stressed out

Jon Kabat-Zinn Ph. D., the man you essentially created mindfulness stress reduction teaches Google about how to be mindful. This video is an excellent, simple instruction on how to use the power of mindfulness. If you are not familiar with mindfulness, use this video to be your introduction. Enjoy.

As one goes up the other goes down. Stress can not only kill us, it also can kill our sex lives. Survival is our first priority; continuing our species is down the list. Stress as we know it is a maladapted survival response that takes our energy and focus away from sex.

Sex and survival are mutually exclusive

If a tiger is chasing you, you are not relaxed – you are running for your life. It is not until you escape and come down from the fight-or-flight response that you begin to feel your sexual urges. Relaxation is the setup for sexual arousal.

Our bodies often follow our heads. If we are mentally stiff, we will be physically stiff. If a man’s head is focused on solving the crisis at work, his little head is unable to receive the attention it needs to feel safe to come out and play. Treating your sexual performance as you might treat your professional or athletic performance will not work. It would be like expecting someone to feel and express his sadness about a deep loss while he is lifting a new level in weights.

Sex is a mirror

An old friend and teacher used to tell me that the body does not lie. In some way, your body will express physically what it is experiencing. The expression may not be outward, but it does occur.

Sex may start a mental experience, yet the act becomes very physical. For your body to be fully engaged it must be fully available to experience all aspects of sex. If some part of your life is not in sync, such as your relationship with your partner, your body will manifest that tension. That body/mind tension will eventually show up in your sex with your partner.

Why do you think affairs are so much fun? You get to experience sex without experiencing the stress that exists in your on going relationship.

Mediocre sex

If you want better sex – create better communication. Your sex life, more than any other aspect of your life, is an expression of how well you and your partner communicate. The communication that might need to occur may not be about your relationship. You may only need to share with her your frustration about work and your fear about not performing well. Those little truths can set your sex life free.

A recent British study suggests that half of their citizen’s sex life suffer because of stress or medical issues.

I have worked with many couples who are so embarrassed about intimate health complaints that it has caused a huge breakdown in communication and put serious pressure on the relationship. Talking to a partner or a professional candidly about the issue is not easy, but it may save a great deal of emotional strain. Denise Knowles, a relationship counsellor with Relate

How to shift it

Chill out – do some stress reduction. Review some of the other posts on this blog. Teach your body/mind not go into the stress response as your default. Getting good bodywork is a quick way to facilitate the process of removing old stress and learning to relax.

Communicate more of your thoughts and feelings. Begin speaking those feelings you have not spoken. In the above study, three out of five Brits said they struggled to speak about personal issues. Start taking risk, just like you did when you and your partner began dating. Some people get bent out of shape when it comes to talking about feelings.. Going back to the beginning often rekindles the spark that was once there.

Keep others out of the bedroom Don’t bring unfinished business into the bedroom. Believing that having sex will solve the problem is a lie. Yes, it will often take the edge off and can create a feeling of intimacy for a period of time.Unfortunately, the issue and its charge is there to come up another time. Do what you need to deal with the problem or release the tension  before you enter the bedroom.

Build intimacy

Support intimacy Great sex is predicated on great intimacy. Sharing difficult feelings quickly builds trust and intimacy. Having a weekly ritual where time is scheduled  just to talk has transformed relationships.

Both of you can have your own stress reduction practice. She may have yoga; you could have your weekly massage. Additionally, the two of you can come up with something you do together, like going to a hot springs.

With sharing your feelings, share what you want emotionally and sexually. Sharing our wants certainly sounds simple, but we all know know difficult it can be. Telling your partner what you enjoy sexually is a risk for you. Yet it will support your partner in pleasing you, which empowers her. As she gives you what you want, you will need to let go and receive, another challenge for us Type As.

Play. All this talk of sharing emotions may sound intense. Create some fun around sex. Set up an experience where the two of you get to play as if your were kids exploring a new game. Bringing a child-like innocence into the bedroom lightens the whole experience, and can reduce the stress and increase the pleasure.

Go slow. Being a Type A aboutsex does not work. Go back to being the kid who played simply because that is what he wanted to do. There was no end goal, he was just having fun – that was the goal.

If you were to agree on discussing old feelings, agree to set the bar low. Your goal should be to build skills and have fun, not to resolve ten years of limited communication. It is like training for a marathon – start your daily mileage low. Going for too much too soon  will create injuries and you’ll never run the marathon.

