How did weight become one of the major concerns in our culture and why is it a struggle for so many? Overeating is how we gain weight, but not the reason. Overweight, as we call it, is the product of:

• First and foremost, a need for emotional protection.
• Ignorance of proper diet.
• Substance abuse, the substance being food.

When you don’t like yourself, it’s easy to gain weight so that you have a good reason not to like yourself. You can just say that you don’t like yourself because you are fat. (By the way, the word fat in some cultures has positive connotations, so it is not an absolute reality that the word implies something negative.) When you say that you don’t like yourself because you are fat, it’s a lie anyway. You are really saying that you don’t like your body, not yourself.

If someone said to you, I don’t like you, now do what I want, what do you think would happen? Would you be willing to do what they wanted? I don’t think so. So why should your body do what you want when you tell it you don’t like it and you will only like it if it does what you say? It’s not going to happen. You can starve your body and lose weight, but you will gain it back when you return to your previous eating habits. You will try diet after diet and the same thing will happen over and over; each attempt becomes more difficult because you have failed so many times before, causing you to lose confidence in yourself. You dislike your body more and more each day until you start hating it. It isn’t your body that is fat, it’s you. Do you want to look a certain way and fit into the ideal to which our society attaches approval, self-esteem, beauty, health and sexiness, instead of being yourself?

We are told that it is excess weight which makes us unhealthy, but it is also the negative feelings we have towards our overweight bodies that create our health problems. We have the power to change the way we think of ourselves and our bodies. Losing weight is not going to make you healthy and happy. Even if you are thin, you must have a positive self image.

Start to love yourself the way you are right now. There is no point in making a bargain with yourself that you will start loving you when you lose weight. Your body will respond if you love it now. Wrap your arms around your body and sincerely tell it you love it and that you are sorry for hating or disliking it. It’s your body; the one in which you are spending your life. Do you want to go through your entire life disliking your body? Your body has been with you from the moment you were born. You loved it then, love it now. How do you think your body feels knowing you don’t like it? Every cell knows how you feel about it and your body wants to be loved and nurtured. You will see the changes when you begin loving it.

Your body will tell you when it is hungry and what it wants to eat. Listen to it. Your body wants food, not chemicals. When you love your body, you’ll eat healthy food and stop eating when you aren’t hungry anymore. You won’t eat to feed your emotions and you will achieve your perfect body size. When you love your body, yourself and your life, you will be happy.

Thinness is the current cultural preference and an obsession in our society, not an ideal based on absolute truth. We have all seen paintings and sculptures from other periods in history, which portray their subjects as well rounded and robust. One day, back when I lived on a little island off the coast of Belize, I stopped to greet a male friend of mine sitting on his verandah looking at a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, that a tourist had left behind.

I see you are enjoying yourself, I said to him assuming he was admiring the scantily clad models.  What’s wrong with these women, he replied, they look sick.  Those are highly paid models from the States, I explained.  They look maga, he continued using the local word for too skinny.  That is how women like to look in the US.  Not here, we like a woman with meat on her bones.

There exists today on earth, a subconscious plot to keep women weak and malnourished. I call it The Invisible Burka. Our culture has allowed women to become more powerful and have more equality, but it is actually a trick because at the same time they are convinced that this power is achieved by being physically thin and underfed, walking in heels that are damaging to the body and even undergoing unnecessary surgical procedures in order to feel attractive. There is nothing striking about a person who is malnourished, depriving their brain of the nutrients it needs for optimum performance.

Another incident I experienced on the island occurred on say while I was about to enter a restaurant as a very large American woman was exiting.  A Belizean woman of similar size stood behind me and said to her, hey fat girl.  I held my breath for a moment and the American woman appeared momentarily horrified, until the Belizean woman finished the sentence with, you’re fat like me! In a split second, the American tourist had experienced the best part of her vacation. She came to the Caribbean to learn about the culture and she was getting a first-hand experience which wasn’t in any guide book. Her look of horror melted into a smile of sisterly camaraderie with the local woman who smiled and gave her a high five. It was an event which allowed the tourist to transcend the negative images she had about her weight and be part of a truly magical moment with a woman who accepted herself as she was.

I have always been very careful not to blindly follow the general beliefs of the mainstream current thought forms of my culture. When I observe everyone doing something I am cautious about following in their footsteps. Actually, I am of the opinion that many concepts which we are encouraged to believe as absolute truth are, in reality, ideas that are not only false, but harmful to our well-being.  One such area that has overwhelmingly consumed, no pun intended, the entire population is weight. The Weight Loss industry, in 2009, was a $350 billion plus industry.  Now, let us stop and think about this.  No one who is making money from weight loss products really wants you to lose weight or else how else will they keep making money.  Diets do not work for most people, since after the desired weight is reached; the person goes back to their usual eating habits.

Let’s back up a little and define what exactly we mean by overweight. I have been contemplating the term for quite some time now and it seems to me that our culture has created an ideal, as do many other cultures, and that ideal has to do with body size.  Now we all know that everyone is physically different, some tall, others short and the rest in between, but we are all being encouraged to weigh a certain amount based primarily on our height. Therefore, we can safely assume that expecting everyone to be the same size and weight is on the current cultural preference, an unattainable goal and doesn’t even make sense. Don’t be duped about weight and the unwarranted negative self image associated with certain body types. Don’t fall for it. The more you focus on excess weight, the more it will stick around.

There’s the old joke about a woman who was considered plump in America and went to Mexico on vacation with a friend of hers that was a model. She noticed that the men mostly looked at her and not her slim friend.  One day the model was taking a nap and the woman asked one of the local men who spoke English, you know in my country the men all look at my friend, but things seem different here. The man replied, Sí senorita, the bone is for the dog, the meat is for the man.

