Welcome! The following was posted under another topic. It has helped me, hopefully you.

Best Wishes,

Carrie




We Fear Of Thin: Is It Keeping You Fat?
By Dr. Matthew Anderson
Exclusive for eDiets

Here are some tough but highly useful comments on why you may be having a terrible time losing weight. This information has helped many of my clients make great progress on their weight loss journey.

If you are fat then you want to be that way. Well at least a part of you wants you to be fat. I know your Conscious Mind tells you to lose weight every moment of every day. But there is another part of you that truly wants and maybe even needs you to stay fat, and it has quite a bit of control over your eating behavior. That powerful, but usually hidden part is called the Unconscious Mind. Your Unconscious Mind wants you to keep the weight on and it clearly has more power over your life than you realize. And in addition to that, your Unconscious Mind has very good reasons for wanting you to stay fat.

Here are some examples of the Unconscious Mind and why it may want to keep you fat.
You may fear your sexual energy.
You may have been raped and fat protects you from men.
Your self-esteem may be very low and you might actually feel undeserving of weight loss.
Your fat may be a way of resisting the growing-up process (baby fat) because adulthood seems frightening.
You may believe that losing weight might require you to make other scary or painful choices and changes (divorce, change jobs, lose friends).
Weight loss may require you to accept more challenges or responsibilities and staying fat then becomes a form of safety.
You may fear being seen and therefore judged.
The point is that each of us who has significant weight we have not been able to lose is invested in staying fat and until we discover these hidden wants, needs and fears we will be stuck in fat.

This information should help you finally understand why you try so hard to lose weight and then, without any warning, find yourself eating out of control. This is what happens when your Unconscious Mind takes over. It (for the good reasons I mentioned above) is very threatened by your weight loss and will not allow you to drop too many pounds without a tremendous fight.

OK, let’s assume you agree with me so far. Now what? How do you learn to deal with an out of control Unconscious Mind? I thought you would never ask. Here are some suggestions. They really work so make sure you do at least some of them.

Finish this sentence as honestly and openly as you can (25 times) even though your responses may seem strange at first.

The reason I want to be fat is…

If you stop before you reach 25 you will probably not find useful answers. The key here is to discover two or three meaningful root causes behind your weight gain. Trust me. They are there. Every significantly weight-challenged person has them. (Write down your 25 sentences and responses in full as you do them.)

When you have done the unfinished sentence exercise, pick the two or three most powerful answers and write them down on a separate page. This information could be the real key to your long-term healthy weight loss. Take it seriously.

Make a decision to do some serious inner work on these three most significant issues. What does that mean? You can start by writing a two-page description of each issue. Take your time and be as descriptive as you can. If you have trouble writing it then find a good friend and talk about each one with that person. The task here is to begin to "flesh out" the issue and explore how it affects you.

Now it is time for a book (or a tape). If you have clearly identified your issues then you will probably find a book on the subject. For instance, if your fat protects you from sexual advances then you can find numerous books that will provide you with support and guidance for healing. This may sound strange but it actually works. There are self-help books and thousands of subjects and there is one just for you. Go take a look.

These exercises will get you started. Be sure to do them. Then you will be on your way to discovering additional guides to help you heal or manage your unconscious desires to stay fat.
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