Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (7 page)

This is an enjoyable part of managing my porous boundaries, and I highly recommend that you incorporate them into
your
routine to feel the full benefit of the Weight-Loss Program for People Who Feel Too Much. Positive changes occur in any energy field when you heat natural salt. Ritualistic salt baths
will
help you better manage your porous boundaries and avoid becoming overwhelmed emotionally.

A high-quality, natural salt in a hot bath will create plenty of negative ions, as well as contribute to a balanced pH in your body and offer relief of oxidative stress. Pure Himalayan salt also has many minerals that your body needs and will absorb from your bath. This is the salt I recommend, and the only one I use, although any natural unprocessed salt will do the trick. The salt bath also can also contain a bit of Epsom salts, or magnesium sulfate, which helps reduces inflammation and relax you. You can find Epsom salts at any drugstore.

I have many favorite aromatherapy blends. Add to the bath the following essential oils for aromatherapy: six drops each of lavender oil (for calming), grapefruit or rosemary oil (for detoxification), and orange oil (a natural analgesic). The bath is an important ritual, so remain in it long enough to feel your energy shift—10 to 20 minutes. Use the Emotional Freedom Technique while saying your affirmations. Afterward, don't let anyone else use the bathwater, which will now contain the energy detritus of your day. You can use it to flush your toilet if you're conserving water. Then, when you get dressed, put on new clothes. Place the old ones, which carry the energy of all the people and places you've interacted with all day, in the hamper.

Why do a bath at 4:00
P
.
M
.? Because about eight to ten hours after waking up, we're most vulnerable to becoming overwhelmed by our empathy and likely to take a detour. It's also when our blood pressure naturally peaks. I know many of you are at work or in school at 4:00
P
.
M
. and won't be able to do the bath until you get home. In that case, use a spritzer of a mild concentration of salt water with the aromatherapy oils to spray yourself and the area immediately around you (do this in the bathroom, not near computers!). Take off one piece of clothing if you can—a sweater, a bracelet, anything that can ritually represent the shedding of your day. Later, when you're at home, you can do the full salt bath ritual.

Many people who feel too much are not used to taking time to nurture themselves. So, you might be feeling some resistance to a daily Himalayan salt bath, even though it will only take you twenty minutes. The people who have done best on this weight-loss program did the baths every day, incorporating EFT into the ritual. So I strongly encourage you to push past that resistance. If you do skip a bath or two, pay attention to how you feel that night, before you go to bed. I think you will see how beneficial the baths are for your ability to manage your porous boundaries. And, it's only for the duration of the program that I suggest that you do the bath regularly. Try committing to a minimum 10 minutes a day for just one week. I know you will see the benefits and will want to keep doing it!

SIMPLICITY

This program is designed to keep you from detouring into an obsession with food, weight, or exercise and to prevent you from becoming overstimulated, overwhelmed, and stressed out, all of which set you up for disordered eating. The program includes the following do's and don'ts:

• don't weigh yourself

• do move your body every day but don't feel pressured to “exercise”

• do avoid media so you can keep your emotional field uncluttered

• do eat three meals and two snacks a day, avoiding foods that you know trigger disordered eating for you

DON'T WEIGH YOURSELF!

Let's start with your weight. Go ahead and weigh yourself once before starting the program and once at the end. If you feel strongly about wanting to get a sense of where you are halfway through, get weighed at the doctor's office or in front of a kind friend who will write down the number and tell you whether you have lost or maintained your weight. I stand in front of the scale at the doctor's office, facing away from it, and I ask only to be told if I am maintaining a healthy weight or if there is any change from my last visit. I know approximately how much I weigh based on how my clothes fit me. Not everyone is scale-centric, but many of you are. In the past, I would decide whether my entire day was good or a disaster, based on the number on my scale. If that sounds like you, don't reward or torture yourself by getting on it during this program.

So, if you own a scale, hide it in the back of your closet or in the garage. If you start worrying about whether you've lost any weight, stop what you're doing in that moment, close your eyes, and say to yourself, “I love my body. I love you, body! Every inch of you is divine. I accept you and love you just as you are. Thank you for being my protection. You are perfect, and I am safe.”

MOVE YOUR BODY EVERY DAY

During the eight weeks of this program, it's important to keep your body moving, but you don't have to commit to a strenuous exercise regime. In fact, many of you may have a condition called adrenal exhaustion, owing to stress, and if you do too rigorous exercise you'll actually cause more stress to your adrenal glands and wipe yourself out for a day or two with fatigue.

You'll learn more about adrenals and adrenal fatigue later in the book, and be given some more guidance on how to work healthy movement into your life, but for now, just know that you shouldn't feel you absolutely need to start working out like a fiend at the gym. I'm sure you're relieved about that! Having said that, it is contradictory to the program to sit all day long—and it's terrible for your circulation of vital fluids and for your muscles and stamina. You must move to move the energy—you will not experience the relief from empathy overload when you are sedentary.

As you clean up your diet and start untwisting the tangled necklaces in the jewelry box of your emotions, you'll have more energy and you can begin thinking about ways to get more exercise. For the next eight weeks, if possible, get some movement outdoors. Sunshine helps your body make vitamin D and serotonin, the latter which is a feel-good neurotransmitter your body and your mind really needs. Just spending five minutes walking or exercising outdoors can improve your mood.

