Why do we as humans seek balance but struggle to find it?

Many of you know that one of my life’s struggles has been food and weight related. I spent the past 10 years seeking answers and I want to share with you what I’ve learned over those past 10 years.

For me I was food addicted, struggled with weight and body image, and struggled with self-love.

So 10 years ago I began the quest. I read all about nutrition. I got certified in nutrition. I got certified in a lot of things really all in a hopes to learn how to lose weight.

And I did. I learned how to REPEATEDLY lose weight. But I did so through shear will. I’d do what most ‘experts’ advised. I’d set a goal weight. I’d find a motivation like a holiday to work towards and I’d lose weight. Then I’d gain half of it back during my holiday and the other half 3 weeks after. I’d beat myself up with guilt and shame for ‘letting myself go’ again.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve lost the same 20 pounds over my lifetime. It’s enough to make anyone insane which is how I felt. I honestly thought the problem was ME. I was exhausted of fighting my ‘cravings’.

So then I thought the next part of the journey was about acceptance and self-love. And again any of you who know me know that when I commit, I go all in so I wrote and published a book about acceptance and self-love. And in the process I did learn acceptance and self-love. I thought if I created inner-happiness that I’d find that inner-peace and freedom I was seeking.

This lead me to believe that I needed to accept the weight I was, to stop ‘dieting’, and to throw the scale in the garbage. Yet doing so did not bring me inner-freedom and peace. AND by the way, isn’t self-love and acceptance a lifelong journey? Does that mean I’d have to wait until the end of life to experience this freedom?

What most ‘experts’ miss the point on is that I wasn’t trying to lose weight just to look good to accept myself. Really deep down what I wanted wasn’t self-love and acceptance, nor was it the knowledge about how to lose weight. Both are great, really, but they weren’t the burning, deep-down feelings I was seeking.

What I really wanted was inner-balance, inner-peace, and inner-freedom.

I wanted to go to bed without thinking about food. I wanted to MAINTAIN my weight and not just lose it. I wanted to feel in control around a buffet table. I wanted to be able to keep a Costco sized bag of chips in the house and not eat it all before the end of the week. I wanted to just stop battling food but everything I learned in nutrition and about self-love didn’t make that happen. No matter how much I loved and accepted myself or knew about weight loss, it didn’t help me achieve feeling balance and freedom.

So it was time to seek answers outside the box.

I realized that to have this peace within myself with food, it wasn’t about strengthening the human conscious brain in order to build willpower. It wasn’t even about FOOD. It was learning how to tame and quiet that animal subconscious brain. You see, the body seeks homeostasis. No matter how young, old, sick, or healthy we are, the body is always trying to heal itself, therefore, it’s always sending you signals for survival and healing. For example, when you are dehydrated it signals thirst. When you need to rest, you feel tired. When you are low in salt, you get hungry. These aren’t life’s inconveniences, but rather life’s wondrous blessings.

All this time I was beating myself up for not controlling urges, but it was the urge I actually needed to pay attention to and not ignore or run from. I was trying to tell my body what it needed rather than listen to it telling me and paying attention to it. I had to stop seeking acceptance on ‘my’ terms and start honouring acceptance on my ‘body’s’ terms.

That’s the miracle of the human body. It already knows what it needs. We need to learn to listen rather than ‘talk’.

This is why it’s so natural and inherent for us to desire ‘balance’ because the body is designed to seek balance in the form of homeostasis. It’s how we humans are designed. And it’s from balance that we create these feelings of inner-freedom, inner-peace, and inner-happiness. When both brains are happy, on a body, mind, and spirit level, we experience this heightened sense of peace.

So how do we go about creating this ‘balance’?

Obviously everyone’s answer will be different but I will share with you my experience and what I need.

Balance isn’t just about food, diet, and the body. Balance isn’t just about self-love, acceptance, and the mind. It’s also not just about positive energy and the spirit. Balance is putting all three body, mind, and spirit functions together. Often when we go to the doctor or the nutritionist or the personal trainer we seek this one magic bullet or one key secret, but it doesn’t exist. Balance does not come from one ‘thing’ or one plane.

This meant for me I had to find a new way to eat that I didn’t learn in my nutrition textbooks. I stopped beating a square peg into a round hole. I started to ‘listen’ rather than to ‘tell’.

Rather than eating an unprocessed whole grain, low fat, and no salt diet that most people proclaim as ‘healthy’, I had to eat no grain, high fat, and high salt in order to give my body the nutrients it needed. I also needed to take away the toxins it didn’t, and in the process my body finally found homeostasis. And when it found homeostasis, to no surprise, my cravings went away, my moods shifted, and I stopped thinking about food! Turns out after 10 years of nutrition research and a few more in self-love lessons, my body was just trying to seek homeostasis. Those cravings weren’t a lack of control or willpower. There wasn’t anything wrong with me. My body was merely doing its job to find ‘balance’ and keep me in survival mode. I needed to work with my body, NOT try adapt it to ‘fit in’ OR force acceptance of its unhealthy state which is what I was doing all these years.

Turns out when you learn how to ‘eat’ for body balance, ‘think’ for mind balance, and ‘feel’ for spiritual balance, you really can achieve that inner-peace, freedom and happiness and it doesn’t take a lifetime to achieve. It just takes learning the right combination of factors to apply so the body ‘falls’ into balance rather than forcing it so.

You can’t consciously think yourself into balance and peace.

You give your body what it needs – the right food.

You give your mind what it needs – passion, meaning, and purpose.

You give your spirit what it needs – positive energy.

Then you take away all it doesn’t need (toxic food, toxic beliefs, toxic relationships, toxic energy).

When you balance the body, mind, and spirit, together as a whole, that intrinsic state of balance you are designed to seek, will ‘fall’ into place as the result.

You don’t seek balance. Balance finds you.