I was fat because my mother told me over and over again that I was fat

As you know from Just Love Your Body, I have struggled with my weight all my life, so I was told and throughout my adult life so I know. Growing up (from age 5) my mother always told me that I was the fat one. She didn’t just say this once, she said it to me over and over again! Fat – compared to what? Another horrible thing she did to me was to say this “Suze – every time you walk past a cake counter in the shops you put on a few pounds.” God how that hurt and even today, when I write about it, it still stings – thankfully the pain is gone as I’ve done most of the healing work required. I have chosen to let go of the bad, to harness the good and I’ve grown as a result but truthfully, most of this has only been since her death in 2013.

I have been all shapes and sizes

In Just Love Your Body I went to great lengths to share with you some things about your mind, especially your emotional, doing, results-creating subconscious mind and how this part of your mind creates your world and all your results. Now that you have read it and understand so much more, do you realise what destructive virus-coded programming my mother’s non-stop vitriol was installing in to my preciously perfect subconscious mind?

Does this make you stop and think about what you’re saying to others and about others and how your misguided words are damaging them more than you know?

Then, does this make you stop and think about what others are saying to and about you and how their misguided words are damaging you more than they might know?

Thing is – were all connected so whatever you “do” to someone you therefore do to yourself and whatever they “do” to you they also do to themselves. You don’t even have to be in the presence of this person for the “doing” to take place as the energy you give off to others knows no time or distance…

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me…….. Rubbish, they hurt more every time!

I hope so as through this article I want to raise your awareness and your consciousness around how much words can and do hurt, and, how they programme young minds, either for success or failure, happiness or sadness, wealth or lack, abundance or poverty, health or sickness, prosperity or misery, riches or scarcity etc.

I was at my Aunt’s house after my mother had died and we were sitting chatting over a glass of wine. I mentioned to her that with everything that was going on at that time I was struggling with my weight again, and how I hated it, that I was again feeling like the fat one. Visibly shocked my aunt asked me what I meant, and I explained to her how I was a fat child. Stunned, my aunt went and fetched a few photos that she had of me (around age 9) with my cousins.

It wasn’t that I was fat at all, it was because they (my cousins) were very slender…

Compared with other girls, I developed early. It was then that I became very aware of myself and with that, my mother’s subconscious virus coded programming of “You’re fat Suze” was well and truly activated and ran riot in my head. It was when I went to high school that I started to pick up the big weight. I developed breast, really big ones and plenty of curves. At size 14 (age 13) I was considered by all to be fat and that’s when the belief that “I AM fat” took me in to its vice-like grip. In hindsight the excess weight and constant stomach cramps were really an indication of the inner turmoil of my upbringing and my unstable home environment.

I was always struggling with stomach pains

I had problems with chronic menstrual pains and cramps, digestion issues, spastic colon and constant stomach aches – so much so that I missed at least 2 school days every month as I was doubled over in agony, sometimes even crawling on the floor from the period pain. In Lise Bourbeau’s book Your body’s telling you: Love Yourself! Published by Editions ETC, she writes on page 334 that “Menstrual disorders are an indication that you are having a problem accepting your femaleness. Probably since adolescence you’ve been reacting negatively toward your mother, who was your first female role model. Because of the perception of your mother’s life (you can read about this in Nature versus Nurture), you may have decided that the female role is an unenviable role.”

When I first read this piece from her book I nearly dropped it as I had finally understood why I had always experienced such horrific period pains, which given the predictability and regularity of my being off-school were made even worse in that I would be teased mercilessly by the boys who would say “Suze is on the rag again” – in UK slang speak that means – “Suze is on her period again.” As you’re reading this I hope that my story is making you aware of the severe price children pay if they’re always tearing them apart, always having gut-wrenching untruths said to them about who and what they are, being broken down as opposed to being built up and having other peoples’ insecurities and misery projected on to them, making them the scapegoats for other peoples’ unhappy existence.

At age 18 when I was pregnant with my first son I gained 77lbs [35kg]. I suffered with severe morning sickness, so extreme that even after he was born I still suffered with it for a while. I had married a handsome man, and took to heart the “not-so-throw-away” comment that he would really like to have a thin wife. There began my love hate relationship with food. Desperate to please my then husband I began a bulimic pattern of eating, not in terms of binge eating, but in terms of purging after every meal. I only needed to do this forcibly for a week or so when my stomach got the message that that was what was supposed to happen. The joy I first felt at getting thinner and thinner soon turned into the realisation that this wasn’t the way, but this on and off behaviour continued for years. Around age 19 my bulimia got so bad that I had to spend some time in 1 Military Hospital recovering. I truly believe that this, coupled with my chaotic emotional state added to my difficulty in conceiving my second child. I suffered several early stage miscarriages before eventually conceiving my second son.

