by Rita Black
The mastery part of weight mastery is what brings the peace of mind that Weight Strugglers want so badly. After 30 days, participants in the Shift Weight Mastery Process feel transformed by this new inner relationship with themselves even though they haven’t yet released all their excess weight.
“I never woke up in the morning without that heavy weight in my heart. Now I can truly say I love myself, and I know I have what it takes to go the rest of the way down the scale. Weight mastery is not just about weight and being slim. It is about protecting this wonderful and connected feeling I have with myself.” Carrie D. (Released 9 pounds in 30 days, still releasing.)
Process
Making this shift to thin thinking and achieving weight mastery is a process. Our culture is into quick fixes, but making lasting change is more like an evolution than an overnight turnaround. My own shift to weight mastery was a process that was greatly helped by using the tools of hypnosis, CBT, and meditation. I have been using those same powerful tools to help men and women achieve weight-releasing success for nearly two decades. You will now be going through this powerful process, starting with this orientation. (The Introduction briefly describes these three parts of the process. Here, you’ll learn more about them.)
The Shift Weight Mastery Process: Book Version
Here is how the process in From Fat to Thin Thinking unfolds:
Part I: The Orientation
This first part of the process is divided into two sections and explains how the shift from fat to thin thinking works and how you move from the weight struggle to weight mastery.
Weight Struggle. The mind falls into fat thinking and the weight struggle despite your knowing so much about losing weight. I will use my own weight struggle as an example of how years of losing weight and finding it again led me into a deep, dark prison of despair and fat thinking.
Weight Mastery. I will then look at how to shift a mind wired for fat thinking and trapped in the prison of weight struggling to a mind wired for thin thinking and weight mastery. I will demonstrate how that happened for me. I released over 40 pounds and have maintained a healthy weight for two decades.
By the end of the orientation, you will understand how the shift process works on the deepest level to enable permanent weight mastery.
Part II: The Shift
During the Shift part of the process, you will begin making changes in your thinking with reading and writing exercises and using the mind tools of hypnosis, meditation, and CBT exercises. This part is divided into three sections:
Starting the Journey: You begin shifting from fat to thin thinking.
Creating the Connection to your Inner Coach: You engage with your powerful Inner Coach who will be essential in guiding you to weight mastery.
The Nine Skills of Weight Mastery (Nine Skills): You learn strategies and habits of Weight Masters who released weight and have maintained a healthy weight long-term.
Part III: The Practice
Finally you will embark on thirty days of daily practice called the 30-Day Thin Thinking Practice which involves meditation, hypnosis, CBT exercises, and coaching that will allow you to reinforce thin thinking while you release weight. The 30-day program is available to you in the Online Resource Center at www.FromFatToThinThinking.com. Practicing for 30 days will start setting new habits deep in your unconscious.
So, without any further delay, let’s jump in and begin with understanding why someone as smart and brilliant as you has been struggling with weight in the first place.
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TIPS FOR GETTING THE MOST OUT OF THE SHIFT WEIGHT MASTERY PROCESS
Go to www.FromFatToThinThinking.com and sign up. The hypnosis sessions for the book along with worksheets, coaching, and other valuable resources that support your Shift Weight Mastery Process are available at this website. I urge you to take advantage of it.
Set aside some time each day for reading, writing, and listening to the hypnosis and meditation recordings. In order to manage your time, make it the same time every day if possible.
Skim the book first to get the gist of what the process is about and to satisfy your curiosity. Then, you can dive in and engage fully with each part of the process.
THE ORIENTATION:
Weight Struggle
All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.
—Helen Keller
CHAPTER 2
WHY AM I STILL STRUGGLING?
The Conscious Versus The Subconscious Mind
I once had a male client who weighed nearly 400 pounds when he came to a Shift Weight Mastery Process seminar. You would think this man needed to be educated about how to eat to lose weight, right? Wrong! He had an impressive, in-depth knowledge of nutrition and exercise. Yet, despite all that he knew, he was still out of control with food and nearly 200 pounds overweight. Obviously, all his knowledge was not helping him.
It Isn’t About What You Know
My guess is that you know enough about food, nutrition, and dieting to write your own diet book. You are in good company. I have had clients in the weight loss and health and wellness professions—personal trainers, nutritionists, family doctors, bariatric physicians, plastic surgeons, and dieticians—who may or may not have had a lot of weight to lose, but they had a dysfunctional relationship with food, exercise, or themselves. Despite the fact that their professions center around helping people lose weight and get fit, they are at a loss when it comes to reigning in their own eating habits.
Like these smart exercise and diet-savvy clients, you may know most of what there is to know about weight gains and losses. So why does research show that nutritional knowledge does very little in the long-term fight against weight? Well, when it comes to weight, the mind has two minds of its own: the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.
