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Hormonal imbalance

Food Cravings

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Learning to deal with food pangs is a major help
Getting Rid Of Your Food Cravings Makes A Huge Difference To Being Successful With Weight Challenges

If you’re reading this then I already know you know how this feels, I hear phrases like, out-of-control, the food’s controlling me, I can’t help myself, zoned out eating, comfort eating, secret eating.

And it occurs for many different reasons.

The bottom-line is that it really is a strategy and it’s been learned, either from others or created by you, as a means for not feeling something else.

Perhaps it’s that the kitchen is your domain, and another area of control, where you dictate what goes into the store-cupboards and fridge.

It can be very much about control, especially when lots of other areas in life, and people make you feel blown around by circumstances, their behaviour, kids growing up and making their own way, not needing you quite so much, work, partner, having to do everything yourself, and more!

It may be none of these, and if that’s it then just think about yours?

Want To Eat Less

What must be understood is that this pattern of compulsive behaviour is just that, it’s a behaviour you learned to do at some point and the good news is you can un-learn it just as easily.

I was working with a group for the day, and when we did work on Food Cravings one lady in particular stood out. Her desire to eat a shop-bought meringue nest was such that she had us all laughing. We had some fun with the wording to work through it and everyone else benefited from her need, because she was just saying what everyone else was thinking.

Two hours passed and she’d not been tempted and said her children wouldn’t believe she could have gone that long without caving in, an hour later she threw it in the bin. She was surprised at both how hard it was to resist eating it at the beginning, that she’d turned it down after such a strong urge, how quickly it changed and all the things that lay behind it, among which was that ‘someone had taken the time to make it’.

This actually harked back to her mum making them in the kitchen when she was a kid. Does some of this already sound familiar?

Chase Away Your Food Cravings

Working on Food Cravings is about realigning with yourself, so you stop getting those pangs of having to reach for unwanted items when you’re not even hungry.

This gives you have a chance to bring along all the things you’d like to start resisting more, your poisons of choice.

If you’re someone who just overeats everything at certain times of the day or month, in other words anything will do, then choose what would be your absolute favourites if you were to make a list.

Then we work through the items and reduce the craving one-by-one.

  • Food cravings
  • Addressing self-sabotage around your own unyielding high expectations
  • Exploring your personal demons
  • Learning how to work by yourself
  • How to break the hamster-wheel habit
  • Eat what you love and still lose weight
  • Get yourself off the yo-yo dieting roundabout

Food Addiction Help

This releases the emotional torment that keeps you dancing around food cravings, which is freeing in itself. It subsequently helps the body to get off the yo-yo dieting roundabout and instead helps address all your basic triggers around certain foods and their associations, in order to become impartial towards it which gives you back the control.

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If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Working with Jane

Changing unwanted patterns with all-things-food makes an enormous difference to everything else, especially how you feel about yourself.

When it comes to making better decisions, addressing what stops you is a very good place to start. Are you ready to take the plunge?

A Healthy Dinner

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The pattern of eating healthy meals starts early on in life
A Healthy Dinner Habit Starts At Home And Is What You Teach Your Kids

When it comes to having a healthy dinner, if you are someone who is easily drawn into what we might call Craving Foods (or non foods as some would say) it can feel like a punishment and totally hard work, to have to eat a balanced and healthy meal, but why is that?

I want to explore, and make no apologies for borrowing Paul McKenna’s phrase, The Clean Plate Club because I took my NLP training with he and Richard Bandler.

I have to admit I became a little smitten with Bandler, as a force to be reckoned with. His powers to facilitate change in others is magical, and considering he charges private clients in the region of $10K it was a privilege to watch him at work.

It’s a great phrase and I’m sure many of you reading will relate to it as I do from childhood. Then like me you were probably taught that it was wasteful or rude to leave food on your plate which didn’t leave much room when it comes to forming life-long and unnecessary habits.

Your Parents Know Best?

Of course your parents thought they were doing the right thing, as their aim was to get some decent nutrients inside their kids to keep them fighting fit especially during the post-war ‘fifties, when I grew up, alongside a sense of you don’t know how lucky you are, nor did we.