Breathe. The more you breathe, the more relaxed you will be and the more your body will be able to experience the pleasures of sex.

Sex as a stress reducer

The sexual arousal curve and orgasm mimics the arousal curve of fight or flight. Unlike many  stressful events, when you have an orgasm you complete that curve, allowing for the recovery phase to occur next. The more you can relax going into asexual experience, the more we can allow yourself to fully engage – the more intense the orgasm and the release.

The act of intimacy, as much as the sex, reduces stress. Another British study: 

Volunteers who had had penetrative intercourse were found to be the least stressed, and their blood pressure returned to normal faster than those who had engaged in other forms of sexual activity….

Having intimate sex with a partner gives you something nothing else can give you.

Replace stress with great sex. Allow yourself the pleasure of learning or deepening your skills of being a relaxed lover.

How to heal rage

“People with this problem [IED] have an insufficient ’stop’ response,” says neurophysiologist Royce Lee, M.D. The power of built-up emotions override any conscious control. Creating more coping behaviors is not the answer. Learning anger management will not do it. Counting to 10, over-exercising, using drugs and alcohol only buries the anger further and can deny the seriousness of your rage. You need to heal the rage – the PTSD of anger.

You must develop methods of going to the cause of the problem. The first step is to get sober about your anger and rage. Your explosions of anger can be diffused before they even begin to occur. Releasing the old stress and trauma is what will transform an automatic, repeating behavior into an appropriate response.

Averting rage

Draining the lake of anger is hard work. It takes determination to release the original stress or trauma. It doesn’t happen in the moment of reaction (screaming at the sales clerk). It happens when you are not in reaction. You do it in the pre-rage moments – those times when you just feel a small irritation.

In the past, you would have ignored those little thoughts and feelings until they built up to a temper tantrum. You start by setting the intent to first be aware of those “petit mal” anger episodes. Awareness is a skill we were never taught. If we were taught anything, it was non-awareness, like when we were told to grin and bear it.

Use your body to learn awareness, specifically your breath. As you focus on what your body does under stress, or how you hold your breath all the time, you will begin to catch emotions sooner and sooner. When anger starts to creep up as a held breath or clenched jaw, you have a chance to express your anger in the moment before it builds into rage.

Rage lake-draining

Stating how you feel about what a person just said or did stops the escalation of anger to rage while breaking an old pattern of repressing those “stupid emotions.” With each expression of pre-rage anger a little of the lake of anger is drained out. You begin to build a new skill-set of behaviors that fit the situation.

To increase the draining of the rage lake you can go out in nature and let it go. This is best done under the supervision of someone who has experience with rage and can monitor you. I say this because if you really get into truly expressing your anger/rage, the levies may burst and you can feel out of control. That said – going out in the desert or some forest where you can scream and throw rocks is hugely healing. These settings maybe your only safe place to lose it.

As the anger that became rage drains off, you may discover old grief or fear. Let them go also. From 30 years of doing this for myself and helping others through the process, I have seen some unexpected effects. As the old, embedded emotions start to release, the old traumas begin to complete themselves. Your body and your emotions may experience feelings you never had before. The unraveling allows for the old emotions and their physical analogues to let go. Having support can make the process much easier and quicker.

On-going support

One excellent resource for men is an international non-profit called the ManKind Project. They offer weekend experiential trainings throughout the world. Even better than their powerful trainings is their network of men’s groups. These groups usually meet once a week. They are not the standard support group, where the focus is around a problem that often becomes self-perpetuating. The ManKind Project weekly groups focus on assisting men to be fully successful. Supporting a man through draining his rage lake is what they are about.

To be continued….

When you are driving down the road and someone cuts you off – do you salute the person with your finger as you shout your feelings to them? If you do, you may be one of the 10 million men in the United States who are so angry that, according to a 2006 Harvard study, they have their own illness - intermittent explosive disorder, or IED. Rage is now an official disease. 

This article is included in three posts. 

How anger becomes rage

Anger is a healthy emotion, just as fear and sadness are. Anger becomes unhealthy when it stops being a natural response to violation or possible violation. Instinctually, we have anger as a means to vend off threats to our boundaries. 

You might observe your dog growl at your cat when it looks like she will be eating some of his food. As a father, you protect your kids. If a stranger comes up to your daughter and starts to take her away – your anger will kick in. 

