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