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Make 2019 The Year You Achieve Your Weight Loss Target by ending yo-yo dieting; erasing the feelings that make you emotionally eat & find a way to eat for nourishment - however pushed for time you are.

Everything you need to turn your weight loss dreams into reality is here #Free Today and Tomorrow (until midnight 27 Dec) only on #Kindle

Both books are based on twenty years of working successfully with 1000s of clients worldwide to transform their eating habits, lose weight and free them from the tyranny of cravings, bingeing and feeling powerless around food. 

 7 Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating

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Resolves emotional eating. You'll find this book a lifesaver as you set your weight loss goals for 2019.

In Australia: https://amzn.to/2ESfvXM

In USA & Worldwide: https://amzn.to/2CBY5wh 

How to Feel Differently About Food

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mybook.to/differtly

Cuts through all of the nutritional confusion so that you can eat for nourishment and transform your relationship with food.

In Australia: https://amzn.to/2Aijl8G

In USA & Worldwide: https://amzn.to/2EPwh9R

Is there a catch? 

If you find the book useful, We would appreciate a review.  Thanks, @SallyBaker & @LizHogon

Making Changes That Last: Simple Ways To Successfully ‘Nudge’ Your New Year’s Resolutions Towards Achievement

By Senior Therapists Sally Baker & Liz Hogon.

If there is an almost guaranteed way to feel like an abject failure then setting a New Year’s Resolution will do it for most of us. There is plenty of research to show that between 40-60% of all resolutions, year upon year, have either been broken or forgotten for good or at least until next year, by halfway through January!

Although many people imbue January 1st with magical properties as the ideal date to change their habits and behaviours. The truth is its just an arbitrary date in the diary with no more power or influence than next Tuesday week or even the next wet Wednesday for that matter.

When you think that four of the most popular life changes people want for themselves are to lose weight; give up smoking; drink less alcohol or achieve a better work-life balance these habits and ways of thinking can seem daunting to change when they represent long-term and entrenched behaviour.

Read more…

How your negative self talk keeps you overweight and stuck

This feature was first published in Fibromyalgia monthly magazine. It explores how living with a chronic disease can affect one’s self-perception and ability to feel personally empowered to make health improvements. Changes can be made and here therapists Sally Baker and Liz Hogon share some of their techniques.

You are already well aware of how challenging it is to live with Fibromyalgia’s inhibiting symptoms of physical pain, cognitive impairment, and erratic levels of energy. You also already know how the unpredictable nature of Fibromyalgia means that even when your symptoms alleviate your ability to live life to the full are hugely inhibited as you are never sure how long a remission will last.

You are also well aware that a lack of mobility, and even taking some prescription medications, including those to counter depression, can make it even more challenging for you to maintain a healthy weight. You also know that extra weight has been scientifically proven to compound Fibromyalgia symptoms, and increase the frequency, and degree of pain, which in turn decreases mobility. So, there you are in the midst of a vicious circle of carrying excess weight leading to additional pain, leading to reduced mobility leading to further weight gain that feels almost impossible to break.

Worse still you can feel it’s your own fault your symptoms are so debilitating when you have so conspicuously failed to lose weight.

Losing weight is a challenge for most people. In addition living with a chronic disease means the typical emotional drivers to overeating such as comfort, and stress eating play a larger role making weight loss seem even more intractable. Therapists Sally Baker, and Liz Hogon specialise in resolving issues around emotional eating so that people who have struggled with weight loss for years can finally successfully lose weight.

Their clients are mostly people who feel particularly over-whelmed with the challenge of weight loss, and they often have other long term health issues to contend with such as depression, IBS, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia. As therapists they understand, and particularly focus on the power of the mind body connection to harness the power of the mind to resolve, and release self-limiting beliefs, and end self-sabotaging behaviour, especially around food.

Living with little or no confidence of how one will physically feel from day to day encourages self-doubt, and frustration. Feeling negative about oneself can becomes its’ own vicious circle of frustration, disappointment and anger, all of which are often directed inward.

When Baker and Hogon work with issues around weight loss with clients living with chronic ill-health one of the first therapeutic approaches they make is to encourage the person to gain an enhanced level of self-awareness to highlight the impact those uncomfortable emotions have on themselves.

In their book 7 Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating they have taken the therapy tools they use in their own individual practices, and made them accessible as easy to learn, and easy to apply self-help tools.

They found one of the most beneficial ways of discovering if a person is prone to negative thoughts about themselves is to explore the kind of things their inner voice says to them. If on reading this your response is, ‘What inner voice – I don’t have one’, then that is your inner voice. Your inner voice runs a continuous internal dialogue commenting on everything you do, and often makes judgments on how well you do it too. Happening as it does just below conscious awareness one’s inner voice goes unchecked, and unchallenged for most of the time.

For many people, especially those living with chronic illness, their inner voice is rarely a source of uplifting encouragement. It is more likely to be an unremitting flow of self-criticism, and negative self-judgements. Taking the time to become aware of how your inner voice speaks to you can accurately demonstrate to you your own level of self-judgement, and self-condemnation. Tuning in, and clearly hearing your inner voice is the crucial first step to silencing the draining, and dispiriting stream of negativity that can hinder moving forward, and making positive changes.

