Chapter 159: Clean diet and exercise as a shortcut to self-acceptance, self-forgiveness and love.

Healthy body weight is a result of combination of right food and right activity levels. Right food and right activity levels balance out the chemical household of the body.

Once chemical household is balanced – negative thinking subsides.

Once negative thinking subsides – need for self-destruction subsides as well, self acceptance surfaces, followed by self forgiveness and eventually self love.

Self-destruction takes more trivial appearance than we would think. It is not about jumping off the cliff, it is more about punishing oneself into oblivion year-in-year-out, for something one does not even remember. It is being said that we gain weight to protect ourselves from being hurt again. I do not share this view. I hear with my heart that it is not about protection but about punishment. There is something we think we have done wrong, more often than not in our childhood or early teen years, and therefore we have to be punished.

I give you one example. A girl is being dumped by a guy she is madly in love with. After that she becomes overweight. Common opinion is that this weight is there to protect her from attention of other guys, because she does not want to be hurt again. As opposed to that I feel she gained weight to punish herself for her not being worthy / able to keep her former love. However I also feel it is less about our love relationships, but more about relationships with our parents, something from really early childhood where we tend to take responsibility for everything what happens in our family.

So there is something we think we have done wrong and therefore we have to be punished. What punishment am I talking about? Mainly suffering kind. What kind of suffering? Let’s say total love deprivation to start with. One would take as a given that a) one is not worthy of being loved (and will be surprised when people show affection, thinking that there is something wrong) b) one is not worthy of being helped (and therefore has to solve each and every issue on her own) c) one is not worthy of being given any gifts. The list goes on.

Love deprivation is followed by total exhaustion. If nobody loves one anyway because there is nothing to love her for, why not turning oneself into a working horse? Why not exhausting one’s body completely to add some physical suffering to the emotional one? This is where chronic stress comes in, followed by a series of burn outs. Nowadays there is nothing like a single burn out followed by recovery. No. There is one burn out on the top of another. A burnout-black-hole-behind-event-horizon kind of situation.

Stress takes tremendous amount of energy. One needs to compensate. But one is suffering, remember? So no clean energy supply here. Instead alcohol does well. Cigarettes do well. Processed food scores high. Energy we receive from these three items is BORROWED which is great for the purpose of punishment anyway, because after initial energy kick we have to give this energy back with … interest, which leaves us even more in debt.

A body punished in this way can get overweight. In fact it almost always does. It is easy to emphasize self acceptance and self love as remedy against excess weight. But there is no short cut like this. The real short cut is to clean up one’s diet (a must) and to add exercise to one’s daily routine (a choice) in order to balance out one’s chemical household, which in its turn will clean up one’s mind of punishment driven thinking. And once this punishment driven thinking subsides, free space emerges for shy self-acceptance to enter, followed by self-forgiveness and ultimately self-love.

Everyone is worthy to be loved and helped. This is an axiom. There is no need to defend this statement. Everyone. Everyone deserves clean diet and exercise.