[Y72]Your Body Can Talk

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jim Katsoulis, a certified yoga instructor, Master Hypnotist and Master MLP Practioner who's helping others bring the excitement back into their lives.

Kevin: How does someone get started off? Because that's where people are coming from.

Jim: It's almost like you have to learn a new language, to a certain degree, but once you learn it it becomes very simple. What are the words you hear when people talk about losing weight? I really got to lose weight. That's it. I need to do something now. They'll talk about it like someone's got a gun to their head, like they're being forced to do it. Any time you talk about something in a way that you're being forced to do it, you're going to set up some resistance. This is what people always feel. There's this internal resistance they have. Everything was going great, all of a sudden I just ate a pound of cookies, out of nowhere, this rebellious part of me. Well part of it because of the way they talk about losing weight. So with weight loss, we talk about it in such a way that it's a negative experience instead of being the one thing you can do in your life that would probably bring you more happiness than anything else, short of relationship and other people's health, even more than money, because I've worked with plenty of people that are very, very wealthy but if you're not happy with your body and how you look and how you feel you're not going to have the level of health and happiness that you want. So as you begin describing, what is it that you want? People don't eat cookies by focusing all the negative things about it. They think about cookies because they think about the pleasure of it. So when you want to start eating better, when you want to look better, begin talking about the pleasure of it, because it's there. How do you feel? Let me ask you, Kevin? Why do you eat well? Why do you exercise?

Kevin: Because it gives me the energy to help more people.

Jim: And you feel it every day, I'm assuming?

Kevin: Yeah.

Jim: It's congruent in your voice. You can hear it. You're connected into that pleasure, you see. So this is really the beginning, the starting point of it. You have to ask yourself, when you want to make a change in your life and you want to eat better and have a different body, you have to clearly define what is it that you want and then you have to ask yourself why you want it. What are you going to get out of it? Will it be pleasurable? One question I always ask people, this could help some people when they're starting. Imagine a magic genie appeared in front of you and gave you one of two choices. They said listen: if you could wake up tomorrow morning with the exact body that you want, looking exactly the way that you want. Shape, weight, everything you want or you could have the most delicious meal that you have ever had in your life right now. Which would you take? No one's ever taken the meal. Why would they take the body? Because everybody knows that that would give them more pleasure, be more long lasting, it would be a more deep, more deep sense of this is what I want, this is enjoyable. I feel good.

Kevin: And if you have the body you get to have the meal, right?

Jim: That's when it gets really fun! You get to have your cake and eat it too! You get to have your body and eat it too! You eat the cake too! Because when you get things in control and you begin asking the questions, how can I have the body I want and eat the foods that I want? As opposed to in order to have the body I want I can never enjoy food again. That's how some people look at it you know. So as you ask better questions, that's what happens. The healthiest people I know, they don't -- it's not about restriction, it's all about pleasure. A lot of times when we go into it with people eating chocolate cake, when you start to really go into it, it's not the most pleasurable experience because they're beating themselves up the whole time. So when people get their eating under control and their body falls in line, and they start having the body they want, they come back and tell me I enjoy cake 1000 times more than I ever did and I eat less of it. Again, this is the thing. The reality of people -- A lot of time when they start thinking about dieting it doesn't allow these sorts of thoughts. It's an either or an all or nothing. It's realizing that that does not work. It's about figuring out a plan that you can eat for the rest of your life.

Kevin: And this isn't so much about just weight loss it's also about any level of health because it's more of a system than it is a result. Is that correct?

Jim: Oh yeah, yeah absolutely. That's a great point. I'll give you example money wise. A lot of times when people think about money it becomes very, very emotional. I don't have enough money. I don't have this and they start going into a state of mind and body where they're not at their best. They're nervous, they're worried and so they're not thinking great, but if you focus on it's not the money part of it, the money is a result. It's an end result. What happens is what you do for the last two weeks, what you've done for the last five years that brings you to that point. It's the same thing with the weight. A lot of times people will step on scale and all of a sudden they'll feel negative. They judge all their success by the results that they get day in and day out, instead of looking at what they're doing behaviorally. For example, for me what worked, one of the things, was I stopped eating meat. I became vegetarian. For me that was a decision that was not only ethical, that was a part of it, but a part of me said if I stop eating meat I think it's going to be a lot easier for me to maintain my weight. It gets rid of a whole bunch of discussions that I'd have to have. I concentrate on that. And I said to myself, if I make this happen, my weight is going to be easier. I'm not going to have to think about it. So it's a different thing. There's peacefulness to it, because you say this is who I am, this is what I do. The system of thinking is really what creates the changes and that's where the attention needs to be placed.

Kevin: Let's talk about the system. Program Yourself Thin is your program. Let's talk about some of the steps, obviously we don't have time to cover everything, but let's talk about some of the steps and how someone can get from where they are now to where they want to be, in any context.

Jim: My approach ? I felt so lucky being exposed to what I call kind of the science, the philosophy of hypnosis. Because I don't think, being a professional hypnotist I did not see great results for me hypnotizing people and putting changes in them. I would see fantastic short-term results but the long-term results were sketchy at best. Then I came across neural linguistic programming which is a science of the mind that really explains ? I call it a practical psychology. We're taught psychology but it's so theoretical we don't know how to use it. What do you do with the ego and the id, and the super ego, these complexes? How do you work with it? You get kind of trapped in the problems, so neural linguistic program was always based on solutions. There's a story to explain that. When he, the inventor Richard Banler, he wanted to help phobics and so a lot of times the traditional psychological model would be to study phobics. What makes them tick? How do they work? All the rest of it. He went into it and he put an ad in the paper for people who used to be phobic and no longer were. So he studied the solution. How do people change? What were the differences? It turned out it was the way that they perceived things, the way that they thought, the way that they felt. The basic distinction we make in psychology, hypnotic psychology, is there's a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. Now, most of the time people focus on the conscious mind. So when they want to lose weight they say ?Well, I need to lose weight. It would be better. I know I feel crappy when I eat too much.? They know all this stuff. They know what to do, but they don't have their feelings in line and that's the unconscious mind. Unconscious mind operates through association. It's Pavlovian. It's Pavlov's dogs. Pavlov's a scientist who would put food in front of the dog, the dog would salivate and he'd ring a bell. Put the food in front, ring a bell and eventually all he would have to do was ring a bell and the dog would salivate as if the food was there. The dog linked up the bell and the food. Our minds do the same thing. We start to think of certain foods and we get emotional responses from it. People think about chocolate and they start thinking sensual. They think about ice cream they remember all the good times they had when they were a kid and they went out for ice cream. It goes far beyond logic into emotions and feelings. So from very basic simple understanding is that our behaviors are controlled by our feelings. I mean, everyone knows that eating too much ice cream's bad. They know that 24 hours a day. So what happens at the time when they're overeating too much of it? Well they feel like they want to eat a lot of ice cream. They feel like it's pleasurable. This whole approach, Program Yourself Thin, is about going to the unconscious level and begin to influence those feelings we have, so that when you think about ice cream there's an indifference, perhaps. Now, think about this. It's estimated the average American sees 3000 ads a day, maybe 1500 of those are food related. Every single one of those ads is trying to get you all worked up and posit emotions to that food. The biggest problem people have is emotional eating. So why is that? We live in a culture where the answer to all our emotional issues through the advertising becomes these different foods. If you didn't emotional eating, if there was no such thing as emotional eating, then when would you eat?

Kevin: Just whenever you were hungry.

Jim: That's probably naturally how we were built. You would make much clearer decisions.