Toysack, Heal Your Life and Change Your World

Preface to Toysack

This book has been safely stored by Barbara Walter and compiled by Susie Brooks. An enormous gratitude is owed to both ladies who were true friends in need, my emotional supporters in my darkest moments, and despite that we never met face to face, I can safely say: they will remain my friends as long as I live.

This final editing was done by Abigail Howes, who also undertook the task of publishing this material.

To all the ladies mentioned above I am saying a heartfelt THANK YOU.

Also last but not least THANK YOU goes to David John Kerridge for designing the book cover.

I, the widow and the co-author  of the writer have the pleasure to present this publication as it was put on paper by my late husband Declan John Twohig. Some of the original methods published here have been floating on the internet with minor changes; some of the authors were contacted by me to acknowledge the writings as my late husband's. He was a gifted and a very talented person and a great therapist.

All the methods published in this book were used and tested either by him or by myself in therapeutic setting. Some of the methods employed had absolutely astounding results.

This self-help workbook is equally user friendly to therapist and lay people alike.

When I met my late husband, the enthusiasm he had for hypnotherapy/psychology was infectious. And since my dream from childhood was to become a psychologist, we bonded in an instance.

Our first published tool was in a monthly newsletter for members of the Institute of Analytical Hypnotherapists in 1989 called The Filling Cabinet. I still have some of the personal letters expressing gratitude from hypnotherapists from Australia, France, Italy, and England of course.

Many evenings we spent together discussing new methods, we practiced new ways of hypnotic inductions on each other, and he even prepared me for two operations where recovery was swift with minuscule side effects.

We reminisced about our childhoods, and my descriptive narrative was immortalised in Koi Carp Lake and Swish and variations. The physical Crystal Vase is still my proud possession (lovingly looked after).

He loved bouncing ideas, rewriting till it felt just right, and he was full of energy and helpful to a fault. His motto was that: no matter what the problem is, there always is a solution. And as he explained to me many a time, you might not like the solution but there is always at least one. 

This self-help book is his legacy. It helped so many people before, I hope that it will help some more now. You, the reader will be the judge. I hope it will exceed your expectations. Many a place you will have the amazing acha moment, and some of oh, and even some of ouch. Some will make you laugh out loud, and some will force you to reflect.  But overall, it will show you how to enjoy your life more.

Our daughter Jola was also an inspiration behind a few twists to some of the tools included in this publication. It is also her legacy from her father. I hope she will be proud that despite his early departure, his work still lives in this book.

And I need to add that I am proud of being his wife.

Jadwiga Pszczolkowska 

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Diets Don’t Work

Why Obesity is Essential

Fat works?

Cravings Are Friends, NOT Enemies

Don’t Fear Cravings

Willpower is a myth

Faithfully Follow that Diet…

Cycle of Dieting

That Exercise Stuff

Failure

Some Questions to Think About?

Fear of Feeling

Why do you want to loose weight?

4 Golden Rules For Loving Yourself Fat

Key to Successful Weight Loss

Fences

Fences Revisited

The Most Useful Question

5 beliefs that make or break weight

Attitude is everything

Boy Scout Motto

The Causes of Unhappiness

The Two Zen Monks

Breathing for Relaxation

Overcoming Stress Worksheet

Stress ↔ Fat?

Juggling Stress

The Crystal Vase

Hot Buttons

Disconnect Now!

Happiness

Judging and Judgements

Chin Up!

Eye Access Cues

What Do You Want And Are There Obstacles in Your Way?

10 Steps to Detect and Stop Self-Sabbotage

Affirmations

Three Tracks

Bill of Individual Rights

Individual Rights Self Discovery Questions

Anger

Is Anger Someone You Know?

