Amazing diet to add 5 pounds solid flesh in 1 week!

Prof David Haslam, chair of the National Obesity Forum, is quoted as saying: ‘If someone close to you has a large waistline then, as long as you do it sensitively, discussing it with them now could help them avoid critical health risks later down the line and could even save their life.’

Dr Jean Pierre Despres, scientific director of the International Chair on Cardiometabolic Risk, agreed: ‘Start by encouraging someone close to you to make simple lifestyle changes such as becoming more active, making small alterations to their eating habits and replacing sugary drinks with water.’

The plate that nags you to diet.

Does exhortation to lose weight ever work? Whether it’s coming from another person or from inside our own head, are we really likely to comply, on a permanent basis? Now there’s even a Talking Plate that nags you to eat slowly! The outcome of most diets is to gain yet more weight, once the diet has ended. And the truth is, they always do end!

However, the good Prof Haslam did put in the proviso about discussing this issue ‘sensitively’ so on that ground alone it feels OK to me to give him a grain of publicity.

My own approach when working with people who consider their weight or fat to be a concern, is to emphasise learning trust in the self, using intuition about what is ‘good’ behaviour around food, listening to the body’s internal signals, discarding shame and replacing it with self-love – all of which, I’m sorry to say, takes time.

Of course, in actual fact it saves time: it’s the diets that waste time! If you drop quick fixes and focus on finding a sustainable relationship with food and your body, you are likely to lose weight over a period of time and keep it off without worrying. This entails deep re-training of ourselves to differentiate between ‘comfort’ eating and ‘hunger’ eating. It also means tackling the guilt and shame head on, by ending the habits of eating in secret, or when distracted such as when driving in the car. It’s a process, I say again, that demands time and effort.

The 12-step programme of Overeaters Anonymous is worth a mention here as it suits many people. Again, it has a slow, steady approach – not shouting at people but supporting them! I’m not sure if the medical profession in its institutional form, say in the shape of the National Obesity Forum, is capable yet of finding the right tone in which to address all the people who feel distressed about their eating, and for whom food is not the unalloyed pleasure it should be. But then, do organisations composed of doctors know how to talk about pleasure?

One such method which I am now exploring is called Lifespan Integration. It is a gentle method which works on a deep neural level to change our self-attacking scripts, and people report that it has enabled them quite quickly to feel…

better about life, become more self-accepting and enjoy their intimate relationships.

Lifespan Integration is said to be – and this is why I am actively looking into its use – an extremely effective tool to support integration and self-control, two of the key psychological goals in most psychotherapy.

The method relies on the natural ability of the body-mind to heal itself. The therapist guides the client to imaginatively re-visit a past memory which is connected to the current problem, and then to bring into the past whatever is needed to ‘resolve’ the memory. Then the therapist leads the client through time to the present using a timeline of visual images of scenes from the client’s life. The effect is somewhat like watching a movie of one’s life.

The ‘movie’ is one with a set of hopeful messages implicitly attached. We have survived. We had the strength and resourcefulness to survive. Yes that was our history, and it is not the present. Our history need no longer affect us. The strategies we developed to protect ourselves back then – we can now recognize we’re free to let them go.

Watch this space!

There are several versions of this poem, including one that ends “I am in the flowers that bloom, I am in a quiet room, I am in the birds that sing, I am in each lovely thing – Do not stand at my grave bereft, I am not there, I have not left.”. Mary Frye wrote it in Baltimore in 1932. She had never written any poetry but was touched by the plight of a young German Jewish woman, Margaret Schwarzkopf, who was staying with her and her husband. Margaret had been concerned about her mother, who was ill in Germany, but had been warned not to return home because of increasing anti-semitic unrest. When her mother died, the heartbroken young woman told Mary that she never had the chance to “stand by my mother’s grave and shed a tear”. Frye found herself composing a piece of verse on a brown paper shopping bag. Later she said that the words “just came to her” and expressed what she felt about life and death.

On its two floors, the Arden House Nursing Home had about 100 patients in residence. Their average age was eighty. Two psychologists, Judy Rodin and Ellen Langer, decided to introduce some additional good things to this particular nursing home: movies and decorative plants.

At a meeting on the first floor, the director told the patients:

I was surprised to learn that many of you don’t realise the influence you have over your lives here. It’s your life and you can make of it whatever you want. You made the decisions before you came here, and you should be making them now. I want to take this opportunity to give each of you a present from Arden House. [Plants are passed around, and each patient chooses one.] The plants are yours to keep and take care of as you like. One last thing, I wanted to tell you that we’re showing a movie two nights next week, Thursday and Friday. You should decide which night you’d like to go.

