Buddha Belly Be-Gone: Effortlessly Shedding Ascension Weight Without Exercising More or Eating Less

Why eating less & exercising more doesn’t work

The current solution to weight loss is to exercise more and to eat less, it has become a game of calories where the goal is to create a calorie deficit that will inevitably lead to weight loss. The idea is that when you burn more calories, while eating less calories than you need – that this creates weight loss and although this may work for some it doesn’t work for every kind of weight issue.

My biggest problem with this approach is that it is unsustainable. you can eat less (aka diet) for a period of time but you can’t eat less all of your life. The same goes for exercising more, there are going to be periods in your life where you will for whatever reason not be able to exercise more and inevitably you will drop one or both and weight gain will likely be the result because you have conditioned your body to play the calorie game.

Like many modern ways of dealing with things, exercising more and eating less is battling the symptoms of weight gain, it doesn’t address the root cause. The problem with battling symptoms is that it’s an endless battle, it never stops because it only addresses the external and not the internal or underlying issue(s) that is creating the external results. which explains why so many people are stuck in yo-yo or weight cycling, often regaining more weight than they initially lost because they didn’t address the root causes why the body retained the weight to begin with.

Modern medicine tends to look at the body as a soulless machine with parts that easily break or malfunction, when in fact from a spiritual perspective the body is the vehicle of the soul within the Earth realm that possesses an innate intelligence that knows exactly what to do to support our Earth experience.

Ascension & trauma weight

You have probably never seen it this way but Ascension is not possible without healing our unresolved trauma, in a way you could actually say that Ascension is trauma healing as they go hand in hand. It’s the trauma healing that facilitates the Ascension which paradoxically is first and foremost a descension of the soul into the physical body.

This descension of the soul into the physical body is only possible when we have healed our unresolved pain and wounding (trauma) to a certain degree (I explain this process in-depth in the Ultimate Guide to Inner Union that you can download for free).

Now you may not consciously remember any particular highly traumatic event, but that does not mean that you do not carry unresolved trauma from this lifetime or other lifetimes. Everyone, every single human being of the currently 7.9 billion souls incarnated on planet Earth carries unresolved trauma within them from the moment they are conceived in the womb, because it is our unresolved trauma aka karma (read this teaching on karma from a new paradigm perspective) that keeps us chained to the cycle of death and rebirth. If we had no unresolved trauma (karma) we would not need to reincarnate in this dimensional reality.

The reason we do not often remember highly traumatic experiences is because we hold them subconsciously, and even when we do remember traumatic experiences we tend to downplay them because we tell ourselves that they aren’t as bad as the cases that make it to the news. This is both a coping as well as a survival strategy to try to minimize the abuse or trauma we have experienced in order to be able to keep functioning at the most basic levels.

There are people that believe they have never experienced trauma in this lifetime because they didn’t experience abuse, but trauma can come in many different shapes and forms. One of my childhood traumas was created when my mother left me with my father and half sisters in our family home for a three month trip to the United States when I was around 4 years old. I was fine when she left, but because she was away so long and because we didn’t have cell phones or internet back then there was close to zero contact and I felt completely abandoned by her, even more so because she had left me behind with my abuser(s) instead of taking me with her.

Trauma doesn’t have to come with a big ‘T’ in order for it to have an effect on us, trauma with a little ‘t’ and especially chronic trauma that lasts over a longer stretch of time even if it isn’t severe can be traumatising. Growing up in a toxic family environment we often don’t realise that what is happening to us is not normal, because it’s normal to us. This continued exposure to stressful and mentally/emotionally/physically painful circumstances is the deepest underlying cause of many health issues including weight problems.

“Dr. Celan explains that trauma sensitizes something called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which is the body’s central stress response system. You can think of this as the intersection of our central nervous system and endocrine system.

Because trauma impacts the HPA axis, it can affect our hormones, especially adrenaline, cortisol, and oxytocin. Trauma makes us more reactive to stressors, and more likely to increase the stress hormone cortisol. In certain situations, hormones like cortisol are very important. Think: If you’re being chased by a wild animal, adrenaline kicks in to help you get out of danger’s reach. But when you’re not actively in danger, trauma keeps your body in that revved-up state, putting serious mileage on your body.

Once the stressor is removed, the body’s hormones should respond in kind. The only problem? “A body that is exposed to trauma long-term will continue to produce these hormones, which may lead to negative long-term effects on the body,” according to Dr. Yasmin Akhunji, an endocrinologist with Paloma Health. “This puts you at an increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, sleep disruption, weight gain, and memory/concentration damage.” Source: endocrineweb.com

According to Louise Hay the metaphysical cause of obesity is: Fear, feeling a deep need for emotional protection. Running away from feelings, insecurity.

These are all trauma related feelings that Louise Hay describes especially the feeling of feeling unsafe, because when do we feel a deep need for emotional protection? When we feel unsafe. Now add to this that the Ascension process comes without a user’s manual and brings to the surface all of our old unresolved pain and wounding even from previous lifetimes and you can imagine that this in itself creates a deep sense of not being safe because all those fears and all those lower vibrational frequency emotions that we still carry have to be released when we often don’t understand their origin and that triggers the physical body to go into protection mode.

This is the kind of weight that won’t budge, because it serves a deeper purpose – it serves to protect you and so eating less and exercising more hardly makes a dent. Even if you successfully lose weight, it is regained just as easily and often just as quickly because the body is seeking to create this sense of protection that is so deeply lacking within.

My personal journey to weight loss

Because I was pregnant at the young age of nineteen my weight loss journey started at twenty. I had gained 24 kilo during my first pregnancy and lost it all within 18 months postpartum. At age twenty-five after a hypnotherapy session, memories of sexual abuse by my father started resurfacing and I started gaining weight. A few years later I became pregnant with my second child in the middle of a divorce from my then abusive husband, who had always threatened to take my child and ruin me if I would ever leave him. Having been together with him for thirteen years I did everything I needed to do to get out of that relationship alive and with my son. I continued to sleep with him, gave him the house, took on his debts, agreed to co-parenting and all his other demands – just to be able to get out alive.