After all don’t parents always do the best they can with their resources at any given time? And you reach a point when you learn to appreciate that at least, no matter what scars they’ve imparted 🙂

How many of you were also threatened with the starving children in Africa line (ouch!) and how wasteful you were being when there are children in the world who would be more than grateful, so the guilt piled up (just like my plate in later life) and it all went into the mix of learning how to turn to food for comfort etc.

Of course as a child the fact that there was no practical way of transporting leftover food from the plate to anyone, let alone those in dire need, was often completely missed (dependent on a number of factors).

Parental Awareness About A Healthy Dinner

Your folks did the best they knew how, but these days society has a more global, social, economic, political awareness and understanding of how this can fill a growing child with some pretty poor coping strategies.

And parents are far more savvy when it comes to implementing different tactics to help their kids eat foods they’d not wittingly chose, i.e. vegetables by employing more creative tactics.

And it’s not your fault, because over the recent decades we’ve been fed (if you’ll pardon the pun) a range of confused messages about what merits a healthy lifestyle, so it’s understandable if you’ve not known which way to jump.

And this is partly what lead me to becoming a Health & Weight Loss Coach (unexpectedly).

And my own search reveals that we need to apply a range of tangibles, among them is a relaxed approach to food, eating and weight, and reset any offset subconscious programming around this often complex topic.

And wherever we aren’t relaxed about food, eating and weight, is a good place to start.

Join the newsletter

If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Working with Jane

Changing unwanted patterns with all-things-food makes an enormous difference to everything else, especially how you feel about yourself.

When it comes to making better decisions, addressing what stops you is a very good place to start. Are you ready to take the plunge?

Natural Anxiety Relief

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if you suffer with anxiety you need some coping strategies
Natural Anxiety Relief Is The First Port Of Call When You Feel Uneasy

Natural anxiety relief is such a helpful skill to learn, whether you have a diagnosed condition, when you’re someone who worries, where you’re a super sensitive person.

According to the Merck Medical Manual:

Anxiety presents a set of symptoms that feed off themselves, and it’s vital to nip it in the bud as soon as possible. Because if you don’t it’ll take over at the least opportunity, especially when you’re feeling vulnerable.

And as intimated there are different levels, ranging from a normal response to a threat, or stress that everyone experiences occasionally, right through to a psychological condition that a medic would prescribe medication for.

Normal anxiety has it’s roots in fear and serves an important survival function. However, where the anxiety symptoms persist and become long-term it’s considered a disorder.

This helps to see where the line is drawn medically in order to understand more about what is part of the human condition, because we all have our off-days right, and what may be detrimental in as much as it stops us from achieving our wonderful potential.

People often use one term or the other, and seem to be pretty much the same thing, as far as our general referencing goes? Anxiety does sit underneath many closely related conditions, which in my view equates to long-term stress. For me it feels like a quivering nervous element that feels a little out of my control but what is it like for you?

Anxiety is common enough

Anxiety lies at the heart of anything that makes us uncomfortable and can include things like:

  • Social anxiety
  • Public speaking
  • Smoking
  • Confidence
  • Stress

Being in the flow

When we are relaxed and feeling centred, in the flow of life, when all is well and everything clicks into place, running just as it should, the anxiety has nothing to latch onto.

It can come from nowhere

But anxiety can erupt, perhaps it occurs in certain situations, and a former experience (or trigger) finds the pattern of anxiety pushing through, staking it’s claim for what seem like a myriad of reasons:

  • Meeting new people
  • Giving presentations
  • Trying something new
  • Something someone says
  • Dealing with something you’ve been putting off
  • Just the thoughts of doing something that is expected of you

It all contributes, you may even have set triggers and tracks that can be traced back to the originating moment when it commenced.

The effects of this finds us holding on (even gripping) needing to stay within the comfort zone to feel safe. Of course it’s different for everyone, but one of life’s challenges is to find the edge (which changes all the time), that place where comfort meets the unknown and how we handle it indicates the amount of work we may need to put in to addressing it, in order that it becomes less instead of more.

It doesn’t need medication

I know you might be on medication, or you’re being guided that way, or you’re resisting everything, and not sure what to do.

Being less anxious just requires a couple of good strategies and next time, I’ll share a bit more about what’s going on there. But for now I’m just going to say, I’m with you, I so get anxiety, and in fact it was only recently that I realised in hindsight, what a nervy anxious person I’ve been for most of my life.

