Trapped Emotions and Weight Gain

Most moms on their weight loss journey don’t know that trapped emotions and weight gain go hand in hand.

Hey Mamas! Let’s learn about trapped emotions and weight gain together! And remember to download my FREE Daily Mood Tracker below!

It’s not just your diet and exercise that is holding you back. It’s your emotions. Trapped emotions are the missing link in weight loss. Let’s learn about it together!

Emotional weight can be just as heavy as the physical kind, but it often goes unnoticed by the person carrying it around. When we talk about emotional weight gain, we are talking about the feelings or thoughts that make you feel stuck in a place where you don’t want to be (or if you do want to be there, these feelings prevent you from reaching your goals).

This could include stress from work or home life, fears about being a good enough parent, parenting partner, spouse, employee , and any other type of emotion or thought that stops us from moving forward in life.

How Negative Emotions Work in our Bodies

Trapped emotions are negative emotions that have not been fully released and can cause a great deal of harm to your health and well-being.

Trapped emotions are stored in our bodies as energy blocks or patterns; these blocks remain even after you feel better emotionally because they have been stored in your body’s energy field rather than being processed within the mind.

Emotions are powerful and can lead to overeating, binge eating, and weight gain. We can see how emotions influence our eating behavior in many ways. One of these ways is when we feel trapped or powerless.

In fact, trapped emotions are one major reason why so many women fail to lose weight on every diet they try.

These trapped emotions, which can even be literal magnets, create pockets of resistance in the body’s energy field that make the release of physical weight extremely difficult.

Trapped Emotions and Weight Gain Hidden Emotional Issues

To gain a deeper understanding of how trapped emotions can cause weight gain, let’s go back to the basic definition of emotion.

Emotion is energy in motion. When we experience an emotion, our body is flooded with energy that stimulates changes in the nervous system, hormone levels, and blood pressure.

These physical responses are part of what helps us adapt to new situations or adjust our actions when we’re confronted with something unexpected.

Emotions are also stored in our bodies as memories—and those memories can be very powerful!

For example, if you’ve ever been really angry at someone but couldn’t express your emotions, for whatever reason, then chances are there’s still some anger lingering inside your body somewhere.

This pent-up anger could cause all sorts of problems down the road if left untreated. Like increased stress hormones affecting your sleep patterns or low self-esteem leading toward depression.

Each trapped emotion has its own unique frequency and vibration, which it uses to attract people and situations to you in order to resolve itself.

When you let an emotion go, the problem that it is attracting disappears. If you’re experiencing physical symptoms or negative thoughts and emotions, it’s likely due to trapped emotions that need to be released.

Hidden emotions associated with being overweight can remain buried inside for years, still exerting an influence on your relationships with food and your physical health.

Some people even carry around a lot of trapped emotions from their childhood. This can cause all sorts of physical problems in the body such as weight gain and illness.

You might also be dealing with emotions such as:

Guilt over eating too much or being lazy;
Fear of failing at a diet when you know that you need to lose weight;
Anger toward family members who make negative comments about your size; and/or
Shame because other people think they know what’s best for your health without even knowing how difficult losing weight really is!

Holding on to these trapped emotions, even when subconsciously, can cause a whole host of issues relating to overeating and weight gain.

Stress, anxiety, and depression
Guilt and shame
Anger
Fear, worry
Jealousy, resentment
Grief and loneliness

Suggestions for Releasing Trapped Emotions

If you have been overweight for a long time, it’s likely that you have not only felt like your weight is an issue for others but for yourself as well. Your body may be experiencing symptoms of poor health and disease, yet the emotional component of this situation can go overlooked.

Therapies

There are ways to release these trapped emotions, so they don’t continue to affect your life. One way is by using affirmations or positive self-talk out loud (or silently). Another way is by using guided visualizations that help you visualize yourself releasing the trapped emotions from the body and mind. Many people incorporate these into their daily meditations.

There are lots of resources and services that will teach you how to meditate effectively. A few are:

7 Minute Mindfulness – Seven Minute Mindfulness is a meditation training program that helps people get better with meditation and discover the real essence of life.
Ziva – Ziva believes that meditation is not enough, and goes all in on The Ziva Technique: mindfulness, meditation and manifesting. They offer two books: Stress Less Guided Meditation and their best seller Stress Less, Accomplish More. They also offer beginner to expert courses and a bunch more resources! A few include 3 Secrets Masterclass, Easy Magic, and a Self Care Center.
INeedMotivation.com – This website sells courses aimed at people who want to improve their lives. Whether it be their perspective on things going on right now, or their productivity; blog, hypnosis, and subliminal.

A less conventional method is to release trapped emotions is by using The Emotion Code or Body Code. The Emotion Code and Body Code are powerful methods of releasing these blockages to allow for efficient healing. Both methods use tapping to release trapped emotions from the body.