Movement is especially important when you're feeling angry or anxious. Try just a short, brisk walk, a quick swim, some yoga moves, a few minutes spent dancing vigorously to your favorite songs, or a session on an active videogame, such as Wii Fit or X-Box Kinnect games, which require that you get up and move. Strong emotions dissipate more easily when you move your body. Physical exercise is proven to improve the emotional well-being of everyone, as it releases the excess energies accumulated throughout the day.

AVOID MEDIA

As I pointed out earlier, because of technology most of us are
so much more
connected to other people than ever before. It's very hard get through the day without being exposed to someone's anger, cruelty, or suffering, unless you take a break from television and social media. Your emotional field can get cluttered very quickly with all the negative emotions you're typically exposed to. For the duration of this weight-loss program, avoid as much as possible all television, the news, the Internet, social media, and most magazines (especially gossipy ones). If you play inactive videogames or online games of any sort to detour around your own emotions or to stimulate you, stay away from them, too, for the next eight weeks. Dancing, yoga, or exercise videogames are okay, but inactive games suck you into acquiring virtual points, livestock, and party invitations and into ignoring the difficult feelings you have to examine.

I know there's a lot going on, and you might feel it's important to stay informed about the news, but if you can't take a total break from the media, then at least avoid visual images, which usually pack a bigger emotional punch than words. And avoid emotionally upsetting stories you don't absolutely have to read, such as the doom-and-gloom pieces on financial blunders and world political situations. Stick with reading good news that will put a smile on your face and make you feel hopeful. When you've completed this program and have established good habits for managing your porous boundaries, then you can start putting media back into your life again. Trust me—you'll be surprised at how little it mattered that you missed eight weeks or so of the media.

EAT THREE MEALS AND TWO SNACKS A DAY

Eat mostly fresh, organic (when you can), plant-based foods that will keep you sated instead of feeling deprived or hungry. At the same time, make sure you quiet the noisy food that stimulates an emotional response. You don't have to measure anything, or worry about what foods you mix at a meal, or avoid certain foods for the first week, or anything like that. That said, I know you want more details, so let me explain a little bit about how to eat simply and healthfully, ignoring the calls of noisy food, eating mindfully, and making detours.

Noisy Food and How to Shut It Up

We all have foods that stimulate a strong emotional response. We tend to crave them physically, but we can crave them emotionally, too, because of their associations. When you're feeling sad or melancholy, as well as physically sluggish, you might crave sugar, but what you really crave is the cookie bars you used to make with your grandmother. Or, you're not satisfied indulging in several pieces of salty pizza when you have a taste for salt; you want to get those slices from the pizzeria where you and your friends used to hang out back when you were in college and were filled with excitement and enthusiasm about what the future would hold. Or, like me, you may have not felt the real connection to your mother when you were younger and food, especially sweets, give you that sense of false nourishment that you connect with the idea of being nurtured emotionally.

Noisy foods call to us when we're not managing our emotions and are deeply seductive when we're in empathy overload and need to feel comforted. They provide a temporary yet powerful sensual escape that we later regret. It's really important that we people who feel too much don't eat for entertainment or emotional sustenance. Enjoy your food, by all means, but don't make it the primary source of your enjoyment. Don't reach for the bag of treats when you really need to reach for your shoes and your phone, and call a friend who will go on a casual walk with you. Sound easy? It's not at first, but with time it gets better and better. Those noisy foods
will
stop yapping at you.

Now, there are also foods that are
literally
noisy. They make your body rumble and grumble with gas, bloating, and indigestion, and make it cry out to you, “Please, I'm so tired! Let me take a nap or zone out on the sofa!” These foods tend to be comfort foods that are too taxing for your system to process, but the pleasure of having them in your mouth distracts you from the discomfort of having them go through your gastrointestinal system minutes or hours later. Are there any foods you know you'll regret eating but which you indulge in anyway because you can't resist them? As you become more mindful of the foods you're ingesting and how they interact with your body and affect you overall, these foods will be less of a temptation for you.

What is equally important as avoiding these detour foods is the way in which you refer to them. Those foods are not bad or evil. If you label them that way, it makes them even more seductive. All food is just food. We learn here how to love ourselves to decide which foods will be best for us and which are not the best choices. You can have any food you choose to eat. It's important just to be aware that there are consequences. For example if you know that when you eat cereal you immediately want to overeat it, choosing to eat it may lead to overeating it. I love ice cream. I eat ice cream when I am in a stable mood and once in a while, and always as something I have chosen to eat. Total deprivation isn't the answer, either. If I'm stressed, however, one ice cream cup could easily turn into a large tub before I know it. As for alcohol, I don't touch it—ever. You will find your way with this as you get honest with yourself.

Mindful Eating

Do you eat so much, so quickly, that you're uncomfortably full afterward? Do you eat in a frenzy when you're overcome with a strong emotion, then regret your binge later? Or, are you utterly clueless about how much you eat and how often you're putting food in your mouth?

Mindful eating means being fully present while you're eating instead of having your mind going in seventeen different directions while your food disappears before you. To eat mindfully, you've got to have boundaries to your eating, as I said. Once a meal is over, and the plate or bowl is empty, that's the end. No free eating!

As you begin this program, it's important to pay attention to your eating habits. To do this, you might want to measure how much food fits on one of your plates or in one of your bowls—some bowls actually hold three or four servings of a food, which is great if you fill it with broccoli, not so great if you fill it with pasta. If you're going to eat some chips, take a moment as you stand before them and determine what size portion you want for yourself. Read the label and you might realize you don't want to eat any given how much fat and salt they contain (and beware of labels with misleading serving sizes—please, who eats a half dozen potato chips?).