If you’re game, and willing to be a little bit open to having less of it, and a little more of how you’d like to feel instead, I’ll share what I found helped me.

In the meanwhile just spend a moment contemplating what your life would look like if the need to worry were reduced.

We’ll pick up on that next time.

Join the newsletter

If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Working with Jane

Changing unwanted patterns with all-things-food makes an enormous difference to everything else, especially how you feel about yourself.

When it comes to making better decisions, addressing what stops you is a very good place to start. Are you ready to take the helm?

Best Ways To Lose Weight

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using the best tools and techniques for weight loss really helps
The Best Ways To Lose Weight Are Probably Different To What You’ve Been Doing

If you’ve tried a number of methods with no lasting effect, and you’re still looking for the best ways to lose weight, then you’re in the right place.

In a recent post I looked at the question of How Can I Lose Weight, and why people aren’t getting it answered.

Finding The Best Ways To Lose Weight

When you’ve followed pretty much all the current wisdom and still not found anything that really works for you then you need something else, and there may be a feeling that there is nothing else, it must be me, etc.

BUT … I’m here to tell you otherwise, this is more that you can do, that may be new to you, so if you’re game let me tell you a little more about it.

Eating Differently Short-Term

Eating differently is part of the process, especially if you’re suffering with any chronic health symptoms, but not in the way you might have done in the past.

It’s an important factor when it comes to getting your body back on track, and changing your eating habits, at least in the short-term, and there is some very interesting research on this, that we’ll dig into again.

Cravings for high salt, sugars (the refined ones) and fats (the non-essential) will not go away while you’re being dragged back into a state of need for unhelpful non-nutritious stuff. Changing the taste-buds is vital in getting released from the stressful vicious circle this leads you into time and again.

We know (on some level) that this is just manufactured junk being churned out by companies who aren’t invested in your health. But more importantly it keeps many you away from your ideal shape, weight and energy levels.

This teaches you what is happening in the body and why you’re reaching for refined sugars, carbohydrates and fatty products, in relation to stress. And dealing with the stress, is a vital component of course.

Energy Levels Start To Soar

Increased energy levels are important to you right, because they dictate the quality of your day and how much you achieve? Therefore it’s obvious that the energy you draw from real foodsJoin the newsletter

If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Working with Jane

Changing unwanted patterns with all-things-food makes an enormous difference to everything else, especially how you feel about yourself.

When it comes to making better decisions, addressing what stops you is a very good place to start. Are you ready to take the plunge?

Eczema Cause

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clearing skin conditions is easier once you know what the cause is
Here’s What Jo Said About Working On Clearing Skin Eczema Using The miHealth & ACE

Joanne came an eczema cause that she assumed was an allergy caused by some jewellery she’s been given as a present. We used ACE (Accelerated Clearing Energetics and the NES miHealth handheld bio-energy machine.

What had in fact been going on is that she’d been separated from her work colleagues of 20-yrs, where the large office was dispersed into various corners of the city.

And there were a few strands to it.

What Was The Cause

In META-Health we understand that eczema is about separation from someone or something, that you either want to be closer or to push away, and dependent on whereabouts it is, i.e. inside arms is to bring closer and outside arms is to push away.

This fitted perfectly for Jo, because she was missing her work colleagues, due to the reshuffle, and she loved the camaraderie with the group.

When she got sent to a small office, none of her new colleagues did the same type of work as her, so she had no support from them. But what really impacted her was that the room she was working in had four desks and they each faced the walls.

There was no office interaction at all.

And once we got to the core of the issue, that went back to something deeper from her childhood, it continued to clear the symptoms. She found the process easy and painless.

It was just something that happened.

As soon as we started worked on the eczema cause, her skin started to change, only 20-minutes into the ACE process, and then we noticed another difference at the end of what was 40-50 minutes.

What Happened Next?

See above what Joanne said about the treatment as the skin eczema cleared and didn’t return. Everything changed, and she found it much easier to leave that job and find another one in a similar field, that was better paid, working with another group of supportive co-workers.

You can see what she thought about it in the video testimonial above.

Join the newsletter

If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Working with Jane

Changing unwanted patterns with all-things-food makes an enormous difference to everything else, especially how you feel about yourself.

