Last post

This is the last post for Slender Women as I consolidate my two businesses and take all my knowledge and experience into the one business.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Sarah

Drama. Drama. Drama!

Do you enjoy a bit of drama? I'm not talking about terrible events that happen to us during our life time. I am talking about a little bit of excitement through created drama. The fact is that we all like a bit of drama now and again.

This week's blog is about drama addiction which leads to all sorts of problems and issues for the person with the drama addiction and for all those involved. What is it and how can you avoid it?

 A little bit of drama through the media is great. It meets our need for variety and excitement. The problem occurs when we want to create unnecessary drama for the sake of it or we become drawn into someone else's unnecessary drama. This sort of drama is unresourceful and can lead to all sorts of negative issues.

There are weekly television shows and magazines that promote and romanticize drama. These magazines follow the lives of famous people and report on their mishaps, misfortunes and misery as well as reporting on their successes. If you flick through one of these magazines you will find more articles on drama than on success. Television adverts about soap operas hook people into the next week of viewing with snippets of drama to come. Will that character survive the car crash/fire/broken heart?

One of the workshops that I run for organisations is about recognising and stopping drama between staff members at work. People like to meet their need for variety by creating situations at work such as bitching about other staff members, spreading gossip and trying to form groups that separate one set of staff from another. It is derisive and causes all sorts of problems, not to mention poor morale and creates an unpleasant workplace.

The way to avoid this sort of drama is to meet your need for variety in positive ways. Here are just 3 ways that you can meet your need for variety resourcefully:

1. If you enjoy watching or reading about drama choose books, television programs and films that portray either a real story, or about people overcoming adversity. Personally I really enjoyed the 'ANZAC Girls' last year, which was about the real story of 5 nurses during WWI. The events were taken from the diaries of the nurses and portrayed brilliantly by a wonderful group of actors.

2. Get out of your comfort zone every week. It could be something as simple as shopping somewhere different, like the supermarket in a different suburb or trying somewhere new for coffee. It could be as dramatic as trying an new sport like sailing, golf or lawn bowls. Have a go at Toastmasters because getting up to talk in front of a group of strangers is going to put you a long way outside your comfort zone.

3. Meet new people. This might be by joining something as suggested above or it could be through a 'Meetup' group that shares similar interests, or a club of some kind. Finding people with similar interests to you helps you make connections. You might not want to meet them outside of the club but enjoy talking about your shared interest at the club meetings. It is a great way to increase your skills in a hobby in addition to meeting new people and getting outside your comfort zone. You could also volunteer. There are a variety of organisations, charities and events that require volunteers. 

What action will you take this week to increase the ways you are meeting your need for variety?

have fun
Sarah

Why a weight loss pill can be a good thing

Last Christmas my siblings and I gave my mum the gift of a cleaner. Once a fortnight the cleaner comes in and gives the house a 'top to bottom' clean, which doesn't take long in my mum's small house. My mum doesn't need a cleaner but I knew that she would like a cleaner.

My mum has never liked cleaning. I can remember as a teenager that she would head upstairs with a duster in her hand and mutter something about dusting. However if you went upstairs you would find her on her bed, duster lying next her, as she enjoyed reading her book.

Now a very fit and healthy woman in her 70s she is absolutely able to clean her house, but she hates cleaning. So a cleaner was an ideal present. It is the sort of present that keeps on giving.

Every Tuesday there is a large red car in our road that stops for a few hours outside three houses. They are a local cleaning business and get business through word of mouth referrals. The houses they clean belong to busy mums who work part-time and would prefer to spend their free time doing something other than cleaning.

I have heard that some women feel guilty about not keeping their own house clean. I can only suppose that as a child they overheard or were even taught that a woman isn't a real woman unless she looks after the home and made that mean that they had to be the ones that cleaned it. Surely paying a cleaner is part of looking after your home. Who would want to have to do everything themselves? Not for me, that's for sure.

