I have been looking over an interesting website – www.obesitymyths.com and while I cannot vouch for its accuracy, it does  make some assertions worthy of closer consideration. I was particularly interested in their comments on how the obesity epidemic was accelerated by a simple change to the definition of obesity. The site tells us that “35 million Americans went to sleep one night in 1998 at a government-approved weight and woke up ‘overweight’ the next morning, thanks to a change in the government’s definition …  ‘Overweight’ had previously been defined as a BMI of 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women; in 1998 it was lowered to a BMI of 25 for both genders.”

A recognised problem with the Body Mass Index, is that it simply measures our weight relative to our height. It does not allow for muscle. The site goes on to cite a research letter published in JAMA (the journal of the respected American Medical Association) that reported that 97% of players in the National Football League are technically overweight and more than 50% are obese. Celebrities who suddenly found themselves overweight included Will Smith and Pierce Brosnan, while Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson immediately became obese. Tom ‘the sexiest man alive’ Cruise woke up to find himself suddenly obese as a result of his height deficiency against his broad-shouldered, muscled body.

The site reports that the 1998 redefinition prompted a group of researchers to criticize the new threshold in The American Journal of Public Health. They wrote:

“Current interpretations of the revised guidelines stigmatize too many people as overweight, fail to account for sex, race/ethnicity, age, and other differences; and ignore the serious health risks associated with low weight and efforts to maintain an unrealistically lean body mass … This seeming rush to lower the standard for overweight to such a level that 55% of American adults find themselves being declared overweight or obese raises serious concerns.”

This seems to me to be eminently relevant. The last thing people need is another reason to feel bad about themselves – the media already does a great job of this! My biggest concern is that it creates a focus on the need to lose weight when the research shows that we are better off being overweight and fit rather than slim and unfit. The site also looks at the research behind well propagated ‘research findings’ that being overweight dramatically shortens our life span. It finds that the research behind these statements is not as solid as people think. While I do not accept all the points on this site, it does prompt us all to raise our level of critical discernment when confronted with the ‘science’ around obesity.

In July 2011, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approved the EndoBarrier^® Gastrointestinal Liner (the EndoBarrier) for inclusion on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. The TGA has approved the use of the EndoBarrier for up to 12 months for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity.

It is an interesting approach that is designed to mimic the effects of gastric bypass surgery without the risks of surgery. It looks like a clear plastic sock, open at both ends (see image). It is inserted into the top part of the small intestine just after the stomach. The barrier is placed endoscopically, via the mouth, with imaging assistance so that the doctor can position it precisely. The device works by simply stopping food from making contact with the lining of the small intestine where so much absorption takes place: the duodenum and jejunum. Read more »

I often see people make decisions much more quickly than they need to. It is certainly a habit I am trying to rid myself of. As humans we feel the need, when presented with a question or a problem, to answer it sooner rather than later. It comes from a need, that we all have to varying degrees, for closure, to take the issue off our mind. Alternatively, we can feel we look like we are not that smart if we cannot come up with a quick response. One of my favourite writers, Mark Twain, dealt with our need to respond more quickly than we need to. With his inimitable wit he suggested, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Our drive to respond quickly in making important decisions is not a problem if we’re choosing a movie, big problem if we’re choosing a car, a house, a career … or a partner. From a weight management perspective you would be surprised how much less you eat if you slow down your decision making when it comes to choosing what to put in your mouth next. You see all of these choices are initially driven by emotions around these needs for closure, comfort, or not to feel a fool, or to keep up with the Joneses. Over time, the emotions will be replaced by rationality as our higher self  is given the space to do what it does.

In certain situations, one has to make lightning fast decisions. The following comes from a pre-flight briefing from a Canadian Starfighter F104 instructor (thanks to Noel Whittaker the financial guru who sourced this lovely quote). These jet fighters were the first combat aircraft capable of sustained Mach 2 flight – yes, that is twice the speed of sound – and at full noise, it could go quite a bit faster again! NASA later used them for spaceflight training. So things happen very quickly in these machines and they did not have a great safety rating. Indeed, the Canadians’ nickname for it was the ‘Widowmaker’. Accordingly, the briefing by the trainer to trainee co-pilots went like this:

‘If you hear me yell, “Eject! Eject! Eject!” the last two will be echoes.

If you stop to ask “Why?” you’ll be talking to yourself, because by then you’ll be the pilot.’

