We are now more than a month into the New Year and many of us have, once again, made resolutions to lose weight. Not usually an easy resolution to keep. Why is that? Believe it or not the weight is so hard to lose because the lifestyle that is keeping the weight on is serving us somehow. When we make the decision to change our lifestyle we are often swimming upstream against the deep rooted desire to continue eating the foods we are accustomed to. To address this conflicting desire we need to examine our relationship with food and the function it is serving in our lives.
Food can have a more complicated role than merely nourishing our bodies. It also serves as a comforter, a stress management system, and a sensation stimulator. Food also serves a social role, as a means for communicating love, as well as a means to bring us together. The roles that food serves in our lives have very deep roots in our subconscious mind. When we try to lose weight and change the foods we eat we often interfere with the deep seated roles food plays in our life. When we begin a diet we often have momentum behind us which helps us to push against our cravings. This momentum however begins to meet an ever increasing wall of resistance to change. This tension begins to manifest as stress in our body and unfortunately our usual form of dealing with stress, our favorite foods, have been eliminated from our diet. It doesn't take long until the level of stress builds up, becomes unbearable and we end the diet.
Not only has our system for dealing with stress been eliminated, we are often faced with a change to our social lives. The impact that changing our food consumption can have on our social relationships is often overlooked. Our refusal to eat specific foods that have been served to us by friends or family can often be met with uncomfortable questions and guilt on our part. Any change from the norm singles us out as different. This change requires quite a strong level of self esteem to hold our own. Unfortunately most people working with weight loss are also working on their self-esteem. With all of this building against our decision to change our lifestyle it is not surprising that so many of us change our mind and go back to our old patterns of eating.
How do we turn these habits around, change how we use food in our lives, increase our self-esteem and succeed? Often these issues cannot be resolved by will power alone. If a person wishes to free themselves from deep seated habits and patterns it is recommended that they find a trusted and qualified therapist to work with. One option is to work with a counselor who has experience with hypnosis. Hypnotherapy has a time proven record of accessing and affecting the subconscious. There are also alternative healing practices that work on the mind-body level such as: acupuncture, acupressure, reiki, and EFT to name a few that would be a very beneficial adjunct to any counselling work.
How long does this process of healing take? From a realistic perspective it has taken a lifetime to create these habits, and the process of exploring and reversing them does not usually happen overnight. However the sweet taste of freedom is there to meet us at the very first step we take. The freedom to choose our lifestyle and habits and finally achieve the resolutions we have made so many times before.
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