HealthEvolution

I’d always been overweight my whole life.  Maybe not as a very young child, but certainly by elementary school, by the age of 8, I was aware and accepting of the fact that I was indeed “fat” and that I liked food very much.  I didn’t feel guilty about it, though, probably because I was too young to have those socially-induced ideas about who I was dictate how I felt about myself.  Somewhere in my young teenage years, however, I started feeling this negativity about my own body - I didn’t like the way I looked, I felt resentful and jealous of people who looked good, and I used food to placate these feelings of fear, anxiety, guilt, and pain.   After high school, this was simply my status quo and through 5 very tumultuous years of college the situation grew even more and more out of my conscious control.  When I finally did have to step on a scale at the doctor’s office, I was even more discouraged than ever before. 

 I knew I was big, I knew that I was shopping at Lane Bryant, wearing a size 24 jeans and an XXL shirt, I knew about the food I was consuming - almost daily binges (mostly pizza, fast food, alcohol, and really anything that was completely indulgent, fatty, and delicious) but I never wanted to “see” the consequences in the mirror and so I didn’t.  I didn’t have any idea that my weight had exceeded 300 pounds and I didn’t want to face it. 

 Because I wasn’t willing to face the mirror or the scale, I couldn’t begin to formulate a way out of this.  It was impossible. 

#2) “Assess Your Readiness”.  In this segment, the WebMD article’s author suggests that statistically, you will be more successful at losing weight if you are ready to do so – make sure the other areas of your life are relatively stable and free of stressors.  I think, however, that this is completely backward thinking.  If you wait until you’re “ready” and free from stress in your life to lose weight, you NEVER will! 

There are an unlimited  number of excuses for not losing weight and things like having no money, a horrible job, a bad relationship, or a lack of time shouldn’t stop you from losing weight.  In fact, you’ll be surprised to find that if you can manage to begin to reorganize your mind and gain control over your physical body, these other aspects of your life will naturally begin to improve and realign also.  Losing weight, especially on a large scale, means that your thoughts, beliefs, and expectations about your life will change.  Exercise is also a huge source of stress relief!  By stressing your physical body, you actually put your mind in a state of complete relaxation, it’s pumped full of nature’s “happy-drugs” and will therefore put you in touch with your subconscious and true emotional self.  Don’t wait until your life is organized to start losing weight – some aspects of your experience may seem outside of your control, like a relationship with a spouse, a boss, or a friend.  But you do, however, always have complete and exclusive control over yourself.  If you can begin to experience this feeling of power and enthusiasm about your own body, you will be able to transition this into other areas of your life – it’s actually a great starting point. 

#1) “Shrink Yourself:  Analyze the Payoff You Get from Excess Weight”.  Here, the author prompts you to ask yourself – what are the benefits you’re receiving from having all this excess weight?  Now, to someone who’s reading this article to lose weight, this may be an unexpected question, but it can be a valuable one.  Most people who are overweight will tell you that they don’t like it and that they don’t receive any benefits from it.  I recall feeling this way when I was very overweight, I couldn’t understand why people would think I must have liked living that way.  I remember watching an episode of Dr. Phil when he was promoting his whole weight loss program a few years ago and he told one woman that she must be getting some reward from being overweight.  Otherwise, why would she be going through all that extra work – the extra effort required to buy, cook, and eat all that food.  The time, the money, the effort she put into staying overweight and remaining fat must be worth something to her.  Why would she continue to put so much work into making herself stay fat if she didn’t want to be fat?  She must really want that if she was working so hard for it. 

I think that people may in fact operate this way, but it’s usually at a level that’s below their conscious awareness.  Most overweight people won’t or can’t tell you how the benefits they’re receiving from being overweight.  There may be things you’re afraid of or want to avoid and being fat makes it easy to do so – you can more easily avoid relationships, work, family, mowing your lawn, whatever it is for you.  Like many people, I subconsciously used my weight as a shield to avoid any close intimacy that might set me up for the kind of severe heartbreak I’d experienced in past relationships.  I felt like I didn’t want or deserve to be close to anyone, I was afraid of what kind of pain I would experience as a result of another relationships, and so part of the reason I was continuing to put so much effort into maintaining my excess weight was to keep myself isolated.  This behavior wasn’t really identified until much later, and I realized that by changing my body, I would have to overcome those fears that had been holding me back.  I began to accept the reality that I was worthy of companionship and that I could not only desire, but actually obtain, a close relationship with someone again.  By remaining overweight, I made myself undesirable because I felt like I wasn’t desirable.  Losing weight means that you will have to accept these changes and face some fears.  As you begin to progress, you will see the ways in which you were previously using weight to your advantage, and you will feel free that these fears are no longer holding you back.   

I came across a WebMD article titled “10 Ways to Lose 100 pounds” and, since I don’t usually encounter weight loss or health advice for a 100 pound weight loss, it caught my attention. I’m so torn when I read articles targeted at this demographic, and I’m always skeptical of their sources because so many people claim to know the facts about obesity and weight loss, but they don’t know how to create results and they don’t understand how to educate and motivate their clients. I subscribe to WebMD’s health and weight loss newsletter and they usually have good recommendations and interesting articles.

They start in the introduction by stating, “If you’ve got 100 pounds or more to lose, chances are you’ve already been on numerous diets and exercise programs, without long-term success. So, the standard advice — eat less, exercise more, and don’t give up — just isn’t enough.”

While I agree that there are many more complex issues that need to be uncovered, I think that simple recipe should be enough. People tend to make things more complicated than they really are – especially something like weight loss, which we’ve all been taught is a painful, slow, struggle that is difficult for us. In actuality, it does not have to be (and should not be) a struggle at all. That simple advice alone, if heeded, would produce incredible results! Be careful not to overlook the simple things, it’s easy to get bogged down by excuses, complications, and specific “plans” – don’t get bogged down, confused, or distracted from the big picture by drowning in excessive and unnecessary details and keep your perspective in check. See the entire situation, the overview. No matter how you choose to go about it, the formula is always the same, and it’s really simple, too: eat less, exercise more, and don’t give up. Period.

Every component of our planet and, really, our entire universe, whether a distant nebula or a microscopic bacteria, is ultimately an aspect of the very same thing – energy.  They exist in the same web, the same ocean of energy and because of this, they are infinitely connected.  There is no separateness, this is an illusion created by our ego and our physical senses.  There’s no real separation of “out there” or “in here” – everything exists as one, it is all connected, networked, gridlocked in a web so complex, it extends through not only infinite reaches of space beyond our planet, but also through the linear concept of time as we measure it by human standards. 

So, scientists don’t really understand what energy IS.  Nor do we really understand the driving force that causes it to constantly move, change, adapt, and grow.  Some people refer to this force as “infinite intelligence”, “the collective unconscious”, “God”, “The Divine”, “The Universe”, but no matter what you call it, there is a force that causes all change, growth, improvement, evolution, expansion, always and constantly moving forward.  This force operates through energy units, or “quanta”, which are the smallest bundles of energy (essentially just vibration) that we can detect.  By observing energy’s vibration and transformations, we can understand and measure certain components about the behavior and characteristics of energy.