To Lose Weight – Express Your Sensual Self

by Boyd Jentzsch

Sometimes in the hurry of being a mom, a wife, a person with a job, (ditto for men) you forget that there was a time when you felt sensual. You wanted to feel sensual. Certain people made you feel sensual. YOU WERE SENSUAL.

Let me be clear about what I mean when I’m talking about sensual… of course there is a sexual component to sensuality, but that is not the core of what I am talking about here.

SENSUALITY IS ENJOYING THE PLEASURE OF YOUR SENSES. ALL OF THEM.
It is the acknowledgment that your body was designed – created – to feel multiple kinds of pleasure. Whether tasting or smelling, whether touching or seeing, whether hearing or combining them all in unique ways (a glass of wine with your favorite music), your senses led you to explore, enjoy and seek new experiences. And to indulge in old pleasures.

The pleasure… of knowing what day it is
So, back to being so busy you don’t know what day it is… a lot of that pleasure gets lost when you live “a busy life.” It is not that the stimulus for pleasure is lacking. You just don’t “stop to smell the roses” any more. Right?

It’s not that you designed your life to be so crowded that your needs got lost in the shuffle. And in part, it is not because you didn’t see it coming. But the needs of so many others – bosses, friends, husbands, parents, kids – all needing, craving your attention to do something for them, YOU REALLY DO GET LOST.

As your needs get submerged into the daily grind, you not only lose sight of the day of the week, (“Is it Thursday? If so, I need hubby to get the garbage out to the street. Oh, wait, that’s tomorrow”) you lose contact with your senses.

You eat on the run. You more often smell food to make sure you can serve leftovers to the family than to enjoy the aroma. No, your senses, DOING THINGS FOR THE SHEER PLEASURE OF THEM, are on hold while you weave your way through the day.

Facebook and the hoped-for adventure waiting to be lived.
Guilty pleasure? Facebook for an hour before you go to bed, while your bedroom partner is watching TV. You need that – that connection. Connection not just to old long-lost friends and assorted family members. You need that contact with your “old” self – your “self” when life was an adventure waiting to be lived.

In sharing with your old friends and family online, if you pay close attention, you are recalling the feelings, the pleasures, the strong mental pictures, the tastes and especially the smells of those days long gone by. You use the words of sensual pleasure describing old scenes (he smelled of Old Spice, those freshly cut roses were wonderful, you wished you had Grandma’s great pie crust recipe). Whatever your fond collection of memories, many are accompanied by aromas. Right? So, what aromas are you collecting these days?

Well, you are now living the adventure you worked so hard to get, way back then. What you didn’t count on was it doesn’t feel like much of an adventure any more, does it? Challenging. Stressful. Tiring. Satisfying. But, adventure? Nah.

Somewhere along the road to living your dreams you got sidetracked. Something got missed. Not that what you have now is bad. Just that it’s not entirely what you expected. SOMEHOW ALONG THE WAY YOU DIALED DOWN YOUR SENSUAL SELF. No time for it. No energy for it. No space for it to enliven your day. Certainly no place for your sensual self to bloom and discover wonder in the ordinary – nor experience the extraordinary.

Gaining weight while missing your dreams
Over the years, while you were dialing DOWN your sensuality, you probably were dialing UP your weight. If you take some time to fully reflect (of course you may have to wait until late Wednesday evening before you get a break to be able to do so), YOUR WEIGHT AND YOUR SENSUALITY ARE CONNECTED. Moving in opposite directions. Perhaps you may not have thought about it that way. But, it’s true.

Your body is a mirror to your accumulated life experiences, to be sure. But your body is also a projection of your future – what you expect from it in your next years. If you knew you were going to be running a marathon this time next year, wouldn’t you change your body dynamics today?

If you knew you were going to be alone, partnerless, would you begin to focus more on your body now? If you know nothing big is likely to change in your life, what’s the moving incentive to change your body today?

That is not to say that you neglect your body. Nor that it isn’t important to you now.

Your body reflects your expectations
It’s just the realization that your body reflects your future expectations more than you probably realize. AND AT THIS POINT OF YOUR LIFE, YOUR BODY HAS TURNED DOWN ITS EXPECTATIONS OF FEELING SENSUAL AGAIN. But that can be changed.

If you want to lose weight, and keep it off permanently, your sense of sensuality is going to change – has to change.

