5 reasons your subconscious is keeping you fat

When I was aged just nine, a doctor put me on my first diet. A joyless bit of paper that ordered me to eat half a grapefruit for breakfast, or one slice of toast with a scraping of butter, and a cup of tea, ideally black but a small dash of milk would be permitted if absolutely necessary for the fat guzzlers who couldn’t manage without it. This diet allowed me about 1,000 calories a day – which was the accepted wisdom in the 1970s. Just consume 1,000 calories a day and you will lose weight. It’s that easy, no arguments, it doesn’t matter if you’re nine years old or 29. And if you can’t do it, there’s something wrong with you – you’re lazy/ not trying hard enough / lying about it / no willpower.

That was the lie I bought. For decades.

1. STUCK IN DIETING PRISON

I spent the next 30 odd years thinking that if I could just stick to a diet for long enough or just do more exercise – even though I was running marathons and teaching aerobic classes – the weight would have to come off. Wouldn’t it? It just has to, doesn’t it? That’s what every so called ‘expert’ source was advising me. The massive billion-dollar diet industry is built on that premise.

It didn’t work for me. The only thing that decades of deprivation, calorie counting, and punishing exercise regimes did for me was make me feel like a failure, make me obsessive and miserable, and trigger eating disorders.

Consciously, I desperately wanted to be thinner and I thought about it all the time.

All. The. Freaking. Time.

This desperation and misery about my weight coloured every moment of my life and impacted everything I did and said, as well as what I didn’t do and didn’t say. It was an acceptable mental disorder. No one ever thought there was a problem with me endlessly agonising about my weight because, apparently, this is an appropriate thing for a woman to do. Admittedly, few people probably realised the full extent of just how obsessed I was with it.

So with all this focus, endless calorie counting and obsessive exercise, did the weight come off? No. It felt like I was in constant battle with a body that wanted to be fat and if I stopped all my efforts, I would end up enormous. I believed that the dieting and exercise may not have gotten me thin. (Yet! Keep trying Fatty!) but if I stopped, I would gain an incredible amount of weight.

It honestly felt like my body was fighting me every step of the way – it was like my body wanted to be fat. If I ever dropped my guard for a day or two, I would gain two to four kilograms overnight. I was trapped in a miserable cycle and I didn’t know how to break it.

2. YOUR BODY HAS A REASON FOR KEEPING THE FAT

So what was the issue? My body DID want to be fat. Well, more precisely, my subconscious mind wanted to hold onto the weight for various reasons and my body was just following instructions.

While the conscious thinking part of me wanted the weight off so I could finally have the life and love of my dreams, the problem was that subconsciously, I didn’t. And with it controlling about 90 per cent of the mind, it’s the subconscious that calls the shots. My subconscious mind had a whole load of very good reasons for keeping on that extra padding and no matter what I did with regards to diet and exercise, my subconscious had powerful tools to combat my efforts. From lowering my metabolism and increasing my appetite, to silencing the hormonal signals to the brain that control fat storage and satiety, my efforts with the latest diet theory never stood a chance.

Let’s go back to that doctor’s appointment when I was nine. My mother took me to the doctor because she couldn’t figure out why I’d gained so much weight in just a couple of years. It was a mystery! Then again, maybe it wasn’t.

When I was age seven, my parents broke up because my father had been having an affair. The divorce was messy and nasty. My mother very quickly bounced into a new relationship. So in that two years, my family crumbled, my beloved dad abandoned me (it seemed to me), we moved house three times and I found myself living with an intimidating man as well as his son, a boy about four years older than me who never seemed to pass up an opportunity to call me fat, ugly or stupid.

Is there any wonder my emotional pain showed up in my body as excess weight? Subconsciously, I was using food as a comfort to numb all the emotions I couldn’t process at that age. I was also using extra weight to hide behind, to avoid unwanted sexual attention as well as mental abuse. I was also learning behavior from my mother who was obsessed with her own weight.