This time I didn’t get back to a normal weight until my daughter was two-and-a-half. I had been vegetarian for the past four years and then switched back to macrobiotics which was how my mother raised me. Within six months I fit into a size 34 (EU) and was super skinny. During that time I met my second husband and one and a half year later I had my third child and was back to my previous weight in a matter of months.

My youngest son turned out to be allergic to soy, one of the key ingredients in the macrobiotic diet and so we went back to a less strict vegan diet as the macrobiotic diet is largely plant-based with fish as an exception and no dairy whatsoever. When my youngest son was two, I became pregnant again in a period of immense stress, uncertainty and family issues. My youngest daughter died thirteen days after she was born due to a birth defect that affected her lungs and heart, as the doctor put it ‘her plumbing system was set up wrong’ which made her chance of survival extremely slim – she had a very rare condition called the malformation of the vein of Galen.

It was after this that I was not only unable to lose my post pregnancy weight, I started gaining weight as there were multiple contributing factors that made it a very stressful time outside of my daughter’s death. I caught my then husband and father of my two youngest children having an affair for the second time with the same woman. My oldest child was placed in juvenile hall because of his drug abuse at the onset of his teenage years, he later developed drugs-related psychosis as a result of his drug problems. My daughter’s school was trying to move her into special education without grounds and we were living in my mother’s two room apartment with the four of us, my mom, the two little ones and myself. My mother and my daughter slept upstairs where the living room and kitchen was, my youngest son and I slept downstairs where the only bedroom and bathroom was. I had spent my whole pregnancy there as well.

My mother who since she had returned into my life after my first divorce had always tried to be as supportive as she could be, especially in the most practical sense – was suddenly taken out by an accident. She had slid into the Amsterdam tram tracks with her bike on a rainy morning bringing my children to school five weeks after my baby daughter had died. My three year old son in a bike seat on the back had been fine, my mother however broke her collarbone and was bedridden for a couple of weeks.

The next morning I got on the bike still having postpartum bleeding to bring my children to school, do the groceries, the laundry, the cooking and so on because there was no one else to do it, but me. I remember talking to one of the mother’s in the school playground one day about everything that had happened within a short period of time, it was literally a matter of weeks in which I had lost a child, lost my husband and lost my support system. Husband number one told me none of this would have happened if I hadn’t left him and husband number two told me that it was my fault that he cheated on me twice and that our baby died (over the years he has drastically changed and is very supportive in raising our son).

However at that time, I couldn’t expect any help from my children’s fathers and the one person that had helped me through much of this ordeal wasn’t able to anymore, at least not in a practical sense. My father was still alive at that time but terminally ill and fully under the influence of my stepmother who channeled all his attention and money to her own children and grandchildren. He was not going to help me, nor could I expect any help from my half-siblings as my father’s side of the family was deeply mentally and emotionally damaged. One of my half-sisters was even part of the problem at that time which is more complex than this quick summary but being childless herself then, she had tried to get my mother to give her my daughter while I was moving back to the Netherlands from a neighbouring country. I had sent my daughter ahead to live with my mother so she would not get behind in the Dutch schooling system, while I tried to find a house for me and the children to live in. Like all big cities, Amsterdam is very difficult to get into because there are not enough affordable houses and a ten year or more waiting list to get in. Only if you had money could you rent privately and I didn’t have that kind of money.

When I saw what my half-sister was doing I cut her off immediately and she retaliated viciously. I had just published my second book in the Netherlands under my married name and was getting some small but important local and nationwide press exposure and this triggered deep sibling rivalry in her because I had everything she wanted. She started spreading horrendous lies about me cleverly siding with my abusive and somewhat narcissistic first ex-husband, which indirectly created much of the problems at my daughter’s school that escalated shortly after my youngest daughter died as he was born during the summer vacation.

Suffice to say, I was being hit left, right, front and centre with both painful and stressful situations – the Universe and my soul really allowing me to experience what I was made of and how much strength I carried inside of me.

That day on the playground I said to this other mom “I have to keep standing, because if I crumble there will be no one to take care of my children.’ So, I forced myself to keep standing no matter what which was when I accumulated a lot of the weight that I have carried since to help me keep myself standing and not be knocked down by the incredible hardships I faced at that time.

Over the years, I have tried to lose weight in many ways that varied from hitting the gym, to nutritional resets, to detoxes, IV liver detoxes, herbal remedies, homeopathic remedies, flower essences, calorie restriction, personal trainers, numerous different diets and so on. Nothing had true lasting effect, even when I did lose weight and most had zero effect whatsoever.

At the end of  2019 I had three weekly sessions with a personal trainer for four months and I ate prepped meals that she picked for me for over one month and the net result was losing 1kg! Especially towards the end of my healing journey, my weight became even more stuck and I gained an extra 14 kilos out of nowhere despite only being able to eat three small meals a day because I would be full after only a couple of bites (which turns out to be a symptom of estrogen dominance).

Outsiders including professionals often think that being overweight is only caused by overeating or emotional eating, but this is not always the case or maybe even rarely the case. I would always tell them if it was a question of snacking too much or constant visits to the fridge or pantry, it would actually be easier for me because I would have the high self-discipline needed to break such a pattern. The problem was that I could eat salad and still gain weight.

I know how to eat healthy, I know how to regulate my weight and still my weight was out of control even though I eat the same as my mother who now lives with us and she weighs 48 kilo on the same food and portion size as me. I eventually weighed twice as much as she did not eating any differently. I felt so helpless and out of control when it came to my weight because I was doing everything the way it had always worked and still nothing I did at that time seemed to work anymore.

