What’s Love Got to Do With Weight Loss?
Most people are looking for weight loss in all the wrong places.
Yes, the food you eat is important. Yes, being physically active and moving your body is important. Yes, figuring out your metabolic roadblocks, things like hidden infections, insulin issues, or thyroid problems is important. Yes, changing your lifestyle habits so you have less stress is important.
But there’s something even more important than all of those things combined.
It’s love. Specifically, it’s feeling loved.
. . .
Think of love as a vitamin. What happens when you don’t get enough vitamin C, for example? You get scurvy. When we don’t get the nutrients we need (ie vitamins and other essential things), our bodies become ill. We become depleted and we get sick.
Feeling loved is as essential to our well-being as water, air, and food.
When we don’t feel loved, we develop coping methods that sabotage our health and happiness. Those coping methods are disguised as all kinds of things:
- people pleasing at the expense of taking care of ourselves
- lack of motivation and willpower
- uncontrolled eating
- sugar addiction (or any other addiction, for that matter)
- dysfunctional relationships with family members or friends
- constant stress and anxiety, or depression
- frequent melt-downs and emotional outbursts
- feeling let down by others
- fear of putting yourself out there in the world
- needing to micromanage or control others
- perpetual grieving, not being able to recover from loss
I could go on and on.
. . .
News flash: Most humans have never really felt loved.
Unless you feel loved most of the time there’s no diet, no exercise boot camp, no intermittent fasting plan, no weight watchers membership, no meditation mantras, no weight loss program in the world that’ll work for you in the long run.
Sure, some diets help people lose weight— but unless your love tank is consistently full (meaning: you feel unconditionally accepted, seen, and adored most every day— just because you exist), you’ll always be leap-frogging from one diet to the next, wondering, “Why can’t I do this? What is wrong with me?”.
. . .
The key to lasting weight loss isn’t keto, veganism, peganism, or whatever the latest fad eating-regimen is. The key is love— unconditional, down-to-the-soul kind of love.
Once you have that, everything else falls into place.
PS. OK, so now what? You know you need to feel loved if you want to have success on your weight loss journey. But how do you get that if you don't have it?
Fortunately, love is a skill. And skills can be learned. So that means love can be learned. Here are a couple suggestions to get you started:
- Read Greg Baer's book, Real Love.
- Participate in activities with groups of people who have a positive outlook on the world. Not surprising, positive people generally feel more loved, and have more love to share.
- Join the next cohort of the More Heart, Less Body program, where you'll learn what unconditional love really looks like while you take an amazing, life-changing weight loss journey with us. If you're interested in learning more about that, click here.