Weight, health and the power of intention

Words KATRINA STEEL

Many people struggle with weight loss – both achieving it and maintaining it. Unfortunately, many will achieve weight loss only to find they yo-yo back to their previous weight or even end up heavier than they were before.

Why is this? Weight loss is as much about mental health as it is about physical health. There is a significant psychological and emotional relationship between emotional avoidance and selfsoothing with overeating.

People binge eat for a variety of reasons, such as avoidance, reward, self-soothing, protection and self-harm. Medical issues aside, eating disorders, including overeating, are often ‘feeling disorders’. To achieve sustained weight loss, the relationship between the person and their emotional body needs to be explored.

By building a more compassionate, empathetic and supportive relationship towards the self, people find instead of avoiding the discomfort of emotions by overeating, they can learn to hold discomfort compassionately and be with the pain – achieving self-love as opposed to self-harm.

As a psychotherapist, when working with disordered eating, I aim to uncover what is at the core of emotional pain in order to access a specific ‘cognitive reframe and healing intention’. Our emotions are the signal and, therefore, the access point for healing. Anger may call for forgiveness, hurt call for compassion, and emptiness call for connection.

By identifying the blocked emotion, you can identify the unmet need and align yourself to health and healing. Good Intentions & Co stickers keep the focus on the healing intention and keep you accountable to what will help you.

This method of intention is backed by neuroscience. By aligning focus and attention on your healing intention, you train your brain and bring about change.

In their book, Words Can Change Your Brain, neuroscientist Dr Andrew Newberg and communications expert Mark Waldman state: “A single word has the power to influence the expression of genes that regulate physical and emotional stress”. Meaning exercising positive thoughts can quite literally change one’s reality.

They further explain: “By holding a positive and optimistic word in your mind, you stimulate frontal lobe activity which is responsible for moving you into action. The longer you concentrate on positive words, the more you begin to affect other areas of the brain.”

Over time, given sustained positive thought, functions in the parietal lobe start to change. Consequently, this changes our perception of the self and those around us. Ultimately, this grants us the ability to shape our reality.

By being mindful of the words you think and speak about yourself, you shift your intention, aligning thoughts and emotions with words and actions, empowering you to intentionally create the desired change in your life.

Good Intentions & Co stickers have 33 words to align your attention towards your intention.

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