FAT NO MORE CORPORATION

If you struggle with losing weight, or if you lose weight but always gain it back, it is important for you to read this article.

Losing weight is not just about dieting or exercising as proven by the countless number of failed diets and exercise programs. First, you need to identify and let go of the many Mental, Emotional, Subconscious, and Spiritual blocks that prevent you from losing weight. I call them the M.E.S.S. blocks; they are limiting beliefs, thoughts, or fears that prevent your weight loss. They keep you overweight regardless of the enormous efforts and the numerous attempts you make to follow different diet and exercise programs. If you do not let go of these blocks, you will continue to have an extremely hard time losing weight and, if you do succeed, you will continue to gain the weight back.

I have struggled with losing weight and keeping it off all my life. I started my first diet when I was eight years old. Because of this first early diet, I started being obsessed with diets and obsessed with my weight at a very young age. Most of my life, I’ve been up and down in weight; unfortunately I always ended up overweight. I was never really able to keep the weight off until a few years ago. For the last 30 years or so, my weight problem was my number one concern.

I tried so many diets! I wanted to lose weight and be thin. So, I tried hundreds of diets, over and over, and after each diet, I always regained the weight and often even more. Sound familiar? So, after many years of struggle, I started thinking: “I always get whatever I want in life as long as I really put my focus on it. Why don’t I simply lose weight and become thin?” My failure at losing weight didn’t make any sense to me. I felt powerless and miserable. I started wondering if perhaps there was a part of me that did not want to lose weight. Perhaps, consciously, I wanted to lose weight and be thin, but at another subconscious level I did not want it. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Bear with me for a moment. Realizing that perhaps at some level, I did not want to lose the weight opened a new door for me and this realization embarked me on a journey to discover the many surprising and often odd reasons why I had been struggling to lose weight for so long.

For the last ten years, I spent hundreds of hours researching, analyzing and compiling the many conscious and subconscious blocks to weight loss, whether they are limiting thoughts, beliefs, or fears and why it is so difficult for us to lose weight and to keep it off.

Before we go any further, let me simply define conscious and subconscious. A conscious thought is a thought that you are aware of. A subconscious thought is a thought that you are not aware of.

It would seem logical to us that the conscious mind would have all the power. Research has shown that 90 % of everything we do comes from our subconscious. Basically 90% of our life is governed by the subconscious and only 10% is governed by the conscious. In brief, the conscious mind never wins. The subconscious mind controls 90% of our actions and behaviors. The subconscious mind makes us do whatever we do.

Let’s go over how both the conscious and subconscious can affect your weight loss. On the conscious level, you are really motivated. You know that if you stick to a good diet and to a good exercise routine for enough weeks, you will lose the weight and become thin. The conscious mind supports you; it makes you eat healthy food and drink a lot of water; it makes you go to the gym, exercise and sweat these extra pounds; it helps you be disciplined and really focused on getting what you want. However, the problem is that the conscious mind only produces 10% of your results. The subconscious mind produces 90% of your results. If the subconscious mind, for some odd reasons, does not support your weight loss, you will have a very hard time losing weight. The subconscious mind will block your progress by blocking your weight loss, creating a weight loss plateau, and/or making you gain the weight back. Unfortunately, you are often not even aware of how the subconscious affects your weight loss.

So, what can you do? You simply need to change the subconscious programming which blocks your weight loss by identifying and letting go of your subconscious thoughts, beliefs, and fears. We, women have so many limiting, subconscious beliefs regarding our body and our physical appearance. These subconscious beliefs drive our lives until we identify them and get rid of them. For example, “I always fail at dieting” is a limiting belief, a pretty common one, actually. “I cannot lose weight” is another one! How about a more complex belief such as: I do not want to lose weight and be attractive because I fear that if I am attractive, I will be get too much attention and might be harassed or abused. This profound belief can come from a deep subconscious fear that you might not even be aware of. How about: “I can only be smart or beautiful, not both”; “I have to give up my looks to succeed”? According to the law of attraction, you attract what you think about and what you believe. If you truly believe that you always fail at dieting, you will always fail. If you fear to lose weight and be attractive because of a subconscious fear, you will not lose weight. Even though these beliefs may have been true for you until now, they are not necessarily true for you in the future. They are limiting and they do not serve you. Once you have identified them, you must let them go. You need to make sure that both your conscious and subconscious minds support you to lose weight so that you can easily reach your weight loss goals, and become thin!

