Emotions And Your Body: Creating The Body You Really Want

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest Year of Your Life, which can be found at http://thehealthiestyearofyour life.com. In this excerpt, Jim Katsoulis, shares on positive and negative
emotions and the body you want.

The Healthiest Year of Your Life with Jim Katsoulis, a certified yoga instructor, Master Hypnotist and Master MLP Practioner who’s helping others bring the excitement back into their lives.

Kevin: You talk a little bit about emotional mastery and to the Program Yourself Thin. What are some of the ways that, what are some important ones that we really need to focus on, that you think that we’re missing out, particularly in our society because you mentioned that.

Jim: I think the biggest one of all, and it’s so simple but it’s so powerful, is relaxation. We are way over-stimulated. I fall into that category as well. The difference being that I’ve learned how to let it all go in an instant. Shift it in an instant. I can breathe deep, I can relax my shoulders, let my mind slow down. Just take a break. When I got certified as a yoga instructor and I was at the ASHRAM it was funny, because watching -- it was a 30-day program, and watching people from the first day to the thirtieth day, they weren’t talking necessarily about healthy eating. They hinted at it, but just from being in that situation where there’s no television, no radio, no newspapers, there’s really very little outside influence and you saw people slowing down. So as they began to be more relaxed, to slow down, they began to eat less. When I came back from there people were constantly remarking how slow I was eating. It was nothing that I ever focused on. I started realizing that’s kind of a natural way to eat, only because I was in more natural surroundings.

I think relaxation is really one of the most important things because it will – you start to feel healthy and you focus on feeling really good, you find that your eating naturally begins to shift. You naturally want to eat a little less. You naturally want to drink more water. One cure all emotion and feeling, I’d say it’s relaxation and calm. The other ones are, that really work well: confidence. Success. Success is huge, because as you create a change in your life you want to have some motivation. You want to keep clear in your mind times in your mind when you’ve succeeded. When you’ve done what you’ve wanted to do. People can remember times when they’ve failed or they can remember the times in their life when they’ve succeeded. Which ones you remember more are going to influence how you think of yourself, how you live your life. I offer in the class notes two menus. One of the menus is all the positive emotions: love, success, gratitude, self-esteem, confidence, accomplishment and it’s just on and on and on. Just by reading the words you start to feel better. As you start to create those emotions in your everyday life, everything begins to shift naturally, because on the right side is all the negative things: guilt, blame, feeling bad about yourself, depression, anxiety, frustration, irritation, disappointment. These are the words we’re hearing all the time. So you start to realize that this is part of the world we’ve been given and some of us have accepted. So we need to move ourselves out of that regularly into this positive thing and experience this positive thing. The emotions of success, the emotions of love, the emotions of intimacy in a sense, even with ourselves. As you go into those emotions it becomes easier to do all these other things.

Kevin: Awesome. I’m sitting here listening to him, taking it down, taking notes. It’s great.

Jim: Even the words – the best thing I leaned and I call it the Philosophy of Hypnosis. By the way, in reality all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. And that’s really where a shift in my career was, a big change was when I went from trying to hypnotize people and create changes in them to teaching them the method of how to hypnotize themselves. And I use the word hypnotize as another word for influence. Program themselves and the words, even the words have so much influence because the difference between, some people say, “I got to stop being so lazy.” But what do you actually want there’s a big difference between saying “I got to stop being so lazy” and “I want to be more motivated naturally.” They’re two completely different things. People say, well I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this. A lot of times people think dieting, they think they got to do it all – they got to get all psyched up. I’m ready to do it. Now I’m ready to do it. All my energy’s ready! But what happens when or you get socked in the gut, you get some bad news or you get really tired or you get sick or something else happens and that energy’s gone. That’s when they fall back on their old habits, because it’s all relying on just getting fired up. This is all about how can I maintain the changes and continue acting this way even when I feel like crap. Let me ask you, when you get sick or don’t feel good, or you get some bad news, Kevin, do you just eat everything in sight? Stop exercising?

Kevin: I don’t usually get sick, which is good. Because of how I eat. No, no, no, no. I go out for a run.