Fortunately, we can generally make decisions more slowly in life. I would suggest that as a rather obvious guideline, the more important the decision, the more time should be put aside to make it. So a movie, several minutes; a car several weeks and a partner several months – and then a couple of years more before embarking on the complete lock-in – having children!

When I have to make an important decision, my first response is a question: When is the deadline? Read more »

In response to my last article on meal replacements, I had this insightful response from Cindy, so insightful I want to reprint it in full. Here is what she said:

I have been on the Tony Ferguson meal replacement diet, and it has worked well. It has a Progress phase where you add in normal meals and snacks with some MR. This has been great in learning about food, carbohydrates in particular. It also encourages mindfulness, and after shakes for a while, every mouthful of normal food is a taste sensation and I certainly enjoy it.

What Cindy did not know is that I did some consulting to Tony Ferguson (TF) and actually developed their Progress program. I was very impressed by their preparedness to embrace the principles of the psychological research that I cover in my book. To clarify a couple of points, right from the start the TF program encourages having at least one healthy meal a day made up of lean protein and salad or vegetables. In the Progress phase, this is increased to two meals on some days as we gradually rebuild our relationship with food. This is the phase where we also add back in the more fattening foods that people love like chocolate and cheese. The trick is to learn to eat these foods on your terms, where you control them rather than them controlling you! The reason why diets fail is because people a) feel deprived of these foods and b) when they sneak back into the person’s diet, they go back to their old ways of overeating – having  not learnt to eat them mindfully as Cindy reminds us. Read more »

From time to time I’m asked why it is that I use meal replacements (MRs) in all their forms – shakes, soups, food bars etc – in working with people to lose weight. How does this fit with me repeatedly saying the ultimate goal is not weight loss but developing a new relationship with food and a healthy eating lifestyle?  The short answer is that when it comes to weight loss there is a hierarchy of the totality of interventions that can be used – starting at the bottom. These are outlined in the pyramid on the right.

A couple of key points to note. The most effective form of weight loss and the inevitable one if all those below it fail, is premature death! As you can also see from the pyramid, working on an understanding of the psychological issues that lead to sabotage sits over every intervention.

In the first instance, of course, as any good dietitian will tell you, we should try to manage our weight by eating in a healthy way.  But the question is what to do when this fails? This is when we start to move up the hierarchy – hence my interest in the next level up of MRs because after this level things get more problematic. Read more »

Rules for Being Human were first popularised by Jack Canfield in his bestselling  book Chicken Soup for the Soul. They were published as by ‘Anonymous’ simply because that was the way they came to Jack. It was Dan Millman, author of The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, who set the record straight and contacted Jack to reveal the author. They came from the book If Life is a Game, These are the Rules by Cherie Carter-Scott. Amongst other things she was inspired in writing this book by Helen Keller. To remind you, Helen Keller became deaf and blind at the age of 19 months. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree and went on to become a prolific author and social activist. Carter-Scott references, in particular, this quotation by Helen Keller, “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

It is worth being reminded of the 10 Rules even though you will probably have seen them. The only one I could not leave alone was Rule Nine. Whenever this principle is spoken about I am compelled to qualify it as sometimes an inner voice can get us into trouble or hold us back.

Here they are: Read more »

It’s not often that I watch a movie twice. Often, if it’s not what I’m looking for, I don’t watch a movie to the end once! And I’m not really into football. My wife says one of the reasons she married me was that I had no interest in spectator sports. I have enjoyed State of Origin, but only because I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the last two games, the equaliser and the decider, from private boxes. At lunch with my wife’s family for her mother’s eighty-something birthday, for the brief period that I remain a world authority on State of Origin, I was sallying forth on football. My father-in-law waded in and argued that League wasn’t real football, Rugby was the game.

Now to be honest, I’m sure there’s a difference between the two sports but be blowed if I have a clue what it is. My nephew chimed in with ‘Rugby is not life and death, it is more important than that.’ So, feeling out of my depth, I went to safer ground and asked if they had seen the movie Invictus. For those of you who haven’t seen it, it is about Nelson Mandela’s first days in office as the President of South Africa and how he brilliantly uses the Springboks rugby team to reconcile the races and their tinderbox tensions. Matt Damon plays the captain of the team while Morgan Freeman does a magnificent job as Mandela. I was more than happy to watch the movie again, because it is not about rugby, it is about inspirational leadership and Mandela’s amazing capacity for forgiveness. Having read his autobiography, I, like the rest of the world, have a deep admiration for this unusual human. So the next day, as we had ten of us at our place watching the film for the second time, I noticed things that were not so evident to me the first time round.