Why? BECAUSE YOU NEED TO MATTER TO YOURSELF to lose significant weight and keep it off. You need to discover your sensual self, explore and expand it. Your body is more than just something that needs to drop a few pounds. You have to focus on the beauty that you may have ignored for too long. Because sensuality is the route to finding the deep motivation to stay on track to lose significant weight.

Gaining your weight loss motivation
If your only pleasure in weight loss is seeing the scale move down a little at a time, you are going to suffer motivational set-backs. Especially if you are on one of those diets that make you eat like a rabbit and sacrifice your favorite treats (don’t they all?). You are going to feel deprived. Denied. Restricted. Limited.

WHEN YOU ARE FEELING DEPRIVED YOU NEED TO BALANCE IT BY INCREASING YOUR PLEASURE ALONG THE WAY. It is the antidote you need to keep the poison of weight struggles from spoiling your life.

Losing significant weight is not as easy as just consuming fewer calories.

Losing a lot of weight, which can take months to do it and still be healthy, is a challenge to your will power to stay the course. No matter what program you are on, your emotional commitment is going to take a strong beating at times. The ONLY way to get through that is to have already begun a path of rewarding yourself with pleasures each step along the way.

Find pleasure – lose weight
Otherwise, when the going gets tough (and it will at times) the pleasure you will most likely seek in those weak moments is to overeat – to binge on exactly the wrong foods (other than Bugs Bunny, no one gorges on carrots). Plus, you just set yourself back several weeks in your weight loss plan. With that blown, further discouragement sets in, and the cycle WILL repeat.

To repeat my oft told joke grandpa told me:
Lady walks into a doctor’s office. She is hitting herself in the head with a hammer. She says, “Doc, it hurts when I hit myself in the head with a hammer. What should I do?” The doctor says, “Quit hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.”

So, I’ll repeat what I just said to drive home a very important human insight:
The ONLY way to get though long term weight loss is to have already begun a path of rewarding yourself with pleasures – real life pleasures – each step along the way. Doing the reverse, you set yourself up for failure.

Your subconscious mind needs to associate weight loss with pleasure, not pain. That doesn’t happen on its own. Weight loss is not its own reward…not for long, anyway.

The preventive measure is to learn, re-learn, permit, allow yourself to find pleasure in living, smelling, touching, tasting, seeing, and being loved again. And to do it now, to make it a habit BEFORE you experience the long haul of trying to lose significant weight. And if you have already started that journey, you’ve got some catching up to do.

You need to feed your body’s senses, if you are going to deprive your body of calories. Open wide, and drink-in your sensuality.

The emotional process of losing weight, the path to weight loss motivation, to losing a lot of weight, is going to have to go through you being willing to be sensual once again. Joyfully accept your sensuality.

Your sensuality will lead you to weight loss. A lot of weight loss.

Don’t believe me. Try to lose a lot of weight and keep it off without increasing your sensuality. Oh, yes, you’ve done that already. We all have. All of us. How much weight did we each re-gain?

Now, it is time to justify you taking the time, and effort, without guilt or apology, to smell the roses, eat great chocolate, to experience once more – to express once more – the perfect kiss.

How do you control your appetite? How do you lose a lot of weight…?

…Express your sensual self.

HEART PLAN — WEIGHT LOSS SUCCESS Begins in Your Heart
© 2014 Boyd Jentzsch. All rights reserved.

By special arrangement with the author, CHAPTERS from the book HEART PLAN are published here regularly. HEART PLAN is not about what you eat. It is all about how you FEEL – your sense of SELF – when you are trying to lose weight. Sign up to receive the new Chapters as they are published here.

-by Boyd Jentzsch

Boyd, a recovering Attorney, turned to weight loss research 20 years ago when he lost his mother to the lifelong effects of obesity. He has spent the ensuing years searching the science, and formulating a comprehensive metabolic map of the body — the only complete map of its kind. The map reveals the causes and effects of obesity and related chronic lifestyle diseases. It shows the only proven pathways to preventing and losing excess weight. From that unique foundation, he and his team created a weight loss education program that has helped tens of thousands to lose weight and keep it off. Plus, they created innovative and fun fitness and nutrition education programs for elementary school children, proven to reduce the early bio-markers for childhood obesity. HEART PLAN is a collection of his observations over the years of the emotional impact and motivational challenges nearly everyone faces when trying to keep lost weight off permanently.

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