We love our personalities. We feel our personalities have taken a long time in creating exactly who we want to be in this lifetime. It took time and our awareness of who and what has influenced us to take root in our subconscious minds as means of survival. Those elements that created our personalities are reactions to experiences and the influence of our parents reactions to shared experiences. These shared experiences helped create core understandings of who we are in relation to all mankind’s awarenesses. We needed to be mindful of not just our immediate relationships for survival however, but of our societal and cultural topics and directives in order to “fit in”, be acceptable not just to our families but to our peers.
This meant two things, first that we had to survive somehow and make certain that we would be acceptable to our immediate families, core group of friends, and peers. This was important for our emotional, mental and societal survival. We needed to pay attention to all of these influences so that we would have a deeply held emotional connection with our families first, then friends and then society in order for us to learn how to experience life together congruently. That meant sharing our parents emotional responses to life events and experiences in order to make them want to be with us more, be responsible for our care and help us survive. As we grew up we started to differentiate our personalities from our parents around ages eighteen to twenty years old. But we already had a foundation personality set in place that would determine most if not all of our responses to our life events and experiences. The second point here is that at that time in our lives we had to acknowledge that we now as adults had choices to make about how we were to react to our life experiences. Those choices would dictate our numerous responses in the future.
This means that you have already gone through that stage for in which you could’ve sought to change certain learned parental behaviors from your past. If you didn’t, you might not have learned how to cope with certain stressors or been averse to anything that might have been perceived as similar to your parents reactions to life events as being a rebellious teen would’ve clarified that for you.
That being said what would we do without our personalities? By now you may have had a certain amount of successes in your life, work, or relationships because of your personality traits and your perceptions of how to live your life. In other words everything might be going well and therefore not necessarily having a need to change or fix any of it. Except to say that if you are more than ten pounds over weight you might need to acknowledge that you could change a few things for the better. This often implies that perhaps we’ve never taken stock of who we are or are becoming, instead we might have missed a few signs or signals that certain parts of our personalities might not be in alignment with our soul’s truth. When this happens the body mind goes into action and appropriately responds to the lack of truth as an interior stressor. So not only are we trying to abate exterior environmental, relationship, or work stressors, our bodies are invisibly fighting interior stressors whose presence imply weight gain is necessary to our limbic brain for survival.
We haven’t even begun to understand the impact our ignorance has when it comes to weight loss. What, if we in fact, we remain idle in our efforts to lose weight and be healthier and fitter. What if there were other repercussions to our overweight or obese conditions the likes and kinds of which have a far more devastating effect on our lives than we could’ve possibly imagined. We know on a conscious level that we are erroneous when we’ve gained so much weight that climbing stairs become a difficult prospect, or when we avoid any physical activity because we will sweat regardless of its difficulty. But what happens when others, our families or our own children who depend on us for guidance, protection, healthy lifestyle choices, are observing and perhaps needing us to help them physically somehow, what happens to them when we ignore our weight and fitness level? As I had mentioned in my last Facebook Live event I knew of one man who understood the importance of staying fit and losing weight to attain a level of health that could literally help to save others lives. In his case it was his own son who had drifted into the middle of a lake in a boat with no oars and tried swimming back to shore to his father but nearly drowned until his father a massive man of 450 pounds swam out to save him. That part was easy as the water was buoying his body until he reached land then had to struggle to pick up his young son and run up a hill to an ambulance that had arrived at the edge of the lake. After he managed to bring himself up to the crest of the hill and deliver his son to the EMS people he collapsed on the ground out of breath and barely able to stand swearing he would never be in that position again. He was going to lose weight no matter what because he couldn’t stand the idea that he wouldn’t be able to save his son’s or anyone’s life ever at the weight he was just then.
Yet our society and cultural trends are telling us all to just love ourselves as we are, which I respect and love. However, we can’t love ourselves if we have somehow failed to save another loved one’s life. Were we to be incapable of performing a physical task in order to make our children or parents healthier, happier, or help them survive a serious event like a catastrophe or be able to give CPR consistently for the expected 15 minutes or more until help arrives. These are the goals we should really be focused on not whether or not Lizzo feels it’s better to love yourself at any size. This is not an article about fat shaming here, I’m the least likely to fat shame since I’ve spent over thirty years empowering the overweight or obese to lose weight and happily be healthier. What I am trying to do is raise awareness of the fact that although our society is trending towards more “full bodied” models, upsizing clothing, and pushing feel good messages to overweight teens, we in our society are remiss if we continue to miss the point of our weight loss efforts and their ultimate impact on others lives. Let’s make that the priority instead of just looking great in the mirror. Would you still claim that being overweight can be justified? Would you feel differently, if you did have an experience like my 450 pound friend? I can say from experience of being twenty pounds overweight that I would not be able to lift my 10 year old son if I had to run him to an ambulance up a hill. Why would anyone voluntarily follow social trends in defense of being overweight when we could all do our best in God’s eyes to be able to help each other survive a catastrophe if we needed to.
