Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Steamy Magazines Make Men Feel as Bad as Women

My friend Tiffany referred this article to me & I thought it was an interesting twist on self esteem. Women are not the only ones that struggle to live up to what we see in the media. Read on...

Jeanna BrynerSenior WriterLiveScience.com jeanna Brynersenior Writerlivescience.com – Fri Nov 7, 12:42 pm ET

Guys who check out the sexy female models in so-called lad magazines such as Maxim have more body-image problems than their pals, a new study finds.
While it is fairly well-known that women feel worse about their bodies after viewing other females in Cosmopolitan or Glamour, guys apparently take the same knock after perusing the lingerie-clad women spread across the pages of Maxim, FHM and Stuff.
The researchers say that by looking at idealized, sexualized women, guys feel less-than because they start thinking they need to measure up on the attractiveness scale to snag such a mate.
"Men make the inference that in order to be sexual and romantic with women of the similar caliber they see in Maxim magazine, they also need to be attractive," said lead researcher Jennifer Aubrey of the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, Columbia.
The jury is still out on whether good-looking people snag others of their same physical caliber, however. In fact some research suggests women go for relatively less-attractive guys.
Nevertheless, Aubrey said lad magazines send the message that guys should be having lots of sex.
"So you have that in your head while you're looking at these magazines. If you want to get as much sex as possible with these types of women, then what's left but the feeling you need to look a certain way in order to do that," Aubrey told LiveScience.
Scourge of sexy women
Aubrey and her colleagues first looked at how guys reacted to magazines such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff, the pages of which are laden with scantily dressed and stylish gals along with articles written from an uber-male perspective about fashion, sex, technology and pop culture.
The researchers had 77 male university students answer questions about body self-consciousness and anxiety about appearance at the beginning of the study and one year later. They found that reading such magazines was related to more body self-consciousness. Statistics ruled out the possibility that guys who have body-image problems specifically sought out lad magazines.
"This was surprising because if you look at the cover of these magazines, they are mainly images of women," Aubrey said. "We wondered why magazines that were dominated by sexual images of women were having an effect on men's feelings about their own bodies."
In another study, Aubrey and her colleagues asked a group of 100 male undergraduate students to view one of these three types of images: layouts from issues of FHM, Maxim and Stuff showing a woman dressed in either lingerie or a bikini, along with a description of their appearances; layouts about male fashion showing well-dressed, fit guys; or magazine layouts that were "appearance-neutral" and so featured topics such as technology and film trivia.
The men who looked at the photo spreads of women reported more body self-consciousness than the other two groups. "Even more surprising was that the male fashion group reported the least amount of body self-consciousness among the three groups," Aubrey said.
Average Joe
To try and figure out why men get such a body-image knock from viewing images of beautiful women, the researchers ran a similar study with 143 male undergraduates. This time, the guys were divided into two groups, one viewing magazine spreads of sexually idealized females and the other viewing the same layouts with an average-looking boyfriend added to the photos next to the sexy woman, along with captions about how the female models are attracted to the average-looking men.
Men who looked at sexualized women reported being less likely to ask a woman out on a date or to interact with her. These men who were less romantically confident also were more self-conscious about their bodies.
Men who saw the average Joe pictures did report less body self-consciousness than men who saw images of just the sexy woman, but the finding wasn't statistically significant.

The research is detailed in the current issue of the journal Human Communication Research

Thursday, November 13, 2008

7 Steps to Ending your Emotional Romance With Food- Sheri Green


Ok here is the second speaker from my workshop! Sorry it has taken me so long to get this up here but the third one is in the works. I am hoping to get these all posted before the end of the month. Wish me luck! This is the handout she gave to everyone so hopefully you will get an idea of what she was talking about.

