Starting with the Mind

When deciding to stop fighting with ourselves and start fighting for ourselves by confronting emotional eating or any addictive behavior, it’s critical to start with the mind. Our minds are where our problems start and where the solutions lie.

In my experience food is 5% of the problem. Just 5%! And I believe that 95% of the problem is the mental weight between our ears i.e. our minds. I don’t care if it’s weight loss, drug addiction, gambling--whatever. Our food behavior is just a "reaction" to how we’re living in our heads. So the problem isn’t what’s on our plate. That’s a reaction. It’s what’s in our minds. And the way to obtain and maintain a healthy body weight for life is to address the "creation" of the reaction. It’s not what’s on the plate; it’s the plate in our head. And if we don’t deal with the problem, where it was created, if we just take care of the reaction, then we’re kidding ourselves. It’s just going to come back. We lose the weight and then we gain it back plus more. The cycle continues.

So the work needs to come from the inside out. 95% of the problem is in our minds, then 95% of the work is on the inside, in our minds, and 5% is on the outside, what’s on the plate.

Think of it this way. We have two warring forces inside of us. We all have different ways of describing it. But let’s talk about it in a way that everyone can relate to and understand.

We’re human beings.

It’s that simple.

The first force is human-ness. It’s the critical self. It’s the voice that says, “I’m not good enough. I can’t do anything right. I don’t wear the right clothes. I don’t drive the right car.” And so on. It’s all the things we say when we become disconnected from our being-ness.

Being-ness has a long list of names...the Light within, Energy, Source, Breath, Holy Breath, God, Buddha, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Christ, this list is long. Whatever team we want to be on is the one we choose to be on. It doesn’t matter what we call it. What’s important to know is that when we become disconnected from that “Being-ness” then we start living from the outside in, from our human-ness. The “Human-ness” critical self, ego, addiction, our little terrified selves steps in and we are disconnected from our powerful selves.

I believe we’re trained from an early age to disconnect from ourselves. It’s very easy to teach a child not to trust what they’re feeling, to not trust them selves. So as adults we naturally don’t trust that what we’re feeling is true and real. We trust what others tell us. That’s what we’ve learned. And when we’re tethered to others (or a cute acronym I like to say -- She, He, It, Them -- S.H.I.T.) then they have all the power. But when we connect to our being-ness, to the energy source within, then we have the power of choice back. We have the power to feel. And the power of choice gives us the power to make the changes we need to make. We don’t stay trapped in the outer world, the human-ness. We dwell in the inner being-ness. And when we live in that place then we can connect with the God in others. Again, it doesn’t matter what we call it. It matters that we reconnect from within.

Intense training negates instinct. We begin to live from the outside in. We don’t trust ourselves. Learning to live from our being-ness, from the inside out, requires retraining or better yet, un-training.

If we want to be healed from emotional eating then we must embrace that emotional part of us and not be afraid to go there. It is out emotional guidance out and through to freedom. Don’t judge the emotions; embrace them. They’re nothing more than blinking lights on the highway of life. When we’re uncomfortable, we need to turn back towards that being-ness.

I know that every time I’ve lived from my human-ness, I have failed. I turned myself into a 260-pound woman busting out of size 24, wondering why I wasn’t living the life I wanted? I mean, I did everything they told me to do, every thing I was trained to do. But when I started to look inward and ask, “But where am I? What’s my truth? Who’s having this conversation?” it became easier to make the choices I needed to make.

And it’s been my experience that’s it’s the same for all of us who seek to be free from the weight. Well, the wait’s over. Let’s re-choose and take our power back and live out our heart’s desire!

Next week: Going Within…Making friends with Fear.