Weight loss: the inside (your head) story

Weight loss. It’s really simple in theory: just eat less and move more. But it’s a little more complicated than that in practice! Recently I saw two clients in one day, both struggling to lose weight, for whom what was going on in their heads about weight loss was far more significant than what was going into their mouths!

‘Claire’ had been battling with her weight for as long as she could remember. She is incredibly disciplined with her diet and exercises like a mad thing. Yet her weight has been stubbornly stuck at 10 kg above her goal weight for months. When I asked her how she felt about her weight, and her body, she made a face that could sour milk, and groaned, “Disgusting!!!”

She loathed her body and always had, and she felt disgusted with herself for allowing herself to become overweight and stay that way – despite the fact she had suffered a genuine medical condition (a thyroid disease) that contributed to her weight problems, and was certainly not lazy!

Claire reported that she isn’t a depressive type of person and doesn’t let her negative body image make her a sad sack around others, but those feelings of disgust about her body are always there in the background. She confessed to me that even when she had gotten close to her goal weight in the past, she was still never happy with her body.

‘Bianca’ had a very different story running about her weight. In the past when she had been slim, her ability to draw the attention of men had attracted some really spiteful, nasty comments about her from members of her extended family.

In a nutshell, the mere fact that she was attractive to men resulted in her being labelled a ‘slut’. She felt outraged that she had had this distressing and hurtful tag slapped on her despite never having done anything to ‘earn’ it, but she had felt unable to defend her reputation against the slurs.

Both women had ‘stories’ about weight loss that were, in my professional experience, sabotaging their practical efforts. In Claire’s story, she is always fat and unattractive no matter what she weighs and how toned her body is (and believe me, she is toned!).

I really don’t think anyone can get slim – and more importantly, stay slim – when they feel fat. Our beliefs are compulsive, and if you believe you’re fat and ugly, you may actually feel incredibly uncomfortable with your growing physical attractiveness as the excess weight comes off, because it just doesn’t fit the picture you have of yourself. You’ll find a way to sabotage your progress, commonly by regaining the lost weight.

Bianca’s story was that being slim is dangerous, because it draws criticism, attacks and jealousy from others, from which you can’t defend yourself. What’s the point of all that effort to lose weight if you’re just going to end up being a sitting duck for everyone else’s bitchiness?

I got down to some serious tapping with both women. With Claire, we focused on the feelings of disgust and self-loathing. While it may sound counter-intuitive to have a client state their negative thoughts and feelings out loud rather than encouraging them to ‘think positive’, the whole point of EFT is to tune into and really feel the energy of the thought or belief, and then through tapping, to release that energy. In the vacuum that results from dissipating the old belief, a new, more helpful belief can form and be nurtured.

That’s exactly what happened with Bianca. We tapped on her memory of how horrible it was to be unfairly targeted by others when she was slim and attractive, and how it made sense for part of her to seek to protect her from a repeat of that painful episode by preventing her from losing weight.

As the trauma of that event was resolved, we began exploring her ideas about what might happen if she lost weight now and was criticised again. Bianca grinned from ear to ear and said ‘F*** them! What they think of me doesn’t matter anyway!’ And she really meant it – she could feel in her bones that she was finally ready to lose weight now, because it was something she wanted to do for herself – and to hell with everyone else and what they think!

Claire and Bianca both have more work to do in order to return to, and remain at, their healthy weights. But merely by identifying some of the dysfunctional beliefs that have kept them overweight, and starting to release them in favour of functional beliefs, both women have removed major road-blocks to their goals.


My intensive program for overcoming emotional eating, food addiction and poor body image, The LEAN Program, incorporates tapping on these and many other weight loss and body image related issues.

The LEAN Program is a completely new approach to weight loss – instead of counting kilojoules and restricting portion size, you will discover:

  1. How to choose foods that reduce cravings;
  2. How to tell when you’re truly hungry and when you’ve had enough to eat – and easily stop eating at that point; and
  3. How to transform your relationship with your body and with food, so that healthy eating just comes naturally to you, with no sense of deprivation.

Click here for all the details.

 

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