APPETITE, ANOREXIA NERVOSA, BULIMIA NERVOSA, OBESITY

Starting with the throat where it all starts.

What is the throat and what is the functions of the throat and what does it represent / symbolise to us in our life. Well lets look at what it does. The throat has two basic functions, namely it takes in air for our lungs (and therefore for our life – it is about taking in life), the other important function is that it takes in food and liquid for us and feeds or sends it to our stomach or nourishment for us (or looked at differently – it symbolises the ability to absorb what we need and to let go of what we do not need).

The other important thing is to see where is the throat situated – it is the bridge between the heart and the head or seen differently it is between the mind and the body. Often neck problems here directly stem from this conflict between the mind and the body or the heart. But that is a separate issue from this discussion. So the throat has two major roles;

In this article my focus is mainly on nourishment and related issues.

So lets start with food entering the mouth – here it is under our control.    We take it in and we chew it – if there is something wrong with it then we spit it out if we so choose – But once it is swallowed we have now surrendered it to the automatic process of digestion. This is where we have surrendered control to the stomach. The stomach sits in our energy centre of will power, personal power and assertiveness. So here are issues to do with personal will, and assertiveness. Therefore issues like gagging on food, or feeling as if we are forced fed, are both conflicts of personal will.

In exactly the same way as we swallow food, we swallow our reality – thoughts, ideas, feelings, events, belief systems and experiences. Swallowing is about allowing change to happen. We can resist change by closing the throat – gagging – or we can trustingly open our selves to change. When we struggle to believe something we say we cannot stomach it – in the same way then to swallow something is that we believe it. Therefore when we swallow our reality we are therefore accepting it into our being. If we don’t like what it is that we are swallowing, we may have to swallow hard or it manifest in out body as a swollen or sore throat. So here again we can ask some pertinent questions, namely;

We may not want to swallow our reality, or we may hold back too many feelings, particularly if they are unacceptable to you or not appropriate. Such repression creates great tension and stress and can affect the rest of the digestive system. We need to get in touch with our feelings so that we can give them a voice to be heard !!!!!! In other words we need to be able to speak our truth!!!

So lets look at the stomach

So now we have finally swallowed the food and it slips downs the oesophagus to the stomach to continue the digestion process. The throat takes in food and liquid for us and feeds or sends it to our stomach or nourishment for us (or looked at differently – it symbolises the ability to absorb what we need and to let go of what we do not need). So lets ask some interest questions at this stage, namely;

Having a healthy digestive system means that we are able to receive from others, and to give to ourselves.   This is important as will be shown in the next section below.
With out this balanced giving and receiving there can be a constant craving, a longing to fill hidden needs, or the opposite a strong denial or rejection of those needs. As we all know, the stomach is the place where we harbour worry – the digestive enzymes churning with anxiety – until we can no longer stomach what is happening. Invariably, most of us, use food to pacify what is happening in the inside, namely that anxiety!!!

So that brings us to our appetite

The way that we see food and how we treat food is the way that we see and manage our emotional nourishment. It is a direct reflection our what is going on, on the inside. The act of eating and swallowing is symbolic of taking in and absorbing our reality. When we have a bottomless pit feeling in our stomach – this is shown as a huge increase in appetite. Children often reflect this as they often eat incessantly in a unconscious way to get a word of praise from the parents because the love that they want is not readily forth coming.    Or put in a different way – a devouring or demanding appetite indicates a personality who devours information, experiences or relationships, yet may be missing the insights or wisdom they offer by devouring tem so quickly.

A lack of appetite can indicate a desire to retreat from the world, not to take in any more. This often is a  reflection of a relationship break down – here we may go for days with out food while we are nurturing the hurt on the inside – indicating an unexpressed need for love, attention and companionship.

Of course a low appetite can also occur when we are healing our selves of some physical problem – here the energy is being diverted for use else where. This occurrence is quite common.

Anorexia Nervosa

So we have now made our way to this particular problem. Here very little food is consumed and the body begins to fade away – reflecting a condition of near starvation. As can be seen from the afore going that this is intricately intertwined in the issues of love and nourishment. Here we secretly have the longing to be loved and nurtured – and so we subconsciously decrease the size of our presence (weight loss) or reduce the presence of us so that what ever little is passed on to us is ok / or the love that we demand and receive is so little that it cannot possibly be an inconvenience to others or if it does not inconvenience them too much. 
So we can see that there is a chronic sense of, of lack of self worth, so much so that our won feelings are considered unimportant. The trigger for this is often guilt or shame. Some of the things that spring to mind are that love was always conditional, based on performance and success, or dependent on giving to others (the others are always the ones on whom they are dependent on for recognition in some way). Yet there is a longing to be loved unconditionally for who we are. So here we are again asking some pertinent questions, namely;

Often we feel that we have to stay small, or to be less, not to be noticed, to fade into the background. Lets look at that.

