For those of us who struggle with weight there can often be no “joy” left in eating.  Food has become a compulsion rather than a pleasure.  We are in a fight with ourselves around food.  We feel strong cravings but also emotional conflict over what to eat, over when to eat, and over how much to eat.

 I spent many years tortured by food choices.  I starved myself trying to stay thin – depriving myself of any enjoyment around food.  Then, all of the sudden, I would find myself on a compulsive binge – shoveling unhealthy foods into my body without tasting a single bite.

 My relationship with food was out of wack, because I used food to cope with stress, anxiety, and emotion.  Food choices became so stressful that I had trouble slowing down and really tasting what I was eating. 

 Becoming conscious of the needs that I was using food to try and meet, I began to dispel the powerful grip that my negative relationship with food had on me.  Finding “self-honoring” ways to meet my needs and designing practices to slowly change my eating habits, I ultimately began to change my experience with food.

 With compassion and care I have come a long way to change my relationship with food.  This is a journey that continues, but I am committed to eating consciously.  My intention is to bring the joy back to eating.

Video Blog – Weight Release Tips – Meal Ttime Affirmations and Mindful Eating

Freeman Michaels Shares free weight release tips in this weekly video blog.

It’s everything – learning to love and accept yourself right where you are is the foundation for change.  You can never get to positive, what I call self-honoring, choices from a negative perspective.  A person can’t judge themselves into loving themselves.  That’s why diets don’t work – they start from the premise that something is wrong with the person.  Look, nothing is wrong with someone who is overweight – their body has responded appropriately to being overfed.  We need to use compassion and understanding to explore the behavior – to recognize the emotional needs that the person has been trying to meet with food.  We need to help them find new ways to get their needs met.   We want to help them to get back in touch with what their body actually needs for sustenance and nutrition. 

 A negative self image is really just a distorted sense one has about oneself.  From a Spiritual Perspective we are all children of God in whom he is well pleased.  Everything that we have ever done is forgivable – in fact a loving God would never judge us in the first place.  It is the illusion that there is something wrong with us – compassion breaks the spell.  Compassion and understanding bring about an accurate perception of reality – judgment is a distorted perception.  So, as we become more compassionate and more loving toward ourselves, we become authentic – we learn to meet our needs in more self-honoring ways.  This is the doorway to a positive (more accurate) self-image.

American’s are the most overweight population in the world today – but I believe Americans are starving – we are starving for fulfillment, and we just keep consuming but it never satisfies our hunger. 

 An estimated two-thirds of adult Americans are categorically overweight or obese.  And three years ago I was one of them.  In this country it is most often referred to as a national health crisis, but I believe it is just as much an emotional and spiritual crisis.  I suspect that much of the nation, like myself, have lost touch with what really “feeds” them. 

 I was forced to face my personal obesity crisis one night in a hospital emergency room when I believed I was having a heart attack.  Stress caused by the collapse of my real estate development company had fueled significant weight gain.  As it turned out, I wasn’t having a heart attack but I was receiving a “wake up call”.

 For me, food had gone from filling a physiological need for sustenance to being a psychological attempt to fill an emotional and spiritual void.  Food had become a temporary distraction from the stress and anxiety I felt at work.  Food was also a way that I coped with all of the feelings that came up around the effect the economic crisis was having on my sense of self. 

With my company facing bankruptcy, my sense of my self as I had constructed it had died.  With a wife and three children I new that I needed to address my weight issues before I really did have a heart attack and literally died.  I realized that I needed to take a good look at my life.

I say in my book, Weight Release: A Liberating Journey, “The ‘self’ that I needed to examine was defined largely from the ‘outside in.’ When I say ‘outside in,’ I mean the way I felt about myself was largely dependent on outer criteria, such as the balance of my bank account, rather than from inner criteria, a sense of wholeness and well-being.  I measured my self-worth in terms of net worth, rather than examining my underlying sense of worthiness.”

Like many Americans I had lost track of what was important.  I was so distracted with things outside of myself that I thought would make me happy, that I neglected my inner world.  It took losing my money to really find myself again.

