Accidentally Overweight

by Libby Weaver

  If love bugs find themselves standing at the refrigerator, peering in as if the meaning of life must be contained inside, another useful question to ask themselves is, “What do I really want?” At first, your brain will probably tell you that of course you simply want chocolate or cookies, but if you keep asking yourself this question the veil will start to lift, and you will see that what you actually want is a hug or company or for someone to thank you for making their bed every day for the last 25 years. Yet it is not even about these things that you have now identified. It is about how you perceive having these things will make you feel. We are governed by how we feel. So the next question is, how will having a hug, or company, or a thank you make you feel? And your answer might be “appreciated” or “connected” or “comforted” or “loved.” It is the emotion you are chasing, not the biscuits and not the hug. It is the feeling you are seeking. So then ask yourself, how else can you experience this emotion without it harming your health? And then do that. Or be that. Or schedule that.

  Emotional pain can serve you

  The belief that to feel emotional pain is too traumatic to bear is like looking at the world through the eyes of a child. As infants, if we didn’t have love, attention, and someone to feed us, we would die. So when we are born, a powerful belief is born as well: Without love, we will die. The thing is, of course, while a child might perish without love, adults physically will not. Love is delicious, yes, but we won’t die without it. The trouble is, if you “touch” this belief too easily because your subconscious mind is set up to do so, then your desire to escape from emotions you won’t let yourself feel, let alone recognize, can be a constant and overwhelming battle.

  To escape, some people choose food; some people drink two bottles of wine every night, while others chain-smoke a pack of cigarettes each day. Some exercise like they are possessed. Some people starve themselves. Some people eat. And every time you do this, you miss out on feeling what is really there. It is the desire to avoid this “pain,” that makes you bolt. You bolt to the refrigerator, and you bolt from yourself and what you truly feel in that moment. Your way back home to yourself—and away from the fridge or whatever escape mechanism you use—lies in acknowledging the pain and truly experiencing that it will not kill you. If you feel sad, you feel sad. If you overeat regularly to blanket the sadness, you just give yourself an additional reason to be sad. Eating does not get rid of the sadness. It adds to it. Why not then simply acknowledge that you feel sad rather than escaping from your pain through food?

  Let’s break this down into a strategy you can work on. The first step is to recognize an emotion that is very tough for you to feel, whether it’s rejection, failure, or guilt, and then explore what has to happen for you to feel this emotion. You will see that humans make it really easy to feel emotions that we perceive will bring us the most pain and that we therefore most want to avoid. Unless you have previously done some work in this area, the emotion you first want to work with was (more than likely) created from an experience you had when you were probably quite young.

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  Case Study

  One of the most simple, yet transformational processes I have ever witnessed was Mrs. M, who came to see me for weight loss but said as soon as she arrived, “I eat too much cake after dinner every night. And if your only solution for my weight loss is to tell me to stop eating the cake, if it were that simple, I would have done it for myself already.” So many people feel this way.

  So here was dear Mrs. M, a short-in-stature, 60-year-old lady of Irish heritage. I asked her my millions of questions, including ones about sinus congestion, if she used her bowels every day and what her transition into menopause was like. Then, as I do with all of my clients, I asked her if her parents were still alive. When I ask that question, most people think I am seeking their family history—looking for degenerative diseases, such as heart disease, for example—and I am partly doing that. But mostly I am watching and feeling for their reaction to having their parents mentioned. In the case of Mrs. M, it was very obvious that there were painful memories. She shared that her mother had died while giving birth to her and that her father hadn’t spoken to her since she was 14 years old.

  She went on to share, “My father brought me home from the hospital to our large farm, which was in the middle of nowhere in Ireland. I had four older brothers and the nearest to me in age was 13. I grew up there. It was quiet but I liked it and I was good at school and helped with the house. But then when I was 14 my father wrote a letter of introduction to an aunt and then put me on a boat to New Zealand to live with her and I never heard from him again. He loved my brothers enough to keep them, but he didn’t love me enough to keep me.”

  There in her history was what she was distancing herself from with the cake—she believed that her father had loved her brothers enough to keep them, but not her. Not that she sat on the lounge each night saying to herself that her father didn’t love her—there was no awareness of the father scenario while eating the cake—but there was her underlying belief in her story. And I’ve seen it time and time again. Perceiving that a parent didn’t love you is one of the commonest emotional reasons for poor-quality food behaviors.

