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Lose Weight by Clearing Emotional
Clutter
You may have seen the television program called Clean Sweep, designed
to help people conquer the clutter and reclaim their space to reclaim
their life. This same concept can be applied to weight loss. When you
clean sweep your emotional clutter, you can reclaim your body and
reclaim your life.
Have you ever wondered why it has been so difficult to lose weight or
to maintain your weight after losing weight? Why is it that whatever
method is chosen for weight loss, the results usually are temporary at
best? Results are so elusive because, although weight loss and
maintenance is about calories eaten in relation to calories burned, it
is also about much more than that.
Your beliefs about yourself, food, and your relationship to food, as
well as your feelings past and present, all play a role in your ability
to lose weight or maintain weight loss. Most weight loss methods
attempt to put a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. The Band-Aid may
temporarily make things look better, but it does little to heal the
wound and restore health.
Over the years you have collected internal closets full of emotional
clutter. You have sets of beliefs that may have served you at one time,
but now hinder your efforts. Stored garbage that others, well meaning
or not, have given you. There may be erroneous beliefs about yourself,
your body, or your abilities. There may be a collection of fears and
doubts. There may be boxes of unresolved feelings.
All of this emotional clutter hampers your ability to focus on what you
want. When you are distracted by unwanted feelings and beliefs, you
cannot see your way through to achieving your goal.
You may be eating to comfort yourself, to protect yourself, or to fill
a void inside. It is not a matter of lack of will power; it is a matter
of too much clutter to see clearly.
Releasing emotional clutter can help with weight loss. Clearing out the
emotional baggage frees you to deal with the present. You will no
longer have to struggle against yourself.
To clean sweep your emotional clutter there are some steps you need to
take:
1. Assess your internal situation
2. Sort and Decide
a. Give back what doesn’t
belong to you
b. Keep what is working
c. Toss out what is harming you
3. Plan the ideal you
4. Implement changes
5. Organize your emotional world to keep
it clean
The first step may require a bit of time and reflection. You are going
to empty your emotional closets, so to speak. You may find it helpful
to write out your beliefs and feelings about weight, food, your body
and whatever you think may be involved. Once you have them down on
paper, it is time to sort and decide. Since your beliefs represent
emotionally charged past decisions, it is possible for you to choose to
discard those that do not really belong to you or that are harmful to
you.
The next step is to clearly plan and visualize the
“you” that you want to be. You will only get what
you believe is possible. Once you are clear about what it is that you
want, you can begin moving in that direction.
Finally, organize your emotional world to keep it clean. This means
resolving feelings as they come up. It also means not accepting guilt
or negative feelings offered to you by others. It means focusing on
positive feelings and beliefs about your self.
Just as clean sweeping your home will help you reclaim your space;
clean sweeping your emotions will help you reclaim your body. Doing
both will help you reclaim your life.
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