5 Mindset Shifts around Food, Weight & Body Image: Part 4 of 5
Shifting from external wisdom to internal wisdom (#4 of 5)
You may not realize the many ways you hand off tasks and problems you’d rather not fully confront and deal with.
Consider the 10-pound weight gain that’s crept up these last few years. It seems easier to just pick a diet and follow it perfectly so you don’t have to really process the underlying pain.
Think about the excuse-making as to why you’re not at the gym today, when this very morning you promised yourself you would work out. It seems easier to just outsource some of that.
You’d sooner trust a co-worker’s random new diet consisting of whiffing lemon zest and taking a lick of some broccoli once a day, (she swears by it!), then listen to your own body.
The raw food guru is on youtube again - sucking you into another $^%@# purchase; a cleanse with a spiralizer thrown in as a bonus this time. Sounds awful but it got 100,000 likes on Facebook, so it must be good, right?
What all of these promises leave out is that by outsourcing your symptoms (procrastination, self-sabotage, weight gain, etc.), you’re relieving yourself (and robbing yourself) of a more deeper understanding about WHY the symptoms started in the first place, the ones that now drive you crazy.
Inquiry and mindful self-awareness give us back our critical thinking. Admit it, you’re influenced by social media reviews online or how many stars on Amazon that your favorite appliance got. You compare it on consumer reports - you make clear and rational decisions when it comes to spending. But, where is the inquiry and cost-benefit-analysis when it comes to the deeper issues you could be solving, rendering the need to bandage the symptoms moot?
When you can stop and shift into internal or intrinsic (gut) wisdom, do you sometimes make different decisions?
So, if a diet you’re on is telling you that you can’t eat after 4pm and you’re starving after 4:05 pm, you’ve already failed.
No, maybe you stick with it, Maybe you shift into primal willpower mode but you and I both know that this is fleeting.
So if you white-knuckle it and stay with it for a while, even if you’re at the point of “hangryfulness”. (Yes, I just made that up. It's a combination of hangry and resentfulness), you know it’s not a long-term solution. And deep down you know that something is not wrong with you but wrong with the protocol that goes against your own body’s wisdom and body cues. What about not forcing your appetite into a neat little box and instead listening to it, getting to know it and asking what it needs?
Would you be afraid of what it might have to say about you? Something you just deeply don’t want to confront?
THIS.
This is the very second when you need to stay with it and go deeper.
You also know other things.
You know you what hunger feels like. You know what trying to lasso it in can do to you - physically, emotionally, cellularly.
You know it makes your cravings greater, and makes you more ravenous for it just because of the restriction.
Why would you mindlessly outsource this opportunity to connect with yourself, befriend yourself and then begin to trust YOURSELF for those answers and solutions? When did it become OK to give our complete faith over to someone else to hold while you follow the “rules.”
Let's start facing our own old wounds. We all have them. What makes you truly courageous is to witness and process them without fear and without judgement.
Just free.
Stop outsourcing your symptoms for fear of facing the deeper challenges you have, be it chronic stress, loneliness, shame, not “enoughness”, etc etc… The very fact that you keep those in, hidden away is contributing to you having the same outcomes that you have always had before. It’s like pulling out only half a weed and knowing that while you’ll be OK for now, eventually that same weed will grow back.
No guru, book, protocol or method knows your body and your circumstances better than you. It’s time to start shifting into an internal wisdom mindset and leave the 5-star ratings for hotels, gadgets and restaurants.
Mindset work is a key foundation in my Eating Empowerment Method. Learn more about this Empowered Eating Essential and 3 others by watching my free online class,
The Empowered Eating Method:
End Food Obsession, Eat Mindfully & Find your "Feel Like Myself Again" weight.
In this 60-minute Masterclass you’ll learn:
+ the one piece of information that diet experts will not tell you about weight loss
+ how to eat mindfully and intuitively to stop obsessing and worrying about food all the time
+ the secrets to regulating your hunger hormones to know instinctively when you're full and stop eating when you're satisfied.
So be sure to nab a space, stock up on your fave snacks and have a plentiful supply of coffee! It’s going to be epic!
And stay tuned for the FINAL mindset shift around your body image…... coming next week.