The following is derived from Chinmayi’s best-selling book, BodyMAGIC! – an End to Emotional Eating Forever
After around 35 years of being obsessed with my weight, my thighs, my stomach, my calorie intake and expenditure, diet plans, fitness plans, dress sizes and so much more, and in a place where I am at last really happy with myself, I am overjoyed to share my message with you.
I reached a point in my life where I wanted to get to the heart of the problem. I’d had enough of it. I was sick to my bloated stomach, my fat butt and my thick thighs of it all!
Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you can stop falling. And boy how I’d fallen! I’d fallen into the trap of nearly every diet opportunity that had come my way for over 30 years.
That’s like a life’s term imprisonment!
The only thing that hadn’t fallen was my weight overall.
That was all I wanted. It was to have thighs like Jane Fonda, a waistline like Rosemary Conley and a bottom like all those partygoers on Miami Beach. It was all that mattered.
I would have done anything. And once or twice I had it. But like everything superficial, I desperately hung on to it, going into emergency action mode whenever I put on a pound.
That kind of fear is not living. And the belief that being thinner would make me happy is just so wrong.
I have tried a lot of diets. I have been to hell and back and at the end of my tether with nearly all of them. That cycle of dieting has gone around more times than I care to remember. It starts with a good intention, almost excitement and hope that this one is the one that’s going to change my life.
The genuine commitment and motivation in those first few days or weeks is beyond what I can ordinarily muster.
Then comes the realisation that it’s really hard to do, that life’s goodies get in the way and I may not be able to stick with it after all. I’m hungry, I’m not enjoying the food that I’m eating and I’m miserable. When I can take the struggle no longer, I let it all go. All my enthusiasm and commitment seem futile.
All that time, money and effort wasted.
The ensuing disappointment, even despair, is a dark and depressing hole. All I have left is a feeling of total loss of any self – self-esteem, self-worth, self-love.
And then the questioning starts.
Why can’t I do it?
Why am I so weak?
Why can’t I just eat normally?
I’d try again the next day, week or even pick it up again months later, but the cycle was the same.
The truth is that diets simply don’t work for the emotional eater.
In the beginning you may resist what I have to say.
It isn’t nice to hear that all of the time, money and energy you have put into dieting has been for nothing.
It isn’t great to hear that you have been misled, even conned, into a totally false place of happiness.
All that pride in losing a few pounds, all the shame when you didn’t, all the hope that that new diet, plan, method would finally get you the body you were dreaming of.
All of those before and after photographs you stared at, moments before you parted with your hard-earned cash.
You see my friend, it’s long-term weight-loss that makes a diet truly successful. Unfortunately, this long-term analysis is hard to find on any weight loss organisation’s website.
I would also suggest that if organisations were very successful in helping most of their subscribers to lose weight, they wouldn’t have these customers for long, and therefore wouldn’t have the success that they have as a business. Weight Watchers are listed on the stock market, so one could argue that their success depends on people failing to lose weight!
When we lose weight, we believe that diets do work.
We don’t consider them a failure when we eventually regain the funds and usually more. Most diet organisations would have us believe that we are the failure, that we had the tools and we just couldn’t make it. That it’s up to us to find the discipline. But that is nearly always not the case.
Maybe you feel that you are addicted to food or maybe like me, you discover that you’re actually addicted to dieting. But any addiction is an emotional dependency and it takes much more than willpower to overcome one.
Unfortunately slimming diets are all questionable, not just for their effectiveness but also for whether they are ethically sourced and fairly traded. It seems we will stop at nothing to lose weight. And businesses will stop at nothing to make lots of money from it. The marketing techniques used are very clever.
But when you have researched as many as I have, you know the pattern. They fill you with so much fear, then hope, that you really do believe that their product or programme is your last and only real chance.
The obesity crisis is feeding a multi-million dollar diet and exercise industry that, I have to say, has had very little success in actually addressing obesity. There are many beneficiaries from this development, and sadly, not one of them is you, the dieter.
We know that the main reasons for the rise in obesity, heart disease, type II diabetes, early osteoporosis and so much more have to do with eating too much unhealthy stuff (I hesitate to call all of it food), not eating enough healthy, real food and not taking a decent level of exercise.
Add to that the stress of modern life, the constant pursuit of wanting more success, more money, more holidays, more gadgets. It’s no wonder we become dis-eased. The problem is increasing so fast that for the first time in history, as adults, at the time of writing, we are likely to live to an older age than our children.
BodyMAGIC! is not an impersonal weight-loss plan where one size fits all (excuse the pun!). It is a lifestyle and attitude shift that you are making just for yourself, according to your needs, to ensure you are healthy in mind and body, now, and for the rest of your life.
The problem is not what you eat, or how much of it you eat.
It’s why you eat what you do and why you eat so much of it!
There is a reason for emotional overeating every time. Once we can see what those reasons are, we can do some work that strengthens our resolve to take good care of ourselves.
So what is BodyMAGIC!?
The list below will give you an outline.
The 10 Principal Understandings of BodyMAGIC!
Health
Healing
Happiness
- Improved Health, an integrated practice of Healing and finding Happiness facilitate life-long freedom from emotional overeating.
- Improved Health is achieved by reconnecting with Mother Nature through the elements of Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space. This connection is through eating, drinking, moving, breathing, sleeping and other day-to-day practices in a NATURAL way.
- Practices of traditional Healing offer holistic solutions to the challenges of emotional overeating.
- Real Happiness is the true meaning of life and can only be found within oneself.
- Diets, including chemical appetite suppressants, meal replacement plans, fasting, nutritional adjustment methods are not effective in the long-term to treat emotional overeating.
- Exercise is an important part of the principles of Health, Healing and Happiness, not a direct method of losing weight.
- Most emotional overeaters have a food addiction, a diet addiction or an addiction to one food, or a combination of these that usually results in sub-optimal mental and/or physical health.
- The basis of addiction is emotional. Therefore, the most important work for this programme is that which focuses on healing the emotions of past trauma, being aware of harmful emotions in current day challenges and having tools to manage negative emotions for the future.
- There are food and drink types that can hinder or help progress, based on current medical research. Therefore, it is necessary to make informed choices about food and drink that is bought, caught, harvested, prepared and eaten. Eliminating or including a food may contribute to health, healing and happiness but it does not guarantee weight loss.
- The basic Keys to Emotional Freedom are to Know Myself and Know My Worth.
“You have been criticising yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked.
Try approving of yourself and see what happens.”
~ Louise L. Hay
