Trauma Is Sabotaging Your Weight Loss and You Don't Even Know It

What if the weight you keep trying to lose is the very thing your body believes is keeping you safe? Welcome to Beyond Diagnosis. I'm Rita De Michele. This podcast is for people looking beyond symptoms and exploring what else might be possible for their health. Through expert conversations and real-life stories, we explore functional and holistic approaches to healing, wellbeing, and feeling like yourself again. Brought to you by the Beyond Diagnosis Collective, your connection to trusted holistic practitioners. Today we're talking about weight loss sabotage and why it's not always about discipline, motivation, or knowing what to do. My guest is Peter McLaughlin, a certified hypnotherapist and life coach whose healing journey began after diagnosis of leukemia in 2003. Peter helps people uncover the subconscious beliefs, emotional patterns, trauma, and fear that can keep the body stuck In the same cycle. Welcome, Peter.

Thank you, Rita. Thank you for having me.

We're having such a great chat before I press record about all of this. You know, you used a great word, which was multifaceted. Here we're talking about sabotage, etc., which is, you know, goes more down the emotional path, but it's so true. Weight loss is multifaceted. There's so many areas. But let's start with, Peter, why can someone be so desperate to lose weight yet keep returning to the same pattern that they're basically trying to escape?

I think the answer lies, at least the way I look at it, in understanding that there's 2 of you. There's your conscious mind.

Yeah.

Which is, which is the part of you that you identify with. When someone says, I like this, I don't like that, this is how I am, this is— they really tend to be talking about their conscious mind. When they're talking about things they can't control, like patterns and habits, they're talking about their subconscious mind. When they say, I don't know why I do this, it's because the number 2 you is pursuing that. And until you understand what the motivations are for your subconscious mind, it's very difficult to tease this apart because we're taught in our culture really to identify almost completely with our conscious mind. We get— we receive almost no education about the subconscious, what it does, how it functions, and how you, how you change or alter it.

I love that number 1 and number 2.

Yeah.

I haven't actually heard it described like that before, but it's so true. It's like some people say, you know, it's like the angel and the devil sitting on your shoulder. One goes, oh, do this, do this. And the other says, no, no, do it like that. You know, it's that constant internal dialogue, that battle.

This is, this is how I'd like your listeners to think about the conscious and the subconscious. Imagine that you are riding on top of an elephant and the two of you are going along just fine. And then you want to go right and there's something off to the right that the elephant is afraid of. It might be water, it might be fire, whatever. And the elephant refuses to go to the right. It doesn't matter how strong you are as a human being. It doesn't matter how hard you pull that elephant. It's not going over there if it doesn't want to go over there. And if If it does, it's immediately gonna come back. That's your subconscious mind. Establishing harmony between the human rider and the elephant, the metaphor for the subconscious mind, is what you have to do if you wanna solve a problem that you've not been able to solve for a long, long time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, that the subconscious is what actually drives most of our life, is 95%?

Yep.

And our conscious awareness and thinking and what we call motivation or control or anything is only 5%?

Exactly, exactly. And that's why I make the metaphor of the human rider sitting on top of a massive elephant. That's about the right percentage if you think about the mass and the body weight of a human versus an elephant.

I would suspect that a little light globe would have just gone off there and just a little bit of relief going, so it's not all about me. It's not all about the fact of willpower or I can't do it. Why can other people do it and I can't do it? Maybe that other person can do it because In their subconscious, they're not dealing with what you're dealing with.

Exactly. In that metaphor, the elephant is fine going to the right, which is the direction you want to go in. It's not, it's not refusing to go over there. And I have a completely different take on so-called self-sabotage than most people do. So the whole, the whole concept, the word sabotage comes from the French word sabot, which means shoe. And French workers 100, 200 years ago that were unhappy with their employer would throw these wooden shoes into the gears of the machine to disrupt, destroy, destroy the machine. So it implies that part of us is messing with us, is angry with us, wants to ruin our— the machinery of our lives. And I don't accept that at all. What I know that it is, is the subconscious mind is not happy.

It's—

it doesn't feel safe going in the direction that you consciously want to go in, and that's why it's fighting you. It's fighting you in order to protect you. That's its concept. Even if the threat is not actually a real threat, the subconscious mind believes that it is. Why is this? Because the subconscious mind has no concept of time. Something that happened 30 or 40 years ago is happening right now if it's never been healed. If a woman, let's say, was sexually abused as a child, the subconscious may be saying, we need distance from the outside world, an extra layer of flesh, kind of like armor. To protect us. And when that person goes to start losing weight, they may get to a certain point and the subconscious says, that's it, no more, because it's not safe. Even if the threat is 30 or 40 years ago and the person who did this to this young girl, let's say, is already deceased, it doesn't matter. Which perfectly lines up with PTSD. It doesn't matter how long the soldier is out of the military.

