Ben & Jerry – & Carl of NLP Marin –
On Naturally Slender Eating...

Carl: Of all the things that human beings can reach for when they're looking for something to change their state of mind or feel better, or adjust their experience in life, food is by far the best thing to reach for. Food reliably produces chemical changes, it is legal and the effects are reversible. What I've noticed more and more among people who reach for food when they don't want to, is that it's the only good way they have of reaching for life.

C: When we get cut off from something in ourselves that we instinctively know to be valuable or important for us, then we reach for life in some other way. People will reach for life in the form of money, or the experience of another person in a relationship of some kind. They'll reach for food, they'll reach for drugs, they'll reach for alcohol. They'll reach for all kinds of things when they can't, or for some reason won't, reach for life itself.

Food is an excellent way to reach for life when we're not reaching some other way. Down at the nitty gritty level where you're eyeball-to-eyeball with a container of Ben & Jerry's at 1:30 in the morning, there's something else in play, your nervous system is trying to find the best offer it can for itself in that moment.

C: Thinking about it almost never helps. In fact, once we're thinking about it then we might as well just go get the container of ice cream, pull the lid off and throw that lid away – you will not need that lid again. So we don't want to be thinking about it. We want to have something that automatically happens for us which means a revision of patterning for behavior, for safety, for comfort, for security.

This is an example of when we are in conflict with ourselves –one part of us wants to eat that ice cream (the part that walked you over to the fridge) and another part really wants to not eat the ice cream. So, if one part of us wins in the conflict, then who is it exactly that wins?

Whenever we eat something that we don't want, it's never a complete loss because obviously some part of us wants to eat it, otherwise we wouldn't be doing that. So it makes working with it a little bit complicated and, at the same time, it can be made more straightforward. If we have a better relationship with the "I" who would like to eat properly, then it's easier to do what we want.

C: People frequently come into my office and say, "I want to change my relationship with food." This is really common parlance. What they need to be able to do is eat properly and not have a relationship with their food. They should just have food choices so that they can eat and enjoy. If they want a relationship with their food, then they should probably do relationship counseling and not counseling about eating.

C: The odds are extremely high that they're basing their food choices and their portion choices on how their body feels rather than on the emotional content of their previous or upcoming life experience.

C: They look at the food and say, "Huh, if I eat this food, how will I be in two hours? Will I feel worse or better than I feel now?" If the answer is, "I'll feel as good or better than I feel now," then they go ahead and eat the food. And if they're not going to feel better in two hours, then they don't eat the food. Connirae Andreas calls this the Naturally Slender Eating Strategy.

Now how do they do that? It's simple. It's not a dilemma. It's an easy choice. Would I rather feel really bad in a little while or would I rather feel good in a little while? That choice only happens when we don't have to process the emotional content of our lives in order to get a forkful of something for nutritional and enjoyment purposes.

C: Some people are just wired that way. They just do that naturally and spontaneously. It wouldn't occur to them to do anything else. If we tried to teach them to use that 7th Grade technique, they would think it was funny and stupid. Why would anyone want to do that?

C: Yes, there are ways of training our nervous system, our reptile/mammal neurology – especially the part that overlaps with our human 7th Grade neurology – to simply move toward better body feelings and make that the main criterion. It's easy to learn, and it's not learned by reading about it. It's actually learned by evoking and using the internal sense of body sensation, body well being, pictures and sounds. There are ways of learning that and having one "install" it in oneself so that we actually acquire it. Then it just runs automatically.

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