PLUS there is a very special offer (www.specialofferfromGemma.com) from Gemma which she has previously kept secret from all of the podcasts…..

Welcome to the People Building members club.

That was despite the 52-year-old former This Morning presenter bringing out a best-selling fitness DVD and advocating natural weight loss in a number of magazines.

After the truth was revealed it sparked a huge furore in the press – and Fern was accused of lying about her five stone weight loss.

Emma Eveleigh-Anderton found a far safer, non-invasive and cheaper alternative worked for her – a ‘virtual’ gastric-band.

The 36-year-old company director from Stoke Park, Coventry, was hypnotised into believing she had a gastric band fitted by clinical hypnotherapist Russell Hemmings, of the Bridge Therapy Centre, Earlsdon.

And it helped her to drop from a size 18 to an eight in six months.

Emma said: “I was really up for it and it worked for me. Russell has a really good reputation and I was recommended by a friend.

“It was a good holistic approach and looked at my relationship with food. I was also motivated to get fit.”

Russell uses a combination of cognitive behavioural therapy and hypnotherapy to ‘reprogramme’ a patient’s mind to respond differently in everyday situations involving food.

Emma needed four £245 sessions over a one month period – costing just under £1,000.

The mum-of-two was brought up in a fit, active family. At school she played hockey and tennis at a county level.

But after the birth of her daughters Antonia, aged seven, and six-year-old Alice a year apart, Emma found it hard to lose her baby weight. She ballooned from a size 10 to 13 stone.

Unhealthy eating habits were exacerbated by stress at work. Although she has always cooked healthy meals for her children, Emma and husband Darren, would sit down exhausted after work and order takeaways most evenings.

“I just got lazy,” she confesses.

Self-employed Emma and her 42-year-old husband run their own international exhibition service, Blaxx, working across the UK and as far afield as Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and Beijing.

But the Kingston University business graduate admits the last two years of recession have been “terrifically difficult” on the business.

“The automotive and engineering industry we work in effectively collapsed,” said Emma. “One of our biggest exhibition shows was cancelled. It was a huge strain. That’s how I first came to meet Russell – to control my stress levels with hypnotherapy.”

Read More of This Article from Coventry Telegraph…

This is a question that came into my mind this week when I heard someone mention that old saying “a leopard never changes its spots.”

We know that from 0-7 years are imprint years that make a staggering difference on who we become and the values we then form in our later lives. But if someone has worked hard to improve themselves, we like to believe that change is possible. I’m not sure that we are as convinced of this possibility if someone has behaved in a totally socially unacceptable way. Is belief in change and forgiveness linked in someway? Do we believe that “baddies” cannot change because we cannot forgive them for the behaviour they have exhibited- even though we know that a person is not their behaviour and that all behaviour has a positive intention (presuppositions of NLP.)

Whilst considering this, I started to reflect on who I was as a younger child and who I am now. I wanted to establish whether I was fundamentally the same then, as I am now, or whether I had changed.

Of course some things have definitely changed- My ideas have evolved and I have gained more knowledge. I never used to eat olives and love them now. But what I was really interested in is whether there were traits in Little Me which could have predicted or lead me to where I am now.

Firstly, I had a think about where I am now, not just in terms of being a therapist, but as someone running a business- was Little Me already showing signs of this?

Initially I thought no. I used to be quiet and shy, I would cry easily and was quite sensitive. I was not always able to speak up for myself and had a bit of a fear of men (I think this had something to do with growing up without my dad at home.) I think all of these things have changed. I can still be quiet, but this is more through choice. I still like to check out a situation before making a contribution to it and now only cry easily if I’ve not had enough sleep!

I remember being told that I was always trying to twist things around. My mum had a horribly depressive period as I was growing up. I remember her getting very frustrated at me as whenever she tried to ramble on negatively as I’d respond with some smarty-pants answer about how things were much better than she could really see at that moment in time. This often would irritate her more but always seemed to get her thinking outside of the box of depression.

Thinking about me being that way makes me wonder if I was in fact a therapist from a very young age.