Jim: Right. See. It happens naturally. By the way, I’m not saying the only way to create this is by learning how to program your mind. Again this whole program has been designed -- I studied over a hundred people who created change in their body. People that used to have weight issues and didn’t anymore. What was the difference? Well, it’s on how I thought about things, how I perceive things, I used to think when I felt depressed that ice cream was going to make me feel better. Now, I think going out for a walk will make me feel better. Eating an apple will make me feel better. It’ll take my mind off it and when I’m down with it I’m going to have a little more energy and I’m going to feel good that I eat well now. It has nothing to do with this getting psyched up. This fake motivation, it’s about a real difference in the way that you understand and perceive the world.

Kevin: 98% of people who lose weight gain it back.

Jim: That’s what I mean. The people I studied, they had lost the weight for over two years or more. That was why. Everyone knows how to lose weight, that’s one of the things -- I don’t like this term, I use it because it’s what everyone uses, is the idea of weight loss because it implies that you’re always going to be overweight in a sense, a master of weight loss. Psychologically to always say, I’ve got to lose 20 pounds, I’ve got to lose 20 pounds and then you lose the 20 pounds, one of the theories is that you have to gain the 20 pounds back on so that you can lose it again. One of the very first parts of the Program Yourself Thin course it’s called a body design session and you begin to define what you want in terms of what your goal is. So instead of saying “I want to lose 20 pounds, I want to lose 20 pounds” it becomes I want to weigh X amount of pounds and I want to be this size clothes and then this is the important part, because it’s going to make me feel more excited, more happy, more energy, I’m going to feel better about myself, I’m going to feel attractive, I’m going to feel sexier, I’m going to be able to communicate with people easier. It’s a whole motivation kind of strategy. It’s not just weight, it’s just not the size of the clothes, but it’s the emotions that you’re going to feel in that lifestyle that are influencing our behaviors. That’s what people don’t spend enough time boosting up. You’ve already got them, Kevin. I created them for myself, too. People that have been successful in changing their bodies, they feel the power of that lifestyle. They feel the pleasure of it, the enjoyment out of eating that way. It’s real to them. You don’t have to talk yourself out of sweets and candies and all the rest of it. You feel it already.

As people go a little bit deeper into what does dieting mean to you, it’s always negative and so why would you want to do that? Your unconscious mind is there to protect you and make you happy. So the option comes up and it says, well, you can struggle and feel deprived and be miserable your whole life or you can enjoy yourself right now and eat this cake. That’s a simple choice, but what happens when it becomes you can eat this cake and it tastes good or you can have a life where you can feel really, really good, you can have some of the cake and you can wear the clothes you want, you can feel like a role model and on and on and on. Now it becomes an easy choice as well, but most people don’t give themselves that choice, because they’re locked into the diet mentality, where it’s all or nothing. That’s not a sustainable thing. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result, but the diet industry has become insanity. It’s always these unsustainable eating plans or exercise plans and they work for a little while and then you can’t do it.

Kevin: I had a short consultation with a girl at an event that we were at and her dietary program that a nutritionist had put her on. To me it sounded like absolute torture. I said to her, “Do you like this?” She said, “No.” I said, “You have to stop.” She looked at me, like crazy.

Jim: Again, it’s hearing this message and getting a different perspective on it. It creates a bunch of clarity. A lot of the programs out there, it’s the same, if you look a little deeper every diet’s the same thing. This one does no carbs, this one does no red meat, this one does no sweets after eight, whatever, but it’s all these things are unsustainable. They’re extreme differences that you can’t maintain and they’re good for short-term weight loss but they’re not good for permanent change.

People know this. They know this, but they’re so desperate and they don’t have any other approach and the other approach in reality is stepping away from dieting. Dieting is almost a guaranteed failure, in most cases. What you said, by the way, 98% of people that diet, they go back, they gain the weight back. But the question we need to be asking is what about the other 2%? What about the people that lose weight in different ways? Because most of the people I’ve talked to, out of all -- over 100 people, I can’t think of one of them that did it through dieting. I know I can’t diet. I need to make a lifestyle change, but how do you do that? You do it by understanding things a little differently and changing the way that you think and ask questions to yourself.