Visualization for Weight Loss -The Gabriel Method

Emotional Obesity

must change and your feelings about the relationship must change as well. You simply must be able to feel safe around everyone in your life. This is your birthright, and if you don’t have it right now, you must reclaim it. Start by acknowledging your feelings. They are real, they are important, and they must be expressed. Talk to people that you do feel safe around until you understand your feelings well enough to be able to express them to your abuser in an effective manner. It’s possible that both of you may need counseling or mediation with a third party to work out the issues. Sometimes, just recognizing that your fear is causing you to be fat is all it takes to resolve emotional obesity. It may not make your relationship difficulties go away, but it will stop mak- ing you fat. Physical and Sexual Abuse In the case of physical abuse, when your physical boundaries are being violated, fat creates a boundary and a shield between you and the abuser in the same way that it does with emotional abuse. Fat literally puts the abuser farther away. Sometimes, in the case of sexual abuse, when you get fat enough, the abuser loses all interest in molesting someone who is hundreds of pounds overweight. Many people have related to me sad stories of their child- hood abuse and how, once they became so fat, the abuser moved on. In this case, the fat really did protect them. Unfortu- nately, it also left a nearly indelible imprint on their subcon- scious. I say “nearly” indelible because it does not have to be indelible; there are things that you can do to permanently remove the association between being fat and being protected. If you have been abused in the past, your unresolved feel- ings might still be influencing you, causing you not to trust people and to have emotional obesity. Later in this chapter and at the end of this section, we’ll talk about some ways of re- educating yourself so that you can once again feel safe and protected. You can liberate yourself from the shackles of emo- tional obesity.

33