The REAL reason you can’t lose weight.

Can’t lose weight? What you need to know about energy, stress and weight loss.

Most of us have had times in our lives when we’ve been down in the dumps. Where nothing seemed to be going right, food cravings and stress are off the charts and it feels like a downward spiral of weight gain, sickness and lack of motivation to do anything.

We’ve likely also experienced the opposite at some point in our lives. We’re full of joy and happiness. Everything is going right. We find ourselves eating better, going out with friends, and our body sings along in harmony and maintains a stable, healthy weight without you even trying.

The differences in these two all come down to our personal energy.

What Is Personal Energy?

Have you ever met someone and instantly had a “feeling” about them, good or bad? Ever had a gut feeling about something and later realized it was spot on? Whether you knew it or not, your body was interpreting and reading the energy of a person or situation. The same can happen when someone full of life and positivity seems to instantly perk you up and make you happier. 

Nearly every culture throughout time has had a notion about a person’s inner energy. In Chinese culture, this energy is referred to as Qi / Chi. In the West African culture of Yoruba it is known as Ase. Hindus know it as Prana. Today, modern science is finally catching up with these ancient concepts and the research is continuing to mount on this topic. There are even hospitals that are introducing energy work like Reiki into their programs. Don’t hold your breath for this happening anytime soon in the United States, but other more progressive countries are utilizing holistic medicine with the modern with great success. 

In my own health and fitness journey, energy work, clearing, and balancing have been a huge part of my healing and is also a very large part of the work I do in the health/fitness/weight loss space.

Personal Energy and Physical Health

Our body is a complicated, interconnected network of systems. For example, our lymphatic system is powered by our movements throughout the day and helps carry toxic buildup out of your body which in turn helps every other system in the body work more efficiently. Evolution has fine-tuned us over millions of years to work in a beautiful synchronistic manner. The downside of this is it works both ways. If something good is happening in the body or mind, it positively affects all the systems, and the same goes for something negative or harmful happening.  If our eyes see something stressful, like a coiled snake, it triggers an instant surge of stress hormones that send countless systems into overdrive, preparing our body to run quickly, to jump high, and to avoid the danger. This is great for a person struggling to stay alive in a hostile environment, yet today’s hostile environment comes in the form of digital screens and cubicles.

The problem is that in our modern times our energy levels are constantly sent into flux by non-life-threatening challenges. We’re stressed by Twitter posts and by arguments with our boss, not by hunting wild animals and surviving the elements. Even our favorite TV shows impact our energy and mess with our internal stress responses. The same stress hormones get released through our systems on a daily basis damaging our energy levels in big ways. These responses interfere with our microbiome and digestive system, tense muscles and raise blood pressure, and a cascade of other systems and everything suffers. The number one thing your body will NOT do under a stressed or compromised energy state is drop an ounce of body fat! It is probably starting to make sense why so many of us struggle with anxiety, stubborn weight gain, health issues, and depression.

One more key thing to know about energy, is we don’t just get negatively impacted by our current stress. Our bodies hold trauma, stress, and emotions from all the way back to our childhood. This is called somatic tension, or how the body holds onto emotions/trauma. These old traumas are basically what control our current thoughts, behaviours and emotional states today. Since we generally aren’t even aware of them consciously, energy work becomes our greatest tool for healing. In massage and bodywork, when someone is doing a therapy that helps release these held traumas and stresses (somatic release) it creates massive breakthroughs in health! Sometimes this results in weight just dropping off someone, depressing lifting, and anxiety melting away. This is one of the main reasons craniosacral therapy is my therapy of choice (to give clients and receive for myself) for releasing old emotional baggage that is hijacking our potential.

Personal Energy and Emotional Health

Since you are starting to understand far better just how entwined our physical and emotional health are we can now focus on some solutions. That’s likely why you’re reading this! 

The mind and body are one. We know even the simple act of lowering our facial muscles into a frown will sink our mood. Conversely, the act of smiling creates noticeable differences in our emotional state. So, the key to lasting health and weight loss is to address the emotional body FIRST. The calmer and more serene our energy levels are, the more relaxed and rich our emotional health becomes. Being happy and releasing stress is easier said than done though, right? Read on…

Personal Energy and Weight

Researchers used to believe that calories in equaled calories out. This concept is the most fundamentally flawed in the fitness industry for sure. This is why people hire a trainer, go on a crash diet, exercise like crazy and get drastic “30 Day Results” but never maintain that weight loss and always rebound to a higher weight. This approach is a recipe for disaster because it combines too much stress, energy imbalance and emotional chaos which we just learned is the opposite of what we want. 

Those in energy medicine and holistic health spaces, understand that our bodies are far more complicated than simple mathematics. Our microbiome can digest foods in different degrees of efficiency depending on the exact combination of bacteria present, how healthy they are, and how the food is presented, our hormones play a huge role in metabolism, and we now know emotional states do as well. 

Let’s talk cravings for a min, because one major reason dieting and deprivation backfire is because of the way they stress our systems out and cause our energy to go haywire. It’s human nature to crave sugars and fats when our energy levels and moods are low, or when stress is high. Our body is trying to quickly bring us into a ‘safe state’ and nothing works better than simple sugars like glucose and fructose.  On the other hand, when we’re feeling joyful and at ease, we’re often able to make healthier choices about what to eat and our bodies assimilate that food far better as well. So when we crave sugar we aren’t just “self-medicating” through a challenge, we are literally following biological cues to help the body manage stress. Extreme diets and excessive intense exercise = stress!

To bring this all together, energy is everything and the physical energy and emotional energy we manage everyday effects each intricate part of our mental and physical health. The fitness industry has everything backward and is responsible for a lot of damage when it comes to its approach to weight loss and health, The more we understand about how powerful our personal energy is, and how we need to nurture and care for that energy, the better it bathes our physical health, emotional health, and weight. This is exactly why Spiritual Fit Chick exists, and exactly why I am so passionate about helping teach people tools that actually WORK, don’t cause long term damage and help facilitate effortless weight loss and vibrant health. 

In my 4 week program, I cover all the basic energy regulating modalities and help customize each tool to fit the individual. We discuss things like tapping, meditation, mindfulness, self-love and other simple techniques that require only mins a day, cost nothing to practice, and can be done anywhere, anytime! No 2 hr CrossFit classes, 800 calorie diets, detox skinny teas or ironclad willpower needed! 

Sound like what you’ve been waiting for? Click here to schedule a free call and discuss if this program (or my other coaching options) is right for you! 

Love & Zen

Holly