Baby Steps Toward Change

Change

How to Start Assessing

Surviving and Thriving

If You Ain’t Busy Living…

I want

Unravelling the Ball of Wool

Fear of Failure/Fear of Success

The Inner Critic

Stopping Negative Self Talk

Negative Self Hypnosis

The Enemy Within

Introduction to the War Horse

The War Horse

War Horse Add On

Swish and Variations

Changing a belief

Anchors

Collapse of Anchors

Letting Go

Anchors Exercise

More on Anchors

Rollright Ritual

Integrations

Integration Hiccup

Something to Do

Bridging the Gap to Your Subconscious

Key Word Demo

Stream of Consciousness Writing

Koi Carp Lake

How to Visit Koi Carp Lake:

Under the Skin of Koi Carp

Koi Carp Perspectives

Sub-conscious Communication

The Magic Room

The Village

The Inner Child

Meet a Villager!

Monsters And Things That Go Bump in Your Head

Listening to the Villagers

The Gatekeeper

Odds & Ends

Combining Tips: back to the basics

Flax

Fats and Oils

Water Facts

Useful Links

Acknowledgement and sources………………………………………………………………...

Note some links and references are no longer available on the internet. These are denoted by *

Introduction

It’s been a long hard road for me, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. I knew that I had much to change in me when I bumped into the Rea Center on the web one day, but I had no idea at the time how to create that change. I had no idea how deep things were buried inside. I had no idea how much I had stuffed down to hide it from myself and, how much weight I had gained to protect myself from the outside world. I had lied to myself and I had been lied to by the diet industry as well. I thought that I was a failure and I am so thankful to learn that I was wrong! The great people at Rea and the club have taught me that! You are not a failure either and never let anyone tell you that you are. 

I initially put this workbook together for my own gratification and benefit. I needed something tangible to dig into and help me get down to the nitty gritty so to speak. I also needed something to help me stay on track because I am easily distracted. I am just like that. This information is blatantly plagiarized from the Slim without Diets Club on Yahoo, and I give much thanks to all of the wonderful club members and those at the Rea Center for such great information and support. I am so blessed to have met such great friends in them! This is also a work in progress that I will update and send Rea periodically. I just can’t see this anywhere near being complete at this point in time.

My hope is that you will print out sections of this workbook and intertwine them with a journal.  I use a loose leaf binder so that I can insert pages where needed. I have found that keeping a journal while concentrating on some areas can both get me to it as well as track my progress (not in weight but in emotions). Throw that scale away! It is such a great feeling to look back over the past year and see how far I have come.

Let me stress that the most important thing is to go slowly. We didn’t get this fat overnight and we won’t get thin overnight and anyone who tells us otherwise is selling us something. There are issues that we have to deal with first or the weight will come back on just like before. 

Also, there are no rules per se, so just relax. Take the time to learn about yourself. I have learned more about who I am (and who I am not) in the last year than I have in all the other years of my life combined. I am so much happier than I have ever been, regardless of my size, and I have much more understanding about the why of things. So, slow down and start enjoying yourself! One day we will wake up and look in the mirror and be content with we are and what we look like. I know that I am not there yet, but I will be. And so will you!

Suz

November, 2001

Diets Don’t Work

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

- H. G. Wells (1866-1946)

When you think about weight loss, you automatically tend to think in terms of ‘eating less’, or not eating ‘bad foods’ or cutting down on fats, following a specific regime, using appetite suppressant medication or having to exercise a lot more. Or you have gone beyond all these, having discovered that they don’t work for you, and you are adrift in a sea of the sharks and charlatans who want you to buy some very strange products that will lead you to supermodel status in a matter of weeks. More to the point, some of you have been following these sorts of procedures for years and years and you know the drill backwards. So we can say two things about it. Firstly, that you have become very good indeed at this sort of learning.

Those who are currently involved in educational courses or degrees or new careers, and worrying that they are not up to it can, in fact, take heart from their dieting history. It does show how brilliantly you can learn, when you want to. The downside is, however, that it hasn’t worked to give you the end point you wanted – a lower body weight and better health.

Here there are some simple truths involved: The first of which is that the slimming industry is as much a business as that of selling widgets. If you, the industry don’t have customers, you do not thrive. If you do not have more customers, you do not grow. If you do not have repeat business from existing customers, you face the prospect of having to attract new customers and this eats into your profitability because you constantly have to fund new marketing and promotion rather than relying on repeat sales and word of mouth advertising which costs nothing.

Years ago, obesity was the province of the physician because it was comparatively rare. There wasn’t a slimming industry because there wasn’t a market for it, and the world was very different. It is hard to believe how much the world has altered in less than 100 years, let alone less than 50. If you go back to 1914, WWI era, aircraft were literally string and bubble gum affairs that were slow, inefficient and terribly prone to mechanical defects. In fact the first air battles involved these slow bi-planes circling round each other with the pilots blazing away at each other with a revolver, or trying to get above the enemy and drop a hand grenade onto his lap.

Today, we have the first signs of space travel for recreational purposes on the horizon; we can climb onto a plane at the airport and be in another continent in a matter of hours. And computers run the military aircraft now rather than frozen pilots spluttering in a haze of

Castor oil mist thrown back by the ancient engine in front. Cinemas were unknown in the early part of the century and silent movies were the norm. The early films were based more on the structure and techniques of the theatre than anything else. Today, a film is capable of a sophistication that would have been regarded as science fiction impossible even thirty years ago.

And much the same developments from the primitive to the very, very sophisticated, fast and available have taken place in every traditional industry including marketing and advertising, as well as the new ones like the slimming industries. It is a very long and convoluted story as to exactly how these new industries came into being as society changed, and it probably isn’t relevant here.

Our beliefs and expectations have changed, and there are commercial companies who can feed our expectations and desires. Worse still, they can now invent them for us. Nowhere is this more common than in the area of weight management. Our whole belief systems have been transformed from outside to make us less dependent on thinking for ourselves and more dependent on external agencies. 

Life has become so much more complex and so fast that there isn’t the time to learn about every aspect of our lives so we depend on support agencies. We buy our food from the market rather than grow our food in the garden. We may not even prepare our own meals but buy them ready made to reheat. We aren’t aware of our bodies, let alone our minds, so if something goes wrong, then we head for the doctor or the hospital to get it fixed. And while all of this progress has given us lives our great grandparents could never have conceived of, even in the pages of H.G. Wells, it has also made us relatively helpless in the matter of running our own lives.

Too many people outside are involved in doing things for us, and in simplifying our lives, the process has also rendered us helpless in key areas. Our expectations can be unrealistically perfectionist but our knowledge of how to achieve our expectations can be woefully low. And this is effectively the situation in the area of ‘weight.’ We fear it, don’t know enough about it, and depend almost totally on external agencies to resolve difficulties. If we were a mechanical device like a car or a toaster, this might be fine. Take it to the repair shop and it’s fixed and returned to us. Or we are told that it is past repair, and we need to buy a new item.

Unfortunately, the drift of the world over half a century has caused us to behave about ourselves as if we were no more complex than the car engine. Worse still is to believe this about ourselves. This is where the slimming industry can and did and does jump in to offer ‘solutions’ based on this view of ourselves, and to manipulate it. If you step back and apply a little logic, you’ll begin to see that slimming companies cannot possibly afford to have their clients take one product and never return. They are far too vulnerable as a commercial entity.  A diet plan can be copied and passed around by word of mouth,

and if the plan worked, then the whole industry goes into a nosedive that ends in its disappearance through the successful elimination of a world-wide ‘scourge’ called obesity.

The way the diet industry works in practice is a sort of ad hoc ‘cartel’. You follow one diet plan that doesn’t work. So you try another, and as time goes on, the chances are that you’ll return eventually to try the first companies’ new improved plan. Dr Atkins, for instance, was first around in the early 1970’s. His revolutionary new plan is doing the rounds again since the late 1990’s. It didn’t work first time, and it doesn’t the second either. And it’s the same with the others. You might get a little apparent short term success before the weight comes back, and this is sufficient to feed the tiny flicker of hope that keeps you going on, to try the next diet, and the next. Or the increasing desperation keeps you trying.

Now, somehow you’ve visited a site on the web and clicked on a link and have come here to the Slim Without Diets Club website*, and while scanning through the posts, it may seem like visiting a foreign country because no one is talking low fat, or diet plan. You might notice that there are a lot of strange posts referring to fish ponds or villages. So what’s it all about? Is it different? Is it expensive? Is it any better than the rest? 

If one of the Rea Center staff write anything that is either outrageously wrong, or misleading, then some of the 350+ members are going to jump on them and put you right very quickly. This is why Rea doesn’t use testimonials – they don’t need these fictions because they have a club full of members with practical experience and the new learning that comes from it, and they can tell you the truth, were anyone to start telling lies.

Traditional slimming approaches tend to have one (at least!!) glaring flaw. They treat the human body as a machine to be adjusted by altering the fuel intake. You, in fact, know this already because you have been doing diet after diet, and with variations, they are all broadly similar in the emphasis and approach. Tackle the food, you’ll lose weight and you’ll be healthy and happy. Yet it simply doesn’t happen. Why not? There is a missing component, the bulk of the slimming industry does not, will not and cannot tackle adequately because it would cut their own throats, commercially. It provides the missing element for a successful outcome, and this is NOT a good idea. For them!

Rea comes in from a different direction. They say that there are three components involved and the first is the key to success or staying overweight. We are not machines. It isn’t a question of having a religious belief that says we have souls, but a commonsense and scientific statement that says we have minds, emotions and feelings, and it is this that forms the missing element. The second is the nutrition that will ensure you have a healthy and enjoyable way of eating that takes food out of the fearful category and enables you to eat, as millennia of humans have eaten until the last fifty years, for fuel and also for pleasure. The third element is exercise, but with a different emphasis. Because modern

life is less physical and more sedentary, we use our bodies much less hard than our parents and grandparents did. This has led to the growth of the exercise industry which complements the slimming cartel and is just as pernicious.

By the time you have gone a little further through what we have to offer you, you’ll know that exercise alone is not going to lose you weight. It will make you fitter; it will make you healthier and happier because of the biochemical and hormonal processes involved. But it will not lose you significant weight. So, unless you actually enjoy sports and gyms, it doesn’t make sense to soldier on grimly in the hope of losing weight doing this sort of thing. Nor do you have to. There are simpler ways of incorporating movement into normal everyday life that don’t need gyms and machines or aerobics classes and time commitments. At the simplest, you figure ways of working physically a bit more every day and this can be as simple a thing as walking three flights of stairs instead of taking a lift.

At this point, it isn’t necessary to worry about this third aspect. And here we introduce a shattering appeal to newcomers. Forget about the food and nutrition for now. It is important but it is NOT THE STARTING POINT for successful weight management. This is also the point many newcomers will find the toughest because all the learning, all the training is that weight loss needs an alteration in the food supply. This comes SECOND not first so I’m going to give you a golden rule from a branch of applied psychology called NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming): if you keep on doing the same thing, over and over again, then you will merely get the same result. Understand? If you obsess right now about what foods to eat, how much and when, you are hooking back into doing more of the same that has let you down in the past, often many times.

So, we start with the emotions, and this is another toughie for many because it really is a huge unknown area for almost everyone. This is the road of the journey to your dreams: On the website – http://www.chetday.com/rea/reacentre.htm* are all you need to start the ball rolling on your new journey of learning success for yourself. The points to follow are simple enough. You may want to know who we are, and what we do so click on the menu link to the Rea interview with Chet Day or click this one: http://www.chetday.com/reainterview.htm* and read up.  There is an open letter from the Director of Rea on the menu as well. This is worth a glance and says much the same as I say here too.

*Then go down the scroll format main page and you’ll find two books mentioned. E1 and E2.  E1 is free and this is the one you need right now. It takes apart the traditional mindset on dieting and starts you off with some new ideas to work with.

The Marylebone Model will show you why the section on the interview about cravings is so refreshing and so exciting as it makes them understandable and positive rather than fearful and negative. Towards the end of E1 are two MANDATORY set pieces. The first is to do something drastic about the one feature of life that makes you miserable and plays you right back into the hands of the dieting industry because it will sabotage everything - the scales. Don’t dither on this one. You don’t have to dynamite them, just get them out of reach.

The second is the first ‘exercise’ called ‘the mirror’ – This will give you a great deal of information about the state of your personal nation. If you look around the posts you’ll see accounts of how people were too terrified to look at their body in a mirror. Or they felt nauseated or angry. Or they managed to do the 20 second turn and ran to vomit. What does this tell you about self-love, self-esteem and confidence? If you have this level of self-disgust and self-loathing, no matter what your previous dieting history is, you stood NO CHANCE of taking weight off and keeping it off. People who feel this way about themselves are at the end of the line in deserving. Fail to correct this, and you will remain fat. Period.  So, you start with the first of the subconscious tools, the mirror exercise. It isn’t about vanity, it isn’t admiring your naked body, and nor is it some sort of weird aversion therapy. The whole idea is to allow your neurological system to correct some glaring flaws by taking in visually (and mathematically and holographically), accurate information about your body as it is now. If you find that you have a strong reaction to doing the turn at conscious level, block it off. Recite a poem, talk aloud saying ANYTHING, sing, and recite a prayer if you wish. Conscious cannot do two things simultaneously so if you are doing something like this, you cannot simultaneously focus on making a misery of the mirror turn.

The eyes scan, the data is transferred into the subconscious mechanism at the rate of millions of bits of data. The turn takes about 20-30 seconds to complete in full. Then, that is it, until tomorrow.

The reason for doing it at bedtime is that this is a convenient time for most in that they are undressing for bed. It isn’t mandatory and can be done at other times, but to avoid skipping a day, it is best to use one fixed time that is a part of normal everyday routine.

The data taken in is used to construct a new and accurate subconscious template of your body as it is NOW which is the bottom line. Does it serve any useful purpose to run away from reality and deny it? You may not like the way things are, but to have any chance of making a change you have to accept that this is me, as I am now. This is the foundation. It also gives your sub-conscious a chance to assess the project lying ahead.

There are also other benefits. Things start to happen after a week or two. Your posture will start to alter from a slumped, hunched, defensive one, eyes down, chest compressed to a healthier upright posture. Read the eye access cues section that you will find in the Baby Steps Toward Change section at this point, and it will tell you what the slumped posture does to make you feel terrible and also activating the internal self-critical mind chatter.

If your posture improves, you will feel better and experience less insistent mind chatter because your eye positions will have altered. Additionally, you will have taken the pressure off your diaphragm so your breathing will improve. More oxygen reaches the cells and the biochemistry of the body improves. You will feel better.

Plus, if your posture is upright, you will carry the weight in a better distribution. You won’t have lost an ounce but it will look as if you have lost pounds. And your friends will notice and pay compliments. Accept them and enjoy them! Every little bit of positive input helps at the start.

The other two practical aspects of E1 are the invitation to come visit the club. Do more than this, join us. It costs nothing and you will have access to a unique club that is full of good people and good things, including a large database of practical things that help as you learn more. Secondly, go to the library under the links section on the club home page. The Library contains additional practical tools, plus some recipes that you may enjoy even before we get to the nutritional side of town, plus Ranger Barb’s marvelous collection will help you find different topics and post subjects on the club now that it has grown to more than 5,000 posts. It’s an idea to start collecting some of this stuff in a three ring binder so that it is all together and runs in a useful sequence. New learning, new doing. As soon as you use the first Toy – key word demo, you will start to realize just how much emotions and feelings are critical to successful weight management: there is a set sequence involved – your thoughts and speech influence the way you feel. And the

way you feel is going to dictate your behavior. Apply that line to your scales and you’ll realize just how deadly it is! Apply this line to what happens when you lost a battle with cravings in the past, and you’ll understand how wonderful it is not to need to fight cravings but to answer them straightaway.

And best of all, you are far away from theory and starting to learn to do practically – and if it is as easy as this first tool, then it’s not going to be beyond your abilities is it? There are a lot of individual items in the Library and not far back on the club is a series of highlight posts from the Director which takes you through them one by one, step by step. These posts, some of which are included here, are WELL worth printing and saving in your file right now, so you don’t forget and it saves you having to scroll back and find them later if you want some hand holding and guidance:

The full sequence is as follows (many of these posts are included in this workbook):*

1) Posts 3756-3761

2) Posts 3773-3776

3) Posts 3787-3791

4) Posts 3809-3814

5) Posts 3838-3840

6) Posts 3861-3864

7) Posts 3872-3876

8) Posts 3917-3921

9) Posts 3987-3989+3991-3992

10) Posts 4008-4010

11) Posts 4045-4047

With the addition of the post references prepared by Ranger in the Library, there is additional resource available for each of the Toysack tools to help plus a lot more available covering different areas of life as you go along. Plus, if you have questions or you want someone to one customizing and hand holding then all you need to do is email support at claddaghrs@hotmail.com* and Rea staff will jump into action. It doesn’t cost you anything, and it is totally private and confidential. You can also post questions on the club and either someone from Rea or one of the lovely family of friends in the club will respond. And on the matter of food – there are some items in the Toysack which deal with nutrition. They are a tiny starting point and quite honestly the most you should think of doing is either to read and learn, or use the learning to do a little cleaning up of your present eating habits.

If you attempt to tackle all three aspects together right at the start – emotions, nutrition and exercise – it’s a lot, and your life is busy enough without trying to take on too much all at once. To do so will only cause you to raise your stress levels and if you look at the Marylebone Model in E1 and do key word demo, again you’ll realize that stress affects your stomach and digestion. So you can slow your progress down by not trying to do everything all at once. Tackle it stage by stage, and it all flows smoothly and easily in a comfortable and exciting sequence.

When you have gone through the Toys and start to explore the Village area, so many of the previous barriers will seem to have dissolved or be under new management, then and only then is it time to start in on the nutrition and for this it’s time to go and get E2 from the website. This isn’t free: it will cost you approximately $31/£21, and represents the only cost to you.*

E2 helps fund the support service team of 14, and also ensures that we can give you free all the rest of the whole sequence, including the Toysack. So it represents the bargain of the century since by the time you have reached E2 – if you accept our advice on the stages – you’ll be almost home and dry, your life will have changed enormously for the better in almost every area, you’ll be ready to lose weight successfully and permanently without some stupid diet plan that will make you miserable and unhealthy, and it hasn’t cost you a dime. You’ve had an exceptional and unique trial for free, and all that you have learned and experienced and benefited from is yours to keep, even if you don’t purchase E2! Now time to start and begin collecting the pieces suggested in the sequence we advise. Don’t just read the Toysack; begin using it. A tool only becomes useful when it is applied. And as you apply, you are building, for the first time ever, a solid foundation upon which you will erect your successful weight loss.*

Why Obesity is Essential

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.

- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

This post is orientated mainly to newbies but it may also give old timers who have got bogged down a few pointers.  I apologize in advance as I’ll take as long as it takes to get the message over.  Additionally, I’m going to split the post into two parts practical preamble and the story bit.  Anyone who skips the practical is wasting their time.  Please do it. FIRST.

