Fattening Roles (Not Rolls) to Drop

What roles are you playing and how does that affect your weight?

“In many cases, happiness is a role people play, and behind the smiling façade, there is a great deal of pain”

Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

This is a common role in the US where sadness and anger are not acceptable. We ask “how are you?” or “How’s it going?” but we don’t really want an honest answer...it is really a long way of saying “hi.”

We can become so immersed in this role that we aren’t even aware of our own unhappiness. Sometimes this role is magnified by other roles we take on like, “The good girl” or the “perfect wife and mother”. These are common roles for women who struggle with their weight.

We want to be liked and approved of...Tolle teaches that this is the ego—a very natural response. The trouble with this desire is that we often allow it to overshadow our true selves. When our efforts to please others, or to be perfect, or to be liked, cut us off from our true inner nature we will at some point rebel...and either punish or comfort ourselves someway...or both.

For me, this was accomplished by overeating and drinking. I was not being authentic, so my falseness and my dishonesty was quite stressful... I use food to calm myself and I got fat too, as a way of proving to myself and the world that I wasn’t perfect.

Tolle tells us to acknowledge our feelings, even the ‘negative’ ones. In the teachings of Abraham we are also taught his. Don’t pretend to be happy if you are not.

Figure out why you are having these feelings. Is there a situation that is influencing the emotion? Can you do anything about it? Can you remove yourself form the circumstance? If you cannot literally remove yourself then perhaps you can do it mentally.

The events around us do not CAUSE our emotions. We are 100% responsible for them. If we choose to keep thinking negative thoughts about an event and therefore feel bad about it...well, that’s up to us.

Our challenge is to keep the situation—the actual facts—distinct from our thoughts about it. Our thoughts lead to our feelings, you see?

Stuffing ourselves with food in order to suppress our emotions does not allow us to separate from them. In fact we will, consciously or not, create more negative feelings as a result. This is the key reason emotional eating leads to obesity.

By breaking that pattern and observing our emotions and the triggers of them we can free ourselves from the unhappiness that pushes us to overeat.

continued tomorrow