What is mental weight and why do you need to “lose” it? Because it’s probably causing you to keep on your actual weight.
Some of you need to hear this: the crap that’s in your head is worse than the weight that’s in your body.
Limitation, defeatism, fatalism, anxiety, baseless opinions, unnatural habits and vices.
These are what’s holding you back. The “weight” you carry in your head.
Here’s how to lose both.
How to Get Rid of Mental Weight
Let’s get something out of the way before anything else.
The mind rules the body.
If your mindset is in the wrong place, your body will suffer.
There’s a reason why they refer to stress as the silent killer.
It all comes back to the mind. The only problem is, many of us never learn how to tame and control the mind.
In fact, the majority of people in America are dealing with unprocessed trauma, mixed up opinions, contorted worldviews, defeatist attitudes, and truckloads of stress.
Mind management is not something that is ever emphasized in our society. We’re just told to “wing it.”
This is a recipe for disaster.
Oftentimes, being overweight is a sign of an unbalanced mindset.
This may begin for any number of reasons, but the origins of obesity rest in the metabolism, and metabolic imbalances almost always stem from an unbalanced lifestyle.
Not eating the right foods, being too sedentary, not having good sleeping habits, never working the muscles properly.
These are all unnatural habits that are created by our society. They are considered “normal,” but are terrible for the body.
Unless you are blessed with a naturally high metabolism and you don’t overindulge in processed foods as a kid, these habits often lead to eating disorders, obesity, and other ailments.
You carry a massive amount of mental weight with you wherever you go, but in order to heal you have to let all that nonsense go.
This is extremely important. Entire books could be written on this subject alone.
The unnecessary crap inside your head is killing you.
Your grudges, your embarrassments, your failures, your opinions, all of it.
None of this stuff is healthy for the body, and leads to disease when you internalize it, as we often do.
So before jumping into some convoluted diet plan, be sure that you’re not overly invested in unhealthy thinking patterns and attachment to the past.
The best way to let go of mental weight to to first identify any attachments, obsessions, or negative thinking patterns that you may have and then meditate on releasing them.
Mental to Physical Causation
When you begin to look at everything holistically, you can see how everything is connected. Your choices and thinking patterns can and do affect the physical world around you.
This can be something as simple as subconscious sabotage, which is very common.
Subconscious sabotage is when you continue to practice self-hate in your mind even while you attempt to make physical changes to better your life.
A perfect example would be attempting to eat better or workout in order to lose weight, while continuing to call yourself overweight, ugly, trash, weak etc. inside your head.
Thoughts have consequences, because thoughts are indeed actions.
Every thought that appears in your head impacts the physical world, regardless of whether or not you believe they do or not.
Repetitive thoughts are even more powerful. The more you tell yourself something, the more it becomes cemented in your reality, as long as the subconscious believes it to be.
What can you take away from this?
If you catch yourself in a negative thinking pattern, you have to bring your awareness to it and smack it down.
Don’t abide negative thinking inside your head.
You should treat the space inside your head as sacred. Don’t honor negative, angry, or abusive thoughts, even if they are toward yourself.
This negativity is not only abusing you, it’s abusing the people around you.
Energy always ripples out. Thoughts manifest into physical circumstances that hinder other people, so it’s not just your problem.
These mental intentions that become physical realities have physical consequences.
For example, someone who is physically unhealthy has a much higher chance of dying early, which means their family members have to deal with their passing.
Your life is not yours alone – we are all connected by billions of threads that constitute the web of our life, who and what we touch.
Mentally sabotaging yourself can lead to despair, anger, and negative impulses in others.
One thing sages teach is to be mindful of your own energy. You must take responsibility for the thoughts and energy you bring into the world.
By doing so, you create a much more positive environment for yourself and others, thereby creating the space necessary to heal and become healthier.
Lose the Weight Naturally
What do holistic health practitioners recommend for anyone looking to lose weight?
Natural practices.
This includes eating more fruits and vegetables and less artificial / processed food, getting more sunlight and sleep, and working your muscles.
The same remedy works for mental weight.
To lose it, you must engage in naturalistic practices.
Right thinking, right living.
Your mental baggage was created by living unnaturally. The only true path toward healing this is by living naturally.
Sounds simple in theory. In practice it may take time, but it is not as difficult as you may believe.
No, you don’t need an expensive years-long weight loss plan. No you don’t need to see a therapist. No you don’t need some exotic medication. Or whatever the new $299 TV infomercial workout device is.
You need to live naturally. That’s it.
Here’s a small regimen to get you started.
- Start every morning with a tall glass of alkaline lemon water.
- Tear muscle 6 days a week. Even if this means 1 good push up or 3 heavy bicep curls at first, you need to start tearing and rebuilding muscle.
- Take ten minutes out of every day to practice pranayama meditation. You need to learn how to release false or negative thoughts as well as how to breathe properly.
- Eat less: processed sugar, processed carbs, meat, dairy, and hydrogenated oils.
- Eat more: tropical fruit, berries, green leafy vegetables, and plant protein (pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, peas, etc.)
- Eat smaller meals, drink more water throughout the day to regulate hunger, snack on fruit.
- Don’t eat 3 – 4 hours before bedtime.
- Practice mindfulness. Observe the world around you consciously, raise your awareness.
This alone could be considered the ultimate guide to weight loss. It really is that simple.
The key is making the connection between your thoughts and actions.
As soon as you wrestle down your thoughts successfully, losing the physical weight becomes that much easier.
The easiest part of losing weight is the actual physical process of losing weight. The hard part is the mental blocks and barriers.
Being overweight is only the product of a slow or malfunctioning metabolism. That’s effortless to cure if you know anything about human biological diets and basic anatomy.
The real hurdle to weight loss is getting past the mental barriers. The ingrained habits, the thinking patterns, the worldviews.
Correcting your metabolism is as easy as eating less processed food and eating more alkaline and water-soluble fruits, while working out a bit more.
What isn’t easy is making those diet corrections, detoxing from bad habits, really working out and not just jogging on a cardio machine for fifteen minutes.
Real change often takes real work, but you have the means. Everyone does.
The power to heal starts in the mind. Lose the mental weight, and you’ll lose the physical.
The founder of Digital Sages, Matt has an extensive background in self-mastery and has authored several books on the subject. His goal is to demystify important esoteric subjects and help people transform their lives through self-awareness and personal empowerment.
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around your blog posts.
Thanks. If you have any questions regarding mental health as it relates to weight loss, please feel free to ask!