Being overweight is a complex issue with underlying reasons that involve much more than our physical body, burning calories, exercising or positive thinking.
This is the main reason why diets do not work in the long term. Diets are standard protocols that we create or follow. It has been demonstrated that people who diet are more prompt to put weight in the medium and long term; very often it become and addictive pattern, overweight and obese people usually try one after another diet during their lives, feeling bad about themselves when noticing that after they stop the diet, their bodies recover again the lost weigh very often adding some extra.
Diets do not work in a sustainable way and instead they trigger different hormones, sleeping unbalances, anxiety and permanent hunger for the body no getting the needed nutrition. Working with will power to control eating, triggers craving symptoms and makes us eat without having the consciousness to choose (out of desperation basically). When this happens, we not only put more weight but also feel more stress, and our self-esteem tend to diminish as we so incline and trained to blame ourselves for the results.
Through my own personal experience of being overweight, and seeing clients struggling with obesity and weight issues, I am very aware that the reason to be overweight is not that we are lazy or lack of discipline or will power. I have known persons going on diets with lots of restriction and self-control, exercising hard and with consistency and suffering the yoyo dieting effects with no permanent results. So..... there are more much more elements playing in the body.
Factors like poor self-Image, Emotional baggage and traumas play an important role in keeping a healthy body weight.
Some important factors that contribute to being overweight are :
1. Digestive/Metabolic Problems: Gut issues, Leaking gut, lack of friendly bacteria in the body. When the guts are not healthy and balanced enough, processing the food as well as detoxifying become less efficient.
2. Respiratory Apnoea: It affects your sleeping patterns and therefore the function of hormones and metabolism.
3. Emotional Stress: This affects not only our metabolism but also our behaviour around food. Food very often is linked to pleasure and comfort. IN trying to compensate emotional stress very often we overeat.
4 . Psychological traumas, mental stress: In search for feelings of safety, belonging which have been stolen from our lives from past traumatic events, we recur to food to cover up.
5. Sleeping problems: Insomnia, Sometimes related to Apnoea, not always. Insomnia alters our main metabolic hormone which is the insulin causing unbalance in our hunger trigger mechanisms.
6. Inflammation: Which is specially due to food and environmental toxins. Being the physical body very intelligent, it creates the mechanism of fat as an option to store toxins in the body, and in that way the these are not spread through the whole system.
There is need of a holistic approach conducive to balance our body weight, an approach where the physiological, the physical and the emotional aspects are considered and understood, an approach conducive to us taking power and pride of our unique body.
Losing weight can be a great opportunity, a path to learn from our body and mind, a way to start or recover a positive self-image and a positive relationship with thyself, making peace with food, making peace with our bones and flesh, finding the harmony that is inside this precious gift that is our physical expression.

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