Anorexia often arises as a result of feeling out of control of what is happening to us – we feel that we cant control it what is happening. Deep inside is a boundary issue that needs to be resolved. This often dates back to, to times that we were subjected to dominating parents or teachers, or to life changing circumstances. This constantly plays out in our life until we resolve to face it and confront it. To act out our subconscious desire to control we clamp down on food – which is a way of clamping down on our won feelings. Where there is no expression of emotion there is complete control.

This is most common in girls. If we as a young girl are not adequately prepared of the changes that come in puberty (and we have been subjected to this kind of emotional background), this can be a period of emotional turmoil. For many it is overwhelming, especially the physical changes taking place that appear to take control over the body and therefore we feel that we cant control it. In some people becoming very thin takes away our feelings of being exposed to being noticed by the opposite sex and therefore our sexuality (which is the ultimate of personal exposure), our sensuality, desirability or impending womanhood. Menstruation can even stop – such is the subconscious process of not wanting to be recognised or acknowledged. There is a desire to escape completely from reality of the body and all the feelings that go with it – especially from becoming a woman in her own personal right and power.

Some of the roots that can contribute other than those mentioned already, are growing up too quickly, social pressures such as models who are super thin and hence acknowledged by the media as the ultimate, such can be the social pressures that subject our young girls are subjected too. These are very powerful, especially if there is not support of you as a young growing woman in your earlier years.

The bottom line in this dis-ease is – to love ourselves, as we are, is absolutely essential and fundamental. When we do this then deep healing can take place.

Bulimia Nervosa

Here the combined inner feelings that are running around within one is the driving force. Inside there is the desire to be perfect (appear perfect in our body ie. ideal so called super thin) and hence the starvation, and coupled to this is the great longing for life and love (and hence the desire for food). The drive for love is supreme amongst all of us – that is deeply inherent within all of our natures. Here the body acts out as a longing desire to be free and yet to consume. This is a vicious place to be  and we become filled with self dislike, if not self loathing, and guilt.

 The body’s cravings become unmanageable. There are cravings in the middle of the night (where no one can see us and see what we are doing), we are desperate to be normal, we long to eat a normal meal but we find that later we throw up our longed for meal. This is a direct reflection our inner emotional world – ie. how we repress our emotional world. The act of throwing up is a direct rejection of nourishment for our selves, a refusal of allowing anything to touch us on the inside. It is a desperate attempt to maintain control over our feelings. So the clue here when we ask pertinent questions to affect healing is namely;

And so this brings us now to Obesity

Food and love are intimately bound up, so at times of emotional loss or confusion the stomach appears as a big hole that needs filling.

The food squashes down our real feelings – the more we eat, the less we feel.  At the same time we build a wall around ourselves that few can penetrate.

Many cases of over-eating develop following deep emotional pain or loss and the excess weight is like a protection against further hurt. The hurt can be from many things such as;
Sensitivity to criticism, sexual attractiveness that is abused, ridicule, exposure, past relationship failures, or a special love failure, non acceptance of woman hood, or a feeling of it not being safe to be a woman, or not safe being a person speaking your truth, a shameful experience not spoken about etc.

It also blocks out our own feelings; we become numb to what is really being felt inside. Grief or shame is often hidden beneath an obsessive appetite.  Many women put on excess weight around their hips and thighs following sexual assault – by covering the sexual area the feelings are shut away.  Obesity is about a longing for love combined with a fear of loving or being loved, perhaps due to past hurt, loss or pain.

Excess flesh indicates a holding on, an attachment or clinging, particularly to attitudes and thinking patterns that justify our behaviour.  It provides a false sense of security – a belief that we are safe from feeling or being hurt.  It also implies a loss of control, and an inner hopelessness or lack of self-respect. To shift the weight we need to explore our attitudes – what being heavy means to us, and what feelings the weight is hiding, what may happen to us if we start to lose weight – would we now be seen, would we now feel exposed? How do we manage this??

Some ideas on what to do to address your weight and some pertinent questions
Rather than focusing on what is wrong with being heavy, start exploring the benefits.  Try writing down all the ways that being heavy is OK for you.  What does being heavy enable you to do, or not do?  Does it make you feel safe?  Look at what attitudes or feelings you are clinging to?  What was happening for you emotionally when you first got heavy? Were you being fed instead of being loved?  Did you feel you had no personal power, or had lost control and didn’t know how to regain that power?  Do you enjoy feeling powerless?  Were you in need of love?

Then explore how it would feel to be thin.  How would it change you? How would it expose you should you lose weight? What would you do that you are not doing now? What parts of your being would be exposed if you lost weight?  Would it expose your sexuality?  Does this feel scary or unsafe?  Would it feel as if you had nowhere to hide?  Does being thin imply having to be responsible for yourself?  Does it mean emotional involvement?

