Inside me there’s a size 10 woman trying to get out.. but I usually shut the skinny bitch up with chocolate!

Yup.  That’s been one of my favourite catch phrases for years.  I’ve always laughed a bit at my weight but like nearly everyone who laughs at their faults, I was laughing before people could laugh at me.  Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not paranoid about my weight.  I’ve been a bigger built girl all my life and I’ve come to accept it as normal.  In fact, it was a relief when I started to look more well balanced by getting hips and a slightly bigger waist.

When I was in my early teens, I grew boobs but nothing much else grew for a while so I was completely out of proportion and got way too much interest as a result.  It’s amazing  how total strangers (men) thought they had a right not just to mention the size of my breasts but to actually touch and grab them.  I had it happen to me numerous times at a very young age, so filling out made them look less obvious.

That of course wasn’t the only reason I put on weight.  It’s taken a lot of years to get to the size I am now.  I tell myself I’m this size because I love food but in actual fact, I’m this size because I’m an emotional eater.  I mistake all sorts of feelings inside for hunger.  I’m one of those people that can’t tell you where pain is, it’s just there and I can’t pinpoint it.  When I go to the Drs with a pain and they say, where does it hurt? Is it sharp or dull? Does it go anywhere else?  I can’t tell them.  All I know is that it hurts.  I can’t tell you exactly where it is, how it really feels or if it’s going anywhere else.  It just hurts.  Isn’t that enough?

Of course, now, what I’ve realised is that I’m the same with hunger.  I can’t tell you the extremes of hunger or even  if the pain I’m feeling inside really is any form of hunger.  I just know that eating will ease the pain, if only for a few minutes.  I carry a lot of internal, emotional pain that I’ve tried to deny and don’t let anyone ever tell you that emotional pain isn’t a physical feeling, because it certainly is.   Don’t get me wrong, I do love food, but not enough to eat what I do.  I actually started life as an extemely skinny kid.  I didnt’ like food at all and would gladly have lived just on cornflakes if I’d been allowed to.

I hated certain textures of food and the only thing I ate when I was little was cornflakes, bread, potatoes, meat and beans if I had to.  I would eat raw carrots but hated cooked ones.  If I had to eat peas I would literally vomit. (I still hate peas by the way) As I got older, peer pressure means you actually do try more stuff.  My friends had a wide range of foods they ate so I had to try stuff just to fit in.  I still have a huge list of foods I don’t eat but I’m certainly not as fussy as I once was.

So food has always been an issue with me.  I either hated it or loved it. I’ve never been a dieter as I’ve never believed they are worthwhile, I still don’t.  But I have realised for ages that I needed to lose some weight.  Now that I’m over 50, I’m realising that if I want to live a long and happy life, I need to address the situation.  What to do?  I’ve been procrastinating for too long.

In a previous blog, The taming of the grey dog or the 50 cents that changed my life, you’ll know that I am a follower of Paul McKenna, the hypnotherapy guru (my description of him, not his).  His book and cd, Change Your Life in 7 Days was an absolute Godsend to me.  After discovering this book and following the regime for about a month, I woke up one morning to realise I was feeling happy.  I had no reason to feel happy but I did.  Nothing had changed in my life.  I was still broke.  I was still lonely.  I was still unemployed.  I was still unsuccessful.  Yet I was happy.  It was an inner happiness I had never known before in my whole life.  That’s what hypnosis can do.. It speaks to your unconscious mind and bypasses our conscious thought patterns.  Eventually, the new improved unconscious thought patterns becomes our conscious thought.  That’s probably not how a hypnotherapist would describe it, but it’s how I think of it.

So anyway, after Christmas, I was talking to my son, who is also a convert to Paul McKenna’s work, when he told me he had brought out a new book and cd.  I had tried his “I can make you thin” book but to be honest, I wasn’t in the frame of mind to follow it and as a result I sabotaged myself and screwed it up but it did  actually help when I was following it, albeit briefly.  His new book is something I’ve been interested in for a while.  Hypnotic Gastric Banding.

This isn’t some “instant cure”.  There is work involved in it.  A lot of hypnotherapists offer this service and it is something that I have wanted to try but just haven’t been in a financial position to do so.  So I was excited to find out that Paul McKenna had published a book, cd and dvd package on this very subject.  I ordered it immediately and today, after another little bit of procrastination, started reading it.

BINGO!!!  It makes sense.  I’ve always been one of those people that cannot do something until I understand why it works.  Don’t give me a task and say, just do this, because I won’t remember what I had to do, but if you give me a task, explain WHY I have to do this, I’ll not only remember to do it, but I’ll be able to find a work around if something doesn’t work properly.  So to start to read about how our body deals with food and the hormones released and what we use the food for (yes I know we have basics but I’ve never known enough) something clicked in my head.

I haven’t started the hypnosis yet. It’s a complicated process to some degree.  First you read the book.  There are exercises throughout the book to do (visualisation techniques etc) which is all part of the pre operative stage.  Then the day I choose to do the actual gastric banding hypnosis, I need to rest for the day.  After that there is maintenance including readjusting the hypnotic band every month.  The maintenance goes on until I’ve managed to maintain my healthy weight for 6 months or when needed after that.

 

I’m going to share the journey as I go along.  Not because I want to bore you all stupid, and I truly hope I won’t do that.  I just think that by writing about it as I go, it may keep me focussed on the goals I am achieving.   This isn’t just a physical journey of course, but very much an emotional one.  I’m always trying to make sense of my life and I guess this is just another step along the way.  You won’t hear me talking about calories or how many miles I’ve jogged this week.  I’m much more focussed on how the unconscious mind is more powerful than the conscious mind than I am in calorie counting.  I’m more interested in how we can open our minds up to use more of our brain than I am in working out how many miles I have to walk to burn off 10 almonds.

I have just ordered a set of bathroom scales as weight ISN’T just a number though I’ve always pretended that it is.  Of course, how I feel and how my health is affected is the most important issue here but weight is a part of that, regardless of what I’ve been telling myself for years.  I’m not looking to become Twiggy, just to be healthy again.  I have many more mountains I want to climb and climbing them becomes harder with so much of me to drag up the hill.  I’m not sharing my starting weight here for a plethora of reasons.  The main two being, I don’t have a set of scales till they are delivered so I don’t know what my weight actually is and the fact that I don’t see that it matters what I weigh now.. What matters is how much weight is being lost along the way and how much better, both physically and emotionally I am feeling.

If, as I believe, this is the answer to the weight problem I’ve carried for years, I want to shout it out to the world and share it with people like me who have battled for years, for whatever reason.  Hypnosis is being used more and more in mainstream medicine for all sorts of reasons and it has an amazing success rate.  I know the power of it in my own life and I’m excited about actually starting this.  If it doesn’t work, you’ll find out about that too.. and hopefully, I can shed some light on the reasons why, but I hope that’s not the case.

I’ll finish reading the book, do all the preparatory work, then start the process.  I know it’s not going to be an overnight difference.  It took me many years to get this size and will take me a long time to take it back off again, but as long as I’m going in the right direction, it can only be an improvement.

Happy Banding… Livvy 🙂