Are You Scared to be In Shape?

The past couple days have been dredging up some unpleasant concepts and emotions. I know this is good, because it will allow me to resolve them, but it doesn’t feel that great.

As a miracle-minded person would expect, I’ve found inspiring forms of media that touch on the exact areas I’m struggling with. I’ve been listening to the World Tapping Summit audio files – two are available each day for 24 hours. Yesterday I listened to the ones about – you guessed it – weight loss, body image and self-confidence. The day before was about self-sabotage. All of these topics helped to explore my hidden fears that have been hiding in the shadows of my life.

To continue to be authentic, I’ll share some of those fears with you. I’ve been somewhat aware of this before, but am only now really dealing with the fact that part of me is scared to lose weight and look good because of the changes and new struggles that will appear in my life. While I’m carrying a little extra weight, I don’t really have to worry about being used for my looks. I can be looked at as a human being. No one is going to simply see me as an object to view or use. I think deep down I fear that if I lose weight and get fit, suddenly I’ll have to worry about why people like me. At that point, I can’t be sure if they like me for me or if they like me because of how I look. I won’t be filtering out the appearance-obsessed guys anymore. I will have entered, willingly or not, the competition of “who looks better?” I’m on the sidelines now, but if I get thrown into the game, I will risk “failing”.

Honestly, those thoughts had crossed my mind before, but nothing really sank in enough to flush out the fear. Anything related to that just stood in line and picked up its uniform at the “I don’t want to be sexy; Looks aren’t what matters; Girls are stupid ditzy sluts; I’m not playing that game” stand. I have all sorts of new calibrations to do on my thought process to rid myself of the fear and replace it with true self-acceptance and confidence no matter what I look like. And regardless, I know I have good intuition, so I don’t need to worry about getting used. I act like it will be so sneaky I won’t be able to notice. Oh, I will notice! See? I should have some faith in myself! My exes like to point out that “nothing gets past this girl,” so really, even if that fear was valid in the first place, I would still be fine.

A lot of what I’m reading and hearing right now supports my own experience as far as you can diet and exercise all you want, but if you are stressed out and miserable and have fears of success, you will not lose weight. Been there! I heard more examples on the audio session the other day, as well. If you are that stressed out, you are releasing cortisol and not absorbing nutrients properly, so you will not lose weight. Everyone’s body works differently, so it is important to tune in and figure out what is happening in your own body. All my life I kept hearing, “It’s all about portion size! Stop eating as much! Cut what you are eating in half!” I’d get so frustrated when people who wouldn’t take 2 seconds to analyze my own situation would give me that advice, because I HARDLY EAT ANYTHING. Cutting my portion size would be STARVING MYSELF. They’d swear it was all about food, and to prove that it wasn’t, I documented everything I ate and how many calories in addition to how many I was burning. Notice what I said there – to PROVE to everyone. I was looking for approval. I was worried about people assuming things about me. So on top of being stressed and miserable, I was additionally stressed about what people thought of my failure to lose weight. What a nasty, nasty hole to be stuck in.

As I mentioned in a previous post, that story has a happy ending. I found my dance studio, started to be happy, and the pounds started dropping off. I wasn't exercising as much as before, and I was eating fine but not ridiculously well as before. It really had to do with the stress and misery, as far as I can tell. I still have some more to go, though.

I still feel that frustration when people talk about portion size. I eat healthy, and if anything, I still don’t eat enough. I finally got myself in the habit of eating breakfast, which is great – I know that is so important. Starving yourself in the morning just makes your body think it is starving the rest of the day. It took some work to eat in the mornings – I didn’t like to do that before. Have just a little something, at least. A banana, a yogurt – something.

Okay I am no doctor or nutritionist so I’ll stop with the health advice there. The bottom line is, love your body as it is, take care of the soul inside, and the body will follow. One of the audio sessions said something resembling, “When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of the mind within it, the shape of the body will change.” That weight might represent something in your life. It might be protecting you from something. Protecting you from standing out? Protecting you from a risk of failure? Protecting you from attention? Sometimes it is as simple as dealing with the thoughts in your head in order to resolve the more outwardly noticeable problems in your life.