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.
For most of us that make a New Year resolution to lose weight, the reality is that we will break our resolve by the end of March if not well before. Why is that? The answer is quite simple - we make the wrong resolution. Many of us also make it year after year, with the result being a feeling of failure.
Sustainable weight loss is rarely achieved by a focus on food or weight. It is achieved by the motivation for change, created through self-loving acts. These are actions that fill our lives with the people and moments that feed our soul and fill us with joy.
Self-loving actions include those of listening to our body by developing the long, lost art of ‘Conscious Eating’. These are habits, with food, used by people who have never dieted. They include the thoughtful, loving act of consuming food that fuels our body for health, happiness and energy.
Also required for these self-loving actions to be sustainable, are new sets of rules or boundaries around the way we view and use our minds as well as food. The act of taking control of our choices to focus on positive thoughts and beliefs is reflected back to us in the way our lives become happier and less stressful.
Managing our emotions without burying them with excess food is another of the self-loving acts that aid in reducing stress. By facing our feelings, acknowledging and releasing them appropriately, a self-loving process heals and dissipates the negative emotions. Then there is no need to use food as a comforter. It is replaced by the comfort of self-loving actions.
When we love ourselves enough to demonstrate this daily, in the way we act and view our world and body, we make a paradigm shift that increases joy and reduces stress. This has a significant effect on the reduction of our comfort eating. A more effective New Year resolution, that brings sustainable weight loss, is therefore to love ourselves more than we have ever been loved before.
© Chrissie Webber 2008
