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.
Did you ever hear the saying that once you can ride a bicycle you’ll never forget how to do it? Even if you would not use it for 20 years and then one day decide that you want to take the bicycle instead of the car, you would still do it the right way without having to think about. 
Improving the quality of sleep and getting enough sleep (7.5 to 8 hours every night) is another such power habit that creates a domino effect. You lose weight easier and faster, you have more stamina during the day, you are more focused and concentrated, and you have more energy to go out and so some exercise.
Our body always follows the rules of nature and is most of the time smarter than the person sitting inside of the body. But once we begin to understand the nature of our bodies, how it works, what it needs to accomplish, and how we can rather support our body instead of trying to force something onto it, we become a team and changes will be much easier and more effective. Then you will be the smart leader and your brain and body will become your enthusiastic partners supporting you in your weight loss goals.
I can’t count how many examples of negative self-talk I have heard from women in my 38 years of being a weight loss coach. Many of the things women tell themselves made me even cry. And these were all wonderful, lovely and loveable women. Yet they all found the worst names for themselves….worse names than they would ever call a dog, let alone somebody else.
These negative self-talks are so common among overweight women, yet they are far from being helpful. That way we can’t build a good relationship with our body and promote lasting weight loss. In order to lose extra weight for good, you need to be in a good relationship with your body to get its full collaboration. How would you like if somebody called you the worst names and then expected you to help them do something for them? Your healthy reaction would be to respond, “Since you can’t be friendly to me, why would I waste any time and energy helping you?” 
To that Laura says, “Well that’s another one of those components. It’s like life is happening now, it’s not a dress-rehearsal, and why would we want to start liking and loving ourselves once the weight is off? I mean, I understand intellectually why people go there. Because they think in their minds, ‘I am not going to love myself until after I get thin or after I stop eating so much.’ But the truth is that you are who you are now, not later. Now. So the love has to be and the self-acceptance has to begin now. And from that place you will stop the war.”
Recently I stumbled on the following story which I find very inspirational. When I read it, I instantly had to think of you. So I decided to share that story with you today. 
For years I am trying to convince my readers and clients to practice appreciation toward their body, because appreciation can really heal many wounds, especially the wounds of the soul. I do get how hard it is to appreciate a body which is overweight or even obese, a body you don’t like. But sometimes it just takes a small step beyond the ordinary, a step into the unknown, an uncomfortable step, even a step that might seem weird at the beginning to make new and desired experiences and see better results. 
Write a list of everything you can be thankful for to your body and everything you like about it. Then keep writing that list for seven days minimum. Every morning after waking up and every evening before going to sleep you thank your body for everything it is doing for you. Try to be serious. Remember, you have plenty of reasons to be genuinely thankful for to your body. 
According to scientists, the worst of all bad habits – besides smoking – is a sedentary lifestyle. Frankly, I have no doubt that sitting all day is very unhealthy. You don’t have to be a physician to understand what sitting all day can do to our body. But what are the alternatives when you have an office job? There are a few ways you can do about that:
Although eating a good amount of protein is important for weight loss, many people eat far too much meat. The biggest problem is the growth hormone IGF-1 farmers use to raise their animals for bigger profits. That substance can promote the growth of cancer cells.
Unfortunately it gets worse regarding cooking. The by far worst and most health hazard habit is using microwave ovens. And it doesn’t matter whether you just defrost some frozen food or heat the food in the oven. First of all, although the manufacturers will tell you, that their ovens don’t leak, they do. Secondly, as soon as you switch on the oven, the electromagnetic radiation goes up dramatically – in other words, they radiate a lot. Thirdly, microwaves alter the DNA in your food and thus your body does not recognize food as such but as toxins. Within only three minutes of eating something microwaved, your blood tests positive for cancer. I know scientists who call microwave ovens “The kiss of death”.
Using bad oils to cook is another health threat. For several years now health experts are warning from using the wrong oils. Most of the time these are cheap ones. When heated, they release compounds that are found in cigarette smoke, such as aldehydes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
Be it smoking or one of these 6 habits, they all contribute to weight gain…some more and some less. Eliminating these habits ASAP will certainly make it easier to lose weight once you will have chosen a sensible weight loss strategy.
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Later we form habits by making daily poor decisions, mostly in an attempt to stay in our comfort zone and out of laziness. Most of the time these are the poor habits…those habits, which contribute to poor health and weight gain.
Therefore, the bad habit of being overweight is not only in the eating, drinking and exercising, but also in the thinking, behaving, and feeling. For example, one of my former participants used to enter the gate to her yard side-wise even long after she had lost all her excess weight with WW. That, of course, created a new reality of gaining weight back in order to fit into that old habit of entering the gate side-wise. Only once she realized how she had been creating that reality of being obese through her behavior and by changing that she began to get lasting results. 