Over the course of anyone’s life, there are many situations where anger is experienced but not expressed. As a child, anger is often not allowed. As an adult, there are many social situations where you learned to do the right thing and kept your mouth shut. The accumulation of unexpressed feelings impacts your physical body as stored stress, much like throwing your unwanted junk down in the basement. 

A minor irritant occurs and then suddenly you are raging. Your head is possibly saying this shouldn’t be a big deal, yet you are screaming at the sales clerk because a bag ripped. The repressed anger from past events starts to release some of its charge as you rage. For a few moments, you feel better, as if you just had a cigarette. Then the shame comes from expressing unjustified anger. 

Post traumatic stress of anger

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is now a common term used to explain how incomplete stressful experiences allow stress to accumulate, creating an aftereffect. The soldier who is under constant stress of never knowing when the next mortar round will come in never experiences the completion of the trauma cycle. We are hardwired to experience stress or trauma, then have the time and space to release that stress by literally shaking it off. When a soldier doesn’t get the chance to shake off the stress, the stress builds. He returns home to safety, but his mind and body are still back in the war. 

When anger becomes its own PTSD, it becomes rage. The soldier jumps when a car backfires; you chew out the sales clerk when the bag rips. The stimulus does not warrant the reaction. 

To be continued….

I am often amazed at how much stress I hold concerning others and their actions. Those mental conversations I have with myself about how I was wronged take a lot of time and energy. 

Several years ago, after feeling betrayed by a close friend, I asked myself – what would it take for me to forgive this man? I came up with two answers: The first had to do with myself – I needed to let go. I needed to forgive myself for how I betrayed myself by not listening to my own senses and knowing. The second centered on what my friend would have to do for me to forgive him in such a way where I could trust him once again. 

This experience got me thinking about how you or I could get the person we dishonored to deeply forgive us, and forgive us so that we regain his or her lost trust and respect. I realized it would mean more than saying I am sorry; it would involve behavior change. 

To prove to the other person you are sincere, you are worthy of not only forgiveness, but also of a relationship based on trust – I came up with five actions. The chronological order generally follows the order I have laid out. 

Admission 

You need to take ownership of what you did or didn’t do, and it needs to be specific. For example, just saying, “I was late,” is not as powerful as saying, “I was late and I made you late and appear irresponsible with your friends.” When an admission is authentic, your friend will know it. As you speak your admission, some place in you will feel vulnerable or weak. The person receiving it will sense the risk you are taking and begin to open up. 

Remorse 

Here is where you want to express remorse as the “perpetrator.” This is more than saying sorry. It’s about going beyond explaining as a justification. Here you want to express what dark part of you was in charge, or what your hidden agenda was, if there was one. 

After you admit you were late and then say you were late because you could not tell your boss that you had another engagement, your honesty may begin to create some forgiveness. If you goes on to say that it was possible to dishonor the friendship because you were jealous of your friend’s success, then you are getting to the real truth. As more of the truth comes out, so does the depth of  forgiveness and your ability to re-establish trust. 

Amends 

Here you make it right. This atonement is as much for him as it is for you; it deepens the forgiveness. When you say you will take him to dinner, and you are saying it because that is what you need to do to feel right, your friend will feel the authenticity. 

If you go further, perhaps to say you will speak to others about how your friend is not greedy, this builds more trust. By admitting you were bad-mouthing him behind his back, because you were jealous of his success, and then by resolving to stop, you move the relationship forward. 

Invariably there is a past cause to a current situation. One act doesn’t usually upset someone unless in some way the other person was holding onto something from the past. When you can connect the past dots, much of the charge towards the current situation dissipates. Your friend goes from feeling strange or nuts for thinking unfavorable thoughts to thinking, to “yes – I was not nuts, something was off.” 

Changing Behavior 

This is where he knows you changed. Even the people who lie to themselves can’t continue to lie when you track their behaviors. It isn’t about a couple of new behaviors; it is about consistent change. Most of us can sustain a false change for a short period, but if it’s not real, the change will not last. Real change means a long-term change in behavior. 

You no longer make promises to your friend or others that you can’t keep. You are on time. He can count on you being on time. 

Forgiveness 

Now forgiveness can really happen. This also where you and your friend experience the benefits of the change, where he can count on you to be a true friend. I have seen friendships deepen at this stage. It is as if a new  relationship is created, catalyzing a spontaneous forgiveness from the other four occurring. This forgiveness nurtures respect. 

