4 subconscious reasons your body is holding on to weight
Updated: Oct 19
You can also experience this content in podcast format:
One of the most fascinating areas I work on with individuals and that has been incredibly revealing on how our emotions and our minds can affect the functioning of our bodies, is weight loss.
Have you been struggling with weight for quite a while now, either going from one diet to another unsuccessfully, not being able to sustain the change, and even gain more at the end of a diet than what you managed to lose?
Maybe you're just not being able to quit drinking soda or eating some of those foods we all know are unhealthy and keep you from having your ideal weight. Or maybe you find yourself sabotaging your exercise routine on an ongoing basis when you know you should be doing it consistently to reach your goals.
If you see yourself in anything of what I just said, then this article is for you.
There are some fundamentals we need to cover, to understand how our minds and bodies work and how it affects our body shape, our health and our ability to have an ideal weight. So lets explore the subconscious reasons why your body may be holding on to weight and understand a little about all the process.
Holistic approach
We've all been told, eat this, don't eat that, you gain weight if you eat more calories than the ones you spend, we go through efforts of understanding how we transform energy from food and use it, how intense our workout needs to be, how much protein we need, and pretty much we will find contradicting positions about many of those topics.
If it was that simple, there wouldn't be so many people overweight and so many failing diets.
As a medical assistant and health coach I am able to provide advice on lifestyle choices that affect health, including diet, exercise, and work-life balance. But if I don't help the individual resolve the emotional side of them being overweight, I may never fully help them permanently become the ideal weight person they want to be.
My RTT (Rapid Transformational Therapy) training and experience, and the use of hypnosis regression has showed me that every ongoing problem, including being overweight, has an emotional aspect to it.
An holistic approach is paramount for a successful weight loss. First we have to resolve any underlying issues through hypnosis, which is the language of feelings and emotions, and make sure that nothing is working against the person's goals.
Your body will work to make real what your mind says and believes, even if only at a subconscious level.
Your relationship with food.
This is a very important thing. What we believe about food will have an incredible impact on our health and subsequently, on our weight.
I observe people saying some things like "Oh I can't eat greens because it upsets my gut." or "I gain weight just by looking at pizza". Or "I don't like fruits and vegetables", or "Green stuff is for rabbits" like my father often says.
Or maybe food can be an addiction for you and you use food to bring you comfort, to take you out of a stressful situation, or you simply feel that you cannot function or calm yourself from your daily life, unless you indulge in some favorite foods like chocolate, or you simply cannot stop even when you feel full.
Deep inside you know you shouldn't be binge eating but you simply feel like you can't control your impulses and replace your bad habits with good ones for once. You also may even feel guilty around your food choices.
When you have a good relationship with food, you give yourself permission to eat those foods you like, choosing mostly foods that make you feel your best, but without restricting yourself. You listen to and honor your hunger cues and you stop when you're full.
You enjoy all foods in moderation, you don't feel stressed over what others think of your food choices, and you're not obsessed over a number on a scale or a calorie count. It's a dietless mindset because you're not on a diet. You are choosing what makes you feel good, look good and be healthy. It's who you are; it's not a phase.
So if you're not like that with food, in order to successfully have an ideal weight and be healthy permanently without struggle in a way that is pervasive and permanent, you need to do the inner work that makes you become that type of person.
And this takes me to the next concept that is extremely important...
Your relationship with yourself.
The beliefs you hold about yourself are as important as the beliefs you hold around food.
A limiting belief or thought can be conscious or not but most of them are running in the background of the subconscious mind and people often are not aware of how they can undermine their weight loss (or weight gain for that matter, if what the person needs is to gain some weight).
The way you speak to yourself, the so called self-talk, also sets your mind and body to work in a balanced way or not. If your inner-critic has a lot of strength, you may find yourself feeling depressed, guilty, angry or anxious, which will affect your cortisol levels, your metabolism, and the capacity to maintain a healthy weight.
If deep inside, you feel unworthy of being healthy, if you don't feel good enough, if you don't feel you are capable or worthy of having an ideal weight, if you feel unloveable, if underneath and on a subconscious level you believe you are safer by being overweight; all those limiting beliefs, thoughts and feelings are a blueprint for your body to follow.