  But I believe everyone has a beautiful heart. Their behavior may be “challenging” at times but I questioned her perception of his lack of love for her. And so I said, “What if the opposite was true? What if your father loved you so much, his one and only daughter, the daughter his beloved wife died giving birth to, the daughter who was good at school, and who at 14 was probably about to start menstruating—and as he was an already relatively elderly father by this stage in her life, he most likely had no idea how he would support you through menarche? What if he loved you so much that he was prepared to send you away and never see you again to give you the best opportunity with your education and your life?”

  She replied that she’d never considered that. I continued, “Well, you said your father is still alive. Do you have any way of contacting him?” She said she could probably get a phone number for him. I asked her if she would do that and then phone him and ask him why he had sent her away. And she said she would.

  To my utter astonishment, this extraordinary lady phoned her father—to whom she hadn’t spoken for 46 years—and asked him why he’d sent her away. He told her, among many other heartfelt reasons, that he loved her very much and wanted her to have a better life than he thought he could ever give her on the farm.

  I didn’t talk to Mrs. M about cake. She just stopped eating it. Well, after dinner every night, anyway. She still had the odd piece when she saw her friends for a cup of tea. And yes, she lost weight. But she said she didn’t even mind now, although she was pleased. She just felt so happy. Yet she never would have been able to tell me that she had had an ache in her heart—an immense sadness—about her father, prior to our consultations. She just didn’t understand why, when she knew how she needed to eat for good health, she didn’t do it. She was simply distancing herself from how she perceived things were because they weren’t how she wanted them to be.

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  Case Study

  I’ll give you another simple example to get you thinking. One of the first people I ever worked with was a publicly well-known woman who was “larger than life” (I’ll call her Mary). Mary was gregarious, hilarious, likeable, financially successful and, as a result, very charitable. She arrived to see me with a statement that went something like “I’ve heard you do weight loss differently and, honey, I’ve tried everything.” Mary went on to tell me that she felt “successful” in every area of her life except when it came to her body. She never mentioned “health.” In everything she said, it was always about her size and weight; until I asked, she never mentioned her reflux, the trouble she had breathing, the regular headaches, or the eczema that had been present since childhood. “Health” was not on her radar. It’s very useful to start noticing your language patterns because a great deal can be revealed through what
you say and also what you don’t say.

  The other thing I noticed was the way Mary spoke about her mother. Her mother hadn’t just irritated her; Mary despised her. She spoke about her in the present tense, so I was stunned to learn that her mother had actually passed away almost 20 years before. When I asked Mary if there was a time in her life when she could recall her relationship with her mother not being so diabolical, she said yes. If someone can recall when a relationship changed, it usually means (in their mind at least) that “something” has happened and that’s where the exploration needs to begin.

  Mary thought the direction I was taking in our session was a “load of rubbish,” particularly as she’d already done years of therapy around her hatred for her mother. She paid lip service to the concept that her mother had done her best, but when she finished that statement with “blah, blah, blah,” a roll of her eyes, and a wave of her hand, I knew her heart didn’t believe it. So I delved deeper. After all, she’d ask me to help her be as “successful” with her weight as she was in other areas of her life.

  I asked Mary to remember a time when things were dreadful between her and her mother and then also a time when it had felt fine, or even quite good, to be around her mother. She said she could remember both. Then I asked her to remember the day it changed. And for the first time, her face lost its intensity and tightness. When Mary was four years old, she had been playing outside by herself, not far from the house on the family farm. She fell and cut her eye, screaming out as she did so. Her mother came running from the house and shouted, “You should be more careful, and then you wouldn’t get hurt.”

  In that moment, my client could have created any of the following meanings:

  My mother loves me so much she wants to protect me from further injury/pain (love).

  Hooray! I got Mom’s attention (success).

  I’ve disappointed my mother (guilt).

  My mother hates me and doesn’t love me (rejection).

  My mother thinks I’m a failure (failure).

  Before we move on, contemplate why you think the mother responded this way. Could her thoughts have been:

  My precious baby has fallen and hurt herself for the first time! I must warn her to be more careful so she doesn’t get hurt again (love).

  I feel so guilty that I wasn’t there to protect my baby girl (her own guilt).

  I am so useless because my baby has hurt herself (failure).

  You can see from the outside looking in to the situation that the mother’s response to her child’s accident came from a place of love and protection, and initially fear at how badly the child was injured. But for Mary it was the first time her mother raised her voice with her and she had now linked it to physical pain. Welcome to the beginning of a new “meaning” locked into your nervous system. This is how the “itch” I describe gets set up for constant scratching as you go through life.

  The mother’s delivery may have been rough or harsh or loud, but the intention was beautiful. Yet when I asked Mary what she thought her mother meant from the words she had spoken, she told me she was a “cruel, cruel woman who hated me.” In that moment, when she was four, Mary created a meaning that her mother didn’t love her. In her eyes, “how could anyone who loves you shout at you when you’re hurt?”