Sheri Green-
7 Steps to Ending your Romance with Food.

You know I am so excited to be here & what I was really excited about was when I walked in and saw a lot of moms & daughters here, because you will see as I get into my presentation here that really a lot of my inspiration was my daughter & what she felt about her body. So I am so happy that you are here. It’s funny because I present a lot to women and as I ran through it, I ran through it with my daughter & I have implemented some of her tips so that it will be interesting to the girls too. So today I’m going to talk to you about 7 steps to ending your romance with food. When I was 13 we lived kind of out in the country. We moved into a rental home & it was only going to be for about 18 months. And we had this rickety old shed out in the back & you know we were excited because it was a new home, well new to us anyway. And so we ran out there & we looked inside & there was a pig inside. We learned that it was the owner’s pig that had left it there & had called his relative to come & pick up the pig. And so this relative came & picked up the pig. Now driving along I noticed there is a lot of farm land out here. Does anyone own a pig? Have you ever had an experience with a pig? She knows how cooperative pigs can be. So this relative of the owner came to get the pig & take care of it while the owners were away for 18 months. So he got out there opened the door & no pig. So dad noticed he was kind of struggling to get this pig out of the shed so he handed him a broom, so he sat there with the broom pushing on the pig & finally it was my dad & this man pushing on this pig trying to get him out of the shed & just about that time the neighbor from across the field came over and he started helping too. So there was three people pushing on this pig but it wasn’t going to go anywhere. But it was a noble battle though. Finally after a while they have mud all over, they smell like barn yard & my dad said you know we are only going to be here for 18 months it might be a really good thing for the kids to have a pig around so they will learn some responsibility. They can take out the feed and make sure the pig is taken care of. And so the pig actually stayed there & we went on taking care of that pig. Well flash forward to today, I ‘m sitting on the couch and I’m staring down on my coffee table at a bag of chips. Its totally empty & I’m looking around the room going, gosh where are all those people that helped me eat all these chips. I know they were here because I couldn’t have eaten them all myself. And then I glanced down on my chest & I have little flex of chips all over my chest and I start feeling bad for these little chiplets because their only purpose in life is to be eaten, I felt bad so I lick my finger and I start making sure I get every last chip. And then all of a sudden a big whack from the stick of reality hit me on the head, I had just eaten a whole bag of chips & downed a 300 calorie soda and I didn’t even know it. I was oblivious. I was sitting there watching TV just eating and drinking. How can I eat that much and not even realize I’m doing it. I’m overweight, tired all the time. I don’t want to feel that way or be that way and then it dawns on me that I have this big stubborn pig inside of me and I it want to leave. AND I DON’T KNOW HOW TO GET IT TO LEAVE. I’VE TRIED ALL SORTS OF BACK UP. Diet books, one time I think I had four different memberships, hired a trainer named Sven, I didn’t tell my husband about him and one time I even asked my brother on his trip to Brazil if he would bring me back a tapeworm. Pretty desperate. So I feel like there is this pig inside of me and it won’t move. It’s not gonna go anywhere. So what do I do about it? Well I’ve actually learned a lot about what to do with it & I’ve learned that this pig is moveable and that we can deal with this pig. I’m going to share with you 7 steps of what you can do about it. The first one is to Love your Body & I know you have an interest in this or you wouldn’t be here. But that is really easier said than done. I know this from personal experience. I know this through the experience of my friends, that loving your body is hard. Maybe not for some, some of you I think you should totally be loving your bodies, actually all of you should be. So step one, love your body. I want to share with you a little bit of my own personal journey on how I’ve learned to do this. This is me about 2 ½ to 3 years ago. And I never wanted my picture taken; I think you can tell by the look on my face how excited I was that someone is taking a picture of me. But I chose these two pictures because this is a time in my life when I hated, hated, hated my body, I loathed it. I didn’t even want to look in the mirror because I could not stand what I saw in the mirror. I remember at this time thinking, you know if I was thinner I would have that promotion at work, if I was thinner, maybe my husband would pay more attention to me, if I was thinner I might have got a better deal on that car I just bought yesterday. So I was blaming everything on the fact that I didn’t like my body. So this was about the time that my daughter was 13. She is 17 now, and she was just getting hips. Very beautiful girl, but she had friends who were still in their 13 year old bodies; very narrow, very small frames. And school was beginning to start so I took her school clothes shopping and we started trying on pants and we went to the girls section and we were up to the biggest size of the girls section and she couldn’t get these pants to do up because she had started getting hips so I suggested well you know lets go look in the junior misses or get a small pair of the adults & she just looked at me & tears started streaming down her face and she ran out to the car and I thought you know the teenage thing a little emotional but I ran