A couple of times Mandela referred to the poem that saw him through his 27 years in prison. Afterwards, I found myself returning to the last lines of the poem, ‘… I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.’ A message I am repeatedly trying to deliver in psychotherapy. Read more »

Have a listen to this beautiful song and then read the story behind it … then listen again – click here: Man In A White Shirt.

The Story Behind The Song

Most of the population have no real idea what we do in psychotherapy, especially group psychotherapy. They often assume it’s about getting advice and who would want advice from unqualified strangers!? One of the things forbidden in group therapy is, in fact, giving advice. I’m the only person in the room qualified to give advice and one thing drummed into me in my training was not to give advice. It’s all about helping people to come to their own awareness of the values that they want to live by and the dynamics they have learnt and stored in their unconscious that determine why they do what they do. These dynamics often stop us from living by our values. Once you have worked out  the dynamics that hold you back from meaningfully pursuing your values, you can start to more powerfully author your own life. To do this you need to assimilate this awareness at an emotional level, rather than at an intellectual level. Group therapy, because of its experiential and confronting nature, is a powerful tool for bringing about this emotional shift.

As a group member explores his or herself in the safety of the group, others from their distance, can more easily see how their own values and dynamics work. In short, psychotherapy, group and individual, is simply accelerated personal growth. Read more »

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while. My Muse has channelled my writing energy into completing my next book – but more of that in time.

Today I want to write about wisdom. I was at a workshop recently with Professor Kelly Wilson from Mississippi. He is one of the founders of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and while he was rather scatty, he made some stimulating points. One was that wisdom is essentially the capacity to shift perspective. People who start with only one perspective and doggedly stick to it (also known as a ‘teenager’) would be considered the least wise.

A person who is slow to adopt a particular perspective, and who, along the way to doing so, considers multiple perspectives is what most of us would see as more wise. Some of these perspectives may be what Edward de Bono would consider to be more ‘lateral’ i.e. they are not perspectives that the majority would come up with as they abandon the usual presumptions.

This got me thinking about wisdom in another way, from another perspective. Group therapy has a surprising power – a power that I have been awed by on many occasions in my 20+ year career as a group therapist. When you have eight people in a room considering an issue, you automatically have multiple perspectives. No one person may be particularly wise, but ‘the group’ is, at its very essence, a wise entity. Diversity is the key. This wisdom gives group life-changing power. Teams in the workplace that work well, where people respect each other’s different perspectives can harness industry-changing power – think Google, Apple, Microsoft (back in the old days).

Which, finally, brings me to the smallest and most important group – couples. As a relationship therapist, the greatest tragedy I witness, day after day, is people not appreciating that their partner’s perspective, being different from their own, is a wonderful gift of wisdom. Our egos, being the narrow-minded, precious things that they are, feel threatened by another not agreeing with us. Deep down their different view might leave us worrying that we are not smart enough, or that to accept our partner’s view means we are ‘wrong’. This is the greatest relationship natural disaster known to humankind. In this way, we can take the gift of wisdom and not just completely negate it, but we can turn it into conflict. Read more »

I’ve been asked to talk abit more about Urge Surfing, given its wide application for managing all urges not just those of the food craving fraternity. Indeed Urge Surfing was originally developed to help people manage alcohol and other substance cravings (could it have been that there once was a surfie with a marijuana problem – what would be the chance of that?!). Successful Urge Surfers are to be found in all walks of life – usually at the top end of their game – resisting the seduction of all kinds of problematic urges.

What to do?

So what does being a cool urge surfie look like? Imagine your desires to be like ocean waves. (Which also means there’s no shortage of them and they just keep coming – that’s the human mind for you.) You’re a cool surfer dude/ss and you catch this nice-sized wave and start riding it. As soon as you’re on the wave you start to pay it close attention – your safety and well-being depends upon it. You realise this wave is a dumper, stick with this wave and there’s a good chance that you could be eating sand, or worse, end up on the rocks just over there. What to do? Exit. Pull a turn up the face of the wave, slide over its back and let it go. Let’s paddle back out and wait for the next wave. Take too long to make the call and you won’t have a choice as it turns into a vertical wall of green mashing power and takes you down. In effect, we thank mother nature for all the waves, but we only stay on the ones we want to.