It is also true that we often overlook all of our own faults in lieu of changing anything as our minds will often prevent us from making changes in order to maintain a sustainable status quo. This is of utmost importance to our limbic brain’s perception of survival. That means that our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits are always subjugated in favor of our limbic brains ability to protect us from all stressors even the ones we are not consciously aware of. When we make ourselves aware of this concept or premise a whole new level of awareness is in view and can make all the difference in the world. This is why I made it a topic of importance in my third Facebook Live video. No one wants to admit that perhaps their personalities are somehow wrong or preventing them from their perfect weight and health. We would all like to consider ourselves to be awesome with respect to the personality that we have created because we, in general, like ourselves.
This automatic response to who we are can however, prevent us from seeing with clarity what needs to change in our responses and behaviors when we hope to eventually lose weight naturally without diets, strenuous exercise regimes, or any other unnatural means. This was made apparent to me over and over again in my thirty some years in weight loss and fitness. Clients “falling off” their diets, sneaking carb loaded snacks or treats, others attempting to stop eating fats or sugar only to replace those with foods that had those ingredients hidden in products labeled “healthy” or “no sugar” and had other even worse ingredients. When we are looking to change a habit it is apparent to me that what we have assumed to be helpful has historically been horribly wrong for most if not all people everywhere. This is true especially when a physiologist or behaviorist tries writing a book about changing “mindset” or that weight loss is an “inside job” because all they are relying on are a subset of psychological rules that pertain to the psychology alone and not the soul or the original purpose of the limbic brain. We believe that are all well within our rights to protect our own personalities and choices through the use of ignorance or denial in order to maintain the sought after status quo.
This meant a few things more that I had observed over my career in fitness and weight loss over thirty years. First that most if not all of my clients were oblivious to their own iniquities that were preventing them from losing weight. In fact, they would defer to saying things like “my body is failing me”, or “my hormones are out of whack”, or “my metabolism is too slow for what I want to accomplish.” Over the course of time we often rely on negative behaviors when our personalities fall short of our own expectations. Meaning we needed to better understand who we are instead of reaching for sugary foods, fat filled or carbohydrate filled foods as a means of coping with said stressors from the beginning of time. If we were aware of our own iniquities and were given tools to better understand our soul’s will’s worth’s intentions for us, our personalities, work, relationships, and life we wouldn’t be in the situation our country is in today.
We give a lot of power to our society and culture to tell us exactly the how, what, and why we need to lose weight however, none of it might be true for you specifically. This was my original intention to use personality and schema questionnaires in my client assessments for fitness and weight loss. It was imperative that I point out those iniquities to help my clients conscientiously acknowledge what needed to change in their personality in order for them to adapt to newer behaviors without a lot of effort. In that pursuit I was surprised to find that I had an even better answer than what traditional cognitive behavioral therapy could provide.
All of this by the way was God’s way of making it nearly impossible to die early or not survive this world as a result of parental or societal negligence. However, all of these stop-gap measures were created within the mind of humans at a time when fitting in meant physical survival at all costs. Now however, physical survival is implied so our realities of a need to fit in are in auspice of trends, and not a way to live. Those trends are dictated by corporations, western medicine, and societal misconceptions of what it is to survive weight gain, disease, and our cultures perception of what is considered to be acceptable behavior. Take for example how the violence in online gaming is alliterated through actual events in today’s news, as sad as that may be, it is true. Violence has increased exponentially since online gaming has come into view as a new trend of horrific “entertainment”. The same holds true for the “Twiggy” era, which spawned a generation of eating disorders and drug abuse as children and adults of all ages attempted to look as thin as she did.
If we had paid attention to aligning our souls with God’s Will on earth and not placed our power and authority in our societal and cultural beliefs, we would never have to go on a diet, rigorous exercise regime, take supplements or get erroneous surgeries. We would in essence, be living in harmony and peace with what our limbic brain knows we need to not just survive but to live a happier and healthier life. Again, there is no manmade way of availing ourselves of neural or limbic peace. Everything created by man irritates the peace of the soul of the limbic brain and its neural balance. This is why I created a brand new online course that will address this very issue and much more. Stay tuned as I will be giving more and more information on this topic soon.
If you would like the link and password to my Personality Quiz please send me your email and drop a note asking for it. I don't always see the subject of the email request. Thanks
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