Complexity in obesity

Sleep and how you sleep is a very important consideration because sleep is your primary source of energy and your Circadian rhythm is very closely related to your body's homeostasis.

Therefore disruptions to your Circadian rhythm (daily cycle) through lack of sleep or disruptions in your sleeping pattern is going to affect your energies and the way your body uses energy. If you're not getting enough sleep and allowing your sleeping patterns to become too disrupted it could affect many things such as feelings of fatigue and tiredness, your mood and feelings of well being, your ability to deal with stress, how you think, your sensory nervous system and also how you eat. Be mindful of the misconception that food is your primary source of energy. It's not. Sleep is by far your major source of energy on the daily.

Another major source of energy, and one that never really gets mentioned, is social interaction. If you're familiar with the five dimensions of life then you will know that there are three physical dimensions of life, i.e. mass and matter, sensation, energy and emotion, and also relationship energies (heat, light, etc). We all project out different energies when we socially interact with others, just as they project out energies towards us. This is generally known as 'vibes'.

Probably you know something about this from your own experiences, but you can be around certain people who seem to give off energy which you can pick up on, just as there are other people who seem to drain you of your energy. I'm making this point because if you're trying to lose weight there is some sense in developing a social support network, spending time around people or even going out and getting involved in some sort of community.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to go to the gym or go out jogging, either. Even a couple of hours of deep, engaging conversation could give your brain a good workout and you might want to think about whether you are eating as a substitute for social interaction, which is what sometimes leads to comfort eating.

When it comes to obesity and losing weight, stress (and exposure to stressors) is another major consideration to take into account. As I pointed out in a previous blog post 'The principles of stress' stress has a major impact on both psychology and biology. How you process stress and what stress you are exposed to has got to have a major influence on obesity and whatever you do or try to do to lose weight.

This is also where I point out that there are sociological, environmental and socio-economic factors involved in obesity and whether we like it or not, these factors are interconnected and even interwoven into the complex medical issue of obesity. If you make work a major plank of participation in society, but do not care whether or not that work is stressful or not, for example due to social insecurity, then you have to accept that some people in your socio-economic system are going to be affected by obesity. It is no surprise that in the United States you have a significant proportion of people affected by obesity when you also have a socio-economic system lacking in social security and universal healthcare. The dysfunctional relationship found in obesity is symptomatic of the dysfunctional relationships in the socio-economic system.

I'm not buying the premise that stress is somehow positive to efforts to lose weight particularly when stress has an important influence in addiction and compulsive behaviour. The burning of excess calories is usually offset with excessive cravings and desires for food to provide emotional and psychological comfort. Some of you might have noticed that you can often be hungrier and crave food when you're experiencing insecurity over your income or finances. Some of the hungriest people in society are those people with empty fridges and cupboards.

Another very important consideration when you're trying to lose weight is what you're actually doing. In other words I'm referring to activity here. How you actually burn energy. You might be thinking "Oh I'm leading an active lifestyle. That's surely enough, isn't it?" No it isn't.

Please keep in mind, despite the fact that I've lost hundreds of pounds in weight, I've never been to a gym, I'm terrible at taking exercise, and I'm not always active in my lifestyle. Yet I'm somehow able to consistently lose weight. But I'm also incredibly creative, spend lots of time writing creatively, and generally give my brain a good workout.

It's not a case of just taking exercise and expending energy to burn off calories. Energy varies in terms of wavelength or cycle and frequency. There are also different types of energy, light energy, heat energy, sound energy and so on. There is also the issue of energy efficiency which doesn't just apply to lightbulbs, it also applies to human beings.

In football there are such things as heat maps or touch maps which show in colours just how much a football player has been active on the pitch throughout the 90 minutes of a football match. What I'm pointing out there is the fact that it doesn't matter whether you're active or not or just how active you are. You also need to become aware or conscious of how your body uses energy and what types of energy your body expends. Then you use this awareness to change or modify your diet.

Water and hydration is also a very important consideration when it comes to obesity and losing weight. As your body is mainly water, then it stands to reason that most of your body mass is in fact water. But see water is the basis of biological existence. You can take a human body, a dog, a cat, an apple, an orange, a cabbage, all of which look different from each other, but they're all based on water.

The mystical properties of water is an entire occult subject in itself which I won't go into here, but in terms of energy and consciousness water is very responsive.

Therefore keeping in mind that tackling obesity and trying to lose weight is really all about changing dysfunctional relationships when it comes to body mass, it's essential that you have enough of the basis - water - and that you are always hydrated. If you understand that the basis of your body mass is water, then water and hydration is the canvas you have to work with to make changes to your body. It's that important.

So now we come to one of the most important considerations and that is diet. This is where you need to be doing most of your investigation. It's not enough to be counting calories, because calories are just a measurement of latent energy and I guess you have no way of knowing exactly how many calories you are burning on a specific activity at a specific time of day in a specific environment.

It's also not about lumping various foods into various categories, such as protein, carbohydrates, fat, and so on and just cutting out certain categories of food. Keep in mind satiation (the ability to feel satiated or full) is a sense and if you mess about with that sense too much through starving yourself or overeating you could lose the sense altogether and potentially develop an eating disorder. The central issue in obesity is the loss of this satiation sense. If you're unable to feel full naturally then you're either guessing or going by habit.

But what I want to suggest is that you investigate what you eat and why in order to develop a diet that fully supports your lifestyle and the various ways you expend energy. Let's take for example carbohydrates. Are you more energy efficient when you eat more rice, or more bread, or pasta? How is your food affecting your sleep? Arew you getting the right sort of nutrients from what you eat? Do you get enough water?

I'm not suggesting following a set diet, which unless a doctor has told you to do for medical reasons is not a particularly smart thing to do. I mean would you let someone else dictate to you what clothes you should wear and how you style your hair? No because you wear clothes and style your hair based on your individual preferences and lifestyle and what I'm saying here is that in terms of diet, you need to be making choices on the exact same individual preferences. You need to be conscious of the relationship each individual food and drink you consume has with your body.