In the same way, we will find ourselves with a desire that’s a problem – a craving for an unhealthy food, drink or smoke. The trick is to see it for what it is and decide early on: Are we going to ride it all the way home or let this one go? You might decide to eat that donut or have that glass of wine. Fine, but on just one condition – you’re going to mindfully savour it and enjoy it to the max. If you decide to use this urge surfing strategy, you will let the craving roll on without you. We’re not going to do battle with it, just, in a Zen way, notice it and let it move on.

First, acknowledge its fullness by saying to yourself, “Thank you mind for that old strategy for dealing with my current emotions, but I would like to see if I can come up with a healthier solution.” You do this, in essence, by giving yourself something healthier to do that will occupy your mind e.g. work on a project, go for a walk, watch TV, take a shower, read a good book/magazine or distract yourself. Make a list of what you can do at these times and keep it in your purse/wallet and refer to it – we often can’t remember what we’ve decided to do when our cravings cloud our mind. Check back in fifteen minutes later. If the craving is still rampant then you may decide to give into it. Remember when it comes to food, the mantra is “I can have it if I really want it, but is it worth the calories?” – but then note the one condition above, if you’re going to ride that bad boy all the way up the beach then do it on your terms and enjoy the hell out of it!

Sacrifices to the God of Work need to be made with extreme care.We typically give  the best waking, fresh, virgin hours of five or more days a week to this insatiable God. Meaningful work is central to living a rewarding life. Now there is research that takes it a step further. Peter Butterworth and colleagues from ANU, just published research from a large study in Australia of over 7,000 people. They found that some jobs result in poorer mental health than having no job at all. Yes, you are better off dealing with the depressogenic effects of unemployment than some soul-destroying jobs.

Jobs that fall into this category have the following characteristics:

• afford little control and freedom to make decisions  i.e. little autonomy
• are overly demanding
• provide little support
• provide few rewards (not just financial)

Jobs that are meaningful are high in

• Autonomy
• Developing an ongoing sense of Mastery
• Purpose that goes beyond ourselves – to in some small way making life better for others, the planet or its plants and animals

Where does your work fall?

In a comment to this site, Joanne asked me to write about “purpose and the daily manifestation of joy.” I thought I would start with Joy. I have to be a little careful here, because it is a small word that people expect a big emotional experience from. It is learning to appreciate the smaller joys to be found in the now that is the real ‘daily manifestation of joy’. I have tried to capture it thus:

AN ODE TO JOY IN THE NOW

Amidst the unending demands of day to day life

Please help me to be aware of your constant presence

From your small forms like a single cloud in a vast, blue sky

To the large forms like the antics and laughter of the innocent child

Keep me in touch with that same child within me that enjoys to joke and laugh

And remind me to appreciate the good things of my life which I tend to take for granted

Help me to leave my fears in the future where they may or may not come to be

While doing what I can today to prevent their outcome

So that I may return to my appreciation of your eternal presence in the now

Help me to learn what I need to from the pain and sadness of the past

Such that they no longer need to haunt me in the present

So that I may return to my appreciation of your eternal presence in the now

Allow me to receive the care of those who are so kind as to offer this treasure

Appreciating the very full value of your presence at these times

Finally, help me to remember how to be the best that I can be, for that is you within me.

by George Blair-West

In a recent post I told the story of how my wife and I sadly left a spectacular looking dessert that failed the taste test. Sitting behind this is the Mantra:

AM I BEING MINDFUL?
I can have it if I really want it,
is the taste worth the calories?

Many of my patients stick this up on their fridge, pantry and in their wallet (to remind them at the shop) to help themselves develop mindfulness around food. Here is the printout for you to print off, cut up and place in strategic places – The Food Lover’s Mantra

Victor Frankl in the seminal Man’s Search for Meaning, wrote of how we find meaning through how we choose to live our life moment by moment. As a psychiatrist and a Jewish prisoner in a concentration camp, where he lost all but one of his 20 relatives, he posed, for me, the most elegant of all scientific hypotheses: ‘If there is meaning to life, it can’t be a fair-weather meaning. It should exist here with me in this spartan life, in this concentration of suffering.’ It was a simple life in the camp and so there was less to examine – if meaning was there it was going to be easier to find. It was the one meal a day that ultimately proffered the answer. With the piece of bread and the bowl of swill, it dawned on Frankl that he had choices – some of which were more meaningful than others. ‘I could eat this bread now, or save it for later, or trade it for something to read. I could drink this swill immediately, or I could share it with my sick friend.’ Each choice had more or less meaning for him and as he pursued the more meaningful choices – like imagining himself speaking of his work at medical conferences in the future – he noticed a profound change not just in his immediate mood but in his outlook on life.