On the second floor, the patients were given the same things, under crucially different circumstances. Here’s what the director told them:

I was surprised to learn that many of you don’t know about the things that are available to you. We feel that it’s our responsibility to make this a home of which you can be proud, and we want to do all we can to help you. I want to take this opportunity to give each of you a present from Arden House. [Each patient is handed a plant by a nurse.] The plants are yours to keep. The nurses will water and care for them for you. One last thing: I wanted to tell you we’re showing a movie next Thursday and Friday. We’ll tell you later in which day you’re scheduled to see it.

The patients on the first floor had control over these new events in their lives, whereas those on the second floor, who were gven the same things, had no such control. The residents on the first floor became more active, had higher morale, and were less depressed. Eighteen months later, they were also more likely to still be alive.

If you get a chance, do consider joining a therapy group, short or long term. A safe, confidential group led by a skilled psychotherapist fosters the appropriate desire to speak and be heard. It supports dignity, self-respect and self-responsibility, and there’s an enormous need for that in this world of indignities and irresponsibility.

Therapy groups sutbly alter the expectations we’ve inherited from our family and schooling. They’re rare, invaluable spaces where we can try out new and different ways of relating and become saner, healthier social animals.

Coming home.
Coming home to me.
This is the way I would like to be.
To walk in my home with love, integrity
Honour, respect for myself and respect for others.

Coming home to myself, means I take
Notice of me, my skin, my smell, my shape,
My hair, my sensuality and sexuality.
My dance and my love
My love for myself and my love for others

Coming home to myself is opening up my
Heart to the core of my existence
My essence, my beauty, my creativity
My soul and my roots.

Coming home is being able
to say to myself I LOVE YOU.

I Do Not Love You by Jeffery Lane

I do not love you because you are not good enough.

I do not love you because you do not deserve love.

My love is not something I will give you freely.

My love is something you must earn.

You want to know what you must do in order to be loved, and only I can tell you.

If I tell you what to do and you do it then you’ll expect me to love you.

So I won’t tell you what it is you must do, so you cannot do it.

I’ll imply that you should know what you must do then you’ll feel guilty for not knowing.

Because you can never know what you must do to be loved nothing you can ever do will make you feel that you deserve love.

If you ever do anything that makes you feel that you deserve to be loved, I’ll make it clear that nothing you can ever do will be good enough and so you will never expect love.

You’ll realise eventually that it is your fault you are not loved because you don’t deserve love.

Because you will never feel that you deserve love you will never make me feel guilty for not loving you.

You’ll be so unused to love you’ll find it hard to love yourself and the harder you find it to love yourself the harder love will be to find.

You’ll look for love, you’ll be hungry for love but you’ll find it hard to find love and accept love.

How can I prepare for a fulfilling life? (letter from an enquiring girl, aged 15)

Virginia Satir wrote this reply:

Dear Dr Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them.

I know you have studied these things extensively, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted disciple and adoring fan,

J. Kent Ashcraft

Self-worth is a natural product of receiving appropriate validation, attention and approval as we are growing up. You need to be confident about your competence, your mastery of the world. Beyond that, you need to feel that you are loveable, someone that others would want to be close to – competent or not – just by virtue of existing.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.    - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you don’t have a lot of self-confidence you tend to be so preoccupied with questions of self-worth that when you interact with someone else, especially someone who is important to you, you may not perceive what is going on very accurately. Questions like:

Am I good enough?
Will he like me?
Will she want me?
Do my feelings matter?
Am I safe?
Will I be attacked?
Will I be hurt?
Will I be laughed at or humiliated?
Is it safe to ask?

One of the things we have to do to develop our sense of self and greater self-esteem is to accept who we actually are, as opposed to who we are trying to fool ourselves or other people into thinking we are. This means experimenting, trying on different hats and finding out which one feels comfortable, exploring new activities to see which we enjoy and are suited to, taking chances, opening ourselves up a step at a time, allowing ourselves successes as well as failures, seeing mistakes and crises as opportunities to learn and grow. For many of us it means abandoning the belief that the alternative to being perfect is being awful.

Another thing that contributes to low self-esteem is having a feeling and at the same time a rule against it. You end up feeling ‘defective’ because you’re feeling the ‘wrong’ thing. This is when you need to examine the early messages you got from family, friends and the wider society.

