Principles of Weight Loss

Principles of Weight Reduction

The call has gone out – something must be done about the alarming number of overweight and obese people in our country. Not only is a large percentage of the adult population being found in this category, but more disturbingly, so are an increasing number of our children. Numerous programs and centers which focus on this problem are springing up everywhere. Yet a great many are finding temporary assistance from these programs only to find the weight building right back up again. I believe this is because there is a lack of understanding of all the factors that bring on the excess weight in the first place. It is my intention to expand that understanding so that those people who need to or want to lose weight will be better informed about all the factors they should address to get the kind of permanent results they desire.

I see three different principles involved in body weight, yet only the first principle is addressed by most programs to regulate body weight. Principle number one: balance food intake to calories and nutrients used by the body in normal activities – this is the diet and exercise principle. Principle number two: the way your body processes and stores food is influenced by the life experiences of your ancestors – this takes into account the genetic influences regarding food that you inherited and is encoded in your DNA. Principle number three: your own life experiences may have left you with specific emotional responses about food – traumatic experiences during your developmental years may be overshadowing your body's actual nutritional needs with an emotional response to food or to eating.

In the following paragraphs I have endeavored to briefly explain all three of these principles and how to take each one into account for you to use in a more effective understanding to permanently shed those excess pounds you have acquired.

Principle #1. Caloric intake vs usage - the diet and exercise part.
Very simply, if you consume more calories than your body uses, your body generally stores the surplus for availability in leaner times. If you burn more than you consume, you get thinner as reserves are applied. If under eating continues, the body will start sacrificing muscle tissue - not a good thing generally, but a survival tactic that has helped the species survive famines. If you consume more than your body needs for daily activity (whatever that is for your stage in life and lifestyle), your body knows to store the surplus as fat and muscle just in case no more food comes along for a while.

As an adult, your body has stopped growing, so it only needs food sufficient to supply the existing cells and to create the new cells that are produced every day to replace the worn out ones. Most counselors and doctors only look at this simplistic, mechanical view of the body's operations, expecting you to find the balance between what you eat and what you burn. From their perspective, if you are overweight, you simply must eat less and exercise (burn) more. If this model of operation were true then every diet and exercise program should work.

There are a number of lifestyle factors that influence this principle. The first is stress. It is widely recognized that during times of stress, the body's ability to properly process food is greatly reduced. In a stressful situation, the body directs its resources to be prepared to run or fight – it has a built in prioritizing mechanism that shuts down the processing and maintenance departments if it perceives a danger to deal with. Unfortunately, many people live in an almost perpetual high-stress lifestyle, so nutrient processing may be degraded as often as not. The second influence is the lack of certain specific nutrients which help to regulate our metabolism -- our ability to process the food we eat. In many cases, these nutrients have been removed from our food supply because the bulk of our food is now supplied by only a handful of giant corporations whose primary concern is to maximize crop yield from exhausted land. Nutritive quality of the food they provide to fill our grocer's shelves has almost no impact on their decision making. Their profitability is more governed by finding genetic specimens which give greater yields and resist mold growth better. They don't nurture plants to grow, they force them by saturating them with high nitrate petroleum byproduct fertilizers. Without a full measure of the proper nutrients, our metabolism malfunctions. We must also take into account that as we age, our metabolism rate slows down, so older people don't process food in their cells as quickly as they did when younger. The third influence is the degree we have allowed someone else to chose what we eat. All the major fast food chains are simply arms of the same giant corporations who produce these poor quality foods, but they are successful because they have learned the science of how to make the food taste good, so we buy it – in huge quantities.

We know how to deal with these issues – make wise choices about the food you put in your mouth, adjust your lifestyle to adapt to the natural slowing of metabolism as you get older, learn to manage stress in your life, and adopt a balanced pattern of food intake, adding supplements if necessary, with nutritional need.

Principle #2. Your body responds to its ancestral experiences.
If you had recent ancestors who lived through famine times, they likely passed on the body message to their progeny the vital importance to eat all you can whenever you can and store as much as you can whenever you can. They did this by encoding this message in the DNA they passed down to the succeeding generation. They didn't do this consciously of course, this is a built in mechanism of the body's own wisdom to aid species survival.