Hmm.

It doesn't matter how many thousands of miles away from the incident they are. If they have PTSD, something can and will trigger it, and they will respond as if they're still in combat.

Yeah.

Even though the conscious mind knows I'm not. With all of this is to influence not the conscious mind, but rather the subconscious mind, to help the subconscious mind in, you know, high-level way of thinking about it, no longer classify that incident as a clear and present danger, but rather something that's been resolved, something that is safe.

Why would this— why would the subconscious mind, for the example that you use about the woman with the weight, like it gets to a certain point and then it goes, oh, no more? What is that point and why? Why, why is it— is it because if you went all the way, is it a feeling of, oh, I've never felt this success, or I've never felt this attractive, and then that attraction makes you feel unsafe? What is it that keeps— sort of cuts it off at a certain point? It goes, no, no, no.

Well, because we're human beings and we're not machines, it would be different theoretically for different people. I mean, you could have a person, let's say, that is afraid of the water. They don't know how to swim, and they might feel comfortable in the water up to their ankles. The person right next to them who is afraid of the water and doesn't know how to swim might become comfortable up to their waist.

Oh.

But at some point, anybody, you know, theoretically is going to be like, I'm already out too far, I've got to come back. And that is what's going on in the subconscious. If that is the reason why that elephant will not go in the direction you want it to go in, it could be other reasons too. And it could be related to The perception could be, if I have more weight, I'm not as attractive. And if I'm not as attractive, I won't be attracting unwanted attention. It could be, I've got this armor or this distance between me and a would-be attacker. These are just some of the reasons, some examples of what it could be. And before you work with someone on a, on a weight loss path, you have to understand for them as an individual what's going on. You know, what is the, what is the root cause or the root causes for, for the, for the weight situation? Because as we said before we started recording, this really is multifaceted. I mean, you, you can't— I don't think you can, for a lot of people, just focus on the psychological and leave out the other factors because there are so many other factors. Stress. This is, this was one of the doorways that I felt like in my mind was presented to me. Because when I first started practicing, I wasn't comfortable working with weight loss because I didn't know how I was going to do it. I didn't know how I was going to— what my doorway in would be. And then I learned how when a person is in a stress response, the body dumps adrenaline and cortisol into the bloodstream. We know this because you can feel your heart gets an elevated heartbeat.

Right.

Sometimes you might be sweating, you might feel like you have more energy, maybe you get more clear. This is a stress fight-or-flight response that's produced by the adrenaline. The cortisol is another hormone that's dumped into your bloodstream when you're stressed, and that hormone cortisol tells your body to hold on to all available fat. Don't get rid of it.

Yeah.

And go find more. So this is an evolutionary mechanism, and you could imagine our ancestors When they were stressed out, it wasn't because they saw news of something that happened on the other side of the globe. It wasn't because 200 years ago they were watching television or something and they were watching, you know, somebody being murdered either in a fictional setting, which your subconscious mind treats as real, or even something real. So I would say weirdly, we are under more stress arguably than our ancestors. And when our ancestors were stressed, it means It— or it meant there was a war, there was a famine, the crops failed, the main breadwinner died, there was a big fire, something horrible happened. And that probably meant that their access to food was now going to be severely limited. And so it makes sense from that perspective that the body, the wisdom of the body, would be hold on to all available fat, don't let it go, because that extra fat might be what got them through a lean winter. It would make sense that we would have the urge to go find more food if we were stressed. And and in modern culture, we talk about stress eating. We talk about emotional eating. So we know that there's a linkage between stress and behavior with respect to food. So I feel like for anyone to get control over weight issues, you have to get control over stress, anxiety, anger, whatever puts you into a fight or flight response. Because let's remember how the autonomic nervous system works. Autonomic just means automatic. You are either in rest and digest or you're in fight or flight. There's no other option. If you're not in one, you're in the other by definition. Modern people stress about everything. Like I said before, watching the news, they get stressed out when they go to a movie and it's an action film. This is why when you're watching an action film, they advertise it as a seat-of-your-pants roller coaster thrill ride and Because it's stimulating your nervous system and your subconscious mind treats it as though this is really happening to you in the real world. And that's why your heart starts pounding, right? That's why you might start crying. That's why your muscles might get tense while you're gripping the seats, right? You have all of these physiological responses, including releasing adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream.

Makes sense to be selective of what we do and protect kind of protect our energy and protect what we're actually putting into our field and our minds and our subconscious. Because it's, you know, you know, the old thing, you know, NLP, they say, you know, think of a lemon.

Yep.

And how sour it is, and you'll start salivating.

Yep.

And you haven't even sucked on the lemon. Self-sabotage to me sounds like it's not really a failure, but a signal.

