Fat Talk Free Week

This week, I am going to be blogging about ‘fat talk’ and how you can decide to take one action right now to make some major changes in the quality of your life and the lives of the people around you.

Following on from my blog posts about the hypnotic effects of photoshopping practically every image of a naked woman that we are exposed to these days – on advertising hoardings, in magazines and throughout the print media – I came across a very inspiring group of people in the States who are urging women to end ‘fat talk’ now.

Now, as I have discussed so many times on this blog, the way that we talk to ourselves inside our own minds in incredibly ‘hypnotic.’ What do I mean by this?

Well, if we hear something often enough, we tend to believe it. That’s why heping people to change their unhelpful ’self-talk’ is a big part of what i do in my work as a hypnotherapist.

The people around us are also incredibly hypnotic. These are our loved ones, people we live with or spend lots of time with, people we’d like to emulate, and so on. If we hear them say something often enough we can end up internalising that belief or way of explaining the world as a part of our own self-talk. Their voices can so easily become our own voices. So, for example, our parents can have a very hypnotic influence over us, particularly in our formative years.

So you can see that there are many good things about ending ‘fat talk.’ Fat Talk Free Week sounds like an excellent idea to me.

And you can join in. Tri Delta is a sorority organisation in the US, working with women across university campuses to end fat talk and promote healthy, progressive ideas about body-image. They have given me permission to get involved and help them spread their message – because it is such a fabulous one.

All week, I’ll be blogging here about how you can help end fat talk and start talking positively and progressively to yourself and others about weight and self- image.

Why is it so important?

Here’s a statistic forwarded to me by the people at Fat Talk Free Week:

81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat. 51% of 9 and 10 year old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet.  (Mellin LM, Irwin CE & Scully S, 1992)

Now, I am not sure if that is a sample of girls in the US or the UK, but I think you will agree that 81% is a lot of young people.

Just take a moment to think about it. Have you talked about your weight or your body-image in a negative or unhelpful way today? If so, what effect might this have had on the people around you? What effect did it have on you?

The campaign’s message is ‘Friends’ don’t let friends fat talk.’

Please do join me in my challenge this week to End Fat Talk forever!

And please do take a moment to watch the video below  and find out more here.

This is something you can do to really make a difference.