A new way to lose weight: Being joyful
What if you were told that, to lose weight, just be joyful? It sounds backwards, but perhaps choosing the emotion we seek to feel if we were say “skinnier” before the physical state manifests is the sure way to allow it to happen with ease. Many words swirl around the topic of weight loss, and for many those words wreak of resistance: hard, difficult, fail, sacrifice, restriction, can’t, or short-term. What if reshaping one’s body engendered different words, ones that elicited images of flow, ease, light, joy, deliciousness. If each word were the title of a weight-loss plan to follow, I know which ones would be the most popular!
When counseling my clients on weight loss, I ask them to verbalize their reason for wanting to lose weight or even better, to “reshape”. These reasons may include to look better, to be healthier, to be able to play more sports, to be able to hike with friends with ease, or to reduce joint pain. Ultimately, though, the real reason lies in the idea that, in addition to all of these achievements, one FEELS better about themselves. You feel more capable, more successful, more energetic, more desirable, more alive. In identifying this emotion, the feeling we want to achieve, then we can make choices that allow that feeling to become more and more prominent. Yes, perhaps getting a cookie might make us feel joyful in the moment, but we typically feel better if we choose something other than the cookie. Why? It’s not really about the cookie. It’s because no matter what the alternate choice is – a piece of fruit or a handful of walnuts or a square of dark chocolate – it’s the act of choosing differently that makes us PROUD of ourselves. Choosing in alignment with our best selves feels, well, the best!
How joyous do you feel without the bloat and the constipation and the gas? Without the sugar high and crash? Without the heavy feeling of a rock in your stomach, a meal that weighs you down? Most importantly, how joyous do you feel when you keep your promises to yourself? Instead of shame and pain and heaviness, you FEEL elevated and aligned. You feel the food assimilating easily into your body and your energy level projects this – even-keeled, light, and vibrant. You feel free.
In this moment, reading this sentence, you can imagine yourself choosing something more nourishing than the cookie, or just choosing differently. Perhaps you bite into a crisp apple, dipping it in smooth, creamy cashew butter and inhaling the warm dust of cinnamon. Or maybe you crunch the lively green leaves of a raw spinach and watercress salad, the bright lemon livening your tongue and the flake of sea salt gliding over a bursting grape tomato. Now, I think you can see how both the classically “healthy” meal and the cookie can seem equally enticing. And that’s the thing - when you’re joyful - they are!
What if you ate in a way what gave you true JOY instead? Food is not inherently good or bad. Sure, refined sugars are not nutritious like a grapefruit is, yet a little something sweet on occasion can be a fun, enlivening treat. We assign feelings and labels to food, then punish ourselves for choosing the “wrong” thing. What if you tapped into your feelings around food, and noticed which choices would make you proud? Pause before choosing and ask yourself: how do you truly want to feel? And which decision makes me feel that way?
Align with your highest self, tune into your feelings and how you want to feel, and make your decisions based off of THIS – not how many calories or grams of carbohydrates are in something, or whether something is good or bad. Try it - then watch and see how your body transforms, all in a state of JOY.