You, who perhaps never missed a meal in your life and often feed yourself rich, high calorie foods, nonetheless carry this code in your cells, instructing your body to operate in a fashion that for your generation is unnecessary, and in fact may be inappropriate and undesirable. But if it's in your DNA , you are stuck with it. It's your genetic pattern and most think that genetic pattern can't be changed. This is the common belief among the general population, put there by the medical profession out of their own ignorance. Remember, their model of life is that you are your body. This model is in error, however and there is new scientific evidence to support what the wise teachers have been saying for centuries. Your body, your emotions and your thoughts area all tightly interwoven. The DNA patterns you are born with were developed by centuries of emotional responses. The actual process of this encoding is done by levels of wisdom deep in your subconscious. The fact that you are unconsciously aware of the process does not alter it's being done, any more than your being unaware of your blood sugar level being monitored and adjusted for you. Using specialized techniques in hypnotherapy, it is entirely possible to reach those portions of the mind that can reprogram your DNA to fit your lifestyle rather than that of your great-grandparents.

Principle #3. Your body responds to emotionally traumatic experiences
This principle applies equally to the eating disorders of anorexia and bolemia, but this article is about shedding excess weight not self-imposed starvation disorders so I won't get into those. There are generally two major patterns of early life trauma which put emotional requirements above body needs regarding food. The first is an emotional need to eat. In this case, food has become a source of comfort and pleasure – trying to find happiness in eating since you can't seem to find it elsewhere. Eating is no longer just the means to satisfy the body's nutritional requirement – that is secondary to satisfying an emotional need that compels you try to fill an emptiness you feel inside by stuffing food in. Of course no matter how much you eat, the feeling of emptiness quickly returns so you keep eating. It is an emotional compulsion you are trying to satisfy which sends a similar "feed me" signal to the brain, so you eat whether your body needs nutrients or not. The quality of what you eat is of little concern, it's the process of eating that gives you a brief sense of filling that hole inside you. This emotional need most often arises from a very early life pattern of being deprived of sufficient nurturing. Perhaps as an infant, whenever you cried out to be held or feel loved, a bottle was shoved in your mouth instead, so you began to associate your eating as a substitute for being loved. You may have been weaned before you were ready, so you were deprived of being held enough at your mother's breast and have been trying to fulfill that longing ever since. The people in this category suffer from a compulsive but irrational response of the subconscious to find love and comfort from eating.

The second pattern in this principle are those people who need to be fat. Subconsciously, they build up walls of flesh around themselves either as a perceived protective barrier or to reflect a learned pattern of that's what they are supposed to look like. The first example of needing to be fat comes following a sexual assault (or threat of assault). I call this the curse-of-the-pretty-girl syndrome. Following a sexual assault or repeated unwanted sexual advances, the subconscious mind of many a young girl will rapidly build up that large wall of flesh until the pretty girl is no longer so attractive and hence less likely a target of sexual abuse. Again, this is a survival instinct the subconscious uses to protect the person. Only by re-educating the subconscious that the threat no longer exists or can be handled in other ways will this need to be fat go away. The second example of needing to be fat comes where a child comes into the world surrounded by fat people. An infant knows no more than the model of what it sees in its environment, so the assumption made by the subconscious in this model is that to be a proper human requires one to become roly-poly like all the adults around him. This is a form of imprinting. It is done very early in life as the child develops to become like the adults he has around him to pattern himself from. The remedy for this is the same – the subconscious mind must be re-educated to adapt to a new pattern that is more healthy and that it is okay do deviate from what it learned at an early age.

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Numerous studies have shown that those people who incorporated hypnotherapy into their weight loss programs lost more weight, lost it more rapidly, and were less likely to regain that weight than those who tried exercise and diet alone. Most people think of hypnotherapy as a tool to use as a substitute for will power and in fact, that is all that some got from hypnosis sessions when the therapist did not take the time to learn what the underlying cause was that need to be remedied. However, as you have seen, properly administered therapy which addresses the underlying causes and compulsions of weight gain may significantly improve your chances of getting the results you want more quickly and are likely to be a more permanent result. You are more than your body and your body is more than just a biological machine. Your emotions have dominion over your body's operations and your mind has dominion over your emotions. This gives you the choice to change anything about yourself that no longer serves you. But just as you may have to hire a computer programmer to change something in a computer program to make it work more to your liking, going to a qualified hypnotherapist can help you change the way your mind, emotions and body operate to help you live the kind of life you want and deserve to have.