I agree that there are some things that we should earn, such as a qualification. I am aware that you can buy certain post-graduate degrees but for me that would feel like cheating. However there are many people who believe that taking some kind of supplement to aid weight loss and weight management is also cheating. I used to be one of these people. But the more I talked to women about their needs, wants and desires the more I came to realise that taking a weight loss/management supplement is like having a cleaner. You can do it all by yourself or you can get some help and enjoy more of your free time.

What are your thoughts on this?

Sarah

A pill for weight loss

When I was teaching nursing my students used to become frustrated when they struggled to perfect a skill. One day I was showing a group of nursing students how to draw up fluid into a syringe. Having been a nurse for three decades I had learnt to do this quickly and with one hand. Although I showed them how to do this with two hands because they were just learning, they wanted to be able to do it like an experienced nurse. However it takes much longer than one afternoon to learn any skill.

Over the past few decades we have become more and more impatient about having to wait for anything. Credit cards and long-term finance means that we can have many of the things we want instantly because we can pay for them over many years. We live in the fast lane. We receive more news in a week than a person did in a lifetime just one century ago. We want it all, and we want it now.

This is the same for weight loss. We don't want to have to wait to loose unwanted weight. We want to loose weight quickly, and with as little pain and effort as possible. We will always move away from pain before we move towards pleasure and most people perceive the process of loosing unwanted weight as potentially painful.

There are non-pharmaceutical ways to loose unwanted weight slowly so that you don't put it back on again but the snag for many people is the word 'slowly'. 

I had always had inflexibility around the use of pills and potions for weight loss. It seemed unnatural and therefore unhealthy, in my mind. But when I asked a group of women what they would prefer when it came to loosing weight over 90% said that they would prefer to use some sort of pill or potion to help them loose the weight more quickly and then utilise the rules to help them stay slender in conjunction with the pills and potions.

'The person with the most flexibility will have more choices and therefore have the most influence in any system.' is a NLP presupposition. In other words if what you are doing isn't producing the results that you want, change it.

I am now researching the higher end market of weight loss pills and potions to work out which would be the most appropriate to recommend to women who would like to speed up their weight loss and then learn how to maintain their goal weight. I will report back when I have some answers and recommendations.

What ever you choose always remember that you are not your weight. Being a healthy weight offers you more opportunities to enjoy feeling more energetic, more playful and maybe even a little more sexy. Being a healthy weight is about feelings and benefits and should not be about conforming to a cultural image.

Sarah

Use the power of quantum physics for weight management

Many years ago I was  invited to attend a family function; an in-law family function and usually I worried about them. Previously I had felt a bit uncomfortable and had had a few awkward moments. I had been reading about something related to this topic and was inspired to try a different approach. I would assume that everyone liked me. This had to be real. You can't pretend that you are pretending! You can't fake it. So I went along and assumed that everyone liked me and if they said or did something that I might have previously meant that they didn't like me, this time I would presume that it was them and not me. I had a ball. Everyone was so friendly and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Why was it different this time? What changed?


My thoughts and my perception.


In the 1990s Dr Candice Pert discovered that your thoughts are real physical things. Every time you have a thought it produces a unique neuropeptide (chemical) and an emotion associated with it. Think for a minute. How many thoughts do you have a day? This is the number of neuropeptides your brain makes each day. Your brain then makes billions of this chemical associated with the emotion  you are experiencing because of your thought.

The short version is that these chemicals attach to your cells and then enter them, and your cells get used to these specific chemicals. Your cells make more of the receptor points for their most common neuropeptides and eventually begin to crave them. In other words, your cells crave the common emotions (feelings) and tell your brain to keep providing the same neuropeptides which means that you need to keep having the same thoughts and emotions to keep your cells happy. Except that this can happen with negative thoughts. Your cells may be happy but you are miserable.

When you change how you think you produce different neuropeptides and when you think these thoughts that create the new positive emotion often enough, your cells will create new receptors for the new chemicals.

