Keys for managing sugar addiction, bingeing, disorderly eating, while building healthy lifestyle changes, include paying attention to details, examining moments in transition, designing and building new disciplines, as well as mind motivations. This chapter is about paying attention to the many aspects of the food connection, while moving in the direction of change. It's not enough to know what to eat and what not to eat. The knowledge alone holds little motivation for the long- haul discipline needed to achieve permanent success.
Self-discipline walks hand in hand with inner motivation. You already have the coupling of these in your subconscious mind in the form of past successful experiences. You practiced this, with interactive self-hypnosis, in an earlier chapter. These tools are now becoming a part of your own subconscious mind library. You are now able to apply them to managing the different aspects of your bingeing, sugar addiction or other addictions. Soon, you will be able to mentor off of these, building new programs with inner creativity tools. Then you will be able to design goals, active them, while continuing to mind- motivate in moments of transition. This book is providing knowledge, some new and some old, but perhaps only forgotten.
Just knowing something is not enough. The world is filled with people who know things, but don’t act. Knowledge must be contained and organized into a plan of action. Then one must step into the action.
MORE ABOUT KNOWLEDGE HOOKS
Throughout this book you are collecting knowledge hooks. Think of these as being similar to coat hooks. After locating or designing your motivations, you will be asked to hang them on the knowledge hooks. There are different kinds of motivations. Some will motivate you towards a positive or reward experience. Others will motivate you away from positive experience and towards negative ones. The levels of positive or negative motivation can be enhanced or diminished. These are interactive self-hypnotic tools that will allow you to take charge of your own mind programming. Both types of motivation can work well, but a balanced approach seems to work best in most people.
OPENING THE FOOD CONNECTION…HYPNOTICALLY
Perhaps you have known about your binge behavior or sugar addiction for awhile, or maybe you just woke up to it. It’s possible that you didn’t know the relationship to other addictions or chronic disease. Patients often tell me its like dream-walking their way up to a particular moment in time. As their eyes opened, they found themselves in the deep, dark place of bingeing or sugar addiction . This is just an illusion, for little happens over-night. More than likely their sugar addiction had been building for years. If you return to the assessment area in this book, I'm sure you can spot the beginnings of food issues in your own life. Remember, knowledge is king. The more you collect, the easier it will be to see even beyond what you can see now. This will allow you to travel further towards high level health and optimum performance.
Students often ask if it possible to be born with a sugar-addiction? They remember their parents telling how cranky they were, and the only way to stop the crying was to give them a bottle of condensed milk that was watered down. Of course that is much sweeter than regular milk. It certainly is possible for a very young child to crave sugar, especially if the family medical history is positive for the diseases and addictions that were mentioned earlier. This is seen in crack babies born to addicted mothers. However, certain babies do need a different type of formula and unfortunately most physicians, in the past, weren’t aware of how to solve these problems. But while the past is useful as a bank of information, you are now living in the present. Your responsibility is to self-manage from where you are now.
In this program you will be working with tools of regression and future pacing. This actual book is written with specialized imagery woven through the fabric of the pages allowing you to go back in time and also forward. If you are unfamiliar with medical hypnosis, or the practice of active imagery let me share a bit with you. For thousands of years the unique powers of these mind and body tools have been well known, but unfortunately found themselves tucked away on a back shelf, out of reach of those who would benefit from them. In this experiential book you are invited to reclaim these tools, dust them off and learn to apply them through different areas of your life. You already have an advanced tool of mine, called interactive self-hypnosis. This type of self-hypnosis allows you to communicate directly with the library of your mind in any moment that ticks on your watch.
Your subconscious , or creative mind loves to learn through stories and metaphors. Whether you are reading this book to stop bingeing, to manage sugar addiction, disorderly eating, chronic disease, or simply to enhance your lifestyle, these images will glue themselves to your specific goals or desires. There is no need to effort, for this is the gift of active imagery.
BUILDING CONTAINMENTS
When working with lifestyle change, it helps to have some inner organization. You will also want to use self-hypnotic organization with other large projects. I like the metaphor of containments. These are simply "mind containers".
Just for a moment image a table with many containers. Locate the labels. Each time I ask you to build a containment for some knowledge, you will mentally come to this table, choose a container and label it. Each and every time you work with this particular area of knowledge, you will take the container off the shelf, and work with it in some self-hypnotic way. When something is contained it is easier to manage, as it no longer sits out in the confusion of the world. You mind and body will not only see it as less stressful, but will find it much easier to send you free floating thoughts or suggestions relating to it.
Now it's time to begin collecting knowledge, locating the hooks and hanging up some motivational mind programs. Then you can place these in labeled containers in the library of your mind.
KNOWLEDGE HOOK
Let's begin with imaging a baseball diamond, a great organizational metaphor for the problems we are focusing on in this book. In fact, you may remember working with this very image earlier in the book. This metaphor works for many different kinds of goals. Remember, you are always the batter. Most of us know there are four bases. In the baseball game of life, first base is the food connection and it is here that you will collect very important knowledge. You will then find out how to apply your motivation to the knowledge.