When you can risk speaking what is true and back it up with changed behavior, you become more present with everyone. You are more likely to say and do what is right in the moment. The Buddhists have an expression – there is only one right action, and it is right for everyone. 

Approaching a situation with this tenacity is not easy. Once done, however, you will experience the benefits far outweigh the stress of holding the feelings. You will get more energy from walking your talk. You will be more likely in the future to make the right decision at the front end. The workout of cleaning up a past action will make you strong, able to stand in your power. 

My suggestion is to give yourself space to develop this level of mastery. The first few times may be a little rough. It will become easier, deeper, and certainly less stressful  as you begin to do what is right.

Every living cell and organisms has boundaries. The cell has a cell membrane or cell wall. The cougar has his territory that he defends. If you were to study forestry, one of the first phenomena you learn about is how trees fight to maintain their boundary for sunlight.

We respond biologically and psychologically when our boundaries become threatened, as if our survival is threatened. Our conscious mind might be able to make a distinction that a situation is not threatening, but our reptilian brain can’t. It is this part of our brain that coordinates our survival responses of fight or flight.

Violating boundaries

If someone violates your personal space with a knife – this response is triggered. You may get angry and fight the attacker or you might find yourself scared and run. If you are to survive, you will do something.

If you don’t have boundaries, you are vulnerable to life’s threatening events and the subtle psychological violations. The knowledge that you have these boundaries and are able to maintain them when needed gives you the confidence of being protected. This is not much different than the cougar who knows no one will enter his territory.

Having these boundaries sends a message out to others that says “don’t mess with me.” So they don’t mess with you. This creates a positive loop of reinforcing your boundaries. Years ago, I read about a study that with criminals using body language to determine who to mug. Just like the predator choosing the weak elk of the herd, the criminal would choose the person who walked in a weak or scared manner. The person who owned his or her space was the last to be mugged.

How to get your boundaries back

First, you must begin experiencing what is occurring in uncomfortable situations. Our tendency is to shut off discomfort. This discomfort is the fight or flight response telling you something needs to be done. Connecting back up to your reptilian brain allows you to become more sensitive, more aware of what is about to occur. Awareness gives you more options sooner.

Once aware, do something. Break out of the “freeze” state. Usually it will mean speaking up, specifically – speak your feelings. Even if all you say is “something doesn’t feel right,” you have drawn a line in the sand that represents your boundary. If you can say, what you don’t want and what you want, better yet. Now you have filled that space with your needs.

The power of no

Realizing we are first animals and have animal responses will allow you to begin to train yourself as if you are training a dog. I know this may sound degrading, but any good trainer will say precise negative and positive reinforcement will speed your learning. When you take the risk to state what you will or won’t do, focus on the courage you mustered to speak up. Focus on how others stepped back. Breathe.

Say “no.” It is that simple and that hard. “No” is the most powerful word in our lexicon. Yet it may be the most difficult word to say. Saying “no” stops the process when you start to feel the possibility of violation. You are telling the person to stop.

The person who has the power of no often controls the situation. I would agree with the statement that your “yes’s” are more powerful when they are backed with “no’s.” If someone knows you will never say no, your “yes” is just a perfunctory approval.

Recently I was in a meeting for local sewer districts with local and state politicians. The moderator was speaking as if the twenty of us would agree to keep the proceedings secret. Being the big mouth that I can be; I spoke up and said, “No, that does not work for me. I view this meeting as a public meeting, therefore I can not honor your request.” You could see and feel how shocked everyone in the room was. The moderator backslid to a point that I found agreeable. I then agreed to proceed with the meeting.

What was shocking to everyone was not me wanting to keep the meeting open; it was that I spoke up. I allowed myself to feel the discomfort of the moderator’s statement and then I allowed myself to say “no.” It was what I had to do to feel comfortable. Yes, the act of saying “no” was stressful, but the result was much stronger.

Putting it at risk

Having others honor your boundaries can put relationships at risk. I know when I started to hold my space some didn’t like it. A few of them are no longer my friends. As I went through my grief process of losing those friendships, I realized these were not really friendships.

When others do honor your boundaries – thank them. It will reinforce your skill of holding your space and their respect of it.

Developing the skill of setting boundaries will take some work and may produce moments of stress. Just like getting in shape, once you develop the skill it starts to be automatic; you will experience much less stress in your life. We are all good at denying and coping with not having our boundaries honored. Becoming sober to how we let others violate our space is the first step to having boundaries. Ultimately, you will find yourself in less stressful situations and more able to resolve them satisfactory.