The Conscious Mind
Your conscious mind is the willpower and impulse control part of your brain. It’s the analytical, rational, reasoning, planning, and problem-solving part of you. This is the part of your mind that says “I need to lose weight. Let’s make that happen!”
This part of your mind:
Reads diet books and buys a gym membership.
Holds the conscious knowledge of what it takes to “be good” on a diet.
Exerts self-control to say “no” to that impulse to grab the chocolate bar when you’re in line at the checkout.
Has the desire to be thin, the need to feel great in skinny jeans, and the self-discipline to make both happen.
Unfortunately, according to the mind-model theory of hypnosis, this weight-loss rock star part of your mind is only about 12 percent of your brain power (See Chart A.). Yes, you read me right, a measly, teeny 12 PERCENT!!!
Sadly, the part of your mind that drives willpower, controls impulses, and keeps you on a diet leaves a lot to be desired. This is where the story of the weight struggle begins.
CHART A: The Mind Model
The Subconscious Mind
Your impulses, desires, habits, beliefs, and emotions spring deep down from your subconscious mind. This is the part of your mind that:
Perpetuates your limiting beliefs. “It’s hard for me to lose weight!”
Develops habits like eating in front of the television at night.
Pushes down stressful feelings or emotions with comfort food.
Whatever the patterns of eating that prevent long-term weight release, the unconscious mind is designed to keep things running just as they are. To add insult to injury, the subconscious mind has little to no interest in what the conscious mind wants with regard to weight release.
This old and primitive part of your gray matter helps survival and has put the daily habits that make life happen on autopilot! This, of course, is an amazing feat when you think of all those daily behaviors t
hat you don’t have to think about like brushing your teeth, getting dressed, and even starting your car. The downside is that great and powerful unconscious minds want the path of least resistance, which is the status quo. And the subconscious mind doesn’t care how many pounds that status quo weighs on the scale or how unhealthy it is!
There exists a powerful unconscious network of circuitry that operates below the conscious “I want to lose weight desperately” mind. These neural pathways of beliefs, habits, and emotions dictate your current weight struggle and continue to grow stronger every time you go on a diet and then fall off it. Every go-around in that vicious and unbeatable neural cycle reinforces these aspects of your subconscious mind:
Belief that you are a failure at weight management.
Habits that keep you struggling with weight and falling off every diet.
Connections between emotions and stress and using food to cope with both.
The critical way you communicate with yourself.
Researchers at the University of Sydney found that different brain circuits take over as behavior is repeated over and over. The behavior starts in the neocortex, the newer mammal brain where conscious thought occurs. However, as a behavior is repeated over and over, it moves to the more primitive brain, the basal ganglia, which runs automatic functions like breathing and certain habits.
Once a behavior is moved to the basal ganglia, the amount of conscious thought needed to run that habit becomes almost nonexistent. The pull of habit from the depths of the primitive brain now overrides conscious reasoning. All of which means that the Weight Struggle Cycle of going on and falling off diets and all those fat thinking beliefs and habits continue despite the best conscious-mind attempts to change.
WEIGHT STRUGGLE SUM UP: Conscious vs. Subconscious
The constant battle with your weight doesn’t originate from a lack of strength or character. The 12 percent conscious part of your mind that wants to eat a healthy salad for dinner is no match for the stronger 88 percent unconscious mind that is used to reaching for the cheese and crackers after a long day.
Our willpower cannot win the battle against our habits and beliefs in the long-term, which is why short-term, external solutions like diets do not work. We have to shift our thinking on a deeper level.
Let’s seek to understand a little more about our precious but limited 12 percent conscious mind resource—WILLPOWER—and why it is so elusive when it comes to helping us manage our weight.
CHAPTER 3
IF IT’S MONDAY, I MUST BE ON A DIET
The Truth About Willpower
“I don’t have any willpower!” I hear this all the time from clients, and I am sure you have certainly felt this. You are right to a certain degree; the daily amount of willpower we have is limited.
The impulse control ability of the conscious brain allows you to get what you want, keeps you from what you don’t want, and helps you keep moving forward when the going gets tough. But remember, that is only 12 percent of the mind’s overall power. Research shows that willpower is used up quickly by many physical and emotional factors, including:
Decision-making
Stimulation from our environments
Stress and emotions
Lack of sleep
Poor nourishment
Dehydration
How Will Becomes Powerless
Daily willpower is at its most potent when you awaken in the morning. That is why breakfast and lunch are not usually a struggle when dieting. By the middle of the afternoon of a day of running errands or working and being stimulated by phones, computer screens, people, traffic, work, and kids, the sand in your willpower hourglass runs out. That’s when bad decisions are made, like reaching into the candy jar, deciding to go home instead of to the gym, and sitting in front of the TV and eating mindlessly.