They encourage their clients to spend a little quiet time, just a few moments, every day for about a week to tune-in to their inner voice, and simply listen and note down the negative statements. A therapy tool they use to facilitate this is called Emotional Freedom Technique, (EFT or Tapping). EFT is an energy therapy that has proved highly effective for revealing true feelings, in this case negative, self-limiting beliefs.

Once you have a greater awareness of your own unique brand of negative self-talk you can then apply another of their core therapy tools called Percussive Suggestion Technique (PSTEC) to turn-down, or dispel the emotions attached to the negative beliefs you have about yourself. Turning off negative self-talk is the beginning of a powerful journey which can transform a former inner-critic into your greatest advocate – someone cheering for you instead of undermining you.

Panic attacks... what are they?

Panic attacks can be terrifying. It is estimated that anywhere up to 6 million people in the United States alone experience panic attacks on a regular basis. Most people, however, have just a few panic attacks over their lifetime and the attacks then stop permanently. This is probably because the stressful situation has ended and they have returned to a calm and balanced place in their minds. The people who continue to have attacks are usually those personalities who continue to obsessively brood and ruminate about a past experience, thus keeping themselves in a state of anxiety.   

Sufferers of panic attacks can experience

•        chest pain
•        a feeling of not being able to catch their breath
•        trembling and shaking
•        sweating
•        heart palpitations to the point of feeling as though they’re having a heart attack
•        nausea
•        dizziness
•        total brain freeze
•        jumbling of words or stuttering
•        vision issues
•        cramps in the stomach
•        feelings of detachment or unreality

… and so it goes on. There is often a very real sense that they are going mad.

It’s common to find these people presenting in Accident and Emergency as they really believe they are having a heart attack and are going to die.

The effects of these panic attacks can last from a few minutes (typically around 20 minutes) right through to hours, which is no fun at all. This is especially true for people in a work environment who are trying to maintain a façade of being in control. Not easy if they having trouble stringing a sentence together!

Anna Lente writes in the Mighty about what a panic attack feels like for her:

At first, little things trigger my anxiety more and more. My senses heighten. My mind and body go on full alert. I feel chilled, though my face is flushed. I feel like a deer caught in headlights, overwhelmed by the blinding lights of a situation I’m trapped in.

My body is frozen in place, but ready to flee. My thoughts curdle and scatter in a million directions. I hear an alert sounding in my head. Danger, danger! Escape, escape!

I become hypersensitive to sounds, movements, voices, darkness and light. Everything feels too close and too loud. Words people say jump out at me. Small movements people make feel like assaults against me. When people come close to me I jump back, startled.

Everything begins to fade to black. I am overwhelmed by everything around me, but I feel very alone, lost inside my body.

My chest constricts. I feel a weight pressing against my chest, preventing me from breathing correctly. My heart pounds wildly. My breathing is sharp and shallow. I gasp for air, as if I were drowning.

I feel light-headed and dizzy. Everything around me starts to spin. I feel disconnected from my body for a moment. The world feels painfully loud, bright and dissonant. I feel trapped and overwhelmed by the world, yet separate from it since I feel so different. I see so many colours at once, so many people talking at the same time. My rapid heartbeats and shallow breaths sound very loud to me, as if they echo throughout the room. I am aware of too much at once, and then suddenly only aware of my own head, my own body, my own attempts to survive this crisis.

The world stops behaving normally. It seems to freeze for a moment, and then start again at different speeds, at different volumes. People’s faces seem distorted, movements exaggerated and strange. For a moment, my heart beating seems louder than anything else in the room, and I feel like everyone is looking at me. But then, the world seems extremely loud, and me silent and ignored.

I realize I need to leave in order to survive this attack. I instinctively cover my face and head and go. I leave quickly, trying not to catch anyone’s eye. Outside, I take large, shuddering gasps of air. My body relaxes and I start to feel safe again. I sit somewhere, overwhelmed, as the blood rushes back into my head and the weight lifts off of my chest. I gasp for air again and again. Air never tasted so sweet as in that moment.

Then I find a place I can relax for a while and be alone. It takes time to heal from a panic attack. It usually takes me a few hours. I rest. I practice my breathing exercises and muscle relaxation exercises. Eventually I recover, and am ready to come back to the world again.

Panic attacks are caused by the release of neurotransmitters (can also be called chemical messengers) to the amygdala. The amygdala takes care of emotions such as fear. Once this happens the fight or flight response kicks in and this starts the cascade of symptoms that we recognise as a panic attack.

Attacks can even happen during sleep and this can lead people to believe that the attack has come from out of nowhere. This is actually not true.

It may feel as though the panic is being caused by something external but this is not the case at all. Panic attacks often occur if the body is sensing any danger or the sufferer is being triggered by past memories or experiences to a place or situation. The recall of this past experience (this can even be on an unconscious level) causes the body to release cortisol and adrenaline (the stress hormone) and the body then goes into full panic mode.

Sufferers can be very socially anxious and, if the attacks are not treated, they will go on to avoid many situations as they try and manage their attacks. Life becomes smaller and narrower. Even just the fear of having an attack can be enough to create one, leaving the sufferer feeling very powerless and helpless.

If you would like to address your panic attacks and regain control of your life, call for a free initial consultation. I am available to work on Skype if getting in to my clinic is not an option.