Oftentimes we don’t speak about personal boundaries. It is as if having them is a bad thing. I believe we need them. They are fundamental to our survival. We are hardwired to survive and to protect ourselves. Setting boundaries is one way we do it.

A quick way to release stress is to cry. While this technique may not be appropriate in all situations, allowing yourself to cry can immediately release a lot built-up stress

These emotional tears contain toxins, the toxins of stress. In Native American traditions, the Medicine Wheel describes the Four Worlds or elements. Some lineages put the emotions and water together in the south of the wheel. Thunder Strikes, a Native American elder/shaman, speaks about giving with our emotions. There is no better way to give these emotions away than to allow our waters, our tears to carry them away. Expressing emotion allows the body, which sits in the west of the Medicine Wheel, to not hold them as tension.

The act of crying, even in private, is an act of courage and surrender. When we cry, we allow ourselves to feel and express what we held. The courage comes from letting go of our mind controlling to allow our emotions to release. When we admit to our feelings by permitting our bodies to express them we are catching up to ourselves, we are getting congruent with our felt sense. In a mindfulness sense, we are now fully present in the moment.

When we let our tears flow in public, we step beyond the social restraints to model courage and emotional honesty. Initially, we do experience more stress at the thought of being vulnerable. Whenever I have done it, I always initially felt more stress. Once I allowed the tears, my stress released. From working with thousands of clients, students and group members over the years, I can say in every case, these people were glad they released their tears and their stress.

Watching TV can increase stress. Observing stressful events, such as the 9-11 attacks, only increases the stress we already have.

A study published in Psychological Science, conducted by Alan Hilfer, chief psychologist at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City, showed that for every hour a person watched TV about the 9-11 attacks, their stress level increased by 6%.

This study also investigated the test subjects’ dreams. After 9-11, their dreams were twice as likely to contain threatening themes.

I believe that we can become unconsciously addicted to the “stress” or the stimulation of watching stressful events on TV. It does not matter if the events are fictional or news stories, the effects are the same – they both produce a stress response in our bodies. Stressful TV experiences add to our overall level of our chronic stress.

Watching T.V. initially provides a feeling of relief. Our minds are distracted from our current concerns. Our bodies arouse the stress response. Like so many of our previous stressful events, the arousal does not eventually lead to the release of stress. When the excitement dissipates, a small portion of the arousal or tension remains, which causes more chronic stress to build. The pattern of stimulation, excitement, stress, and then tension, is reinforced as we accumulate more tension.

In order to lower the stress our bodies feel, we need to expose ourselves to less stressful events. Watching less-stressful TV may be the one of the easiest ways to create a more relaxed lifestyle. Over the years, I have seen clients and students become more sensitive to TV once they release their chronic stress and develop their awareness. They feel their bodies tense up when watching stressful events on TV – they decide right then to choose more relaxing TV programs.

Spokesman Review, Spokane, Washington’s newspaper did an article on www.stressedout.org. Frank Sennett reports how I get stressed out.

Let’s get honest. Are you really just a little overweight? By 2030, according to a Baylor University study, 100 percent of U.S. citizens will be obese by current standards. For many, being overweigh is stressful. For others, stress is a significant cause of extra weight. It’s stress that holds the key to shifting this paradox.

To understand the importance stress plays, we need to understand that it’s a survival response that’s always activated. To survive, we either do fight or flight, so we need quick energy – sugar. We crave survival food under continuing stress. Simultaneously, our bodies are shutting down other functions such as digestion. Complex adjustment of body functions makes us crave foods that we should not eat.

Then there is the culture we live in, which shows anorexic models, and movie stars that have lipo-sucked every once of unwanted fat. If that’s not enough there is Photoshop morphing of humans into super humans. These unreal images create huge stress, particularly for our young girls, to the extent that they are experiencing puberty earlier than ever and getting plastic surgery to be perfect. These images become subliminal. Then we are consciously blind – we don’t realize we are seeing them. They linger in our unconscious, drive us to spend our money on merchandise to be beautiful, and stress out about our imperfections.

Whatever we may stress about will impact our bodies. Often the influence will effect the disposition of our fat. A new study will be based on the phenomenon that stress creates a pot belly. Because of the hormone released under stress, pot bellied people develop a more dangerous fat, a visceral fat that lies between the organs.

