Feeling weighed down by stress, baggage, or even pain? Motivated to feel better but unsure why you can’t seem to make progress despite the self-help books, the seminars, and all the healthy eating and living? You may be looking for solutions in the wrong places.I tried desperately to feel better and could not figure out what was wrong until I discovered the real reason: I was emotionally obese(more on that later).I want to share everything I have learned in the hopes that others will benefit from my experience and have a shorter path to more happiness and joy.Over the next several emails you will see:

  • How Emotional Obesity might be your real problem. Specifically, we’ll define: what it means to be emotionally obese; how gaining awareness of this problem is half the battle; and what you can do to get emotionally fit.
  • How Emotional Obesity may be keeping us from living our dreams, even hijacking our lives and preventing us from being healthy across the board.
  • Finally, once emotionally fit, Emotional Obesity will explain how to keep the emotional weight off.

If you are familiar with this idea, feel free to skip down to the next section.

What is Emotional Obesity?

Imagine if we had no idea what we fed ourselves. Imagine if foods were not labeled and we had no idea what we were putting in our bodies.Imagine if there were no scales, doctor’s offices, or even clothing sizes. We would eat what we were drawn to: fats, salts, sugar, even drugs and alcohol. We would wonder why we felt terrible and wouldn’t know how to change our lives.This is exactly what we are doing when it comes our emotional health.We are feeding ourselves a steady diet of unhealthy thoughts regarding our work, our families, our relationships, and ourselves, but with no understanding of the harm we’re doing. We don’t have a scale to measure just how much unhealthy emotional baggage we have added. We just know when we feel terrible.Occasionally, we may go on an “unhappiness crash diet” – we might take a one day seminar on self-improvement, go see a therapist for a few weeks, or even more drastically, quit our jobs, end a relationship, or otherwise attempt a major life overhaul.But none of these really last for long before we are back to our bad habits.When I get out of physical shape there are many indicators: my clothes don’t fit, I lose my breath climbing a set of stairs, my blood pressure rises, and simple tasks, like sitting on the floor and standing back up, become labored.What are the indicators that allow me to see my emotional shape deteriorating? The challenge with emotional weight is that it does not exhibit physical signs.However, emotional weight does give signs, they’re just less recognizable than the signs of physical weight.

How to Recognize Emotional Weight?

My thoughts sounds exactly like me. The tone of the voice and the way in which it speaks, from sentence structure to vocabulary, is indistinguishable from my own. It would be really helpful if this voice took on the voice of its originator, but it sounds exactly like me.My first step in my emotional fitness was to learn that my voice, the one that sounds like me, couldn’t be trusted. Sometimes the voice really was from my unique self and sometimes it was from an outside source, an impostor.I became aware of the stories I was telling myself that were not my own and began to question their validity. In other words, I was learning how to step onto the emotional scale and see how many emotional pounds I had gained.

How to Test the Validity of Our Voice?

 

Step One: Brain Scan

Ask yourself: Am I blaming? Am I a victim? Am I coming from anger? Am I comparing? Do I want to be right? Is the voice of “not good enough” active? What about a sense of low self-worth? Am I reacting to others’ emotions and taking them on as my own?

Step Two: Body Scan

What is happening in my body? Scan your body and answer these questions:Do I feel pressure in my head? Are my eyes suddenly intense? Are my shoulders up to my ears? Is my throat tight or my mouth dry? How is my stomach? Is it feeling anxious or nervous? What about my chest? Is it tight or does it have a sense of pressure? How about my heart? Is it feeling pain?

Step Three: Acceptance

If any of the above are true, your voice cannot be trusted to act in accordance with your higher self. Yes, it is true. This is your emotional scale.Why? Because this is your body telling you something is wrong. Pain, whether from emotions or from physical problems, needs to be investigated.Say you experience chest pain. You make a doctor’s appointment and the doctor says there is no medical concern, but the pain continues. Most would stop there. The pain in your chest is concerning in either case. So is the head pain, shoulder pain, or the heaviness in your heart.The tension in your body and the negative messages in your mind are the signs that your voice has been hijacked.This voice (your hijacked thoughts) creates feelings (emotional weight) that take your life in the wrong direction.Want to take control over your life? Do not take action if you suspect an impostor has taken charge.Steps to stop the voice of the impostor coming in the next week’s blog.Love to hear your feedback- I plan on taking all feedback to help make the best book possible!