Beauty and smarts don’t go together

All my life, I really thought that I could not be beautiful. Since I was smart and successful, I had to be unattractive. It had to be one or the other and this has always been a major challenge for me. As I became more successful, it was very hard for me to be beautiful. Therefore, it was very hard for me to lose weight. As a matter of fact, I had created a subconscious block on losing weight. Losing weight meant to me being more beautiful and therefore less smart and less successful.

This belief came from my childhood. When I was growing up I’ve always been the “smart” one. In my family, people continuously praised my intelligence. This was a good thing for my self-esteem because I am extremely confident that I’m a smart woman and I’ve been using this self-confidence to really help me in my career and other areas of my life. This family reinforcement has been very positive for me.

The negative part of my family’s influence is that for my family, I could only be the “smarty”. So what happened is that my sister was the “beautiful” one and was always praised as “beautiful”. I talked to my sister about this and we both realized that we have developed limiting beliefs for years that we can be smart or beautiful, not both. We had to decide between beauty and intelligence.

The truth is that we are both smart and beautiful; my sister is gorgeous and she is also extremely smart. As for myself, I have been told that I am gorgeous even though I did not feel beautiful for almost my entire life. Yet, I know, thanks to my parents’ praises that I am extremely sharp.

Unfortunately, for years, my sister and I just did not believe it that we were both smart and beautiful. I know that my family didn’t do this on purpose, they simply believed it. The problem is that what they believed of me, stayed with me all my life. And yes, I am smart. But I’ve struggled so much to be and feel beautiful.

Obviously when I’m talking about beauty, I’m also talking about weight. This was the real problem. Because I could only be smart and not beautiful, I held on to the weight. There was absolutely no way I could be thin because if I were thin, I would be beautiful and could not be smart, which would contradict what my family had been telling me during my childhood.

How about you? Is there anything that happened in your childhood that you need to bring back to the surface? Do you have any beliefs that have been anchored in your subconscious when you were a child? Is there anything that your family told you when you were young that now makes it almost impossible for you today to see yourself thin and lose weight.

I encourage you to step back into the past and really think about all experiences that could have influenced your appearance and weight. Write down everything that goes through your mind. How did a certain childhood experience make you feel? Did it influence you for the rest of your life? Past experiences may not seem important at first but when we look back, we realize that these key experiences totally change the way we feel or we think, and prevent us from being thin. Remembering them is one of the keys to our freedom.

Grab a pen and some paper and list any past experiences that may affect your desire to lose weight and be thin.