Questions part 5 final

The same area of this question is tied in with the next two:
Are you comfortable expressing your feelings to others?
And Are you sensitive and concerned for the feelings of others.
Very often we are afraid of expressing how we feel to others in case they do not like it and react adversely. 

It is very common in marital situations where a couple can drift into a situation of mutually setting up taboo zones that are never approached, and they are not even explicitly decided between the couple. 

There is simply the awareness that x sparks off y so it's a lot safer and less troublesome to suppress x so it doesn't trigger the y reaction from the other. And what happens, not theoretically, but in reality? 

Two people become inauthentic cardboard cutouts, behind which the real individuals hide, never to expose themselves or become vulnerable.  Real people are vulnerable people. Life doesn't come with absolute guarantees, but if your self esteem is high then you know that it is safe to allow yourself to be vulnerable – especially in the unique setting of a marriage. This is also called living with passion. Most marriages can drift into such a stale and moribund state  of lifelessness and habit that it becomes stressful in its own right – bored to death. 

Again, it takes two to tango, and opening up the communications between a couple allows both to emerge from behind the cardboard cutouts and draw a bottom line on the past.
Now is now, ahead has yet to be written. But live in the past and it completely masks the present and obscures the future into invisibility other than as a sense that it will be more of the same.

Do you let go of unhappy thoughts?

 We are creatures of habit and this includes our thinking. We tend to run old thoughts over and over again on neurological tapes loops and every time, they produce the same old feelings. 

It's a very impotent position to put yourself in and a relatively simple one to disconnect. Memories are permanent – they are encoded in our neurology for life, but what isn't fully realized is that you can disconnect the emotional content of a memory so it becomes a dry husk and simply fades back in long term memory never to trouble again. 

No one can oblige you to relinquish these old and rancid thoughts that keep repeating. But it is worth asking yourself what useful purpose they serve in your future new healthier, lighter life. Keep this rag bag of mischief and it can sabotage and block your progress.

Do you understand that mistakes are only `misses'? 

This is another thing that is relatively new training over the last 50 years or so.
Particularly in schools onwards. Mistakes are seen as failures and failure has the ring of doom about it. 

Dieters are well accustomed to the idea of failure as diet after diet doesn't give them what they want. Mistakes are seen as evidence of incompetence and defectiveness
and something to be feared at all costs. 
And this fear allows in something called the curse of perfectionism that says that only 100% counts and anything less is regarded as failure. 

Which is humanly impossible and guarantees that life will be a very rocky ride where fear and anger will alternate at the steering wheel.
There is no such thing as failure, there is only an outcome'. 

In other words, whatever action you engage in will produce a result or outcome. Nothing more, nothing less. The outcome will either be very closer to the one you anticipated or some distance away. 

This is NOT a failure, merely an indication that you need to course correct, adjust what you did and try again. Then assess that outcome and, if needed re-adjust what you
did, based on what you learned from the previous attempt. Until you have the outcome that closest matches what you sought originally.
Now, this isn't some sort of wacky way of glamorizing `failure' . It is, in fact, the way humans MUST learn. By making mistakes and trying again. And this is something most people have long forgotten because far off in childhood, you learned by trial and error and making mistake after mistake.

 As for instance when a youngster first learns to crawl and then to walk. It doesn't happen overnight; it can take weeks or even months before the repeated efforts and mistakes pay off, and the outcome is that mum has mobile trouble around the house.
 All human creativity is based on making mistakes a learning mechanism, assessing what was done, adjusting and repeating in a zig zag of progress towards a desired outcome. This is inflexible and wired in.
Unfortunately the crazy modern world tries to over-ride this and install the virtues of failure! Or rather install the virtue of regarding mistakes as failure and therefore a bad thing. 
We are trained to buy into this nonsense and it allows fear to dictate what we attempt or do not attempt, and in the process it sets the seeds of an unwanted outcome because we are trained to live without passion, and we are trained to `try' without any underlying belief that we can `do'.

Do you take responsibility for your actions? 

Another major area of minefields, quicksand and thin ice. Many avoid any hint of possibility of accepting responsibility by devolving this onto others. It was my genes, my background, my environment, my parents, my lack of opportunity or talent and so on. Rubbish. 

All this plays a part. However, it is also transformable by you. You are born, you are raised within a family, and then the real business of life begins as an independent adult. You have no responsibility for the circumstances of your birth, or the quality of your parenting – these were circumstances outside your control.

 But however good or however unpromising the early beginning, as an adult, you get handed the keys to the door of life, and after that, it is your responsibility and no body else’s. Unless you hand over responsibility to other people and other circumstances to take over responsibility for your life.

 In which case this is a choice, a perfectly valid choice, and the outcome is that you get the level of results you chose for. Others are running your life for you, and you accept what they produce. Or not! You can make a quantum leap into changing things around by accepting responsibility for yourself – your thoughts, your feelings, your actions. It is a change of mind set, and no, it doesn't create an instant new wonderful life in the
twinkling of an eye and a flash of sparks. 

It is once again setting a foundation stone upon which you can learn to build, by the human process of making mistakes and accepting full responsibility.
And finally:

 Do you allow yourself to be different from others? 

This ties in with some of the other questions and yet enlarges them. 

Are you afraid to be authentically you? 

You are uniquely different to every other human being on the planet, after all. If you do not like and respect yourself, then its likely that fear will draw you into the line of least resistance, and that means the herd instinct. You will be afraid to live as an individual and will be more likely to allow your life to be dictated by what everyone else does, and follow trends. 

Those who have worked step by step on their emotions, their feelings, their behavior, their outcomes will have a full and satisfying life and they will have a healthy level of self esteem. So they will not have a problem in saying `I am me and I am proud to be me' and stand out from the herd. They won't permit others to dictate their thoughts and feelings, they won't permit others to prevent them from living a full and happy life, and they won't permit others to put them in a nice safe box where that risky business of life is excluded.
 
RECAP
 
Before you even think about the practical matters of how to lose weight, and the nutritional factors that go with it, these are the sorts of questions it is essential to ask yourself – and answer fully, and if necessary on paper.
1)What new difficulty will arise when I lose weight. Will I encounter a problem that lay behind a valid need for the protective barrier of fat?
2)What old pain or trauma have I neglected to work through or heal?  How often do I eat to avoid the feelings associated with old issues?
3)If there is one thing in my past that I most want to avoid, what would it be?
4)What uncomfortable feelings do I avoid the most – specifically naming the feelings. How often do I use food to numb or change my feelings?
5)How comfortable will I be with the new thinner me?
6)Do I appreciate all the things I can do and I am capable of doing? Do I appreciate my own uniqueness as an individual?
7)Do I understand the importance of being my own best friend, and irrespective of religion, understand the message of love thy neighbor AS THYSELF?
8)Do I pay attention to my feelings, listen to them and try to
understand what they are telling me of value?
9)Am I comfortable openly expressing my feelings to others or do I hide my true feelings for fear of rejection, adverse reaction or not being loved? Am I sensitive to the feelings of others?
10)Do I let go of unhappy thoughts or do I tend to store up greater and greater levels of emotional baggage of the past that serves no useful purpose either in the present or in my future?
11)Do I understand that mistakes are not failure but just learning feedback, and nothing to be afraid of?
12)Do I accept self responsibility as far as my thoughts, my feelings and my behavior are concerned – as an independent adult?
13)Am I willing to allow myself to be different, and not to be
fettered by what everyone else thinks or does?