal for her support, before realizing that she would have to be retired and replaced with his adult self. These intensely emotional confrontations with parental figures are often unpleasant for my clients but are essential in helping the inner child to disengage from the need for parental approval, and to help the child bond to the adult self, and, where necessary, to new inner parents. Then I encouraged Bob’s adult self to access this child through gentle self hypnosis techniques for a few minutes in the early evening and create some drawings. I greatly increased our chances of success by encouraging him to buy brightly colored magic markers and quality pens, pencils, and drawing paper. We also determined what room in the house is best for some quiet and undisturbed creativity. I then instructed his adult self to enjoy this creative activity, which he will find so much more exciting than the television, while praising his inner child for the effort. This is not the time for a critical evaluation, but for warm encouragement. I instructed him to bring one of his drawings to me, and to hang all of them on his fridge at home. Soon his television watching was down by more than half, and so were the eating patterns. Of course, we need to remind clients over and over that producing a Van Gogh is not the goal of the process. Nor do we use the oft-repeated mantra “practice makes perfect” which has destroyed thousands of creative inspirations, in my opinion. The real goal is feeling good while expressing one’s creative instincts. To the extent that the client’s friends and family can be enrolled in support of this creative expression, we encourage this involvement. But the client’s adult self is the primary resource for this process. For some clients whose belief system includes reincarnation, we can journey back to a past life in which the client was engaged in a specific creative activity which is of interest to the client. After accessing a creative ability which the client is ready to bring forward, we can enter these abilities into the body of the client for instant access. Some of the abilities brought forward include piano playing, dance, art, even leadership skills and public speaking. Of course there is no substitute for practicing these abilities, and classes in creativity are also to be encouraged. But this process makes it much easier and more fun to develop these abilities with a minimum of drills and lessons. Obviously, the development of these creative abilities does far more for my clients than simply altering their eating habits. These gifts enrich lives at every level. This series of articles outlines some of the ways we can solve the problem of emotional eating habits. While there are many sources of destructive emotional eating habits besides those mentioned here, the vast majority of my clients in 25 years of experience in hypnotherapy have some problem with infantile eating, stuffing feelings with food, and suppressing creativity. We hypnotists do not offer a magic bullet, a simple pill to cause weight
to fall off. All of our methods should be used in conjunction with a well
informed plan for diet and exercise, hopefully with the guidance of a
medical doctor or other health professional. These hypnotic techniques
can, however, make the difference between a lifetime of dieting and weight
obsession and having lifelong healthy eating and living habits which can
allow your life to be about many things…but not about controlling
your appetite and your eating. True Secrets of Permanent Weight Loss: Part Four Secrets of Portion Control for Permanent Weight Loss One of the most important problems for the client who is serious about losing weight is portion size. Everyone wishing to lose weight needs to learn about healthy eating habits, the importance of fresh fruits and vegetables, avoiding highly processed foods, and the value of whole grains. In fact, I require every client I see to research proper nutrition or consult a trained nutritionist. But another major challenge is controlling the portions that we eat. No matter how good their food choices are, overweight people often simply eat too much. One solution is to join a diet program like Jennie Craig which basically determines both your food choices and portions for you. Such programs have a high success rate for rapid weight loss. The problem of course is that it may be difficult to make the transition from this kind of highly regimented program to a self-regulating regime. While carefully measuring ones portions may be workable for some of us, many of my weight loss clients are looking for an easier way to manage portion size than always using measuring cups. And there is one. It requires that we understand the proper role of the stomach in managing our eating habits. We need to start listening to our stomach ’s wisdom. The human stomach is a uniquely versatile organ. For most of the last two million years of evolution our human ancestors needed a stomach that could hold up to two quarts of food. That’s because they might spend two days chasing a mammoth across the plains on an empty stomach. Then they had to eat very quickly before they were chased off by the saber toothed tigers. The uncertainty of food sources