Spirituality and Weight Loss – Episode #005

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Welcome to the soul science nutrition podcast where you’ll discover that when it comes to your health, you’re so much more powerful than you’ve been led to believe. And now your host, she’s a holistic nutrition and lifestyle coach, chef, author and Yogi Christine Okezie
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Hello and welcome to episode five of the soul science nutrition podcast. I’m Christine Okezie Thanks so much for tuning in today. Today I want to dive into the topic of spirituality and weight loss. So we know that as multidimensional beings, our longterm health depends on nourishing the psychological and emotional components of our being. So the question becomes how does spirituality fit in? Well, very easily actually see in my journey I found that there is indeed quite a natural overlap between emotional health and spirituality when it comes to our food and weight issues. So many of the practices recommended for improving emotional health are really similar to those that are part that cultivating our spiritual wellbeing. Essentially the link is awareness. Both emotional management tools and spiritual practices cultivate deep levels of self awareness, which bring forth powerful shifts in how you relate to yourself and the life around you.
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And how you relate to yourself is probably the most important factor in your health and wellbeing. You see, I believe it’s the stories and beliefs that we have about ourselves that shapes the course of our lives. A genuinely holistic approach to health works with these unseen non-physical parts of our nature, if you will. A lot of these strategies work with rewiring and reprogramming the subconscious mind, but ultimately what I found is you find yourself in the spiritual realm, the power of cultivating a positive state of mind with tools like mindfulness, gratitude practices, yoga and meditation comes from the ability to broaden your outlook, to experience a connection to something larger than your 3d self. You step into a more expansive dynamic relationship with yourself, your body, and the life around you. So let’s take spirituality. Well, spirituality is all about seeking a meaningful connection with something bigger than yourself.
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And when this happens, it can result in positive emotions such as gratitude, inner peace, contentment and acceptance. The very same emotions it turns out that are intrinsic to our healing when it comes to our food, weight and body image issues. You see, embracing our challenges from a spiritual perspective is acknowledging that both the biology of weight and the nature of human behavior are shaped by our consciousness. What do I mean by that? I mean the collective experience of our thoughts, our feelings, basically the full range of activity that occurs in our mind and in our census. So first and foremost, wait from a spiritual perspective means healing our issues at the true root cause. By redirecting our attention toward the nonphysical aspects of our lives, we can begin to see our food and weight issues as an invitation, an invitation to go deep into our inner world, underneath the surface and rediscover something that’s been lost.
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What is that? It’s a sense of wholeness, enoughness, a sense of true belonging, essentially a capacity to rest peacefully within our own bodies and our minds, our food and weight struggles become an expression of this lost connection. There is often this pervasive void, you know, conscious or unconscious, but it’s a feeling like something’s missing in our lives. Something unfulfilled, a level of unsatisfaction that and all this gets expressed in the negative behaviors like overeating, overworking, anxiety, perfectionism, other compulsive habits that easily give way to our food and weight issues. And no matter where you are in your experience with diet culture, we are all in touch with society’s obsession with weight loss and self-improvement that’s fueling this toxic collective belief. You are not enough. So this is the first way that spirituality plays a powerful role. Cultivating awareness and appreciation for your spiritual nature. Your inner self fosters a deep level of self acceptance that cuts through this trance of not enoughness.
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Connecting to a greater source of intelligence within yourself allows you to get underneath the negative mind chatter and where you will find this loving, supportive voice. This is the voice of your true self. We all have access to a wiser, more evolved version of ourselves and she readily dissolves the shame and the belief that we need to fix our bodies and ourselves at all costs in order to be loved and lovable. When we can find meaningful connection to something greater than ourselves, we cultivate a spiritual wellbeing. And this is what dissolves an unhealthy overidentification with our body, body, shape or weight. This powerfully shifts how you relate to yourself, your body, and the world around you in a health enhancing way. And what’s important to see is this is not an intellectual exercise. It’s an embodiment process to start seeing yourself as more than a number on your scale, more than a clothing size, more than a physical body.
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And from this vantage point, we find freedom, freedom from the body and weight issues. We change how we relate to ourselves and our bodies in an empowering way, which gives us the clarity and the resolve to take care of ourselves in meaningful ways. On the spiritual path, you begin to realize that you already have everything within you to fulfill your goals, which makes you far less susceptible to diet gimmicks and wellness hype. We shift the focus away from losing weight and constantly thinking about what to eat and what not to eat. It’s truly freeing. Annexed, developing your spiritual self helps you see setbacks and struggles not as failures, but as opportunities for self reflection and learning, learning from mistakes and doing better. This cuts right through that perfectionism. That’s all too often the downfall of our best intentions to lose weight, eat better, et cetera.
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Another way that spirituality is a game changer are the contemplate of practices, meditation, prayer, conscious breathing. All of these being still being out in nature. All these activate the healing physiological relaxation response. The state of the body where the body and the mind are in balance where digestion, nutrient, assimilation, hormone health, metabolism are all optimized. Meditation and prayer cultivates self-reflection, so it’s really this beautiful opportunity to change deeply grooved behavioral patterns and make us less emotionally reactive, which is so key to lasting habit change. Bottom line, weight loss as a spiritual journey literally stops the stress of being at war with ourselves and our bodies. For so many of us in diet mindset, caring for ourselves can feel like just another thing we don’t have time for, but when we bring a spiritual lens to the process, we access a devotional energy. For our self care.