What I say to my clients often is it's like you're walking around holding the hand of a 4-year-old version of you, and the 4-year-old believes everything you say and think. So if you say, I'm no good, I don't deserve this, this always happens to me, the 4-year-old will believe it because the subconscious mind is literal. And if, if you really did have the hand of, say, a 4-year-old child and that child was afraid of crossing a busy street, Even though the light was in your favor, because maybe they don't understand that, and they, they're pulling against you saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Are you just going to drag them across the street? Are you going to sit down and explain it with— to them? You see how the light changes? Watch all these cars stop. Let's watch a couple iterations of this before you feel comfortable enough to walk across the street. Because that's what's going on in the subconscious. It's trying to protect you. The confusion is that you don't see any threat right in front of you because your conscious mind understands you're not in the military anymore. It understands that that abuse happened 30 years ago.

Yes.

And that the person that did it is dead, but your subconscious doesn't. And so do you want to spend the rest of your life in a battle with a force that, as you said, it's 95% of your brain's processing power? It's always gonna win. Or do you wanna figure out what's going on there? And the way you would interact with a child, treat it with curiosity and with compassion to resolve whatever that block is so that you don't have to be at war with yourself.

God, I, I think a lot of people have just gone a big sigh of relief that they're not broken.

No.

That they're not, you know, a total lack of motivation like we said before, and all of these things that they've been actually putting themselves down with, you know. Like, it can be such a vicious cycle and become depressing if you, you know. And, and then you've got all the outside influence of, why don't you just do this diet or that diet? And then they go, oh, that diet you're on doesn't work. And then it's just an absolute Sea of confusion. No wonder why people just throw their hands up in the air and reach for the next best thing they're, they're craving. I have this friend, and every time, you know, she was very much into personal development, and every time she was about to make change or she did some change on herself, she would say she would just naturally gravitate towards Eating, because she'd go, I'm gonna eat now because this will be the last time, you know, because she was like feeling like she was in that process of change.

Yeah.

So is that the kind of thing that you're saying, like, you know, how, uh, unresolved trauma can show up through cravings, emotional eating, or body shame, or even, uh, intimacy?

Yes.

If you have intimacy problems.

Yeah. Imagine being a doctor, just a regular general practitioner, and somebody walks into your office complaining about anything— anxiety, inability to sleep, excessive weight gain, migraine headaches, whatever it is. And imagine that you look across the desk at this person and they have 3 arrows sticking out of their body. You would immediately think, well, before we do anything, we're going to remove those arrows and let the underlying wounds finally heal, because they can't heal while the arrow is sticking out of your body. And I think it's— that's kind of what it is, that everybody is walking around with emotional wounds. And if you could see them, you know, in the form of, say, an arrow, everyone would understand, oh, you know, Betty Sue has 3 arrows sticking out of her body. You know, let's, let's help her get those out, and then maybe her back pain will go away. Maybe she'll sleep better at night. Maybe she'll have— maybe she'll have a better relationship. Maybe she'll lose the weight.

So what can we do when we find ourselves in that? Because sometimes we can find ourselves in a spiral that we can't quite get out of, and we find we're just, you know, eating almost like a frenzy. You know, because you just— something is really bugging you. So we talked about stress, we talked about subconscious and the emotions, but what other factors do you find in lifestyle that sort of keep us stuck?

Well, yeah, I mean, I think we— I would like to mention what you and I were talking about before you pressed record, and that was we both, you and I both lived through the 1970s. We were kids, but we remember what it was like. We remember what the 1980s were like, and in those decades, I don't remember very many heavy people at all. And people were eating cookies, they were drinking Coca-Cola, they were drinking beer, they were smoking cigarettes much more than they are now. So what happened? That's the question I ask myself when I think about a more holistic approach. And this is not an exhaustive list, but I can rattle off a bunch of things that are different. You know, I can say for sure that you and I really didn't look at much blue light at all. You know, we had TV, we had TV, but we didn't even have cable. So, you had where I grew up, which is in Boston, Massachusetts, we had maybe 5 or 6 channels. We didn't have 200. We didn't have 1,000 channels. And, TV went off at midnight or 1:00 in the morning. They put a test pattern on there and the national anthem would play and that was it.

That's right.

And, we certainly didn't have these devices walking around looking at blue light constantly, you know, inches from our faces. And it's clear that blue light disrupts our endocrine system that regulates our hormones, and our hormones have a big impact on our weight.

Yes.

And we haven't even had these as a species very long, but you and I can observe and say, wow, some things have really changed in terms of the general population. I don't think we had Growth hormones in the meat in the 1970s and the 1980s. We didn't have high fructose corn syrup. We had sugar, regular cane sugar. You know, these things are, are real, and they are interacting with the human body in a way that is, I think, obvious as more time goes on, extremely deleterious.

