It’s July and your News Years Resolution to lose weight is packed up with the Christmas decorations in the attic. You realize though as you look at the invitation to your best friend’s wedding in two weeks, you did not obtain that glamour slim body you thought you would have by now.
Should you just not go to the wedding?
It always seemed odd to me that we tie looking our best to being skinny. Why isn’t it that we look our best because we have a great hair day or more importantly are a super sweet, kind person?
Nope.
It’s always about what size we wear and how great people tell us we look.
Ok. So now what do you do? The weight wasn’t loss. You’re looking at your body in disgust, again, and looking for the black dress you wear to everything. Black covers it and makes us look slimmer, right? That’s what we’re told anyway.
By the way, wearing black all the time to hide our body, is equally bad for your emotional health. Yes, black a great color to have in your wardrobe but if you only wear it to hide yourself, it’s emotionally and spiritually draining. It also doesn’t help you love your body.
Still have that big event this summer, is it too late to lose weight?
Dieting is always a panic reaction
As I work with my clients, one of the things I always ask about is their dieting history. What they tried. Do they do Keto?
Then I ask, how it made them feel. This is very telling because most people talk about their weight they lost or didn’t. It’s never about feeling better, sleeping well, having more energy, being happier.
It’s always the number.
I believe we have been so engrained by the diet industry that the point of losing weight is no longer about being healthier unless we are thin. That’s incorrect logic.
When we go on a diet, it is always in a panic reaction to something else. A big event, milestone birthday, promotion, relationship, a scare from the doctor. Any other time we may think about our weight and think we should lose some but doing anything about it doesn’t usually come until we have a bigger reason. Again, I believe this stems directly from the diet industry and not our own natural behavior, that we can’t feel anymore.
The truth is, weight loss is a side effect of making other things in your health better. – Amy Kramer, Dragonspit Apothecary
If we don’t address the stress in your life, then you will always be prone to junk food to cope.
If we don’t learn to process and release big emotions, then they stay in our cells protected safely under fat layers.
If we don’t learn what our body individually and uniquely needs for nutrition, we will always be over-eating and starving.
The list goes on.
Until we address the core of why we have a weight problem, the weight is just going to go up and down. Mostly up.
What the diet industry and probably not your doctor are telling you, is that your body already knows how to heal itself and lose weight. It can’t though until you remove the other things that are in its way.
Another panic realization that you should start a new diet on top of a mountain of stress in your days, is not going to work. Ever.
Certainly not long term.
How then do you lose weight?
Call it woo-woo or some of that hocus pocus natural health stuff that you’re told not to listen to but hear me out.
The ability to stimulate your body to do what it needs to do in losing weight, is to rebuild the relationship with yourself.
Connect all the parts of you in the way you were designed and supporting the real you.
Easy, right?
I hear you shucking back in that sarcastic, “Yeah sure.”
Our US health care system breaks us into parts. You see a specific doctor or specialist for a certain thing. The one part doctor doesn’t talk to the other part doctor. You support your health in parts.
The diet industry does the same thing with your weight.
Over time we have become parts instead of a whole when it comes to our health.
Putting back together your mind, body and spirit into one whole being that works together makes things an incredibly lot easier to make health, and weight loss, happen.
Yes, I’m telling you the reason you’re not losing weight or able to stick to a diet is because your mind is trying to be in control and punishing your body. Your spirit is over there in a corner crying.
Your body is exhausted and not interested in listening to your mind anymore. Your mind is angry at all of you.
Hence, you’re not losing weight, sticking to your diet, are mad about this upcoming exciting thing in your life instead of being happy and you’re looking at a dark black dress, swimsuit, whatever.
It’s black. It’s hot summer time. You’re depressed.
Sounds fun!
How to rebuild you
This is where the self-care trend of getting your nails done and doing nice things for yourself has also missed the mark.
There is nothing at all about being good to you. That is important. Treating yourself well is important but that’s not where we actually practice self-care or stimulate our body to do better. Self-care in this way is just a couple hours of distraction.
I’m talking the deep work, the ugly stuff that isn’t a 5 minute fix.
When you rebuild that relationship in your mind, body and spirit you are taking on a journey that only you can go on. Well, you and a lovely health practitioner such as myself who can guide you.
This is about understanding you on the levels we are not taught when it comes to what we need for food, sleep, release, movement, love, and all the things that make us who we are.
This work is tricky because we are so dunked in the pool’s deep end of comparing ourselves to others. Who has the bigger house, nicer car, better job, more well behaved children. It is super easy to feel you are not enough and that you want the things you see others have because you don’t know the words to describe your own person. So we put on the mask of other people’s lives and wear those.
In working with me, we take off those masks and figure out you. We look at your body to see what foods actually help you thrive. We talk about your emotional processing and how food is used with cravings that come up. We talk about how you respond to stress. All of this creates the picture of how you try to fit in this world and what it is doing to either build or break the components within you.
Knowing this information is where healing and weight loss begins. With knowing comes the identification of the path needed to make all the great goals you have in your life, that are truly yours, come to reality.
But I have this thing in 2 weeks! Is it too late to lose weight?
When I hear a client is basing their life activities because of their weight, that tells me they are not looking for answers. They want another diet that further strips their body of nutrients, punishing it for not being skinny enough so they can fit into a dress or swimsuit.
They’re not ready.
Yes you can lose weight quickly on a lot of the diets out there. Here’s what happens though. The minute you stop doing that diet, the weight comes back plus some. You create resistance in your body for the next time you get into a panic and need to drop weight.
There will be a next time too.
The reason this happens is because when you hard core diet, your body stores all the emotions and things that are protected in fat, deeper in the body. It goes into survival mode against the brutality you are applying to it. Once you stop the maddening diet, it is all like the munchkins in the Wizard of Oz when the Good Witch tells them, “You can come out now. She’s gone.”
They do all come out too and expand across the body stronger for the lessons they learned in hiding. This is where we see metabolism resistance, insulin resistance and more make it nearly impossible to break through on diets alone.
Why not look forward to whatever event you have coming up and being you? Why not be happy for the thing you have been planning, paying and praying for and celebrate in that moment?
Why would you let your weight be the barometer for how much fun you can have?
When you have rebuilt the relationship within you, you know your body is doing all it can to help you lose weight. You are giving it the right support to be successful in that work. You have peace in your heart and confidence in your eyes to go into any situation assured you are doing right by yourself.
You may or may not be wearing black because that too becomes about who you are and not what some designer said you wear when you didn’t lose weight.
To work with me, visit dragonspitapothecary.com