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.    - Lao Tzu

It’s often not what is said that determines what happens, but what we read into an interaction. A smile that seems friendly to you may seem condescending to me. A criticism that I intend as helpful information may knock you for six! So much depends on whether we have a solid sense of ourselves as worthwhile. If I feel good about myself I can value my partner for his unique qualities. If I feel badly about myself I may, for example, need my children to help me feel good about myself, thus require them not to be different or individual or to show initiative.

When our self-esteem is solid the people close to us don’t have to be an extension of us, so we don’t see difference as an attack nor independence as a danger. Instead of competing with our partner or suspecting them of blaming us, we can find them interesting.

When our self-esteem has not been fostered in our childhood, we may look for surrogate parents everywhere – friends, partners, employers – whose approval we crave and whose criticism we dread. People addicted to falling in love are often seeking someone they can be loved by, because they don’t much love themselves and they’re under the illusion that another person can cure their sense of inadequacy.

Among the positive attitudes we need to instill in ourselves are:

1. I exist, I am a human being unti myself, I am not my mother and I am not my father, I am me, I am unique, by virtue of being born I’m entitled to exist.
2. I need, by virtue of existing I have needs, I’m entitled to have my needs, I will not submerge my identity in solely meeting other people’s needs, I am in charge of myself and I will not wait for someone to take care of me.
3. I am entitled, I deserve to pursue what I need in order to be happy, to be imperfect and to ask for help.
4. I am loveable, though I have unattractive qualities and you may not love me, and I am entitled to be honest about who I am rather than only present my defences to the world.
5. I am good enough I may well need help, I am certain to make mistakes and I can learn from them.
6. I am worth it.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

 
Then move on to sentences that begin:

 
Having expressed your anger and then your hurt and sadness, move on to your feelings (there are bound to be some) of fear and insecurity:

 
Next, deal with your feelings of guilt and responsibility:

 
Finally, make space for expressions of understanding and love:

 
This order or arrangement is important, and so is an even weight between the sections of the letter. Review what you’ve written, making sure it truly expresses your feelings, and in a balanced way. If it’s fuller towards the start of the letter, you may be stuck in anger; if it’s fat in the middle, you may be overidentified with guilt; if it’s bottom heavy, you may be avoiding the angry, ‘nastier’ stuff in you that needs some sort of honouring and respecting. The principle is, all the parts of ourself need some exposure or airing some time or other.
 
Take the time to reflect on this experience and see what may or may not have shifted. Can you think more clearly, understand more deeply and more constructively seek solutions to resolve your anger and conflict?

Allowing Others To See Me

If I were willing to be vulnerable I might tell you…
If I weren’t afraid of being condemned I might tell you…
If I weren’t so scared I might tell you…

If I didn’t feel I always have to be strong I might tell you…
If I knew you wouldn’t laugh at me I might tell you…
If the child in me could speak s/he might say…
If I was willing to let myself be embarrassed I might tell you…
I can’t possibly tell you…
One of the ways I protect myself is…
If I knew no-one would ever find out I would…
If I didn’t have to worry about my image…
If I could show you my hurt…
If I felt free to SHOUT I might…
If I were willing to share vulnerably I…

A Perspective On My Life

Ever since I was a child…
All my life…
One of the things I had to do to survive was…
I can remember…
One of the things I’m afraid I might remember is…

A Perspective On Growing Up

One of the ways I keep myself a child is…
The hard thing about being an adult…
The good thing about being a child is…
The bad thing about growing up is…
‘Grown up’ means…

Mother

My mother was always…
With my mother I often felt…
My mother often seemed to expect…
What I needed from my mother and didn’t get was…
One of my mother’s ways of nurturing me was to…
My mother never…
My mother made me feel…
My mother thought of me as…
When my mother was angry with me she would…
If I had felt free to be angry with my mother…
When my mother touched or held me I felt…

Mother’s Influence

My mother often gave me the feeling that I…
My mother always saw me as…
If my mother could see me now…
My mother gave me a view of men as…
From my mother I learned that crying was…
My mother gave me the sense that an intimate relationship with a partner was…
What my mother taught me about sex was…
I’m still trying to win my mother’s approval by…
My mother gave me the sense that my body was…
One of the ways I’m like my mother is…
My mother gave me a view of women as…
From my mother I learned that anger…
The message I got from my mother about life was…
How I mother myself is…