out after her. I was a little disgusted because we tried things on & I had to drop them off & go get my daughter. So I sat out there in the car and she just cried and cried and said mom I hate my body, I hate my hips, why can’t I look like my friends? It’s hard for me to even think about that right now without getting emotional. And I proceeded to tell her I said, “Sydney, your body is a gift, your body is precious, you’re beautiful.” I wanted to tell her so much more about that but I had a really profound moment; I realized I don’t feel that way about my body, I don’t feel like this is a gift. How can I tell daughter to feel that way when I don’t even feel that way? It’s like standing there with a cigarette in your mouth telling them hey honey don’t smoke it’s bad for you. I mean you can’t do that with your kids. And so it was just a very rude awakening for me & so I realized that I definitely needed to change that situation. I chose a couple of pictures. This is me in the past year. The focus here isn’t necessarily on body, if you can see it, this is more the look on my face that I have now. This is the look on the face of somebody who has learned to be grateful for what she has and has learned to take care of it & honor that. I’ve since started teaching some classes, I’ve learned a lot in this whole transformation that I went through & I started teaching some classes to other women. And the first thing I said about loving your body is that you’ve got to be grateful for it, you’ve got to thank your creator everyday for giving you this gift. I remember saying that in one of my classes & I have one of my good friends who she’s just well at the time she was almost 300 pounds. So she was a pretty large person and she raised her hand and said Sherri I can’t do that. I cannot be grateful for this. She said, Do you know how much it hurts me to get out of bed in the morning, and even just walk to the car? It hurts me to move, I can’t be grateful for that, & I thought, uh what do I say to that? But luckily I didn’t have to say anything. She had a sister that she had brought to the class with her that had a son when he was 17 was in a really bad car accident and ended up losing the use of his arms and legs, paralyzed who is an absolute joy to be around. He just spreads cheer and happiness even now to anyone who meets him & her sister turned to her & said do you know what? Kyle would give anything to feel his legs, even if it were pain he would love to feel his legs again. So I didn’t have to say anything, I think at that moment she also accepted the fact that we’ve got to be grateful. That’s where it starts. So loving your body is the most important & I did put that in step one because if you can’t get there, you might try dieting you might try exercising, because this isn’t just about weight loss, this is about the way you feel about yourself. Because if you can’t get there, you will never make lasting change. So you need to do what it takes to get there & I am going to give you some tools that will help you do that.
Step 2 is getting in touch with your body. I taught a college class, they were technical classes so I always had a lot of men in my classes. Well I remember this one particular class I had a girl, her name was Amanda, she was a great student, she never missed a day and always turned her work in on time. She was like clockwork, wonderful girl. Well it started getting toward the end of the semester & she was getting an A in the class. Well one day she didn’t show up. And I thought oh I wonder, this must be serious because she never misses, so I didn’t worry too much that day I just noticed it. Then the second day I thought wow something must be really up because she never misses, this is strange. So by the third absence in a row I got very concerned about her. So I went and looked up her phone number and I gave her a call at home & I was shocked at what I heard. She said Sheri, a few nights ago I was sitting at home & I started getting really bad cramps, just this severe abdominal pain & it kept getting worse & worse so I drove myself to the hospital. Well three hours later, she gave birth to a baby boy. She didn’t even know she was pregnant & I know this is an extreme example but I was dumbfounded, I thought how could you give birth & not know that you were pregnant, I had heard of this happening before but it was interesting to have it happening to someone you knew. Well I shared this story in one of my other classes too & one of my other students raised her hand & she said, I know how she can do that. I was thinking oh really. You know those of us that have had kids know how obvious it is, the changes in our bodies when we are pregnant. And she said I know exactly how that is. Elaine is about, probably about 63 years old also very large and she said you know I spend a good hour, hour and a half every morning on my hair and my face & then I just throw something on my body and ignore from my neck down. Because it is too painful for her to acknowledge what’s from her neck down & sadly Elaine has had some health problems for that reason. But we have done some things to help Elaine get in touch with her body and help her understand and listen to it. I’ll share one of those with you but let’s move on to the next slide. I want to talk first , I put this slide up for my daughter, I did this presentation for my daughter and she said mom you’re going to give someone an eating disorder, you’ve got to make it clear that it is ok to eat. I thought, huh. Because what I have struggled with mostly is overeating, but I know there’s maybe even some in this room & a lot of women at sometimes struggle with under eating, which a lot of times is based on the same emotional responses. So I need to make this very clear, “It’s ok to eat and your body needs food.” You’ve got to feed your body. So with that being said I’d like