Have you been doing all the right things to lose weight and get in better health, but find yourself stuck or not getting the results you want? Or, maybe you are so fed up with cycling through doing all the things and getting minimal to no results that you’ve just kind of thrown your hands up. If this sounds familiar allow me to shed some light on how your mind may be what’s keeping you from breaking plateau or getting results.
If you are like me, you may find you tend to make some great initial progress with weight loss and then hit a plateau. It may have happened to you so many times that you have just sort of thrown in the towel. Now what I’m referring to here is when you are following a certain approach, be it a diet or fitness program of some sort, and you are following it to the letter. Maybe you started it because you saw others’ results, but you aren’t getting those results yourself even though you are doing all the things. This has been the past six plus years of my life, so I certainly understand this. It is so beyond frustrating to put so much effort into something and not get the result that you are working so hard for. I’ve recently had a major breakthrough, after over a year of digging deep within myself and I’ve learned that this is actually caused by the mind and once you can get to the root of it and clear it, you will start to get that forward movement toward your goal.
If you listen to my podcast or have been reading my blog, you know that I have struggled with my weight all my life. No matter what it is I’ve tried, it has always seemed to be harder for me to get results and it seems to take longer to get the results. I sometimes wonder where I’d be without my tenacity and determination.
For most of my life, I thought it was just my metabolism, my body. It’s harder for me to lose weight, I would tell myself. I whole heartedly believed this until about a month ago, but I wasn’t going to let it stop me. I started with a goal of losing 65 pounds six years ago. I lost 25 pounds within the first six months and I have been around the same weight ever since. I’ve had drops and increases on my measurements over the course of this time, but my weight has fluctuated by about the same 5-10 pounds. About two years ago, after restarting macros, I dropped about 7 pounds over the course of eight months, then got stuck again.
After about three progress checks with no change and having tried adjusting macros, I got frustrated and stopped tracking. I eventually gained back the same 7 pounds it took me almost a year to lose. About a year ago, I started another program, where I was tracking macros but there were some other things that are different. One of these being taking a food sensitivity test and eliminating all foods that you have a high sensitivity to. I did this for 8 months. Same thing, tracked all my food, weighed and measured everything, cut alcohol, drank only water, continued working out. I lost two pounds and very little change in my measurements.
To say this is frustrating would be an understatement. Again, I took a few months off of tracking macros and shifted back to the whole food approach, continuing to work out consistently, continuing to drink only water. I was just so fed up with not only all the tracking, but also being so restricted with cutting out a long list of foods I am sensitive to. I never had any issues with any of these foods before, in fact, there are few foods that bother me. After almost a year of obsessing over labels and avoiding all these foods, I was fed up. Not only had it made no difference in my weight or my energy levels, it was just creating more stress, work, and frustration. The effort, restriction, and frustration was not justifying the lack of results.
Over the course of this past year, I have also been doing a lot of inner healing and more recently energy healing. I started to look back on this lifelong struggle with my weight, but I was also working through past traumas and hurts. I had many breakthroughs and came to realize a lot of my problem was in my mind. Yes, I was doing my mindset practices like affirmations, meditations, and gratitude, but there was something deeper down in the subconscious, and getting at the root of that is when I started to see a shift in the direction I want to be heading again. So, let’s get into what I’ve come to realize and how it has helped me start making progress again.
So how is it that the mind can keep you from losing weight, or from accomplishing any other goal you may have for that matter? Well, the short and sweet answer is it is trying to protect you. So in my case, my mind, my subconscious mind to be exact, has instructed my body to hold onto a certain amount of excess weight. It has given a directive to my body to stay where it is. This is why no matter what I did I couldn’t get past this certain point I’ve been stuck at. How did this happen? Why is this?
Well, the simplest way I can put it is that I had a lot of unhealed trauma and past hurts that had gotten stored in my body. But before that happened, they were limiting beliefs, lies that cycled through my mind over and over and over. Sometimes these limiting beliefs show up in behaviors; things we avoid or the way we do certain things to protect ourselves from some negative emotion. Before limiting beliefs turn into limiting beliefs they are thoughts or experiences we had that were painful, or which elicited feelings we don’t like, like fear, anger, sadness, humiliation, etc. Eventually, they make their way into the body and turn into a variety of health conditions, diseases, symptoms, or other issues.