At many junctures during our day, we can choose to respond to life’s many challenges in a way that is more meaningful or less meaningful for us. In this way, step by step, moment by moment, we can create a more meaningful life. Franklreminds us that life is not inherently meaningful, but that it is through exercising our freedom of choice, that we make it meaningful, more rewarding.  This awareness forces us to work out what it is that we truly value, what it is that we want to choose to attend to – as I discussed in the recent blog on where we place our attention.  Through becoming aware of what is meaningful to us, for it is different for each of us, we can slowly but surely move our life towards our purpose and live in a way that aligns with our values.

Often we don’t even realise that we have the opportunity to choose. More to the point, we don’t want to. It is much easier to go through our days conveniently overlooking our opportunities to create meaning in our life. Like all forms of creation, it takes effort and it doesn’t always achieve the desired outcome – we can ‘fail’. By choosing we take responsibility for things not working out -  this is Existential Responsibility, the yin of the ‘choosing meaning’ yang.  ‘Failure’ is painful – but then nothing focuses us on what we need to learn more than pain. This is why pain gives us much more potential for growth – providing we don’t just beat ourselves up with it as I discussed in an earlier post. But this pain is nothing compared to the slow, inexorable, quiet despair of living a meaningless life because we don’t have the courage to take the responsibility and choose. A close second to this despair, that makes it all worse, is one’s disappointment in one’s self, deep down, for not having the courage to take this responsibility.

For a long time the Buddhists have reminded us that it is attachment and desire that causes us emotional distress. From unhappiness about current circumstances, to anxiety about the future – as humans we are plagued by the distress of things not being how we want them to be. How do we marry this old Buddhist teaching to modern life?

Surrender is a word that is often thought to equate to giving up. I’m thinking here of voluntary surrender as a way of accepting where we are. But when I examine how life goes badly for people, I rarely find that they surrendered. Not in these terms of surrender as a voluntary process. No, what I see people do is struggle against what is happening to them until they become overwhelmed with anger, unhappiness or anxiety while things get steadily worse. A good example is when people are having relationship problems. They rage at their partner for things not working out, but the healing doesn’t begin until they surrender and start accepting where they are and look to themselves, rather than to their partner. It is a similar process when jobs, or finances, or our weight are not working out the way we desire them to.

But when I hear stories of how people voluntarily surrendered, I hear about a very different process. Mind you, I don’t hear this so often, because if they did this, they are less likely to need to consult me. A defusing occurs with the surrender as they accept where they are, as they open themselves to accept the painful reality of it. As they consciously and voluntarily decide to stop fighting with another, or raging at themselves, a space opens up in which things can move in a very different direction. I think of this as the ‘saving grace’ space. I’m not coming from a religious position here at all. I think of  ‘grace’ as a lovely word with deep connotations around peace and emotional healing.

As the Buddhists tell us, often what we need to surrender is our sense of how things should be or how we desire things to happen in our time frame. Countless times now, I have worked with people with traumatic experiences that turned out to be major turning points for the better in their life. Sometimes they learn to love better than they ever have before. Sometimes they realise that at the time of what seemed to be a horrible trauma they were on the wrong track and that they needed a wake-up call. The higher truth is that we often don’t know what is good or what is bad for us. Adversity is always an opportunity for personal growth. When we surrender, on our terms, we step out of the struggle. We don’t surrender to failure, we simply decide to stop doing what obviously is not working and create a healing space – the space for grace. This is the space, the rich soil, that nurtures the eternal flower of personal growth.

In an earlier post on managing ‘Lag-Time’, I wrote about what I see as one of the most powerful ways to master our mind and achieve true personal freedom. This is something I teach most of my patients – it is that important. By reducing our ‘Lag Time’ to zero we can finally exercise our freedom to choose and behave in a way that is conscious, a way that we choose, rather than being driven by old unconscious programming. (Lag Time is the time between when we trigger one of our old unconscious programs and when we realise we have done so.)

The other key to mastering our mind and making the most of our power to choose is to use this power of choice to focus our attention on how we want to feel. Whereas reducing our Lag Time is about taking control over what we do, the focus here is on taking control of how we feel. (Can I say at this point that I not talking about people suffering with intense grief, acute anxiety or clinical depression here – in those states we have little influence over the way we feel.)

