NLP Article 3 - Why it is Not Your Fault if Your are Overweight!

In most civilised countries rates of overweight run at over 60% and rates of obesity are around 20%. For adults, these rates have doubled in the past 10 years. For children, these rates have trebled in the past 5 years! This is despite diets, appetite pills, shakes and other meal replacements, pharmaceutical preparations, liposuction, stomach banding and other surgical interventions!

What is the answer! It's quite simple really. For 99.9% of people, taking better care of nutrition, and putting a bit less on the plate, together with moving the body energetically for an extra 30 minutes each day, is all that is required. Not much, is it? The trouble is, we all know that, and we can (mostly) do that just for short periods of time. But sooner rather than later, our bodies seem to exert minds of their own and revert against our will to old habits.

When you realise how the mind and body work together this strange problem becomes quite easy to understand. Simply put, it is not our conscious mind which runs our life at all. We are operating under total misconception if we think that we are "in control". We are not. Our unconscious mind makes decisions even before the conscious mind realises that a decision can be made. Our unconscious mind responds automatically and rapidly (less than 0.02 seconds) to stimuli like food. Our unconscious mind presents us with all our attitudes and feelings about food and about exercise and our conscious mind is merely the recipient!

This is exactly why it is not your fault if you are overweight. There is literally nothing you can consciously do about it. You are like the "ex" smoker who becomes aware that she is standing at the smokes counter taking change from the packet of cigarettes she doesn't even remember asking for. The unconscious mind will have its way!

Fortunately there is now something that can unconsciously be done about this serious problem. We are now able to extinguish (eliminate) all conditioned responses around food so that we revert to our original, healthy programming. This is the key to permanent change.

One of the easiest ways to do this is through an NLP process called anchoring.

“Anchoring” is an NLP term which is really referring to making use of conditioned responses. Eg, we hear a telephone and even though we’ve decided not to answer it, our body “twitches” as if to rise; our partner gives us “that” look and we get a feeling of anger, or love, or whatever; someone pats us on the head and we get the same feeling of humiliation that we got as a kid (or maybe appreciation, depending upon our internal state at the time it got “programmed” in). In all these cases the “anchor” is the sensory trigger that led to the automatic internal state.

Food addictions are often programmed in the same way. (I’m not talking about physical addiction, but psychological or psycho-somatic addiction.) The person sees or smells the food (even in their imagination) and must have it, for example. This sensory representation immediately triggers a state of irresistible desire.

We take that trigger and by conditioned association, link it to a feeling of extraordinary disgust. We normally do this kinaesthetically, say by touch on a knee or elbow. We repeat the process around three times, and that is generally adequate to completely eliminate the food addiction, permanently. Each specific food addiction is treated in the same way. We take special care that the “disgust” feeling is pure disgust and not associated to fear or distress in any way. (Typically there will be lots of laughing throughout this process!)

Conversely, we use the Resource Triangle (an anchoring technique developed by NLP genius and master trainer Rex Steven Sikes) to deal with more purely psychological food addiction. Eg, at certain times of day the person may crave the food (not of course including diet inadequacies leading to cravings) maybe it’s 4.30 pm and they’re at their desk and they get that “almost time to stop” feeling; maybe they’re driving home and the deli is coming up and they get that “almost home” feeling; maybe they’re in the kitchen preparing dinner and the kids are screaming and they get that “help!” feeling; maybe it’s late at night and finally it’s quiet and they fall down into a chair in front of tv and get that “tired/collapsed” feeling.

In these cases the internal feeling itself (rather than the sensory experience of, say, smelling chocolate) is the trigger that leads to the food desire. The resource triangle attaches 5 or 6 alternative states to the initial internal state (eg, tired/collapsed + feeling of wind blowing through hair, tired/collapsed + mud squeezing through toes, tired/collapsed + walking along beach on a perfect day). Now when the person gets the tired/collapsed feeling, we have broken the sequence of internal states (messed them up, much like messing up a recipe by adding the wrong ingredients) and the sequence or strategy that they had for emotional eating no longer works. Their behaviour alters without their making any conscious effort to do so.

It’s a mistake of course to use these types of techniques in isolation. We might take away the chocolate addiction, for example, and leave the person without comfort or nurture in a difficult marriage. That would be cruel. We must first discover together what purpose the food addiction serves.

If you'd like a step-by-step description of the NLP anchoring technique used as described above, simply visit www.weightchoice.com.au and you'll see a downloadable free report on the home page.

About the Author: Christine Sutherland is the founder of The Lifeworks Group Pty Ltd. She is a behavioural therapist, clinical researcher, and internationally-published author of a range of reference texts for health professionals, corporate managers, and the general public.

You can contact Christine on christine@lifeworks-group.com.au.