We all have bad habits that we want to change but don’t know how to stop. When it comes to things like giving up smoking or losing weight, “The Problem” is rarely the real problem and we can waste a lot of time trying to correct a problem that is not really the problem.
Let’s take the example of losing weight, people often spend years fighting fat and are still overweight. They blame all of their problems on being overweight. Why do you think this is?
The excess weight is only an outer effect of a deeper inner problem. Primarily the real problem in this situation tends to be fear and a need for protection.
When we feel frightened, insecure or “not good enough” many of us will put on extra weight for protection.
Yes, you can spend time berating yourself about being too heavy or feeling guilty about every bite of food you eat but isn’t that a waste of time when all that serves you to do is feel more frightened and insecure and consequently put on more weight for protection.
So why focus on the excess weight or a diet when really what you need to look at is the mental diet – dieting from negative thoughts.
Then and only then, when your mind is congruent with loving yourself and everything about yourself can you truly break a bad habit.
I’m sure in some peoples mind they are saying “but, I can’t love myself because I am too fat” but really the truth is that they are too fat because they don’t love themselves.
If we look at this from a high level we can see that what we are really talking about is our thoughts about ourselves which in turn create a feeling like fear. And guess what a thought can be changed.
Even self hatred is only a hating thought you have about yourself. So it stands to reason that we choose our thoughts and if that is the case we can choose to change them.
Our thoughts are essentially created from our beliefs and those are mostly set up during childhood and we then perpetuate them along the way.
This means that we have to take ourselves back to time when those beliefs were formed, understand what was set up and change our attitude toward the past.
The kicker is that to release the past we must be willing to forgive and generally speaking the very person you find it hardest to forgive is the one you need to let go of the most.
Forgiveness means letting go, giving something up. It has nothing to do with condoning behaviour. We do not have to know how to forgive, just be willing to forgive.
In a nutshell breaking bad habits is really about loving, accepting and approving of ourselves exactly as we are, then everything in life works.
The key to doing this is to remove the cognitive limiting beliefs and that is actually what stops people from creating change as they find it too challenging to do this on their own.
That is where working with a therapist can assist you through this process and Kinesiology works well with the mental/emotional aspects of a problem.
You can find much more information on living a holistic lifestyle in these free magazines and on our YouTube channel.
Sara Carter