  That moment set up further challenging interactions between Mary and her mother. Why? Because, subconsciously she started looking for evidence of what she had begun to assume about herself.

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  Please note

  These words are not intended to elicit any feelings of guilt for parents. Please keep in mind that creating meanings from what others say is part of being human (everyone does it), and yes, it shapes us, and who we become, but it also gives us the opportunity to learn and grow and contribute. The skill, growth and freedom comes with being able to step back and see the “story” you are telling yourself. If all of our needs were always met—in our own eyes—we would never contribute.

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  Think about it and you’ll see evidence of this type of scenario everywhere. For example, you might be seven years old now and you are leaving the house for school, and your mother calls out, in a frustrated voice because she has 80,000 things to do that day and is running late, “It’s cold outside and you’ve forgotten your sweater. Go and get your sweater.” If you were Mary in this situation, and had in that first instance when you fell, created a meaning of “Wow, my mum loves me so much she never wants me to go through this pain again” (love), then when your mother reminds you to get your sweater, you would have skipped off to your room, grabbed your sweater, and happily gone off to school, regardless of the tone in her voice. In fact, you probably wouldn’t even have noticed her “tone.”

  If, however, from that first instance, you created a meaning of rejection or failure, you would create that meaning again now from your mother’s words reminding you to take your sweater to school, and you would validate that meaning by thinking to yourself, “See, she doesn’t even think I can dress myself.” You will stomp off to your room, collect your sweater, and go sullenly to school, only to have your mood lighten once you arrive and see your friends.

  Can you see how two completely different lives could play out just from that one meaning, and therefore belief, that was created so early?

  When you are little, from a psychological development perspective, you are the center of the universe. It is all about you. It has to be or you wouldn’t survive, remember. But once you are older and have the opportunity to see such situations as if you are hovering above them, that clarity can be enough to elicit the most beautiful “healing,” the most magnificent “a-ha” moments. When an adult “sees” a mistaken belief from childhood, the forgiveness and compassion for their parent’s life, as well as a newfound compassion for themselves, are palpable and always an honor to witness.

  It is important to acknowledge that the meanings we’ve created will have served us in some ways until now. Indeed, they may not have always brought you challenges. Until now, some of the meanings you have created will have done some great things for you. For example, if you were a part of the scenario above and the initial meaning you created was guilt, then you may have spent your life pleasing everyone so that you never felt like you were letting anyone down, and as a result people probably deeply love and appreciate you. For Mary, on the other hand, feeling rejected with a decent amount of “I’m a failure” thrown in, caused her to develop an “I’ll show you” attitude, meaning she was determined to create an extraordinary life to show her mother that she was successful and therefore loveable. This not only influenced the development of her likeable personality, but also made her financially successful, enabling her to give back to those in need in enormous ways. So her meanings fostered a lot of good.

  But there often comes a point when the meanings we’ve created no longer serve us. For example, if you are always pleasing people—so you feel like you never let them down, or disappoint them, so you can avoid feeling guilty—it is likely to become exhausting after a while and could deplete your adrenal glands, and this may be the basis of your health problems. Mary ate huge volumes of food most nights as a way of avoiding the reality that all she ever really wanted was her mother’s love. She would never have seen that because the hatred she’d constructed was so vast. When Mary could see that her mother had actually always loved her, her food patterns and body fat changed significantly.

  Sometimes all it takes is a glimpse of the “truth” for a shift to occur, leading to an effortless change in food behavior and a gentle letting-go of the blanket of protection (body fat) that may have been carried for decades. For others, I take them through a process that I created many years ago to help people better obtain the health outcomes they were seeking. I was first exposed to the concept of subconscious rules in a book called Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins. I recognize the significant contribution Tony has made to this world by deciphering so much of human psychology, and for his i
nsights and strategies.

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  What are your rules?

  The process I guide people through at my weekend events involves first recognizing and writing down what currently has to happen for them to feel love. Then I ask them to write down what currently has to happen for them to feel rejected.

  Question: What emotion do you want to feel regularly?

  Answer: Love

  Write down what currently has to happen for you to feel love.

  When I do this exercise with female love bugs, common responses often include:

  He has to look at me with soft, gentle eyes, smile like he really means it, and reach out and touch my hand all at the same time.

  He can never raise his voice at me.

  He can never use anything but a nice tone with me.

  He can never be late.

  He can never play computer games when there are jobs to do around the house.

  He always has to notice when I am overwhelmed and help me, even if I haven’t asked.

  No one can ever ignore me!

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