and lack of storage options required our early ancestors to develop a stomach that was uniquely suited to this environment. Early humans lived a life of nearly constant physical exertion. And their stomach would be filled with food only once every few days. The rest of the time it would be a few bites of leaves or fruit. Our ancestors did not suffer from overweight problems. Now this same large stomach no longer serves us. If a modern human who is living a sedentary life fills this stomach even once a day to capacity, obesity is the inevitable outcome. That’s because this stomach was never intended to be filled every day in this way. Unfortunately, we are conditioned to eat to capacity in many subtle ways. We are trained to experience eating to a sensation of fullness as the goal of a meal. Even during our mealtimes as a child we were programmed to stuff ourselves. (“Come on, Joey, have another piece of pie. Don’t you like it? You have to grow up big and strong. Are you sick? Where’s your appetite? Don’t you want to be in the clean plate club?”) Restaurant portions are also designed to fill us to capacity, not to mention the joys of all you can eat buffets. In the face of this kind of programming it should hardly be surprising that obesity is a nation-wide epidemic. But this same stomach that creates such a problem for weight loss also offers us a solution to this problem. I teach my clients to eat slowly and remain tuned in to their stomach’s signals after every bite, rather than waiting until they feel stuffed to listen to their stomach’s complaints. What this reveals is that the stomach gives a more subtle signal when it is no longer churning with hunger. Instead our stomach is simply calm. At this time the stomach is telling us “I’ve got enough now to fend off starvation.” While most overweight people are trained to ignore this early signal and keep on stuffing themselves, it is easy to use hypnosis to help us experience this subtle signal and stop eating at that point. Since it will take up to twenty minutes for the food still in your mouth to reach your stomach, you will leave the table with a comfortable feeling of satisfaction. But, you will not feel the sense of tiredness, bloating or heartburn so common with a full stomach. Along with tuning in to stomach signals, we can tune into our taste buds for help in portion control. All of us are aware that when we are truly hungry the first bites of a good meal are incredibly delicious. But after a few bites, as the edge of our appetite is reduced, the taste of the food diminishes. After a few more bites the taste of the food may entirely disappear and we are simply shoving the food in because it is there. Next time you sit down to a meal, notice how this is true for you. Now, here’s the secret: if you tune into the enormous pleasure of eating those first bites you will multiply your eating pleasure. Enjoy these bites even more by chewing slowly to absorb all the subtle flavors. And as soon as this enormous pleasure is gone, as soon as your eating becomes routine, even boring, simply STOP EATING. You can put the rest of your delicious meal in the fridge. Tomorrow those leftovers will bring you a second serving of sheer gustatory ecstasy. But for today, the pleasure is gone, and so is your need to eat. Most of us are not accustomed to tuning in to our bodies in this way. Many of us are conditioned to stuff our faces automatically throughout the day in response to every feeling of stress, hunger, or simply boredom. Many of us are ruled subconsciously by emotional eating habits which have nothing to do with our taste buds or our physical hungers. These issues are addressed in Permanent Secrets of Weight Loss, Parts 1-3. So it requires disciplined effort and patience at first to tune in to these subtle signals. My work as a hypnotherapist often requires me to explore traumatic mealtimes in my client’s memories in order to rescue their inner child from these experiences where they learned inappropriate eating habits. Then hypnotherapy can be used to help tune in to these signals from our bodies, and respond to them. Remember that our eating habits, like all other habits, are stored in the subconscious mind, which can be easily accessed in a hypnotic trance. Once these new eating habits are in place the benefits are enormous. First, we lose weight effortlessly without the need to count calories. Second, we multiply the pleasures of eating as we learn to tune in to our bodies more efficiently. Thirdly, we gain control over the common symptoms of heartburn, bloating and indigestion which are the universal signals of poor portion control. Try practicing this new style of eating. Soon, you’ll discover that it is easy to control portion size by
listening to your own stomach and your taste buds. Then your life doesn’t
have to be about controlling your eating any more. Perhaps you can enjoy
the valuable external controls of a program like Jenny Craig or weight
watchers while developing these internal controls. But now you won’t
always have to depend on others to control your eating choices. Good luck
on your journey. If you would like to experience greater health & vitality, |
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