You can learn more by reading Erin-Dail Plunkett‘s article, The Emotion Code The Body Code, or Stephanie Mandel’s article Emotion Code and Body Code: Unlock Your Healing Potential.

I also recommend the book The Emotion Code: How to Release Your Trapped Emotions for Abundant Health, Love, and Happiness by Dr. Bradley Nelson.

Changed Behaviors

You may be wondering what kind of emotions can affect weight loss. Well, emotional eating is a big one.

If you’re feeling stressed, depressed or anxious and reach for food as a way to soothe yourself, it might not feel like emotional eating at the time—but it is!

The same goes for feeling stuck in a rut or lonely without realizing it. As humans, we tend to eat when our energy levels drop because this helps us feel better emotionally (even if only temporarily).

This kind of behavior often leads to weight gain because the body doesn’t register that you are full until after your blood sugar has dropped. When your blood sugar drops too low, you get hungry again and eat more food than necessary.

Emotional eating is a disorder that can be triggered by various factors in your life. The best way to deal with this problem is to have a healthy lifestyle and develop self-awareness.

If you are struggling with emotional eating and weight loss, here are some tips that might help you:

Try to set up a routine of physical activity. It will help you stay in shape and release trapped emotions.

If you are feeling sad, try talking about your feelings instead of trying to suppress them. This will help you get over the sadness faster.

Try not to use food as a reward for yourself or for others. It will only make the problem worse in the long run, so it’s better not to do it at all.

Struggling to find healthy meals? Don’t want to deal with meal preps and plans? Try one of the options below!

Everytable – Everytable aims to redefine the food landscape the same way McDonald’s did fifty years ago. But this time, instead of burgers and fries, we are selling nutritious, fresh, made-from-scratch food, at fast-food prices.

Blue Apron – Blue Apron’s mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone. Blue Apron only supplies the best ingredients. They believe in setting a high standard for their ingredients so they work directly with family-run farms and artisanal purveyors.

Butcher Box – ButcherBox curates and customizes high-quality cuts for you, including grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, heritage-breed pork, wild-caught seafood, and more!

Tips for Losing Emotional Weight

Recognize Your Emotions

Emotions are powerful. They can have a serious impact on your body, including weight gain. This is because emotions trigger hormones that affect metabolism and body fat levels. The best way to avoid this is to recognize your emotions and learn how they affect you.

To track your daily emotions, download your FREE Daily Mood Tracker!

Emotions are feelings that arise when you experience something either positive or negative. They include anger, fear, joy, love, sadness and many others.

Your body has an important role in how emotions influence your health; it releases chemicals such as adrenaline when something happens so that both mind/body respond appropriately (e.g. fight-or-flight response).

These chemicals also help control appetite. When we are stressed out our bodies may crave comfort foods which often contain high amounts of sugar/fatty acids. These foods make us feel better momentarily, but worse later on down the line since these types of foods aren’t great at keeping hunger satisfied long term.

Remove Negative Emotional Baggage

Clearing the negative emotions from your life is the most important thing you can do when addressing trapped emotions and weight gain.

Negative emotions are emotional baggage that you carry around with you. They don’t just weigh on your mind, they weigh on your body too. When we hold on to negative emotions, they affect our health and well-being in a variety of ways:

Emotions affect our choices—we make different decisions based on how we feel. If we’re feeling angry or resentful or afraid of something, we might avoid certain situations that could help us grow or improve ourselves (like going to therapy or seeking out an accountability partner).

We also tend to make poor food choices when we’re feeling bad about ourselves. Of course, these aren’t the only ways that emotions affect our weight—emotions affect everything in our lives!

Know Yourself

Another important step to losing weight is knowing yourself. In order for you to be able to lose weight, it’s important that you understand your strengths and weaknesses, as well as your emotions and how they affect your behavior.

To assist with knowing yourself emotionally, I highly recommend getting a Mood Tracking Journal. Here are a few of my faves:

Understanding what type of person you are has a significant impact on your ability to lose weight. But how do you truly gain an understanding of self?

Simple! By taking a personality test. There are several options out there, but I recommend including the Personality Hacker.

Heal from the Past

“What’s the point of this?” you may wonder. Well, it’s simple: by healing from the past, you can release trapped emotions and heal your body. In order to do so, though, you need to take some time for reflection.

Breathe deeply and pay attention to how your body feels as you think about your life up until now. Where have you been emotionally? What are the major events that have impacted who you are today? Are there any unresolved issues from childhood or adolescence that still haunt your mind at night when all is quiet? When was the last time someone told you they loved or appreciated something about yourself?

Once these questions are answered, move on toward working through these feelings so that they don’t hold back progress in other areas of life such as losing weight or improving relationships with friends and family members.

How Negative Emotions Work in our Bodies

Trapped Emotions and Weight Gain Hidden Emotional Issues

You might also be dealing with emotions such as:

Holding on to these trapped emotions, even when subconsciously, can cause a whole host of issues relating to overeating and weight gain.