CathyArsenault

If you resolve the issues in your mind that keep you stuck, and overweight, then you will be successful. Your mind has the power to make you slim, and healthy.
And your mind has the power to keep you overweight, unhealthy and stuck.Your greatest wealth is your health and wellbeing.


The excess weight you carry, or your disordered eating habits is simply a consequence of you rewarding, and commiserating with yourself with food; stress and comfort eating; sugar cravings, and a myriad of old habits, and beliefs that are no longer helpful for you to lose weight, or be as healthy as you can be.
Your mind plays an enormous role in how your body is allowed to manifest health, and slimness together with the ability to make the right choices to ensure you eat for nourishment instead of self-punishment.
Carrying excess weight is never about being greedy, or about a lack of willpower. That’s why diets simply do not work - but you already know that!
As therapists Sally Baker and Liz Hogon target your body by changing your mind.
YOUR MIND IS WHERE YOU WILL CREATE YOUR WEIGHT LOSS, AND WELLBEING.
Surgical interventions alone...won’t do it.
Any "step-by-step approach"... won't do it.
"Forcing" yourself to go without... won't do it.
Any preconceived ideas... won't do it.
It is time to finally explore, and release your mind of old, unhelpful beliefs, and negative thinking to become a manifestation of good health, and well-being so that you can achieve a slimmer, happier you.
If you resolve the issues in your mind that keep you stuck, and overweight, then you will be successful.
Your mind has the power to make you slim, and healthy.
And your mind has the power to keep you overweight, unhealthy, and stuck.
It's your choice to free yourself.
If you understand this, just whisper "yes" to yourself. It is time to acknowledge it out-loud to make it real.
The underlying reasons for emotional eating are similar to the layers of an onion, so it’s important to peel back those layers in the most effective way releasing, and resolving deeper, and deeper issues as you progress. One effective way of approaching this work is chronologically.
Tracing your past
Focus on increasing your understanding, and insight into your own life events, and memories around your weight. Write down times in your life when your weight and your eating has felt more in balance, and times in your life when your weight escalated and your eating felt out of control. This exploration is called The Time Line Protocol. It’s useful to begin with your earliest recollections, and go right through to the present day. What was happening for you emotionally around those key times in your life, and most critically what judgements do you make about yourself from those memories, and events?
Blaming yourself is exhausting, and keeps you stuck. “It’s all my fault,” and other negative self-talk is dispiriting and undermines your self-esteem. Many people who struggle with losing weight think very poorly of themselves so making changes to how you think about yourself can be key to effectively clearing negative self-beliefs.
Sally Baker, and Liz Hogon recommend two free therapy tools to help you explore, and resolve any negative judgements triggered by the past, and release your negative thoughts. You can use EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), and PSTEC (Percussive Suggestion Technique) as two easy to learn self-help therapy tools available for no charge from www.your7simpleteps.com/Resources.
This will assist you with everything practical you are doing for your own transformation.

Breakfast means breaking the fast. If you fast too long, your body starts breaking down muscle mass for energy.


A common meal pattern seen with new patients is skipping breakfast. The most common reasons include lack of time and not being hungry. Once a patient starts eating breakfast, the lament is “I’m so hungry about an hour after breakfast!”
You are likely experiencing physiological hunger. If you go too long without eating, your body will start breaking down your muscle to convert to blood sugars. When you lose muscle mass, you burn fewer calories. Your muscle mass is like the idle on a car. When the idle is set high, the engine burns more energy. When the idle is set low, the engine needs less energy to run. Good muscle health is like having a higher idle set point for your body.
Skipping breakfast to lose weight backfires for two reasons. The first problem is that you lose muscle mass, which decreases your ability to burn calories. The second problem is that you will get too hungry by the next meal which leads to overeating. Eating too many calories at one time leads to storing fat. Research shows that starting your day with a high protein meal leads to eating fewer calories throughout the day. A high protein breakfast can be eggs, light Greek style yogurt, low fat or fat free cottage cheese, string cheese or other low fat cheese, a high protein shake or high protein cereal like Special K Protein or Kashi Go Lean with skim or low fat milk. Start eating a high protein breakfast within an hour after waking to get your metabolism started.

Self-sabotage may still live inside us, but it's not US.




