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.
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, there have some fat-burning supplements hit the market with big claims and promises. Because people often ask me what I think about these products, I tried several for myself. Besides, I knew what I had to look for and how to protect my health. In this article I want to share with you my experiences and conclusions.
What would the alternative be? When you lose weight through leading a healthy lifestyle, your body burns a little bit fat, deals with the released acid and toxins small enough so that your system can really deal with without being jeopardized. So it’s burning fat… excreting the released toxins…burning fat…excreting the released toxins…burning fat, etc. On the other hand, if you use a fat-burning supplement, the process is burning fat…burning fat…burning fat…burning fat, and liver and kidneys have no chance to deal with all these newly released toxins. Your system is not prepared to deal with such a sudden load of acid and toxins at once. The consequences are a damage of some organs (liver damage, kidney damage, skin cancer, etc.) and eventually early death. Although then you would not have to worry about your weight anymore, I assume that this is not an option for you.
By transforming the root causes, they also automatically improve their overall health, their social life, their love and sex life, their professional success, their finances, and their relationships. Many of my former clients have even deepened their spiritual life. These are all very positive and extremely powerful ‘side effects’ you can’t get from a diet, a supplement or a gastric surgery.
Emotional eating is an issue many overweight women are struggling with. The problem is that they don’t understand the real cause behind emotional eating and thus try to tame the beast with willpower.
When I asked her what the reason for our obesity epidemic in the Western world might be despite of the fact that we have so much food to choose from, she said, “There is definitely something wrong in the system and there are a lot of factors that contribute to that. I think the whole world is feeling so much stress. People who work in corporate jobs are functioning with so much pressure and so much uncertainty. People are so overwhelmed with their lives; and overcommitted. There are so many demands and responsibilities and less support, and less social interaction; which is one of the keys to happiness. Stress is really equivalent to what smoking was in the 50’s. It’s killing us. One of our favorite responses is to overeat and I think that people just don’t make time for themselves and they just don’t pay attention. There is a lot of unconscious eating going on until something happens and then you say: Okay, I’ve got to do something about it.”
Stress causes emotion, tension, fatigue and a lot more…all reasons that are driving us to the refrigerator. A lot of times you don’t even realize what’s happening there and why you are looking for food.
How do you feel about yourself?
The true definition of self-worth is rather intrinsic and internal than external.
People with a low self-worth break down when they lose the job, go broke, lose friends, lose a spouse, lose their status, grow old or experience any kind of loss. They feel less worthy because they measure their self-worth on external things, situations and on others.
If you have experienced lack of love, conditional love, setbacks, and restrictions earlier in your life, then it’s certainly easier for you to stay in that state of low self-worth. But that’s not the solution. You don’t need others to tell you what a great person you are. You don’t need others to love you so that you can love yourself. Simply start by treating yourself well. Take care of your health. Eat healthy. Exercise. Do something good for yourself. Pamper yourself from time to time. Pat your shoulders each time you have accomplished something or made another person happy. Be generous with your smiles when meeting others. Be of service. Make this world a better place no matter how humble the beginnings.
Then they go on the next fad diet, take expensive weight loss products or get a gastric surgery done which create tremendous health problems and make matters worse in any regard. And at the end they gain that quickly lost weight back because it was not a sustainable method. Yes, they did have quick success…but at what cost? 
If you have thought so far that you’re just a victim of your ancestors’ DNA, this is now good news for you. It is worth to eat healthy, it is worth to sleep enough, it is worth to exercise regularly, it does matter who our friends are. Therefore, our health, weight, and pretty much our entire life is very much in our own hands.
Since everything has two sides, good habits can also turn good genes on and bad genes off. Positive habits lead to a never-ending positive chain reaction leading to reduced stress, better health, financial freedom, longevity, happiness, good relationships, success, etc.
It is my hope that you begin to realize how powerful habit change can be, how much easier weight loss can become and how much better your overall life can be.
