Seth on Why Diets Don't Usually Work

Seth, The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 660

Seth: Diets do serve momentarily as outer signs that you are in control, and can seize the initiative; and as such they can be important. Usually, however; a pattern of unsuccessful diets occurs, operating then as a series of negative suggestions. The resistance is the result of conflicts in beliefs. You think you are overweight and accept this as reality. Steps to lose weight do not make sense in the face of that belief. They are 'unrealistic' or even impossible.

The same applies to underweight conditions. In each case frequent attention to the scales serves as another negative stimulus, reinforcing the condition. The effort to eat more will be as resisted by the chronically underweight, as the effort to refrain from eating will be by the obese.

Not only will these reactions occur, but opposing tendencies will be brought to bear. The concentration upon not eating, and the resulting tension, may instead cause increased consumption. And the underweight person may actually eat less the harder he or she tries to eat more —the latter being interpreted as an impossibility by the overriding belief in the underweight condition.

The best thing to do is to stop all such efforts, but instantly begin altering your beliefs as instructed in this chapter.

The reason why some lose-weight groups succeed in their therapy, at least momentarily, is that belief in the worth of the self is stressed. Unfortunately, weight is attacked as 'bad' or 'evil', symbolic moral judgments enter the act. The therapy seldom has long-reaching effects because from then on any gained weight is even more negatively charged.

© Laurel Butts

How to Use Your Imagination

Abraham, Orlando, FL  12/15/01

Abraham: How do you use your imagination?

Well, first of all, you put you in the picture and then you live as you would like to live from an inside feeling place. You feel how your body feels; that's a good place to start. Now this is your call, you are the architect, you are the creator, so you can be as vital and alive and youthful and flexible and good feeling and slender and eager and happy as you want to be. And so, stand in your body, and put yourself anywhere that pleases you, on the golf course, in a swimming pool, on an airplane, in your motor coach. Put yourself in any environment and feel how good your body feels.

Since it is a virtual reality, make the temperature exactly as you want it to be; make your clothing exactly appropriate to that and breath in the deliciousness of the air that it there. Make the sky blue, put clouds in it if you want, make it sunrise, make it sunset, make it the middle of the day. You get to do whatever you're wanting to do.

Be there by yourself, or bring your favorite person in. Take a look at your favorite person. Give that person the mood you would like that person to have. Make that person playful, make that person beautiful, make that person happy. Make that person in perfect vibrational harmony with you and together go someplace you know the two of you would adore being. Have a conversation with that person; say what you would say under those conditions: bask, applaud, praise, appreciate, approve, listen, receive compliments, blush with them, return them, adore, be adored, move your body, see delightful things, have stimulation relative to the conversation, relative to anything that you care about.

Get on a subject that is really important to you. Solve problems. Find solutions. Sit with your president. Talk to anyone on the planet that you would like to talk to. Bring them in, give them the mood, give them the attitude, give them ability to hear you, you get the sense of this.

Some say, "Too much work."

We say, "Its your life."

You are walking into the future of whatever you do with your mind. So where is your mind? Is it perusing the puzzles and problems of the past? Is it perusing the problems of the world? Is it looking for reasons to feel good? Is it looking for reasons to feel bad? In other words, you get to focus wherever you want to focus.

© Abraham Hicks Publications

Seth on Botox. (Sort of.)

Seth,  03/02/76

Seth: Now: it may seem to most people that an exuberant, always-vital, energetic, healthy body would indeed be one of the greatest gifts of all--a body that never worried or showed signs of any disorder, a body that went ahead on its own, so to speak, propelled by feelings of strength and vigor.

This certainly sounds like a fine ideal. Yet I tell you that in such a body you would finally feel like a prisoner, for your moods and reflections, your feelings and your thoughts, would find no responsive mirror in your flesh.

You would wear a constant smile, and your blooming cheeks would often deny the heart's hard-earned knowledge.

It is natural and HEALTHY to yearn for a comfortable body if you are in health difficulties. The body, however, is NOT an assumed facade, but the physical materialization in your world of your inner being. All of nature is responsive, pliant, changing, each part connected with each other part.

It is quite natural, then, that during a lifetime you experience various assorted periods of temporary illness.

These will be caused by your beliefs and your feelings, but they will not be necessarily negative at all, but a demonstration of the body's responsiveness. It is not realistic to expect a life of unending, exuberant health, with no momentary lapses of any kind.

Such momentary lapses follow personal and cultural patterns. Some generations fall heir to certain fashionable diseases, for example. The body copes with inner and exterior reality, and performs a marvelous job of maintaining multitudinous balances.

Ideally, the body would always right itself after such lapses from exuberant health--but even those lapses often exercise that resiliency. Maintaining that resiliency, then, is the important issue. Many such lapses are exaggerated because of your beliefs, so that they are experienced in a more drastic form than necessary. GENERALLY drugs impede that resiliency.

