From Caterpillar To Butterfly

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

From a caterpillar to a butterfly … excess weight as a symptom of imbalance in life

Completeness is what interferes with a quality and enjoyable life, taking away beauty, and most importantly, health. You want and need to get rid of it. Enough has been written about being overweight. This is an exciting topic for many, especially for women - it migrates from glossy magazines to publications about sports, fitness, health, fashion, etc. You will not find anything particularly new, the recommendations for getting rid of excess weight are the same: lifestyle changes, proper nutrition, physical activity, massage and much more. At the same time, many from year to year are desperately struggling with excess weight, periodically resorting to the advice of nutritionists, doctors and fitness instructors, but not many manage to put themselves in order and maintain results. The rest, after a while, quit training and dieting, disappointedly saying "It didn't help me … Maybe next time … They haven't yet invented a way for me to lose weight … I have a wide bone … I'm not bad anyway …".

So what's stopping you from achieving and maintaining good results?

Many specialists who work with weight loss programs admit that it is possible to help their clients with quality and for a long time only if, in parallel with diets and physical activity, a person begins to change his attitude towards life in general. Then the risk of "sliding down" to the previous weight and the habit of overeating is minimized. Specialists-psychologists and psychotherapists working with psychosomatic problems come to the rescue.

Let's try together to understand the psychological reasons for gaining and maintaining excess weight

It is this that can serve as a qualitative incentive to revise your lifestyle, increase motivation to lose weight, and, as a result, lead to good results and their preservation. Let's start from the theoretical premise that being overweight is a symptom. Positive Psychotherapy (the founder of the method N. Pezeshkian, German neurologist, psychiatrist, psychotherapist) says that any symptom is a violation of the vital balance in one of the 4 main spheres of life:

1. Body (sleep, food, health care)

2. Activities (work)

3. Contacts (communication with colleagues, friends, relatives)

4. Meaning (Future, Faith)

Therefore, working with psychological reasons: imbalance in life, stress factors that ultimately led to the appearance of such a symptom as excess weight and help to maintain it - there is a qualitatively new opportunity to look at this problem, understand your life history, find your personal motivation to losing weight, determining what weight and self-awareness will be the most comfortable and healthy for you. At the same time, this will help to strengthen and consolidate the effect of programs (fitness, diet, supplements, etc.), the action of which is aimed specifically at physiology. And most importantly, psychotherapeutic work helps to mobilize the internal resources that each person has and a healthy lifestyle becomes not a goal to strive for, but a natural necessity, then proper nutrition brings pleasure both walking and water procedures. As a result, a new sense of self appears, life becomes energetic and filled, but no longer food and excess weight, but good impressions, interesting communication, achievements at work or in business.

Shelest Hope, psychologist, psychotherapist, member of the Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists, co-author of the project "From a caterpillar to a butterfly"

Voitsekhovskaya Lyudmila, psychologist, psychotherapist, member of the Ukrainian Union of Psychotherapists, member of the European Association for Transactional Analysis, co-author of the project "From a caterpillar to a butterfly"