You are going to start thinking that I’m a GMTv fanatic but the truth is I catch about ten minutes before I head off to work. However, once again Paul McKenna is doing his thing on breakfast TV, this time helping people to reduce comfort eating in an effort to get healthier.
Yesterday he dealt with someone who had put on a lot of weight after the death of her daughter. It seemed that she was carrying around with her a vivid image of the moment she found out. The funny thing with images and memories is that the more vivid the memory, the more vividly we will experience the emotions and feelings that were associated with that memory. Effectively she was reliving that moment all of the time, and to be fair, that’s a pretty good reason to be comfort eating.
Paul then proceeded to do a disassociation with her, by making that image smaller in her mind’s eye and draining the colour out of it. This exercise, which is similar to the method used to cure phobias, helps the mind to remove the emotion from a memory. It may be useful to have memories of sad experiences, however it can be damaging and limiting to carry the associated feelings with them. This process was a very emotional experience for her however afterwards she seemed much more centred and at ease with the memory. A useful tool.
He then moved on to talk about another method for preventing comfort eating, by taking the foodstuff in question and making an association with something that you really hate. This is, in fact, the process that we can unconsciously go through to create phobias (although this is a much less extreme version, after all a phobia of chocolate might make a trip to Tescos rather traumatic). Once in place, you will have an aversion to the foodstuff in question. This is very useful if you have a particular weakness for something that is making you miserable. However, bear in mind that usually NLP is all about giving people choice where before they had none. This takes an “attracted to” compulsion and turns it in to a “repelled by” compulsion. It would be better, would it not, to take or leave chocolate, and enjoy it when you have it. However if that isn’t an option you might benefit from using this technique, safe in the knowledge that anything that NLP can do can be reversed just as easily.
So if your New Year resolution is to ease off the empty carbs, head over to http://www.gm.tv/ for some videos by Dr. McKenna that will help you get in to those lycra running shorts in time for Easter! The other option for you is to see a local NLP practitioner, details of which you can find at http://www.bbnlp.org/. Of course if you are in the Leicester area contact me, which is easy to do now the contact page is finally up!
