The Secret to Permanent Weight Loss

slim blonde woman on a sofa

Five Steps for Achieving Your Desired Size Without Dieting

Is this you? Go on a diet, lose weight. Go off the diet, gain the weight back. Feel like a failure for not having the willpower to stay on a diet. Decide you are destined for a life of battling your weight.

I could never stay on a diet for more than a day. I always felt miserable and desperate to go back to eating whatever I wanted. I was obsessed with being thin, but I could rarely get there and was never able to stay there. It was a constant battle for me. I even went to Overeaters Anonymous for a brief 35 years. I remember my teens and twenties in increments of weight and pants size. I hovered somewhere between 115 and 175.

I finally realized that if I was going to be thin, it wasn’t going to be from no stinkin’ diet: It was going to be when 100% of me wanted to be thin. I am now 125 at 5’3″, and I never weigh myself, because it doesn’t matter. Here is my gift to you:

1. Love Your Body Just As It Is: Start by loving your body – the miraculous vehicle that houses your spirit and takes you from point A to point B on this great earthly adventure and for purposes of growing your soul – just as it is. It’s no one’s business what size you are, and all bodies are perfect and beautiful exactly the way they are. You can feel beautiful at whatever size you are and simultaneously have a goal for sometime in the future.

2. Understand Schizophrenic Weight Conundrum: Your body instinctively knows what your ideal weight is for health and for protection. And it’s not necessarily the same number. The answer to the “I want to be thin I can’t lose weight” conundrum is getting to the root of the conflict going on inside you.

3. My Schizophrenic Weight Conundrum: My father made it clear to me that he did not want me loving anyone other than him. He criticized all my boyfriends and best girlfriends up one side and down the other. When I was 21, he became enraged after I spent the night with another man.

When I was 16, my father started telling me way TMI about his sexual prowess and all the women he was “sexually attracted to” and why – what 16-year-old wants to hear that? Add to that his lectures on how men are only attracted to ‘slender’ women (translation: I am only attracted to slender women; get slender for me).

I needed to be heavy so Daddy wouldn’t be attracted to me, and I needed to be thin so Daddy would approve of me. Plus, being thin meant, according to Daddy, being attractive to men, and I knew that would upset him horribly.

In addition, I was sexually assaulted, during which the man told me I was a “tease with my tight little ass in my tight little jeans.” I gained 50 pounds in a month after that.

4. Think Back on the Hidden Messages: When something happens to traumatize you when you are thin because you are thin, or when things happen to convince you that you are safer with extra weight on your body, the part of you with the more pressing need wins.

5. The Formula for Healing: Get a journal. Write down why you want to be thin and also what that scares you about being thin. Write about all the times you were hurt in a relationship and/or inappropriately brought into someone’s sexual energy field. Describe how it felt each time it happened. Write angry letters and then rip them up. Make a list of all the emotions that have been churning around causing you to be conflicted in the area of weight, food, and love. Get with an EFT Practitioner or tapping partner and tap on those feelings, saying what triggers you to feel those feelings and when you first remember feeling them, and do some inner child visualization re-do’s. Forgive yourself for not knowing how to fend off hurtful behavior by parents or others, and understand that you have done your best to take care of you.

Janet Stegman is an EFT and Inner Child Practitioner, successfully counseling people with addiction and other mental health disorders for more than 20 years. Janet is the author of Sandcastles: Tools for Letting Go of Addiction and the Pain of the Past; How to Raise a Healthy Happy Child; and My Mother the Comedian . . . I Mean Superior Court Judge. She also has extensive comedy and musical theatre credits including Janet Stegman Starring in HBO Here I Come! and Peter in Peter Pan. Janet lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she teaches Silver Sneakers and dances the Lindy Hop every chance she gets!

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2 Responses

  1. Great article! So glad to see Professor’s House featuring Janet’s book on their website because it has SAVED MY LIFE! I have battled weight and addiction disorders my whole life, and the advise and writing assignments that Janet gives in this article and her book, SANDCASTLES, helped me dig deep to discover the source of my pain so I was able to let it go. I’m thoroughly enjoying the lightness Janet’s process has brought to my life, as well as having more energy and an overall feeling of well-being.

    I HIGHLY recommend Janet as an Author and Healer. She is awesome!

  2. Wow, Janet I had no idea about your dad. I am so proud of you. You helped me through a super rough time and I thank you for this. I might not stay in touch like I should but my life has been chaotic for awhile and drama has made me shut up for the longest time,not normal for me. I will find the fight in me again and please know genuinely I am so truly very proud of you. ❤️ you. You’re a miracle worker. Tap tap tap.

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