There are many approaches to dealing with obesity. Few, in my view, ever address its unconscious driving forces—poor self image and low self esteem. These two emotional factors initiate and perpetuate the tendency towards obesity. They are also exacerbated by the condition, thereby setting up a vicious negative spiral from which many find it impossible to extricate themselves.
To do so requires the courage to face the deeper emotional roots of poor self image and low self esteem and permanently release them from the unconscious mind and body.
Look for deeper emotional roots
Why would anyone ever have a poor self image or low self esteem? Many of you might think it’s because of the societal messages that subtly and not-so-subtly invalidate your inherent attractiveness as a human being. Well, here you are only partly correct. The problem actually began well before you were exposed to those messages.
You see, many individuals, carry negative memories from early life in the unconscious mind that they identify with and with which are associated negative messages about who and how attractive they are. These memories consist of traumatic events as seen through the eyes of a child that essentially leaves them feeling unwanted, unloved, neglected, useless, and ugly and so on.
Worst of all, when you complacently accept it as truth and identify with these internally stored messages, you are left with no other option but to dislike who and what you are. Negative feelings of low self esteem, poor self image and low self worth become constant painful internal emotional threats that must be parried and pacified in order to feel comfortable, at ease and peaceful.
Try to break the cycle
The need to keep these painful feelings at bay leads to the adoption of numerous strategies often classified as addictions. These addictions attempt to suppress, bury or distract one’s self from feeling and becoming incapacitated by the negative feelings. The individual who learns to use food as a pacifier at an early age may continue this compensatory approach to the internal pain eventually culminating in obesity.
This strategy, which attempts to bury emotional discomfort, also leads to a partial desensitisation to the physical discomfort of the obese condition itself. The awareness of this discomfort, which is supposed to act as a self-regulatory mechanism then fails. Sadly the approach to coping with the emotional turmoil is also untenable because the emotions don’t go away, they only go underground. Further, they become accentuated by the emotional repercussion of being obese. So the individual is faced with a growing onslaught of negative emotions as well as the health problems of the obesity that result. It all then becomes a vicious circle.
Weed out the bad memories
It becomes imperative to diffuse the negative emotional charge that emanates from early unconsciously stored negative memories that I call ’emotional landmines’. And the only way to do that is to completely eradicate the memories themselves. So what does that mean?
Well, it effectively means one must effectively ‘erase the past’ as it is stored in the person’s consciousness. Although there are many modalities that attempt to simply decrease the emotional charge of such negative memories, it has been my experience that this alone will not yield permanent results. It’s much like the metaphor of the weed growing in the garden, unless one pulls it out from the root, it will simply re-grow.
Don’t fill it with wrong things
While working as a psychiatrist about 10 years ago, I learned a sad fact and it completely changed my view of many of the therapies I had been employing until then—negative memories, while stored in our mind/body deplete us of our life force energy.
You experience this depletion in many ways, but one of the prominent ways is a deep feeling of emptiness that you desperately need to fill in order to avoid feeling like you are going to fragment or disintegrate emotionally. Individuals with obesity simply happen to choose food as their solution to their inner feeling of emptiness. Unfortunately the only thing that will fill it is their depleted Life Force Energy.
Refuel the energy
This insight evolved into a powerful new coaching modality I call the Mind Resonance Process [MRP] that is able to challenge many of the beliefs we have about why the past cannot be erased.MRP helps erase the offending negative memories from the mind/body and causes a spontaneous return of this vital energy. The individual experiences this as feelings of wholeness and completeness.
In other words the driving force for all the overeating disappears, thus breaking the cycle. Now, I must give a simple word of caution here. This process, albeit simple and straightforward, doesn’t happen all at once; it’s an evolutionary journey to wellbeing and happiness. This is because such individuals often have many negative memories of early life that must be processed with MRP.
So, in effect, what is experienced is a progressive accumulation of self empowerment, self esteem, enhanced awareness and self control. As they begin to feel ‘filled-in emotionally’ their need to fill themselves with food externally disappears.