Do you struggle with your weight?
Weight is an issue packed with reference: personal, familial, ancestral, sexual and cultural. There are few topics that have so many powerful correspondences attached to them. Some people want to lose weight, others want to put it on, many would love to take a bit of weight from somewhere on their body and place it somewhere else.
My daughter and I were speechless when in a the lingerie department of a department store recently we came across a several pairs of pants with a built-in padded bum! Coming from my family genetics such a padded accoutrement had never crossed my mind!
Too much or too little weight can be related to serious health issues such as malnutrition, diabetes and heart disease. Bulimia and anorexia compromise the quality of life for thousands of women every year, and increasingly men. According to Anorexia and Bulimia Care, “The UK has the highest rate of eating disorders in Europe and also of self-harm. Exact figures are hard to know. Those quoted in studies etc are only the tip of the iceberg and one must differentiate between figures for those receiving treatment as opposed to those suffering.
Recent figures suggest that 1 in100 women has a clinically diagnosed eating disorder (approx 269,000 females in England and Wales alone) and over half have a ‘serious issue with food’ that wouldn’t be clinically diagnosed but causes them significant trouble. Estimates vary, but between 11 and 13 million people in this country have psychological issues or problems connected with food that often leaves them in effect on a permanent diet. A quarter of adults admit they feel guilty after eating, and a quarter of adults also say that they think they would be happier if they were thinner (when in fact they are not overweight). Six out of ten women say they cannot stand the way they look and only one in 25 is totally happy with their body. One in six women and one in 10 men regularly skip meals in an attempt to control their weight. On the other end of the weight see-saw is obesity, which is suggested to affect more than 50% of people in the UK.
And of course, this continues to make weight a hot topic. Most high street popular magazines devote thousands of pages a year telling you something about your weight, and whatever it is, it’s unlikely to be self-empowering. Or it purports to be self-empowering within the article and then every second page has advertisements selling a slimmer, sexier you - slimming pills, slimming drinks, diet fads, exercise crazes!
So, to write a blog on the fullness of weight issues is outside the scope of this blog! But the good news is that energy approaches can be powerful with all aspects of weight issues, from reconnecting individual self-esteem, to changing negative eating patterns, to rebalancing your body’s ability to digest and assimilate the nutrients in food. There is also a lot that you can do yourself to ensure that your relationship with food and nutrition becomes one of balance, health and vitality. Because, you eat every day! There is no getting away from your relationship with food, so the priority becomes to make it a relationship that is healthy and nourishing.
Here are five ways to be in good relationship with your weight:
1. Help your metabolism by stretching regularly.
Energetically this keeps the Spleen meridian flowing well so that you can metabolise easily. Below are some exercises for metabolism and to keep stagnant energy moving. This will help prevent toxins settling into the system.
2. Help your fight/flight/freeze response settle down.
When we are stressed we tend to fall out of relationship with our eating and it also greatly affects our hormones. This can often lead us to get the messages in our body to eat more. The exercise below will help to keep the fight/flight/freeze response calm, which can be key to healthy eating.
3. Plan ahead.
Figure out what food you will be cooking/eating for the next two or three days and buy accordingly. That way, when you get to having to prepare your food you know what the plan is and are ready to get into action. There is nothing more disheartening than getting to the early evening and then wondering what on earth you are going to eat. That is when it is so easy to choose easy, convenient (and therefore often poor nourishment) choices.
4. Share your food with friends!
Research shows us that eating socially improves our health and our well-being. It doesn’t have to be fancy or cordon bleu, just gather a friend or two and get the health benefits of eating together.
With love
Prune
Discover more easy, powerful tools for achieving and maintaining an ideal weight in my 90 minute online class:
Optimise your size! Achieve your ideal weight by understanding your energy.