Not even acupuncture, or different types of therapies and healing made any difference. So, when I talk about weight that was stuck I am not kidding. I paid $1000 in Dubai for a revolutionary IV detox therapy that was guaranteed to have you lose weight. I did lymph drainage massage, cupping and hydrocolon therapy and none of it helped me lose weight. I spent a small fortune (multiple 5 figures) on finding the thing that would help me lose weight and aside from 2015 when I lost a substantial amount of weight, but then gained twice as much back because I did it through diet and exercise – nothing has actually worked until now.

Which is why the results I am getting now are absolutely amazing. It is my story of frustration to almost effortless victory that makes it that despite not having any credentials in weight loss I am THE person to be writing about this from a new paradigm perspective, instead of the old 3D perspective on weight loss. Further on, I will share the small and easy steps I took to lose weight without eating less or exercising more. Even crazier, I have actually regained my appetite and am currently eating more than I did before, while losing weight nonetheless.

I am hoping by sharing my own journey of weight loss on the Ascension journey, to help others facing the same issues – to unlock the key to their weight loss as well.

The connection between trauma and weight gain

That things are finally moving now I attribute to the following overall approach that I took:

• Regulating my nervous system
• Supporting the adrenals
• Balancing my hormones

I did other things as well that contributed, but these were the big game changers for me and I actually believe that balancing the hormones was the most important part which I will explain in further detail later on.

I am of course peri-menopausal but that was already the case when I started gaining weight as the peri-menopausal stage starts in our mid-thirties. If it was just a question of menopause, weight would be the only menopausal symptom I would be having – as I do not have any other such symptoms. So this is not menopausal weight, as I will explain hormone imbalances DO NOT even have to be connected to the female menstrual cycle.

In fact, it’s not even a women’s thing, because men can have estrogen dominance as well. If you are a man you would have to research the cause of estrogen dominance in men yourself because I retraced my steps as a woman. One quick Google search already shows that cortisol decreases testosterone, while progesterone functions as a precursor in the male body to produce testosterone while also acting as a balance to decrease estrogen. Source: Hardingmedicalinstitute.com

This teaching therefore applies to men as well, even though I will be citing female oriented research as I am a woman myself and did not research the science behind this phenomenon from a male perspective.

What I was shown writing this teaching is that estrogen dominance is the bodies way to protect us from the effects of guess what?! TRAUMA. ‘Estrogen regulates the brain’s fear response, protecting against PTSD. New research suggests that its additional role could be protecting the female brain from trauma.’ Source: Medicalnewstoday.com

‘When your body is stressed, it works to produce higher levels of the hormone cortisol which manages stress in your body. Because progesterone is the precursor to cortisol, when cortisol levels increase, progesterone levels decrease. So, too much stress in a woman’s life can lead to a progesterone deficiency, causing estrogen dominance.’ Source: bodylogiccmd.com

Current research has found that high estrogen levels protect us against developing PTSD while low estrogen levels contribute to the development of PTSD. In case you are wondering PTSD stands for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Science also confirms that there is a correlation between trauma and weight gain:

‘Research suggests childhood sexual abuse increases the odds of adult obesity by between 31 and 100 percent. One study found that about 8 percent of all cases of obesity, and 17 percent of “class three” severe obesity, can be attributed to some form of child abuse.’ Source: theatlantic.com

But it’s not only childhood abuse that can cause weight gain…

‘The risk of becoming obese was 36 percent higher for women who had experienced at least four negative life events in the past 5 years, compared with women who had experienced no negative life events. The more negative life events endured, the higher the obesity risk.’ Source: medicalnewtoday.com

The more trauma we experience the higher the chance we become obese, while at the same time another 2021 study supports the link between excess weight and higher hormone levels. ‘The study found that estrogen and testosterone levels dropped quite a bit when overweight and obese women lost weight.’ Source: breastcancer.org

The above is probably why my weight gain hit at that time in my life and not earlier because in that period I lost a child to drugs and although he didn’t die – he never became the person he was before the drugs. My youngest daughter died shortly after birth. I caught my husband with another woman for the second time shortly after our daughter’s funeral and because I had no money back then I became a victim of the system in many ways during the period of 2004-2007.

That whole time-period was really a dark night of the soul initiation for me.

Because of my mother’s accident shortly after my baby died and me needing to be there for my two little ones who were also grieving the loss of their older brother, their baby sister and their father being torn out of their lives quite abruptly – I had no time to grieve. I went into a fight for survival that had me get my life back on track one step at a time, our own home in 2009 despite waiting lists, getting off of welfare in 2011, becoming debt-free in 2014 and eventually creating a six figure business.

It wasn’t until 2014, seven years after my baby daughter’s death that I finally had the mental and emotional space to really dive into my healing process. Even though I had of course worked with healers in the years prior. I did lose weight in 2015 through diet and exercise and then regained it, but I never lost weight to the extent of my pre-pregnancy weight in 2006. Even in 2015 I was still 26kg heavier than I had been prior to my fourth pregnancy.

In the beginning of 2016 I lost whom I felt to be the love of my life and if it had not been for my two kids, I would have checked out at that time as I had completely lost the will to live. This set me on a trajectory to heal all my unresolved trauma from this lifetime as well as previous lifetimes and the closer I got to my deepest pain and wounding, the more weight I packed on.

At times it felt that merely the act of breathing led to more weight gain, when now in the light of all that has been revealed to me through writing this teaching I understand that it was my body protecting me and keeping me safe while I faced all of these painful experiences of the past and dealt with them one by one.

What I have found is that estrogen dominance is the bodies way of damage control during the healing process, without higher levels of estrogen we would be more susceptible to PTSD which is counterproductive to our healing. Becoming obese is initially a lesser threat to our survival and therefore ‘seen’ as a lesser evil than developing PTSD which is essentially a fancy term for a group of symptoms that describe someone stuck in their trauma response.

The body chooses storing fat over being able to function less efficiently cognitively especially within situations where functioning less efficiently cognitively is not an option, for example within situations of domestic abuse where you need to stay sharp to survive. It isn’t surprising then that women who are victims of domestic violence are more prone to be obese (Source: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

It would make sense that in the process of healing our trauma, this same stress response is triggered that depletes our progesterone in order to create cortisol which then over time leads to estrogen dominance. Facing our painful unresolved emotions is stressful in its own way as it forces us to come to terms with the demons of our past.