For those who are thin by nature, this is a healthy physical state, but for the rest, losing too much weight is usually not in their best physical interest.  In order to reduce body mass to a size that is not compatible with the body structure, but is with a young woman on the cover of a magazine, one must eat less food than their body requires.  In addition, the type of food that has become associated with weight loss is very often laden with chemicals and has very little fat. The brain needs a certain amount of fat to function properly, so we must.

The word food is used very loosely nowadays. Chemicals are not food and foods that have been processed and have lost most of their nutritional value are of little benefit, if not harmful.  Artificial sweeteners are not food and should not be used in or with food…EVER. They are chemicals that upset the alkaline/acid balance of the body and can cause serious health issues and even addiction. In addition, it is said that artificial sweeteners make you crave carbohydrates, so you end up eating more of what will make you gain weight.

The current methods of farming food, coupled with environmental pollution and soil depletion due to single crop farming, fertilization and the seeds being used have robbed our food supply of many nutrients. Because of this we are required to take nutritional supplements to make up for what is not in our diet and should be. For those not supplementing their diet, cravings occur when the body is not getting what it requires to be healthy.  Our bodies know what they want, there is no tricking our cells, therefore, even after we have eaten a whole plate of lettuce with only vinegar, we are still hungry. Big surprise!

Our beliefs have been infringed upon and little by little until we are programmed to behave in such a way that will allow someone besides us to profit.  What do women eat when they are out in a restaurant, you guessed it, salad. Why is that? Don’t get me wrong, I love salad, and I eat salad when I desire it, but I do not order or prepare it just because I think it looks good and people will think I am thinner because I eat salad all the time.

As a culture we are so focused on thinness that people are divided into two categories, those who are thin and those who are not. I realized this to be true, on a Sunday at the mall when I caught myself in the same trap. I was horrified that this was the mentality of my culture and even more that I had been participating in this belief. I was determined to begin to see others as perfectly where they are supposed to be, which is where they are.  As I sat in front of the food court filled with throngs of people, consuming mostly junk food, I began to think about the situation at hand.  For the most part it appeared that there were a number of things going on; first and foremost was that it was dinnertime and after a long afternoon of walking the mall and shopping many people had worked up an appetite or perhaps just felt like eating.  I walked amongst the tables topped with burgers, pizza and French fries and noticed that there were excessive amounts of food in front of most people, even children. When I say excessive, I am basing it on how much food I personally care to consume at one sitting.

Most people in our culture eat more than they need, this is a fact.  The amount of food we require will be communicated to us by our bodies. In other words, when our cells require nourishment, we get hungry. If we eat slowly, chewing and swallowing our food with care, we will know when we have had enough because we will not feel hungry anymore. The old adage of clean your plate is fine if there is not too much food on the plate to start with, but I have a sneaking suspicion that when that saying came into being, there was not the amount of food readily available as there is now or refrigeration to save leftovers. Food had to be prepared; people didn’t just reach into the refrigerator or freezer or go out to a restaurant each time they felt hungry.

The social pressure to be thin and the implications of being overweight, a term applied to a measurement that exceeds a number arrived at by the medical community and/or the fashion industry, has the result of creating low self-esteem and even self-hatred. Beauty is big business and there is a disproportionate amount of focus place on whether or not a person is beautiful.  In fact the person can be amongst the worst scoundrels ever to live and if he or she is beautiful, they hold our attention and maintain our admiration. Inner beauty is highly under-valued and outer beauty, even though it can be bought is the measure of a person.

You don’t need to keep weighing yourself. First of all, you must know when you have gained weight if you are aware of your body and, if nothing else, your clothes will feel tighter or looser. Secondly, if you haven’t lost your desired weight, you will most likely get frustrated and eat more.  Remember, your weight is not a measure of your self-worth; it is a measure of the weight of your body. You are not better if you weigh less, you only weigh less.

Larger people are kept separate so that thinner ones do not have to shop with them as anyone who wears plus size clothing will tell you. The plus size departments are hidden in basements and corners of areas where no one goes. The clothes are not stylish, for the most part, and sometimes they even cost more, as if an extra two inches of fabric between a size 16 and 1X is going to make a difference in the cost of creating the garment. Why can’t these garments be amongst the regular clothes? Are we to hide people away who are an inch larger that the privileged, acceptable thin ones?

Begin to tell yourself that you Love yourself.  Stand in front of the mirror and admire what you see and say the words out loud until you begin to feel the Love.  Think of someone in your life that you love, whether it is a romantic love or love of a family member or friend and think of how you feel when you experience love for them. Then start feeling the same way when you look at yourself.  As you see your reflection, admiring and loving yourself, realize that there are two of you participating in this process; one is yourself, the you that is in your conscious life and the other one is the person that is talking to you or your higher or real self.  The one that you refer to as “I”, when you say I love you to yourself is your higher self.  It is that part of you that has always loved you, was born loving you and always will love you no matter what.  That part of you doesn’t care about how much you weight, the color of your hair or how many wrinkles you have, because that part of you is eternal and only exists in your body during this lifetime.

A young child that loves an adult does not judge the way that person looks, they just love them and in the same way, your higher self loves you unconditionally; so do not be afraid to tap into that feeling for yourself.  Don’t let the standards that society has set for beauty, which are fleeting and change from time to time, keep you from loving yourself and do not allow yourself to be convinced that you are not a beautiful creation of the Universe. When your mother and father first saw you, they could not imagine anyone more beautiful so believe that you are healthy and lovely and that is the reality you will create for yourself. Be the vibrant being that you were born to be.