Fat is a symptom of stress. We can continue to treat the symptom as we have for the last 50 years or we can shift to treating the cause. There are external factors, such as the media, which we can’t change. More powerful and more immediate are the internal factors, our response to stress. After 30 years of working with clients and students who often sought my help for addressing the cause of their weight, I can say often reducing stress will take weight off and create a body that you will inherently accept.

Here are 8 approaches to losing weight through reducing stress. Some of what I discuss may not be comfortable to read. My goal is to assist you in escaping your stress, not making you feel good.

1. Leave survival behind. Begin to understand the power of stress. Fighting stress and its response (craving survival foods) is a losing fight. You are going up against your biology and genetics. You are hardwired to survive, so stop trying to repress a natural behavior. Focus on taking yourself out of the survival state.

Another view is to realize you are stuck in post traumatic stress. The body is experiencing trauma when stress is not actually present. You need to unwind tension and unlearn stress behavior. Your body will transform itself when this occurs.

About 15 years ago, when I had a clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, a woman came in asking if I could do for her what her friends claimed I did for them. I told the woman that if she lost her chronic stress and learned to not recreate it, after several months she probably would be thinner. She saw me for ten weekly sessions. Her body changed some, but we both agreed it was not transformed.

Six months latter, I saw a very attractive woman in a black dress at the end of my long hall. Not until I was close to her did I realize it was my former client seeing someone else in my office. I told her I did not recognize her. She said few months after finishing with me she started dropping pounds without dieting or exercising. Her parting comment was, “this is the body I always wanted, but thought I would never have.” It was the body of an unstressed woman.

When we release old stress, we learn to not recreate it. The cellulite women often complain about disappears. The fascia (the connective tissue which is also scar tissue) that holds the stress also holds fat. When the stress is released, the fascia is released and the fat can dissolve away.

Be aware of when stress or tension is going into your body. Then breathe and express your feelings. These two simple behaviors will change your life.

2. Challenge your beliefs. What are your unconscious affirmations? What are your mantras that you keep repeating? These internal voices become self-fulfilling statements. For example, if you tell yourself and others “I am fat,” you will continue to be. I am not suggesting the opposite, that you go around staying “I am thin” when you don’t believe it. There is a middle ground that allows for change. This ground is where you stand in the present experiencing what is true while holding the possibility and intent of change. For example, you might say to yourself – “I am losing weight.”

As you begin to accept being overweight, along with the corresponding emotions, you hold the in you mind the intent of being your thinner self. At first, your mind will want to escape to the old patterns of denial, self-loathing and setting unreal goals before it settles in a place of acceptance. This acceptance can then lead to creating a vision of what you want while still maintaining the experience of your negative emotions. The juxtaposition of acceptance and goal setting may seem counter-intuitive, yet it in this space you create an opportunity for something new to occur.

3. Give up unreal images. What literal and metaphorical images do you focus on? Do you have pictures of thin bodies on your fridge? Or are you looking at magazines with “perfect bodies?” When we put what we believe are unreal goals in front of us our minds say, “Who do you think you are, you are not that person and never will be.” These inspiring images backfire. They reinforce our self-loathing and repeated failure at losing weight.

Making the shift from seeing these images as a finite state to a process can enable change. Rather than saying “I am that image,” try saying to yourself “I am in a process of becoming my own person who shares characteristics of that image.”

The mind will know when something is not true and it will, on some level, fight back. Hold images and use affirmations that are possible.

4. Lose the secondary gains. These are behaviors or even illnesses we create to achieve indirectly what we believe we can’t get directly. In other words, if you were not getting something out of being overweight you would not be overweight. We all have some self-defeating behaviors. I certainly have had my share. I can remember allowing kids to pick on me because I convinced myself that was safer than standing up for myself

There was a book a woman wrote 30 years ago, I think it was “Fat is a Feminine Issue.” If it was, I can’t find it. Her thesis was that women (the corresponding can be true for men) acquired fat to keep men away. Dealing with the fat was supposedly easier than dealing with the possibility of a relationship. The author challenged her readers to address their issues around relationships as a means to losing weight.

My challenge to you is to act as if your fat had a purpose beyond reflecting the bad diet you may consume. If your fat was saying something, what would it be saying? Who would it be saying to? Are you angry with someone, even yourself? Are you attempting to get attention from someone?

