It is very difficult to lose and control weight when the subconscious part of the mind believes that happiness is not possible without being overweight.

One of the supreme ironies of Western culture is that people who suffer from one of the most common causes of unhappiness — overweight — are perceived as being jolly and happy. Yet it is evident that overweight people are in fact among the unhappiest people alive. This has been demonstrated in virtually every major research or poll on the subject.

But the myth persists. And it sometimes invades the subconscious realm where, if it is not identified and changed, it will make any significant or permanent weight control impossible.

Here, in highly simplified form, is how it usually works:

"Fat people are always jolly and happy." (This is the major premise in what will here be a syllogism, which is the epitome of the deductive process. Deduction is the only logic available to the subconscious mind. In this case the premise is false, but the subconscious mind would have to be able to reason inductively to know that. It cannot.)

"I want to be happy." (A good logician would be unhappy with the formulation of this, the minor premise, but stated this way it is more accurately representative of the subconscious process.)

"Therefore I want to be one of the fat people." (This is a perfectly logical conclusion to the logic of the syllogism but it is of course logically false — technically — because the major premise is false. But, again, the subconscious would need inductive reasoning to work that out correctly.)

So here you have a situation in which the subconscious mind has decided that happiness — or being jolly, which is basically just the outward expression of happiness — is dependent upon being fat. In other words, fat equals happy.

If you determine through ideomotor questioning that the "jolly factor" is relevant to your situation, you will have to formulate and apply suggestions to change it.

Fat Safety and Dieting Failure in Weight Control

The spiritual and psychic investment we make in our mates is sometimes prodigious and these bonded relationships become more important than just about anything else—short of children—in our lives. Yet there remain some primordial drives lurking in our minds. Lurking in almost every young adult's limbic system (that's probably where it is) is the urge to procreate with anything higher up the genetic ladder. This drive is built in. We come wired that way and resist temptations through fear (pregnancy, disease, social disapproval, and so on) or moral convictions. (Opportunity, or lack of it, also plays a part but that can usually be overcome in ordinary modern circumstances.)

One way to reduce the probability of yielding to such temptations is to eliminate the targets of those temptations. If we are not attractive to others, they are less likely to give us the opportunity to stray. It is pretty obvious that, if no one finds us desirable, we are unlikely to cheat on mates or otherwise get into trouble.

Mind you, much of this typically goes on at a mentally subconscious level and may trigger only marginal conscious awareness, if that. Even though we have absolutely no conscious intention of cheating on our mates, the subconscious may nonetheless be worried that we might. And one outstandingly effective way to make ourselves undesirable is to be fat.

This happens to both men and women, but it is more likely to happen to women. But it works both ways, that is to say in both genders. But the effects are not limited to oneself, or just to what one does to oneself. There also exist frequent situations in which one mate's insecurity motivates him or her to influence the other mate to be overweight. For instance, a masculinely insecure man might be driven to make his wife overweight. That way he has less to worry about from the competition. He might wish his wife were svelte and sexy, but the insecurity that that would produce are far more painful than putting up with a fat wife.

There are lots of permutation and combinations that can arise in this kind of context. Here are most of them:

• Person is overweight to reduce the temptation to philander.
• Person induces mate to be overweight to diminish mate's temptations.
• Overweight person induces mate to be like him/her (for several reasons).
• Person senses mate is insecure so becomes fat to ease mate's insecurity.

Of course this kind of mate-insecurity syndrome is by no means the only reason, or set of possible reasons, for being overweight. But it is very common.

ideomotor questioning is one of the best ways to poke into this issue to see if fidelity or mate-security issues are factors in your problem with weight. If it is, sharpen your pencil and work up some suggestions to get started changing your subconscious dynamics so you won't have to fight what is probably an unnecessary battle.