Sunday, November 2, 2014

The Yachats Gazette, Issue 39, November 2 2014

 
SYNERGY WEIGHT RELEASE

The Yachats Gazette was delighted to meet with Maryann Candito and discuss her approach to helping people lose weight through non-traditional methods.

TYG: Where did you first learn about EFT [Emotional Freedom Technique]?
Maryann: Let’s see…I was a life coach, and I started to get e-mails about it, started to read about it online. It just was one of those synchronistic experiences where once you hear about it from one person, you start seeing it over and over in different places. Then I was really interested in it, so I started researching it and studying it, and I learned to be a practitioner.

TYG: What is EFT?
Maryann: It’s just a tool. My business is Synergy Weight Release, where I help my clients release weight naturally and intuitively. EFT is just one of the tools I use, that helps people release those subconscious programs they have around food, to help them lose weight and naturally choose better foods and to not react to environmental and emotional triggers, like stress. A lot of people stress eat. […]

TYG: For a while, I was down to 20 foods, including flavors, because I had H. pylori and we hadn’t discovered it yet! I couldn’t eat grilled cheeses, I couldn’t eat cheese tacos, I couldn’t eat mac and cheese… almost anything cheese-related, I couldn’t eat. I was [getting sick] almost every night.
Maryann: Well you see, that’s where trusting your own inner wisdom about what you should eat is a good way! I teach my own clients to trust their bodies. One diet may be good for someone, person, and not someone else. Although… I’m a firm believer that you don’t have to diet to release weight. That’s what I teach, and that’s what I’ve experienced through my program.

TYG: I believe so too! You do not have to diet, you just have to exercise more.
Maryann: Maybe not. It’s not so much what you eat, although what you eat is really important. It’s more of the reason why you eat. Why you eat, why you overeat, why you eat to an emotional trigger. Some people stuff themselves. Why do they do that? They’re not comfortable. Some people eat foods based on emotional triggers, or stress triggers, or environmental triggers. That’s what I look at; that’s my specialty: helping people find why they’re eating. Not so much what they’re eating.

TYG-Graphic Design: That sounds very psychological!
Maryann: Yes! And once they get into alignment and clear those reasons why they eat at that subconscious level and energetic level, they naturally begin to eat better, healthier foods that are more nutritious and better for their body, because the cravings no longer compel them. They’re not controlled by the cravings, because the cravings start to drift away.

TYG: I don’t really have cravings, but when I’m at the TV set, I eat.
Maryann: And that could be an association you have, just like popcorn and movies!

TYG-GD: Can we backtrack a little bit, and ask: What’s your name? Where are you from?
Maryann: Sure! My name is Mary Ann Candito, and I live here in Yachats. I’ve lived here for about two years, and moved from Portland. I’m really loving the coast, really loving Yachats. […]

TYG: Why did you choose Yachats to move to?
Maryann: We used to come here for vacation! My partner retired from OHSU, and we thought that now was a good time to head on down here, and that’s what we did. We started looking around, and we found a house the first time we set out to look for a house, and the rest is history.

TYG-GD: What did your partner do?
Maryann: He was a surgical tech in labor and delivery at OHSU. […]

TYG: Where did you live before Portland?
Maryann: I lived in Eugene before Portland.

TYG: […] I was born in Portland!
Maryann: I’ve only met a few native Oregonians—my partner is one of them. But I was born on the East coast.

TYG: When did you learn about and become interested in EFT?
Maryann: I started it when I began my coaching practice about five years ago. My Synergy Weight Release, I started about a year and a half ago.

TYG-GD: You said you were a “Life Coach”—what is that?
Maryann: A life coach helps people to improve their life in helping them shift their mindset and helping them make lifestyle changes. I’m certified through Christy Whitman’s program, Quantum Success Coaching Academy, so I have a certification as a life coach. And I’ve had about 20 years in holistic health. I started off as a massage therapist, way back, and moved on from there […] to reiki, energetic healing work, cranial sacral work, then eventually got into meditation instruction, life coaching, and EFT.

TYG: Wow, interesting! What services do you offer at Synergy Weight Release?
Maryann: I offer many different types of weight release programs. People can work with me privately one-on-one, or they can work with me as a group—I actually have a group coaching program that is more affordable for people. They can still get the same coaching, but it’s in a group setting. They get lessons every couple of weeks. I also have home study programs, so people who like to do things on their own can sign up for one of my home study programs and have support that way.

