Addressing the Psychological Blocks to Your Weight Loss

In early 2022, Jelena Katić Ujević, Head Coach at the MAP Coaching Institute (MAP CI), was at her heaviest at 100 kilos. Everything seemed perfect on the outside: she was enjoying her work at the MAP CI and had just gotten married to the most wonderful person on Earth. Still, she felt miserable inside. The more weight she gained, the more she tried to hide herself from others.

When Jelena recognized this as a negative spiral, she set out to change her life story about her physical and emotional weight. Following the success of her signature MAP program, When the Body Says YES, she created a new program in 2022 to help people release their emotional and/or physical weight. She has since lost 25 kilos with ease.

What felt more amazing to her than her physical weight loss, was how much freer, happier, and more grounded she felt, through experiencing this program. She felt perfect as she was from the inside out.

This program called NeuroReShape — Release Emotional and Physical Weight with MAP is now newly relaunched with lifetime access.

On behalf of the MAP Coaching Institute, I’m delighted to interview Jelena to share more about the benefits of this program. Here are some key highlights of the interview, with my questions as the header and her answers under each question (edited for conciseness).

Hi Jelena, can you share what led you to create this program?

Sure. I’ve been struggling with my body image and physical weight since my childhood. Being the only girl with three other brothers meant I had plenty of responsibilities even from an early age. I didn’t have the childhood I yearned for and felt like a grown-up at ten years old. Nobody taught me how to acknowledge and process my emotions.

In early 2022, my mom got COVID and she ended up on a ventilator in the hospital. Our whole family would gather at my parents’ home in the late evenings to pray for our mom, and to accompany our dad. Food was the last thing on my mind. I kept stuffing myself with work commitments and only ate once a day.

Unfortunately, my mom passed away a couple of months later. She was in her sixties. Her body was so broken and her heart was so traumatized. She took care of everything and everyone, and she constantly neglected her own health and happiness.

I gained 10 kilos within those two months, even with the obvious calorie deficit. I could see how I was running a life like my mom, and I didn’t want to end up physically and emotionally broken like her.

"Your story follows your state."

Your body and brain communicate through the vagus nerve, a communication highway. Because of this, your physical state can directly influence your mind, creating your life story.

My old story was my mom’s story of neglecting her emotional and physical health by over-giving to everyone around her. In fact, this is more like a generational pattern, as all the women in my family were strong, independent, and running the household.

To change my story, I needed to feel heard, seen, and safe, regardless of my physical appearance and life circumstances.

During that time, I had a couple of clients wanting to work on their physical weight issues as well. They tried dieting with different supplements and exercises without much improvement. I only used MAP to neutralize their emotional responses to events connected to their weight.

To my surprise, these clients started to report that they were starting to lose weight. They also seemed to be happier and more fulfilled.

That led me to create this program later on.

How did you design this program to be gentle and effective?

I first started doing research experiments with these what-ifs:

• What if we address the emotional pain of everything that has been happening in their life?
• What if we address all of the reasons why a body would hold weight no matter what we do?
• What do you do when you don’t feel motivated at all to take care of your body and soul?

What could happen?

I did three rounds of these two-month research experiments in 2022 from June 1st to December 31st with support from the MCI. There were about 600 participants from all over the world, with different ages, genders, and histories of trauma.

The participants agreed to listen to at least one 30-minute subliminal MAP session once a day.

From my experience of facilitating over 3,000 single sessions and helping more than 5,000 participants in group MAP sessions, listening to subliminals is the easiest and gentlest way to process our memories. I also added some optional recorded group MAP sessions with specific themes and some other short exercises for emotional management.

I’m so happy to report that after six months, there were so many people releasing a crazy amount of weight without changing their diet and physical exercises. Here is Luisa’s incredible sharing of her weight loss through the research.

It was purely a release of heavy emotions that led to a direct loss of physical weight.

In early 2023, I finally created a program to help people release emotional and physical weight. People who bought it had a one-year access to it.

