Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much

 

An Interview with Colette Baron-Reid

 

By Randy Peyser

 

 

As a lover of all things “oracle,” it was a delight for me to interview internationally-renowned intuitive, Colette Baron-Reid, creator of The Wisdom of Avalon Oracle Cards, the #1 best-selling author of The Map, and founder of The Master Intuitive Coach® Institute.

Colette hosts a weekly call-in program on CBS at www.NewSkyRadio.com and has been featured on Dr. Phil, Oprah and Friends with Dr. Mehmet Oz, and George Noory’s Coast to Coast among others. A popular Hay House presenter, she has spoken to more than 150,000 people in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and has advised more than 35,000 individual clients in 29 countries.

Colette’s new book, Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much®, published by Hay House, comes out this month. This book focuses on the complex relationship between empathy, eating, and weight-loss. If you are a sensitive person who’s packed on the pounds and can’t seem to take them off, Colette offers a cache of wonderful exercises that have helped hundreds of people melt off the weight — without dieting.

For more information about her new book or coaching programs, visit http://www.colette baronreid.com/en

 

Randy Peyser: What are the characteristics of people who feel too much?

Colette Baron-Reid: People who feel too much have a sense of the world beyond their own boundaries. Being empathetic, they can feel the energy in a room just by walking into it. For example, they can tell when there’s been tension in a room. It’s a palpable feeling, and it feels like it’s an emotion that is their own.

Randy: How does empathy apply to weight loss?

Colette: Empathy is the ability to feel others. People who are highly sensitive and have eating issues tend to experience their empathy as an overload. Throughout the day they get more and more agitated. By 4pm, they often turn to food to ground themselves.

Put a highly-sensitive person into a high-stress situation, like a family gathering where people are drinking, or a situation where they may feel pressured to perform, and the stress will feel overbearing. Under these conditions, highly-sensitive people often experience what I call, “the Pufferfish Syndrome” where weight is gained even if they have eaten normally or eaten nothing at all.

Other issues can affect highly-sensitive people as well. We are becoming more empathic as a civilization. For the first time in history, and in any given moment, we have access to information about people on the other side of the planet. Wherever we are, communication and information is delivered so rapidly via cell phones, Blackberries and texting, that we really do have access to other people’s experiences.

The more we have access to people and global events from the internet, the more we are bombarded by information eliciting emotional responses from us.

As such, we’ve become “non-local”; we’ve become global in our reactions. For example, oil spills, tsunamis, and wars are not part of our local experience, but we are subjected to our personal reactions to them.

Humans were designed to experience what is in our general locality. Our intuition allows us to be non-local and to connect outside the boundaries of consciousness. We experience the emotions of the world in such a big way that we are always on hyper-vigilant patrol.

Another issue affecting those who are highly sensitive is that we live in a consumerist culture where we are taught that there’s not enough and that we need more. “Not enough” is a theme that bombards us in the news every day. We live with the idea of droughts, food shortages, devaluation of the dollar, an unstable economy, not knowing if our retirement money will be there, and having to work into our old age, for example.

Women also receive the message that they have to be skinny to be beautiful. Our standard of beauty is abnormal. The average American woman is a size 10 or 12, but we are told that we are supposed to be a size 0. That’s ridiculous. In countries that are economically copying the West, like China and India, people are now experiencing eating disorders they never had before.

Randy Peyser: Can you talk about what you call, “porous boundaries”?

Colette: People who are highly sensitive don’t always know where they end and where others begin.

Randy: I expressed that exact sentiment to a partner many years ago who responded by saying, “The parts that hurt — they’re yours.”

Colette: (laughs) People who have porous boundaries are constantly tuned into other people. They know when a person feels broken and want to fix them. Porous boundaries are the crux of co-dependency. We have no control, and we do not know where we end. There’s no level of independence between people. We “bleed” into each other. For example, my mother was a Holocaust survivor. From her life experiences, the pervasive idea in our house was that we were not safe. If someone rang our doorbell, we didn’t want to answer it. We would literally hide. If my doorbell rings and I’m not expecting anyone, I still feel like I need to defend myself.

Randy: How does this relate to eating?

Colette: Eating is a very physical experience. In the moment, when you don’t know where you end and others begin, and you feel overwhelmed by the amount of stuff you’ve taken in, the only thing that helps you to shift from that discombobulated state is a physical act. Eating

is the most physical self-soothing act we can do. You put food in your mouth, and right away, your entire system is focused on that — the taste, the sensation of it, what it means to you, the positive nurturing, the self-soothing. Food is a quick and effortless self-soother. It’s a detour away from feeling something.

Randy: What do you recommend to counteract these feelings?

Colette: For people who feel too much, the most important thing is to identify if you’ve taken on too many feelings. You don’t have to analyze the feelings or worry about what you’re feeling. You just need to detach from those feelings.

Randy: Can you give an example of how to detach from feelings?

Colette: I have developed a 3-minute trademarked process called, “IN-Vizion®,” that I wrote about in The Map. Part of the process involves seeing yourself as inhabiting a landscape that represents your thoughts, feelings and beliefs. This process enables people to quickly say, “Where am I?” instead of “What am I feeling?” All of a sudden, you will be looking at what appears to be a place. We turn your feelings into a place and then you learn to recognize that you are not that place.

We use indigenous symbolism to get distance from the place. We use something with wings because winged birds appear in all traditions in archetypes that connect humans with Spirit. We invite whatever comes to the imagination of a person to come forward. They get on the back of the bird, go off, and then see themselves at a distance in an area like a sanctuary where they feel safety and certainty. Then they have the ability to go to some level of sanity and objectivity to see what is really going on. The IN-Vizion® process has now become the foundation for my coaching school. It’s fast and it works every time.

Randy: Talk about creating an “experience board.”