I have a saying, “If we all went to bed at five ’o clock, we would be thin!” But you probably don’t go to bed that early, and so your willpower is likely to give way to preconditioned habits and beliefs. The conscious knowledge of what to do to lose weight dissipates as you eat food to soothe, sedate, and reward yourself. Then, when you eat something bad, the tendency is to think I already blew it, so I may as well start over tomorrow. This hope springs eternal from the idea that somehow willpower will be stronger tomorrow. Unfortunately, as you have probably noticed, to your dismay, it rarely is.
Diets also work against that willpower reserve. Just the idea of restricting food and focusing on what to eat and not eat creates a lot of stress, which wears your willpower down.
My Mother, the Nutritionist
I learned very early on that the “struggle with weight” had very little to do with knowledge about food and nutrition. My mother graduated with honors with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. She then earned a scholarship to complete her master’s degree at Cornell University. If anyone knew about food and the impact it had on the body, it was my beautiful, sweet mother.
As a child I loved spending hours with her in the kitchen. I watched her cook as she told me the nutritional makeup of the healthy family meals she was preparing. “See this green pepper? It has vitamin C, which protects against colds. That’s why it’s important for you to eat it.” I was in awe of her nutritional prowess.
Yet, as much as my mother consciously knew about nutrition, she became a victim of her own weight struggle. She prided herself on her tall, slim physique, and she watched what she ate until we moved from Portland to Seattle in the early 1970s. The move was tough on my mom. Staying at home to take care of three small kids and living in the city of gray skies, cut off from friends and family, Mom turned to food for solace and comfort.
Distraught by the pounds that were creeping onto her, she tried to cut back and diet. I often came home to see her standing in the kitchen with a cake on the counter and a fork in her hand. “Come and help me even up the edges,” she would say as I joined her with a fork. “We won’t eat a slice,” she said with a seductive wink, “but a few bites aren’t going to hurt, right?”
It was painful to watch my strong mom so out of control and helpless as she got more frustrated and ashamed of herself. She gained sixty pounds over a few years. Her deep knowledge of the chemistry of food and understanding of what it did in her body was little help against the emotional stress that ate away at her willpower. That same stress drove her to eat comfort food despite her best intentions of trying to be “good” on a diet.
WEIGHT STRUGGLE SUM UP: Willpower
Willpower, on its own, is no match for a powerful, fat thinking, subconscious mind.
Willpower gets quickly sapped over the course of stimulating days, making it easy to fall back into old behaviors that perpetuate the weight struggle.
This “lack of willpower” reinforces a sense of failure.
Let’s now leave the conscious willpower mind and dive down into the subconscious to understand more about the very root of your fat thinking and weight struggle—your FAT THINKING BELIEFS.
CHAPTER 4
I STRUGGLE, THEREFORE I AM
Fat Thinking Beliefs
One of the first questions that I ask a client is “When do you believe your weight struggle began?” The answers are as varied as the stars in the sky. Some people swear they started struggling the moment they were born! Sometimes it was their childhood years or early twenties when they headed off to college and stopped being so active. Others didn’t struggle until later, after their first child, during their thirties, or around menopause. Some believe their trouble started because of things that happened, such as a tragedy in the family, the diagnosis of a medical condition, or a promotion to a sedentary position.
Many admit that when they look back at pictures of themselves when they believed they were fat, they see with hindsight that they weren’t fat at all o
r at least they were a lot thinner than they thought. “Why did I think I was fat? I was beautiful. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that now!”
How the Belief System Evolves
For better or for worse, your beliefs filter how you experience reality. From birth until your early to mid-twenties, your subconscious mind is imprinting information about you and your family, including your morals, cultural rules, and the surrounding world. Your parents, friends, teachers, and life experiences all take part in this process. The subconscious mind takes all this overwhelming and sometimes chaotic information and forms it into beliefs that help you experience reality in a consistent way.
Once beliefs are in place, the unconscious mind creates a “critical filter,” a system that sorts through the billions of bits of information bombarding it every hour of the day. This filter allows the unconscious mind to reject information that collides with your personal reality, morals, and ethics and reinforces what your beliefs say is true.
Our beliefs and critical filtering system come together to form a belief system, the stories that define our personal sense of who we are in the world. Many belief systems work well, helping us achieve success in school, make friends, find a good job, and function highly in the world. But when we keep struggling with weight, we come to see ourselves as a Weight Struggler. This self-image is like a prison, holding us captive by the rope-like wires of all those fat thinking stories we have come to believe as true.
You Can’t Diet Negative Beliefs Away
At the root of fat thinking is the belief that you are the problem—that somehow you are flawed and need to be fixed. Therefore, you reason, the solution must be outside. Maybe a diet will help you escape that pain.