Father

My father was always…
With my father I often felt…
My father often seemed to expect…
What I needed from my father and didn’t get was…
One of my father’s ways of nurturing me was to…
If my father saw me being successful…
If my father saw me failing…
My father never…
My father made me feel…
My father thought of me as…
When my father was angry with me he would…
If I had felt free to express anger towards my father…
When my father touched or held me I felt…

Father’s Influence

My father often gave me the feeling that I…
My father always saw me as…
If my father could see me now…
My father gave me a view of men as…
From my father I learned that crying was…
My father gave me the sense that an intimate relationship with a partner was…
What I learned from my father about sex was…
I’m still trying to win my father’s approval by…
My father gave me the sense that my body was…
One of the ways I’m like my father is…
My father gave me a view of women as…
From my father I learned that anger…
The message I got from my father about life was…
How I father myself is…

My Wants And Needs

If I were willing to admit my unmet needs I might tell you…
One of the things I find it hard to admit I want is…
What I need and have never received from a man is…
What I need and have never received from a woman is…
If I were willing to share what I want I might say…

Acceptance

If I could accept my own body…
A hard thing about accepting my body is…
What’s difficult about accepting my sexuality is…
What’s difficult about being a man is…
What’s difficult about being a woman is…
The hard thing about being an adult is…

Feelings

I easily become frustrated when…
I tend to blame others when…
I usually take the blame when…
I blame myself for…
When I get angry I usually…
When I get angry it’s usually when…
What concerns me about my anger is…
When you get angry I notice that you…
I’m still angry inside because…
What concerns me about your anger is…
I’m disappointed that you…
I’m furious that you…
I’m irritated that you…
When I feel hurt I usually…
Crying, to me, is…
I would feel ok crying if…
One of the ways I hide my hurt is…
You can tell I’m hurt when…
Hurt feelings still inside me are from…
You hurt me when…
I notice you are hurt when…
What I need when I’m hurt is for you to…
When I’m afraid I usually…
You can tell I’m feeling threatened when I…
Becoming vulnerable and showing fear, for me, is…
One of the ways I hide my fear is…
I feel anxious or afraid when…
One of the things I really fearful of is…
The scariest thing I’ve ever experienced is…
When I feel sad I tend to…
I still feel sad that…
A big loss in my life was…
I still need to finish grieving…
A time when I felt helpless is when…
I feel ashamed that…
I still feel guilty that…
I become depressed when…

Conclusion

What I’ve learned is…
I’m becoming aware that…
A way I want to change now is…
I now understand…
An important issue I want to resolve, soon, is…
What I want now is…
What I deserve is…
One of the things I’m thankful for is…
I appreciate…
I love…
I am…

with affectionate thanks to Jo Harvey

I WALK DOWN THE SAME STREET.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in, again.
I can’t believe I am in this same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

I WALK DOWN THE SAME STREET.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in.
It’s a habit.
But, my eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

I WALK DOWN THE SAME STREET.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

I WALK DOWN ANOTHER STREET.

The Daily Mood Log (© David Burns, ‘Feeling Good Handbook’, 1989) comprises a four-step approach to tackling distorted thoughts  -  which we often don’t even realize are distorted until we get some external feedback or do something like this exercise.
 
Get some paper out and try it next time you’re feeling a bit low or stressed.
 
I’ve adapted David Burns’ original format slightly.
 
Step One:  Record the Upsetting Event in between about 10 and 25 words.
         
Step Two:  Record your Current Emotions and rate them from 0 (the least) to 100 (the most).
 
Examples of Emotions are: sad, guilty, lonely, gloomy, miserable, cheerless, unhappy, hopeless, dismal, sullen, despondent, melancholic, angry, annoyed, irritated, livid, furious, enraged, resentful, outraged, cross, irate, frustrated, afraid, fearful, anxious, scared, terrified, helpless, nervous, worried, alarmed, frightened, embarrassed, mortified.
 
Step Three:  Record your Upsetting Thoughts and then next to each of them write the Distortion contained in the Thought together with a more positive and realistic Counter-Thought.
 
The Upsetting Thoughts and the Distortions will probably be habitual and even feel ‘automatic’, whereas the Counter-Thoughts may be less familiar: be creative and give yourself some lovingkindness through this process!
 