Your body will work to make real what your mind says and believes, even if only at a subconscious level. Limiting beliefs and thoughts will not only keep you from having the behaviors that would allow you to drop weight, but your body itself will match that belief and those thoughts.
That emotional state and blueprint will give your body the ability to control your metabolism, the way your energy flows in your body, your vibration, your digestion, your health overall, and hold on to that weight to fullfill the belief and thought that originated it.
So you may even see yourself conscioulsy wanting to drop weight but your subconscious is keeping you overweight and leading you through ways of self-sabotage. And that's why diets don't work, that's why the work has to be done on a subconscious level.
Hypnosis allows practicioners to guide an individual towards finding the reason why they are overweight or holding on to weight and there's always, always a deep emotional reason of why that happens. Food and weight are deeply related to our emotions and hypnosis is the language of emotions.
By understanding your inner world of emotions through hypnosis, you can resolve pretty much anything in your life. When you find the root cause of you being overweight, you have the power of transformation in your hands.
You're able to challenge and remove limiting beliefs or reframe past experiences and introduce new positive empowering thoughts and beliefs that will make you feel energized and behave in ways that are aligned with your weight loss goal.
4 Subconscious emotional "road-blocks" to weight loss
1- Stress and anxiety:
When you're in constant stress, you release cortisol at levels that are detrimental to your health. When your mind believes you're in danger or in a threatful situation, cortisol will do what it can in order for you to keep calories and fat in your body. It will increase your apetite, cause insulin resistance and slow down your metabolism.
This could be one of the reasons you're not dropping weight and may even be gaining it. Hypnosis can help manage stress and anxiety and give you coping skills to manage it so it doesn't get out of hand.
If you're in this situation and trying to lose weight, make sure you understand that a stressful life is not doing you any good for more reasons than just the weight loss, and that it is something that must be sorted before hand.
2- Negative self talk:
Yes, your harsh words towards yourself may be killing your ability to lose weight.
Negative thinking on itself has the power to cause you stress or even lead you into depression. So sorting the habit of thought, by replacing negative thoughts into positive ones and becoming your own best friend and cheerleader, is the goal.
Feelings of shame related to how you look or related to the sabotaging actions you take, need to be under control. A study has shown that the development of self-reassuring competencies in weight management programs improves weight-related affect and well-being.
To learn more about those competencies, I invite you to check out my article on the power of self-talk where you can find "7 ways to turn your mind into your best ally".
3- Depression
Life events and isolation can get us into a perspective of the world and ourselves that lead into a depression that may seem hard to get out of. Together with it comes negative self-talk.
Johann Hari's research interviewing several experts on depression from around the world, also gives incredible insights on how to fight depression. I strongly advise watching his TED talk video.
Depression can be a reason for weight problems, and hypnosis has proven to be effective to resolve it. The Rapid Transformational Therapy method is a great way to find the root cause of limiting beliefs, and lead us towards thoughts and behaviors that fulfill our hearts desire and our need to be part of a community and connecting with other human beings.
4- Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE's)
Now this here is a very important cause because it is more insidious that one may think. Different studies show an undeniable link between childhood trauma and obesity.
Here is a link to the Adverse Childhood Experience Questionnaire for Adults that may help you reflect on your own situation.
About two-thirds of middle class adults have reported one or more Adverse Childhood Experiences, whether in the form of abuse, neglect or household disfunction during early development.
The likelyhood of adverse consequences in adulhood such as obesity, rises with the number of ACE exposures. 25% of adults actually report having experienced 3 or more ACE's and the number rises even more in socio-economic disavantaged groups.
Longitudinal studies suggest that childhood physical or sexual abuse greatly inscreases the risk for severe obesity in adulhood, with double the risk for abused females and triple the risk for abused males, compared to individuals with no physical or sexual abuse.
Furthermore, another study shows that 69% of people undergoing bariatric surgery for weigh-loss reported some form of childhood abuse or neglect.
Most people are not aware, but the incidence of sexual abuse unfortunately is not rare.