The mind is far more powerful than we realize or give it credit for. We have our conscious mind and our subconscious mind. You can think of the conscious mind as what we are aware of and the subconscious is what we aren’t aware of. The subconscious mind is the most dominant part of our mind. The conscious mind is less than 5% of our mental energy and the subconscious is the rest. So, in our conscious mind is where we have thoughts and ideas and it’s where we experience our five senses, where the subconscious is where we have feelings, beliefs, and habits.
The subconscious doesn’t know the difference between a good thought or a bad thought, truth or lie; it just receives the messages from our conscious mind, and it takes those messages as directives. So, if you spend all your time thinking that you can’t lose weight and you’ll always be stuck at a certain weight, your subconscious is going to make that happen. When we go along and do all this stuff to lose weight and it doesn’t happen, we reinforce it, because now, oh look, see I can’t lose weight. This is because deep down, we still have that belief, in the back of the mind, telling the subconscious I can’t lose weight.
So, what can you do about this? I’ve learned you have to have a multi-component approach. First, you must do the work to change the thoughts, which means you have to become aware of the thoughts that are occupying your mind most of the time and you have to flip them around. So, for example, I can’t lose weight becomes I lose weight effortlessly and easily. Second, you have to get to the root of the negative thought or limiting belief; where did this start? More than likely there will be multiple events where this belief came up and you need to get to the first one. So, this involves writing down all your memories about weight, body image, etc. Go back as far as you can remember.
To illustrate, I’d start with the most recent I tried where I didn’t lose weight. Then I’d go back to the one before that and so on and so on. I’d also start listing memories around when I started to want to lose weight or started being unhappy with my body. So, that would start with things my ex said about my body at times, then it would go back to dating and rejections where I tied it to my weight, then it would go back to when I was younger and things people said about my weight, then it would go back to high school, junior high, elementary when I was bullied about my weight, then back to seeing my dad struggle with his weight and my mom always exercising and dieting. Your list will be different of course, but I am trying to give you a sense of the types of things to look for, because they all fed and turned into these limiting beliefs.
The third thing is, alchemizing these beliefs. You do this by looking at each one and asking if it is true and then you rewrite it into what feels better. Forgive the events and people who led to these beliefs and forgive yourself for adopting them. After this you get rid of the list or the paper. Let it go and forget about it. You will then need to be aware of thoughts and shut it down when the limiting beliefs try to come back up. Simply remind yourself, no, I don’t believe that anymore, and replace it with what feels better, like my body is strong and healthy, or I lose weight effortlessly and easily. You can use the process I laid out in my previous post, Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers for this as well.
This process I’ve laid out here will help with shifting the mindset and clearing some of the things holding you back. However, there is another important step that really changed the game for me and that was when I added energy healing into the mix. As I mentioned all of this makes its way into your body at some point. We don’t like to feel certain feelings and so we suppress them. Different feelings end up in different parts of the body. So, in addition to doing the work with the mindset and some of the inner healing around the events that led to these beliefs, particularly those that stem from trauma or extremely emotionally painful experiences, you also need to move those feelings out of the body.
Feelings are energy, so this can be done with energetic healing. You can explore doing this yourself. There are a lot of great books out there, lots of resources on the internet. You can also find an energy healer to help you with it. There are many different methods and practitioners. Some you may be familiar with, others maybe not, like reiki, sound healing, and others. It is important to find one you feel comfortable with if you do go that route.
I eventually sought the help of an energy healer and it is what made the difference for me. Keep in mind it can take some time. It just depends on your unique situation and where you are starting. It took a couple months for me, after I had been doing all the things I laid out here for some time. A lot of what I had been holding in my body energetically has finally been released and I am starting to see my body changing and I am starting to get results again after being stuck for a long time. In my situation, on a subconscious level it wasn’t safe to change, to get the results I’ve been working toward because of my past traumas and hurts. So, I’ve had to do a lot of internal work and energy healing to shift this in my subconscious and my body.
So, this is how the mind can be keeping you from getting the result you want. Yes, there can absolutely be other things causing this, if you don’t have past traumas or hurts that may remain unhealed. However, if you do have some things that may remain unhealed or you have limiting beliefs around weight loss, then this may be something you want to explore and see if this process I’ve laid out can help you as well.
So, that is how the mind can be keeping you stuck in plateau or keeping you from losing weight despite all your efforts. This is a rather complex topic and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of it here, but I hope this gives you a place to start and gives some insight as to how your mind may be at play in keeping you stuck.
Please share your thoughts in the comments. If you find this helpful and want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also find Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram. Please reach out to me on social media or at rachelle@faithfitnessjoy.com if you’d like to work with me privately. Thanks for listening and I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!