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In this episode of Simply Living Wellness, Donna Abreu interviews guest, Lauren Ciesco, about how to re-wire your brain so that weight loss finally becomes natural and effortless and life-lasting. If you struggle with weight loss and cannot seem to stick to any diet without “white knuckling it”, as Lauren calls it, and even then cannot keep the weight off, this episode is for you.
Lauren shares her story of going through 20 years of yo-yo dieting, losing and gaining the same 50 pounds, and at times weighing up to 199 pounds. Lauren is a naturally empathic person, and as a young girl used food for comfort and sooth herself from the powerful emotions she felt all her childhood and twenties. She thought there was something wrong with her. Food became her coping mechanism. She used food to check out, and through conditioning with food, she did not know how to feel her emotions. Using will power and diets, Lauren could lose weight, but she would eventually gain I back. The cycle was a vicious one and not sustainable.
In her 30’s, Lauren was tired of the up and down cycle, and sad about who she had become, a person who did not love her own body and who constantly battled with emotional eating. One day she woke up and said, “This is going to change”. She became a personal growth junkie. She studied leaders like Tony Robbins and Wayne Dyer, then enrolled in Brook Castillo’s The Life Coach School certification program. Brooke’s tools completely change Lauren’s life in a short period of time. From her teachings, Lauren realized that her past thoughts and emotions created a residual effect that kept her in that vicious cycle. If she wanted to change, she would have to start thinking differently.
Lauren describes her change as an inward turn. She realized, it’s about taking responsibility for one’s self. In her 20’s, Lauren used to chase outward validation which resulted in the use of food. She had an awakening, a spiritual awakening, and was able to learn that food was just a symptom. Food was a symptom of her lack of ability to process her emotions and think differently.
She learned that everything in world is neutral. Thinking about a neutral circumstance creates a feeling, and it’s our feelings that create our actions, and our actions that creates our results. So in essence, her thinking was creating her reality.
Subconscious Programming Keeps Us Stuck
Our thinking usually comes from subconscious programming. It’s not always easy to identify our current thinking. We wake up in the morning, and our thinking throughout the day is automatic. We are typically not conscious or aware of our thinking, and therefore, not conscious of what we are creating in our lives.
When you are able to realize that you are in control of what happens in your life, you begin to create the shift. You start to become aware of your current thinking a lot of which is based on past experiences. “I can’t lose weight, because I have never been able to do it in the past.” The shift also comes from imagining and feeling your future self. Feeling and thinking that you are already there. This future thinking and feeling helps you to remain in a high vibrational state which then makes your positive actions automatic and effortless.
Lauren first applied these concepts to her career, and in about one year doubled her income. That fantastic result led her to believe she could apply these principals to her weight.
Making the Mind Shift
Creating this mind shift is easier said than done. How do you make that shift? It’s a process that Lauren teachers to her clients. In this episode, she describes the 3-step process she uses with her clients to assist them in making that shift.
This process is about awareness and taking ownership of your current story, an inventory of the story you currently tell yourself. You can’t move forward and create change until you know what you are currently creating. She helps her clients by being that mirror to show them how their current thinking is creating those current results. From there, they are able to get intentional and identify what thoughts they need to be thinking in order to get the results they desire. She empowers them to think differently.
This process is also about allowing the feelings. The thought is the vehicle for the feeling, but the feeling is what drives the actions. What we feel, we attract into our lives. Lauren teaches us how to identify your feelings and how to allow them, so that you don’t resist them.
Emotional eaters have spent all their lives eating in place of feeling. It’s the resistance of feelings that keep us stuck. Society has conditioned us to avoid the feeling of pain. We are wired to resist discomfort. We turn to other outside substances, like alcohol, food, television, social media and drugs to numb that pain. It’s the conditioning from continual use of substances to numb the pain that creates substance addictions.
The path to freedom and effortless weight loss it about brain science and re-wiring. We have a thought about food which leads to an urge that we then reward with food. Our brains are literally wired and conditioned to expect the food. So, when you decide you are not going to answer the urge, it’s going to be uncomfortable. But it’s possible to reprogram your brain to erase that conditioning and create a new conditioning.
