"Of all the judgments we make throughout life, none is as relevant as the one we make about ourselves, because this judgment is the engine of our existence". Nathaniel Branden.
How is it possible that after dozens of diets a person is not able to learn to eat well and stay within healthy weight limits?
One attempt is followed by a new one, with practically the same results. It is possible to lose a considerable amount of weight, many dietary restrictions, and when leaving the diet, either because the desired result has been achieved or because all motivation has been exhausted, all the kilos are recovered and some more as a gift.
Anyone who is overweight will see that this is what his life is summed up: one diet after another and a feeling of loss of control over his body and, by overgeneralization, over his life. Miracle diets, new exercises and treatments appear and the thought that this time it will be the good one resurfaces in the head. The attempts do not come to fruition, something fails and they do not find the explanation.
However, everything is much easier than it seems at first glance. To do this, we must understand the body as a mixture of feelings, thoughts, emotions, personality and genes. Everything, absolutely everything, makes up who we are. Entities that are closely and directly related. Entities that would not exist if one of them disappeared. Therefore, if we decide to lose weight, Wouldn't other factors also be at play, and not just diet and physical exercise?? In fact, it is the other factors that support the diet and the new habits.
And we can simplify the equation even more. Emotions, thoughts, feelings and, of course, behaviors are covered by a single concept: the self-esteem, our ability to value ourselves and the world, a set of beliefs based on the experiences accumulated throughout our lives.
"There is always a moment in childhood when the door is opened and the future is allowed in". Deepak Chopra.
At the beginning of our life, when we are babies and young children, our way of seeing and understanding the world does not extend beyond our parents and our closest relatives. Everything they say becomes a universal truth. Therefore, their way of relating to each other, to us and also to themselves, is for us an irrefutable truth. Their prejudices, their arguments, their annoyances and, of course, also their good things, are creating in us a letter of life that will gradually become our personality..
If our parents - first parents and then the other people who will join our lives, such as our teachers - tell us that we are bad, we will believe that we are bad. If they tell us that we are unable to do anything right, we will make it an absolute truth. We are absorbing everything they say and do to us, this being the pattern that we will repeat in our adult lives..
Therefore, self-esteem is the pillar on which our life is built: emotions, feelings, thoughts and behaviors. We are what we are and we do what we do because our self-esteem marks it. And, in addition, he will always look for a way to show us that he is right. Do we think we are not able to pass an exam? He will find a way to confirm this: we will not study enough, we will skip class, we will decide to party the night before ... Whatever it takes to confirm the belief.
It interferes in all areas of our life, which also includes our weight, the way we eat, our diet, and our habits. Low self-esteem, determined to sabotage us to be right again: you don't deserve to be happy. Because, although it seems unthinkable, we can come to hate ourselves.
Low self-esteem, which implies an excessively unfavorable assessment of ourselves, ends up generating hatred and resentment towards who we are. A hatred that makes us look for people, behaviors and habits that harm us. A hatred that many direct towards food, since in the short term it generates calm and satisfaction due to biological mechanisms, but that entails subsequent guilt, generating even more hatred.
As we said before, self-esteem always wants to be right, and with food and the lack of control over it, it is achieved. This vicious circle makes us feel that we have lost control of our own life, and as we need to find calm, we eat again, ending up as slaves to food, the mirror and the scale, unable to differentiate real hunger from emotional hunger. , without restraint and criticizing us even more. We have managed to hate ourselves and we eat to show ourselves how weak we are.
After this, we can logically understand that the problem of overweight does not reside in diet or sedentary life, but that behind it there is a set of limiting beliefs under the dictatorship of self-esteem that will make us fail again and again in the attempts to get out of the hole.
The solution is to learn to control our emotions, our feelings, thoughts and behaviors and, for this, we must work the most important thing, self-esteem. The work consists of reformulating our beliefs, turning them into allies and little by little creating a foundation of self-love and positive assessment that cooperates in our objectives, not that they become our worst enemy.
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