to cover the differences between physical hunger & emotional hunger. Physical hunger comes on slowly & it builds gradually. Usually physical hunger will come a couple of hours after your previous meal while emotional hunger will usually come on suddenly, unless you’re pregnant, that might be physical. Physical hunger is satisfied by a variety of foods while emotional hunger is really a craving for a specific food. Usually there is just something you are craving; you just have to have it. Physical hunger can wait & be put off for a certain amount of time. You don’t want to put it off too long, but if necessary can be put off while emotional hunger feels very urgent, like you’ve got to have it now. Has anyone ever felt any of these? Yeah, I have. Physical hunger is not triggered by emotion, but by physical needs. If your stomach is going to start growling you’re gonna start feeding it. While emotional hunger is often paired with an upsetting emotion. With physical hunger you are generally aware of what you are eating. Emotional hunger is a lot of time unconscious eating & don’t really eat when you are unconscious you could choke. And this is my bag of chips story, when all of a sudden you’ve eaten a whole bag of chips & you don’t even know it. With physical hunger, you are aware of being full and satisfied usually after about 20 minutes & you don’t need to be stuffed. Emotional hunger keeps wanting more of the tastes & textures of the food even if you feel full. Physical hunger strikes below the neck & emotional hunger is above the neck. I want to kind of demonstrate what I mean by that & this is tool number one for emotional eating. First of all I want to go back to the story of Elaine. She is a diabetic, lots of different health problems. She had type 2 diabetes and she had had the habit of ignoring her body & continuing to eat things. But we went through this exercise with her & it really helped her to open her eyes & get back in touch. So if you’ll just be patient with me, if you’ll just close your eyes, I’d just like to kind of help us all get back in touch with what’s going on in our body and this can help with both under eating & over eating. So first of all I want you to close your eyes, I want you to focus right now on your body, take a few deep breaths. And pay attention to what your lungs are doing for you. How much air are you taking in? How does it feel to have full lungs? What are they doing for you? Think about your lungs, think about your heart. Is your heart beating fast or slow? Mine is beating very fast right now. Just feel your heartbeat, get back in touch with that. OK, now let’s go to your stomach and I want you to think about your stomach. Is it full? Is it empty? How does it feel right now? Could it use a little food? OK, think about your stomach right now & imagine that if you were to eat a candy bar how would your stomach feel after that. How would it feel after eating that candy bar? OK then, now in contrast, let’s say an apple. How would your stomach feel about taking in an apple? OK, so kind of get in touch with that. Now open your eyes. Did you kind of notice things that maybe you don’t normally notice? How were your stomachs; were they full, empty needing a little bit of food? So I wanted to kind of point out the difference between being hungry from here up versus from here down. My friend Elaine, what she started doing, she said the first time she used this, she went to the drive up to get a strawberry milkshake; it’s her favorite thing. And she started drinking it, this was after one of my classes, she started drinking it because she was really excited about having it so she took a couple of sips & she paused for a moment and put it down & she started paying attention to what her stomach was saying. Now being diabetic, when you’re eating a lot of extra sugar not only does your stomach get upset but your body gets a little upset because your blood sugar is too high. So she started paying attention to that. She said you know what Sheri, I felt sick to my stomach. My stomach felt sick, my stomach did not want that shake. So instead she got something that her stomach did feel good about having. So that is tool number 1 for you today. That is just being able to pay attention. So if you do feel like…you know I don’t know about you but I’ve gotten pretty good about knowing what I am eating because I need to physically & when I just want to for different emotional reasons. But if you stop and pause for just a moment and say how will my stomach feel about this and on the other side of that, if you are feeling hungry and are ignoring that. I had another lady in class who raised her hand and said, you know what; this emotional eating is not for me. When I’m upset, I don’t eat & I said why is that. She said when things start to get out of control that is one thing that I can control. I am in charge of my body. Now that is not healthy either, so my point here is you need to be in touch with your body & listen to it. And as soon as you kind of teach yourself & train yourself, you can overcome that. So step three is pay attention to your behavior. So we want to really take a look at what we are doing when we are eating and how we are eating. So here are some specific things. I got to thinking about it & I thought ok I am probably the poster child for emotional eating. I’ve done every single one of these types of emotional eating and I started kind of thinking & digging & doing some reading about what this might mean. So when I crave a specific thing. The way I got this is I was thinking about a month ago, I was home on a Saturday everybody wanted me to do all of these things for them & my husband came up to me & said so what is your plan today. And I said, my plan is not to have a plan. Nobody is telling me what to do today. You know there were so many demands on our time that day I