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12 Emotional Blocks
The 12 Emotional Blocks that sabotage weightloss could be the most important blog you read….
Have you ever wondered why it’s so hard to lose weight or if you do lose weight, it’s hard to keep it off?
Chances are you know what to eat to maintain a healthy diet. You don’t need to be told that sugar is bad for you and you need to fill up on vegetables. You also know that you need to exercise and move more. You may also motivated to get to the gym or put for walks – The will is there!
And yet, despite all this knowledge, weightloss is still a struggle.
It’s not only about appetite, we know that about 70% of people eat when they’re not hungry. The key question is, why?
It’s In Your Head, Not Your Stomach
The truth is there is a big factor in weight oss which mostly goes unacknowledged. It’s the thoughts in your head. As long as these are left unexamined and undealt with, you will find it hard to reach and maintain your ideal weight. No matter how good your eating plan is and how attractive your gym membership is, we need to address this issue first.
The 12 Possible Stumbling Blocks – 12 Emotional Blocks That Sabotage Weightloss
Each person’s emotional blocks that prevent them from losing weight will be different. However, there are 12 categories of blocks that are extremely common. You may identify strongly with one or several of them.
1. Out of touch with your body: If you’ve never been thin or weighed more than twice your ideal weight, you may have lost touch with your body and how severe the issue is. Maybe you haven’t looked at pictures of yourself from the neck down recently. Maybe you have stopped caring for yourself like you would your car or your house for example.
2. Negative associations with being thin: You may associate being thin with being sick or weak, perhaps because of first-hand experience with someone close to you who was thin for those reasons.
3. Conditioning: If you overeat, chances are there are particular triggers that spur you to eat. Consider for example whether you associate food with boredom and therefore comfort eat whenever you’re bored.
4. Sexual blocks: You may not realise that challenges with intimacy or the lack thereof are at the root of many weight problems. You may have a partner that is uninterested in sex. You may have been raised with sex being a taboo. Any such reality can be one of the Emotional Blocks stopping you from losing weight.
5. Happiness: You may be unhappy because of your weight. In order to achieve happiness, you need to love yourself. Happiness can come only from within, from a sense of pride and accomplishment in having attained your goals through hard work. If you don’t feel that, it can be difficult to lose weight.
6. Secondary gains: You maybe suffering from an emotional problem and using weight gain as a means of seeking attention, or to compensate for a lack of assertiveness (for example).
7. Imitation: If you lack confidence and self-esteem, you may be trying to compensate for these deficiencies by modelling yourself after someone you admire. If they are overweight, you might want to subconsciously look like them and be afraid of deviating from their example.
8. Self-punishment: Self-punishment is a serious block. Not only can it result in obesity, but it can poison an entire life. If something has caused you to be guilt-ridden, you may be punishing yourself by overeating and making yourself unhealthy.
9. Emotional Shock: If you suffered an emotional shock at an earlier stage in your life, and dealt with it, even in part, by overeating, than chances are whenever you suffer an emotional shock, you end up reacting the same way.
10. Reaction: Reaction consists of rejecting what we feel forced to do and then doing the exact opposite to prove to ourselves that we’re independent and able to take care of ourselves. If you had a parent who harassed you about your weight, you may overeat to reject how you were forced to diet as a child.
11. Fear of Failure: You may be unable to lose weight because you are afraid of experiencing a failure which would weaken your already poor self-image so you never start.
12. Fear of success: If your self-image is that of a failure, you may consider yourself incapable of succeeding and of handling the responsibilities that come with success.
Your Self-Image Is Key to Your Diet
Our actions are always determined by our self-image. We are what we think we are.
Your weightloss is mostly a self-fulfilling prophesy: you think you can’t lose weight because all your past attempts have ended in failure or when you start a new diet you’re convinced you won’t succeed. Inevitably, you’ll fail no matter how good your intentions are. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, despite all of these emothional blocks. You can change your own self-image.
Taking time to identify your emotional blocks, understanding where they originated and beginning the process of re-programming a new improved belief system will help develop a healthier relationship with food and therefore a healthier body and mind.