Lose weight by changing the way you think and feel about yourself, by changing your self-image.

Address the mind and the body will follow.

True personal transformation is reflected by lasting physical changes and new possibilities in life.

Research has found¹ that diets and diet pills do not work long term due to compensatory changes in body’s energy expenditure that oppose the maintenance of a lower body weight. It is as if the body remembers that it should be heavy and makes adjustments to compensate for our dieting efforts in order to remain status quo.

Mental techniques can change this body-memory/body-image and help produce lasting changes with less efforts at dieting and exercise. In mind-body medicine, changes produced in the mind affect how our bodies handle food. This transformation can change food absorption and energy metabolism without the use of medications. 

Mind-body medicine addresses the issue of weight through exploration and change of the beliefs and by addressing the various eating patterns used as means of coping with stress. For instance, one is invited to explore the idea of being heavy, and what it brings into one’s life. Besides the usual negative connotations, for some, excess weight brings a sense of stability, groundedness, substance. Lightness, is easy to carry but one is more prone to be blown away by the wind of passing events.

Excessive weight may represent a relationship toward food that substitutes for the lack of sufficiently meaningful relationships in the person’s life. There can be a variety of relationships that may need to be transformed or taken to the next level. These can include inter-personal relationships with friends and family, work-career relationships, creative relationships (perceived limits of one’s creative possibilities).

Weight may be an embodiment of the “weight we carry” such as the weight of responsibility, guilt, or blame (a debt that we feel other owe us). It can also be the weight of all the things that we’ve been hoarding and have not been willing to let go of. It can be an accumulated reserve for a person who is anxious about the future survival. The person who resonates with any of these, or other similar beliefs, can employ mental techniques to find a new way of feeling well in a thinner body by connecting to and using the resources of our inner storehouse consciousness.

There are twelve eating patterns that contribute to chronic weight and /or body image problems:
Binges
Compulsive eating
Constant thinking about food
Eating portions that are too large or too small
Eating too quickly
Eating when not hungry
Emotional eating
Sneakning food
Lack of confidence (usually because of repeated diet failures)
Late night snacking
Snacks between meals
Starving yourself and/or purging

Techniques of mental imagery and voluntary will together with the science of morphology (the correspondence of facial and body type to temperament and personality) are utilized as a basis for formulating individualized eating and exercise plans.

We will work on helping you to:

• view your relationship with food in the greater context of your life;
• establish a positive relationship with your body and appearance;
• achieve your ideal body weight through a gentle, clinically proven and healthy approach;
• develop a program for maintaining your desired weight.

If you have been on diet after diet, attempting diet pills, crash diets, medication, and/or even healthy dieting approaches - only too quickly to return to your old eating habits and subsequent weight gain, you may find this approach both insightful and fruitful.

 

References:

1) RL Leibel et al, Changes from energy expenditure resulting from altered body weight.  N Engl J Med 1995; 332:621.

Oleg I. Reznik, M.D.   Board Certified Family Physician

Assistant Professor at OHSU  Department of Family Medicine

Weight Loss