Every day in my mentoring practice, I speak with (mostly) women who are utterly confounded, overwhelmed, and exasperated by the excess weight on their bodies. They are doing #allthethings, and yet still can't zap those 40, 50, or more pounds. Last week, I spoke with a woman who described her exhaustion this way:

I'm exhausted just typing it. I pointed out that she lacked motivation and discipline, and therefore results, because of the astronomical amount of energy she was expending managing her feelings of shame around her body weight. On things that, by her own admission, were "supposed to help," but weren't helping quite so much that her struggle (and her fat) were obliterated. And the struggle cycle continues.

ALL of those "tools" had been recommended by her therapist. If this sounds familiar, may I suggest three "wellness" practices you can drop right now without guilt, because they're actually doing you more harm than good? And may I suggest one more that is going to change your life?

1. Journaling

This might sound counterintuitive at first, because we're programmed in Western culture to believe quite the opposite, but it's true: if you are someone with excess weight to lose, you don't actually need to spend any more time in your head than you already do. You're already spending way too much time there. It's where you live; because you certainly aren't living in your body. You're actually completely disconnected from your body. Journaling ("processing" the shitty events of your life on paper) is little more than regurgitating the putrid, decrepit contents of your consciousness and then re-consuming them and expecting them to provide more nourishment this time. It's like a dog going back to its own vomit. I see this time and again with my clients whose desire is a leaner, lither body: they mistakenly believe their feelings need to be memorialized forever and ever in order to be worked through or experienced or digested or whatever it is they're hoping to achieve through the exercise. This is not so.

What we create when we put pen to paper is incredibly powerful; in the energetic, quantum field our human eyes cannot see, and in our manifested, physical world. For this reason, journals should be used for the new, the inspired, and the creative. Not for rehashing our old, tired psychic dramas.

2. Food logs

Are you already seeing a pattern here? The whole point of food logging is to go back later and re-read your logs. How is this helpful? Let me ask you a question. Are you fat? I was fat for a long time. Not ever in all my years of being fat did I ever not know that I was fat. I didn't need to reread alllllllll the things I ate in a day to be convinced that I was eating too much. Do you need to keep a record of all the times you've eaten "bad" foods and how much? Awful terrible. The only, only, only behavior this reinforces is obsession with food. You will never experience freedom this way. And freedom is what you're after, isn't it? Stop logging your calories, stop counting your macros, stop reinforcing the idea that food is some kind of beast that needs to be tamed or else it will bleed you dry. The beast is never outside of us.

3. Psychotherapy

You can dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and dig and DIG into your wounds forever. There are lifetimes of content there for your subconscious to serve up for endless dissection for purpose, meaning, and "sense." No matter how much we dig in, we won't ever come out on the other side. And, this is America and we do have a healthcare business, (I would argue it's more of a sick-care business) and there are plenty of people who will gladly accept money (yours and the insurance company's) to stand at the edge of your hole and echo moral support while you dig. I don't know of a single person who finally freed up their physical bodies after years of talk therapy. Where are those success stories?

By now you see that the wellness industry gears its solutions for the "problem" of fat directly away from the channel which most needs intimacy: the body. This is to say nothing of the spiritual wellness community who would include NLP, EFT, affirmations, visualization (think yourself thin!) past life regressions, and probably a whole bunch of other techniques.

That's not to say that you can't get there using one or a combination of any of these. Sure you may, after giving years away to the process and creed of struggle: seek, and do not find. But you likely won't, because your power and energy will remain tied up in trying to manage the beasts of your psyche while keeping you far, far away from the space with which you truly need reunion: your body.

Get Out of Here

Instead of spending one more moment inside your head, get outside. Ideally with your feet bare. Wiggle your toes into the sand along one of our beaches. Take a walk in your neighborhood while the sun rises. Or on the boardwalk. Garden. Go for a massage. Dance, even if it's in your own home. Stretch. Practice taking deep breaths. Pull up a beginners' yoga class on YouTube or attend one in-person. It doesn't need to be "exercise," it just needs to provide the experience of actually BEING in your body. Sometimes this means just sitting with your body and allowing it to send you impulses about what specifically it craves right now, be it food or activity. And then you must honor what it is that your body has told you. This is how we complete the loop and provide feedback to our internal guidance system that yes, we are here in our body and we do care.

Once we start to rebuild our intimacy with our bodies, it becomes exponentially easier to listen to the guidance they are constantly providing, about all dimensions of our lives, and to recognize it as truth. The process of uncovering and incorporating these truths into our consciousness is what affects massive transformation and ends struggle for good. It is not easier, but it is infinitely more powerful.

The internal guidance system I run my life, business, and mentoring practice on is intuition. High octane, clean, clear, piercingly-truthful direct insights that are always streaming from the vast wellsprings of information available to each and every one of us at any given moment. I'm teaching a masterclass on how to activate your own unique internal guidance system, so you can end your struggle with struggle and do something that probably doesn't even seem conceivable right now: have a highly pleasurable, freely-flowing experience of your body, and your life. Register for your virtual seat here, and click here to visit my website for more content like this.