TYG-GD: Do you have a website?
Maryann: I do: www.synergyweightrelease.com . An important part of the story—how I got started in all this—[is that] when I started [to study] massage therapy back in Florida, I was compelled to work with Deepak Chopra, so I moved to San Diego.

TYG-GD: Who is Deepak Chopra?
Maryann: Oh, he’s very famous. He’s a best-selling author, he’s been all over. He’s one of the major world new thought leaders. So I worked at his center in La Jolla, CA, a long time ago back in 1996—and that really started me in the process of Eastern philosophy and Eastern healing methods [such as] Ayurveda. So I’m trained in ayurvedic massage and meditation. [… It focuses] on a mind and body type. Even though I don’t teach that, that started me on my path of really expanding. There’s so much more than just our physical body. My path really started exponentially taking off after I worked for the center there in La Jolla.

TYG-GD: So are you associated with Jai Tomlin in any way, at the Yachats Health Clinic?
Maryann: No, not at all. Right now I just work out of my home. Our coaching calls are by phone or by Skype, because my clients are all over the country. I’m getting ready to publish a book, so I’m looking for speaking engagements to get out the word about what I do, and how you have the power to change your life. You have more power than you think you do! The main point of what I do, is that I really help people transform their minds so they can transform their bodies. I find than when we clear a lot of the core issues of why people eat a certain way or have triggers to emotionally eat, that we actually clear other things. And things improve in their life. So when it comes to the brain: the brain has a unique capacity to learn, and that’s called neuroplasticity. What I do with EFT and different meditation techniques, I help people to re-learn, and disengage that automatic pilot that takes over our lives. By the time we’re an adult, about 90-95% of what we think, do, and feel is a series of conditioned programs. So what I do is help my clients to disengage that automatic pilot. Then I help them energetically, and through the mind-body techniques to reinstate new, healthier purpose.

TYG: So you don’t do anything physical, like touch.
Maryann: No, not at all. Well, the EFT is tapping, but they tap on themselves.

TYG-GD: What is tapping?
Maryann: Tapping on the energy meridians, [accompanied by] statements, or phrases.

TYG-GD: So, if 90% of pathways are fixed by the time we become an adult, how should we be raising our children?
Maryann: Oh no, it’s not even like that. Think about driving a car. The first time you’re driving a car, you’re paying attention to every little thing: turning the key, steering the wheel, fixing your mirrors. After you do that a number of times, you don’t even think about it. And that’s the automatic pilot that happens.

TYG: Although if it’s auto-pilot, it’s good.
Maryann: Yes! On the one hand, it’s great, because it makes us not have to think about certain things. On the other hand, when we get these well-established bad habits, like the first time, perhaps, I use food to comfort myself from a painful emotion. That, over time, gets more ingrained, and then automatically, I react. If I’m stressed, food—I go to food. Automatically, without thinking! So it’s that area that we want to disengage, is the automatic pilot that’s not helpful.

TYG: Interesting! For me, it’s when I’m really interested that I go to food. Or exercise. I have two responses, basically.
Maryann: Right! And if it’s not healthy for you, or it’s something you want to change, you can change it. It’s about basically teaching the brain to relearn a new pattern.

TYG: Like when I’m done with school, I instantly turn on the TV, or the computer.
Maryann: Right—you don’t even think about it. [… Those] are the conditioned programs that we don’t even realize are going on—our responses to things.

TYG-GD: Well that’s why I was asking about raising children, because it seems to me that the time to nip a bad habit is in the bud. It seems to me there should be techniques for younger users.
Maryann: Right. And I actually do tap with my son. We have done some tapping together, some EFT work…

TYG-GD: So, what is this tapping?
Maryann: How it works is… say we’re going to deal with a food craving, for example. Say we look at sweets. Somebody has a sweet craving. We could put a piece of chocolate cake in front of them, and we could do a series of this tapping with the statements that we would do, and after we’re done with that, they won’t have that emotional charge, or that craving for that cake anymore.

TYG-GD: Because they associate it with tapping?
Maryann: No, no, we just clear that need to have that, that uncontrollable urge to have that.