When I think back to being at school, I worked really hard. I was by no stretch the smartest or best, but I worked really hard and always gave it my best shot. I was nominated vice house captain and then house captain and my house won the sports day that year. I would also always step up to take the lead parts in school plays, despite being otherwise a bit of a loner. I didn’t have a best friend and was often working on my own little projects, which I’d then “recruit” friends into help me with! This part certainly sounds a lot like the Gemma I am now.

My mum said I should join a club to try and make some more friends as I couldn’t latch onto a best friend at school, which used to disappoint me. At about age 7 years I joined Brownies in an effort to widen my social network (which is like the younger version of Girl Guides.)

It really didn’t work out too well. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that we were in these little groups and that there was like a chief girl who was from my school who was at school, meek and mild but at Brownies had some sort of special powers to boss me about. I kept challenging the ideas she had because I thought mine were better. (I still maintain they were.

After a few months, I’d had enough and gave notice. The Brown Owl (who is like the chief of the Brownies) asked why I wanted to leave and I told her that I thought we’d be doing more interesting stuff like making fires in the woods and cooking jacket potatoes on them. I told her that quite frankly I could make a mothers day card at home and didn’t need to dress up in brown to be able to do it. I also told her I thought it was a bit too religious for me and that I wasn’t keen on the colour brown.

You see the thing with Brownies, is that the uniform is (or was) brown with a yellow scarf. Brown and Yellow! I told the Brown Owl that these were not the sort of colours that girls of my age wanted to be wearing. I told the Brown Owl that she could significantly increase the number of girls joining Brownies if the uniform was pink with a silver scarf.

She said this wasn’t ever going to be possible.

To be fair I think she was probably right as we would all have looked like Penelope Pitstop or the women from the Sheila’s wheels adverts. Plus they’d have had to have changed the name to “Pinkies.”

Which sounds like a club in Soho.

So in conclusion; yes, I do believe we all have the potential to change, if the impetus and desire to do so are great enough. I also believe that ultimately, there are characteristics that are part of who we are as people, that will always be there. And that evolving as a person is about learning how to harness that which we cannot change and use it to the best possible effect and our advantage instead of only acknowledging those characteristics as faults that can hold us back.

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org

Well perhaps it’s a bit of both. But did you know that you can actually cause your body to fall in love- not a natural romantic love- more of a hormonal love. It’s fascinating stuff particularly for anyone starting out n a new relationship.

Or anyone lusting after someone.

Or anyone lusting after someTHING. Such as an Iphone.

As usual you will hear the hypnosis script- which is all about OCD this week, a relaxing session of hypnosis and feedback from listener land.

I was writing about this case in the NLP4Kids newsletter this week and mentioned the power of independence. I suggested to this child, who was also a generally fussy eater, that she could begin helping to cook the dinner. I explained (and you might find it a little surprising that I explained to her the methodology of what I was doing instead of just trying to “coax” her into the idea- but I like to be honest with my clients, even the children) that sometimes when children help with cooking the dinner, it makes them get a bit more curious about food. They end up eating and trying more foods because they feel like they’ve had some part in creating it. She seemed pretty open to this idea and we started to do a couple of dislike to like processes to help her feel more encouraged to eat some foods she had previously been avoiding.

Half way through one of the processes, she suddenly stopped me and and said in a most excited tone “I’ve just had a really good idea! I could make my own lunch for school too. I can have other things for lunch, like pasta instead of sandwiches….”

I also once worked with a young chap who had very bad eczema. As part of his treatment he had to apply a cream in the evening and refrain from scratching at the eczema as much as possible. He came to see me because his parents were worried about his attitude which was quite negative and that his self esteem was very low. After working with him for a while, he told me that his mum had made him some mittens that he had to wear in the evenings to stop him from scratching his skin. Because of this, she would have to apply his cream for him. I thought this was a little odd. I’ve heard of scratch mits for babies but this guy way 15 years old.

In having him wear the mittens and with mum applying his cream for him, he was in a very powerless position. It was difficult for him to take responsibility for improving himself emotionally, because he wasn’t even taking control (or being offered the opportunity) to take care of his own body. By using the mittens, he was avoiding the consequences of what would happen if he infected his skin by scratching. By having his mum apply the cream, she was dealing with his problem skin. He wasn’t.

It’s difficult to step back sometimes and watch children learn to do things for themselves. They mess it up! We can (as experienced adults) do it far better than they can (we think.)

