If you are carrying excess pounds, you could be holding onto them for a reason. Once you recognise what you are doing and why you are doing it, it is more than likely that you will have the will to get rid of the baggage that you don’t want. You also have more chance of doing this if you learn to love your body.

Let me give you an example of why someone carries excess weight. The other week, as I marched through the shopping centre of a nearby town, I noticed a teenage girl that I’ve labelled ‘Warrior Woman’. As she owned the steps at the side of Barclays Bank, my eyes snapshot the image that she flung at the world. It was indeed that of an aggressive machine.

Although she was probably only about eighteen years of age she had a vast bulk and even though it was a cold day, her thick arms were bare to demonstrate that they were covered in tattoos. Her hair was scraped back in a ponytail on top of her head like a sumo wrestler and she sat as if she was ready to spring at any moment.

I saw behind the image she was portraying to the world, this was a kid that had been dragged up in the school of hard knocks and probably worse. She carried her bulk to say to the world ‘don’t mess with me.’ This could either be to ward off unwanted sexual attention that she may have suffered from as a child or it could simply be that she wanted to look ‘hard’. Whichever it was, it was definitely a form of protection in her mind.

The problem with carrying such excess weight is that it has a catastrophic effect on people’s health. However, that is not the point of this offering of mine.  I want you to take a moment to consider this –  if you are carrying more weight than you would wish to, have you any idea why you are doing so? I’m not talking about treating your symptoms here so don’t say that it’s because you eat too much and exercise too little. I want you to get to the root of the cause so you may need to delve very deeply into your sub conscious.

There are many reasons why folks sub consciously choose to carry excess weight. A major one is to fend off sexual attention. This can either be someone that was abused as a child and sees it as a way to keep predators at bay or it can someone that has had bad experiences as an adult. Whatever the situation, as a grown up you can tell yourself that you are not willing to sacrifice your health because of people that can’t keep their hands or any other part of their person to themselves. You need to learn to love your body so much that shedding the pounds and getting healthy is your priority. When you get that positive about your body then you will have no problem telling folks that shove their unwanted advances upon you to butt out.

Another reason that people sub consciously carry excess pounds is so that they can become part of the back ground and be accepted.  At this point, anyone that suffers from excess weight will be exclaiming that they get all sorts of nasty digs about their weight and it stops them from being accepted. Again that is surface behaviour.

If we dig deeply, being overweight, often means that you are not considered competition in the work place or in the dating stakes so others let down their drawbridge because they don’t consider you as a contender.  In other words, they overlook you but accept you and may even befriend you because they don’t see you as a threat. Subconsciously, you may have realised this and found it a comfortable place to be.

However, if you learn to love your body, it will be more important to you to have a healthy one than to blend into the background. You will also find that true friends love you whatever size you are.

There are other reasons why people hold onto excess weight but I can’t cover it all here. The reason I wrote this post is to get you to think about why you might do this and also to consider if you learn to love your body, would you then stop hoarding weight.