TYG: Because it clears your mind, and you realize what’s going on, and you’re like…
Maryann: Right, but that would be tapping on the global issue. But what you really want to do, to have long-lasting effects so that sweet cravings don’t happen all the time for you, is to uncover the core issue that’s beneath that, and then we clear that event. The event could be anything, really. For me, what started my weight problems, was that I was at my grandfather’s house. I was five years old, four or five, when he had a heart attack and died. I didn’t have any weight problems until after that. That was a major event in my life, one that I still remember, and I was just a small child. [It was] one that clearly started some of my coping mechanisms with food, to soothe myself. So if you clear that event—there are other issues too, you know we all have lots of issues at the core of something big—

TYG: I’d like to sign up for a program like this!
Maryann: Well, this is my website. When I first started using EFT for my weight, I didn’t even know I was going to be teaching my clients, and I didn’t even realize I was going to be specializing in weight release until it worked so well for me! But I do have on my website different videos where I actually took myself through the program and put it up on YouTube, going through the different problems that I faced. So you’ll see me talking all very raw and emotional, because I actually went through some things of my own, personally, and they’re there on my website. And you’ll see: I was bigger then.

TYG: You’re brave!
Maryann: Yes! And I had a real carb… I don’t want to say addiction, but I loved carbs and overloaded on carbs. […] What I uncovered is that I missed the family, I missed the traditions, I missed the family celebrations: my family is all back East, so I compensated with carbs! And once I realized why I ate so many carbs, and I cleared it at the energetic, emotional, physical level, carbs don’t control me anymore. I’m eating more balanced, more nutritious foods—and I love carbs still, but I don’t eat and overload like I used to.

TYG: One reason I’m not 200 pounds is because I get a lot of exercise.
Maryann: That helps! [For] a lot of my clients, we work with motivation to exercise, too, because movement is good for everybody, and it’s just good for your heart, even! So to help people get motivated from that subconscious level is really powerful, to clear some resistance and areas like that.

TYG-GD: So what do you like about being in Yachats while you’re doing this work?
Maryann: I really like the community; I’m just getting to know people more. […] I’d love to find someplace local [to do group work]—I’m just talking to a center in Salem about doing workshops up there. […] In the back of my mind I’d love to do some retreats—a 3-day workshop would be great. I’m just not prepared for that yet. Eventually!

TYG: What kind of prices do you have?
Maryann: Well, that would vary depending on what the client needs. The lowest-priced products would be to do some home study courses. I offer an Emotional Eating course, a digital course, for $47, and it goes all the way up to someone signing on to do courses for a year. It depends on how often they would need to meet with me. Everyone is unique, and there’s not really a cookie-cutter answer. One of my clients was seeing me for two sessions a month, and what we realized was that for her, specifically, she needed to have more accountability. So we broke that one-hour session down to three “laser” sessions of 20 minutes, so I coach her three times a week. Once we did that, we shifted the way we worked together, her weight loss has been tremendous. That was what was needed for her. So it depends on the person. […] I will give you one price though, because it’s group coaching. It’s called “Synergize Your Life.” We meet twice a month. We have a Facebook support forum, and you get lessons every two weeks delivered digitally.

TYG: Like Skype?
Maryann: No, there’s a back office where you would log into your private area, and you see your lessons. That’s $67 a month right now, and next year that will be going up. That’s a really affordable way to learn what I teach, to have me help coach you in a group setting on the phone, but it’s still a way to have access to me at a really affordable rate. It’s really helpful, because everybody is at different levels in the group, and everybody needs help with different things.

TYG: Thank you so much for your time!
Maryann: Thank you!

INTERVIEW WITH EMMETT FITTS

The Yachats Gazette had the opportunity to interview Mr. Emmett Fitts, a resident of Sea Aire Assisted Living Facility in Yachats. Sea Aire’s sitting room has on display a working model, built by Mr. Fitts, of the mechanicals of a 19th century steamboat. 

TYG: That’s one impressive model!
Emmett: This is an actual model [of the works] of the Delta Queen. Now, the Delta Queen was a riverboat years ago on the Mississippi. And that’s an actual copy of the whole thing.