Yeah.

And we're fighting a battle We weren't really designed to fight. You know, we haven't had a chance to adapt to the speed at which technology is changing and how much time we spend with electronic devices, you know, staring into the light. I mean, we, we know for sure, if you watch experts about the effect of light on your endocrine system, it'll blow you away. You know, we're supposed to wake up in the morning and not look at our phone. We're not even supposed to have it in the bedroom. We're supposed to go outside and get that natural light, because the natural light tells your body, oh, it's morning. And this is what we do with your metabolism, for example, in the morning.

Hmm, that's right.

You know, we don't want to spoof the brain and the endocrine system that now it's a different time of day. Like, these things, I think, cannot be ignored. I think we have to look at them. We know for sure that people who have trouble sleeping, Have trouble with taking off weight. We know that. That's that's just a fact. Part of the reason is that if you don't have enough sleep, your body's looking for energy, and so it will go to you know candy bars, cookies, energy bars, you know monster drinks. What it'll caffeine. It'll look for these things, which are all going to add weight on you. And speaking of caffeine. Caffeine functions by creating an artificial stress response in the body. That's why it wakes you up. Yeah, we should understand this. We should know this.

Mm-hmm.

And it's not taught to us in schools. There's no— there's no, uh, it seems like there's no incentive for the healthcare system to teach us these things. So people are left, and thank God there are people like you, that are, you know, promulgating information like this so people can say, wow, I didn't know that, that's really interesting, I want to dig into that deeper. Yes, it's, you know, there's a whole, there's a whole seed oil thing.

Oh yes.

You know, part of, part of my journey, because I'm 64, and for the vast majority of my life I had no problem at all with my weight. And I want to say in maybe the last 15 years, suddenly I was getting weight on my gut. It was like, I'm not even eating that much. I don't drink alcohol. I might drink alcohol once a month or something, and I wasn't eating much in the way of sweets. And there it was, there it was, there it was. And I took an approach that, that touched on all of these different areas, and I felt like, okay, it's making a big difference for me. And I— and 15 pounds just came off, and it felt like it came right off of my chest and my stomach, and I was back to the weight that I was, I was most of my life. And part of it for me was thinking even farther back than the '70s. It was thinking back to our ancestors. What did our ancestors— how did they eat? How did they function during their day? And I was remembering back to being, you know, in my 20s living in New York City, and not— I didn't eat 3 meals a day. I didn't— I definitely didn't snack. I wasn't grazing. And I started learning about about insulin and about how every time you eat something, your body has to produce insulin to deal with what you just ate, particularly if what you're eating requires more of an insulin response. So obviously sugar and other form of carbohydrates, which turns right into sugar inside of your body. And so I thought, all right, so what will happen if I favor eating how our ancestors ate? If I favor more meat, and animal products, if I favor things like nuts and vegetables, what will happen? And what will happen if I just eat twice a day? Like, and I stop— let's, let's say I stop eating at 1 o'clock in the afternoon or 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and then I don't eat again until the next, the next morning. What happened for me— I'm just speaking for me, I'm not telling anybody what to do— but it went bang. It was like within a couple of months, boom, to normal. Crazy. And I think it's because of this They call it— I think they call it metabolic syndrome.

Yes.

When you reach a point where your body can't handle sugar anymore, you're basically a pre-diabetic. And so your body has to release more and more and more insulin into your bloodstream, and the insulin takes the, the sugar and it stores it as fat.

Yes.

And so if you de-emphasize— A, if you de-emphasize the, the food that produces a heavier sugar response— in other words, carbs— and you, you only eat, say, twice a day with no snacking, then you're giving your body all of this time. Like, for me, when I stop eating at, say, 1 or 1 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the afternoon and don't eat till the next day at 9 AM or 10 AM, I've got about like 20 hours sometimes. I'm giving my body plenty of time to digest all the food and then to start repairing things.

Yes.

And it's making my body more insulin sensitive and moving me away from diabetes and moving me away from metabolic syndrome. And this— I remember when I did this, and this wasn't long ago, Rita, when I did this, I thought, oh my God, why, why isn't everyone doing this? Like, that was honestly the first thought I had. Why isn't everyone doing this? Why are they taking drugs that could cause them to go blind?

It would not be fun, that is.

Yep. That might be $1,000 or more a month that maybe you have to be on for the rest of your life. And if it can cause people to go blind, God knows what else it might be doing. And again, it's one of these things where people haven't been on it long enough to really know. There's not like 50 years of data or anything, but, but the, you know what I'm saying? It was like, exactly.

Wow.

What? And, and the answer is always the same, which is there's no money in the, so then the natural solution.