didn’t want anybody to tell me what to do. So I decided I wanted a lemon cookie. Not just any lemon cookie, it had to be from the Smart Cookie Store. So that’s what I did and then as I started looking through that and picking it apart, I felt like there was no control in my life & the one thing I felt like I could control is a nice treat for me, a nice flavor for me & I was feeling deprived in some other areas so I wanted that one thing that could satisfy it. So then there is the eating whatever is in sight. A lot of times this is maybe that you are avoiding something or distracting yourself. It is a fact that when you eat a lot of carbohydrates that your body produces more serotonin which makes you happy so a lot of times your body is reaching out for that when really there’s other things that need to be addressed. And so avoiding something, distracting yourself. When you can’t get enough & continue to eat when you are physically full, this goes back to being out of touch with your body & the physical messages that its sending. And that visualization that we just did will help with that. When you can’t pass up food that you like when you see it even when you are full, a lot of times, now these are just samples there might be other reasons you do some of this, but there’s not enough. It’s interesting I read in a book, they talked about a study where they gave people three snacks and then they observed the order of the snacks they ate & then they had the person tell them which was their favorite. And it was interesting because they learned that half of the people who had participated in the study ate their favorite thing first while the other half ate their favorite thing last. And they thought now that is very interesting, why would that be, nobody ate it in the middle it was either first or last. So before I give that away tell me who eats their favorite food first, yea me too. Who eats their favorite food last? Wow there’s a lot of you. So what they ended up attaching this too was interestingly enough large families versus smaller families. So I don’t know if that was statistically true here. But they found that people with three or less people in their family ended up eating, they knew the food was going to be there so they would save it & eat it last. But the larger families, & I know because I came from a family of 8 kids & I had five brothers & I if I didn’t get to that food fast I wasn’t getting any so I learned to get to that food quickly. So I don’t know if that’s how that worked out here but it was very interesting to me & I was questioning myself, why is it that when I’m not hungry but at work when there are some cakes sitting on the table or something that I want, why can I not just pass it up & move on. It kind of goes back to there not being enough. And then there’s the even though you are full you can’t throw away good food that is on your plate. Were a lot of you raised with you clean up your plate, if you don’t eat that people are going to be starving in China. That is a big weight to be put on a child! “If I don’t eat this people are going to starve!” (Question from audience)“How do you deal with that because my husband’s family was worse with that than mine was? And so I’m seeing my husband put that on my kids and because I’ve been through Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers when they talk about the behavioral trends and I’m like I don’t want my kids to think they have to belong to the clean plate club but his argument is they need to at least try it so we are having a battle of wills of what is most appropriate for the kids.” That’s very interesting & there’s a lot of ways you can do that. One thing you can do is let them choose their own amounts. It’s interesting there was another study talked about in this book where they gave three year olds big plates of food & they would only eat until they were full & then they left things off their plate by the time the child was five years old they ate exactly what they were given. And so a lot of times, if you want them to try something say you need to try some beans take some & then maybe go on to the next thing but let them choose their own portions as well. But honestly I think this is a dangerous thing to do to kids, unless you are worried about their nutrition if you are worried about their nutrition, if they are not gaining weight there’s some problems of course you don’t want to take it to the extreme and just let them eat their candy or whatever but that’s kind of a dangerous thing to do & a lot of people that still do this they sometimes are battling guilt, if I don’t eat this people in china are going to starve & always trying to do the right thing. That’s just kind of one area & there is a balance with everything, I had that battle with my own mother in law when my daughter was little she would sit there & make her eat and drink everything & I had to have a talk with her, I said I don’t agree with that, put healthy things on her plate and she’ll eat but I’m not prone to force feeding people. There was another question… “I totally agree with that, I have struggled with that myself because I grew up with the same thing so with my children I have a very large family and I kind of changed it so that when I put the spread out I put it all out on the bar and then everybody makes their plate according to how hungry they are but they are required to take something of everything I’ve made and they never have to finish their plate. And then if they want more they go back to the bar. So kind of taking it off the table also kept us from overeating; as you continue to visit sometimes we keep eating so keeping it at the bar where if you really are still hungry you go back for more kind of kept us from doing it without thinking about it.” Excellent, that is a very good suggestion. The next four steps actually are tied into…It was