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Moving us away from this toxic punishing diet mindset spirituality adds this element of reverence, respect for our bodies and the source of motivation and willpower to eat better. Take care of ourselves comes from respecting our bodies and frankly a desire to live in alignment with our authentic self. This is powerful fuel for change and healing. With this reorientation towards our inner world, you become much more attuned to the messages of your body. Weight loss as a spiritual journey cultivates your intuition. It lessens your overdependence on that thinking analytical mind, that dualistic thought nature that we have good, bad, all or nothing. You learn how to trust your instincts more and a beautiful gift comes from this heightened capacity to hear the messages of your body, to be able to distinguish, for example, emotional hunger from stomach hunger. When we develop our spiritual selves, we can heal issues around trust, trust within ourselves, and it’s oftentimes this lack of trust that’s holding us back from being in our full power, being able to take choices that we know are right for our bodies and our life.
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Now a powerful element of spirituality is the concept of surrender. This recognition that you can hand yourself over to the universe, which always has your back and your highest good in mind. Why is this so healing? Well, when it comes to our health and weight loss goals, setting goals and making plans, it’s important and wonderful, but have you ever noticed that sometimes you’re actually getting in your own way by fixating and obsessing and needing to control? We get caught up in this fear of failure and self criticism. Again, that perfectionism mindset, it’s this way of being that’s at the core of us not having the health that we desire. Cultivating spiritual surrender as a path to healing our food and weight issues allows us to perceive all the beauty in our lives that exists right now and seeing any obstacles along the way as detours for our personal growth, redirecting us towards the parts of our life that need the greatest healing.
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Being open to surrendering our struggles and worries opens us up to guidance within ourselves. It trains us to stop abandoning on ourselves and being present for what’s really happening in our psyche, in our body and in our emotions. Wait as a spiritual journey has an emphasis on compassionate self exploration. We invite a nonjudgmental curiosity to our food and weight issues and explore important questions like what is my body trying to teach me? What am I avoiding or neglecting by focusing too much on my weight? What beliefs do I hold about myself and are they really true? What am I really hungry for in life? See, when it comes to weight, it’s not really about the number on the scale, the body shape we think we should have. It’s about the feelings and the state of being that we believe we’ll have. Once we have those things, what we really want is freedom, contentment, joy and love and all those things won’t come from changing your body or anything on the outside of yourself for that matter.
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They come from connecting to an awesome, an infinite source of energy within yourself so you can see it as your true nature, your higher self, universal consciousness or God. And I definitely recognize how that can be a triggering word for some of us. So I like the acronym for God. Grace on demand. How does that feel? So spirituality and weight loss allows us to find the sacred, the sacred in our relationship with food and our bodies. And this my friends is the secret to peace and freedom and wellbeing. It’s really all about recovering and remembering who you really are beyond the weight you are. As the wonderful quote says, a spiritual being, having a human experience. Bottom line is that loving your body and knowing that you are enough exactly as you are is a hundred percent the cure for any weight loss problems that we’re having.
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Everything always just boils down to loving ourselves and the ability to maintain that connection with ourselves is a daily and ongoing practice. A practice that works on our connection from our mind and our heart, and when we can feel connected to that higher power, that divine intelligence within us, the amazing feeling of safety and trust becomes our super power. We open up to self-acceptance and in this way we say we’re ready and open to change. We get out of our own way in this regard. So remembering our true nature is really what this is all about, right? There’s no need to change or conform to anyone else’s idea of what you need to be or what you should look like. So on so many levels, healing our food and weight issues evolves us spiritually, putting us on the path for deep healing and transformation and the evolution of our full human potential.
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We connect to a higher purpose and authentic way of living that helps us move in the direction of choices for our greater good and away from choices that don’t serve us. Navigating self care is no longer about should and supposed to guilt and blame the answers that we find in our stillness practice in prayer and meditation out in nature. Whenever we’re able to quiet that ego and busy problem solving mind, the answers come. The answers come from that infinite source of energy, that quiet wisdom in your body that makes it impossible not to love what you feel, your true essence. So like I said, caring for yourself becomes not something that you need to force or make time for. It actually becomes an act of devotion. You start to see everything that you do for yourself around food, movement, sleep, rest, all forms of nourishment, and this begins the gift.
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The gift is the opportunity to fall in love with taking care of yourself. And this exactly why I love the work that I get to do with my clients. You see, when you open up to the spiritual dimension of your health challenges, you gain the peace and contentment that happens from coming home to yourself and this readily dissolves the obsession with food and weight. We awaken and live from the knowing that the healing that we seek is always within us eating and moving in a ways that align with ourselves on the emotional and the spiritual level. Bottom line, my friends is that spirituality in weight loss, they go hand in hand because there’s no more guilt. There’s no more shame about good foods and bad foods. We stop obsessing about calories, carbs, and fat grams. We learn to prioritize true wellbeing, prioritize true nourishment, and our bodies respond with harmony and balance. So my friends weight loss as a spiritual journey is learning to love yourself wholeheartedly and caring for your whole being, body, mind, and soul in ways that are in alignment with the real you. So I’m Christine Okezie Thanks again so much for listening today. If you liked the show, please hit subscribe and feel free to leave a review sending you lots of love, light peace, and great health. Bye for now.