You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (11 page)

Like Lorna, Barbara had a very controlling mother. She was not put on a diet but she was not allowed any kind of sweets or biscuits. Her mother very strictly enforced this; at school if the children brought in a birthday cake to share she was not allowed any of it. At birthday parties she was not allowed any of the cakes or chocolate. Her mother could only enforce this when Barbara was small but even in her teens no sugar was allowed in the house. As soon as Barbara had her own money she would buy as much confectionery as she could afford and eat it all at once setting up a long-lasting sugar addiction. She was very overweight but could not stay on any diet as the foods they forbade were the very same foods her mother banned (sweets, biscuits and cake) and she linked pain to being denied them and pleasure to eating them. Diets tell you what you can’t have, many people have a desire to eat the very foods they are forbidden. It is human nature to want the things we are denied, hence people on Atkins who crave fruit when they did not even want it much beforehand. You can only stop eating certain foods by choosing to, not by being made to.

Use the following statements to give your body the messages you want it to respond to:

Amy was an emotional eater who had an addiction to cakes and biscuits and ate them daily. She ate them even more when she was unhappy, sad or bored. Her mother worked away a lot and didn’t spend much time with Amy. On special events like birthdays she would put a lot of time and effort into making Amy a cake and this made Amy feel special. It seemed that Amy tried to get that special feeling back by eating the same food her mother had made her. Since her mother’s death Amy had only wanted to eat cakes. If our mothers make us rice pudding with strawberry jam or apple pie when we are unhappy we often want those very same foods whenever we feel low. Again part of breaking the pattern is to fully understand how we acquired it in the first place since we all come into the world with normal eating habits. Understanding why can be a powerful tool in letting go, as you can’t change what you don’t understand. When we say, ‘I don’t know why I do this (eat like this) I just can’t seem to help it’, we are taking no responsibility. Once you can say, ‘I understand exactly why I did this and I choose not to do it any longer’, you are taking control and becoming free. Like Amy, it is normal to cross over into more than one category.

 

Adapt the following suggestions to suit you, substituting your specific food, i.e. chocolate, biscuits, pizza, ice cream, fast food, in place of cake:

Patrick was a very successful city trader who would begin each day eating normally but after a business lunch he would send his secretary out to buy him a box of cream cakes. He would eat them all then feel disgusted with himself. Every day he vowed not to eat cream cakes but on the days when he did avoid them he would stand at his fridge door in the middle of the night eating cream and chocolate instead.

In hypnosis Patrick remembered being poor during the 1960s and only having the most basic food to eat. He and his friends would walk to school and on the way they would stop to look into the window of a nearby bakery. Patrick would look at all the fancy cakes and say out loud, ‘When I grow up I am going to eat all of these every day’. He and his friends would amuse themselves by picking out the cakes that they would enjoy the most if only they could afford to buy them saying to each other, ‘I will have that one first, then that one, then that one’, in doing so they could forget that they were dirt poor for a few moments. Patrick told me this was a ritual that he indulged in every morning and afternoon for years on his way past the bakery. His brain clearly got the message and acted on it because years later he was doing just what he had visualised, eating cakes and chocolate excessively.

If as a child you long for a certain type of food and link enormous pleasure to eating it in abundance, if you frequently focus on that longing and repeat it regularly, then your mind will assume you want that and the emotional imprint will be far stronger than the logic that tries to ignore it or fight it.

Patrick was wealthy, successful and heading for a heart attack as his cholesterol level was alarmingly high. He understood in hypnosis that he was acting from an outdated and redundant longing and that in his mind he had linked being successful with eating high-calorie confectionery. By having Patrick state over and over again, ‘I am forty-five, I have money, I can have cakes every day but I choose not to, I’m free of them’, he was able to lose all interest in them.

 

Do exactly the same if you have a history of not being allowed certain foods as a child and longed for them. Many children were not allowed fizzy drinks and as adults they crave them for the wrong reasons. (Including me – I only got them at my grandmothers and they were an enormous treat that I continued to treat myself to as an adult. I only stopped when I was pregnant and they made me so sick I have never drunk them since.)

Repeat:

Martina was fourteen and obese. When I began to talk to her she told me that she was very unhappy because she felt no one took any notice of her at home. She told me that she had a much smaller bedroom than her older brother and sister and that her mother called her ‘my baby’ while her father called her ‘my little girl’. For her parents this may have been a loving gesture but Martina felt so insignificant and so small that I wondered if she had an unconscious need to be big, to be noticed, to stand out and be a physically bigger and more important presence in her family.

