How to lose weight naturally and permanently without exercising and dieting: the fifth natural way

For many who gain weight due to regular overeating for psychological reasons, I wish to introduce five natural ways to lose weight. Please start with the first episode, in which I discussed why we are not our mind and why our regular overeating has nothing to do with our body’s needs but with our identification with the overeating habit of the mind. In this episode, I am going to discuss the fifth natural way to lose weight; that is, loving ourselves without condition. The truth is quite simple. If we can love ourselves without condition, we will not overeat. Unconditional love is causeless and reasonless, and thus it is not of the mind. Therefore, whenever we feel unconditional love to ourselves, we are free from the mind and its overeating habit. We know that occasional overindulging in foods seldom causes significant weight gain. Many of our vicious set-backs often are the result of giving-up entirely after several relapses, due to self-doubt, self-shame, and self-abandonment. Loving ourselves unconditionally means we love what we are and where we are in any moment regardless of what we have or haven’t done and can or cannot do. For example, after strict diet and vigorous exercises, we lose some weight and feel lighter and happy. Suddenly we relapse and ruin our arduous effort. Instead of eating again to cope with our shame and despair, we close our eyes and feel unconditional love to ourselves. We know we are after all a human with a collectively conditioned body-mind, and we know there is nothing to be forgiven, for we would’ve done differently had we not unknowingly identified with the mind’s overeating habit again in those moments. Immersing in this unconditional love, we give our own humanness a break: we look at our silliness with a sense of humor, we look at our weakness with a tender heart, and we look at the empty bag of the potato chips with an awe that our ingenuous mind has tricked us again. In so doing, we anchor effortlessly in our energy field of love and free ourselves from the mind and its overeating conditioning. There is another reason why unconditional self-love is of a great importance for our weight loss journey. As some of us may have already experienced, we cannot transcend our mind once and for all. As long as the mind is here to stay, so is its overeating habit, and so is our unconscious identification with it or awareness of it. Therefore, the transcendence of the overeating habit is a living process on a moment to moment basis. We can be vigilant for months but then unknowingly follow the mind’s different reasons to overeat again and again. This is when unconditional self-love keeps us on the journey. If we can love ourselves in spite of our relapses, it is not possible to give up on ourselves. And we know we are okay as long as we do not give up. Loving ourselves unconditionally is not telling ourselves that we love us without condition. It is to let the love that we are flow forth. In other words, it is to feel our innate love in the silent state of the mind. We then realize that this inner love is unconditional, for whenever we feel it, it is ever here and now, in spite of our setbacks. And we continue our weight-loss journey not because we have to but because we are passionate about it, for where there is love, there is passion. What is unconditional love? In the deepest sense, it is our intuitively felt oneness with life, and it is the pure awareness that becomes aware of itself and recognizes itself in each and all existence. Since unconditional love cannot be separately obtained or given, to love ourselves is also to love others and to allow others to love us. Therefore, loving ourselves without condition is actually a selfless act. Relaxing in unconditional self-love, we then love life and everything that exists because of love. We do not overeat because we love our body and no longer need food to fill our deep yearning for love.