So, how does it work? In any moment, we will feel certain feelings depending on which thoughts or feelings our mind is focussed on. Whatever we focus our attention on will simply expand in our awareness – in simple terms, we will feel more of it for longer. So, if you are focussed on that embarrassing thing you did earlier, you will feel, and expand, the negative feeling that went with it. If you are focussed on how productive you felt when you were working on that project at work yesterday, you will expand that positive feeling.

Now here’s the rub. From what I see in my psychiatric work, most people seem to ‘forget’ they are the masters of their mind. Indeed, I think our mind wants us to forget this ultimate truth. Why? Because it’s easier. One of the hardwired, very old programs in our minds is to find us the easiest way forward. Helpful for trekking up mountains and down valleys, not so helpful in running our emotional world. It was Eckhart Tolle who reminded us that our mind is just a tool, not the master. Like a hammer, we need to pick it up when we need it and put it down after we are done.

Your mind needs to be told what to focus on. Remember, whatever you focus on will expand in your awareness. Choosing what to focus your mind on is your primary responsibility as a human. This ability to choose our attentional focus separates us from other animals – so make the most of it! At any one time you could focus on a whole range of different thoughts or emotions that are hanging around in your mind. Take a moment to notice which ones are available to you. For some people they will feel more comfortable focussing on concrete thoughts, for others of you the focus will be an emotion.

You will find all kinds of thoughts and feelings hanging around if you let your attention wander over what is happening in your mind. Think back over the last few days. Think about what’s coming up in the next few days. If you wake up in the morning feeling warm and dozy, focus on that feeling, hang on to it. If on awakening your mind wants to focus on what you did wrong yesterday, think about it long enough to learn the lesson it is wanting to teach you (‘Next time I will handle that situation this way ….’) and then choose where to focus your mind next. (Or, if your good at managing your mind, you might say, ‘Not now mind, I will come back to that later – make sure you do, or your mind won’t believe you next time!) Don’t struggle with your thoughts, instead simply choose which thoughts or feelings you wish to connect too. These are the ones you will amplify. Some people prefer to focus by thinking thoughts about it, others by simply connecting to the feelings – whatever works best for you.

To really master this you will need to check-in throughout your day. Yes, this takes more effort but then there’s that reward … feeling better. What price that? Oh, and by the way you deserve to feel better!!

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What does it really mean to feel sorry for ourselves after something goes wrong in our life, after we screw up? Why might we want to beat ourselves up? To think of ourselves as a loser? I see people doing it after they go on a binge and gain weight, say something they wish they hadn’t or do something they’re ashamed of. As I have watched many patients do this over the years I have realised that feeling sorry for ourselves and beating ourselves up has certain benefits.

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want
The alternative to beating ourselves up is to focus on what we can learn from the experience. To turn the dissappointment in ourselves, or the pain of allowing others to hurt us, into motivation to grow and do things diferrently next time round. As the saying goes, ‘experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.’ Greater wisdom comes from greater experience. So, in theory, we should try to move to embracing things not working out as soon as we can by letting go of the self-pity and the self-flagellation. So why might we choose not to turn setbacks into learning experiences?

In simple terms, the first benefit in feeling sorry for ourselves, for beating ourselves up, is a protective one. It slows us down, causes us to pause, as we doubt ourselves, so we don’t get ourselves deeper into trouble. The greater benefit however, is that it keeps us safe from the threat of success, of growth. To learn, to grow, takes us to new, higher levels. The higher we go the further we can fall. Much safer to stay down at the lower rungs of failure. Moving into victim mode, feeling sorry for ourselves, seeing ourselves as losers is a superb way of avoiding the opposite of this mode i.e. authoring the meaningful life we might just aspire to … with all of the anxiety inherent to this aspiration.

(By the way, for those of you who are interested, I have just run you through the concept of  ‘Existential Angst’ – the anxiety that goes with taking responsibility for authoring one’s own life.)

The Master of Public Health  Organization (mphdegree.org) offers Masters qualifications from some of the world’s top Universities in this space including the New York Medical College and Liverpool University in the UK. They recently published on their blog site their list of the international top 20 most influential obesity experts from around the world – yours truly made the list – and no, I’m not ranked third, the list is alphabetical! Here it is: mphdegree.org/2010/top20