Looking back on my yoyo weight over the years I realised that I could associate a lot of my weight gains to significant emotional events starting age 5. As I’ve mentioned before, not only did I believe I was fat, but that belief was reinforced through a string of other events which made this belief a tap root of truth in my mind. All the great teachers on the mind teach that “the roots give the fruits.” What they mean by this is that as you believe so shall you receive or as above (your results) so below (your subconscious mind). My subconscious mind had grown a powerful tap root that I was fat and so no matter what I did, that root fed and nourished the only shoots it could produce – fatness. Same held true for me with money – my mind had a powerful tap root that I was not worthy and deserving of money so when the big money finally came as a result of a great business built with a world-savvy, street-wise business partner, as fast as it flowed to me so it vanished again. I tell you all about this in Poor Girl, Rich Girl, Poor Girl

Suzanne, you’d make a great Polar Bear

Bar two medical triggers where hormone, steroid and cortisone treatment were the cause, inmost cases in the last 15 years I had never been able to get my weight below 158lbs [72kgs]. I can remember visiting a specialist who did full blood work on me to see what my options were around losing weight. She was quite sympathetic, which you often don’t find in the field, as most professionals want you to eat less and exercise more. She just looked at the blood work results, and then at me, and quite simply said, “You have the perfect metabolism for a bear”. You pack all the weight on just in case… It was astonishing as it made a lot of sense, I held on to carbohydrates like my life depended on it. She explained to me that emotions can play a massive role in weight loss, I wasn’t the unhealthiest or healthiest eater, I was pretty ok, but no matter what diet I tried, or what exercise I did, the weight stayed on. Quite simply I wasn’t ready to let it go.

Weight and Emotions are intrinsically linked

If you have read In the beginning, More to Life and Starting Over, you will know that from the moment Chris and I met our lives were a roller coaster of options and significant events. If you haven’t read them yet, this piece of the bigger It Is What It Is story is well worth reading, but if you don’t have the time to, then to rapidly bring you up to speed, I will give you a quick background.

Chris and I got together, separated, got back together and married in an 18 month period. Three months after our wedding I found out that Chris was having an affair, and I was truly devastated. We decided to stay together to work things out, and we embarked upon the hardest journey a newly married couple could probably ever go and endure. The casualty though once again was my weight, although on the outside I was keeping the pose, with the affair, my head strong attitude towards two business ventures, the subsequent collapse of our lives on a financial level and the loss of our home was suffocating me on the inside. My self-confidence and self-esteem plunged to new lows and we weight rose to almost 200lbs [88kg].

I was so busy taking the blame for everything that had happened, even after all the studying I had done, all the courses I had qualified in, I had a blind spot there. It was only when I really understood that I was sabotaging myself with the blame. That the shame and guilt were crippling me, that I could get control of my life by transforming blame into responsibility. Through this I realised that I needed to do something about my weight and I found a plan that worked for me, one which would practically support the picture which I was seeding in to my subconscious mind all the time. I don’t advocate that any plan is better than the next, just that there will be one that suits you when you give yourself permission to let go of what is holding you back on an emotional level and move you toward what you’re accepting image wise subconsciously. I have released almost 35lbs [16kgs] so far and I’m so proud of this achievement.

As much as I am loving that I am releasing the excess weight though, it’s the overall effect of forgiveness and permission that has made it possible for me to share all of my stories with you. The introspection exercises that I have shared with you in Overcoming Shame and Guilt have allowed me to embrace my Queen Particle and to acknowledge and give recognition to me, for me, for all that I have survived, as I once again thrive. It has been extremely liberating.

Every story I share with you is about how we all, every day are presented with challenges and experiences to help us grow and teach us lessons. No matter how much we would like the great experiences to be the biggest lessons we learn, they seldom are. Why is this? Well lessons learned easiest are not the most impactful because they do not trigger emotions of equal intensity to the harder lessons. What may surprise you though is that if you had learned the lesson the first time it was brought to you, it wouldn’t be so hard the next time, and so on.