I couldn’t find any research to corroborate this but this can simply be because it has never been researched. Much of this research is fairly new and it is long know that there is a gender bias in medicine and medical research that puts women’s health at risk. (Source: theconversation.com)

For example, research has shown that women are almost twice as much at risk to develop PTSD (Source: apa.org) when according to that same research men are more at risk to experience trauma than women, however as women’s trauma stems primarily from sexual assault, incest and domestic violence one has to take into account that sexual assault remains dramatically underreported (Source: brennancenter.org) the same is true for domestic abuse or intimate partner violence (Source: womensaid.org) and incest as well (Source: theatlantic.com).

Such conclusions are indicative of the male bias in research as any women would know that all three of these types of crimes against women and girls are underreported. Of course men and boys can be and are victim of such crimes as well, but statistically to a lesser degree although I have no doubt that these cases are underreported too.

Just look at the trial of Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard and how this is raising awareness for male victims of domestic violence. Notice that Johnny is the one that has gained weight (Source: houseandwhips.com) in 2022, while Amber claims to have lost weight due to the alleged abuse she experienced in her marriage. Stress does sometimes lead to weight loss, but it is interesting to see that Depp as a survivor of childhood abuse and in his marriage with Amber what appears to be spousal abuse has suddenly started to gain weight. Perhaps this is because he has to confront his alleged abuser in court and is feeling a need to protect himself while he has allowed himself to be so vulnerable in the public eye. This would then be an example of how men can be influenced in the same way as women by this dynamic. ‘As the high levels of cortisol course through your bloodstream, the hormone increases your appetite, causes insulin resistance and slows your metabolism. This leads the body to store fat and calories to help you cope with stress.’ (Source; bonsecours.com)

Even women that suffer PTSD are statistically prone to gain more weight, which would make sense if estrogen works to protect the female brain. The body would want to ‘produce’ more estrogen to protect against the PTSD, when physiologically of course the PTSD would work in the same way as chronic stress due to trauma leading to a depletion of the body progesterone reserves to fuel cortisol which creates estrogen dominance and the with estrogen dominance associated weight gain.

‘Women with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) gain weight more rapidly and are more likely to be overweight or obese than women without the disorder, find researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Harvard School of Public Health. It is the first study to look at the relationship between PTSD and obesity over time.

The biological pathway of how PTSD leads to weight gain is unknown, but scientists have a number of guesses. One is through the over-activation of stress hormones. PTSD may lead to disturbances in functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system, each of which is involved in regulating a broad range of body processes, including metabolism.’ Source: cuimc.columbia.edu

This is the same mechanism that triggers estrogen dominance. This means that even when we develop PTSD through the stress of not being able to heal or recover from our trauma, the body goes into protection mode as we have learned that higher levels of estrogen protects against PTSD. Emotionally the extra fat or thick skin may increase a sense of protection while going through deep emotional pain whether that is through reliving it or by healing it which also asks us to revisit it.

This is sheer ingeniousness from our bodies to protect us in this way from further damage to our nervous system, brain and other key functions of the body. As ingenious as storing childhood trauma in the feet as far away from the heart as possible in order to protect it (something that I have written about before after falling down the stairs and breaking my foot last year). It makes me marvel at the innate intelligence of our body that is indeed so much more than just a meat suit, constantly looking out to ensure our survival by protecting our most vital functions and organs.

For me addressing estrogen dominance in my body has been key in the weight loss that I have experienced.

The metaphysical cause of estrogen dominance

I always look up the metaphysical causes of my physical conditions or ailments and found this explanation particularly interesting. Especially because I had been in the process of healing the collapsed inner masculine, which had my inner feminine take the place of the masculine as a trauma response to my early childhood abuse.

‘If trauma, neglect, or abuse have impaired your inner masculine’s ability to defend you by going to bat for you, tracing boundaries, and fighting off dangers coming at you from the outside, your inner feminine will feel unprotected. She will have to take over the task of protecting herself. In other words, she will try to take on the function of your inner masculine. Since your inner feminine is the receptive part of your nature, responsible for your ability to open up and receive, the only way she can protect herself is by closing off and rigidifying – but at this point, her fluidity and receptivity will be lost, and she will become destructive.’ Source: TheSacredLoversWithin

The above describes how trauma can alter our inner feminine and masculine balance, or as Carl Jung classified them our anima (f) and animus (m). This made what I found and share below on the metaphysical cause of estrogen dominance even more interesting:

‘The teachings of the ancient wisdom through many sages in the past from Pythagoras, Patanjali, Plato, etc all describe how our emotions are responsible for all our illness and disease. When emotions are not dealt with, and thus buried into the body, they create a stagnation or excess in the etheric (energetic) body which then affects the corresponding physical body.

The undealt with emotions of self loathing and/or a lack of self worth experienced by most women is the underlying emotional hurts which is the cause of oestrogen dominance. To protect yourself from these hurts women disconnect from their natural nurturing and gentle way of being, often described as a stillness, beingness or femaleness, opting for a more protective hardness which is a doing, driving and achieving male energy. This causes women to lose their ability to self nurture as they operate from a more male (doing) energy which is a harder way of being than that which comes naturally for a women. These emotional hurts are buried in the etheric ovaries creating a stagnation in the corresponding physical glands which results in suppressed ovarian function. This causes a decline in progesterone production by the ovaries creating a hormone imbalance in the physical body which ultimately causes estrogen dominance and its corresponding illness.

Those women who excessively live life from the hardness (male energy) often have this reflected back to them with elevated testosterone levels. If this is the case you need to let go of the hardness and reconnect to the gentle, nurturing loveliness it is being a woman. Low progesterone levels reflect you have lost connection with your natural nurturing aspect. Self love, self acceptance and self nurturing will help heal the hurts of self loathing and lack of self worth and thus overcome these imbalances.