I think one of the attractiveness around those products or any diet pill is that people have so much food noise, like what you were saying, eat twice a day, and then if you don't eat for a long period, I'm just wondering whether that gives the subconscious a chance. Does it ever relax? Like, how do we stop that food noise? Food noise is a big driver towards overeating and perpetuate all these emotions that make you sabotage yourself.

Yeah, it was for me too. And there's 2 more 2 more factors here, and one of them is the emotional factor. Your body is either primed— the pump is primed to burn sugar, or it's primed to burn fat. It can burn either one. We're basically dual-fuel beings. I would say almost all of us are primed— the pump is primed because of the diet that we eat in the West, is primed to burn sugar. And within, say, 2 to 4 hours, all that sugar is gone and the person's going to get really, really hungry.

Yes.

And that's why they snack. That's why they have to eat again. And it takes a few days of, of doing what I was talking about, like eating primarily animal products and nuts and vegetables and things, before your body switches over to burning fat. Once it switches over to burning fat, it's like the difference between burning wood You know, a log even in the most efficient wood stove might last, say, 45 minutes or something. Or burning coal, and the coal, like a shovel full of coal, will last hours. It's the same thing with the fat. Like, once you start burning fat, you realize, oh my God, I'm not even hungry. It's been 20 hours.

Hmm.

I wake up in the morning, I think, well, I should probably eat now, but you don't feel like you have to. It's crazy, but it makes sense. That this is how our bodies would have been designed because our more distant ancestors didn't have refrigerators. They didn't have supermarkets, you know, right around the block. They didn't have fast food restaurants all over the place. They had to hunt and they had to forage. I'm talking about like before farming even.

Yes, yes.

And they may have, they may have been able to feast for a while when the hunting was really good, And then they may have had a few days or even a few weeks when it was really lean. And the reason they didn't die is because they were burning fat. And it's estimated— I'm probably going to get this number wrong— but it's estimated that we have something like 30,000 calories on us of fat at any given time.

Sounds scary, doesn't it?

It does, but it's also a kind of reservoir that would keep us alive because if we— if the you know, the proverbial shit hit the fan and we lost our, our ready access to food, we'd all switch over to burning fat. That's, that's what would happen.

Mm-hmm.

And we would be able to go longer between meals without discomfort. And the hard part is, is we've been so acculturated around food when it comes to celebrations, when it comes to comforting ourselves, when it comes to a routine. you know, socializing, that food is involved in all of it, if not alcohol as well. And so there's a little bit— I found a little bit of panic in the beginning of, oh my God, I'm not gonna have dinner tonight. What's it gonna be like? Am I gonna be able to make it through? How am I gonna handle this? And part of, part of how I dealt with that was I just told myself, eat as much as you want for breakfast, eat as much as you want for lunch. That's how I decided to do this. So if I wanted to have 3/4 of a pound of beef, I would. If I wanted to have more avocado and more berries and more nuts and whatever else it was that I was eating, I would just do that. I kind of packed it in, and then I, I was able to realize, wow, that was pretty easy. I wonder if I back that off a little bit tomorrow, because I kind of stuffed myself. And so I gradually started backing it off and realizing, no, I can I can easily handle this. I can handle this window. But there definitely was an emotional component that I noticed myself having to navigate.

I used to have that actually. When I would come home from work late and everyone wanted to go out, I'd be like, wait a minute, I haven't had dinner. I haven't had dinner. Well, it never really mattered. It didn't hurt me that I would miss dinner that night, but there was an underlying panic. And I often questioned And what was that panic? Was it a sense of missing out? It wasn't for me a sense of missing out. Like, I'm trying to cover up that I missed out maybe when I was younger, and I'm trying to now cover it up by, I can't miss this meal. So there's so many things to it. So it— I'm really curious about if someone's listening and they go, well, that's fine, but I've got an addictive personality. Do our subconscious beliefs, do they really have an addictive personality is what I'm wanting to ask? Or do our subconscious beliefs create the addictive personality? Or is it our choices? You know, it's all related, but is addictive personality really a thing or are our emotions driving that?

It's a great— it's a really good question. And these are the kinds of questions that I love when they pop up because it, it induces me to dig down a little bit deeper for the answer. So to answer this question, I have to first tell you how I would define an addiction, why I think addiction even exists in the first place. Human beings are wired to avoid pain and seek pleasure in that order.

Mm-hmm.

And so for me, I believe that addictions are primarily driven by a person not wanting to be in pain.

Mm-hmm.

That pain could be boredom. That pain could be a sense of purposelessness. That pain could be a feeling of loneliness. It could be physical pain. It could be psychological pain. It could be a fear of death. It could be that they hate their job, right? These are all, I would say, a form of pain. And when the pain is gone, do you have to tell the person to stop taking the Tylenol, to stop taking whatever drug they're taking? You probably don't have to tell them to stop taking the painkiller if they're not in pain anymore. If the leg doesn't hurt anymore, do you have to tell them to stop using the crutches? You probably don't.

