Lose Fat, Lose Emotion – What Are You Afraid To Lose? Insights Oct 2007

Usually when one thinks of fat, it’s worrying if the lifetime on the hips after a moment on the lips is a real curse.  Most people don’t wonder what emotion is stored in the fat that keeps it from leaving, or keeps it coming back.         

We’ve been taught constantly that fat is a consequence of eating too much.  In fact, eating is a symptom of what causes fat.  When the subconscious mind has a reaction to an emotional situation, a flood of chemistry occurs in your body.  This flood includes cortisol, which creates a physical requirement for food – so you eat to complete the physical program of the chemical reaction.  This type of eating has nothing to do with a requirement for fuel, though you may feel as if you are starving, or you may feel need for food without hunger.  You can’t stop the eating unless you stop the reaction.         

This kind of physical imperative is like sweat – you can’t stop it with willpower.  Diets can work temporarily because the emotional states that trigger eating can be overcome – for a while – by the emotional stress of the diet.  The diet stress can only be sustained for a limited amount of time, then the latent emotion will resume, and the fat comes back.          

Clearly, the key to permanent weight loss is in the emotion.  If you realize that fat is a storage place for obsolete emotion – emotion that is from the past, not the present – then you can start thinking about why you might store such emotion.        

Sometimes emotion is stored as armor against future hurt.  If you remember how something hurt you, then you can be sure you won’t let it happen again.  But what about wisdom?  After all, you learned something from your experience, and that learning is stored in memory and cognitive awareness.  Do you really need the emotion to remember what happened, and to remember you don’t want to repeat it?  Perhaps not.      

When there are unresolved issues that were emotionally intense, often the emotion is stored in holding as if waiting for the resolution that may never come.  If you feel responsible for the lack of resolution in any way, such as not being able to face the person, or talk about the situation, or having a judgment about your part in the situation, that guilt is like a huge iron anchor holding the emotion in place – and holding the fat in place.

Sometimes emotion is stored as a tribute.  Grief may be stored in an attempt to prove how much you cared for someone who is no longer in your life.  

Emotion does not obey will.  In fact, it occurs in a different brain location than willpower, so they don’t even talk to each other.  How can you possibly release stored emotion if it is tangled up with caring for people, guilt about uncomfortable situations in your past, and hurt? 

Fortunately, there are techniques to help you.  Any technique for releasing emotion requires the same starting point:  telling the truth to yourself.  Consider each of the situations listed:  being hurt, feeling guilty about how something turned out, and grief.  Unless you can admit you have these situations, you can’t think about releasing the fat storage system.  Releasing emotion is a physical process like showering away sweat.  It does not remove a memory.  It may change how you feel about that memory and give you some resolution. 

That’s another challenge: when guilt is involved, it’s hard to believe you deserve a resolution, and a release.  This is the fundamental question:  does being fat make it better?  Will it make you feel better about what happened, or miss the person less, or change how you were hurt? 

Sometimes people hold onto their fat as punishment for their guilt.  Sometimes people hold onto their fat as penance for letting themselves be hurt.  Sometimes it’s a tribute to the lost person.  What is the emotional purpose of your fat?  When you can consider the possibility that holding onto your fat doesn’t fix the past, or protect you, or honor someone, you are ready to learn how to release it for good.  Unlike eating, which is driven by a physical chemical state, this is your choice.

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