As illustrated above the teaching of the ancient wisdom agrees with the assessment of modern medicine but goes deeper to explain why and how the hormone imbalance were initiated.’ Source: custommedicine.com.au

This metaphysical explanation is the same process of protection, but on an emotional level. By going into their masculinity, women are trying to create that emotional safety that is lacking inside. It shows us the emotional state that triggers the physiological response which has the same function of protection.

Being a woman and looking feminine, does not guarantee that we are in our feminine essence in fact many women that I have worked with and even women in general tend to be very much in their masculine energy because it feels safer to them than being in their feminine energy. Due to my own childhood trauma, I was no exception.

In fact, in exactly the same period that I was deeply healing the balance of the inner feminine and the inner masculine on a childhood level (I had already healed this on a past life/soul path level before) I was diagnosed with estrogen dominance by my doctor and she started treating me for it on a physical level.

Nine simple steps I used to release stuck weight

I have to be honest that I have only been losing weight for the past two months, but because I am losing weight that did not budge before without eating less or exercising more I am confident that this is lasting weight loss. As you read further on you will understand why I am not afraid to regain this weight, because I am pretty much eating as I like with a mild carbohydrate restriction that I allow myself to have cheat days on whenever I feel like it.

Granted, if I had been stricter I might have an even more impressive weight loss but I wanted to create sustainable weight loss and not weight that I would easily pack back on. Taking this flexible approach led to 3,4 kg (7,5 pounds) effortless weight loss in two months, when as I shared before huge food restriction and three high level intensity personal training sessions a week had led to 1kg weight loss in four months.

I think that supplementing progesterone, while purposely working on eliminating estrogen is the key ingredient of my success although I also believe that the other small tweaks I made contributed to the overall process that allowed me to drop weight more significantly and more effortlessly, when before I couldn’t lose weight and I couldn’t prevent my body from creating more weight – which has now finally been reversed.

It took a lot of trial and error, a lot of money spent on various solutions and non-solutions and then finally being put on the right path by a Dutch doctor here in Ibiza to get me where I am today after being overweight in various degrees for a solid 15 years almost. I hope that by sharing my weight loss journey with you as a reader potentially facing the same issue, that you can benefit from this information and use it to your advantage to reverse weight gain in your own life.

That being said I am not a doctor and everything I have shared is based on my personal experience and internet research backtracking why all of a sudden I am able to lose weight when before I couldn’t. Do of course always consult a physician or a hormone expert to advise you in your specific situation based on your personal health history. Four of the steps I took were suggestions or prescriptions from my doctor who combines modern medicine with alternative medicine with great success in my case, but as we know medicine is not a one size fits all which is why you should always check with an expert what is best for you.

With the medical disclaimer out or the way, let’s dive into the details of what I did that has been working and that could potentially help you lose your trauma or Ascension weight as well.

Warm water morning and night

Within Ayurveda it is believed that drinking warm or hot water removes Ama (toxins) from the body and improves your digestion, so the very first step I took was to start and end my day with as warm or as hot as you can drink water on an empty stomach. As I don’t eat after dinner which is between six and seven pm, by the time I go to bed my stomach is not full and the warm water can do its thing while I sleep. This also provides me two of the eight glasses of water that I need to drink daily anyway and I use these big lemonade glasses that you can get at the IKEA .

This is the Ayurvedic science behind it:

‘As the hot water flows through your digestive tract, it will cleanse the entire digestive and eliminative system and help dissolve Ama impurities. Your digestion and assimilation of food will improve, as will your elimination. Having a stronger digestive fire, and more effective elimination, will also prevent any further Ama from forming.

The hot water will also be absorbed into your circulatory system and travel throughout your body. The extra fluidity and warmth this provides helps open the circulatory channels, known as Shrotas, and helps dissolve and wash away any accumulated Ama that is blocking both tissue and cellular channels. The result is that nutrition can be delivered more effectively to your cells and cellular metabolic waste is more efficiently eliminated.’ Source: Maharishi.co.uk

You can drink warm water throughout the day, but in order to easily add it to my daily routine I take it first thing in the morning and the last thing at night to ensure it becomes a habit and is not left up to chance.

CBD oil to calm the Nervous System

Having a son who has drugs-related psychosis mainly due to his abuse of weed, I am not a fan of anything that contains hallucinogenic or psychoactive qualities. CBD oil however is available without THC, as THC is the component that creates the high in marijuana. I bought high quality THC free CBD oil at a CBD shop, they carry a brand called the Dutch Natural Healing (why doesn’t it surprise me that it’s a Dutch company ;-)) that I found palatable and of a good quality. I had tried other brands from the health food store before but they weren’t that great and I saw no results in taking them in the past, which is why I went to a specialised shop this time to get the best available.

One of my business mentors had recommended me this and she would take it at night, because it made her sleepy so I followed her advice and I use three drops (I started with one as I am very sensitive) at night after my warm water and right before I go to sleep. My sleep improved immediately and I would also process deeper within dream time, when before I slept lighter, woke up more and therefore didn’t get into that really restorative sleep phase the way the CBD oil helped me to.

‘Your nervous system is the command center of your body. In addition to thought, memory and movement, it’s responsible for interpreting sensory information, sleeping, breathing and digesting. It also plays a large role in your body’s circulations, serotonin levels and how you respond to stressful situations.

When your nervous system is dysregulated, you might feel stressed or tense. Your body may be unnecessarily kicking itself into the sympathetic nervous system’s fight or flight response — preparing you to face a threat when there is none.

When ingested the CBD interacts with the body’s endocannabinoid system. The endocannabinoid system works directly with the nervous system to maintain homeostasis and help regulate stress. As such, when CBD interacts with the endocannabinoid system’s receptors, your body may begin to feel more calm and relaxed. Source: zebracbd.com

Because trauma dysregulates the nervous system, I used CBD oil as a way to regulate the nervous system, in order to get my body out of its perpetual fight or flight response as this was where my progesterone was being borrowed upon to create cortisol. Without this you would as they say in the Netherlands, be mopping with the faucet running. In other words there’s no use supplementing progesterone, without addressing the physiological root cause of what is causing the low progesterone levels.

