If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Lose Weight?: Tools to Get it Done by Brooke Castillo

Author:Brooke Castillo
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Book Surge
Published: 2006-04-25T22:00:00+00:00

It’s not what they did. It’s what you believe about what they did that hurts.

Belief Tool #2

We Have Many Illogical Beliefs that Drive Us

A belief gives us a feeling of certainty about what things mean and who we are. If you want to know what your beliefs are, look at your life. Your life is your beliefs manifested. What we believe encompasses what we do, what we say, and how we react.

Anything you want to change in your life must be changed from the belief level if you want the change to be permanent. You cannot just treat the symptom; you must dig deep and get to the belief that caused you to get there in the first place.

For example, if you believe that you will always be overweight, it will be very difficult to lose weight permanently. Beliefs and reality like to be reflective of each other. When reality starts to contradict a belief, a tension is created in our life and this tension makes us uncomfortable. Many of us have no idea when this is happening; we just think we are stressed. At this point, we have two choices to reduce the tension: change the belief system or change the reality. Because most of us don’t realize we have the negative belief, we have no choice but to sabotage our reality and gain our weight back in order to be back in line with what we believe.

This is a very common dance most of my clients experience. It’s not until we get hold of the belief and change it that we find any permanent weight-loss results. It’s very important to remember that many of the beliefs that drive us are completely illogical. When we discover the things we believe in, we might be tempted to disregard them because they seem so silly. This would be a very big mistake. Many of our belief systems were formed when we were small children and when we didn’t have the emotional maturity to understand why things happen to us.

As children, we tend to blame ourselves for everything because we don’t understand the complexities of other people’s lives and experiences. We might believe that it’s our fault if our parents fight all the time. We internalize the blame for the negative circumstances because the alternative of being completely out of control is unthinkable. We then believe that if we were better behaved, our parents wouldn’t fight anymore. At least, we feel as if there is something we can do about it. We search for ways to cope and survive by trying to generalize what everything means. We take two unrelated things—our behavior and our parent’s marriage—and we connect them. When our parents later divorce, we might internalize that and believe we were not good enough to keep them together.

The bad news is that many of us still have beliefs we developed when we were too young to know any better. We don’t have a class in adulthood where someone comes in and

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