So you want to lose weight?

Do you feel fat? Sluggish? Are you currently HATING YOUR BODY?

I am not sure if it is because of the Spring season and the vision of ourselves in bikini, but this week most of my clients expressed dissatisfaction or frustration with their bodies.

I can relate on this. I spent years of hating my body: too much of this, not enough of that. Usually too much weight, but also the short legs, thin lips, big nose, small breast but large hips… and we could go on and on.

It is only with yoga practice that I slowly understood that we cannot change something to which we resist. What we resist, persists, and if we are focusing on losing weight because we are unhappy with the current state of things, we are actually nourishing what IS by our focus: where the attention goes, energy goes. We RESIST our weight, so it stays. The secret is to ACCEPT what is, our weight, our shape, our eating habits, our laziness, our lack of will power, our lack of discipline… and at this very moment of acceptance, the process of transformation starts.

My clients usually scream at this point: "So you are saying I should be happy how I am and accept it, so I will do nothing about. "

This is exactly what I am NOT saying. It sounds contra intuitive to ACCEPT what is, in order to CHANGE IT. But it is how it works. Stop resisting. Relax. See and say: I am OK with my 10 kg on the top. This is me how I am now and my body has its reasons to be that way.

Those reasons can be of various nature:

-I compensate for something missing in my life.

-I am filling the black hole inside of me with the food.

-I am punishing myself for something.

-I am making myself undesirable.

-I am calming my anxiety.

-I am making myself feel better because I am stressed out.

-I am feeling pleasure at least while eating.

-I am filling my empty nest.

-I don’t want to be like my mother (I want to be like my mother).

-I am calling for attention.

-I believe I don’t deserve love and success.

-I ……………………. ( fill in the blank your own reasons.)

All the above is coming from our unconscious Mind, from our belief system, from the programming we went trough during our life. Most of our eating is coming from our “emotional hunger”, not the “physical hunger”.

This is why I am completely against the “dieting”, because it means that we decide that for a certain amount of time we will only eat a certain type of food and we torture ourselves when we don’t follow the diet. Our self-esteem falls down slowly, sometimes faster, and this creates a new cycle of self-hate and self-loathing.

My way to work with clients who want to lose weight is to make them aware of WHAT they eat everyday and HOW they feel in the moment of eating. Some emotions are directly linked to our food choice: a light depression will ask for dairy and starch (cheesecake, pizza); adrenaline stress can call for crispy and oily (salted peanuts, chips…) food and so on.

Mind programming will make us eat more in a certain set up (with family, with friends) or at the contrary we will not eat enough in public but we will stuff ourselves in the privacy of our bedroom.

So in my work, of course we watch the food we are craving and why. We work on making more healthy choices on everyday basis (I am particularly working with the glycemic index on food intake) but there is not a really restriction on amount. We accept when there is some indulgence and we make our weekends free to eat whatever we want. (You will notice that after 2-3 weeks you tend to make healthy choices even during weekends because YOU FEEL BETTER with it).

We move, we breath, we cultivate contentment, we appreciate our body and we learn to love ourselves. Our food choices are often the expression of SELF-RESPECT and we are respecting ourselves in a flowing and pleasurable way.

In some moment, and it happens to most of my clients, there is a “breakthrough”; there is a BIG AHA moment when they realize why they are doing what they are doing, often for years and always unconsciously. This is a painful moment but very needed; from that point, there is no way back or not for long. We discover the root of our weigh gain, energy lack, and sometimes even illness.

The transformation is just happening. The process has its own speed and we definitely need to cultivate the patience with ourselves. Yet, the results are visible after 2-3 weeks, or at least you can feel them.

How to proceed if you want to lose your weight in an efficient and healthy way in a nutshell? Stop thinking about weight. Not even weigh yourself. This forms ENERGY, SHAPE, JOY, and most importantly LIFESTYLE.