Your body holds the key that will guide you to release your weight safely and slowly without ever dieting again. if you’re looking for lasting change and you want to learn how to manage your emotional eating, you have to learn how to master food. And diets will never teach you how to do that. They’re just not the answer. Maybe your body’s been telling you that for some time, but in a desperate attempt to make it work, you’re still trying to avoid the foods you love instead of learning how to live with them.
I’m encouraging you to let go, and stop resisting, but don’t listen to me. Start to pay attention to your own inner wisdom.
http://thejuicywoman.blogs.com/my_weblog/2011/11/listen-to-your-heart-your-body-gives-you-all-the-answers-you-need.html
“Every extra pound you carry on your body equals a pound of emotional pain you’re carrying in your heart.”
– Doreen Virtue, Ph.D
It’s an indisputable fact-one that you probably know deep down in your heart:
It’s just not easy being a fat woman in a thin-obsessed world.
As a plus size woman, you can probably relate to standing in front of the mirror and talking to your body. And perhaps not really being so nice about it. Right?
Maybe you’re shouting at it, or gritting your teeth is more like it. Perhaps the extent of your mirror conversations are an attempt to motivate yourself to change a habit, or as a way of criticizing something you did, or putting yourself down. Would that be a fair bet? It’s kind of rare that we pat ourselves on the back and talk to ourselves lovingly at all, but especially not in the mirror. What do you think? Is it true for you? Is your mirror your friend or foe? If it’s become a weapon of mass destruction for you, I’m here to help you change that.
As a certified empowerment coach, I’m all about teaching you what you need to feel good about yourself. So I want to encourage you to have different conversations with yourself and become friends with your body. Because despite what you may think about it, your body is pretty amazing.
But you may not have been able to see that because the media and society in general slams us with so many negative messages pressuring all women to be ridiculously thin and implying that if we’re not, something is wrong with us. Nonsense!
The point is whether you’re fat or thin, your body still works the same way internally. The scientific field of mind/body medicine has discovered that there’s a constant conversation that’s going on between your brain and your body. Dependent upon what messages you accept, and the stories that you have about yourself, that’s what your body manifests. In other words, the body you have today is the result of what you’ve been thinking about yourself.
Where Do You Carry Your Armor?
Think about where your fat is on your body. Is it all over, on your face, neck, across your arms, back, chest, legs evenly distributed making you seem like a large woman or, is it concentrated in one area, maybe on your thighs making you a pear shape or does it manifest in your stomach and abdomen area where the rolls of fat cover your genitals? Where is your excess weight?
Where do you carry your armor? Yes. Let’s think for a moment of your extra fat as being like a suit of armor. What has it kept out for you?
If your body could talk, what would it say? If your thighs could ask for something, what would it be? What would your arms want to tell you? What message does your stomach have to share? Sounds stupid, I know, but your body has been trying to tell you something every time that you stuffed food into your mouth when you knew you weren’t hungry. Isn’t it time that you listened? Let me get you started having a conversation with your new friend, your body.
Stop using the scale as a measure of your value; value yourself for who you are.
I think it’s time you start giving yourself a little more respect and credit. Don’t you? Although you’ve probably sworn you’ll never accept yourself as you are, I encourage you to question the value of that decision. Can you imagine how much resistance gets broken down when you just learn to accept how you look and accept where you are? It makes being happy and living joyfully possible right now.
That said, let me help you get reacquainted with the wonderful woman who may have gotten buried under a ton of lies, pushing her to feel badly about herself.
You are you. The best you can be is the best version of you. When you start eating real food and begin to live and eat as a naturally slender woman, you’ll notice that the fat is coming off of your body. This is your body’s way of readjusting to its former natural shape. The truth is that unless you are , you are not Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Aniston, Cher, Tyra, Oprah, or any other person. You are you. It makes no sense to wish you were someone you’re not.
Just like in the children’s game of tug of war, when you finally let go of the rope, you release all the tension. When you feel more relaxed, you’re more at peace. If you let yourself continue to be pressured by society’s standards of fleeting beauty, you only guarantee yourself misery.
If you want to get thinner for health reasons, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t love your body exactly as it is. You have to begin wherever you are.
But if you’re looking for lasting change and you want to learn how to manage your emotional eating, you have to learn how to master food. And diets will never teach you how to do that. They’re just not the answer. Maybe your body’s been telling you that for some time, but in a desperate attempt to make it work, you’re still trying to avoid the foods you love instead of learning how to live with them.
I’m encouraging you to let go, and stop resisting, but don’t listen to me. Start to pay attention to your own inner wisdom.
Your Body Gives You All The Answers You Need
The heart, as part of our body, is electromagnetically charged and carries impulses to your brain and throughout your body, communicating and offering vast stores of information that often may go unnoticed or disregarded. Whenever something feels right or is true for you, you can feel it first in your heart. Some people call this intuition or inner guidance.
To my way of thinking, it’s all a way of accessing your soul’s higher intelligence. God, Buddha, Higher Power — no matter what you call it, you can tap into more of that internal communication and wisdom for yourself on a consistent basis.
Here’s a simple exercise from my upcoming book, “Lovin’ the Skin You’re In.”
Finding Your Truth
Place a hand over your heart and slowly read aloud the following Doreen Virtue quote. Repeat it several times.
“Every extra pound you carry on your body equals a pound of emotional pain you’re carrying in your heart.”
Keeping your hand on your heart, take some time to think about the words and what they mean to you. Notice what images or memories come to mind when you read it. What words or thoughts do you hear when you think about it? What feelings arise when you read those words? Now with that new information in hand, keep your hand over your heart, and ask yourself, “Does this feel true to me?”
Just like yesterday’s hunger exercise where you were asked to place your hand on your stomach, this is another way that you can begin to reconnect with your body’s inner wisdom.
I find that when I have a decision to make, when I close my eyes and place my hand over my heart, what’s right for me becomes more clear. See if this also works for you.
Andrea Amador, emotional eating, The Juicy Woman, body image, self esteem, Doreen Virtue, heart math,