The four rules to weight release. I said I'll catch myself sometimes messing up here and saying weight loss, but weight release it is. Number one, when you're hungry, eat, and I mean tummy hungry, not head hungry. How do you know the difference? Well, when was the last time you truly felt tummy hungry, where your tummy, where your stomach was talking to you and was like, "Feed me. I'm freaking hungry. I'm starving"? When was the last time you had that experience?
I've worked with some clients, actually quite a few clients, many clients, in fact, that they can't even remember the last time they were truly hungry, but they are overweight, some of them even morbidly obese. So some of my clients who haven't ever had that sensation or can't remember it, I set the task, and the task is simple. You are not gonna eat until you're tummy hungry. It doesn't matter what your head says. It doesn't matter what your routine or your clock says. It doesn't matter if everyone else around you is eating. You cannot eat again until you feel tummy hungry.
Now, of course, they are gonna eat again, because at some point they are going to get hungry. But oftentimes they report to me that they don't even get hungry for 18 hours, 24 hours. They drink plenty of water, and that's fine, but they don't feel any hunger, and it's the first time they gave themselves the opportunity, just the pleasure of actually allowing that real hunger to stop. So rule number one, when you're tummy hungry, eat. If you're head hungry, don't.
Now, if you're stressed, you're bored, you're happy, you're excited, you're down, you're sad, and you wanna eat, no, you don't eat. You deal with those emotions. The kind of work that I do with people, we help instill those kind of emotions during self-hypnosis. During hypnosis, we may do some kind of meditation and then some kind of change work, all that kind of stuff. So if you're feeding on emotion, good or bad, deal with the emotion. Let the emotion run its course, but you're not allowed to eat. But if you're tummy hungry, absolutely, by all means, eat, because that's your body's feedback mechanism telling you, "Hey, stupid, feed me."
Rule number two is eat what you wanna eat, not what you think you should eat. What does that mean? Well, example is this, there's a piece of chocolate pie, there's a plate of broccoli. If you do not like broccoli, if it repulses you, but you do like chocolate cake, chocolate pie, that's what Americanists will call it, then, by all means, have a piece of chocolate cake, not the whole damn pie, or the whole damn cake, just a piece of it. You might say, "Well, isn't that gonna make me fat?" No, nothing is gonna make you fat. The one thing that you can eat that's gonna make you fat, well, eating fats is gonna make you fat. If you eat too much of anything, it has the ability to make you fat or give you intolerances.
Now, here's the thing, here's why the diet industry has about a 98% to 99% fail rate. That means when most people are on a diet or use some kind of miracle supplement or pill, that the inclination to fail, the statistics of failure, is around about 98%, 99%, which gives it one of the biggest fail rates possible, and it's absolutely crazy. Because how most diets work is they restrict your calories, they restrict certain foods, whether that's carbohydrates on an Atkins diets or a keto diet, whether that's just injecting vitamins and minerals in your [inaudible 00:11:40] diet, whether it's weight watches where you're counting points or you're just doing a generic count and there are certain amount of calories you can eat every day. You're restricting the certain foods that you might not be able to eat, or you're restricting your calories.
If you like doughnuts, or insert the thing that you really, really like that you think is a known bad food...by the way, there are no know your bad foods, but you know what I'm talking about. And think about the one that you really like. If I said, "All right, you're never allowed to eat that ever again for as long as you live," out of pure willpower, some of you might be able to go a couple of days, heck, even a couple of weeks, but pretty much all of you at some point are gonna break and are gonna eat, not just a doughnut, but 10 doughnuts, or whatever that thing was. You're gonna overindulge. You're going to fall off the wagon.
But if you realize that whatever you wanna eat, you're allowed to eat for the rest of your life. You're just gonna eat less of it. You're not being restricted at that point. It doesn't even feel like you're on a diet, because you're always allowed to eat what you want, but you just won't wanna eat so damn much of it. So rule number two is eat what you want, not what you think you should eat. And if you do like broccoli over chocolate pie, then there's something really, really wrong with you. I'm just kidding, kind of, not really, but you know what I mean. You can eat the broccoli if you choose.
Rule number three is to eat consciously. Now, most of us who had problems with eating too much food in the past will think about food all the time until we're actually eating, then we're thinking about something else, or we're in an emotional stress, or we're just thinking about the next thing we wanna eat later on. We're not actually thinking about the thing that we're eating at this moment. We're not thinking about... We're thinking, but we're not enjoying. We're not in our senses. So rule number three is eat consciously. What does that mean? It means that you chew your food a good 20 to 30 times. You chew it till essentially it becomes liquid inside your mouth. You put your knife and fork down between every bite. You always leave a little bit of food on the back of your plate.
You're like, "Luke, Luke, Luke, but I don't wanna waste food. You know, it's bad to waste food." No, leave a little bit of food on your plate, and then you can eat it later on. It doesn't have to go to waste. You can give it to your dog, give it to one of your kids, or you can throw it away, whatever you wanna do, but you don't necessarily have to waste it. But you're gonna leave a little bit of food on your plate, because that starts to train your unconscious mind to know that it's okay to leave a bit of food on the plate. Nothing bad happens.