Colette: An experience board is different than a dream board. On an experience board, you put images or words that elicit an emotional response from you. You want to use images for emotions that you want to reinforce in order to “imagineer” your future. We are like computers. We base everything on memory from information we have taken in, but we can train ourselves to have new expectations by using tools like an experience board. When you continue to reinforce an emotional experience, eventually the brain and subconscious start to believe that this is the truth.

Randy: I love the exercise about making a shopping list for your new life. You encourage people to create this list as if they had no obstacles.

Colette: Your list could be anything that you want to overcome, or life experiences you would like to have or thought you could never have. This exercise challenges us to see past our self-limitations or self-identification. You can ask yourself, “If I didn’t have any limitations, what would I do?”

For example... writing this book was on my shopping list. I was terrified of writing it. I had a lot of shame because I could not control my weight. I am not a size 0; I am a size 8 or 10. I also want to be fearless. Fearlessness and being completely myself without fear of reprisal are on my list.

Randy: How effective has your program been in helping people lose weight?

Colette: I did a case study on 100 people. Using my system, the average weight loss for 3 months was 16 pounds. The largest amount lost by a single person was 60 pounds and that person didn’t diet.

Randy: Can you offer some advice about food?

Colette: The best eating for three months is to not eat sugar or flour and eliminate processed foods. If an item contains more than 5 ingredients or lots of chemicals, don’t buy it. Your body needs to be clean. The IN-Vizion® Process really helps with sugar addiction. There’s so much more I write about in the book, but this is a start.

Randy: You also discuss the importance of changing the magnetic field around us.

Colette: Yes. A lot of us have Electro-Magnetic Frequency (EMF) poisoning because we sit in front of computers. EMFs come out of computers and electric cars. Every electrical appliance in our homes emits an energy wave of positive ions that affect the atmosphere. We are also magnetic because our bodies are electric. We collect EMFs like they are lint or dust. Soaking in two cups of Himalayan salt in a bath will clear the EMFs off your energetic field. EMFs release into the hot water where they change bionic structure, producing negative ions, which counterbalance whatever you’re tuned into.

Randy: You suggest 4pm as the time to take this bath. Why?

Colette: That’s typically the time when people who feel too much can’t take on any more. That’s when we start eating high carbs, going for drinks, or drinking lots of coffee — anything to get out of ourselves.

If 4pm doesn’t work for you, soak the moment you get home from work. Then change your clothes. This will help you to clear yourself so you can start your day again. You will be in a different state of being to carry on for the evening, and be less likely to detour around food.

I also advise people to do IN-Vizion® exercises while they are in the tub. For example, you can meditate and build a sanctuary; say “positive in, negative out”; or breathe in light and push out a muddy color while taking your bath. You really will feel different.

Randy: Can you talk about unplugging from the energetic cords of others?

Colette: You can feel when somebody is sucking your energy. For example, you get off the phone and feel drained by the person you were speaking to. To cut cords, you have to first identify there is a cord. Then you have to see who it leads you to. Next, you can imagine that the cord is cut and see it coming back to you like a vacuum cleaner cord that coils itself back into the vacuum. Cutting cords involves the symbolism of identifying something, acknowledging that you don’t want it, and saying “no more.” It’s very freeing. You take your power back.

Randy: A lot of sensitive people eat from stress. Then their adrenals get overloaded.

Colette: When we are in flight or fight and we feel anxiety, our hormones and glands get thrown off and our adrenals constantly pump adrenalin. In effect, we think there’s a rhinoceros charging us in the forest. Adrenal fatigue is very common for people who feel too much. We have a class on supplementation and a list of supplements in the book that are helpful.

Randy: You also discuss the importance of remembering to go out in nature. Many of us are sitting at desks instead of getting out for some fresh air or a walk by the ocean or through a grove of trees.

Colette: People forget that nature is crucial — especially those living in urban areas who don’t experience much greenery at all. Going for a walk reminds us that we are part of an extraordinary living system. It brings us back into more of a harmonious quality internally. You won’t get that at a gym where you are surrounded by equipment.

Randy: What about the role of metabolism? So many women hit perimenopause and the weight just gets packed on.

Colette: Perimenopause is a hormonal thing. We start to see our bodies change and then we will react. We try to control our weight by going on a diet, but we put on more weight because the body is responding to our thoughts, too. Your thoughts, feelings and beliefs affect your physiology. We get into a vicious cycle. Also, there is no real ritual to honor our passage into menopause. On top of it, there’s the anxiety to conform to a particular body weight. We begin to feel bad about ourselves and then we reach for chocolate.

Randy: Speak more about your weight-release coaching program and institute?

Colette: Weight Release Energetix is a 3-month coaching program using the IN-Vizion® Process in which individuals learn how to help highly-sensitive people lose weight. We teach new ways to dialogue with the body and heal parts of the self that have been disowned. There is a nutritional component as well, but the strongest emphasis is on the emotional component. The coaches who have taken the coaching program have released so much weight. One coach dropped 50 pounds.

My Master Intuitive Coach® Institute is a holistic coaching program. People can sign up for different modules, including Weight Release Energetix, Divination Dynamix, Heart Dynamix, Wealth Energetix, Intuitive Kids and more. We will be signing new coaches on at the end of February or the beginning of March.

Randy: Do you have a final message?

Colette: There is hope. Love yourself and accept yourself. Forgiveness is not an option; it’s a must. You must give up resentment, anger and hatred because you must relinquish the things that keep you tied to your past. You can live in society without being completely overwhelmed. There are tools that work, like the IN-Vizion® Process, as long as you work it.

Randy Peyser edits books and helps people find literary agents and publishers. www.AuthorOneStop.com  She is the author of The Power of Miracle Thinking. www.MiracleThinking.com