Chrissie Webber works as a writer, business coach and motivation/ leadership trainer and is Managing Director of Life-Shapers Ltd, an online weight-loss motivation company. With over 20 years experience in the field of business and people development she has an expertise in the area of motivation for permanent weight loss.
Following a lifetime of weight issues - at her heaviest, over 21 stone and a massive size 30 – she has personal experience of diets and their devastating effect on size and psyche. With a background in nursing, psychology and business coaching, coupled with a lifetime of dieting, she developed and successfully used a series of models and tools that enhance weight loss motivation. Now over 5 dress sizes smaller and having sustained her weight loss for several years, Chrissie continues her passionate drive to change the mindsets of people away from a ‘Scarcity’ dieting mindset – where food is demonised as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – to an ‘Abundance’ mindset where mind, body and spirit work hand in hand with food and nature.
This morning I received an email from my great friend Jen. In it was a question asked by the cybernetics engineer Norbert Weiner in response to a question, about how to determine the causes of schizophrenia, from his friend and epidemiologist, Gregory Bateson.
The email went on to adapt the question into one that I found most revealing. So I though you may like to ponder over it as I have done...
"If you were going to build a machine that produced a battle with weight, size, shape and food the way you do it, what would the machine need to do?"
Think about it and write down your own answers before you read what mine were. Don't forget, we are all uniquely different and your machine may be quite different from mine!
So my machine (as it used to be) was developed to run a programme that...
1. Constantly identified food as 'good' or 'bad' so I feared it and yet craved it.
2. Ran continuous movies about the 'bad' food and how much I loved to eat it.
3. Was based on a negative body image 'platform' (belief system) that considered my weight, size and shape was all wrong.
4. Contained a database of negative messages that I was not 'good enough' to be loved, and distributed them constantly.
5. Picked up all external messages that reinforced that I was not 'good enough' and added them to the database.
6. Easily stored negative and unhappy memories.
7. Made the storage of positive and joyous memories difficult and inaccessible for quick retrieval.
8. Easily triggered the rebellious 'child within me', giving permission for me to eat whatever and whenever I wanted.
9. Prevented me from connecting my mind to my body.
10. Triggered binge eating as a means of avoiding my emotions and the truth within them that was there for me to learn from.
Now you have the basis from which to modify your present programme and so rebuild your machine without all its negative viruses.
Happy programming!