Yes.

So I think every human being in, in the— in certain circumstances Would absolutely start drinking alcohol or taking drugs or overeating or, or doing any number of things in order to numb themselves and/or distract themselves from something that is unpleasant or un— or, or uncomfortable. I mean, I, I'm getting some dental work these days, and anyone who's had serious dental work will tell you it hurts like hell. And when I come home and the Novocaine wears off and it's really hurting, I'm taking the Advil. Like, I'm not going to just walk around in all that pain. Well, what is it for a person who's got ongoing pain from a relationship in their life? What is it for the person who's got trauma from their past? And as I established before, the subconscious has no concept of time. Everything is now. They may not even know why they're doing it, but I'm I'm here to tell you, I believe that they're doing it to palliate some discomfort somewhere. And so if I— when I work with people with any kind of an addiction, including food, because I think that's the most utilized, in quotation marks, drug in our culture, is to find out, okay, what is the pain that they're trying to get out of? And resolve that. Because once that's resolved, then it's easier for them to just say, why do I need to keep eating that? I don't need this.

That's right. All of a sudden, it doesn't have the same emotional power behind it, does it?

No, it doesn't. If there's one thing, like a tagline to my philosophy, it's root cause.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's what the show is about.

I'm not interested in chasing symptoms around. The symptom is valuable in that it tells us Something's going on under the hood of the car that we need to take a look at. And the symptom is valuable because when it gets worse or it gets better, we know, okay, something is— something's moving, something's shifting here. And obviously in the work that I do, we're always looking for it to get better and then go away. That's what we're interested in. What I do with all of my clients, I'm going to do right now, which is to define what it is. What is hypnosis?

Mm.

Because the average person is— in fact, it's even more than the average person because psychologists don't receive training as to what hypnosis is. But everyone has been exposed to that concept through entertainment.

Yeah.

You know, even the lyrics of popular songs, comic books, movies, TV shows, newscasters will throw around these words. But everyone is coming at it from the dramatic or entertainment version of it, and that's the one that people are afraid of. They think, oh, I'm not going to let somebody take control of my mind and make a fool out of me by making me bark like a dog or, or cluck like a chicken in front of other people. When people understand what hypnosis really is, they, they generally just take a nice deep sigh and go, oh, okay, I get it. So examples, you're driving your car, you're thinking about work, you're thinking about a relationship, you're thinking about a movie, and you pull into your driveway and you can't remember driving the last 10, 15, or 20 minutes. You're playing a sport or you're working in your garden and you come in, you wash your hands, and you realize you got a big cut on the back of your hand. You're like, how did I get that cut? You don't know. You didn't even remember feeling the pain from it. You're in the shower. You look down at your leg and you've got a bruise on your leg that big. Like, where did I get the bruise? How come you didn't feel that? Or you're, you're watching a film and you're so engrossed in the film that it ends and you think, that was 2 hours? It felt like it was 20 minutes. Those are all examples of hypnosis. It's where you go from a large aperture of awareness To where you're so focused, it's like you're looking through something the diameter of this pen and anything outside the diameter of that pen, it's like it doesn't exist, including pain. And when you're in that state, you are much more of what we would call suggestible. In other words, your subconscious mind now opens up to receive information that can then influence your subconscious mind. And I would like to say, for anybody out there who is afraid of hypnosis, is afraid in particular of subliminal persuasion, do not under any circumstances look at your cell phone, social media, don't watch television, and don't go to any movies, and don't walk through the mall where there's stuff playing, because any of it could have subliminal messages embedded within it. And I know this because I make subliminal content for my YouTube channel. I make Audible content too, but my most popular track for weight loss has 3.5 million views right now, has thousands of people that have written in the comments section talking about how they lost weight just by listening to this thing while they were sleeping. And it doesn't work for everyone, but you can read the comments. It's got the good, the bad, and the ugly, everything in there. That proves that subliminal hypnosis works. And if I can make it, just one guy by himself in Florida with, with a laptop, then imagine what marketers and other kinds of businesses and the government could be doing. It's staggering to consider it. And you and I would not know, because when I make it, I mask the words with some other sound. So it could be music, it could be the sound of waves, it could be the sound of rain or whatever. And I, I, I write in the, in the description of my video exactly what's in there. And I've got a huge body of work, so people can look at my body of work and get a sense of who I am and what I would be doing. But you have no idea when you walk through a mall, you have no idea when you watch television, you have no idea when you look at your at your mobile device? None at all. So the per— you know, and when you watch TV, you are in a hypnotic state. You're watching a flickering image at a fixed distance that has emotional content that draws you, that draws your focus in. And if you've ever had the experience yourself or with a loved one where you call their name and they don't answer you, and you call it again and they don't answer you again, and they call you— you call their name a third time and they say, huh, what, huh, what, That's hypnosis. And they're being programmed, programmed by television. What do they call it? Programming. Yes, they're telling us what they're doing.

