I recently wrote this outline of what I consider to be the most effective methods of helping people manage their weight.

The weight management industry is huge yet unregulated, and its advice is contradictory and confusing. I thought it ethical to clearly outline the strategy I will use to help you build the capacity in managing what you eat. You dont have to like all of this.

OBJECTIVE 1 Restore normal eating

The last 30 years have proven beyond doubt that simply manipulating food –  be it by calorie counting, playing with macros, bingeing on a specific type of food, banning others and playing with time slots – has little lasting positive effect.Apart from not working, attempts to deploy starvation and deprivation methods merely result in disordered eating.Stop dieting and start eating normally. Basically, that means the plate method. A highly validated, effective nutritious method harking back to the “good old days” of “meat and two veg”

Objective 2 :Master your mind

Most people have no idea how to master their own minds. Our thinking is wrong, we do not recognise the influence our bad habits have, are often too inflexible in our approach to life, and have little to no idea as to how to change our behaviour.Our aim – using cutting-edge business, elite sport, and combat techniques –  is to put you in control of  your mindDon’t commit to goals, commit to processes.Treat goals with contempt. Goals are about the results you want to achieve. Systems are the processes that lead to those results.Goals are fine for the general direction of travel, but systems give you progress. Problems arise when you use your energy to focus on your goals rather than perfecting your system. Every sports person, and competitor wants to win. The winners are those who optimise their system.

Goals destroy your happiness. Your belief that joy and success appear only when your goal is achieved means you are never happy. Instead of tormenting yourself with goals, fall in love with the process.Goals are at odds with long-term processes. If you have a specific goal, what happens when you reach it? The purpose of setting goals is to win. The process of building systems is to continue playing the game.Setting up your system and processes is not a euphoria moment where you revel in positivity. Effective plans anticipate the barriers you may encounter and help you plan in advance about solving them.  Otherwise, you can fall at the first fence. These barriers are known as inflection points. We help you imagine unpleasant situations in advance and write out a plan for responding. This strategy isn’t speculation, it’s taken from the Starbucks playbook. This is how willpower becomes a habit. By choosing a response to an issue in advance, that becomes the behaviour when that inflection point arises.

Objective 3 Build Better Habits.

We get you to understand habits. We guide you to identify the bad or unhelpful habits you’ve acquired, and how to transform them into better, more helpful habits. It’s certainly unhelpful to harangue people with generic exhortations to “meditate,” or “drink water”.Increasingly research has shown that those struggling with weight management often have certain habits in common. The more flexible you become in your daily life, the easier it is to manage what you eat.  

Objective 4 Understand Will power

.For years people have been made to feel like failures when their willpower faded and their diet collapsed. It was thought that willpower was a skill to be learned, like riding a bike.  This is a useful analogy. If you ride your bike on Monday, you don’t expect to be unable to ride it on Tuesday.  So, if you have the skill to eat healthily on Monday, then Tuesday should be a breeze!  We now view willpower as a muscle that needs both exercise and practice, but can equally end in failure. Willpower is a finite resource that needs to be managed. We will help you build your willpower.Some find the concept of willpower unhelpful, so we also explore the idea of “grit”. To make you more “gritty” we need to engage your interest, develop your ability to practice, discover your real (higher) purpose and build your hope. Researchers like Angela Duckworth have popularised and validated this approach.Little winsLittle wins have been shown to be crucial in redesigning how you think and feel about situations. By using simple daily tasks, we will get you some early successes.The underpinning theme is to help you find out how the mind works.We support you in studying powerful mind management models that can help you become a more happy, confident,  healthier, and more successful person. We will help you understand the struggles that happen within your mind and know how to apply this insight to every area of your life.  You have to changeTo manage your weight, you must change. At a fundamental level, you need to change your beliefs and values. This may sound drastic, but as the British cycling team found out, change is successful when made in 1% increments.

Objective 5. RECONNECT WITH YOUR EMOTIONS. Practicing healthy eating, building better habits, and understanding your mind is helpful. It’s also found that building your emotional resilience is equally important. However, secure within our relative wealth and comfort, much of our lives to date have ignored the need to attend to our emotional health. The overused phrase “How do you feel?” Is hackneyed, but the question remains essential. If you follow the work of Julie M Simon, you may quickly trace many issues as being created by a failure to manage your emotions. In its simplest form, people need to recognise, identify and accept their emotions.Once this is done, you can move forward to finding a solution.Emotions are too often either ignored or discounted. In other words, you are taught to ignore your emotional state. What can you do? You still have the emotions, you still feel them, fear sadness, and anger (more choice here!).How do you deal with them? You haven’t been taught how to cope with emotions so you need to soothe yourself. The number one choice of self-medication is food, although later on it could be drugs, booze, or pornography. Every time you feel joy, sadness, happiness, or failure, you go straight to food. Essentially, food becomes the only thing that means you can control your emotions. Where does this get you? If you cannot identify or control your emotions, then realistically you cannot control your food. It seems that food is the only thing that keeps you sane.  For years you have used it to smother emotions, so it makes sense that you won’t allow it to be restricted or measured. If you do restrict, then it makes sense that you’ll binge later on during the day.Our program guides you through the emotional maze and helps you reconnect with your emotions, dealing with them in a better way than binging on cake

Objective 6 . Understand Trauma. One of the last pieces of the puzzle is trauma. Today this is an overused word. In this program, we use it to describe a “failed freeze” response.In simple terms, if you are attacked, most people think you have two options: fight or flight. Actually, you have four: fight, flight, a search for social support, or “the freeze” response. On a primal level, predators don’t like eating “dead meat”, so often creatures that freeze stand a higher chance of escaping. The mouse feigns death while the cat is staring, but when the cat loses interest the mouse runs like hell! The full freeze response is freeze THEN run.You may not have experienced a war zone or been mugged in the street; but what if your boss walks up and shouts at you, and you sit there and take it?  Once your madcap boss wanders off, if you stay put, the chances are that you are accumulating micro traumas.. You froze, but you didn’t run. This leaves you feeling very unsafe. You do not need to be shot in a war zone to feel trauma (more here). Using drills developed for the military, our program gets to restore the safety you need and teaches you how to stop it from happening again.

How does this all work?

email Andrew@andrewstemler.com