The first step to meaningful change is to admit were we are and that we need help. This often is the hardest step. Frequently much of what we have avoided comes home to us. When I began to admit getting bullied was more about being afraid to take a stand, I started to develop the courage to say no to the bullies. What amazed me was that I did not have to prove it them as much as to myself. They stopped picking on me when I stopped cowering.

5. Your body is your ally. So often, we approach diet and exercise from a forcing prospective. We deprive, punish and generally coerce our bodies to conform to our wishes. We can produces change – but at what long term costs? The constant binges of exercising and dieting train our bodies to not find a healthy set point

You body is like a kid. It will constantly fight back if forced to do things it does not want to do. As we know, an angry kid will find a way to get back.

My intent here is not to give specific advice about a diet or exercise program, but to encourage you to find programs that are not forcing your body. Seek out programs that support your total health. Of course if you have not exerted your body in 20 years there will be some discomfort initially. At some point, the discomfort should shift to more ease. If it does not, you are back to the paradigm of punishing yourself for not being thin.

I suggest starting easy. Even if it is a yoga class, start with the lowest level of a beginning class. If you do not like what you are doing or are hurting yourself, fine a new teacher or a new activity. A slow walk in the woods can be more enjoyable and healthier for some than going to the gym and running on a treadmill.

Just watch kids play. A child can run around all day. She is not exercising; she is playing. I encourage you to rediscover your play.

6. Step out of double binds. These are mental and relationship traps we put ourselves into where there is no way out. It has been said, “The only way to win at a child’s game is not to play.” Once you are trapped in the maze of the damned if you do, damned if you don’t, you lose.

One double bind I have seen around weight is “I can’t have a loving relationship until I lose weight.” This person is always trying to lose weight to be loved, giving the message to his body that he does not love himself. As I was saying, not loving yourself makes permanently losing weight very difficult.

7. Let others do your work. We often make change of any kind harder than we need to. Being a lazy kind of guy and enjoying being a rebel, I saw getting help as a way to further my cause.

One huge way to shift the fat thing is to have others address the issue directly. Good bodywork can crack open new possibilities for losing weight. Bodywork releases chronic and acute stress and tells our bodies that they are being loved through the gift of receiving someone’s attention. Having someone else’s hands touch places that we are ashamed of brings acceptance to those areas.

Find groups that support the outcome, not the problem. This helps spread the load. So many illness support groups support the problem, not the healing. On a few occasions, I have been asked to speak to different support groups. Virtually everyone in the audience was more committed to commiserating about their shared problem then learning about the array of possible means to alleviating it.

My suggestion is to find a group that supports its members being successful, healthy or just happy. Not to find a group that talks about losing weight or being thin. Yes, there are the diet programs — groups that have success in assisting their clients in losing weight. I am encouraging you to step beyond them to organizations or groups that encourage generating a fulfilling life. If you’re interested in some of these organizations, write a comment expressing your desire and I will get back to you.

8. Enroll your mind to transform your body. Being the advocate for mindfulness, I can’t do this post without mentioning mindfulness for transforming fat. By now, everyone has come to accept the mind-body connection.

Having your mind be your ally sounds simple. Achieving this takes some work. Essentially, you begin using your awareness to witness what is occurring. Witnessing is not judging, evaluating or criticizing. It is just being an observer. When you see that picture of a thin body, you observe your response. What is your first thought? What does your body do? What is happening to your breath? These are just questions to get you started. As you develop this skill, you will not have to ask. Your body/mind will bring to you its response.

In the last 20 years, mindfulness has taken off. There are excellent courses that I no longer teach, but others do. Mindfulness works – there is a growing body of research that supports the efficacy of mindfulness. The prior study on pot bellies is organized around teaching a group of women mindfulness. “Weight loss is not the goal,” said Daubenmier, the lead researcher. “But we are thinking we will find a reduction in the visceral fat, which is really important. We’re looking at breaking that stress — eating link.”

In the development of mindfulness there always has been mindfulness eating used as a natural means to enhance the practice of mindfulness. The added benefit of mindfulness eating is that it can shift your eating habits while increasing your eating enjoyment.

Success lies in not treating the fat, but the cause to why the body choose that expressions of stress. Liposuction and stomach stapling will reduce your fat, but what will reduce your stress? I advocate that you view being overweight as a sign that you are stressed-out. Start with admitting that maybe your fat is stored or unexpressed stress. Then explore ways to remove stress from our life and your body. You can create the body you always wanted and sustain it.