Often your medical beliefs as a culture stabilize conditions that, left alone, would right themselves. As you know, this can apply for example to children being given eyeglasses. IN THE SITUATION IN WHICH YOU FIND YOURSELVES, however, eyeglasses become a more practical alternative because you do not possess the proper mental methods to offset the current belief system.

The mind may want to react. The individual may realize that his or her pace has been too fast, and so natural feelings bring about a lethargy of body, or a slight fever, or an indisposition--all quite natural, resilient activities. I do not want this ever to be interpreted to mean, a priori, and in conventional terms, that "suffering is good for the soul". A reliance and faith in the natural self, however, would be large enough to accept certain indispositions without fear, panic, or doubt.

With the best of intent most public health announcements shout the symptoms of critical diseases to the skies, so that the smallest of indispositions become the trigger for personal fear on the part of millions. Such announcements actually teach people to fear what might be happening within the body. There is a stress upon disease rather than health.

When such beliefs are shared by an entire society, then the slightest indisposition is instantly suspect.


© Laurel Butts

External Validation and Weight Loss/Body Image

Blogger's note: This is relevant to those with any kind of external validation or approval-seeking issues, not just weight loss.

It isn't WHAT you eat, it's how you feel when you eat it.

Abraham - Boca Raton, FL 10/30/06

Abraham: But what's wrong with the chocolate chip cookies anyway?

Guest: Too many of them tends...

Abraham: But what causes you to call them "too many of them?" You say, "I want to be slender, but I believe the cookie is the opposite of that." So I want this but I am doing that, so how does it really feel when I'm eating the cookie?

Now stay with this, you're really gonna like it.

So if I am reaching for the relief of aligning with my physical intention, then it would feel better for me to let the cookie go as long as I believe the cookie is in opposition to where I want to go. But often that is not the subject on the table. The subject on the table is "I'm frustrated out of my mind about this and this and THIS! Oh, that cookie looks like relief! I'm frightened about this. This cookie looks like relief."

As you begin to reach for relief, there is nothing wrong with reaching for the comfort in food. There's nothing wrong with that, but just don't let that be the only comfort you are reaching for. Reach for the comfort in thought.

Now imagine this really sophisticated chemical factory that has the ability to extract from everything that you give it necessary components. Your body's ability to digest breaks everything down into usable stuff. And the cells of your body then attract to themselves the parts of that usable stuff that they most need. Very raw description, but really an accurate description, too. So your chemical factory has the ability to effectively utilize what you are eating unless you are angry about it, or frightened about it, or guilty about it. If you don't make peace with the way you are eating, you make it harder for your chemical factory to utilize it.

When you love what you are eating...

That's the biggest thing that has gone wrong with diet in your culture today. You used to eat and like your food, and now you've made all food your enemy.

It's a really rare one of you who can eat anything and not find something in it that makes you believe you should not eat it. So it is really odd to find a human eating and taking pleasure from the food. Instead, you've got this love/hate relationship with food. You want it because the cells of your body are asking for it. You were born with this guidance that lets you know it is time to refuel. You have this cellular calling for the food, then you give it the food and before you have even swallowed it, you've set up a vibrational wall of resistance that makes it more difficult for your body to utilize the food.

That's why different people can eat the identical food and get different results from it. If it were as you think it is, by now or long ago, you should have been able to get a formula that works for everyone - This food means THIS and this food means THIS. This combination of food means this. You are leaving out the only factor that matters. And it's the resistance/allowing factor.

It isn't WHAT you eat, it's how you feel when you eat it.

It isn't WHAT you say, it's how you feel when you say it.
It isn't WHAT you do, it's how you feel when you do it.

It's ONLY how you feel.

Abraham on Weight Loss and Body Image

Abraham - Sedona, AZ 08/25/07

Make peace with where you are. Appreciate your magnificent body as it is. Appreciate that it moves and that it is flexible and that it digests, that it assimilates. Accept the cellular metabolism, the cellular functioning.

Your body is a veritable chemical factory. It is an amazing mechanism. It is morphing constantly into that which is new. It is constantly becoming. It will be whatever you ask it to be. It will be whatever you ask it and allow it to be. It will be whatever you want it and allow it to be. It will be whatever you ask and allow it. It will be whatever you see it to be. It will be whatever you EXPECT it to be!

And most of you can't expect past what is. That's your limitation. You find it hard to expect past what is. Stretch that expectation by listening, by feeling for it. And when you start feeling - Oh, if you could feel what Source expects for you - and that's why so often you feels such strong negative emotion, that's that fear and inadequacy you describe. When you look at yourself so differently than they way Source looks at you, when you don't expect good things from you - because Source is expecting such wonderful things from you - there's a cross current going on.

You have to see as you want it to be. Never mind what is. What is does not mean diddly squat. What is doesn't matter. It's just a point in time, a momentary, manifestational indicator of how you've been thinking. Think differently and it will shift. It will morph with your thoughts every single time.

© Abraham-Hicks Publications