really important to me today to send you home with a tool or something that you could use. So I am going to walk you through one way of doing it right now. So essentially, the way I see it or the way I visualized it is right next to that inner pig there are also a bunch of little bombs. And each one is some kind of emotion. It might be feeling out of control, it might be frustration, it might be helpless. There’s all sorts of little bombs sitting inside of me & at one point one of those bombs gets lit & that’s when I go off on my emotional eating. And the very first step is to identify the charge. Let’s see, what’s setting us off, what’s lighting up that bomb inside of me. And this is the I part, If I win I want it to be easy to remember so the I is identifying the charge. Some possible emotion charges, the first thing that tends to set us off are the people around us. There’s something very important about this though. In this process in this tool that I am going to give you is it’s not a blame game. What this is is us taking ownership to our reaction to people and situations. So this is us taking ownership. Nobody can make us feel a certain way; that’s up to us. And so, but it is important to identify when somebody is setting us off so that we can change that within ourselves. Then there are situations. Sometimes I find myself financially stressed, maybe overburdened at work, maybe feeling overwhelmed with all of the responsibility that I have. And this is one of these little triggers that might set off one of these bombs. When I first started teaching this I just put the first two and then I had this lady that said nope doesn’t apply to me, I don’t eat when I am stressed nope I don’t, I said well do you overeat & you know it was obvious she was a little overweight & I said so do you feel like you overeat & she said yes, & I said well when do you? She said, I eat to reward myself I eat when I go out with friends, I eat… so I though it kind of deserved its own category, so celebrations socializing & reward. I kind of thought a lot about this, can you think about when you had family gatherings, what did you do? You ate. When you did something good in school what did you get, a nice little treat. We celebrate with food and there is nothing wrong with that. When it becomes wrong or bad for you I should say it’s because we are doing it too much or we are choosing the wrong kinds of foods to celebrate with. But the other thing I was thinking about I was thinking of all the fun things that I ate when I was younger. My mom used to always make a big family dinner each Sunday and I thought was it really the food that I enjoyed & the truth was it wasn’t. It was all of us sitting around the table talking joking laughing. So that food represented closeness, it represented family, belonging. So there were a lot of things that I associated with food & when I don’t get that in my life sometimes I go to food to get that. So that’s a really important one. And then boredom just didn’t seem to fit anywhere, does anyone eat when they are bored? It’s ok to come out cause you know what, I’ll lay it all out here. So I definitely eat when I am bored. And I kind of got thinking about that because I’m not really stressed, I’m kind of bored & I got thinking about that, do I really never have anything to do? I thought about that I thought, no I have plenty to do & I shouldn’t be bored. So I narrowed it down to I’m avoiding something. The problem is I don’t want to be doing what I really need to be doing so I am avoiding it. So a lot of times attaching entertainment to food, it’s something to do. So I would like you to look at the I portion on your papers, I would like you to think of a time in the near past that you might have chosen to eat unhealthy for emotional reasons & I say unhealthy this could mean you chose to starve yourself or you chose to overeat or you chose to eat bad food. So I want you to pick one of these four, again we are not blaming; we are taking ownership of our response. So the I is identify, the w is a when statement, so I want you to think about that time when you made an unhealthy eating decision, and I just wrote a few things down in each category, if it’s a person you might say when my children take me for granted, if it is a situation, when I am financially stressed, when I overeat while celebrating with friends, when I avoid responsibility. Now I gave you a cheat sheet on the back so if you turn it over, you’ll see some categories. So here are some people if you have identified a person it’s good to be specific about who the person is because awareness is the first step. You can say when this person criticizes me, misunderstands me, accuses me, doesn’t trust me, competes with me and when I put this down it wasn’t someone that I hated it was someone I was very close to that I loved and admired. And that person was not intentionally doing anything to trigger anything within me but it just did. I felt competitive with this person. I don’t know why, they weren’t necessarily being competitive with me or maybe they were but that just sent a trigger off with me. So I would like you to write specifically when my children, or when my husband’s name is Shane, when Shane takes me for granted, when my children take me for granted. And if you have chosen a situation when I’m overloaded at home, when I’m not meeting deadlines, when I think someone is disappointed with me, when my house is dirty. All sorts of things and only choose one. So go ahead and write a when statement. Then next thing, so we’ve done I identify, when, and now we are doing an I statement. This is the switch from where you are saying this is happening to me, this person is doing this. This is when you take ownership of it. You need to do an I feel, I want, statement. Here are a few examples, when my children take me for granted I feel unvalued, when