First off the bat, few people think about what they eat and drink in relation to the needs of their body. Even fewer think about what they put in their mouths in relation to their family and personal medical history. In most people’s minds, it is like these things have no relation to each other. It is actually uncommon for someone to build a connection between what is eaten and the function of the mind or body.
It helps us to think in imagery. We were all born with genetic wallpaper that comes with designs from parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on. Some of us were born with a tendency towards certain diseases such as heart, diabetes, circulatory diseases and certain cancers. This tendency towards is a biochemical factor that can cause you to either over-produce a hormone called insulin or to develop a resistance to it. You visited this knowledge earlier in the book .
You also learned that through the years you might have developed some of the risk factors such as high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, obesity or yo-yo weight gain patterns. Perhaps you added a history of smoking, alcohol or drug addiction. How you managed stress over the years also is an important consideration when evaluating where you are in relation to where we want to go and how your food connection hooks up. Now that you know this, it is a good time to work with the knowledge. If not, it will have the tendency to go out with the tide.
INNER MOTIVATION
Many people have difficulty finding a place to begin lifestyle change and so they answer to this by not beginning. They either procrastinate or bury their head in the sand, either way achieving the same negative outcomes. But you are not like most people because you are reading this book, and you can choose to begin right in this moment. There is no need to wait. Let me show you how.
Read through this exercise and then close your eyes . Earlier in the assessment area you learned a simple relaxation response. Employ that now and go a bit further by tilting your eyes up just slightly, allowing your mind screen to appear behind your lightly closed eyes. Notice a movie is in progress and that a hand is being extended to you, offering to pull you forward. Take the offered hand with confidence, knowing you have nothing to lose in learning about yourself and wanting to change. Your subconscious mind is now engaged. You are on the path to first base.
Your past family is waiting for you with their rolls of wallpaper. Walk past each member, even if you don't know them, thanking them for coming. Place all the wallpaper into your cart and go into a quiet place where you can spend time reviewing it. The more you understand and accept where this comes from, the better your self-care will be. There is no room to be upset. Just like anyone else, you received both good and bad from those who came before you. Your work is to do your best with what you have. You can choose to commit to this now through the planting of an inner motivational affirmation:
• I understand and accept my genetic wallpaper.
• My wallpaper serves as a guiding light to the needs of my mind and body.
KNOWLEDGE HOOK
Pinpointing your current location on your life path is important when deciding to change course. Most of us have little idea as to where we are "path-wise" in relation to the chronic disease door, nor have we evaluated how fast we are walking towards it. Moments do count. Everything you put in your mouth counts. Think of your body departments as being bank accounts. Each time you put something in your mouth, a record is made in that particular area. Think about yourself for a moment now. How would you evaluate your inner prosperity?
Waking up is often unpleasant. Just the idea of making a lifestyle change can cause panic. Lifestyle changes can appear monumental, especially in the deciding and early phases because usually no containment has been build. The emotions are in charge and most people have no idea how to get their life back on course. For success, both containment and emotional management must be engaged. In this book you will be learning how to do this and more.
A patient of mine had his first heart attack this year. He was forty-two. While that was really frightening, he was actually more frightened when his doctor told him that if he didn’t make radical changes to his lifestyle, he would die. That meant he had to lose weight, stop smoking, stop drinking and learn to relax. He is a corporate executive, living on a high stress career track. He saw this as his “worst work project to date.”
He is not alone in his boat. I wish I had a dollar for every patient who is given a similar message. Here is a good example of knowledge not being enough. This patient, like all others, needs a containment and a plan of action. Then the plan needs to be fired off, motivated and supported, especially through the early stages.
continued in next blog...
A NOTE TO NEW READERS:
This experiential blog/workshop is based on my new book, "How Many Cookies Will It Take to Make Me Happy?" This book is not published as yet, but you have the opportunity to read it in it's unpublished state. If you are new to my writing, you might want to read the earlier mini-chapters. They are available on FaceBook, The PublishersMarketPlace & at the following link. Remember to scan down to find the earliest chapters & work your way up. http://beyonddisorderlyeating.blogspot.com/
A bit of background.... we are working with creative Interactive Self-Hypnosis imagery, planting suggestions directly into the creative subconscious mind as you read along. What appears like a story is a series of self-hypnotic sessions, designed to bring about desired lifestyle changes. The inner mind is creative & rather child-like, loving to play with images, especially when they are emotionalized. Just like the saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words", well-planted mind images, can be worth hours of therapy. We can actually change or motivate in 1/200th of a second. So come along & look forward to some lifestyle-changing events.
Copyright 2009 Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht
May not be copied or reproduced without permission of the author.
Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht is author of Sugar...the Hidden Eating Disorder & How to Lick It. She is also the writer/producer of over 350 mp3/CD programs in the areas of medicine, health, prevention, addictions, self-development & sports for adults & children.
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