You Can Be Thin: The Ultimate Programme to End Dieting... Forever (12 page)

Tanya was one of my favourite clients. She told me that she longed to be slim and had frequently lost weight on different diets. However, when she was slimmer she felt incredibly vulnerable and had a powerful urge to overeat which she always gave in to. She always gained all the weight back that she had worked hard to lose. In hypnosis Tanya regressed back to being two years old and watching from the stairs as her father hit her mother. Tanya tried to intervene and stop him but he tossed her aside like a rag doll. She reported other instances in her childhood where her father hit her mother in her presence. Tanya felt so small and vulnerable; she wanted to protect her mother but could do nothing as she was too little. These events led to Tanya feeling vulnerable when she was lighter and more secure yet unhappy when she was heavy.

Talking through this with Tanya gave her the power to move away from acting and reacting like a helpless child. It also stopped her feeling so powerless when she was lighter. I gave her a tape to listen to every day that told her she would be slim and strong and that she had all the adult power she needed to protect herself. She had a voice and rationality and intellect and an awareness of her rights that she didn’t have as a child and therefore the need to be bigger was redundant. She reached her ideal weight within four months and had kept it off for several years before we lost touch.

 

If you have ever felt helpless and small because you were bullied or intimidated when little and are now overweight say the same things to yourself:

Find words that work for you and repeat them every day. If you have had these issues for years it is unrealistic to expect that a week of new affirmations will give you immediate results. They could, but you also may have to repeat your new words hourly, daily and weekly to replace the years of negative conditioning.

David was obese and his story was heartbreaking. In hypnosis he regressed back to being molested frequently by a neighbour. While he was talking as if he was still that small child he kept saying, ‘If only I was big these bad things would not happen to me’. Because he was so small for his age he also got bullied and beaten a lot by older children and repeated the same wish to himself, ‘If I was big people could-n’t hurt me’. I asked him how often he longed to be big when he was a child and he replied, ‘Every hour of every day and for years’. I have seen this so often with my clients, many recall being children who were too small to protect themselves against bullying parents or siblings, or to protect their siblings or a parent from a bully. Children who are abused or molested and feel too tiny to protect themselves want to be big, just like Tanya who could not intervene when her mother was hit because she was too small. In the film
Big
Tom Hanks longs to be big. In truth he longs to be tall and an adult, a grown-up. If you as a child longed to be big or bigger or to have substance don’t be surprised that you have made that happen. The strongest force in every human is that our body has to act in a way that matches our thinking. When you long and wish for something your body finds a way to express that longing physically and it often does it in an unwanted way because we are so unspecific in our longing. It is never too late to undo and reverse this.

 

Repeat the following until you believe them:

Fiona’s parents had a very bitter divorce and fought in front of her. She was traumatised by their rage and began to comfort eat. She gained an enormous amount of weight very quickly. The weight clearly had a role, function and purpose. It was telling her parents that she was deeply unhappy and that something was wrong. When we cannot open our mouths and tell people what is bothering us our body must take on this job. In Fiona’s case her weight was saying, ‘Look at what you have done to me and look how unhappy you are making me’. One of the keys to having inner peace and emotional wellbeing is to express your hurt as close to it occurring as possible. When I was training to be a therapist we were taught that one of the ways that madness is defined is in the length of time it takes to express a hurt or grievance. Become used to expressing your hurt out loud so that your body does not have to express it in a disguised or abnormal way for you. When you express your feelings you don’t need to swallow them with food. Using food to push feelings down doesn’t work. When you can’t say it out loud because it’s your boss or relative who’s upset you, lock yourself in the bathroom and run the taps so you can say out loud what you’re upset about rather than comfort eating. You
must
express it verbally.

Although Fiona was grown up and had long ago left home she kept the excess weight. Its function and role were still so imbedded in her. Discovering what it was all about freed her.

 

If you identify with this client’s case history then use the effective statements below, repeatedly, to achieve freedom from the bad habits you have developed:

Nell was slim when she married her rock star husband. He made it very clear to her that she was expected to look perfect all the time. He was very controlling about what she ate and if she appeared to gain any weight at all he was critical and cold with her. She began to feel that he did not love her, only what she looked like, and within a year she gained a lot of weight. It was her way of saying love me as I am.

I had another client, Susie, who was married to an even more famous actor. She began to live a Hollywood life and hated it. She found it hard to look beautiful every day and told me that she felt she was in a competition with all the other wives to look sensational 24/7. She realised she was in a race to stay slim and pretty and not only could she not win this race, she couldn’t even reach the finishing line. It constantly moved beyond her reach as she was surrounded by younger and more beautiful women. She found the pressure so overwhelming that she became a compulsive eater and gained a lot of weight which took her out of the competition completely. Nell and Susie could be classed as emotional eaters but in each case their anger towards their husbands and the situation they were in drove the overeating, and of course the anger is an emotion.

 

Use the following statements to enforce the right messages:

Particularly with habitual and emotional eating, there is also the issue that for many of us food equates to love. I had a wonderful grandmother who absolutely loved me but showed me that love through food. The minute I walked in her door she would get out the cake tin and offer me all kinds of goodies that she had bought or baked just for me. As a child I was delighted by this, as a twenty-year-old trying to control my weight I refused them and she was very hurt and offended. She took my refusal personally. I soon noticed that the instant I entered her door I wanted to eat cakes. If she wasn’t home I would help myself from the same tin. Even if I had had a full meal beforehand I still wanted them. I had built an association with her house and food that was very strong. I had an issue with food for years partly through being loved with food. It is not an exaggeration to say it ran my life and I am so happy that it no longer does.

Habits are easier to break if you replace them with something new. To break a habit you need to: