Weight Gain Journey: the struggle sets in

Apr 10

Posted in News

This is quite a personal post. Most of my posts aren’t, but this one is. You get to choose how you deal with that.

When I started out on my particular journey of personal change – to gain weight and attain a BMI of 20 – I knew that there were likely to be bumps in the road. I knew that it probably wouldn’t be a smooth progression of weight gain every week, and that I might struggle to keep up the change. I also knew that I was likely to have some existential dissonance, because, after all, the shape of my body is part of who I am, and changing that is changing who I am. I’ve been this shape as long as I can remember, and I’m used to it. Even though I want to be a different shape, the conservative parts of myself whose job is to keep me safe by resisting change aren’t going to like the process.

Let me expand on that last sentence before I go any further. It used to be believed that there was basically one “executive” personality function within the mind, exercising command and control over all the rest, but it’s proved elusive. (That doesn’t stop a minority of cognitive scientists from still believing in it.) It appears that the mind is more like the Internet: a committee with nobody in the chair, a giant and sometimes fragile consensus. This is why at times we have the experience of parts of ourselves wanting to do one thing – like change – while other parts appear to be resisting. The resistant parts, generally, are parts that were formed to protect us during uncertain times, often in childhood. They’re just doing their job of protecting us, but they’re doing it in a way that isn’t necessarily helpful to the whole, adult person in the current situation.

More and more in my hypnotherapy practice, I find myself working with the disparate and even quarrelling parts of my clients’ minds, getting them to do what I call the “parts conference”. This is where they, metaphorically speaking, sit around a table together, with the creative and problem-solving parts interacting with the resistant parts and coming up with ways that the resistant parts can be comfortable that the person is protected, while still allowing the necessary change to occur. I base it on work by Edgar Barnett in his book Analytical Hypnotherapy. Barnett’s method doesn’t require the client’s conscious mind to become aware of the strategies that the parts come up with (and certainly doesn’t require the therapist to ever know what the strategies are), so there’s no need for them to be put into words, just into feelings and actions.

photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

I’m seeing good results with this approach. Usually when people visit a hypnotherapist it’s because they want to change but somehow can’t; they have some sort of internal conflict going on. Settle the conflict – reminding all the parts that they have a responsibility to work together for the good of the whole person – and it seems to free the client to change in the ways they want and need to.

Anyway, that was kind of a digression – I hope an interesting one. Back to talking about my own experience, because part of the point of doing this exercise is to give me up-to-date personal experience of making a significant life change, so that I can empathize better with my clients’ struggles.

Last Friday when I weighed myself, I found that I hadn’t gained any weight since the previous week. I’d eased off on stuffing myself with food, as I mentioned I would in Eat as if you were the weight you want to be, and I had evidently eased back too much. Now, I got officially weighed on Monday for a supplement study that I’ve volunteered to be part of, and according to that weigh-in I weighed 57kg, where the weigh-in on my bathroom scales on Friday said 54kg. I re-weighed myself in the same clothes with the same junk in my pockets when I got home, and it looks like my scales are weighing a couple of kilos light (and I had picked up a kg, to 55, since Friday). I’ll keep using the same scales, though, to keep things consistent, and weighing myself on Fridays to give a consistently spaced set of data points on my graph at Fridgegraph.

Anyway. Point is – sorry, I’m rambling – point is that I felt pretty discouraged about not gaining any weight last week, and I’ve been feeling a bit demotivated. I’m carrying on with the eating and the exercising, but in life in general I’m feeling demotivated, directionless, and resistant to paying attention. Paying attention is one of the things I go on and on about, so it seems there’s an internal struggle there – and in fact, I was not paying attention very well all last week, so the lack of weight gain is probably a symptom rather than a cause.

What am I going to do?

Well, I’ve started carrying the Motivaider again and turning it on, to remind me to pay attention. That’s helping, though I’m still drifting a bit rudderless. What I need to do is sit down and give myself a therapy session and a parts conference.

I’ll let you know how that goes.

Technorati Tags: weight gain, nutrition, parts therapy, parts conference