So I don't know about you, but, growing up, I was part of the clean plate club. You know what I'm talking about. This is when my parents would tell me, "Eat everything on the plate, and you'll grow up, and you'll be big and strong. Eat everything on the plate, because there's people, kids starving in Africa or namely a Third World country that are dying because they don't get enough food. So eat everything on your food." You're not a child anymore, and as an adult, [inaudible 00:14:28] that sound, as logically as you know, that does not make sense. So you're not working on logic when it comes to overeating or any of your emotions. They're being controlled essentially by a five-year-old that's pulling the strings inside.
That's why illogical problems with quite illogical solutions. So by leaving a bit of food on the plate and realizing that no one blames you for someone's death in Africa or a Third World country, or your mom or dad doesn't call you up saying, "I see through that camera on your computer. I can tell you're not eating all your food. I'm gonna come there, go over there and give you a spanking." Whatever it is, you realize as an adult nothing bad happens to you.
If it's appropriate, close your eyes when you eat. See, they've done studies with people, two groups of studies. I believe this was in the mid '90s, about 10 years ago. They happened in England. I'm not entirely sure about that, but you can research this online. And these scientists took 2 groups of people and so I believe for 12 weeks, and it was a weight loss group essentially, and none of them went out to exercise, and essentially they could eat whatever they wanted to do from a certain menu. They weren't given restrictions.
One group was suddenly just told, "Once you've ordered your food, you just have to close... Whenever you eat your food, you just close your eyes." The other group were allowed to have their eyes open. That was the only difference between these two groups. And the group that actually closed their eyes when they were eating, that group actually ended up losing about 55% more weight, because once they closed their eyes, a lot of that food lost its appeal. This is quite extraordinary, something as simple as that, a little hack, like closing your eyes when it's appropriate, when you eat, will cause you mostly likely to eat less food.
That was rule number three, so eat consciously. Be aware of your food. Chew it a good 20 to 30 times. Leave a bit of food on your plate. Put your knife and fork down. And here's a really important one, turn off all distractions. Turn off your TV, your cellphone, close the newspaper, switch off the Facebook, close your tablet, close any books, and just be mindful of what you're eating. Whatever you're eating, whatever it is, whether it's broccoli, chocolate cake, whatever, chicken pot pie, be there in that moment, enjoy the hell out of it. Not be five minutes into the future, not be an hour in the past, but be there, be present.
And what all this does is start to slow down the whole eating process. Well, about 50, 60 years ago, when we used to eat, a meal that maybe we'd scoff down now in about 3 to 5 minutes, 50, 60 years ago may have taken an hour for us to digest, for us to actually eat, because we had so much less distractions, and eating was a far more family time where people got together, and it was more of an event. Now, we're multitasking all these million and one things to do while we're swiping right on Tinder, or we're updating our Twitter status, or we're seeing our friends on Facebook, or we're illegally downloading this program, or whatever it is, we're checking all these pools at once, but we're not focused on any one thing.
So you end up scoffing, chowing down on this food way too fast. It takes approximately 20 minutes for the signal of sate that lets you know that you're satisfied from eating to go from your tummy to your head. So, in the old days, the meal would be over 20 minutes, sometimes up to an hour, the same meal that you'd eat in about 5 minutes now. But now because we eat so darn fast that this meal that should take us a minimum of 20 minutes, we're done in 5, so takes our body another 15 minutes to remember, oh, to register that it's actually satisfied, it doesn't need to eat anymore. And what do you do in that 15 minutes, waiting from that signal? You end up eating more, and more, more and getting fatter, and fatter, and fatter.
And, lastly, when you feel satisfied, you stop. What does that mean? When I'm stuffed after Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, then I should stop? No, no, no, it means when you're satisfied, not when you're stuffed, not when you feel absolutely bloated like a pig. But when you feel satisfied, when you just feel like, "That was the right amount to fill me," when you've done that, then you simply stop. And you're like, "Well, Luke, then what do I do when I'm hungry later on?" You do the same thing, rule number one, eat when you're hungry, when you're tummy hungry, not when you're head hungry.
Number two, you eat what you want, not what you think you should eat. Number three, you eat consciously, knife and fork down between bites. Chew 20 to 30 times. Close your eyes if appropriate. Leave a bit of food on your plate. Don't have to waste it. You can eat it later if you want to. And eat consciously. Turn off all the electronical devices, close the books, the newspapers, and just be mindful of what you're doing. And then when you feel satisfied, number four, stop. That's it. I know it sounds ridiculously simple, but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars on a personal trainer, hundreds of dollars on a nutritionist. You don't have to buy any more books. You don't have to even download that app if you don't want to. You do not need to invest in a miracle pill, in miracle supplement.
If you do those things, and that's all that you did, it would make a profound impact in your waistline and how you feel. Change the very mechanics on how you eat. Basically, you're in a state of hypnosis when you're eating, because you're not even thinking about it, and your hands are in what we call hypnosis catalepsy when you're biting, when you're eating something, and you turn it into a complete conscious movement, and it loses a lot of fun. It loses a lot fun there. So you go from making that switch from living to eat to eating to live, and that's always my goal when I'm working with weight loss clients.
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Always Believe,
Luke Michael Howard CHT
Clinical Hypnotist Toronto