 We are a consumer nation.  We always need more because we have bought into the notion that we are fed from the outside in.  We are NOT, nor can we ever be, fed from the outside in.  Only by discovering what really fulfills us will be ever be satiated and content. And that is the truth behind the obesity crisis in America.

Self-punishment and Self-rejection cannot lead to a positive change 

There are two types of motivation: negative motivation and positive motivation.
Negative motivation is a little like fool’s gold – it seems great on the surface but it is ultimately ineffective and unsustainable.  Frankly, this is the motivation that most people are used to.  Most people, who struggle with weight, absorbed a lot of this growing up – they were punished and reprimanded, but very rarely got the support and encouragement they needed.  In school they got a lot of red pen marks on their schoolwork but not a lot of positive remarks.  The focus was on what was missing – what should be fixed or corrected.  Punishment for perceived failures in their childhood has fueled destructive patterns of behavior in their adulthood.

 When we talk about weight – many people want to change because they don’t like themselves.  They view their weight as an outward manifestation of their inner self-hatred.  They judge themselves for being heavy.  This leads them to make choices that involve self rejection and support their self hatred. 

 When someone doesn’t like themselves often the choices they make are unconsciously “set up” to fail.  The failure supports the unconscious position they have taken – that there is something wrong with them.

 Extreme diets and extreme exercise programs – where pain and self denial are intended to bring about a positive result – are classic examples of a plan destined to fail.  But people who don’t like themselves use these “diet programs” to essentially punish themselves.  These diet programs are outwardly focused.  There is some outward image, some goal weight that the person is pursuing.  Outwardly focused ideals usually deny the inner experience.

 When someone hires a trainer or joins a fitness boot camp they may be unconsciously looking for someone to yell at them and punish them.  In this type of scenario there is no room for vulnerability or weakness – in fact that is what is judged as “being their problem”.  They believe that they lack willpower, or that they aren’t committed enough.  As they lose weight they refer to the heavy “self” with contempt.  They use expressions, such as, “I am becoming a new me”.  They are trying to distance themselves from the vulnerable and weak person who got so heavy.

 But inside they are vulnerable (that is the good news) – the patterns of behavior around food have been the best way that they have known how to cope with the pain, stress and challenges in their lives.  It is only through self-acceptance and self-love that they will ever be able to release weight.  Only when exercise is fun and intended to be fulfilling can it become a lifelong practice.  When emotional needs get met rather than denied or suppressed than food can become sustenance and nourishment for the body again.

I personally struggle with overeating at night.  I generally eat pretty well during the day.  I eat breakfast within ½ hour of waking up (to start my metabolism); I eat a mid-morning snack, a healthy lunch and a mid-afternoon snack.  But when the evening comes around self-honoring choices around food can often go “out the window”.

 Pitfall number one – snacking before dinner:  I scan the cupboard looking for snacks.  I’m hungry and dinner isn’t ready.  Chips?  Crackers? What can I find?  I’m only going to eat a handful – but half a bag later I find myself recognizing a familiar pattern.  I have completely gone unconscious and chomped and smacked my way through handfuls of crunchy, salty little tidbits. 

 Pitfall 1 ½:  If there is beer in the fridge – and I deserve just one – than the beer and the bag of snacks are gone.

 Pitfall two:  Portion size – it depends how much I cook.  I tend to unconsciously serve out whatever I make.  And, of course, I’ve must clean my plate, right?  (Remember the starving people in Africa).

 Pitfall three: Dessert – it sounds a lot like “deserve” – I deserve a sweet treat – it was a hard day.

Opening Up to Weight Release

When we say that someone is irrational we are usually referring to someone who reacts or makes quick rash decisions from an emotionally charged state.  This is an imbalance that must be addressed in order to heal and release weight.  The skill we work to develop with people who struggle with this type of response pattern is called “the conscious compassionate observer”.  This specific skill helps interrupt emotionally triggered reactions and create a space to analyze the circumstances before making a decision.  We refer to this as expanding the space between stimulus and response in order to make self-honoring choices.

