Context

Our weight is our most personal of personal challenges and for many people, it’s been a lifelong challenge. You may think that your body simply reflects your lifestyle (your behaviours); every imbalance creates a stressor, which then leads to food and/or inactivity, which then shows up on your body. But did you realize that your body also reflects your life (your beliefs)? Every negative thought forms a limitation, which affects your sense of deservedness, which determines what you will allow into your life, even though you may say otherwise. When it comes to weight loss, we’re unconsciously reminded of this every time we step in front of the mirror. Our bodies become the most visible example of incongruency in our lives.

Background

Conscious Weight Loss™ is the result of my recent 4-year odyssey with my own lifelong challenge. I didn’t fully comprehend the scope of what I was creating back then but I always knew it had more to do with personal growth than weight loss – weight loss was the natural outcome. I’ve since seen this process morph into an even deeper and substantive evolution and leadership model for myself and for my clients, opening up unimaginable possibilities for each of us. I’ve also developed a much more reverential view of this process, one that respects it as a daily practice – a profoundly different way to live – in shifting from living with struggle to living in joy.

Frankly, I designed this process for myself, an ordinary 40-year-old woman (now 44) with about 30 pounds to lose. I didn’t anticipate the relevance and broad appeal it would eventually have with others. I was interested in exploring my penchant for sabotaging myself, most often through overeating or procrastinating, and how this inevitably left me feeling like I wasn't living up to my full potential. While I was able to create success in other areas of my life, I rarely allowed myself to enjoy it and always felt I was capable of more. One of the first truths I had to learn to be with was that I was “conspiring in my own diminishment”, not just in my weight loss efforts but in my life overall.

So I started articulating and capturing everything I was going through with my weight loss and in sharing this, I discovered I had a gift for putting words to people’s experiences. I was doing this with fresh perspectives and with such clarity that they were understanding the “why” of their weight loss struggle for the first time. That clarity would lead them to profound insights about themselves and enable them to step more confidently into their actions, creating the success they had been searching for with their weight – it was giving them the clarity to act.

It was surprising to me to see who was responding to this process. It was equally effective at taking the last 10 pounds off of personal trainers as it was in taking the first 100 pounds off of the morbidly obese. More specifically, dieticians, nurses, therapists and other health care professionals were gravitating to this process over everything else available to them. It was then that I truly started to appreciate the universal principles this process is grounded in and how applicable they are to every one of us.

What was most surprising to me though was the coaching my clients needed to fully accept the success they were creating in this process. They literally didn’t know how to be in this new place of joy. And so a significant part of this process developed to coach ordinary people on how to be with their own brilliance and learn how to have extraordinary impact on others – it was helping them understand their life matters.

Finally, I’m humbled to know that I’m a conduit, not an owner, of this work. The flashes of insight that show up in the moment and the deep wisdom that bubbles up over time all stem from an unbridled creativity that presents itself as needed. I’m humbled to know that it’s my role to get this work out into the world, that it cannot be accomplished alone and the ever-expanding scope of it means it won’t be finished in my lifetime. For every life it touches, I consider it an honour and a privilege to be able to contribute.