Different ways to do the timeline exercise with clients:

• Use the grayscale printable version of this worksheet, (which isn't branded with my branding), and make it your own.
• Or, spread a huge sheet of paper on the wall, and do the timeline with stickynotes, in real time, with them talking you through each stage.
• Or, mark a line on the floor with tape. Make them stand at one end of it, with their eyes closed, and talk you through in chronological order as they 'see' in their mind's eye what's happening to them.
• Sometimes, I have taken clients through a hypnotic induction, back to the first 'Oh Shit' moment where they made a survival-based choice about how to live and to start trying to alter their body. I ask them to step right into that moment, to feel its importance and get inside their younger head, speaking out the rationale for how they must live from then onwards.

It's important to note that if you do the latter, you shouldn't leave them in the midst of their traumatic experience. I usually follow a pattern proposed by hypnotherapist Marisa Peer, where your older self meets your younger self (good opportunity to ask your younger self any questions about what they need), and they feel totally at home with you. So you can imagine making a special bedroom in your home, where they can live, and be totally safe with you.

Points of discussion or focus:

What was going on when you felt best in your body? What was the rest of your life like? Did that have any knock-on effect for good?

Looking at your life as a whole can be overwhelming. It can be disheartening if you repeated something a lot. But this is a good way to get ready for an eating psychology journey - a good way to draw attention to the fact that it might be a good idea to do something different from what you've done all these years.

Be tender with the you that started all this food struggle off. You might wish you hadn't begun the whole food struggle in the first place. But understand that you reached for the best survival tool you had to hand. You did your best to comfort and protect and try to change your life at a painful moment.

The only reality is now. The past is past, and the future hasn't happened yet. We aren't pulling up the past so we can feel stuck. We're just seeing how it ebbed and flowed.

Are you ready to press 'pause' on trying to control the eating and body part of the equation for a couple of weeks, and go over to the psychological and emotional side? To try to undo a few of the things that keep us repeating the same patterns? If so, then go here.