We’re alive, and most of us want to stay that way. Fundamentally, underneath all of the noise and the preferences and the prejudices we just want to live as comfortably as possible for as long as possible. We want to be able to play in the world with the stuff we like and the people we love doing the things we want to be doing for as many years as we can. For most of us, this is our deepest truth. It makes sense that our fundamental drive, then, is to act in ways that keep us strong and healthy. It's this drive that inspired most of us to have - or explore the possibility of having - weight loss surgery.
Post-op, many of us realize that we still have something in us that wants to keep us from getting or staying strong and healthy. We still hear the voice of self-sabotage. When faced with the choice to follow through with or disregard a commitment we’ve made to ourselves and our health, it still chimes in with “Oh, screw it,” or “It’s not worth it,” or “Maybe later.” If you’re anything like me, it takes every chance it gets to slap me with “Exercise? Eating well? Who exactly do you think you’re kidding?”
Sabotaging efforts to take better care of ourselves has always worked against us, but after surgery, turning a blind eye to our nutrition plan, skimping on sleep, failing to take supplements, and / or not following our doctor's orders can have way more serious - and more immediately life-threatening, consequences.
The voice urging us to disregard our post-op commitments is not our voice, and the sooner we allow ourselves to recognize that voice as a separate entity, the better. I call my self-sabotaging voice the Beast, and when I remember that it’s the beat’s voice urging me to quit, or not even try, I can listen critically instead of just going with the flow, and doing (or not doing) whatever it suggests. Seeing the beast as separate from me gives me some space to remember my truth - I want to live, and live well - and to act accordingly, which means eating well, eating mindfully, and taking care of my body in every other way that I can.
One of my commitments is to work out every day, because it makes me feel breathless and alive and sexy and it ramps up my energy (I have two toddlers, and I can use all the energy I can get). After a long morning of working out my personal training clients, I’m tired, and the thought bubbles up that “I need a break.” I’ve been in this situation enough times to know that taking that “break” (which usually involves sitting, mindlessly snacking, and losing an hour to Facebook) will suck the life right out of me and set me up for a crappy, lethargic evening.
After years of practice, the moment this kind of self-sabotaging, undermining thought pops up, my radar goes off: “That thought isn’t coming from me.” I know it’s the Beast, and I know that listening to it will yield me the exact opposite of what I want most, which is to feel healthy and vibrant and fully engaged in my life.
And it’s that little mental shift that helps me walk into the gym, even after a long workday.
Odds are there’s a beast living in your head, too. I suggest giving it a name - you’re welcome to use the same one I do. When self-sabotaging and self-harming ideas bubble to the surface, practice labeling them with the name you’ve chosen. “I’m too tired to workout.” That’s probably your beast. “One cigarette won’t hurt.” Most definitely your beast. “Eh, it won't matter if I eat cake and soda while I'm on vacation - life is short!” It just may be short, or at least you may wish it were while you're in the midst of a horrible dumping episode. Surgery junk food after gastric bypass? Yup, you guessed it: Beast.
I work every day to disempower the beast in me and to give my clients the tools to disempower theirs. Today, my Beast tells me not to bother blogging because nothing I write will ever be good enough. It tells me not to bother giving people tools to end self-sabotage, like I’ll be doing in a free, live webinar on April 1 at 8:30 PM Eastern (CLICK HERE to claim your seat). It tells me I’m a fraud for trying to live a healthy life, nevermind trying to teach other people how to do it, too.
Because I default to self-harm and self sabotage, I need to keep my deep desires - to be comfortable in my body, to be available to my children, and to be a resource to women like me - front and center in my mind. When a thought comes up - to do or not to do something, anything - I ask myself “Is this in line with what I want most?” If it is, that’s me - that's my voice. When it’s not, that’s the beast.
Try it for yourself - you’ll be amazed how easy it is to figure out who’s talking.
Another way that I keep the beast from controlling me is to share the fact that it exists with you, so thanks for listening, and for joining me on April 1.
If you relate to my story, and you’re lugging around your own self-sabotaging demon, I empathize. I'm living proof that women like us can get a handle on self-sabotage, and live the lives we want: comfortable, strong, and free.
Please join me for "Of Course You Can: 3 Essential Strategies to End Self-Sabotage"
Details: FREE & LIVE, April 1, 2015 at 8:30 PM Eastern; webinar
To claim your seat, visit: http://webinarjam.net/webinar/go/14421/b8b8bcf46d