Just a few years ago, food was more important to me than anything else in my life. My life was empty, and I filled it with food. I thought of food constantly and obsessively. All my thoughts centered around when and what I was going to eat next. I could not give up food because I felt deprived and unsatisfied without it.

I was in a constant struggle because I wanted to be thin (or so I thought), but I was addicted to food, and I lived to eat. I would rather eat than be thin, and I made the subconscious decision to stay overweight so that I could eat whatever I liked even though I felt guilty and miserable about it. I was afraid to give up food and the comfort I derived from it. Today, I’m fortunate to be free of my food obsession.

How about you? Are you obsessed with food? Is food so important to you that you can’t give up overeating? Would you rather be overweight so you do not have to restrain yourself? Do you want to be thin consciously, yet, subconsciously, you’d rather eat and be overweight than give up food? If eating is one of the most pleasurable things in your life, you will keep on eating to feel pleasure, and you won’t care about how much you weigh. You will just want to eat.

Having a healthy relationship with food requires self-love, discipline, and commitment. It is easier to be overweight. You do not have to restrain your eating if you have given up being thin. Many people prefer to be overweight because they got into this habit of overeating, and they just don’t want to discipline themselves around food. They overeat and don’t want to stop. Subconsciously, they’d rather be overweight and eat what they want than be thin.

You need to figure out what is most important for you and make a decision. Are you ready to let go of your food obsessions and reap the rewards of a healthy lifestyle with vibrant energy and health as well as a fitter, leaner body. Or, are you going to stay obsessed with foods for the rest of your life and miss out on the precious jewels that life has to offer you. It is time for you to decide what you want!When you don’t know what you want, you make the wrong choices simply because they seem to be the right ones at the time and they fill, in the short term, an emotional void.

Here are some advices on what to do once you decide to clean up your relationship with food:

Find food substitutes

You need to find other things in life that are better than eating. Here is your homework! Make a list of as many things as you can think of that bring you happiness and pleasure and that you can do instead of overeating. Here are some ideas to get you started: listen to great music, dance, talk to loved ones, have a hobby such as beading or gardening, work out, walk, take a bubble bath, breathe deeply, etc. Once your list is created, do something from the list every time you want to overeat. It takes 21 days to break a habit, so do this for 21 days and see if you can change your behavior permanently.

Eliminate your food cravings

We are like children. If something is forbidden, we want it. When we forbid ourselves to eat what we love, we make ourselves want these foods even more. If someone tells us not to think about a blue elephant, we think about a blue elephant. If we constantly think, “I cannot eat this cookie,” the only thing we think about is eating the cookie. I recommend that you eat your favorite, unhealthy foods in moderation and only occasionally. Depriving yourself of these foods will make you obsess about them.

Release your subconscious blocks

As you may know, the conscious mind only influences ten percent of your actions, while the subconscious mind controls the other ninety percent. Even if you make a conscious decision to eat healthy, you still need to overcome your subconscious blocks to it: the invisible blocks making you fail, no matter how hard you try to eat healthy. It is critical for you to let them go.

You need to understand that it is a lifelong decision to have a healthy relationship with foods—not just a short-term mean to lose a few pounds you will gain back within two years as 90% of people who lose weight do. When you decide to have a healthy relationship with food, you also decide to have a healthy relationship with yourself filled with love and respect for yourself and your body. It is a wonderful act of self-love and now is the time for you to love yourself by eating healthy.