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.
Last night I watched a new BBC programme, The Extreme Pilgrim. On a journey to find spiritual enlightenment Peter Owen Jones visited a Buddhist
Monastery in China to discover more about their philosophy. He immersed himself in the Buddhist way, in an endeavour to find inner peace and happiness – enlightenment.
Through the practice of non-attachment by keeping the mind clear of thought they work towards a life of enlightenment.
As I watched, I began to think about the importance of non-attachment to sustainable weight loss. For most of my life I have attached myself to a number of things that brought me nothing but pain and a battle with food and myself…
· An unhealthy attachment to food – always thinking about it;
· An attachment to destructive negative thoughts about myself and my body;
· An attachment to beliefs that I was not good enough;
· An attachment to comparisons of myself with others;
· An attachment to the beliefs I had about my weight, size and looks. It was no wonder I was so unhappy most of the time. The programme reinforced my belief that happiness and permanent weight loss for most people cannot be achieved when we are so attached to the negative. I am not advocating us all becoming Buddhists, however I will say that regular meditation is a great way to keep stress levels at bay and so reduce comfort eating. The point I am making is that to find the happiness and peace we seek in life then maybe we need to change our attachments… · Attach to the joy of living, the beauty around us and the very essence of the present moment as much as possible;
· Attach to positive thoughts, turning the negatives around and letting go of the things that you have no influence over;
· Attach to beliefs and experiences that show you how much others believe you are definitely ‘Good Enough’ and start believing them yourself;
· Attach to comparisons with others by highlight your own great attributes that they do not have;
· Attach to the belief that right here and now in the moment you are a unique, special and wonderful person no matter what your weight, size or look are. How about making 2008 a year where you attach to the things that will make you happy instead of the ones that cause you pain and a struggle with life? If you missed the programme and are interested in seeing it then click on this link and you can watch it on BBC iPlayer. This is available for the next 7 days. 
How we see ourselves becomes our own reality.
