Nine Strategies to Help You Release Weight
Chances are, you hold on to excess weight as a way to protect yourself. If you just "lose" the weight, you'll "find" it again if you don't first replace it with some other form of protection. Find healthy ways to deal with underlying fears and needs, though, and you'll release weight permanently. Here are ideas that can help.
- Stay in the safe zone. Identify some "safe zones"-areas or people with whom you fee safe. Establish who might be allies and find places where you feel comfortable just being yourself.
- Minimize bad days. For many of us, bad days can quickly translate into bad days of eating. Practice unplugging from negative people energetically in order to create your own positive reality.
- See slips as alarm bells. When you catch yourself in a negative pattern around food, don't slide into self-criticism. Instead, ask yourself what's going on for you that wants to be addressed.
- Change something-anything. Make a change, preferably something you have resistance to, that has nothing to do with food, diet, or exercise-for instance, rearrange your bedroom. Note how the mere act of changing something affects you emotionally.
- Talk to your body. At least once a week, have a dialogue with your body before a meal. Place your hands on different parts of your body and record what you learn.
- Plan to "snack consciously." Buy and prepare foods you can snack on throughout the day. Schedule in snacks twice or more per day; don't wait until you're starving.
- Eat before you eat out. Before you go out to dinner, eat a healthy snack so you're not impulsive and motivated by hunger when ordering.
- Prepare "meal" affirmations. Before you eat, say a silent affirmation. Examples: "I choose to eat what my body needs," or "I am healthy, I love my body, and I offer it fuel and sustenance."
- Use outside resources. Find complementary books, audio CDs, groups, organizations, and classes that enhance the work you're doing on yourself and support your weight release.
Using Brain Chemistry to Help You Release Weight:
When people feel good, they tend not to seek food for comfort. To produce more serotonin, the "feel good" chemical in the brain:
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Watch uplifting movies and read uplifting books.
Listen to music that exalts you.
Exercise and get moving.
Practice acts of kindness, mentoring, and praising.
Freeman Michaels is a personal development coach, a sought after seminar leader and speaker, and the author of Weight Release: A Liberating Journey.
Michaels is well known as the actor who played Drake Belson on The Young and the Restless in the mid 1990s, when he was 175 pounds, smoked cigarettes, and was living an unhealthy Hollywood lifestyle-obsessed with staying ultra-thin for the camera.
After making the decision to retire from acting in 2000, Michaels became a real estate developer. For the next seven years, he managed a stressful multimillion dollar business, watched his weight balloon to 275 pounds, and finally landed in the hospital with chest pains brought on by stress.
His business collapsed. That's when Michaels changed his path. A life-long student of personal-growth principles, Michaels decided to pursue a Master's Degree in Spiritual Psychology from University of Santa Monica-and set out to learn everything he could about human potential and happiness.
Over the next few years, all the lessons from his past, work he had done, and knowledge he had acquired fell into place. This led him to develop a personal fulfillment program, called Service to Self™, which helped him lose more than 70 pounds, and became the foundation for his book and coaching practice. This is the only book or program on the market today that uses principles of Spiritual Psychology to address weight.
Michaels strongly believes that his process is the best program available for achieving lasting weight release. Today he leads workshops and webinars for people who struggle with weight. In his Life Coaching practice, he also uses the Service to Self™ principles and process to help clients who are seeking help with challenges related to career, leadership, parenting, and relationships.
Michaels lives and works in Southern California. When "checking in" replaces "checking out" and a few deep breaths replace a bag of Cheetos, weight gets released-not merely lost. By letting go of judgment and making self-honoring choices, it is natural and effortless to release weight.
Taking the "Loss" Out of Weight Loss:
This book shows how self-compassion and minor adjustments in thinking can help you achieve lasting weight release. For most people, "losing weight" is about loss-giving up foods and behaviors that have provided comfort and served other valuable purposes.
It's also about judgment-I'm fat, I'm unattractive, I'm undisciplined-which is a major roadblock to healing and releasing weight. But when people learn to be compassionate toward the part of them that holds the shame, blame, or guilt, they begin to release the weight of unresolved issues-and actual weight release is the result.
That's the idea behind the new book by former soap opera star Freeman Michaels called Weight Release: A Liberating Journey. In it, Michaels, now a successful motivational coach and workshop leader in Southern California, shares with readers the process he developed that helped him shed more than 70 pounds.
Called Service to Self™, the process involves a series of mini-lessons or action steps-each outlined in a short chapter with one or more journal exercises, like a weekly self-care session. Over the course of the book, these practices gradually train you to look at negative thought patterns, tweak your behaviors and attitudes, and finally adopt a new vision for yourself, what Michaels calls "positive projected potential."
Weight release, says Michaels, happens naturally as you pursue internal fulfillment, rather than an external image of yourself.
For more information, visit www.servicetoself.com
There is a lecture and book signing on February 8 at 6:30 p.m.
Jewish Community Center of San Francisco
3200 California Street
San Francisco CA 94118
Phone: (415)292.1200
For more information, visit www.jccsf.org/programs