I am financially stressed I feel helpless, when I am avoiding responsibility I feel guilty. I want this to be a tool that you can whip out when you are thinking I want to eat this box of chocolate. Go ahead and go to the next step. This is the new me statement this is when we are discharging the bomb. We’ve identified the person situation whatever it is that is making us want to eat we’ve identified the emotion or the belief about our self that’s underneath it. So now what we need to do is get rid of that belief and replace it with something new. My husband is kind of a neat freak & he cleans out the garage, and for some reason he always cleans out all the shelves. So I go out there and all the shelves are cleared so I go out there two weeks later and there is a bunch of junk on the shelves. This is the switch right here. This is how you are discharging so rather than feeling helpless, feeling guilty , feeling all of the things you might have identified, we are going to let go of that & replace it with something more positive and actually more truthful. Because who really believes that they’re powerless or helpless. So one way to do that is this new me statement & there are some rules here and this is actually based on affirmations. Has anybody ever worked or done affirmations before? So there are a couple of rules on these, one it has to be in the present. It can’t be I will take charge of my finances. It has to be I am taking charge of my finances. It has to be something positive of course because we are clearing off the negative off the shelf & replacing that with something good and positive. It has to be meaningful to you. It really has to be something that resonates with you and is meaningful to you & you have to read it every day. So basically once you have gone through this process you take your statement & write it down & you put it on your mirror and you read it every day. Now I’m a very logical person, I have a masters degree in computer science if you can believe that. So when somebody first introduced this to me I thought, yeah right that’s gonna work, reading a couple of words. But I tried it & it makes sense to me now, basically what you are doing is you are reprogramming your thought process. And you’re taking away that charge that is setting off that bomb inside of you that makes you want to solve whatever it is that is bothering you by eating. So it has to be meaningful to you and you have to read it every day. On the back of your sheet there are examples of new me statements, these are some that you can look through & use if you like, but the things that will really go better for you are if you choose something that is very meaningful and if you choose something that if you feel like ok instead of feeling hopeless I am going to feel adequate capable and equal to any challenge. So you write that on your card & you read that everyday & you reprogram yourself & eventually these little bombs are not going to go off. So this is the tool that I’d like to send you home with.
Some of you might be asking, I’m sure you have been sitting here on the edge of your seat wondering what happened to the little pig we had when I was thirteen. It was very interesting we just learned so much from this pig, it actually got out once and my sister and I went out there with brooms and shovels & we were whacking on this pig fighting this pig trying to get it to go back into the shed just like the other people were fighting to get it out of the shed and into the truck and my parents weren’t there. I hope there aren’t any animal activists in here but you can hit a pig really hard. So we just fought with this pig & we went back into the house to try to get a hold of my mom & dad & I don’t know what we were so worried about. It was pretty slow & it really wasn’t running away or anything it was just in the backyard but that was kind of an emergency situation, so we tried to get a hold of our mom & dad and they weren’t there so we kind of stewed and thought what are we going to do with that pig and we kind of left it alone for a while & we walked back out there & because we had left the shed open the pig had walked back in on its own. And the thing that I learned about that is, it didn’t help to fight the pig, the more we fought it the more it resisted. And this is exactly how our bodies are, the more you fight with your body the more you are I am going to not eat anything this stupid it doesn’t deserve food or the more I’m working out going I’m going to get this fat off if it is the last thing I do. That’s fighting your body, that is fighting and working against it & you will get resistance. It isn’t going to be until you love your body and you are thankful for it. That is the first step is just being thankful for it. In my prayers every night I thank Heavenly Father for giving me what he has given me; it is not perfect, I am never going to be a 5’9” model but I am still thankful that I can do the things that I can do with my body & I always will be and that is the message I want to leave with you and I hope that some of this has made sense & that you can use some of these tools and help make sure your eating is for physical needs and is in a healthy way.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Work in progress!

I just wanted to update everyone on the speeches from the workshop. I appologize that it is taking me soooo long to get these up here but I have been working on it just very slowly. I have bad eyes so I have to work a little at a time & each of the speakers spoke for about 40 minutes. It is a longer process than I thought & in the future I will have a better way of getting this out to you. I am working on the second one right now, like I said, very slow process! So I am very sorry that I am taking forever on this & I will get these posted as soon as I possibly can. Thank you for your patience!