Recently I helped out at a kids camp. At snack time we got the children to cut up their own apples. I had 2 children to oversee. One of them had clearly never used a knife before. It was a round ended knife but sharp enough to cut an apple. I was cold sweating as I watched him chop up this apple. I advised him the best I could, told him to slow down and spoke in a calm voice. Guess what….He cut his finger. Not much. It was still attached to his hand. But seriously it was a cut about 4 mm long and not terribly deep, though there was a lot of blood and he did keep squeezing that blood out of the tiny cut. The blood went all over the apple. It was a bit of a nightmare.

Next time I get him to cut apples, he will be more careful.

Sometimes we think we are helping others and protecting them by doing things for them, organising for them, thinking for them. Sometimes we do this when their behaviour is appalling. We just can’t help helping them. I had a boyfriend once who was always getting into trouble and I was always bailing him out. I lent him a lot of money, I helped him with his disciplinary when he got into trouble at work and when he was caught drink driving, I picked him up from the police station, took him home and paid for his car to get released from the pound. At the time, I just couldn’t help helping. I couldn’t stop myself because I could see the pain it would cause him if I didn’t save him.

The problem was, I was preventing him from learning and growing. I was preventing him from being independent and taking charge, I was neglecting him of an opportunity to man up and take responsibility.

There was even a point when I realised this, but I still kept doing it!

Now of course it is always the individuals responsibility to change or improve or learn, but this can be a difficult thing to do if someone close by is an “enabler.” This means that they enable the old behaviour to continue by giving too much support, assistance, money- whatever it may be.

Perhaps there is someone close to you, who you wish so much would change, improve, grow up, take responsibility whatever it may be. Now consider how what you are doing is holding them back.

It doesn’t feel good to sit back and watch a child cut their finger with a knife, but he was very proud of that cut and put in a special request to chop apples with me the next day. (I said no- I wasn’t sure my heart could take it.) But the point is, he didn’t want me to chop the apples for him. he wanted to do it himself.

This shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their bodies.

Professor Peter Weissberg, British Heart Foundation said “It showed that those who were happy less often had higher levels of a bloodstream chemical called plasma fibrinogen, which shows if there is inflammation present. It is an indicator of how great a risk a person has of developing heart disease in the future.”

Researchers tested 116 men and 100 women who were taking part in a major study of thousands of London-based civil servants recruited between 1985 and 1988 when 35-55 years old to investigate the risk factors for coronary heart disease. They carried out tests on people at work, during leisure periods and in the laboratory. People were also asked whether or not they were happy at 33 moments during the day. The researchers then evaluated how often people were happy in the course of the day. Leisure was, unsurprisingly, linked with more happy moments than work.
It was found that some people reported they never felt happy, while others reported feeling occasional happiness and those who felt happy most of the time.
The results were adjusted for gender, age, employment status, weight, smoking habits and psychological distress. Levels of cortisol – a stress hormone – were 32% lower in people who reported more happy moments. Cortisol has been related to abdominal obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and autoimmune disorders.
The researchers also discovered happy people have had lower levels of fibrinogen when they were stressed.
Emotional state. Professor Jane Wardle, who worked on the study, said: “All the research to date has been on unhappiness, rather than happiness.
“This research suggests we should aim to maximise the happiness of the population.”

Professor Andrew Steptoe, who led the study, said: “It has been suspected for the last few years that happier people may be healthier both mentally and physically than less happy people. “What this study shows is that there are plausible biological pathways linking happiness with health.”
He added: “What we find particularly interesting is that the associations between happiness and biological responses were independent of psychological distress. “We already know that depression and anxiety are related to increased physical health risk. This study raises the intriguing possibility that the effect of happiness may be somewhat separate.”

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation said: “The results of this study build upon this team’s work, which we are delighted to have supported. “Evidence that emotional state is important for good heart health is growing and this shows that people who are happy and unstressed are likely to have less potentially dangerous stress chemicals in their bodies.”

Read the full article on the BBC News website

Plus we explore the neurological effects of over eating and the links between food and highly addictive substances.

There is also some linguistic effects to increase your motivation to lose weight and take good care of your body.