Losing Weight and Solving Emotional Eating for Women

First, your struggle is natural, it doesn't mean that something is wrong with you.
The body gets accustomed to a set weight and creates a hormonal balance that supports that weight. In effect, it resists letting that weight go by slowing down your metabolism and things like that.
At the same time, we have those cravings what many of you mentioned already. Cravings can come as an emotional reaction (that is the mind tries to relieve nervous tension) or as a hormonal reaction (eg. insulin made your blood sugar drop) or a combination.
Once you start to understand what is happening you start to get back control.
Weight loss doesn't have to be a struggle.

What you can do:

1. Find out what are those emotions that trigger you the most and bring those cravings. Anxiety and depression are amongst the leading causes, but it can be shame, guilt, fear and so on. Whenever you feel that you need to eat (and it is not real hunger), ask yourself: "What do I feel? What am I hungry for?"
You will see the pattern quite fast. Seeing is knowing. Knowing is power.

2. Self-love, self-acceptance, letting go of past issues and emotional healing will make wonders to you.

3. Hormonal balance and resetting the set weight. Just a few tweaks in your diet or a well-planned fasting can do the trick. You just need to know more about where your body is now, and what it needs to let go of its previous programming.

4. Learn to control your relaxation. Everyone can relax deeply within a few seconds, it is just a skill. With that, you switch your nervous system to the parasympathetic mode and that's when fat burning starts. Moreover, it feels wonderful and energizing.

You can easily be the next success story out there.
Remember: "Good things come to those who believe, better things come to those who are patient, and the best things come to those who don't give up."

How do you know that things change?

We often don't realize that we are changing.

Our subconscious needs confirmation and reinforcement that you are going in the right direction.

That's why it is crucial to develop an awareness of change.

These can be very small changes or huge steps. Be grateful, be supportive.

Assess your emotions

Self-image

Self-confidence

Self-love

Sense of safety - anxiety

Ability to say no and protecting your boundaries

After this section repeat this assessment and outline the things that need more attention and work.

Don't forget to download the guided meditation exercise attached to this lesson.
Listen to it for two weeks in a row, every day before going to sleep.

Here I share an actual hypnosis session that I did with Michaela.

In this session we uncovered her feeling of not being good enough that was holding her back from feeling free and accomplishing her dreams.

You can also download a meditation audio that will help you deal with the feeling.

Comfort eating.

We comfort ourselves with food when we are anxious, stressed, or lonely. We binge when we break up and experience loss and we eat when we are bored.

It seems we have countless reasons to eat.

What do these reasons have in common?

They are all experienced as stress.

When our nervous system is under a critical amount of stress the brain will look for a solution to reduce the nervous tension.

Eating is one of its favorite solutions.

Not just that eating in itself triggers the secretion of "feel good" hormones known as endorphins ?‍♀??‍♀??‍♀?

but it is pleasant and ??????

brings up feelings of comfort, safety, and love coming from our early infancy, where we were fed whenever we cried and felt stressed. ???

We condition our brain to act as an automatic feeding machine:

whenever we feel bad, it instantly switches to the eating mode. It becomes a habit, a reflex and we lose our control over this stress-relief mechanism.

In fact, it takes over control and we suddenly find that our body gains weight like crazy and we feel worse than ever.

Why is that?

Because we never really looked into our hunger.

Apart from a variety of physical reasons (like sugar addiction or insulin resistance), there are emotional reasons.

The HUNGER-MONSTER is our basic emotional needs starved, distorted and furious.

?‍♀?‍♀?‍♀

What are those?

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The need for:

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safety

acceptance

intimacy

connection

expansion, challenge

purpose

status

privacy

control etc.

How can we find out who is OUR hunger-monster?

1. AWARENESS

What is the feeling behind our emotional eating?

What do you need to comfort yourself for?

TIP: Talk with your hunger.

Become the voice of your hunger and answer the following questions:

What are you really hungry for?

What feelings do you suppress by eating?

What are you ignoring?

What feeling do you hope to get by eating?

What do you really need?

How can you give yourself what you really need?

2. ACCEPTANCE

Accept the feelings that come up, and

Accept your emotional needs even if you have ideas that contradict them.

For example, some people have the idea that being "spiritual" means they shouldn't have anger or hatred because those are nasty feelings.

This way they suppress their natural emotional responses, so instead of being able to work with them, transforming them or using them, they get out of control.

3. FIND OUT if comfort eating has other benefits for you, as well.

You can out yourself questions like this:

"What would I lose if I would /no longer binge / lose weight/ eat less?"

It can be a loss of social connection with the colleagues if you used to go to lunch together or disapproval of a family member who loves to cook.

