Weight Loss Blocker 1 – Our Beliefs
I am sure you already know that weight loss is tricky.
We see plenty of ads that say drink this or do that and the weight will fall off in just a couple of weeks. There is an ad showing up on my Facebook feed at the moment that suggests, that just eating this one chewy sweet will have you losing a ton of weight in weeks. Ahh, how we all wish that was true, but it is not possible, without compromising our health.
We think we want to lose weight, but our bigger goal is to be healthy, to not just lose weight but to feel more energy, feel stronger and be able to do all the things we want to do in our life. The way to do this is actually really simple – eat less junk food, add more healthy food and add more activity every day.
But doing this is hard.
We might start our day or our week with the plan, but something happens, and the food “just jumps into my mouth”.
So why is it that the answer is so simple, and the goal is something that we really want, but we keep trying and failing? Well, it is not your lack of will power, or that you’re hopeless or a failure.
We all have subconscious patterns that determine our behaviors in all areas of our lives, and these are most notable in the area of weight loss.
I think they show up in weight loss because this is one of the few areas of life where you need to be consistent 100% of the time. When we are trying to increase our income, we can still watch some TV, and visit friends or even take a whole day off.
But if we watch TV and eat a whole packet of chips, visit friends and enjoy a few pieces of cake with them, or take a whole day off, eating all day, we will mess up our weight loss goals.
To lose weight consistently we need stay on the healthy eating track most of the time and doing anything most of the time is really hard, and hence we beat ourselves up for lacking willpower.
But there is much more going on behind the scenes.
I have identified 8 weight loss blockers that get in the way of us achieving our goals.
Each week I am going to talk in detail about one of these blockers and how to get rid of them.
Blocker One – The Power of Beliefs
One of Louise Hay’s (You Can Heal Your Life) key philosophies was “The only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and a thought can be changed”.
When you say, “I hate my body”, what you are actually saying is that you hate your belief about yourself. Your belief might be “I’m hopeless, I am not good enough, I am a failure”. That belief is creating an emotion, a feeling, and this is the level that we work on with EFT. Whereas dieting is simply working with the actions and habits, without addressing the beginning of the process.
Our beliefs are powerful.
Louise Hay put it so well “No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effect of inner thoughts”
The world around us – our relationships, our financial well-being, our health, and our weight are all reflections of our beliefs.
Holding onto negative beliefs is like trying to go through life with grey-tinted glasses. Glasses that show the world to be a difficult place, full of negative experiences, pain, and failure.
Our beliefs about our body can have started in our family when comments were made about us, or by the beliefs that our carers had about themselves and about us, or by our own experiences that we interpreted to mean something, or even by our interpretation of what society was telling us.
For example: My mother was a model. She was naturally skinny and looked stunning. I don’t think anything was ever said to me, but I always felt like an elephant beside her. When I was 10, I snuck into her room one day and tried on some of her clothes. They didn’t fit. I was too big for them. I decided that I was fat and would never be as pretty as my mother. (I wasn’t fat, just a much bigger frame) I have carried that belief with me for so many years. The fact that I actually had a perfect female figure of bust, waist and hips, not a model figure took me 40 years to figure out!!!
Once we have a belief, we tend to see it as a fact and act accordingly. I just assumed I was fat and that was who I was.
I never thought of myself as having a good figure, until I read a magazine article one day about the supermodel Elle McPherson.
This article had her measurements in it. Her bust, waist and hip measurements were the same as mine and I weighed the same.
Targeting a belief is about questioning the way we have looked at the world and ourselves. This is where we start our tapping. We tap on the beliefs and our emotions about that belief and start the process of questioning what is the real truth.
Maybe I do not have to be tiny like my mother to look good.
Maybe my weight has nothing to do with what I am like as a person.
Maybe I can see myself as valuable.
What are your beliefs that are holding you back?
You might resist the idea that changing our beliefs we can change our lives.
We have so much proof that we can’t lose weight, that diets don’t work, that the only way to lose weight is through massive self-discipline and serious dieting and exercise.
But if you keep thinking that way it will continue to be your experience and you will cut yourself off from the belief that weight loss can be easy, fun and life-changing. Until we let go of the emotion and stress response behind the negative beliefs, we can’t fully let them go. The first step in letting them go is to identify them.
What are your beliefs about your weight?
Do you believe that you can lose weight?
When did you decide you were not the “right” look?
What events have you used as proof of your beliefs?
If you would like to read about the other 7 weight loss blockers then make sure you sign up here to get onto my mailing list.