Hard lessons are painful, and the more extreme and painful they are the more you have to learn, and the more you need to change. If you are into self-help and you have been working on your personal development for some time now, then you will have read that a lot of the personal development gurus will tell you that the process of change is easy. Well if it was so easy to change why isn’t everyone doing it? Well really it’s because the books say it’s easy when they should say, it’s simple. The process of change is simple, and no matter whose method appeals to you, the process is the same. You have to replace non-serving behaviours with serving ones, simple. What makes it so hard is that you have held on to those non-serving behaviours and paradigms for so long now, and whenever you experience an emotional trigger relating to a specific event, your subconscious mind will revert to the default behaviour until you have completely replaced it. Your investment in your personal development is a life-long commitment, Bob Proctor once told me “Suzanne, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.”

You cannot change the past, you can’t change what happened to you or what you did that impacted on other people. Whether good or bad, it happened, it just is. What you can do though is change how it impacts on you and controls you, today and every day. Whatever happened, whatever you experienced, whether done to you, through you or by you, just forgive yourself, forgive everyone else and let them go, and give yourself permission to be happy, to be successful, creative, loved, loving, healthy, slim, beautiful, whatever it is that you want to be, you can.

I forgave myself for everything that I felt that I had done to contribute to my life experiences, I forgave everyone that I believed had, had a role to play in my anger, sadness, pain, hurt and guilt. It was quite a long list, then I made a list of all the things I was giving myself permission to do, and be, that list was even longer.

I gave myself permission to share my experiences, the lessons I learned and the tools I created and found to learn them, with you. I did this because the world today is filled with a lot of anger, violence, pain, abuse, I could go on, and we can change this if we change ourselves, the women of the world. We wear many hats and fulfil many roles, but we bring the children in to this world, mostly we are the primary carers for these children, boys and girls, if we change our behaviours, we change our circumstances, if it changes for us, it changes for our children too, it’s a ripple effect. Changing myself at this stage of my life doesn’t impact on my children directly as they have all grown up and are out in the world making lives of their own, but indirectly who knows? I find peace knowing that I am doing something to affect change in the lives of women who may have had some experiences similar to me. Know that you are beautiful, know that you are amazing and know that you are worthy.

Having read the first article of mine on my journey of discovery around my body, then having done the most comprehensive exercise which went with it and now having completed reading I was fat because my mother told me over and over again that I was fat, I would hope that it has become clear to you that the state of your body is also a powerful representation of how you feel about yourself on the inside. This bring your internal self-image in to play.

To most, self-image is all about what’s going on, on the outside. The way you look if you will as that’s how glitzy magazines of the rich and famous like to portray self-image. Whilst the way you look, dress, carry yourself, walk, talk and conduct yourself (your external self-image) is extremely important if you are to enjoy great success and riches in your life, what most people don’t know is that the greatest sustainable success comes from building your internal self-image.

Your internal self-image is that which nobody other than you can see. It is that image of yourself which sits deep within you, which tells you honestly, what you think about yourself in those private moments when you look yourself in the eyes in the mirror and the mirror never lies. It is your internal self-image which gives you your results – even those unwanted ones – over and over again because it is your deep internal reality of how you think and feel about who you truly are.

Questions:

• What does how you talk about your body, feel about your body and see your body, tell you about your internal self-image?
• Is your internal self-image taking you toward your desires in that you truly believe you are worthy and deserving of them, or is it keeping them at bay from you because deep down you don’t believe that you are worthy and deserving of much more?
• Did you know that as within (who you believe you are on the inside), so without (all your results)?
• Did you know that it is impossible for you to ever outperform your internal self-image?
• Did you know that if you desire more health, love, happiness, wealth, peace, prosperity, joy, riches etc. these will only appear on the outside by way of your results once you’ve grown in to them, and accepted them as a truth, on the inside (via your internal self-image)?

Exercise:

1. Given that your external world (in this instance your body is in focus) is a mirror of your internal self-image, what is your external world (your body) telling you right now about your internal self-image? Write down your answer in detail.
2. Well done! Now, let’s really delve deep in to your internal self-image…
3. How would you describe the self-image you project to the outside world?
4. Is this a true image of how you feel about yourself deep down?
5. If there are differences, what are these and why do they exist?
6. So, how do you really feel about yourself?
7. Do you have a positive self-image or is there room for improvement?
8. Is your self-image a limiting subconsciously programmed belief or is an empowering subconsciously programmed belief?
9. What’s your inner dialogue? (in other words, what are the messages you tell yourself about yourself, in private, in secret, on the inside?)
10. What are the qualities you really like and love about yourself and how can you make more use of these qualities?
11. Given all the above, would you like to improve your internal self-image?
12. Yes? Excellent. Now bring to mind someone whom you really admire and respect, someone whom you believe has a superb self-image?
13. Now, write down in detail all their fabulous qualities and state why you feel these traits are so wonderfully powerful.
14. Take the above description of these qualities you admire, find a quiet place and totally relax. See yourself as that person – literally see yourself embracing the qualities which this person displays – see yourself copying them and rapidly becoming them. Connect with all the powerful emotions and good feelings which go with you living these qualities.
15. Write down three action steps which you can take in the next two weeks and then do these actions, repeatedly, every day, until you become comfortable with them and see them as being part of who you are. Then choose another 3 new actions and using exactly the same mimicking process, do these every day, often, over and over again. That’s right, it’s all about repetition of the “good traits” as this becomes a powerful, new layer which replaces the “bad traits”.
16. It’s as easy as that. Keep doing this over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Never stop adding new success traits to who you are on the inside. This way you keep growing yourself and soon you’ll have gone so far that you’ll need a telescope to look back and where you’ve come from!

My profound lesson:

I learned the hard way about internal self-image but I am so grateful for these tough lessons. Late in my forties I realised that my internal self-image was not good at all and that this was a huge contributing factor to why I looked the way I did and why I experienced so much trouble with my weight. Since then I’ve been hard at work every single, on the inside of me, to build a new serving internal self-image. Is it easy? No. It is painful to do? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely? Am I enjoying the fruits of my hard work now? Yes I am. How long has it taken me? Given the devastating losses I experienced during 2011 and 2012 and the horrible shame and guilt which went with that, getting my internal self-image back to the point where I now know and believe I have my mojo back, has been 3 years. You see, that’s where most people fail – when the initial excitement of the “new” turns in to the “mundane”, the really hard work which you have to do daily, deep down daily, that’s when the sexiness and appeal fast disappears – that’s when most quit the process; they’re the ones who then glibly say that “Oh, this stuff doesn’t work for me.”

If you’re prepared to knuckle down and do the hard work, then you will reap the rewards; once again I want to remind you what you can never and will never outperform the self-image which you have of yourself on the inside. So, here’s what I want you to know and remember about the internal self-image and then you’ll understand that just as you brush your teeth every day, so too must you make a habit for the rest of your life, to grow your internal self-image.

Understanding the psychology of the self can mean the difference between success and failure, love and hate, bitterness and happiness. The discovery of the real self can rescue a crumbling marriage, recreate a faltering career and transform victims of ‘personality failure’. Discovering your real self means the difference between freedom and the compulsions of conformity.

Whether we realise it or not each of us carries about with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It may be vague and ill-defined to our conscious gaze. In fact, it may not be consciously recognisable at all. But it is there, complete down to the last detail. This self-image is our own conception of the “sort of person I am”. It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves.

Most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experiences, our successes and failures, our humiliation, our triumphs and the way other people have reacted to us, especially in early childhood. From all these we mentally construct a “self” (or a picture of self). Once an idea or belief about ourselves goes into this picture it becomes “true” as far as we personally are concerned. We do not question its validity, but proceed to act upon it just as if it were true. This self-image becomes a golden key to living a better life and producing vastly improved results because of two important discoveries:

• All your actions, feelings, behaviours – even your abilities – are always consistent with this self-image. You will “act like” the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. You literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts and willpower. The man who conceives himself to be a “failure type person” will find some way to fail, in spite of all his good intentions, or his will power, even if opportunity is literally dumped in his lap.
• The self-image can be changed – you are never too old or too young to change your self-image. Once the concept of self is changed, other things consistent with the new concept of self, are accomplished easily and without strain.

Self-image sets the boundaries of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot do. Expand the self-image and you expand the “area of the possible”. The development of a vastly improved self-image will seem to imbue the individual (and by default the team) with new capabilities, new talents and literally turn failure into success.

The “power of positive thinking” works with some individuals and not with others. Positive thinking “works” when it is consistent with your internal self-image; it literally cannot work when it is inconsistent with your self-image. That’s why so many people you meet (especially those who have done a “mind power seminar or five” will talk up a great game about how they’re always applying positive thinking, yet you never see their results improving, they just always seem to stay right where they are right now.

Through this piece of my It Is What It is series, I’ve gifted you a superb exercise and wonderful knowledge – now it’s up to you to do something with these gifts. Make the decisions today, right now, to do the work required on the inside – set about actively and persistently building yourself that new, powerful, prosperous, wealth attracting, results creating internal self-image – you’ll be so glad you did! Suzanne.