Where You Put Your Fat Insights Jan 2007
The process of permanently losing weight is a process of healing. Where your body holds fat can be a key that reveals the issues that cause your body to hold onto, or restore, lost fat.
I know from reactions in my workshops that it can be shocking to realize that food cravings are actually triggered by your body’s desire to restore fat you’ve lost through dieting. It’s as if your body is actively sabotaging your efforts – that would be true! When your subconscious believes that you require the presence of fat for reasons that make sense only to your subconscious, it will perceive your attempts to lose weight as self-destructive, and it will immediately try to correct the problem. Your subconscious is trying to save you from being thin – no wonder it needs reprogramming to support your goals.
Consider saddlebag hips. If you know anything about chakras, you probably realize that your base chakra is about feeling safe, feeling that your life has value, and feeling that life is worth living. Most people have days when they wonder why they bother living, or bother getting out of bed, and those can be particularly aggravated when the circumstances of your life seem overwhelming or frustrating.
Even if you’re a cheerful, positive person, life can seem frustrating at times. If you do not allow yourself to process that frustration emotion, it ends up residing on your hips – literally. Fat is a storage facility for emotion that has not been allowed to flow. If it can’t flow, it can’t go – and you end up carrying it as pounds and bulges.
An obvious question would be ‘if that’s true, why isn’t everyone fat?’ That’s because people will store their blocked emotions in different tissues: blood, bones, joints – wherever it suits them. That depends on genetic imprinting, conditioning, and sometimes on the type of emotion they’re holding.
There are many books describing many paradigms that are theories for how people store certain kinds of emotions in certain kinds of tissues, thus resulting in certain kinds of illness. I’ve studied a bunch of those paradigms, and many of them are useful, but no one obeys all the rules. People have their own reasons for storing their emotions where they do, so even this list I’m providing is probable, but not guaranteed. It may give you some useful insight that helps you recognize the emotion you don’t allow to flow, and go.
Later I’ll give you a tool to help that emotion flow.
A little higher than the hips is that bottom belly roll, below your belly button. It does things for your butt, too. That’s the sacral chakra, which is about being true to yourself. Unless you live in total isolation, there are compromises in your life. No surprise this is a trouble spot. Obviously compromises won’t go away, the key is to recognize how you are actually feeling, and honor the parts of you that don’t care why you have to do it, they just don’t like it. We’re so used to making things work or putting up with, we forget to be honest that we don’t like it so the emotion gets jammed up and forms that spare tire around your hips.
Above your belly button is another favorite roll location, corresponding to the solar plexus chakra. This is a little more complex. The solar plexus is all about roles: mother, father, friend, professional, employee – basically any role-based noun with which you can be described. You will have personal beliefs about how to be successful in fulfilling your roles, whatever they may be. There are also social beliefs and tribal beliefs about how to successfully fulfill those roles, which may not correspond to your beliefs.
For instance, social beliefs might be to teach your kids to obey rules and respect authority figures, while you might prefer that your kids know how to be safe, and to use their own judgment. Your job might have requirements that interfere with your actual ability to do the job, that you’ve learned to work around. You may have friends that are demanding, and you have to manage your interaction with an answering machine. There are many ways we manage our lives, and those are decisions we make every day.
Here’s the problem: if your choices about how to fulfill your roles are in conflict with the rules of the tribe or social expectations, it creates a conflict for your subconscious. That means an internal conflict for you, since your subconscious is big on conforming to expectations. That conflict will show up right around your solar plexus, in a roll.
Upper chest fat could be from two potential sources: heart conflicts or decision conflicts. Heart conflicts can involve loved ones, or desire for love, or feeling that you are not loved the way you’d like to be loved. Heart conflicts also occur when you have trouble making your goals happen. Decision conflicts occur when you have trouble making decisions, or resist making decisions that might make change in your life. This kind of conflict also puffs up your upper arms.
The neck and shoulders get thick when you take on responsibility that is not yours. The simple test for whether an issue is yours is to determine if you have control of the outcome. For example, if you have work to do, it’s up to you to do it. If another person has work, either in your workplace, or your kids’ homework, or elsewhere, it’s their job to do it. Obviously you can’t control whether or not the work gets done. If you worry about stuff where you can’t control that outcome, it will show up at your neck and shoulders.
Everyone has this kind of emotional stuff going on; the problems occur when the emotion isn’t processed and released. There are reasons why that happens that are beyond the scope of this article, but I will provide a tool to help you release the stuff that’s trapped. This also works to help you let the emotion flow when it’s happening. If you notice thoughts like the ones I’ve described here, use this tool to help them flow and go, so you won’t need to store them in fat cells.
Sit quietly and let yourself breathe slowly. Don’t worry if your mind chatters, just focus on your breath going in and out of your body. Imagine you are sitting in front of a fire. This fire is made of white light, and it does not burn. When you are ready, stand in the flames that do not burn, and allow those flames to pass through your tissues. Imagine those flames seeking through you, finding stored emotions, or blocked emotions, and melting it away. You may feel emotion as you do this, and that’s okay. Let it flow and go. Remember, when you let emotion happen it finishes. When you hold onto it, it haunts you. When you feel you have had enough, or have done all you’re going to do for now, step out of the fire. Sit for a few moments and breathe quietly. Then, return your attention to what is around you.
Many times emotion is not allowed to flow because we’re afraid of the effects it will have on our behavior, or how it might look to others. This is a great tool because you can do it privately, away from people who may judge what you feel. It also allows you to release old emotion that you may not have been able to cope with at the time it happened.
Remember, when you release the emotion, you release the fat you need to hold onto the emotion. Now that’s exciting!
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