Women all around the world have experienced this: they go on a diet, lose some weight and after a while they gain the lost weight back. The harder the diet was, the more frustrating this is.
Yes, the awareness that diets don’t work is rapidly growing among women all around the world. But what is the alternative to the dieting/exercise approach?
That’s a great question and the answer is not obvious…unfortunately. There are many theories out there, and most of them are quick fixes which really don’t fix anything. This is very confusing for a woman who is looking for serious answers.
I personally had to grow into my sixties, work with over 10,000 women worldwide, I had to go through decades of struggling with my weight to detect at least 75 possible root causes of weight gain in women. This may sound like an intimidating number but it’s not nearly as hopeless to find your root causes as you may think. As a matter of fact, understanding your root cause will significantly speed up the weight loss process, and in most cases the result is sustainable, unless there is another root cause in effect.
So let’s first talk about root causes.
There are five levels on which a cause for weight gain can happen:
- Physical pillar: For example. toxic overload, hormonal imbalance, food intolerances, some auto-immune diseases, parasites, stress and many more. Actually, eating too much and a lack of exercise are only two of the 72 causes I have counted so far. So please forget dieting for a moment.
- Your emotions: When there is an emotional imbalance of some sort, this can lead to many behavioral habits. The habits in that case are only the symptom but not the cause. Especially for women, the emotional pillar is a big one when it comes to weight loss. Some of the most common emotional causes are a lack of love, not feeling valued, overwhelm, not being seen, etc.
- Mindset: Although the first two pillars are very important, the probably most important one to look at is the mindset. Especially women have developed a terrible mindset around food, weight and their body. They are often so fixated on what to eat and what to wear on any given day, that they think of their weight all day long. And after a while those thoughts become so automated that they run on autopilot on a more subconscious level. And that is really dangerous because the women are then not even aware of their thinking anymore. Therefore, uprooting a negative mindset is a very important and large part of my work because this is something most women can’t handle by themselves anymore.
- Subconscious Mind: According to psychologists, 80% of the problems are in the subconscious mind, why it is almost impossible for most of the women to understand what the real problem behind their weight issue is. The good news is that 80% of the solution is also on that level, and that’s where my expertise is. The largest part of the work is the digging and the finding. Once we have found the subconscious patterns, it’s easy and fast to transform them. And equally the weight loss process is also fast and relatively effortless. Even transforming past trauma is most of the time a matter of a few weeks or a couple of months.
- Spiritual level: It happens more and more that we can also see some spiritual issues and root causes behind weight problems, for example when there is some karma involved.
Imagine you never having to worry about your weight ever again!
Go and dig deeper.
Go look beneath the surface. The problem is not the stomach but the psychology behind the eating. The problem is not what a person eats but why she eats what she eats. Is she bored? Is she lonely? Is she unfulfilled? Does she feel under-valued? Does she feel abandoned? Is she with the wrong partner or at the wrong job? Has she been abused?
I can tell you that in my 40 years of working with overweight women I have seen and heard hundreds of different stories. Never ever did I recommend any of the over 10,000 participants to do a diet. Develop health eating, yes, but not a weight loss diet. What we do is learn to apply an overall healthy lifestyle just for the sake of a healthy body.
How on earth do you want to fix that with gastric surgery?
How on earth does anybody believe that it’s enough to get you on a diet?
Here are a few examples of women who lost weight simply by transforming their root causes:
- I lost 54 pounds and kept it off for 14 years after I transformed some childhood trauma. I didn’t do any diet and I did not exercise at that time.
- Trudy lost weight after she realized that her root cause was a rape. Once she had transformed that traumatic situation in our coaching, she lost weight without changing her diet or exercise regimen.
- Tina wanted to find the love of her life, and after we have transformed her invisible wall which has repelled the right men before, she not only found the love of her life, she also lost weight although this was never her goal or focus.
- Giselle lost 45 pounds withing 12 weeks without changing her eating habits nor did she exercise. In her case we had to deal with some family problems, she had to change the job and she too found the love of her life at the age of 55. Check out this blog post: https://www.angelabuhri.com/case-study-giselle-from-a-total-ruin-on-all-levels-to-having-it-all/
- As a teenager, Mavies found out that she is gay, and being raised in a catholic family she never learned how to deal with her feelings. So she closed up and did not allow anybody into her life and heart. When I met her, she had just survived two heart attacks and breast cancer, and her face seemed lifeless, like hidden behind a thick layer of fog. After we started working together she learned to love unconditionally regardless of the sex of a person. She has accomplished that within the first month of working with me and is still in the transformation process.
For many women, the extra weight serves as a protective shield. In those cases a coach should never take that away from her through a diet, a pill or a gastric surgery. The very first job of a coach in such a situation is to replace that protective layer with another form of protection and through helping their client to set healthy boundaries so that the weight is no longer needed.
Please, don’t be afraid of looking deeper. It’s so deliberating to break free from these invisible shackles and to find your true, slim you underneath these layers.
Although it requires a little bit more than changing your eating habits, it’s still the easiest, fastest, most sustainable and quickest way to lose your weight. Why? Because it’s the most direct way.
Start melting your personal ‘iceberg’!
Happy slimming :-).
Angela B.
On the very first coaching call she brought up all her problems at once and it was a real challenge to dig through the clutter and to choose the most pressing issue to begin with. She had pretty much all the problems you can have: deep depression; financially broke; unemployed; she had no idea what kind of job she wanted – all she knew was that she no longer wanted to work as a nurse; she had no more energy left and has gained a lot of weight (close to being obese); a daily almost crippling head ache; in a relationship she was deeply unhappy with; having been abused by her father; an extremely dominant mother who thought that Giselle was not capable of accomplishing anything and thus made all the decisions for her and even took over the job of raising her child.