To her parents’ credit they came to a session and both agreed to stop referring to her to as ‘my baby’ and ‘my little girl’. Her father moved his office into Martina’s small bedroom and Martina made her father’s office into a bigger bedroom. Once Martina stopped feeling so small and unimportant in her own home her weight changed, she found it easier to eat differently and she dropped two stone.

 

If you feel in any way insignificant or unimportant and you are overweight you must deal with the feelings of insignificance and counteract them. They are as important as the excess weight. You cannot fix one without the other because they will be interlinked. You must say:

Repeat until it is an absolute statement of truth for you and you can feel it ringing true.

Once I heard Sandra’s history I told her she should never go on a deprivation or restrictive diet ever again. Sandra, who was in her sixties, told me that she would try to diet by eating as little as possible during the day. She even tried to fast or just eat fruit but by 4 o’clock she would have such an overwhelming urge to eat that she would hurry to the nearest shop and start cramming food into her mouth before she even got to the check out. She usually crammed in any kind of bread or cake and did not care what she looked like or who saw her.

In hypnosis she described living in Holland in hiding during the war and having so little food that her family once ate tulip bulbs and pet food just to have something in their stomachs. Sandra’s brain had linked the most overwhelming pain to having an empty stomach. For her, going without food triggered memories of intense pain and deprivation. Her brain was so keen to move her away from this pain that it motivated her to get any food into her body as soon as possible. Our brain’s job is to move us away from pain and towards pleasure.

Sandra could not diet. She could only succeed in changing what and how she ate. Although Sandra was an extreme case, denying food to someone who has been deprived of it cannot ever work. If you have ever been deprived of food because of financial circumstances or because you had a rigid controlling parent like Lorna or Barbara, any time you put yourself on a restrictive diet the memories will at some level motivate you to sabotage it. You can counteract this by telling yourself you have chosen to eat differently but do not say, ‘I can’t have that, I must not eat that, I am not allowed to eat those’ – it just will not work long term.

 

Use the following affirmations to keep your eating habits in line:

Liam was brought up the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. Food was put on the table and the children grabbed what they could and ate as quickly as they could to stop someone else taking more than their share. If ever there were seconds the one who finished first got them. Because Liam was the smallest his elder siblings often took his food as he was too little to fight back. As a result Liam became an adult who rushed through his food and always ate as if it might run out or be taken away from him. He did not take any pleasure from eating slowly and enjoying his meals. He told me that at the table he put his head over his plate of food and literally did not raise it again until he had eaten everything in front of him. Remembering in hypnosis that he acquired these habits and came into the world with a normal attitude to food allowed him to regain the normal eating habits he was born with. He reinforced this by playing a hypnosis tape daily for three weeks and began to eat normally and regain a normal body weight.

Adapt the following statements to the particular circumstances of your own life:

Ian could not understand why he was overweight as he thought he was doing everything right. He ate cereal and toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and a low-calorie ready meal or pasta and low-fat cheese in the evenings. He snacked on crackers or low-fat crisps. If he went to a fast food restaurant he ate the salad and dressing rather than burgers and fries. He always bought low-fat and reduced-fat food and drank four or five cansof a diet fizzy drink a day. He was baffled about why he was overweight. I work with clients like Ian all the time and you will find all the solutions for this type of eater in the section in the next chapter called How to Eat.

Over twenty years ago when I had just established a practice I worked with a young girl who had just landed a job as a catalogue model. Irene was very pretty and it was her dream to be a model but she was a little overweight (this was long before models looked skeletal and unhealthy) and needed to lose 10 pounds for the job. She was sent to a dietician and trainer and she lost the weight but her contract stipulated that she had to keep it off. During the fitting period in preparation for the shoot she gained it all back. She then paid for herself to go to a health farm and returned 10 pounds lighter then regained the weight even more rapidly. After this happened a third time she was sent to me and during hypnosis we uncovered in Irene an enormous fear of failure. She was so worried about not being good enough, about failing in the eyes of the public that it had become easier for her to opt out and use her weight as an excuse. In her mind it was less painful to say, ‘I could have made it as a model but my weight problem stopped me’, than to say, ‘I got some work but I wasn’t good enough to make it long term’.

Many of us fear failing and need something to blame, something that almost gives us permission to hold back, such as being overweight.

 

If this could be you, take a few minutes to write out how you are sabotaging yourself with weight and why it must stop and stop now. Remember to use the correct terms for your brain – do not call it fat, call it insulation or cocooning until you fully understand its purpose, its role, intention and function and can let it go.