So true.

In hypnosis, and you're being programmed. And it's one of the reasons why television advertising is so powerful, that businesses for decades have been willing to spend billions of dollars on it. They don't do that if it doesn't work.

People take anything from this episode That is one of the most important, to understand that just sitting in front of a TV, you do become in a hypnotic state and you're taking in all of this. And all of this, like you were saying before, has an effect on our biochemistry.

God help you if you have the TV on in your bedroom and then you go to sleep. One of the reasons why I make subliminal sleep hypnosis tracks, including that one that has 3.5 million views, it's designed for For people to listen to while they're sleeping. Because when you're asleep, you are by definition in a suggestible hypnotic state. Your conscious mind is out of the way. All that information, whatever's going on in your environment, is going directly into your subconscious mind, which makes it frightening if you have a TV on, because God knows what you have on the TV. You've got a— you've got a crime show going on, you've got the news, you've got— who knows what you got? You got going a horror film, I don't know, verse— but it's also a time that you could be programming your mind for what you want. You could be programming, and you're not giving up any time. You're not carving out an hour. You're not carving out 15 minutes to program yourself. You're, you're in bed, let's hope for 8 hours, but even if you're only there for 5 or 6, it's still time when you could be playing a subliminal track. And programming your mind for whatever it is you want. Let's say in this case it's weight loss.

It's fascinating how it still works whilst you're asleep.

Because your subconscious never shuts off. And that's the reason why your heart doesn't stop beating while you're sleeping. That's why you keep breathing. That's why your immune system is still functioning. That's why the temperature, your body temperature, is being regulated. Because your subconscious mind is in charge of all of it.

Peter, I believe you also work with past life regression and soul memory and spiritual pattern influences. How, how does all of that relate to somebody's body? They're like we're talking about in this episode, possibly their weight in this lifetime.

What if you starved in a past lifetime and that, and that incident of starving to death Never was resolved. And so in your subconscious mind, which has no concept of time, it's, it's hypervigilant against letting that happen again. It might say, you're— we're just going to keep extra weight on you because if food becomes scarce, you'll at least have that extra weight that's on you to get you through a number of weeks or maybe a number of months before you starve to death again.

People will look at that if they believe in past life If they don't, you know, they may think it's just everything that's happening in this lifetime. It's a very interesting concept. And is that sometimes when people say the familial history or the energetic pattern has been passed on through the family?

It could be. Yeah, it could be. That's been proven by science. You know, they have done experiments where— and I don't know what kind of person does this, I don't think I could do it— okay, they traumatize a mouse, you know, they shock a mouse in the presence of some other phenomenon. Like, let's— and I'm just going to make this up because this isn't what it was, but you'll get the idea. So they shock a mouse and let it smell lavender while they're shocking it. And you know this from neuro-linguistic programming, you're creating an anchor Yes. You're tying together 2 disparate phenomena. So the, the pain of the shock with the smell of lavender. And then that mouse, they condition it, that mouse has a child mouse, and the child mouse has a grandchild mouse, and they introduce the smell of lavender to the grandchild mouse, and the grandchild mouse acts like it's being shocked. So something About that trauma is being passed through the generations. So could there be something passed through in terms of trauma that your ancestors suffered, including things that might pertain to weight gain and weight loss? Absolutely.

Fascinating.

It's already been proven. Like, it's already, it's already been proven.

And you can help someone access this in a hypnotherapy session.

Do they—

this is just curious— do they have to access their emotions to change, or they don't need to know, you just put in the positive subliminal messages?

So there's a distinction between hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Hypnosis tends to be— it's just the positive suggestion with a person in a hypnotic trance, and you're looking for the desired outcome. That's really what most of my content— most of it, not all, but most of my content on YouTube, because It's for a generic audience. It's hypnosis. Hypnotherapy has more to do with finding the root cause and resolving it because we were taught that the most powerful emotion always wins. You know, you could be looking— you and I could be looking at the most beautiful painting that an artist has ever created in the history of the world. And if there's a car accident right in front of us, where do you think we're going to put our attention?

Yeah. Yes, yes.