After some job interviews she realized that she no longer wanted a job and put an add in the newspaper offering her service as a caretaker for elderly people. Within only a few days she got two great engagements and now she is her own boss, deciding how much her work is worth and making the price. Now she earns more money than she has ever earned before as a nurse and has not to work any night shifts anymore. 
She began to be more careful about when and how much she would allow her bossy sister and girlfriends into her life and what she would tolerate from them. She learned to say ‘No’. For the first time in her life she could set boundaries and clearly say what is tolerable and what is not. 
Two weeks ago she met a lovely man who is 10 years younger than Giselle – the kind of man she always wanted and was certain he would not exist. They both fell in love with each other and both feel that the other one is just the “one”, the partner they have always been looking for and dreamed of but never found before. Very quickly they realized that everything fits. Beside the fastly growing love, they have many common interests, he treats her with the respect she deserves, and they have the best sex life ever. They both feel that they have arrived. 
In Giselle’s case, I did nothing else but helping her to transform her personal root causes which had led to weight gain. We never did anything regarding her weight at all. She always loved cooking and she is still enjoying it and has no food restrictions except those foods she is allergic to. What we did do for the sake of her health is eliminating a few bad habits. 
When you adhere to the laws of the universe, you will reap positive things in ALL aspects of your life. It doesn’t matter whether you want to lose weight, find a better paid job, find a new love, gain better health or achieve any goal, the way to approach these goals is always the same. Just follow the laws of nature and you will manifest all these things into your life because when you do that, literally your whole life is going to improve. You can’t cut your being and your life in slices and pieces either. On the other hand you can not go on a diet and by doing so find a better job, find a new love, improve your health and lose weight all at the same time and with that same tactic. The reason is because diets are not only not based on the laws of nature, they are flat out a violation of the laws of your body. Our body reacts conversely to diets than we want and consequently we ‘reap’ the yo-yo effect.
Sоmе оf these habits are simply about kеерing our body funсtiоning рrореrlу but a lоt оf habits have to dо with the way wе do things, move, behave, react to people, situations and circumstances; the way we think and perceive our environment. Unlеѕѕ we livе in a ѕоlitаrу wоrld with no intеrасtiоn with thе rеѕt оf thе wоrld оr thе people thеrеin, wе will аlwауѕ bе соnfrоntеd with ѕituаtiоnѕ where wе must mаkе сhоiсеѕ, and these choices often happen within a split second by bypassing our conscious mind. Sоmе are simple, ѕоmе are more соmрlеx like whаt tо еаt оr what not tо еаt, when to exercise and when to relax. Many оf them require nо thought though since our brain is already pre-programmed tо асt in a helpful wау in our body’s terms. We hаvе done something wеll or inappropriately in thе past and our brain hаѕ received fееdbасk (it wеnt wеll, do thаt аgаin; аltеrnаtivеlу thаt wаѕ rubbish, do ѕоmеthing differently). Cоnѕеԛuеntlу the unconscious part of our brain iѕ full of wауѕ of dеаling with situations that wе thоughtlеѕѕlу еmрlоу to make our lives easier.
You just can’t conquer habit with willpower. The only way to optimally dealing with habit is by understanding the way our subconscious mind works and using it’s own way of forming new habits. By the way, strong willpower is a habit as well. Your ways of aproaching weight loss, your ways of pursuing a goal, your mindset, your motivation (or the lack of it), these are all habits as well and can – need to – be trained.
And it gets much worse.
Since I have talked about the diet approach many times, I want to make this short. Dieting is against the body’s own nature and therefore can’t work long term. Going on a diet can give you some short term results but the weight will come back after a while. Depending on how many diets you have been trying or will choose to try, the constant up and down usually goes on for years and the person will eventually come to a point where she will resignate and give up all weight loss attempts.
Exercise alone has never been a fast tactic. Although exercise should always be part of a sensible weight loss strategy, it’s far from being fast nor maintainable. You can jog for an hour every day and 365 days and you may not even lose a pound. Believe me, I did it and that was the results. Zero weight loss.
Like with any diet, at the beginning you may lose a lot of weight very quickly. But after a while you will gain it back because you didn’t take your body’s nature into consideration. You can’t fool your body.
In my humble opinion this is the most stupid way of losing weight, and any doctor who offers that kind of surgeries should be put in jail for a long time. Gastric surgery is slow murder.
Hypnoses is a great method and I personally use several kinds of hypnoses in my coaching and therapy practice.
Although a healthy lifestyle ABSOLUTELY has to be part of a maintainable weight loss strategy, by itself it’s not a fast method and very often not even a lasting solution. The healthy lifestyle approach looks at weight issues exclusively from the physical standpoint and that’s never enough to make losing weight to last. Inner causes will not be transformed. 
Changing your diet may bring you a step ahead.
“You could eat the best foods every day, but if you don’t exercise, you are not going to be healthy. Or you could eat the best food, and you could exercise an hour a day, but if your thoughts are always negative, if you are always harboring thoughts of doubt, worry, anger, guilt, jealousy, helplessness and hopelessness, there is no way you’re ever going to be vibrantly healthy.” –Dr. Susan Smith Jones
You may moan about the fact that losing weight for good is a little bit more complex than just dieting. But as soon as you realize how much more effective a weight loss strategy is than dieting, you will begin to love it. It’s not complicated and – again – it can happen by taking baby steps and simple changes. Besides, what is fast about yo-yoing? 
