Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (13 page)

• irregular menstrual cycles

• dry skin, hair, and nails

• hair loss or muscle tone loss

• mouth sores

• stomach pain or bloating, gastrointestinal problems such as acid reflux and gas

• dehydration

• tiredness

• erosion of tooth enamel from vomiting

• sore throat, inflamed salivary glands

If you feel obsessed about dieting, eating, weight, and your body, or you have symptoms of an eating disorder, you may have one of these life-threatening conditions. Seek help.
Listen to the people who care about you if they express concerns.
They can help you.

Compulsive eating is a maladaptive way of addressing a very real underlying problem of empathy overload. If you find yourself obsessing over food or experiencing depression and anxiety, you might have a nutritional deficit you don't know about that, once addressed, will balance your body's biochemistry and change your mood and thoughts (more on this later in the book—for now, pay attention to what are your noisy foods).

HANDLING EMOTIONS

Speaking your truth also means letting your emotions surface and acknowledging them. This is difficult for people who feel too much, because we become so overwhelmed by emotion that we can't sort out what we're feeling. It's as if our emotions were one big ball of pain. Some of my workshop participants realized they were avoiding the 4:00
P
.
M
. bath because they knew that, once they stepped into the tub, the emotions would flow and they'd feel scared and ungrounded.

Here's the secret about emotions: they don't last. When you actually let them surface and don't try to justify them by creating all sorts of thoughts that perpetuate them, they peter out fairly quickly. It doesn't feel that way when they come up suddenly and they're intense—it seems that you'll feel like crap until the end of eternity! However, if you make sure you are in a safe place, alone, when you get in touch with your feelings, they will rise and fall naturally in a matter of minutes. Often, our emotions surface at very inconvenient times, and we're so afraid of being out of control that we learn to stifle them—and do, every time.

Of course, you don't want to burst into tears when you're talking to your boss, or cut loose your anger when you're talking to someone you care about, but once you're alone, do you stop to let your feelings surface? Probably not. The moment has passed and you move on, but your emotions remain stuck inside you. Then, if you stay busy enough, and repress your strong emotions every time you feel them start to bubble up, you can maintain that false sense of control for quite some time, maybe even years. Maybe you always run late because you fear that if you have a few minutes' downtime and awful memories or feelings might emerge. Avoiding emotions doesn't make them go away, though. It just means you end up spending enormous amounts of energy trying to keep a lid on them.

When you learn to let your emotions rise and fall, in a natural rhythm, you'll find that they aren't as strong and difficult to manage when they come up unexpectedly in conversations with others or situations where you'd be uncomfortable expressing them.

Emotions will rise when you're in the bath and as you write in your daily journal. Let them, and just observe them. Breathe deeply while you're experiencing them. Ask yourself,
What is this emotion?
Don't think about
why
you're feeling it until the emotion has passed. That way, you won't accidentally intensify it through negative self-talk.

Another way to bring up the emotions you need to feel and let go of is using
cinematherapy
. Choose movies to watch that you know will make you cry or get you in touch with your anger. Try to watch them alone so you feel safer when your emotions surface. Afterward, take out your journal and write about what you felt and why. Finally, ask yourself,
Did I see myself or others in those characters and those situations?
In fact, if you see a movie just for fun but it really upsets or unsettles you, and you don't know why, take the time to get your journal out and write about what you just experienced.

I think it's an especially good idea to watch movies that will make you cry but have uplifting endings that leave you with a sense of hope, joy, and optimism. For example, you might watch
The Joy Luck Club, Water for Elephants, It's a Wonderful Life,
or
Ghost.
Keep the tissue box handy and don't let your partner, your kids, or anyone else interfere with your good cry!

What if the emotions you're feeling actually belong to someone else or to the great ether—what if they're something you picked up from the electromagnetic field we all share? Cinematherapy and the IN-Vizion exercises are effective ways to let go of them. Then, to help ground yourself when you're feeling empathy overload, you can try the following two exercises as well: The Slick Blue Shield and Them's Grounding Words.

THE SLICK BLUE SHIELD

Close your eyes and breathe deeply and consciously. Let your thoughts float away like clouds in the sky. Allow yourself to feel your emotions without thinking about them or justifying them.

Now imagine that you are surrounded by an egg-shaped, brilliant blue-neon bubble. The surface is oily. All the emotions and thoughts that come at you from outside of you hit the surface and slide down like raindrops dripping down a window. You are safe inside this bubble. Even if you are feeling strong emotions, they are going to dissipate soon. Continue to breathe.

Observe yourself as a sense of calm and safety fills you.

Open your eyes when you are ready.

THEM'S GROUNDING WORDS

One of the easiest ways to ground yourself when you feel caught up in a ball of confusing emotions and are outside of your body is to say your name, the date, and your location, and name the objects around you: the chair, the kitchen table, the phone, the sink, and so on. Actually speak the words aloud. When you do this, you will feel yourself coming back into your body and bringing your rational mind back online. My certified Weight Release Energetix coaches work with clients using a process called Counting, which on its own is like the above description or is used as a component of the IN-Vizion Process when someone gets stuck inside his or her own imagery. It's highly effective and actually a lot of fun to do.