Find out how do you threaten the status-quo if you decide to change.

4. Make the DECISION TO CHANGE.

"It would be nice..."

"I'll try..." or

"I'd like to..." is not enough.

These few simple tips can change your life if you are committed

Let's see what we are going to learn in this section.

Being single is hard.

Not just because you have to cope with life alone, but because you are made to feel that you are:

?

- not good enough
- not being wanted
- not important, not being seen, being constantly on the sideline
- not being a WHOLE
- not having a purpose
- not being normal etc.

People saying that time is ticking, you should have a family are not helping.

You might wonder: "What's wrong with me?"

In this session, I help you to gain clarity and I'll show you a simple but powerful exercise to make you feel better, because:

❤❤❤

IT'S OKAY TO BE SINGLE.
IT'S OKAY TO BE YOU.

❤❤❤

These ideas and exercises will help you to challenge the limiting beliefs about yourself.

Your emotional eating, if you struggle with that, comes from the stress relief mechanism your mind uses to reduce the tension between you, your current situation and the expectations you subconsciously feel you need to meet.

In the next session, we will talk about how you can attract the right relationship at the right time when you will be ready.

How you can attract the right relationship at the right time when you are ready?.

Let me share an inspiring story with you to show how the mind affects our weight.

Claire (42) had an abortion 24 years ago. She was a student at a college, and deeply madly in love. When she got pregnant the boy panicked and left her. He was not ready and didn't have a job or a penny. Her family convinced Claire to abort the child. She did what she was told but it took a toll on her.

She went to therapy and it seemed she moved on. Years later she had a baby girl, everything seemed fine, but, whenever she got close to a man and stayed with him for about a year, she started to gain weight like crazy. Her relationships never lasted more than 1 year and a few months.

By the age of 42, she was more than 250 lbs. She had extreme mood swings, obsessive behavior and depressive periods. She had been dieting for the last 20 years, losing some weight and gaining it back immediately and she felt she would throw up whenever she weighed herself. She developed skin and gut problems.

When she started to resolve her past issues on a deeper level (although she thought she had gotten over her abortion, she just couldn't go back to those memories) she realized: she got pregnant one year after meeting that guy. Her body remembered that and every time she met someone, after a year the body "got pregnant" that is it started to grow and it would resist letting the "baby" go. Weight and the big belly coming with it was a substitute to the baby that she couldn't let go deep in her heart. So she carried it with her.

She did a great job working through her issues and healing those wounds. She forgave herself and she bonded with the unborn child in a different, more healthy way.

She said: "Now my weight feels so alien to me. It used to be a part of me, now it is like dead matter that has nothing to do with my body."

She started to lose weight automatically and quite drastically, 16 lbs per month, so she had to slow it down a bit because she just pushed herself out of balance too much. She learned to control her weight loss and keep it in balance and now she's about to step into "onederland."

Isn't it amazing how the mind and body work? That story moved me very much.

A short inspiring story.

I spoke to a single woman the other day. She was very intellectual, smart, and controlled. She said she was a disaster when it came to men.

It seemed that she was rejected even before she could properly get to know them.

"Let's just stay friends," was the phrase that she kept hearing all the time.

"What's wrong with me?" she asked, "Men just seem to run scared when they see me."

In hypnosis, she connected to her feelings, and she suddenly realized, "I hate the woman in me."

"She's vulnerable! She's stupid, needy, and emotional. She's flawed and weak. I just can't stand her. And whenever there is a guy around, she wakes up and takes over control and scares them off with her childish neediness. She makes me feel ashamed and ridiculous. I wish I could get rid of her."

Then she realized that her dream was actually a loving relationship and a family, which would not be possible without that woman in her.

"That's tough," she said, "I'm in a trap. I can't live with that woman in me, but I don't want to give up my dream of a family either. So what do I do?"

Then, she came up with a brilliant idea; she would change the woman in her.
She created in her mind a smart, calm, and strong woman.

She was delighted with her work, and it seemed everything was perfect.

As she started to imagine herself dating men, she suddenly gasped.

"Men still reject me. But now I know why. I created a woman who is basically a man. There's nothing feminine left in her. I created her like that because I was afraid of being feminine. I tried to eliminate that aspect of myself because I felt I couldn't control her.
I will never be able to connect with a man unless I connect with the woman in me.
I never realized that by rejecting the woman, I dismissed my future partners and my future family."

It took her some time to understand the roots of her fears to be a woman and the limiting ideas that she had about her feminine traits.

When I asked what helped her the most, she said, "Building up a loving relationship with myself first. It was never about the relationship with men, it was always about the relationship with myself."

To give your subconscious a positive pattern, become aware of the change in your understanding of your emotional eating.