TYG: I wanted to know whether this thing actually runs!
Emmett: Now you see, there’s a tube down here where you [hook it up]. Instead of steam, we put it on compressed air. And  it’ll run. There’s a little [switch] that makes it go backwards or forwards. And there’s a control that’ll make it go either fast or slow.

TYG: And there’s a reverser lever somewhere?
Emmett: Right here is the reverse. It’s on the side.

TYG: I was wondering—if you hooked this up to the back of a boat, with a bunch of compressed air in it, would it actually propel the boat?
Emmett: Absolutely! Now, I don’t have rudders on it. There’s little engines that run the rudders. It fits on the same deck.

TYG: That’s amazing! In miniature, of course.
Emmett: Yes. It’s to scale, though. I had the exact layout of every one of those pieces. There’s 800 pieces in that. Well. I’m proud of it, because it’s all hand made, and it took a good many hours to do that. But—anyone can do it, and you don’t want to give up, ‘cause it’s awfully easy to get a little discouraged. Now, all those bearings on the back were hand cast, and that was sand casting. But you know, I belonged to a group of men in Corvallis that were like-minded. They all took this kind of work, and you could ask any question, and they’d show me how to set up sand to do that.

TYG-Editorial Assistant: So you did the sand casting?
Emmett: I actually did the sand casting.

TYG: Wow!
Emmett: It was a lot of fun. And the wood work, of course I had the machines to make all that.

TYG-EA: What was the hardest piece to build?
Emmett: Oh, these valves on the steam engine. Now, you can’t really see the valves, but there’s a rod here—it opens that steam valve, and then the other one’ll be shut…. Most of this, just like the cylinder, was made out of a pipe—but you might have had to ream that pipe out, to be exact size.

TYG-EA: So you basically bought solid pieces of brass and pieces of brass tubing—?
Emmett: No, you’d use a piece of copper pipe, but you’d have to ream that out, to make it fit.

TYG-EA: But all the little solid brass pieces you manufactured?
Emmett: [nods] I put it on my lathe or milling machine.

TYG: Wow.
Emmett: I say I was lucky to have all that stuff. But what I did was, each payday, I’d buy a tool.

TYG-EA: Nice!
Emmett: Well, I had a good job. I was in the service for five years—I didn’t do this until I was out of the service. Then I had to have a machine shop, and I had it.  [laughs]

TYG-EA: So this had nothing to do with your profession?
Emmett: No. See, I was a pilot, and later a carpenter, and that was all a different story.

TYG-EA: This was entirely a hobby.
Emmett: [nods] My hobby. Absolutely.

TYG-EA: Pretty serious hobby!
Emmett: Oh, yes—but anyone can do it if they really want to. … You know, I was twelve years old when I first had a dragsaw. You’ve seen dragsaws? I was twelve years old when they turned me loose on one of those. [laughter] They were made in the 1920s. It’s a saw that goes back and forth, and the engine lays against a log. Kids couldn’t do that nowadays—they’ve got laws where you cannot do that.

If you’ve got a computer, you can tune in on that dragsaw, and you’ll get pictures of it.

TYG: So basically it’s a scaled-up, flipped-on-its-side, jigsaw.
Emmett: Well, it’s a great big saw like loggers used to have; they were called crosscuts. They were six feet long. And they had to be filed just right, or they didn’t cut very good. The loggers started using the chainsaw after the war. That revolutionized the logging industry.

TYG: Yeah, because chain saws are so much more efficient.
Emmett: That’s right. So this is a wonderful hobby, if you could get interested in that. Now, it does not cost an awful lot—they have lathes pretty cheap now. There’s Chinese lathes, but there’s nothing wrong with them. And they have milling machines—all it does is true the tops up.
Not too many people can do it, but if you’re young enough like Allen, I know someone like you could do that. Now, you’re not going to do it overnight. I used to go down to…. There was an old machinist, in an old boat that made a machine shop, and I used to stand there for hours watching that guy. To cut a taper, he could figure it out, you know, how much you want offset—nowadays, you have that all built in your lathe, all you have to do is set a dial, and it’ll make the taper you want. Now, you don’t run into a taper many times, unless you’re into automotive machinery, and you’re adapting things to fit. But a taper has to be perfect, it can’t be haphazard.

