Hello, Stephen. You wrote, "I do not believe that I can be an honest and effective practioner of NLP until I: Am able to achieve and maintain a bodyfat composition that is healthy for me. And have a choice in having a phobic response to blood being drawn or not." which I interpret to mean, "I can practice NLP with integrity only if I have a healthful bodyfat composition and I can get my blood drawn without experiencing fear." Having a healthful bodyfat composition is important for your health.  So personal integrity may force you to attain a healthful bodyfat composition.  Helping others does not automatically help yourself, so keeping your integrity as an NLP practitioner may not be enough for you.  In helping someone lose weight, a weight-management specialist draws on knowledge from outside the field of NLP.  As part of that specialist’s job, he will get rapport with you, and help you set specific short and long-term goals.  Those activities fall within an NLP practitioner’s skills.  But the exercise and eating habits you perform to lose weight are not taught in NLP practitioner classes.  The stress-reducing behaviors you perform to lose weight may be behaviors that you did not (have to) learn in a practitioner training, but are ones that have worked for you.  Also, the weight-management specialist will offer you information taken from research that occurred in the fields of sports medicine, health fitness, and nutrition. Internal strategies play an important part in eating habits, so an NLP practitioner could help you, but lifestyle changes are also important to achieve healthful eating habits, so to be your only assistant, your NLP practitioner needs the training of a weight-management specialist.  But an NLP practitioner can work with a weight-management specialist to help you, it’s part of that specialist’s job to work with other professionals in helping his client achieve lifestyle changes. The modern weight-management specialist will also help you model and rehearse specific behaviors, so be sure that the weight-management specialist follows the lifestyle they advocate. You might have good reasons to fear your blood being drawn. The needle or collection vials may be dirty, or the phlebotomist may be new or out of sorts.  In general, if anything seems wrong at the phlebotomist’s office, I decide against having my blood drawn.  But if you unreasonably fear phlebotomy, let someone successfully perform the NLP phobia pattern on you before you visit a phlebotomist. -nj