The bigger we get, the more likely we are to reject ourselves and feel ugly or unlovable. Losing weight occurs through a deep shift in attitude, starting with an acceptance of ourselves just as we are – we need to give ourselves the love we long for. Then we can start working on the layers of fear that lie beneath the excess weight.

Now we come to Indigestion

This is the stage where we have swallowed the food – swallowed the events and it is now becoming too much to bear, what the reality is that we are trying to digest is just too bitter or sour and we literary cannot stomach it any more. The stomach is acid is stimulated and activated. We feel uncomfortable, we may get heart burn. The pertinent questions that we need to ask here are namely;

And now we come to Nausea

This is a direct indication that something is churning within us in the wrong way. Often when we vomit we feel immediate relief. The trick to solving the problem is to find out what it is that we are feeling at the time that we vomit – that is our direct indication of finding out what it is that you need to address and sort out – if it is an emotional issue. If we throw up because the food is off that is another matter and not part of this discussion. When we vomit there is something that is making us want to throw up. This is the physical expression – bodily expression of us experiencing rejection or even repulsion – is there something that we don’t want to absorb, integrate or deal with. Now e can ask some more pertinent questions that may help in solving the issues, namely;

And so to the last issue namely Stomach Ulcers

This is a wide spread phenomenon. It is when the reality that we are dealing with becomes or starts to become to corrosive for us to bear, it eas away at our stability or our coping mechanism. The ulcer may be brought on by a virus, but the virus is all around us most of the time anyway, why then does it only come at a particular time. The answer to that is through the worry process, and worry is the key word here, we have weakened our immune system to the extent that we allow in the virus. The virus carries with it a very important message in that it comes from the outside that is deeply affecting us.
 We may be taking in too much acidity from others or our own feelings are eating away at us. The digestive juices in the stomach look for something to digest. When there is too much of the juices or we have not fed ourselves adequately the digestive enzymes look for something to digest. The enzymes are stimulated by our worries – this may be from too much pressure, worry about financial pressure, worry about work situations, relationships, or even our role in the world.

Ulcers create a feeling of being raw and exposed, as if there is no where to hide. There may also be repressed aggression, a desire to get revenge or to lash out to someone. There is a deep need to be soothed and nurtured, to return to safety of being cared for (as in having baby foods).

Positive thinking on it’s own will not solve all of your problems, however it is one of a series of things that we all have the power to implement which will get us on the path to leading the life we want.

About the Author:

Peter has particular effective techniques in identifying what is going on within oneself, why is your life like this, what is going on, what is your thinking pattern and belief systems. Once identified, we then decide what it is that you want to do about your life situation. This is where you take control, take personal responsibility and choose to change what ever it is you want to, you then replace them with something substantially better. Peter has seen many clients’ lives change completely within weeks of a consultation. You can also do it.

Peter’s sessions are powerful, quick to resolution and bring about long term healing. Peter does not believe in long term therapy and in most cases between 5 to 10 hours of process work can sort out most problems be they business, personal or illness.

Peter is a Business Consultant, Life Coach, Healer, Teacher as well as a Business & Personal Coach. He is an expert in the areas of Leadership, Self Empowerment, Healing and Personal Development and in integrating these several, seemingly different, disciplines, Peter is successful at this as the result of personal experience - a solid business background combined with a passion, and gift, for personal development and helping others.

To find out how Peter can help you to move your life forward, check out his web site at http://www.iempowerself.com/index.html, and contact him directly by e-mail on peter@iempowerself.com .

Please read these articles hyper linked below. They contain gems that will assist you to gain some insight into yourself and why this happened to you and how you got there. The real crucial thing is for you to understand, in some way – unconsciously – you put it there. All you need to do is discover how you did it then you can undo it. You can overcome it, many have already around the world. Because we are all constructed in the same way, we all have access to the same healing possibilities, if they can heal so can you. The final issue is that it is your choice!!.

Here are the articles on the web site, enjoy and ponder – these are pointers for you.  God bless you.
 
My Unconscious Belief Systems.

The Universal Laws and how they affect you. Once you understand them you can get them to work for you. Look also at the Universal Law of Belief Systems – it will amaze you.

The wonderful world of Quantum Physics. See how this actually is the mechanics of the laws and the belief systems. Once you get this and use it to your advantage you will never look back. Never!!

Also look at the law of attraction and your belief systems. You will see how it is that you have attracted this to yourself to facilitate your growing. Learn it, the sooner you do the sooner you get better.

Now you may or may not fully understand all of the above. Contact us to teach you how to overcome it. If you can do it in your own – well done and God bless you. Please pass your insights and learning on. Thank you - Peter