Do you want to be healthy and at your ideal weight? Do you want to understand why you struggle with your weight?

Dr. John Demartini explains how we can understand why we have issues with weight management and how we can work through this.

In an interview with Dr. John Demartini, Sharon Atkins asks about women and weight. Many women are not happy with their unhealthy patterns with regards to eating. How can we find out what we can do to stop these patterns and be the healthy, strong individual that we should be?

Dr. Demartini – I have asked women who are having some challenges with their weight to look back at the patterns that they have and one of the things that they will notice is that if they have something extremely important, extremely inspiring to them that they are going to do the next day they find out that they have more self-governance the days before. So, if they have a special event coming up, they will have a motive and a reason not to live to eat but to eat to live and they will keep themselves self-governed because they have something extremely meaningful and inspired to do. So we find out that people tend to eat to live and not live to eat when they have priorities that are high in their values that they are structuring in their life.

When people live by their highest values, they are more likely to moderate and have order and self-governance. Their hormones are more inspired and more awakened but when people are not fulfilled, not inspired, not doing what is highest on their priorities, sometimes like on the weekend when they are just kicking back, they have a higher probability of losing in self- governance and over- eating etc. So from just that perspective alone one of the wisest things to do is to identify what is really most important to you, what is really highest of your values and structure and fill your day with high priority actions. That automatically makes you feel more inspired, and you are more likely to eat moderately and your hormones are more likely to be more balanced.

Weight Gain and Relationships

The second thing that we find is that women sometime accumulate weight if they are in a relationship that is unfulfilling and they have got repressed frustrations in that relationship. They will put a wall up and build weight around them to protect themselves from the verbal or non-verbal communications that have been painful, and the second they break up with that relationship some of them drop weight very rapidly.

Sometimes there are relationship issues that have to be resolved and I encourage people in that case to do what I call “The Demartini Method” on that relationship so that they can resolve the conflicts or at least find out what that relationship partner is dedicated to and finding out how what they are dedicated to is serving  you and what you are dedicated to is serving them to resolve some of the conflicts because if there is no dialogue and communication we tend to put on weight and eat to protect ourselves from the frustration.

Another one is I see is some women have had issues in their relationship and subsequently they nearly had an affair and in order to prevent themselves from having an affair or disrupting their family, their children and their marriage they will sometimes gain weight to protect themselves and keep themselves from having an affair.

I have seen this many times when they do lose weight and look good then they are sometimes vulnerable to other men coming on to them and they are vulnerable to disrupting their family so they might gain some weight and try to make themselves less attractive to protect the family. So these are unconscious motives.

And the other one is sometimes I have seen some women who don’t like to be pushed around so they gain weight to prevent themselves from being pushed around by other people. Instead of mastering the ability to assert and direct your own life and fill your day with high priorities and say no to people sometimes we gain weight just to try to protect ourselves from the pushing around of others.

Benefits to Weight Gain

These are four common variables I have seen, there are other ones, but these are some of the reasons. When you ask somebody what are the benefits you are getting when gaining weight, they will probably say none. But we don’t do things without a motive and if we are gaining weight there is usually a motive involved. Sometimes there is endocrine involved, sometimes there is thyroid and estrogen involved.

But even those relate sometimes to repressed emotions and if we identify what the motives are and ask what the benefits you are getting out of it sometimes uncovers those benefits. I have asked people who have gained weight what are the benefits they are getting out of it and they think there is none until they dig deep and we find all kinds of unconscious motives that are the reasons why they keep the weight on.

I had a woman in San Diego, California that was a lawyer and every time she would get a client that was a male client the wives would ask their husbands not to have her as the lawyer because they didn’t want to be having an attractive woman be the one that is closest to their husband. So the woman found that she kept losing male clients so she ended up putting on glasses, gaining weight, changing her hairstyle just to build her business so she wouldn’t be a threat to other women. She started befriending the women and making herself more homely to protect herself from losing business.

So there are all kinds of motives and finding out what those are can be very revealing.

Dr. John Demartini is a human behavioural specialist, educator, author and founder of the Demartini Institute, a private research and education institute with a focus on empowering individuals and organizations and transforming micro and macro social dynamics.