I have heard from many of my course participants that getting out in nature, even for just a short walk, helps them to ground. Also, you might find that if you push together or pull apart your joints, an action that provides something called
proprioceptive input
, and get deep pressure against your skin somewhere, it can help you to feel present in your body again. Think walking, jumping, pushing or pulling something, calisthenics, hugs, and massages. This is called “heavy work” by occupational therapists who work with people who have sensory-processing issues (they process physical sensations atypically). These therapists often suggest that people who have sensory issues do heavy work throughout the day to prevent that overstimulated, overwhelmed feeling. In fact, many people who feel too much also experience sensations more intensely, and they may have sensory-processing differences (more on this later in the book in the section on movement in Chapter 7).

THE TRUTH ABOUT SELF-TALK

If you don't believe in the power of positive affirmations and self-talk, guess what? Even the U.S. Navy SEALS have discovered the effectiveness of actively replacing negative self-talk with positive affirmations. When we change our internal chatter to have a positive quality, our primitive, limbic brain, which is responsible for setting off a fear response of fight-or-flight, begins to calm down. The power of positive thinking is even stronger if we're also using a visualization or doing something physical to quiet our system. In moments of stress, there's actually more blood flow to your limbic brain, and less blood flow to your prefrontal cortex where you can think clearly, make good decisions, and check your impulses. Saying to yourself
I'm okay. I can handle this
really does help you think clearly and feel more balanced.

Remember: words create emotions, and emotions have a biochemical reality in our bodies. When you replace your negative interior dialogue with positive thoughts, the cells in your body respond. With practice (and, yes, you have to practice!), you can replace that endless disempowering chatter with a positive string of beliefs—and you will believe
I am beautiful, I love my body
, and
I deeply and completely love and accept myself
. These become your truths. Make sure your self-talk nurtures and supports you.

What sort of things are you telling yourself regularly that you're not mindful of? What's the quality of your self-talk? Pay attention. Are you harshly judging yourself as fat, crazy, or inadequate? Create affirmations that are in the present tense, and make sure they're positive, not negative; for instance,
I love my body
not
I don't hate my body
. If you find yourself resisting the affirmation, reword it. You have to believe what you're saying and feel positive emotions for affirmations to work.

Using positive affirmations is part of the EFT ritual you'll be using daily in your salt baths, although, as I pointed out, you construct these particular affirmations by combining the difficult truth about what's going on with you (“Even though I ate a huge piece of pie … ”) with a positive statement (“I deeply and completely love and accept myself”). It is very important to speak your truth! In your journal, write down some affirmations and memorize them—and find times throughout the day to repeat them silently or aloud. The EFT only takes a minute or two to do, so you can start creating a habit of doing it a few times a day. In this way, you'll retrain your inner dialogue track.

That said, it's okay to laugh at yourself and use humor to bring yourself back into a positive state. One woman I know responds to frustrating and disappointing situations by saying, “Well, now, this is
exactly
what I wanted.” It's such a huge lie that she can't help laughing. Everyone has a different sense of humor. If there's a funny mantra that will make you smile, or even laugh out loud, and will shift you out of anger, frustration, or sadness, use it!

As you learn to speak your truth, you're going to feel more powerful and much safer. You'll realize that the earth isn't going to shift beneath you and the sky isn't going to come crashing down just because you are finally being honest with yourself. The new techniques you're using will bolster your ability to speak fearlessly about where you are in your life and in your process of learning to manage your porous boundaries.

PROCESSING IT ALL

When you begin to sort out your emotions and recognize the many different threads that together are the fabric of your life, you start to recognize your truth. The process of uncovering and speaking your truth takes time. Be good to yourself, and be patient. You may need to devote more than a week to doing the journaling exercises in this chapter so as to deeply explore what your story and your truth are. There's no one standing over you saying you must complete this step in exactly two weeks. Only you can judge how much time you need before you're emotionally ready to move on to Step Two.

All processes take time. In fact, think about processed foods: They're meant to be time savers, right? Crack an egg, beat it, and add it with some oil to a cake mix and you're cooking from scratch—well, not quite. Some clever businessperson figured out many years ago that you could fool homemakers into thinking they were baking it, not faking it, by leaving a few ingredients out of the cake mix. Do you do that in your own life? Do you take shortcuts in your process of working through your emotions? When you do, you don't get the results you want.

Because you are taking on others' emotions, and so many of them, you might require more time to process your feelings than other people do. You may need lots of down time with a journal, in nature, or meditating to get in touch with that tangle of emotions and process them. Life is so fast-paced these days that it's hard to take a breath before you are hit with a new piece of information to digest, or a new emotional experience to make sense of.

In this weight-loss program, there are no shortcuts. Speaking your truth ends the detour of denial and saves you a lot of time and energy. You get straight to the issues you need to deal with and avoid the detours that take you far off your path. This is difficult work. If you decide you need more than two weeks to work through Step One, be sure to do your daily journaling exercises during week one, writing your story, then follow through with the daily baths, the simple eating plan, morning and evening journaling, and journaling whenever you're moved to do so or you've done one of the exercises and want to process what you experienced.

When you are ready, and no sooner, move on to Step Two.