This year in 2024, I want to make it more profound and address even more topics I didn’t cover in last year’s version. This program now includes lifetime access so that participants can go back to it whenever they feel like they are struggling emotionally and need more support. I definitely was struggling while trying to cope with my mom’s health crisis and passing, so I want to offer others support through this program.

You still need to do the work for this to succeed.

I want to highlight that not everyone experienced weight loss through this program. There were people who lost a crazy amount of weight, and some people who didn’t experience much success. It was fascinating to observe the differences between these two groups of people.

But the funny thing is that before launching this workshop, I started to record more sessions to be placed in the new version of the program. I needed a live audience to record these new sessions, so I asked the previous members to be my audience. Almost all of them started to lose weight even though they hit a plateau some time ago and nothing was helping. This breakthrough came from just listening to these half-hour sessions a few times per week. How crazy is that!

Even though this program is designed to be easy and convenient to use, you still need to do the mindset and emotional management exercises, play the subliminals, and fine-tune the way you use the program according to what is working and not working for you.

What was the journey like for you as you did the inner work through this program?

During those six months of weight loss research experiments, I finally went back on track to do what was most important to me. I went back to school and I am finishing my degree in psychology. I also lost about 15 kilos. And now, a year and a half later, I have released about 25 kilos in total. With the launch of this newly updated program in March 2024, I plan to let go of what is left.

But I can tell you that I never felt freer, happier, and more grounded than ever in my life.

I had been struggling with my body image and weight almost all my life for the past 25 years.

A couple of months after my mom passed away, I found a photograph of my 10-year-old self wearing a beautiful blouse she made for me. I wore this blouse with a black skirt while singing solo in a crowded church. I felt beautiful.

I remember staying on my balcony, waiting for my parents to pick me up after the performance. My neighbors saw me and commented on how big I looked. I was just 10 years old! I felt beautiful, but my external reality said I was not.

I also struggled as a teenager. I was in a phase where things were bad at home, therefore I couldn’t eat at all in school. In a short time, I’ve lost more than 20 kilos. Everyone was commenting on how beautiful I was and how I should never go back to my chubbier self. My body was perfect, yet I felt miserable inside.

The MAP program helped me process and release these conflicts in me.

I realized the destructive power that these words from people around us can embed unhelpful beliefs in us. When we believe them, their story becomes our narrative.

We become afraid to show up as beautiful in our desired body shapes because of the way other people associate with their ideas on beauty and being slim. Some of us were abused emotionally, financially, physically, and/or sexually when we were thin. This pattern gives rise to a new belief: "If we become thin and beautiful again, something bad will happen to us."

That was my story for the past 20+ years. And now, with the help of the research and the program, I finally changed my story for the better. It is my deepest wish that this program will help many others who have suffered the way I did.

Do you have any final message you want to share with our readers?

When my mom died, I was so miserable. I was so lost. She was my rock in life. Her death was also a wake-up call for me. My mom was taking care of everyone and everything. She ended up in a hospital with her body completely broken, and I said to myself: "You know that if you continue like this, you're going to end up like your mom."

I want to enjoy my life to the fullest, and I want to say to whoever is reading this article: THERE IS NO REASON FOR YOU TO SUFFER ANYMORE.

It's never too late to start choosing yourself.

Start choosing your mental and physical well-being, but most importantly, start believing that you deserve it and you are worth it.

It has to be you who takes the responsibility for yourself. No one can do that for you but you. Yes, it can feel scary and painful and sometimes it doesn’t feel right, yes, bad things happen and we get hurt. But if we do not take responsibility for our lives, someone else will, and we don’t want that.

We don’t want anyone to dictate how we’re going to live, how we’re going to feel, and what we are going to do.

Test-drive this program for free for 7 days

I hope you have enjoyed reading this exclusive interview with Jelena.

If this is something that resonates with you, take a look at our newly launched program and you can test-drive it for free (no credit card details needed) for seven days.

The goal is not for you to lose weight within seven days. The preview is to help you feel into what the program is and how you feel after listening to the subliminal and doing some of the exercises and for you to decide if this is the path where you want to go.

Please refer to this link to find sign up for the free preview: NeuroReShape — Release Emotional and Physical Weight with MAP.