When it comes to making better decisions, addressing what stops you is a very good place to start. Are you ready to take the plunge?

Signs Of Addiction

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Being addicted to things like coffee is mundane and hardly noticed
Signs Of Addiction, How Does It Work & What’s Your Poison Of Choice?

Characterized by changes in the brain which result in a compulsive desire to use something as a replacement.

A combination of many factors including genetics, environment and behaviour influence a person’s addiction risk, can make it an incredibly complicated disease.

The new science of addiction considers all of these factors, from biology to learned family patterns, in order to unravel the complexities of the addictive brain.

The definition of addiction

A dictionary definition is:

When you have to carry out a behaviour even when you don’t really want to … it’s feeling compelled to do something.

Have you felt this way … I know I have?

What does it apply to?

Well anything that can’t pass a test regarding the above definition; such as, eating, smoking, drinking, shopping, gaming, sex, keeping fit, gambling, well you name it.

A BBC documentary

Alex Riley recently ran a 3-pt series for the BBC where he looked into how some of the largest corporations, selling some of the best-known products on the High Street, manage to persuade us that their product is the best one for us! The programmes were themed around the super-brands, and fell into 3-categories:

  • Technology
  • Food
  • Fashion

The Amygdala and desire

Part of each programme involved demonstrating through the use of MRI brain-scans how the Amygdala is programmed towards pleasure and away from pain, and is a basic instinct!

It showed how these innate instincts in search of both the feel-good-factor and safety are what marketers play on.
So we just fall for it and further on into this article you can see more information as to why you shouldn’t beat yourself up for it.

As for the marketers, it’s simple, these are some of the shrewdest companies in the world and they’re bound to hire the best persuaders.

It’s a reflection of the times we live in, but ultimately we always have choice, especially once we become more consciously aware of what drives our choices.

What are the scientific findings?

An article first published on 29 Jan 2010 (online) shows the following scientific findings by these scientists with a detailed summary below this:

  • Joseph Frascell
  • Marc N Potenza
  • Lucy L Brown
  • Anna Rose Childress
Brain Vulnerabilities Open The Way For Non-Substance Addiction

For more than half a century, since the beginning of formal diagnostics, our psychiatric nosology has compartmentalized the compulsive pursuit of substance (e.g. alcohol, cocaine, heroin, nicotine) from non-substance (e.g. gambling, food, sex) rewards.

Emerging brain, behavioral, and genetic findings challenge this diagnostic boundary, pointing to shared vulnerabilities underlying the pathological pursuit of substance and non-substance rewards.

The working groups for the fifth revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders, the DSM-V, are subsequently considering whether the nosologic boundaries of addiction should be redrawn to include non-substance disorders, such as gambling, etc.

This review discusses how neuro-biological data from problem gambling, obesity, and normal-states-of-attachment (romantic infatuation, sexual attraction, maternal bonds) may help us in the task of carving addictions at a new joint.

Diagnostic re-carving may have a positive effect on addiction research, stimulating discovery of crossover pharmaco-therapies with benefit for both substance and non-substance addictions. You can find a down-loadable .pdf of the whole report (297 pgs) by clicking through here.

Changing addictive behaviours

And I think it does help us understand that although we are not wholly responsible for the causes, we are fully able to get on board with making the necessary changes where we want to have a different set of behaviours.

As that is something I fully know to be pliable and not set-in-stone … and making the decision to have another set of behaviours is within our sphere of choice, in fact it is only you that can make such a decision that will affect some real change for you.

Taking the first steps

And this can be exciting as well as scary! But you know how it is, quite often before deciding on a plan-of-action we frighten ourselves half-to-death with all manner of ideas and notions of this, that and the other, but the reality of these tools and techniques and the general process is that it and they are far gentler than you can ever imagine.

Yet the impact they have on changing something, is subtle and long lasting, as it changes at the deepest levels of the subconscious mind and makes changes along the neural pathways where behaviour patterns are held.

Join the newsletter

If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Join the newsletter

If you haven’t already, join the newsletter and receive tips, news and up-to-date information about the mind:body connection in relation to weight loss.

Working with Jane

Changing unwanted patterns with all-things-food makes an enormous difference to everything else, especially how you feel about yourself.

When it comes to making better decisions, addressing what stops you is a very good place to start. Are you ready to take the plunge?