So my feeling is you always, if you can, you want to remove the obstacle and then do the programming. And I've thought about this in terms of a metaphor, like if you wanted to create a garden but you had a driveway there, you had asphalt, and you just threw the seeds on the asphalt, you wouldn't be very successful because the asphalt is like a block or an obstacle. If you removed all of that So that you had the soil and you tilled it and then you put the seeds down, you'd be way more successful. And then if you added one more step, which is you tended to your garden, so once a week, twice a week, you went out and weeded it and watered it, it would be optimized. It's the same with us. Remove the obstacle, put down the seeds, tend to the garden.

Very doable if someone would— is open to it, to— and to understand that. Stop fighting. With your conscious mind. Stop putting yourself down thinking it's willpower and, and, you know, why am I not like the other— everyone else who can do it? And, and start realizing that that's not driving the show.

You have nothing to lose by, by putting on some of these tracks while you're sleeping and give it a month because repetition is key. With hypnosis, it's key that those that you keep flooding your mind with these positive suggestions and see what happens. You may be one of the people who has this remarkable result without having to go to see somebody like me to find what the obstacle is and to remove it. You may be one of those people, so why not give it a chance? The other thing I've noticed in my comments section on my YouTube channel is that with a lot of the Sleep hypnosis tracks. Sometimes I'm going to say, I'm just totally guessing, it might be 5 or 10, 5% of the time people will write in and say, I had a horrible dream, like a nightmare or something while they were listening. And I know there's nothing on the track that would by itself create that. But what I also know is that it may be the way the subconscious mind is actually resolving something from the past. It might be going through its own process where it comes out as a nightmare because the person is trying to process something. So one of the phrases that I always use on my weight loss tracks is, it's safe for you to release the weight of the past, because I know it has 2 meanings. One is obviously to release the pounds, the extra weight on your body, the, the extra fat. But the second one is, I know how the subconscious mind is going to interpret this, the emotional weight of the past, which is probably what's driving all of this. And so if a person has a nightmare, for example, I think they're probably in the process of releasing the emotional weight of the past.

That's powerful. I was going to— I was going to say, what message would you like to leave our audience with today? But I think you just did. That was a really powerful message, and I love it. Peter, this has been such a helpful conversation and so eye-opening in many ways, and I think a relief for many people to stop bashing themselves around.

Yeah, exactly.

And actually understand, like you said, what this podcast and everything I try to do is about is let's find the root cause and then work from there. The weight, trying to deal with the weight as weight is actually up the top. It's at the end. No, you have to travel all the way back and let's see what's actually the driver.

It's important that you treat yourself with compassion. That you treat yourself with kindness. Because a lot of people who are carrying extra weight and have tried many things to lose it start beating themselves up. Like, they'll look at their body in the mirror and they'll, they'll treat it with contempt. They'll treat it with disgust. And what does that do? It puts them into a stress fight-or-flight response. What does that do? It drops adrenaline and cortisol into their bloodstream. And the cortisol, as we've established, is telling the body to hold on to all available fat and go get more. So they're actually making it harder for themselves. And if you ask people, which is what I always do if I'm working one-on-one, it may sound like a stupid question, but why do you want to lose the weight? A lot of times people haven't really thought about it. They'll say things like, well, I want to feel better about myself. And my message is you can feel better about yourself right now. You're allowed to do that. And the paradox is that if you allow yourself to feel better about yourself right now, if you're the kind of coach for yourself who is kind and compassionate and positive, you're way more likely to drop the weight than if you're the kind of coach who berates, you know, yourself, tell you— tells yourself you're a failure, that you're a pig, you're disgusting, whatever it is. That's counterproductive. And I just want people to know you're allowed to love yourself. You're allowed to be lovable. You're allowed to feel good. You're allowed to feel joy regardless of what your weight is. And let that be the foundation upon which you build your weight loss future.

That is so uplifting to finish this episode. Thank you, Peter. I think so many people will be running to the show notes To go to, go to your website and your YouTube channel, which will be in the show notes. Thank you so much for sharing all that valuable information.

You're welcome. And I just thought of one other thing that I'd like to put out there. I, I created this— it's a short video. It's basically a self-assessment regarding weight loss. And there are 3 pillars, and each pillar has 3 pieces underneath it. And it's basically this simple Red, yellow, green, like a traffic light, where you rate yourself in each one of these areas. And it's so eye-opening in terms of being able to step back and look at this and say, oh, these are the areas where I'm, I'm all in the red that is, that is really creating the weight issues that I have. It really brings so much clarity. And there's no, there's no charge for this or anything. If people just send me their email address, I'll send them the link to this self-assessment so that they can take it. And then, if we end up working together, I would want to want them to take it anyway because that would allow us to know with this person, here's where we're going to put our focus. With that person, it may be in a different set of areas.

Hmm.

But even if you don't work with me, it's just so eye-opening in terms of where Where is— where are the problem areas? Where are the areas I have totally under control? Where do I need to place my focus?

Thank you, Peter. It's been an absolute pleasure.