I can talk till I am blue in the face and after so long I can talk with the voice of many decades of experience as a therapist.  It doesn’t count.  Water off a ducks back, if you DO practicality, then you’ll understand in full.  If you read, you’ll either say wow; I can relate to that or bull doings.  All of you reading this post are highly qualified and experienced dieters.  Yet you are still fat.  And you will be fat till the day you die, if you keep on doing the same thing that you have always done.  So you have nothing to lose by taking a few minutes to humor this lunatic.  At worst, you can thumb your nose at me and say I’m talking bull doings.  At best, you stand a chance of achieving your dream. 

Diet plans have a built in flaw.  No, it is not that they don’t work.  It is that they take over the driving wheel for you.  You pay up, or don’t pay up according to the plan but either way you learn zilch that matters and the diet plan craftily doesn’t deprive you of hope.  So, you’ll be back.  Don’t believe me?  Check these messages from Andrew Guruji’s group on an allied subject of cravings (read the Rea Interview with Chet Day that is listed in the club links or jump down to some additional cravings posts in the workbook*).  If a diet company had done its job, these folk would not need to be asking questions like this and sounding as lost, uncertain and confused, as they do:

<<<<<< Chris, I have food cravings too, and have read the same thing, the cravings signify a lack of something the body needs.  I also read a suggestion for when we feel hungry, to drink water.  Water is the most important substance we can give our bodies, next to air.  I've tried drinking water when I have cravings and it does help.  I don't know much about this subject.  I do believe it is very likely that our cravings are telling us we need something specific.  Sincerely, Feather :)

--- In AlternativeAnswers@y..., carp119@a... wrote: > Can someone tell me what craving a certain food means?  I heard that it means that your body is lacking something.  I am always craving cheese.  any kind.  I know it's not the best food so I'm concerned that I am lacking some vitamin or mineral. Any ideas? > > Chris L.

When I crave cheese, Chris, it usually means that I need more essential fatty acids.  I used to crave fatty foods all the time (cheese, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Ruffles potato chips with dip, etc.) but quit craving them when I started taking a healthy dose of flaxseed oil and/or salmon oil every day.  When I stop the supplements, the cravings come back within a few days.  My naturopathic doctor explained that the body can't send the brain a detailed message like I'd like some essential fatty acids please.  It has to send a message of I crave oily food in the hopes you'll eat some things that have the right oils in them.  Your craving could be for essential fatty acids... or calcium... or something else in cheese.  I sometimes crave grapes and never have figured out exactly what it was in them that I am dying to have.  Since it's not a bad" food, I give in and get the grapes even if it's winter and cost a bundle.  In your case, Chris, I'd suggest you try EFA's if you aren't on them yet.  If you do calcium supplements, I'd recommend calcium lactate or calcium citrate but NOT calcium carbonate which can be difficult to absorb.  Everyone that I know that has developed kidney stones was on calcium carbonate!  It's cheaper but not a good choice IMHO. Good luck! - Anna

It is timely to repeat the subject for newcomers so let’s do it right and start with some practical experiments which will throw the spotlights on the nitty gritty.  Would you please start by digging out the KEY WORD DEMO (located in the library) and doing it with a friend or partner with some panache and energy applied.  This is what happens every single day of your life when you are not watching or paying attention so it is nothing new to your sub-con.  It will, however, tell you that you have one, and if you have one that it works the same as everyone else’s.

Next, go the Anchors pages located in the Baby Steps Toward Change section and have a play around.  This will tell you how easy it is to lock in a feeling for life, or have someone else lock it in for you.  The anchoring technique is loosely based on what happens when you acquire a phobic response.  It takes a split second to acquire a phobia about spiders or mice and this is nothing ‘wrong’ but merely an example of how perfectly and swiftly your subconscious picks up new learning and wires it in.

