Tips on Losing Weight the Healthy Way

This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's Renegade Roundtable, which can be found at http://www.RenegadeRoundtable.com. In this excerpt, Phillip McClusky shares what he tells the others he coaches who want to lose weight the healthy way.

Renegade Water Secrets with Phillip McClusky, who lost 200 lbs. and found health and happiness in a raw food lifestyle. He is the host of www.lovingraw.com.

Kevin: Let’s kind of turn the tables here because now you’re coaching other people on how to lose weight. Someone comes to you, 300 pounds, kind of like the lovely woman out in Israel who’s listening to this call right now at 3 o’clock in the morning, probably 4 o’clock now, she’s got a client who’s 300 pounds, the client is diabetic, has dropped their blood sugar and all. How do you coach someone through that? What’s like one or two or maybe three tips, principles, that you would coach someone doing that? Because I know there’s a lot of practitioners on this call.

Phillip: Well the first thing that I really aim for in any kind of coaching I do is I want to discover the reason why. Anybody can say, “Make a better food choice.” And we might know that up and down. Even when I was overweight I kind of knew that me eating a large pizza for dinner is not the best food choice and that having a salad is better. We can have the knowledge, we can read books up and down and we can know every single thing there is about health and nutrition but still eat the pizza. So I want to really discover with a client what’s the reason why we’re choosing that pizza and how can we break that pattern? Is there a trigger involved with that? Does eating a giant bowl of pasta remind us of family and of love and of sitting around the table with family? And does every time we want that feeling of that we go for pasta? Do we have an emotion that’s associated with food? Is there a way to break that trigger? Is there a way to separate that emotion? So those are some of the things that I look to do first. Find out what’s behind there. Is there a lack of self love and subconsciously we have that going through our mind and so we tend to abuse ourselves? We know it’s time to eat but we just want to keep hurting and hurting and filling and filling. Is there a big void there that we’re just trying to compensate for and really fill ourselves up with?

So I kind of go onto the emotional aspect of it first and kind of really discover what’s behind all that. Once we find that place and we’re able to pick out some of those different things, then we can actually start to say, “Okay, now we’re in a space where we want to love ourselves so we want to do the best things for ourselves. We’re no longer trying to hurt or injure ourselves. Now that we’re making good choices for ourselves and things that are going to help us, let’s figure out what are some of those good choices. “ That’s when a food routine comes in and figuring out how we can slowly bring ourselves to the next level as far as maybe losing some of the things that we’ve been consuming like sugars and gluten and some of those things, a little bit at a time. And then seeing if we can bring in some friendly foods and some fruits and vegetables and work in some of those things right off the bat.

So it’s a slow process. I’ve known people who have gone overnight and have no issue, but not everybody’s like that. Finding out where you’re client’s really at is the most important thing. I don’t believe there’s any cookie cutter formula for anything. That’s why a lot of times when some of the raw food authors come out with the book and they say, “You have to do it this way, “ is I think that works for that person that way, and it works for a lot of people, but it doesn’t work for everybody that way. So I’m a firm believer of educating myself and encourage people to educate themselves about all the different styles of raw foods and different ways of eating and then just working intuitively with themselves.

The first step is discovering why we do it. The second step is after we’ve discovered the emotional issue finding out what some good choices are to sort of replace some of those negative foods or bad foods that we’ve been eating. And then as a third step learning to use our intuition and teaching the client how to make choices based on their own body, not on anybody’s rules that they’ve set about for them but literally just making choices based on your own body.

Maybe your body hasn’t had greens in 15 years and you’re body is just craving that chlorophyll and just really wants it. Somebody might have green juice every day and a green smoothie every day and a salad with a bunch of different kinds of greens and their body is just craving that. For that person that’s going to be right. But if I just say, “Okay, you need to do the exact same thing that Phillip did, or the exact same thing that this person or that guru did,” then it’s really me just putting somebody on a program that may or may not work. I want them to find out what’s going to be the best for them. That’s kind of what I guide them along with and bring them to a space so that they can kind of discover themselves, because I don’t want to be another guru or take the place of another doctor and just tell them what to do. This is all about self-empowering and about you really finding out what’s best for you and going from there.

Kevin: So we have about two or three minutes left. I did want to ask one last question and then we can talk about what you’re doing about your website and the book, the project that you’re working on. The question is this, you’ve lost 200 pounds, do you feel like you can accomplish anything?

Phillip: Absolutely. And I feel that everybody can once we set our mind to it. I’ve really moved from a space of hopelessness and depression and not sure if I was going to live to a space of feeling limitless about every single thing in my life and knowing that there’s nothing that we can’t accomplish if we put our mind to it. I believe that’s not just for me that’s for every single person here. There’s nothing that any of us can’t do. Weight is the smallest thing. Once I lost the weight it opened my world up to a whole new world as far as changing jobs and relationships and priorities and my outlook on life and spirituality and just coming up to a place of feeling confident and strong and being able to speak in public and give lectures and motivational talks and different things. I would have never been able to do that before. I never had the confidence to do that or the willpower to want to get up on stage or share. I might not have even cared enough, to be honest with you. It’s put me in such a new space.

So many people just relate raw with food, and it does have to do with food but once you start to rid yourself of some of those old foods and some of those dyes and pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, all those different things, dyes, colors, chemicals, that really are just poison to the body and kind of dumb you down to an extent, once you get rid of those out of your body you start to discover who you were really meant to be and the purpose that you were here for. It puts you in a space of really having the best day ever, living in a limitless life and just knowing that anything is possible.