Yo yo dieting

Yo-yo dieting is a part of many eating disorders. It is particularly painful and damaging to self-esteem because, like gambling, with each win, you feel a chemical rush of happiness, satisfaction, and elation, and with each loss, your self-esteem crumbles under the weight of critical internal voices that say it’s your fault. The allure of dieting is a seductive one. Relinquish control to these rules, and victory will be yours. People who have been caught in the dieting net often feel relief to give up food in favor of shakes, prepackaged meals, personal trainers, and even body-altering surgery.

Being overweight is a societal stigma that can’t be hidden. It’s on display for all to see. The emotional pressure to be thin is enormous. It far outreaches the pressure to be healthy. The physical aspects take their toll in the form of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart and kidney problems, sleep disturbances, joint and muscle pain, loss of mobility, and on and on.

It’s easy to fall prey to the food and diet industry. The availability of cheap, densely caloric, low nutrition food is everywhere. It’s created in laboratories to be addictive. The diet industry steps in and offers an endless supply of supplements, shakes, to save us from the food industry, only to let us down with tiny portions, and processed food that is as inexpensive as possible for them to produce.

Stop dieting for good

I learned about the non-diet approach to eating disorder treatment when I worked at the Renfrew Center. Their method is to legalize all foods and eat them in moderation. No food is “bad” or off-limits. Instead, attention is paid to the feelings and associations food stirs up for you. It’s very similar to the weight watcher approach. In terms of behavior modification, I like this. Be mindful of food, allow yourself to enjoy it, and mend your relationship with it.

Mostly. I believe some foods can’t be bargained with because they aren’t really food. Anything created in a laboratory to produce maximum bliss isn’t food. You may be able to mend your relationship with chocolate or freshly baked bread, your mother’s lasagna, or your grandma’s empanadas, but it’s illogical to seek a moderate relationship with any low nutrition, high fat, sugar or salt, test tube, frankenfood.

Personalized Holistic treatment

People come to me because they want to lose weight and keep it off. I have many overweight clients who share the goal “achieve and maintain my ideal weight”. We set this goal, and work backward to find the interference patterns blocking the goal. An interference pattern is a behavior, belief, emotion, trigger, or lack of resources that is common to many people and interferes with the achievement of goals that you consciously want. Interference patterns are unconscious which means that, by definition, you do not know what they are. Because of this, I teach clients how to use muscle testing to quickly access their unconscious minds.

Muscle testing eliminates the guesswork, bias, and time wasted by “spit-balling” or pursuing the wrong path. Muscle testing makes therapy 100% personal because every single word, every step, every intervention serves your highest good. I teach every client how to self muscle test so there is no doubt that the answers they are getting are coming from them and them alone.

Recently I was working with a client who put up the goal: “achieve and maintain my ideal weight”. This is a woman who has struggled with weight issues and yo-yo dieting her entire adult life. She, like many people, has tried everything. And spent a lot of time and money desperately trying to get her weight under control and avoid chronic illness.

A new kind of therapy

At the start of each new goal, I establish the amount of negative emotional charge on the goal. Negative emotional charge, (NEC) is the amount of unconscious resistance or negativity toward the goal. In this case, it was 20-30%. We muscle tested the priority interference pattern to work on first and it was a phobia. As you know from other blog posts: a phobia is an unconscious, exaggerated, irrational, fear or shame about an event, situation, or emotion.

“I’m afraid being overweight is going to kill me. I’m ashamed of the way I look because it’s proof that I don’t take care of myself”.

We very carefully map out the phobia, muscle testing each word for accuracy. Her phobia was, “ I’m afraid being overweight is going to kill me. I’m ashamed of the way I look because it’s proof that I don’t take care of myself. We went on to locate the place in her body where she was holding this phobia. Not surprisingly it was around her torso and hips. Her deepest wisdom indicated that tapping would be the best method to clear this pattern at the conscious, unconscious body and soul levels. So, we tapped.

We did two rounds of EFT tapping with our attention on the phobia statement and the area of her body where she felt it. When we finished we tested our work. We found that all four levels were clear and the negative emotional charge on the goal had reduced to 15%. We set a goal to clear it in our next session, I gave her homework to continue tapping and write whatever “learnings” occurred to her. In order to lose weight, she has to make behavioral changes as well as tend to the emotional issues that are triggering her.

Weight loss made easy

HBLU is effective because it allows people to find the unconscious patterns that are holding them back from their goals. As interference patterns are eliminated, resistance and symptoms are greatly reduced allowing for greater ease in establishing new healthier behaviors. HBLU allows you to work strategically, quickly and permanently remove the blockages to lifelong goals you have been trying to reach through other methods.

Stop white-knuckling your way through one unsuccessful diet after the next. Eliminate the resistance and reach your goals once and for all.