You can’t satisfy the inner hunger by eating. All that happens is you get fatter – and what does that do for your self esteem?
If you restrict your access to the food that’s satisfying the inner hunger and don’t separate the inner hunger from the food, as likely as not, in a couple of months time all the fat will have come back on again.
It takes a monumental amount of discipline to keep starving yourself of the foods to which you have become dependent. It trivializes the issue of maintaining an ideal weight to simply focus on eating and exercising.
Any diet that doesn’t also address this core issue relating to the satisfaction of the inner hunger sells its customers short. It’s easy to dash off a few recipes – tell people to stop eating junk.
It’s a much tougher assignment cranking up a personal development program that digs down deep into the subconscious and unlocks the potential people have to eat to nourish the cells of their body without fattening themselves up in the process.
Finding the source of the inner hunger is one of the keys to overcoming the psychological barriers to maintaining an ideal weight.
Dredge back to your past and find the emotional events that triggered eating to satisfy the inner hunger. Lack of affection, separation, loneliness … Think back. My own thinking took me back to the time my father went overseas for a few months and my mother was hospitalized. My inner hunger had me eating four double cut rolls for lunch, as an eleven year-old child.
If you can’t work it out for yourself, go to a counsellor. Get support.
Books and programs addressing this issue are around but because scientists from different disciplines don’t talk to each other, you’ll have to go to the psychology section. Find out what’s causing you to eat to excess and fix that.
If you’re on a diet that restricts your access to the food that’s satisfying your inner hunger and you don’t deal with and separate the inner hunger from the food, as likely as not you’ll enter the struggle zone experienced by Michael Finnegan (who as the children’s rhyme tells us got fat and then got thin again.) In a couple of months, all the fat you’ve lost will have come back on again.
As well as taking a monumental amount of discipline to keep starving yourself you can only survive on will power for so long; sooner or later won’t power takes over.
I watched a current affairs program on Biggest Loser finalists. In six months most had stacked on 10 Kg. Take off the pressure, lose focus and KAPOW, ‘to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, (the fat) creeps on this pretty waist from day to day.’
Trying to lose weight while you’re emotionally challenged is a hard call. As well as going back to the past, stop, stand back and reflect on what’s going on in the present that has you stacking on weight. Often it’s a case of not spending enough time nourishing your Self emotionally.
Exercise and meditation are two powerful symbols of your ability to give back to yourself. Your body responds accordingly. In the sit down, stressed out age it’s a necessity.
In the quietness of meditation you may well gain insight into what has been holding you back from being the fit, slim, healthy person you are. It could be that you’ve been feeding the inner hunger with food, rather than with emotional sustenance.
On your journey to understanding what’s holding you back from being fit and healthy, you might find a few visits to your counsellor worthwhile. Then, as the emotional tension is released so will the fat you carry around your body
Satisfy the inner hunger and there’s a good chance the weight will look after itself.
Overweight
The problem is rarely the real problem
Overweight is another good example of how we can waste a lot of energy trying to correct a problem that is not the real problem. People often spend years and years fighting fat and are still overweight. They blame all their problems on being over weight. The excess weight is only an outer effect of a deep inner problem, To me, it is always fear and a need of protection. When we feel frightened or insecure or ‘not good enough’ many of us will put on extra weight for protection.
To spend our time berating ourselves for being too heavy, to feel guilty about every bite of food we eat, to do all the numbers we do on ourselves when we gain weight, are just a waste of time. Twenty years later we can still be in the same situation because we have not even begun to deal with the real problem. All we have done is to make ourselves more frightened and insecure, and then we need more weight for protection.
So I refuse to focus on excess weight or on diets. For diets do not work. The only diet that does work is a mental diet; dieting from negative thoughts. I say to clients, ‘Let us just put that issue (dieting and fat loss) to one side for the time being while we work on a few other things first.’
‘They will often tell; me they can’t love themselves because they are so fat … I explain that they are fat because they don’t love themselves. When we begin to love and approve of ourselves, it’s amazing how weight just disappears from out bodies.’
Louise Hay
‘You Can Heal Your Life’
To find out more, click on the book cover.