But I didn’t realise all that at the time. I was a child of the 70s. The diet industry was just getting started, there was the grapefruit diet, the F plan diet (basically, you eat fibre), meal replacement shakes and endless calorie counting. We were sold the message that if it wasn’t working, you were doing it wrong, and the answer was self-flagellation, deprivation, self-punishment and more calorie counting and exercise until you do get it right. ‘If it’s not working, it’s your fault, you don’t have enough willpower…’ was the bullying and erroneous message.

3. YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS ALWAYS WINS

Here’s the crux of what I believe: If you’re holding onto excess body fat, you have good reasons for doing so. Good subconscious reasons. And the subconscious always wins. It doesn’t matter what you consciously want, cognitive neuroscientists conclude that the conscious mind contributes only about five per cent of our cognitive activity. That means that 95 per cent of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behaviors are derived from the processing of the subconscious mind.

Every single behaviour that you demonstrate, good, bad or ridiculous, is run by your subconscious mind. So if you want to change a behaviour, you cannot do it by willpower alone, you have to get into the subconscious mind and change it there.

So what kind of beliefs might be hidden in your subconscious that are sabotaging your weight-loss efforts?

To be honest, there are thousands of possibilities because everyone is different, with different experiences that got them to where they are today. The best person to find yours is you – with perhaps some help from a healer or therapist. Generally speaking though, based on myself and my clients, here are some of the most common:

1. Fat as love: You have wonderful memories of eating food with people who love you and who nurtured you so you turn to food to feel loved and nurtured. It’s how you nurture yourself. Trouble is, the resulting excess fat is also seen by the body-mind as love and comfort so you hold onto it to feel loved. (Interestingly, I had a client whose weight issue was that she was too thin and just couldn’t gain weight no matter what she tried. She very much disliked being so thin and was desperate to gain weight in order to fill out clothes like “a proper woman”. During our sessions, we found a core belief she had that ‘food is hate’.)
2. Fat as protection: This is when people use fat to avoid unwanted sexual attention or as a buffer against emotional abuse. Subconsciously, people make themselves unattractive to avoid the wrong kind of attention. Also, the extra weight literally puts more distance between them and the abuser. This can be emotional or mental abuse as well as physical, a bullying boss for example.
3. Fat as safety: For example, some people gain weight when they get married as a way to avoid being unfaithful.
4. Fat as an excuse: Excess weight is a great excuse for procrastinating, eg, ‘I’ll start dating/ travel/ go skydiving / learn to swim / get a new job… when I lose weight.’ Why do we procrastinate? Out of fear, usually, fear of change, fear of failure, even fear of success – say you succeed in getting that amazing new job, will that mean longer hours, harder work, no life-work balance, more competition…?
5. Fat as survival: If someone has financial or job worries or if their ancestors experienced famine, this can result in holding onto excess weight. In our lizard brain, we know we are more likely to survive the winter or a famine if we have extra fat and in our lizard brain, the 21st century worry about not being able to pay the mortgage is the same as the Neanderthal man’s worry about dying of starvation. Solution? Fat stores.

The million-dollar question of course is, how to find and clear your subconscious beliefs? This is where you need to go inwards, get a bit navel-gazey and introspective. Methods include hypnotherapy, self-examination through journaling or meditation, alternative healing therapies such as ThetaHealing or EFT Tapping.

You can use any technique that gets to the roots of subconscious emotional drivers that cause disordered eating and clears them – essentially you’re reprogramming negative thought patterns by deleting and replacing files in your brain/computer.

If you’ve had the ‘I must lose weight, why can’t I lose weight’ tape spooling on repeat in your conscious mind, ask yourself, ‘how am I benefiting from being overweight?’ ‘How is holding onto excess weight serving me?’ Initially you might shout ‘it doesn’t benefit me!’ but I guarantee you that if you’re carrying excess weight, you’re holding beliefs at some level about why this is a helpful thing.

So find those old beliefs and change them because once the body-mind doesn’t see the need for the extra weight, it’ll start doing everything it can to release it.

To get you on your way, you can download my free introductory ebook here.