By Freeman Michaels
Americans are the most overweight population in the world today, but I believe Americans are starving. We are starving for fulfillment, and we just keep consuming, but it never satisfies our hunger.
An estimated two-thirds of adult Americans are categorically overweight or obese. Four years ago I was one of them. In this country it is most often referred to as a national health crisis, but I believe it is just as much an emotional and spiritual crisis. I suspect much of the nation has lost touch, as I had, with what really “feeds” and fulfills them.
I was forced to face my personal obesity crisis one night in a hospital emergency room when I believed I was having a heart attack. Stress caused by the collapse of my real estate development company had fueled a significant weight gain. As it turned out, I wasn’t having a heart attack. But I was definitely receiving a “wake up call.”
For me, food had gone from filling a physiological need for sustenance to being a psychological attempt to fill an emotional and spiritual void. Food had become a temporary distraction from the stress and anxiety I felt at work. Food was also a way that I coped with all of the feelings that came up around the effect the economic crisis was having on my sense of self.
Facing the collapse of my business and the possibility of personal bankruptcy, my sense of my self as I had constructed it had died. With a wife and three children I knew that I needed to address my weight issues before I really did have a heart attack and literally died. I realized that I needed to take a good look at my life.
That realization led me to develop a new way to release weight. When I learned to be compassionate toward the part of myself that holds the shame, blame, or guilt, I began to release the weight of unresolved issues—and actual weight release was the result. Now, more than 70 pounds lighter, I have found that I don’t have to feed my hunger for fulfillment with food anymore.
Below are 12 keys to personal fulfillment that are invaluable for healing your “inner hunger” and releasing weight.
1. Accept that everything is perfect. When viewed accurately, your life is a synchronistic series of events. You have been on a magnificent journey to get to this moment.
2. Acknowledge yourself for the choices you have made. You have faced a lot, and you have done well. The very fact that you are reading this suggests you are courageous.
3. Recognize the genius in the skills, talents, and gifts you have.
4. Track your experience and develop an inner observer—watch the negative beliefs that cloud your perception.
5. Identify misinterpretations based on shame, blame, and guilt.
6. Release judgment as you learn to view your experience and the experience of others from a higher (and more accurate) perspective.
7. Reframe your experience from a place of compassion and look for the learning opportunities in what you may have previously regarded as negative.
8. Surrender your life to your higher purpose (or God, if that language suits you). You are on a special path intended to uplift you and those around you.
9. Support yourself by surrounding yourself with allies. Practice positive self-talk. Remember that being effective involves finding support for things you are not naturally good at or need help with.
10. Celebrate accomplishments—yours and others’. Maintain an “attitude of gratitude” for the blessings in your life.
11. Course Correct—gently recognize when you are on a course that will produce an outcome you don’t necessarily want, and gracefully adjust the course you are on.
12. Teach others to accept and love themselves by modeling confidence, peacefulness, and compassion.
We are a consumer nation. We always need more because we have bought into the notion that we are fed from the outside in. We are NOT, nor can we ever be, fed from the outside in. Only by discovering what really fulfills us will be ever be satiated and content.
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Freeman Michaels will be leading a nine week, on line, Weight Release Program through the Well-Being Expo starting January 22nd. Click Here to connect with more information about the event, about Freeman, and about the amazing process that he has developed.