I don’t know whether you’re interested in it or not, but I’m writing my story, about my life. See, my father died five months after I was born, and that left it hard on the family. My mother had to be the breadwinner. That was during the Depression. And my goodness, those days you didn’t have Welfare. You had to go pick strawberries, prunes, potatoes—anything to make a few dollars. Of course, I don’t really want to preach about my poorer life, but—you just can’t give up. The name of my book I’m writing is “It Can Be Done”—and it can be done, if you really want to do it. Now, do you think you would be mechanically minded at all?

TYG: I’m planning to become an architect when I grow up. Architect-slash-engineer. I’ll get a major in both fields.
Emmett: Well, that’s a wonderful trade. You see, I just took whatever was available. And that’s why I got into this. And it was fun, and it didn’t cost anything. But times were tough then. Well, it wasn’t tough when I did this [the Delta Queen model], but that was after the war.

TYG: When did you do this, anyway?
Emmett: That was in the 80s. I was pretty old at that time. [laughs]

TYG: One hobby that I can suggest, that I’m totally into, and that I think would be great for you, is model railroading.
Emmett: Well, there’s a lot of people, you know, that do that. Of course railroading now isn’t like it used to be, but it’s a good hobby.

TYG: Yeah. And that’s totally my hobby. I’m totally into model railroads.
Emmett: You’ve got all your remote controls, on your model trains, too. So I know you’ll get into that.

TYG: I prefer, actually, the old classic method, where you have to put all the wiring in yourself. And make isolation joints. I personally prefer just a bank of controllers over DCC. DCC is the newfangled controller method.
Emmett: You know, a hobby like that would be wonderful. You’d have all that wiring to do. Wiring isn’t too easy if you don’t know how. [laughter]

TYG: It’s not too easy at all. Especially because my old locomotives are starting to break down. I just bought a book on the repairing of locomotives and rolling stock. So I’m going to have to start doing that, because I’ve got a bunch of useless, broken-down locomotives.

[Extensive discussion follows of steam, diesel, and magnetic-levitation locomotives.]

TYG-EA: I have a question. If one were to get interested in machine work like this, what tools would you start with?
Emmett: A lathe. A band saw. And a milling machine. Now of course, milling machines nowadays, you can set ‘em up on a computer, set ‘em up to do the right thing...

TYG: I prefer the old classic way.
Emmett: … And it does the whole job. If it’s a bunch of little holes that has to be drilled, it’ll drill them for you.

TYG: Now that I wouldn’t mind using the computer for, but for the general stuff, like if wanted a pipe to be fit exactly, I’d rather do that by hand.
Emmett: You’re on the right track!

[We retire to Emmett’s room, and look at a picture of several seaplanes.]

Emmett: These are the planes I used to fly, right over there. I was an instructor down in Pensacola. The top one is what we used to teach the students in. The bigger one, it had 2000 horsepower. Those were the PBY, and the PBM. All seaplanes….

I got to learn to fly out of the service. During the war…. The government put on a program, that they were taking young men like myself—see, I was only about 20 years old—and they were having a program to learn to fly. Of course it didn’t cost us anything, and boy, I jumped at the chance! And it was really just as good a course as the navy, because they were more fussy with their materials, so you didn’t make any mistakes there! It was in Vancouver, Washington. And then you could put in for either army or navy. After we went to that, they sent us over to Swan Island in Portland. That was when it was an airport. And I had six months of that.

And then the war broke out. I’ve been lucky my whole life—when I applied for the navy, why, they put me right in as an instructor, because I’d had these other two courses. Well, all I had to do was teach these people how to take off and land in those big planes, and you see, that was duck soup, it didn’t amount to much, but it did give me a break, for I didn’t have to get into battle. Now, I didn’t know any more than anyone, only how to fly. And I knew a little navigation, how to go out and get back in there. That was half the problem, the navigation. You’d take these students out, and you’d go on a triangular course, and they had to find their way back. Then too, we had to tow targets, for the other fighters. In that day, the shot had to go through the propeller, and the propeller timed those shots. Now, they did away with that during my time…

TYG: …And they did the sensible thing, which was to put [the guns] out of the range of the propeller.
Emmett: That’s right, you’ve got it all figured out. How about flying, do you want to fly?

TYG: One day, yeah!
Emmett: Well, I’m sure you could do it. It can be done!