Flexible keto

I call it flexible keto because I use it flexibly, which means that I still eat carbs when I feel like it or when I need to. This means that I have still eaten a slice of bread now and then, made fresh oven pizza, had rice once a blue moon or used ramen noodles to make a quick veggie and a source of protein stir-fry.

I love soups and salads and make plenty of those as well as for example cauliflower crab mac and cheese and other typical keto dishes. I also have still used honey or eaten eucalyptus candies that contain sugar to soothe my throat and lost weight nonetheless. Although I hardly eat any fruit, except for half an apple in my daily juice and I sometimes make chia pudding for breakfast with some yoghurt and berries.

I try to keep it at 70-80% less carbs daily, although some days I eat carbs at every meal and then go back to eating less carbs the next day. Because my goal isn’t to have a bikini body by the summer, but instead work my way back to my ideal weight over a longer period of time my approach is very soft and gentle. The thing is I can be very strict with myself, very disciplined and stick to that for longer periods of time but that is exactly the kind of energy I want to shift out of.

I am shifting deeper and deeper into my feminine essence and so I approach things more from this new energy.

What I would like to add is that coming from a more plant-based staple diet I had to really get used to eating large portions of protein and arguably my calorie intake is much higher now than it was prior to switching to keto. This has also made me realise that the calorie story isn’t as solid as people like to think it is. You will not believe some of these recipes that include cream cheese, whip cream, cheese and fish for example. Prior to keto I would never eat so much fat and protein within the same meal in order to manage my weight. So, I am eating more rich foods now than I was before when my weight wasn’t moving at all.

Although I prefer savoury to sweet, I do sometimes but rarely indulge in an ice cream or other sweets which is why I am confident that this weight loss will continue because I am not dieting and so there isn’t going to be a moment where I get back to normal eating because I am eating normally. Maybe at some point I will ease up on the protein but because I am not depriving myself the things I want to eat including a nice greasy cheeseburger including the bun when I feel like it, I am fine because these are not things that I eat on a regular basis. I eat them occasionally and so I still eat them from time to time, because that is what I would normally do.

So when I say that I am achieving this adequate weight loss without starving myself, I am not kidding. I allow myself to pretty much eat what I want while keeping an eye on eating healthy and clean (as much from scratch as possible). Over the years I have developed such healthy eating and drinking habits that it’s easy to stick to them, I don’t drink alcohol, soda, or juices in general, but on occasion I do and that works because on a daily basis I will mostly drink water or unsweetened herbal tea. I have continued to do literally everything the way I did before, except that I reduced the carbs and increased the protein and fats in my diet. While before I had restricted my protein and fat intake not to gain weight.

I may at some point take this up a notch to see what happens and if it accelerates the weight loss, but initially it was super important to me to lose weight the easy way and in a way that did not have it all come back later because it was unsustainable weight loss.

Supplementing body identical progesterone

My doctor prescribed me body identical progesterone, that the body can easily assimilate. You can get it at the pharmacy here for around €5 and one packet lasts two menstrual cycles, as you only take one tablet a day starting on day 15 of your cycle until your first day of menstruation and then you take a break until 15 days after the first day of your period before you start again until your next period. The package actually says to take two tablets a day, but my doctor told me to only take one and this has been one of the ultimate gamechangers in my current weight loss success.

‘In all these effects note that progesterone does not directly cause weight loss. Instead it reduces the effect of other hormones in the body which are causing the weight gain.  Think of it as allowing rather than causing the body to lose weight.’ Source: Propelltherapy.com

This is definitely how I have experienced supplementing progesterone, it finally allowed me to lose weight while eating normally and moving normally. Before no matter what I did, my body would hardly lose weight. It was simply the internal switch that needed to be turned on, to have everything else that I did work.

One of the most frustrating things was that even my personal trainers both females didn’t have this knowledge and kept hammering on calorie restriction and more movement as the solution when it clearly wasn’t. I have seen more weight loss now without working with them, then I did working while with them and the first personal trainer cost me €1000 a month! The second personal trainer even more or less accused me of not working hard enough to get the results, which led me to stop working with her because I knew that my weight was not being caused by what I ate as I hardly ate at that time and I still ate largely plant based. I still eat largely plant based, but I increased my protein and fat intake due to switching to keto.

Massaging feet

One of my in the Spiritual Spotlight guests Anna Golden Ray advised me to massage my feet as this would increase a sense of safety. Because the feet are connected to the root chakra, massaging them would affect our feeling safe, something that has becomes diminished when we have experienced trauma – because trauma makes us feel unsafe.

I had heard before that a lot was released through the feet, so I decided to give it a try and the first feet massage session made me physically ill and my feet started hurting more and more afterwards which I saw as a sign that I was releasing more and more. I don’t get a foot rub in every evening, but I do try to do it as often as I can (which could be more) to help my body release the mental, emotional and vibrational dead weight that I am still potentially carrying from my past.

Adrenal support

My doctor also prescribed me adrenal support supplements to help the body heal from the constant cortisol hits. It’s a large bottle natural supplements that is high quality and lasts long (my guess is three months). I take it together with a vitamin B complex and extra magnesium.

She gave me Adrenplus-300 from Douglas Laboratories which is a blend of vitamins, minerals and bovine* adrenal glandular concentrate designed to support adrenal tissue (*it’s not vegan).

The adrenal glands control the hormones that initiate the flight or fight response, much like the CBD oil it’s to help the body get out of survival mode. Although adrenal fatigue is not yet fully accepted by Western medicine,  naturopathic medicine does acknowledge it. In layman terms it comes down to the exhaustion of the adrenals due to long-term exposure to chronic stress. Adrenal support supplements are meant to build up the adrenal function again. I listed the ingredients of the supplement I was given because there are different types out there, including supplements with herbs such as ashwagandha which work in a different way but are also used to treat adrenal fatigue.