Many of you tell us that you cannot get the technique to work for you and therefore it does not work, period. However, if you read the follow up sheet on collapse of anchors you can erase this experiment. Think of a time when you were REALLY angry, totally pissed off with someone or something. Bring the memory back and the feelings will trot along happily to have you feeling as mad now as then. When the feeling is strong, clip a finger and thumb together, hold for 5 seconds and release. Now go and raid the fridge for a minute or five, or walk the mutt or watch TV. Then clip the same finger and thumb together. How do you feel??? This is anchoring in action.

Anchor triggers can be a word, a feeling, a picture and once set, they can trigger for life in the background, with no conscious input at all. A parent makes a seriously derogatory comment to you in childhood and that incident becomes anchored and it will trigger for the rest of your life. Some of the triggers, when fired will drive you to compensatory behavior, like bingeing, because you haven’t a clue what is going on, other than a duff feeling and the spin off panic reactions.

Next, if you are visual, this is easy; if you are not, work with feelings or sounds. Think of a time when you were REALLY angry and picture the incident or see it or hear it. Perfect, is it not. In a flash you feel the lot, and you’ll probably be looking for the perpetrator of the original to initiate round 1001 or whatever.

The brain codes specifically for all memories and the image you look at or the sound/feeling you have is very specific. This is the territory of the Lego kit, the building bricks of past posts, technically known as the sub-modalities of experience.  Your subconscious has to have a reference code to know where something is stored and how to bring it back and reconstruct it accurately.  So look at you anger picture and notice the main features. 

Is it big and bright, is it close up and so on.  Let’s take an example.  It is big and bright and very much ‘in yer face’.  Playtime.  Shrink it down and see if this makes the feeling better or worse.  Then enlarge it again and turn the brightness down.  Better or worse? Put it back the way it was.  If it is close up, try moving the picture further away, to the left, center, or right – or even above you, below you or behind you.  Better or worse.  Put it back as it was and tot up the list of those sub-modalities that made it better.  Now change them all at once and voila, your nasty old memory has just got itself castrated and it is harmless.  Leave it as it is, and celebrate your new learning skill.  I am sure there are plenty of other memories you can defuse by changing the sub-modalities and if you hit the library, you’ll find the Lego kit resources to help*.

OK, brief but usable.  There are more elements but these few suffice to illustrate that you have a sub-con, it works and you can direct its operation.  Neither this, nor what follows will be the least use to anyone who believes that either their conscious mind rules, or that they don’t have a mind or that to use the mind is a mortal sin and the motorway to fire and brimstone. 

The rest of you, follow me and pay attention.  What I have been trying to illustrate is the awesome power of the computerized and automated subconscious.  It is the most powerful computer system in the world – even in a village idiot – has the same and more design flaws and limitations as the computer you are currently in front of.  The sub-con may be very powerful, but it is also incredibly childish and has no intelligence worth mentioning, no future pacing ability, no great flexibility of choice; it works only in the present moment and it has limited executive powers.

It needs your conscious mind to request or tell it what you desire because it cannot guess.  So while you possess this awesome power.  It needs someone to sit at the keyboard or it is stuffed.  Sub-con has to continue working 24/7 whether you are consciously involved or not – it looks after 40 billion body cells and a lot more besides.  So, if you are not involved, it has to do its best, unaided and alone, and this is where the problems start to pile up, because its best has serious limits. 

Based on the forgoing practical experiments, I’d like you to look a bit closer at the childhood influences that can affect your weight.  Nothing monumental – I’m not referring to the tragedies of child abuse but the perfectly normal everyday family existence where no one is perfect, parents do not realize that a word spoken in haste or anger can have a profound influence for life. 

Do you recall being criticized and told that you were ‘stupid’, ‘inadequate’ or something similar?  Remember it now.  How does it make you feel?  See the point?  All those single sentences were registered by sub-con and they are still ‘live’, but behind the scenes.  That doesn’t matter.  You encounter an adult situation where you feel inept or inadequate and sub-con triggers the original incident back