About That Weight Loss (Part 6/6)

Here’s Why You REALLY Hold Onto That Weight

Welcome to Part 6 of About That Weight Loss – the GRAND FINALE! Yay!

In Parts 1 and 2, I shared some of my own life-long struggle with weight loss and dysmorphic body image, in Part 3 I talked about how my self-loathing started to shift, and in Part 4 we looked at several reasons that our bodies like to hang onto weight, and in Part 5 we looked at several ways (10!) to start shifting our weight toward a right-sized body.

Thanks for sticking with me to the end. It has definitely been a journey and the feedback I’ve received has been super-encouraging. I’m also excited to be getting back to talking more directly about business and Divine Alignment and work-life balance. I miss those topics.

Today, we’re looking at the BIG SECRET about why women – yes, especially women, but, not only women– hold onto so much extra fat on their bodies.

(WARNING: this is big stuff – THE. BIG. STUFF. – so I suggest you grab a tea and take a deep breath and we’ll just ignore that I’ve been scrolling Facebook to avoid writing this because it is really big stuff and it’s still a bit scary to put it down on ‘paper’.

Okay, let’s do it…)

Having been classified as overweight my entire life (yes, even when I was at my healthiest and working as a personal trainer), having worked with overweight individuals for the last 18 years to change their body shapes, and having researched, researched, researchedwith both mundane and heavenly sources to try and figure out just WHAT. THE. HELL. is going on that causes us to hold onto weight when we would swear up and down that we want to lose it, here’s what I’ve come up with:

We don’t want to lose the weight. At all.

Yup. 

Despite all our protestations, we want the weight to stay right where it is – on us.

We need the weight. It has a job.

The weight is our protection. It makes us feel safe.

(check out Part 4 if you missed the ways that fat protects us)

And, on an even deeper, more twisted level, the weight is our ‘just desserts’ – our punishment – for being female.

We do not lose the weight because, at some level, we hate being here, we hate being in a physical body, we hate our Self, we want to go ‘home’, and we’ll be damned if we’re going to stay one minute longer than necessary.

So, we take a slow, painful, self-loathing road to death that runs through decades of struggle and wanting something that we can’t ever have because the thing we think we want is not what we really want.

Let me put it this way:

We keep the weight because we do not love our Selves enough to get rid of it.

Period.

We do not treasure our Self. We do not cherish. We do not care for.

We just don’t.

And please feel free to argue with me on this one, but this is what I have found at the root of EVERY. SINGLE. FRICKIN’. weight loss Breakthrough I have ever done. It was at the root for me. It was at the root for my clients.

And, if you struggle with weight, then I’d bet a $1000 that it’s at the root for you, too.

(and it isn’t something you can change overnight – or even in the 10 hours of radical transformation that we go through in a Breakthrough – though that can jumpstart you on your way.

I’ve learned that it takes serious, consistent effort to develop the muscles of self-care in a way that allows us to get where we want to go. this is an epic journey, not a Sunday afternoon putter.)

So, Why Do We Do This To Ourselves?

Patriarchy.

Yeah. Frickin’ patriarchy.

I’m coming back to it – I always do – because it is at the root of all the self-loathing, the self-hatred, the lack of belongingness, the low self-esteem, the inability to receive, and the ‘get me off this planet where I don’t have a place’ feelings that we have.

Yes. All of it. It is the deep, deep black and poisonous root that keeps us sipping at the waters of death even while we try to live well.

To quote Sera Beak in Red, Hot and Holy (an excellent read and deep dive into the Divine Feminine, by the way), patriarchy is “not just a sociopolitical system of power that has dominated both women and men for millennia by directly or indirectly undermining females and feminine values; it is also a multi-dimensional energyand a tricky motherfucker in the truest sense of that phrase.”

Patriarchy tells us that to be intuitive, soft, earthy, flowing, surrendered, emotional… anything assigned to the feminine pile of traits, is to be weak, less good, and under the more masculine traits that you can see dominating our society and culture and religion.

Here’s the good news:

It is shifting.

It is decaying.

It is transforming.

But, every time we stuff out mouths with sugar and flour to numb our emotions and psychic pain because we live in a world designed to keep us numb, we are letting patriarchy win.

Every time we stuff our anger and holy rage and let it ferment into bitterness and depression, we are letting patriarchy win.

Every time we allows ourselves to be belittled in the workplace, in our intimate relationships, or in our own mind by the demons who chirp so happily along with patriarchy’s tune, we are letting patriarchy win.

A decade ago, I decided that I was going to let my weight go wherever it needed to go and I was not going to do ONE. MORE. THING. to force my body to try and lose weight – because it never works long-term – until I had done this one thing:

LOVE MYSELF.

Like, really, really, love myself.

