Weight Gain Triggers

Craig are you there? Craig?

Yeah, hi Jon.

How are you doing?

Good. How are you?

I’m good.

I was just wondering, I’ve been overweight from a very young age, like right about nine or ten years old, but you talk about in your book that there’s triggers that make you fat but how can you work out what those triggers are?

Well, let’s talk about that. You say since you were eight or nine year’s old, right?

From what I can gather, yeah. I remember playing football and I was nine years old and I was front row.

What does that mean, front row?

Well, oh sorry, rugby league. Probably don’t know much about rugby league in Australia but it’s — yeah, you normally sort of have to be fairly big to play front row but I was sort of nine years old all playing well above my age.

So you were a real big kid when you were nine years old?

Yes.

Is that right? Okay. So is your family big?

Yes, yes. Pretty much everyone in the family’s big, yeah.

Okay. So, and prior to nine years old did you have a weight problem?

Not that I can remember, no. I look back at some of the old photos and I ran about — I suppose five or six I was probably just a normal kid.

Okay, okay. Just tell me a little bit about what your life was like when you were eight or nine years old, what your family life was like? Was it stressful, was it harmonious, was there fighting, was there brothers and sisters, was your father upset, like angry? Like what was your life like?

It’s pretty hard to remember back that far but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t too bad. I mean there was obviously the usual arguments of brothers and sisters. I’ve got two sisters. I suppose I can’t really remember too much about me childhood. That’s probably the frustrating thing about it as well.

That, to me, is a little bit of an indication like that there could be something there to trigger you, but a lot of times when people say they’ve had weight issues since childhood, we usually come to a trigger point where something happened. Maybe a bully beat them up or the father — something happened with the father. Everyone has all kinds of stories, including myself, which were triggers.

And what happens is, when you’re a kid you’re just so vulnerable to — and kids are like always — can be so mean to each other, and that’s going to cause a type of stress that’s going to make your body want to hold on to weight. It’s going to be like, whoa, this is unsafe. I’m living in an environment where I’m threatened. I could get beaten up or I could get yelled at or I could get in trouble or whatever it is, doesn’t matter whether the stress is a physical stress or emotional stress, but it could trigger your body to want to hold on to weight.

So there could be something like that going on and it’s worth investigating especially when you say you don’t remember your childhood because that could –

Yeah. As I said, I don’t remember a lot. One of the few things I do remember, I mean I have lost my hearing and that happened when I was around about that age. I lost the hearing in one ear. I don’t know whether that might have been the trigger.

Oh. Well, how did that happen?

That’s devastating.

Well, I had the mumps.

Oh, okay, okay.

So, say for example, if we pinpoint, I mean, I don't know how we can pinpoint it, but if, say for example, it is the mumps, then how do I go forward and say, okay, well that’s definitely the trigger and then we sort of release it sort of thing?

Okay. Well, if that’s the case, then really you just have to kind of work with your body to sort of communicate to it that you’re living in a safe environment and it doesn’t need the weight. And it's interesting, it ties in a little bit to what I was going to talk about today, about being genetically thin or genetically fat because some people say, “Oh, my whole family’s fat, I’m just genetically fat and that’s why I can’t lose weight,” and people that — like if people look at my family. I come from a family that’s very heavy, and if you look at my before pictures, when I was over 186 kilos or over 400 pounds, and you look at my whole family sitting around and you look at that person, you say that person’s genetically fat.

And now five years later, I’ve been the same weight. I eat whatever I want. If people look at me and they follow me around, they see I eat whatever I want, I’m not on a diet, they say this person’s genetically thin. So does that mean?

There’s just this whole new study going on of biology called epigenetics where it used to be — the traditional paradigm is that your genes are written in stone, so if you’re fat it’s because genetically you were meant to be fat and you can’t change your genetics. What they’re finding now is, even though your DNA is an actual code and the code is what it is, the DNA, what it does, is it expresses certain genes. And each gene can have up to 30,000 different variations and those variations are influenced by your environment and by your beliefs and they’ve done some incredible studies to show how your beliefs affect, on a cellular level, which genes get expressed.

So what I’ve done is I’ve just sort of — you kind of like — it’s a very new science and you kind of have to feel your way through it, and I’ve just found, from experience, that visualization has just been a really, really effective way to communicate to your body that you don’t need that weight anymore. And I have a sort of visualization that I used to do about becoming genetically thin where I would actually imagine a thin version of me and going into one of the cells of my body and actually going into the DNA and just programming it into that DNA, just this really thin version of me, fit version of me, right into the cell of my body the DNA. And then just imagine that it spreads through every cell of your body and that every cell of your body gets this programming.

And even though it sounds strange I can tell you it works and there’s just so much research now that’s coming out to prove that your body is influenced by your beliefs and your thinking. So I’d like you to try this visualization where you’re just visualizing your exact ideal body. Visualize it going into one of your cells, and just right into the DNA and just program it right into the DNA, and with the intention that you’re a genetically thin person. That you can activate the genes, express the genes from your DNA that make you naturally thin, that your body just wants to be thin. It doesn’t need that anymore. And then imagine it spreading to every cell, and then just — what happens is, when you do a visualization the first time it might take a couple of minutes to do it, but then you can just do it in a second. Like as I’m talking to you right now, I can do that visualization in two seconds. So it becomes kind of like something that you get better and better at. And that’s going to help you a lot. Now let me just ask a couple of other questions because I might have some other suggestions. How much weight do you need to lose right now?

Well, according to the figures that they say it’s probably around about 50 kilos.

50 kilos?

Yeah.

Okay and so what — do you have sugar cravings in the afternoons and the evenings? Like do you crave sugar?

Yes, pretty much, yeah. At the moment, I’m suffering from depression and anxiety but that’s from a foot injury I received about two years ago, so as a result of that injury I got terminated from work so there’s been a fair bit going on the last probably two years which that’s caused me to put on a bit of weight as well.

Are you taking medication for that?

I am, yes.

What type of medication?

I’ve just changed it. It was Lexapro for depression, but now I’ve changed it to another one because I had trouble sleeping because of the pain in the foot as well. It was actually causing me to wake up during the night.

Yeah, okay. Are you still having the pain in the foot?

Yeah, yeah. Pain in the foot’s pretty much all the time. They’re pretty much saying there’s nothing they can do with the foot.

Okay. That’s going to be — that’s a little bit of an issue. The medication that you’re taking for depression also can cause you to gain weight. What I find is a natural cure for depression is taking live foods and omega-3 fatty acids because the omega-3 fatty acids, over time your brain gets covered with this very permeable membrane, and that permeable membrane allows for really good communication with the neurotransmitters. And the problem — a lot of times the reason why depression gets worse, it could be caused by an incident that happened, but it gets exacerbated by the fact that there’s not really proper communication between your neurotransmitters and your brain cells and that can cause bipolar type of situations and mood swings. But when you have that problem with communication —

Yeah. Well, I was on medication which actually was supposed to stop those transmitters. It was actually to stop the pain from going to the brain. I was on that medication as well, but I had to stop that because I was getting too tired.

So your medication is a bit of an issue right now. But I would look to work, first of all, to, over about a six-month period, get off of the antidepressant medication, and that I think you can do by adding omega-3s and listening to the CD for about six months. That’s going to help enormously. Practice that visualization. Once you’re off of that medication, there’s a very, very good chance that it’s going to be much easier for you to lose weight.

Okay.

But don’t go off of the medication until your doctor says so, but it could — there’s a very good chance that you can get — and you have to get weaned off of it, but you can get weaned off of it in about six months period.

Okay. All right then. Thanks very much.

Okay, bye.

Okay, bye.