I want to reiterate here that I am not a doctor and that this is not medical advice, I am simply sharing what has helped me finally be able to lose weight. You should always check with your own medical professional, what is best for you in your case. However, obesity itself is a health risk that needs to be taken seriously and in my case we are not talking about losing 5-10kg to look hot. At the height of my overweight, I was at least 40kg over weight but because I carried this weight more or less evenly distributed over my whole body (as a protective layer) and midsection – I didn’t look obese despite carrying a lot of extra weight. Losing weight wasn’t just a matter of vanity to me, it was important for my health.

When discussing the adrenals we must not forget the chakra that rules them, which is the root chakra. The root chakra is connected to our ability to feel safe in the world. Skipping meals, inadequate protein, too much sugar or junk food, insufficient sleep and relaxation, prolonged infection, trauma, chronic pain, severe allergies and any ongoing toxic exposure all rely heavily on the adrenals to compensate for these stresses. Source: catalystmagazine.net on the Root chakra and the adrenal glands.

Because I was trying to manage my weight I decreased my protein intake initially but increased it on the keto diet.

Replacing cappuccinos with green juices

My one and only daily guilty pleasure was a cappuccino with oat milk and a dash of honey, the guys at the coffee shop knew exactly how to put the right amount of honey in because I would simply return it if they made it too sweet. I am very sensitive to sugar and eating too much of it can make me feel really ungrounded and high, even when it’s more natural sugar like fruits or honey.

First of all I did the math and I realised that my coffee addiction was costing me somewhere close to €1100 a year, at least one cup a day at €2.85 which was an absurd amount to be spending on coffee.

I also realised that the caffeine was being extra hard on my adrenals, while before I had been drinking decaf and my blood test showed that my cholesterol was rising which can also be caused by decaf. So, I decided to quit coffee completely.

My doctor had told me to drink daily green juices as they help eliminate excess estrogen, so I replaced my existing coffee habit with green juices. I have a juicer at home, but if I can’t make it I buy them while I am out. I juice half a Granny Smith, a small cucumber, celery stalks, half a fennel, a small piece of ginger, lime juice and I will add whatever leafy green available spinach, kale or chard. I drink it directly after juicing and this helps eliminate the excess estrogen from the body according to multiple sources on the internet and my doctor.

I juice religiously, because it’s an important part of restoring the estrogen-progesterone balance and healing the estrogen dominance.

Normal movement no strenuous exercise

As I have shared before I used to do more exercise because I have lived a pretty sedentary lifestyle the past years, although I do daily walks and since I have lived where I have lived for the past two years I swim 10 laps daily and do 300 under water crunches (6×50) in between laps during the summer. I absolutely love swimming, I swim in the sea as well but that is more recreational and less about working out.

I fired my last personal trainer at the beginning of this year and went out for long walks multiple times a week instead, that is until in mid March when my mother broke both of her arms trying to chase the cat out of her room and falling on the marble floor. After that all the work she did had to be done and initially I was the one doing the brunt of it, cooking, cleaning the kitchen and taking care of the laundry, We have cleaners coming in weekly, because otherwise my mother would die trying to clean the whole house as well. She is a very active person, so she loves doing all of these chores as her love language is acts of services.

In the beginning however, after her fall, we needed to feed her, pull up and down her pants to go to the bathroom and so on. She couldn’t do anything, which meant that I had to take on her work as well as her care work on top of my already busy schedule. It took some back and forth to get my teenage son involved as my mother had always done everything for him, but in the end he did understand that he needed to do more and stepped up to meet the challenge.

This automatically meant more movement for me because of the extra work that needed to be picked up and there simply wasn’t anymore time in the day or energy in me to work out. But to be honest, all the times I have lost post-pregnancy weight before, except for the first time, I did it without exercising. I will now, that my mother can do more for herself pick up daily swimming again as the pool is getting to swimming temperatures, but because I love swimming I don’t see it as exercise – I see it as a fun way to move my body that I deeply enjoy.

Trauma healing

Last but not least I of course worked on trauma healing and I have done numerous sessions that worked on weight issues – they are too many to all describe in detail, so I will describe the most pivotal ones. Although I also did numerous sessions to get my body out of the continuous fight or flight response aka survival mode that included craniosacral therapies that went into the amygdala which is the organ that controls our survival system.

I would say that I have done at least 100 sessions that worked directly on aspects pertaining to the excess weight I am carrying, but in the end all the sessions I did led to becoming completely trauma free which allowed my body to come out of its trauma response. Imagine trauma being like a constant background noise that is playing 24/7 on repeat, nagging at you, disrupting your sleep and all other functions within the body.

When the trauma is healed, that noise is finally shut off and there’s an inner peace which allows the body to fully return to homeostasis and function the way it should. It removes the biggest chronic stress that the body can experience, which allows the body to final go into restorative state instead of simply trying to survive the non-stop internal disruption caused by the unresolved trauma.

Transforming the protective part inside of me
The day my mother fell and broke both her arms, I had a session with a hypnotherapist who took me back to the period 14,5-15 years ago when I started to gain weight, after my daughter died and my mother had broken her collarbone and I had to pick up life abruptly while I was still grieving the loss of my baby daughter and my marriage. My breasts full of milk, still having post-natal bleeding and needing to pump my breasts slightly but not too much to avoid both clogged up breasts as well as stop the milk production because there was no child to feed.

In the hypnotherapy session we talked to the protective part inside of me and told her I didn’t need to be protected in this way anymore. We then transformed her into what I needed her to be moving forward and I was asked to pick a symbol which was a white lily – very fittingly a white lily symbolises soul rejuvenation. We thanked this part of me that had kept me standing in order to meet the great challenges I was facing, but explained to her that I was no longer in that situation and no longer needed this weight to protect me.