Not the schmear job of self-care and self-love that you see everywhere on the inter-webs. Not the love and light b.s. that spiritual-lite gurus espouse in an attempt to sell more books.

But deep down dirty sexy self-love.

Like, I love myself enough to STAY.

I love myself enough to say NO.

I love myself enough to set BOUNDARIES – emotional, energetic, and physical.

I love myself enough to TELL THE REST OF THE WORLD to kindly go fuck itself while I figure out exactly what brings me joy and makes staying on this gorgeous blue and green ball worthwhile.

(because, for most of us, we honestly don’t know why we have to be here)

I love myself enough to tap into the will of the Divine for my life and FOLLOW IT.

That kind of love.

A powerful love that will STAY.

A love that means more to me than the temporary pleasure of a really good piece of bread or a Blizzard or chocolate covered almonds or any of the other sugary treats that have made my mouth salivate and my heart go pitter-pat for my entire life.

A love that is willing to FEEL the pain of staying present with life instead of jumping into a numbed out chemically induced high every time something hurts.

And, oh beloved, it does hurt.

Sometimes, the hurt is so big that I don’t know how to bear it.

Sometimes the hurt of this world buckles my knees and I collapse sobbing under the weight of it all.

But, we are made for this.

We are Divine Vessels. We are made to receive. To hold. To cradle. To process.

To bring the swirling energies of pain and confusion through our bellies and wombs and transformatively birth out a new world.

I am madefor this.

You are madefor this.

We are madefor this. This moment. This time. This challenge.

And we don’t have to do it alone.

The Divine is with us.

We are beloved.

We are cradled.

We are treasured.

Even if we’ve spent our entire lives hating God because we were taught that He is just one more man judging us, shaming us, and telling us how we’re wrong and that we will never be good enough because we don’t have a penis.

(yes, Church-hurt is a thing and it’s a big thing and most of my clients have some version of it)

The truth is: that’s not God. That’s people. That’s patriarchy. Patriarchy seeps into religion, subverts it, and turns it into shame instead of joy.

And that’s not God.

That’s people.

And we’re here – Oh! Butterfly! I believe this with every fibre of my being!– we’re here to change it.

We’re here to pull up that dark root of patriarchy induced self-loathing and hatred.

We’re here to transform it with our breath, our hearts, our hands, and our wombs.

This is the moment.

This is the time.

But…

But, if we don’t love ourselves first, we cannot transform this world into one that we love.

We must do the work inside, before we do the work outside.

Otherwise it will be bitter and fragile and we will burn out.

The world will reflect back to you what is happening in your interior world and you mustdo the work. Consistently. Diligently. Passionately.

The Divine Alignment Breakthrough

I’ve had 3 Breakthroughs in the last six months where the big Outcome they said they wanted was weight loss. That was what they had identified as their big win. Maybe this sounds familiar…

“If I could just lose this weight then everything would be good.”

“I’ve got to get this weight off.”

“I can’t be happy until I lose this weight.”

Truth be told, I don’t do weight-loss focused Breakthroughs anymore. Haven’t in years.

Why?

Because they rarely work.

Why?

Because the clients don’t really want to lose the weight.

For all the reasons I explained above.

Stay with me here.

They think that they want to lose the weight.

They have been conditioned to believe that they will only be good enough and happy enough when they have lost the weight.

It is sincere.

It just isn’t true.

But, because they were all long-term clients and friends, I agreed.

Because if someone really does want to right-size their body, it will happen. There are formulas and plans to follow that will get you there.

(here’s the key: the weight is a symptom, not the cause)

If you want it. Really want it.

Do you want to know what reallyhappens during a ‘weight-loss’ Breakthrough?

At some point, in the work after the Breakthrough, every single one of them – EACH ONE – decides that what she truly needs is not to lose more weight – at least not now – or have it be their focus.

That what she really needs is to learn how to be happy in her body.

To learn how to love her body. To learn how to create a life that she loves.

To really love it. To really listen to her Unconscious Mind and make friends with it and get the self-care and nourishment that it really needs.

And each one makes massive strides toward just that end.

They have more joy. They have more peace. They have more focus and clarity.

They are creating lives that hold happiness… instead of letting it drain through like the energetic sieves that they were before.

Now, that?

That is worth breaking through millennia of oppression for.

That is worth giving the middle finger to the patriarchy for.

That is worth living for.

The Even Better News?

The even better news is that once you have nailed the really real self-love, Divine Alignment piece?

Then you can deal with the weight.

Because it is no longer the centre of your life, you can let it go.

It is no longer THE. THING.

(now, it’s just a thing. an artifact of an old way of living you don’t need anymore.)

Now, LIFE is the thing. JOY is the thing. PURPOSE is the thing.

And that is a very good thing.