The re-wiring of your brain is essential, but the process is also about identifying your compelling reasons to want to lose weight and become healthy. Your compelling reason will aid you in moving through those uncomfortable feelings.
Why is it that some people can have cookies in their house that never get eaten?
Lauren talks about the idea of over hunger. People are overweight because their bodies, despite eating, are still hungry all the time. Their bodies are literally starving and deprived of nutrition due to the typical western diet of processed foods laddened with chemicals and toxins and an abundance of flour and sugar. This over hunger and lack of nutrition then causes an imbalance of hormones. We can be overweight and literally be starving (craving nutrition) at the same time!
How about over desire? Over desire is all about brain science. Through this viscous thought-feeling-reward cycle that many of us live in, we condition ourselves to over desire the food from the consistent rewarding. If you move through these feelings of discomfort enough times (Lauren refers to this the as The River of Misery), you will reverse that conditioning and be re-wire your brain. You will eventually lose those urges and cravings and your new actions will become automatic and a part of your identity. It’s literally freedom when you don’t have that desire or craving anymore.
What tools does Lauren use to help her clients achieve their desired results?
Lauren has many tools in her toolbox, many of which she learned from Brook Castillo’s program. Brook’s model can be summarized in five steps:
C – Circumstance
T – Thought
F – Feelings
A – Actions
R – Results
Lauren promotes a program that results in a long term sustainable way of eating. It’s not a “diet”. To support this mind set change and brain re-wiring, she also recommends eliminating sugar and flour from one’s diet. For more rapid results, for some people, she recommends intermittent fasting, and slightly increasing healthy fat intake to allow for extended satiation, to balance hormones, and to teach your body to use its own fat for fuel.
Lauren is not a nutritionist and does not create food plans for her clients. She typically works with women who already know about healthy food plans to follow. Lauren is a mindset coach. She consults with people and helps them actually succeed with the food plan for lasting, lifelong lifestyle changes.
High Vibe Living
Lauren teaches high vibrational living, hence her business name, High Vibe Living. Emotions and feelings such as resentment, anger and fear have a very low vibration. Joy and love on the other hand are high vibrational words. Success comes from remaining in high vibration and creating intentional thoughts and feelings so that you are able to take the aligned actions to create the life you want.
An example of high vibrational living, is that fact that Lauren chooses to BLESS her past of yo-yo dieting and weight loss challenges, as opposed to holding anger or victim energy about it. She chooses to live through the quote, “You have been assigned this mountain to show others it can be moved.” She decided to look at her challenges with her weight as an assignment and a blessing, rather than playing the victim and asking, “Why am I still dealing with this.” And with that blessing she can now embrace her past and be the example and teacher for others in similar situations. She has the direct experience of challenge and recovery to now be able to relate to and help others.
Could it be that Lauren actually chose this life of struggle with weight and emotional eating?
More About Lauren Ciesco and High Vibe Living
Lauren Ciesco is a former emotional and binge eater who then turned herself around and became a personal growth junkie and certified Life & Weight Coach.
At her heaviest, she weighed up to 199 pounds and was stuck in a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting losing and gaining the same 50 pounds for over 20 years. In her thirties, Lauren swore off dieting for good. She was over the “struggle”. Lauren works with women who are emotional eaters that are looking for a different solution to permanent weight loss that doesn’t require dieting, exercise or willpower. She teaches women how master their minds and emotions by breaking through limiting beliefs, self-sabotaging behaviors, and creating new habits that result in permanent weight loss. She helps women shift their identity from being an emotional eater who struggles with their weight to someone who doesn’t even desire food, feels confident and leaves her program thinking, “Now that I have lost this weight, what else can I accomplish?”.
Her weight loss program isn’t about the food or the weight, those are the symptom. This is a mindset program which she addresses the beliefs that are keeping you stuck and teaches you the “meta skills” to create the results you want in your life!
You can learn more about Lauren Ciesco and High Vibe Living at www.LaurenCiesco.com. Learn how to create a life and body you love through mindset, self-love, and spirituality. Lauren offers a free 30-minute consultation to explore your situation and see if coaching is a right fit for you. You can alsoask her questions here on her Facebook page. And finally, Lauren has a new 3-part free video series where sh will teach you 3 ways to end your struggle with food and your body today! Click here to get access.