The trick is to feel the emotions that you will be feeling when you have achieved your goal or desired outcome. You need to feel those emotions as though it had already happened.

Start by writing down the emotions that you want to feel when have achieved weight management and then practise feeling those emotions every day.

Enjoy the benefits of quantum physics and you can read so much more about it on the Internet

Sarah

Discover how you came to believe if you are (or aren't) amazing

This is an amazing photo of an eight week old foetus taken using ultrasound. Until now the foetus has grown in exactly the same way for both a boy and a girl. But at eight weeks old their brains start to become very different because of the flood of testosterone if it is a boy.

That flood of testosterone will cause some of the communication cells to be destroyed and cells in the sex and aggression centres to grow and increase. Boys are born wanting to get to know their surroundings, interested in everything from the Christmas tree lights to your car keys. They don't want to spend time gazing into your face and learn about facial expressions and moods. As they develop into toddlers they are into everything and anything. If you have had boys you will know what I mean.

Little girls, from the moment they can focus, want to gaze at faces and study facial expressions. By the time they are toddlers they can tell from your face if you are happy or cross, upset or confused. They will look to you for guidance and support. A glance from you tells that they can or can't touch something.

Being listened to, even before they can construct a sentence is very important to them. They want your full attention and they want you to be happy about it. As a toddler a girl will do everything she can to get an adult to smile at her and most of her attention is focused on her parents. If she repeatedly gets a flat face because of depression or disinterest, or a sad or cross face, she will believe that it is because she isn't liked by her parents and she will look for that recognition from other people. It could be her older siblings or other adults in her life. She can make it mean that she isn't worthy and develop a lack of self-worth that can stay with her for years and affect every aspect of her life.

But if she is listened to, focused on with love and affection and happy faces (most of the time) she will believe that she is wonderful and worthwhile.

What this means is that if you are one of the women in this world who believe that they are not enough and have a low self-esteem it not you but what your very young brain made it mean all those years ago. And here is the good news. You can change that belief for one that recognises that you are amazing.

Enjoy being you
Sarah

3 ways to return to being slender after Christmas

I love Christmas. It is my favourite time of the year. I love the decorations, the glitter and sparkles, the excitement and anticipation, the planning, buying presents for people, the increased generosity of spirit collectively, and the food. Some of my favourite food is eaten at Christmas.

Usually I live by the 7 rules that help to keep to me stay slender but over Christmas I give myself permission to 'have a holiday' from some of the rules. This means that I usually gain a kilo or two knowing that once I return to the rules I will go back to my original weight. It always takes longer to return to my usual weight than it did to gain a few extra kilos and that is just fine because I know that I am going to reach my goal within a month.

There are 3 ways that can help you to return to your pre-Christmas weight without 'dieting' in the traditional sense. This is important because as soon as your primitive brain thinks that you are at risk of famine it will flick a switch to save as much body fat as possible. Instead try these 3 ways for one month to help you to return to being slender:

1. Greatly reduce added sugar: you can still eat 1 - 2 pieces of whole fruit a day but avoid prepared foods with sugar such as bottled sauces, biscuits and cakes, spreads and fruit juice. If you make your own juice use 2 vegetables for every piece of fruit. Avoid alcohol and all soft drinks.
2. Get back into meditating: during the busy holiday season it can be easy to slip out of certain habits, and meditating is easily missed when you are busy or relaxing with family and friends. Make of point of finding 10 minutes a day to meditate and start by breathing slowly and allowing your body to relax.
3. Get 20-30 minutes of gentle exercise every day: running around after people isn't the same as gentle exercise. Running around after people can convince your primitive brain that there is some danger lurking and flip the it must be a war, famine or flood' switch. Gentle exercise is calming, boosts your body and brain with oxygen and feel good hormones, gently builds muscle and can be refreshing.

Implementing these 3 easy ways to loose a few holiday kilos will help you to feel refreshed, energised and ready for 2015.

Happy New year

Sarah