Examples of Distortions are:
 
‘All or Nothing’ (thinking in absolute black and white categories).
Overgeneralisation (one setback makes you think in terms of never-ending defeat).
Negative mental filter (dwell on the downside instead of exploring the upside).
Dismissing yourself (insisting your qualities and achievements don’t count).
Assumptions (taking it for granted that other people are reacting badly to you, even though you can’t possibly know for sure).
Fortune telling (pessimism, even though none of us knows the future).
Magnification (blowing things out of proportion).
Minimisation (inappropriately dismissing the importance of people, things and events).
Inappropriate reliance on your feelings (I feel like an idiot so I must be one; I don’t feel like doing this so I’ll put it off).
Inappropriate reliance on the word ‘should’ (taking your internal Critic too seriously).
Labelling the person instead of their action (calling yourself a ‘loser’ instead of acknowledging you ‘made a mistake’).
Blaming (usually simplistic and leads nowhere!)
 
Step Four:  Reflect on your Counter-Thoughts. Try and make them believable to you, such that you can take them on board, literally breathe a sigh of relief, and think to yourself ‘Actually I’m not a bad person’ or ‘The world isn’t a wholly bad place’ or some such, more realistic view. The breath of relief is important. Take your time over this. Then consider your relationship to your original Upsetting Thoughts, and make a note how you experience yourself:
 
·         No better.
·         Slightly better.
·         Somewhat better.
·         Quite a lot better.
·         Much better.

Repeat dose as often as required!
                       

If our communication is not moderated by tact and sensitivity our partner’s reactions may block the message we intended to send. And without clear communication we cannot make our needs known or negotiate on them.

It’s generally useful to be direct, and harmful to be ambiguous or give subtle hints. It’s useful to be precise, and harmful to be vague, leaving our partner to puzzle over what we really mean. It’s useful to be specific, giving concrete detail, but harmful to generalise, leaving ample scope for misunderstanding. It’s useful to be honest and speak from the heart, and harmful to say half-truths or to lie outright. It’s useful to respect our partner’s right to their own beliefs and decisions, but harmful to control or bend our partner to our will. It’s useful to honour our partner’s sense of self-worth and it’s harmful to be insulting.

In our own biographical past each of us learned habits and strategies that at some level worked for us – to be tactful or tactless, to aggressively control, to be empathic, or not, to be blaming or distracting or rigid or play helpless. As adults in intimate relationships we need to look at these ingrained styles with honesty and decide what we need to work at discarding or modifying.

For many of us anger is the hardest emotion to communicate to our loved one, but we do need to learn how to handle and to share all our feelings and in ways that are not destructive. Otherwise the feelings will leak out anyway, or be acted out in the form of coldness and distance, or be held in the subterranean volcanic hell of an inner rage, ready one day to burst out to destructive effect.

We cannot expect our partner to read our mind and simply know what we want. They’ll get it wrong anyway and probably grow tired of the guessing game in due course.

On the other hand, if we continually mis-hear our partner or don’t properly listen, because we’ve already made up our mind what they want, they’ll grow tired of trying to be heard!

In the end the only useful ways to communicate are those which lead to a successful resolution – this means communication based on mutual acceptance, respect, goodwill, openness and trust.

Tell your children about men who love men
And women who love women, in all manner of ways.

Tell them stories about princess who meets her prince, yes,
But tell them also about the princess
Who made the flower girl her lady-in-waiting,
And loved her dearly ’til the day she died.
Tell them of the soldiers
Who came back from the war loving soldiers,
And the people, from all walks of life,
who choose lovers sex-similar,
Not different.

Tell them so that your words break the silence,
For the silence kills more of us than the violence.

Tell them about possibilities.
About boys who like flowers,
And girls who like guns,
Men who wear dresses,
And women who don’t.

Remind them that nature is plural,
That life is multi-,
That all girly-boys aren’t gay,
And all girly-girls aren’t straight,
Tell them some of them are and some of them ain’t.

Tell them these things,
Because at some point, in some place,
They will be different,
They too will deviate from the norm.
And when that time comes,
They will know it’s OK
To be who they are,
And they wont be tempted
To betray the something inside that is true.

Tell them because one day their friend, their teacher, or their child
Will be lesbian. Yes, one day she will.
Tell them so that when that day comes
They know how to love,
And not how to hate,
Know how to love, and not how to hate.

Finally, tell them
Because they might be too,
And their ears will burn with relief and delight,
To know they are safe and known to you,
Not alien,
Not alone,
Not cast out and rejected,
But safe and known and loved by you.