Feeling safe in the world
Being a victim of incest at an early age, safety has always been a big issue for me in a way I didn’t fully understand until I did really unravel my childhood trauma. It took a lot of healing both my childhood trauma as well as my past life trauma to really start to feel safe in life and in the world. Pivotal in this was starting to understand how many of my previous lifetimes were connected and in fact had been attempts to heal previous life traumas that I had brought into consecutive lifetimes in order to heal them once and for all. Not understanding that these experiences were connected to previous lifetimes, the trauma became deeper and accumulated more as every lifetime that I felt victimised again added more unresolved trauma to what I would bring into the next lifetime.

This accumulation of trauma is true for everybody and not just individual to me. We all have the choice each and every lifetime to heal what we brought in, or become retraumatised by it.

In one particular recent session, my connection to the Divine Father and the Divine Mother as their Divine child was completely restored. Not being able to trust your parents is a human experience, through the traumatic and karmic bonds we have with our Earth family but this is of course different on a soul level. On a soul level there is complete trust in the Divine Mother and Father as they are unconditional love and love never harms and love always supports and comes through for us – especially if it is Divine unconditional love. What I was shown in this session is that we project the broken template of our human experience on our relationship with the Divine Mother and Father because this is the template we have been living for eons and eons in the physical – this is what we know.

Much of the healing work that I have done over the past seven years and more, is restoring my Divine Blueprint. This is also what I do with my clients in the Akasha Quantum Soul Healing™ Journey sessions. As Divine humans fully reclaiming who we are on a soul level, we also need to restore our relationship with the Divine as our father/mother to our original blueprint.

As souls our relationship with the Divine is Oneness, it consists of both unconditional love and unconditional trust. When we have had painful relationships with parents in this lifetime or previous lifetimes, which we all have experienced at one time or another within our soul’s journey, it distorts or taints the relationship with Father/Mother God because we subconsciously project this unresolved trauma onto our relationship with the Divine. Healing this distortion allows us to restore our connection with the Divine to our original Soul or Divine Blueprint which brings a sense of safety and security that no other aspect of healing brings.

This of course goes far beyond mentally grasping this concept into truly being able to embody this unconditional trust in the Divine. Knowing that you are safe, being guided, supported and taken care of under all circumstances even when things appear to be going the wrong way or in any case different than what you had hoped for.

For me these two sessions were the most pivotal and impactful and it was bizarre that the same day that I had the session revisiting my mother breaking her collarbone in 2007, that my mother would trip that same evening trying to chase our cat out of her room and recreate almost the exact same circumstances now as back then while she knew nothing of my session that day.

Stress now vs. before trauma healing

Which brings me to the final and last point that needs to be highlighted and that is what happens after the body is no longer under the influence of trauma. I touched upon this a little bit before with the noise analogy, but now I am going to compare 2007/2008 to 2021/2022 which is a 14 year period and as we know karmic cycles often come in cycles of seven years. This is two times such a seven year period, and for those on the Twin Flame journey I met my twin in 2014 which is exactly on the cusp of another seven year period starting and ending last year when I was prompted by my soul to leave the Twin Flame industry.

For me it seemed as if a lot of the same themes that I had gone through in 2007/2008 resurfaced in 2021/2022. In a very similar way, like I was back then I have again been hit with one thing after another in the past year. As I referenced earlier, I fell down a flight of stairs on my way to the beach and broke my foot in April 2021. I got a lot of backlash during the summer changing my business focus and business model. In October I had a lot of extra stress because my mother’s house in Amsterdam had to be emptied and the person helping stole a lot of our belongings and sold them and then walked out on us and we were miles away in another country. In November I was viciously attacked online by two ex-students who did their best to drag me through the mud. Then I faced sudden revenue issues in December, problems with the landlord in February and finally my mother breaking both her arms in March. I’ve just been going from the one crisis into the other.

But here’s the difference with 2007/2008…

I am fine, I’m not anxious or stressed out. I don’t need anything to calm my nerves. I am just moving through what needs to be done and going with the flow. At one point both my chiropractor as well as my acupuncturist said that for the fact that I have so much going on in my life and that there’s so much extra stress it was not bering reflected in my body. In other words my body was not showing any signs of stress corresponding to the stressful situations that were playing out in my reality. This is the key difference between before and after trauma healing, that because there is no trauma anymore being subconsciously held in the body, the body responds differently to stress.

When we still carry a lot of unresolved trauma and emotions, the body is already in a perpetual state of alarm (chronic stress). It’s as if it is filled to the brim and any extra external stress makes it flow over, aka floods the whole system with high intensity levels of stress. When the trauma is healed, the body is in homeostasis and can easily deal with external stress because peace is it’s natural state and therefore it is rested, resilient and strong enough to face external difficulties without and this is equally important – triggering old stories and old pain that cloud what is happening in the here and now.

In this way it is vital also on a physical level to release the subconscious burdens we carry, because not only do they subconsciously create the reality we live in as I have explained over and over again throughout all the teachings within the Inner Healing Circle, these subconscious burdens wreak havoc on our bodies and in many cases can even create disease. Especially unresolved emotions as you will find in all literature on the connection between emotions and the body or the metaphysical meaning of our physical ailments are connected to many of our current day illnesses. This teaching focuses on just one of the many ways that our unresolved pain and wounding can alter our physiology and how addressing the root causes of our issues, can change our physiology for the better as well.

I pray that this teaching brings you what you need in this moment, to move forward in your own process of both trauma healing and Ascension. If you are facing similar issues as I have described in this teaching, I pray that it will help you reboot your hormones and metabolism as well. Estrogen dominance is one of the most common hormone imbalances in our modern world, that is rooted in everything that we have touched upon today. As we were shown by my soul, there are many different aspects (layers) to this condition on different levels of existence that can be reversed and healed through a multi-layered approach that addresses the various underlying dynamics as discussed in this teaching.

It is my hope that this teaching will help you and others like you, feeling helpless and frustrated around your ability to lose weight or inability to stop unwanted weight gain – see your experience from a different perspective and receive the tools necessary to fix what has been sabotaging your weight loss all along.