Programmed To Be Overweight

There’s no question that we are an overweight society and it has reached epidemic proportion. How did we get here, and what can we do about it.

We were all born with the natural instinct to know when and how much to eat. As a baby we cried when we were hungry and stopped drinking when we were full.

Unfortunately, that natural instinct was interfered with when someone (the doctor or a parent) decided we should be on a schedule and we should drink and eat more than we wanted. As we grew older we were told we had to eat everything on our plate. We were rewarded with sweets when we did something good, when we hurt ourselves, when we didn’t feel good, when we had a bad day, or for cleaning up our plate at dinner time. We were taught to think of food (and especially sweets) as satisfying other than nutritional needs and at that point we were programmed to be overweight.

Studies have shown that when very young children are presented with a number of food choices they will choose a healthy diet. The adults in our lives were the ones that messed that up for us, and it went downhill from there.

We all have an inner voice that knows what is best for us, but unfortunately we sometimes lose contact with it. It’s like losing our favorite radio station that made us feel really positive and good when we listened to it . . . but somehow we lost the signal and now all we get is static or a station that broadcasts negative messages.

You may have lost touch with it in childhood because negative childhood experiences caused you to feel you weren’t worthy of being happy and having the best life has to offer. You may have been taught to suppress your emotions so you have internalized your feelings of guilt, shame, anger, frustration and resentment as well as the positive emotions of love and happiness. Your “feel good” station is not gone, you just have to change the frequency of your thinking and you can get it back.

My research and experience has shown that overweight represents more than what you are eating . . . it also has to do with what is eating at you, and once you are able to deal with and resolve your hidden saboteurs, your roadblocks to successful and permanent weight loss will disappear.

Let me relate a personal experience to you that proved that point to me. Some time ago when I felt “Body Esteem” was nearing completion, my marketing manager, (who is also my son), told me he thought we needed to make some changes. I’m hard headed and stubborn, and frequently think I know it all (to my detriment I might add) and I reminded him I was the expert here, that I knew what was in the program would work, and told him not so politely, to just do his job, which was to layout and design the book, and let me do mine.

He’s also hard headed and stubborn, (darn those genes) and he asked me if I had done my own program. I related this to a dear friend of mine, and his comment was, “well have you?” Actually he said a lot more than that and it started me thinking.

They were relentless and after a lot of resistance I said to myself, “Oh well, why not, it will get the two of them off my back and I could stand to lose a couple of pounds.” I started with Page One and followed it religiously. By the time I got through the Self-Evaluation Section I was seeing some changes. I was a lot more motivated to exercise and I was actually thinking a lot more about my food choices – WOW!

And then I did Mental Exercise 5. This exercise is one of the most important exercises in helping to uncover the deeper emotional issues underlying your relationship with food. I discovered there was an experience I had about 40 years ago that I thought I had sufficiently dealt with. I knew about it, I wasn’t suppressing it, I thought I had handled it . . . but . . . much to my surprise – I found I was feeling guilty because I felt it was my fault . . . and I was angry at myself for being so stupid. I forgave myself, and guess what happened right after that . . . at my next weigh in . . . I had lost FIVE pounds! So now I can say, from my own personal experience – it works.

And, by the way, you’re probably wondering if I’ve ever been overweight. Yes, I have. Probably a lot less than many of you, and maybe more than some of you. At one point in my life I weighed 170 pounds and over the years I have utilized several different methods to lose weight (not realizing at the time that I was doing research for my book).

What you’ll find in “Body Esteem – Weight Loss Through Self Discovery” comes from my own personal experiences, and the experiences of many people who have struggled to lose and maintain their weight losses. I have had conversations with psychologists, and other professionals interested in the well being of their patients, as well as with the owners, employees, and clients of the most popular weight loss programs, conversations with users of the “latest fad programs” and hundreds of hours of research.

You may feel that many of the choices you made in life were out of your hands – and that is true – BUT – you also have the choice of how you react to them and how you let them affect you. The difference is – not what happens to you in life - BUT - how you handle it. It’s the difference between the winners and the losers – It’s all in how you play the game.

We see it every day – people who overcome tremendous odds and are happy, positive people, and people who seemingly have everything in life and are unhappy, self-defeating, and miserable. Your mind is more powerful than you know and it can be your best friend, or it can be your worst enemy. What you believe in your mind becomes your reality, and that goes for positive as well as negative thoughts and beliefs.

Don’t believe me?

How many times have you allowed your mind to take control in response to a suggestion – for example – you’re walking down the hall at work and a co-worker asks, “You don’t look too good, are you ok?” You think you’re ok, you felt fine when you came to work . . . then someone else asks – “are you feeling ok?”

Now you’re not so sure. In fact, now that you think about it, you don’t feel so good! And the more you focus on not feeling good, the worse you feel, and the next thing you know – you’re going home because you’re sick. Stop and think about it, you were ok – what happened? You began to believe it and it became your reality.

That’s how powerful your thoughts are. “Body Esteem” can show you how to make your mind your friend.

It’s more likely than not that you have been, or are now on a weight loss journey – you may have stuck it out for a time, but then you ran into a road block and didn’t know how to get around it, or how to remove it. Or maybe you ran out of gas (lost your motivation), got off track, or lost sight of your goal. You know where you are now – you know where you want to be, but you don’t know how to get there.

Would you start out on a cross-country journey without a road map – probably not unless you are the really adventurous type and don’t have a time frame for reaching your destination. Most people would get a map and chart out a course to their destination. “Body Esteem” is your road map to your destination of a slim and healthy future.

As you take the “Body Esteem” journey you will find out for yourself, why you haven’t reached your destination. You will find out where you are now, where you took a wrong turn and how to get back on track. “Body Esteem” will give you the tools and techniques to maneuver the road blocks, the pot holes, the forks in the road, the wrong directions given by well-meaning people. It’s going to help you determine who you should listen to, and who you should trust. It’s going to help you make the decision to go left to (the cookies) or right to the (the veggies). Hint -Cookies are the dead-end where you have to turn around and go back.

You will learn to navigate the aisle in the supermarket so that when you leave with your cart full of groceries you are still headed to your destination and not on another detour (quilt trip) that could have been avoided. You will encounter people who will give you wrong directions because they don’t want to see you reach your destination. You will learn how to recognize these saboteurs and avoid them.

“Body Esteem” will give you the tools and techniques you need to reach your goal, but at the end of the day, if you haven’t used them, you won’t be where you had hoped to be and you will probably find yourself at another dead end.

If you approach the program with an open mind, a positive attitude and a bit of commitment, your discoveries will change your life.

Do it for yourself, you deserve it.

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