1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men report experiencing some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. Now look at those numbers and be aware that those are just reported cases. There's a lot of secrecy and shame attached to it so I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers were actually double than that, but that would be me speculating.
For people with sexual trauma history, telling them to move more and eat less is a fallacy. Not only weight-loss programs fail to approach this issue, the individuals themselves have no idea of what is keeping them from achieving long-term weight loss, and how important it is that they are aware of how trauma might be making them weight-loss resistant.
The body has created certain mechanisms after having gone though the traumatic event, to put on weight as an act of protection to its integrity. Excess weight may subconsciously be creating a sense of safety for the individual, where the increased weight and size reduces feelings of vulnerability.
It can also be protecting the person from being seen by others, especially the opposite sex for women. The less attractive they become, the less comments, harassment and attention they will get, and the more invisible they will be become.
Others may develop a pervasive feeling of shame and blame for what happened to them and subconsciously put on weight to punish themselves and as a confirmation of what they have convinced themselves they deserve.
All these are mechanisms that usually run in the background, on auto-pilot, while the individual has no awareness of it whatsoever. That's why it is so important to recognize the ways that trauma may be interfering with your weight-loss and lead you to self-sabotaging behaviors.
For these people, what I do through hypnosis is sort out the root cause of them being overweight in the first place, which is the trauma. Resolving the childhood trauma is adamant to resolve mental and physical health issues. Only then the body will be ready to drop weight effortlessly.
Releasing that trauma charge and blockage, will help people challenge and replace their belief around what “safe weight" is, and around social attention and compliments. After understanding subconsciously that excess weight is not longer needed, they will release the chains of the past experience and replace them with empowering cognition alternatives.
It's incredible the amount of evidence that shows how allostatic overload (toxic stress) in childhood can affect the functioning of regulatory systems like the endocrine, immune and nervous systems, and manifest physiological as well as psychological impediments to weight loss.
Hypnosis can resolve and transform the way you feel about what happened in the past and move you towards new empowering meanings, thoughts and behaviors that will help your body and mind to find balance. Only that resolution can bring you some kind of healing and closure so you can regain your health and control your weight effectively.
Whichever of these 4 subconscious reasons may be for you to be holding on to weight, once resolved, it is a massive let go that your mind and body go through and every system starts working as nature intended it to. The metabolism, digestion, endocrine system, nervous system, everything starts reseting and removing excess weight.
The individual is motivated, with a new sense of self, and it's like they become another person, they are able to be more of who they actually were meant to be. It's so beautiful to see this type of transformation take place and I am so blessed to see it all the time with my clients.
A dietless mindset
This is the ultimate goal I have when I guide individuals through hypnosis and my RTT weight-loss program.
You become the actions and behaviors that you choose to have and that you know are aligned with your health and ideal weight goals. And because you are happy with your choices you don't deprive yourself of anything, you don't feel the inherent stress of not eating something you really crave, because you don't crave it anymore.
You actually become the person that loves saying no to certain things, that loves choosing nourishing healthy foods, that eats in moderation and loves being active. Diets don't work if you feel deprived and if you can't maintain that habit for life.
So when you know that you're not missing out on anything or depriving yourself of anything, you understand that quality comes over quantity and you know that less is more.
You know you are deserving of being healthy and you treat your body as a temple and with respect. You don't beat yourself up if one day you choose to eat something less healthy. It's ok because you get immediately back on track.
When you go through life making choices that don't come from a deprivation point of view but from a clear choice that you love saying no to what is detrimental to your body and you crave things that are healthy and nourishing to your body and mind, everything changes.
This doesn't mean you can't occasionally eat ice cream if you love it. It just means you won't eat ice cream every day or the full container all at once. There is balance and you listen to your body and you honor your body.
Of course if the goal with hypnosis is not eating ice cream anymore at all, that can be worked on as well.
If any of this sounds like something you would like to achieve, send me an email to support@holistictransformationcenter.com I would love to help you achieve your weight loss goals.
Thank you so much for reading. If you enjoyed this content, drop me a comment and subscribe with the word "WEIGHT" on this link and I will be happy to offer you a free consultation call and answer any further questions you may have.
Take care and remember that your mind is so much more powerful than you think.
Further references:
Comments