Health: Losing 50 Pounds and Keeping it Off

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Jim Katsoulis shares on his journey to health, that included losing 50 lbs. and keeping it off.

Renegade Water Secrets with Jim Katsoulis, a certified master hypnotist, a NLP practitioner, a yoga instructor and great motivator.

Kevin: Let’s get right into it. Let’s talk a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are now, because you have an interesting story behind everything that you’ve developed.

Jim: Yeah. I can say, for anyone on this call, the thing I want to make absolutely clear is that my behaviors have changed exactly 180 degrees. So I have completely hanged the way that I eat. I always make the joke, and somebody that’s been on the other calls may have heard this, but my last name’s Katsoulis , which is Greek, you see that movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” I always like to point out that they don’t call it “My Skinny Healthy Good-Eating Wedding.” So again, that’s where I grew up and food was really central --meat, sweets, everything, junk food, the whole thing. And so I grew up with that. And that’s what I learned to eat growing up. And a lot of it was good and a lot of it wasn’t good, but I got to a point where the weight started coming on and I wasn’t able to control it and I used a lot of the methods that most people use, which is willpower. And I did have a lot of willpower, so I would force myself to really work out hard and eat a certain way. What I would find out is when I did get results is that they wouldn’t last. And this really wasn’t only in the physical areas of my life but really in all the different areas in my life. I was able to do things for a little while, but I wasn’t able to make things stick. I wasn’t able to get myself motivated long-term. And so it was by the grace of God I suppose that I came across neuro-linguistic programming, yoga, hypnosis, and some other things as well. But really those are the core of my new information that allowed me for the first time in my life to really, truly understand what was going on with my mind.

So the first step was really understanding how I thought, how I behaved the way that I did. And it gave me an understanding that was practical. And I can’t overstate how important that is because I think most of the time in this culture if we learn psychology at all it’s so theoretical -- id, ego, whatever -- I just wanted things that I could learn and use right away. And so with neuro-linguistic programming and, not so much hypnosis, but the philosophy of hypnosis, understanding how hypnosis works, that really allowed me to make real, real deep changes in my life. And so I was lucky enough to be good with myself and really transform the way that I ate, the way that I acted, the way that I thought, really everything about it.

And then it became such an important part of my life that I began doing it professionally. And I worked with people one on one to help them create changes. I started off as a generalist. I worked with anything anyone wanted to change. I would help them change. And as I continued to do that, refine my techniques more and more until I came up with what I call self-hypnotic programming. And that’s really an approach that I’m going to share with you tonight. I’ve always focused more on health, so I focus a lot on weight, weight control and vibrant health. But what I want you to understand is that what I’m going to talk about tonight is not so much...We’ll get a lot of questions which you’ve probably heard but what I want to invite you to do is take a step back.

And what I’m going to suggest is that you look at these questions and this approach from a new angle. So that’s going to be the real thing. We’re going to reframe things. As we do that I’ll give you a new way to look at these questions that normally come up. So that’s what I want you to understand. So it’s not just the specifics of what I’m going to say but the way in which we’re going to look at it. That’s what I want you to take away from this. So listen, I’m going to make it as explicit as possible, but notice that when we approach things in a new way, when we think in a new way, you’re going to begin getting new results. And it gets interesting. Most of the questions and the answers that we get, it’s the same ones we’ve heard. It gets boring. It gets discouraging. So I want to show you that, I’m going to give you a new way. At the very least it makes it a little more interesting. Find some new answers.

Kevin: Well let’s get into some of these questions. By the way, you lost about 30 some odd pounds too, right?

Jim: Fifty, yeah, I lost fifty pounds. And that happened over 10, about 12 years ago. Yeah, I guess I should have mentioned that. I lost 50 pounds and I’ve never, this is the important thing, it wasn’t through dieting. So in 12 years now I haven’t dieted once. And this is the impressive thing, not to impress you but to impress upon you the power of the techniques, is that my weight has never shifted more than five pounds. There’s always a little fluctuation but I’ve never gone back up. That’s a key thing. That’s really where a lot of my techniques came from.

NLP is based on modeling and so if you want to be successful you study success. And one of the real differences for me was when I began finding people and studying people and finding out how people had lost weight permanently, for more than two years, had done it. And what I found out is very obvious things that they were doing different than what most people did. So it’s really about studying success.

Kevin: A lot of people, and I think I want to take this from an approach of more general because there are people on this call who want to lose weight, there are people on this call who want to stick to a raw food diet, there are people on this call who want to stick to a vegan diet. All of which you are very familiar with. So the first question is, I think it’s one of my favorite ones, is how do I get started? One of the users said, “Hey, how do I just start?”

Jim: Sure, sure. That’s a great question. And this is a great place to start. Again, what I want to tell you is I want to take a step back. So often people go through this same pattern. A real quick foundational knowledge to understand where I’m coming from. Hypnosis says there’s a conscious and an unconscious mind. Real simple. Conscious mind is the part of our mind that is very logical, understands what we should do. Okay? Why we should do it. And that’s the part that we usually use to try to motivate ourselves. The thing to understand though is that most of our lives are run unconsciously. When you wake up in the morning, Monday through Friday if you’re on a regular schedule, you do the same stuff. You don’t have to think about it. You can go through most of your day without even having to think. And then on the weekend you have a different schedule.

You do the same stuff and you don’t have to think about it. And this is really the way we run, ultimately. You can be as mindful as you want to be but ultimately the majority of your life you’re kind of running unconsciously. So you think about your ability to walk, to write, to read, these are all unconscious behaviors that you’ve learned and now are run automatically from the unconscious mind. And the thing that happens is all your behaviors are in your unconscious mind. So this is the part of the mind that we want to begin to explore and understand. And when we want to make changes this is the part we want to focus on.