 Conversely, someone who is hyper-rational – who overanalyzes everything – is also out of balance.  This type of person tends to be paralyzed by a tendency to question and doubt the process.  They over-think everything.  We often say that this kind of person is “in their head” – suggesting that they are disconnected from their feelings.  The decision making process, which they think is rational, is actually irrational because it does not account for feelings, intuition, intimacy, etc.

 When we work with this type of personality (or persona) it is important to explore emotions and find outlets to express feelings.  We also must look at fear – as this behavior tends to suggest a defensive stance that was taken early in childhood to protect the persons vulnerability.  The person must come to recognize and honor their fears.  It can be very helpful to examine shame and guilt – as these misinterpretations have usually contributed to the pattern of over-rationalizing.  Compassion is the primary tool used to interrupt this pattern.

Simply put, habits are formed when we repeat something over and over again. 

There are five steps to changing a habit:

1. First, become conscious of the habit.  Recognize the behavior pattern.  This is simply a tracking process.  When something you do is unconscious you are simply not aware that you are doing it.  The idea of tracking relates to awareness.  It often really helps to keep a journal and record the number of times that the behavior occurs – you may also want to track the circumstances that generally accompany the behavior.

 

2. Second, interrupt the behavior pattern.  This requires a more heightened awareness of the pattern.  I often refer to this as holding the behavior in your consciousness.  It is very important that you be gentle with yourself – when you recognize the behavior do what you can to interrupt it.  Often, when something is deeply ingrained in your personal experience it is hard to recognize the behavior is happening until it has already begun or even finished.  The important thing is to simply work on interrupting it whenever you can.  Don’t beat yourself up if you “slip” now and again.

 

3. Third, identify the deeper cause of the behavior (hint: this usually relates to needs).  Again, if you can track the circumstances that surround the pattern you may begin to recognize what I call a “trigger”.  This refers to the particular dynamics that tend to evoke the behavior pattern.  For example: stress – I eat when I am stressed.  I particularly gravitate towards crunchy and salty snack foods, such as chips. 

 

4. Fourth, find a different way of meeting the need (I call this “making a self honoring choice”) I may want potato chips, but what I need is an outlet for my stress.  Sometimes I need to do something active – say, go for a walk.  Maybe there is anger behind the stress so lifting weights or running may be a better release.  Perhaps I simply need to meditate or take a warm bath.

 

5.  Fifth, practice the new behavior until it becomes a habit.  If I recognize that I get stressed out at work – perhaps even at specific times – I can plan some activities into my schedule to allow me a healthy outlet.  Presently, I go for a walk in the midmorning as a way of releasing stress.  I also do a 20 minute meditation every afternoon.  Initially, I struggled to make these choices, but I have come to recognize that the benefit outweighs any perceived “cost”.  I used to say that I didn’t have time but taking time for myself has actually increased my productivity and efficiency. 

 

Providence and Weight Release

This famous quote illustrates the power of decision:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen events, meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would have come their way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now!”

-W.H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951)

 The word “providence” is very interesting to me.  The word means divine guidance – often referred to as “the hand of God” influencing our experience.  In my book I talk about “stepping into the mystery” in describing one’s embracing of the unknown.  To do this requires a certain trust or faith, which I see as critical to releasing weight.  This is a very sacred and honorable part of the human experience – and thus a very sacred and honorable part of the Weight Release Program.  We always want to honor people for “showing up” for themselves.

 When you “show up” you allow for the possibility of synchronistic events and information to occur.  Books you may have bought or been given years ago will suddenly “pop off the shelf” – in other words you will be drawn to certain books that support your decision.  All of the sudden you will begin meeting “kindred spirits” – people of “like mind” who will support your decision.  The more focused you are the more outlets and resources begin to appear.

 Now, I know that this is a little “woo – woo”.  Personally, I was raised to reject these types of notions – but my life and the events and experiences I have personally witnessed have verified the existence of providence.  Now I recognize the importance of faith along with a basic understanding of this concept.  In short, be open to synchronicities, be courageous and have faith in your decision to heal and release weight.