“I want to feel sexy,” my client Jasmina told me as I probed why losing weight was important to her. She had come to me for help with my specialty—pleasurable weight loss—and I was getting to know her.

“As soon as I lose the weight I can feel sexy, but I need to lose it first.”

Art by Aurora Andrews

I sympathized with her. From all outward appearances in our culture, it does seem that way: “weight loss” comes first, and “feeling hot and sexy” comes second. I used to think that way too.

It was only after close to a decade of working one-on-one with smart New Yorkers that I discovered through direct experience something startling. The fastest, most reliable route to lasting weight loss came through feeling sexy first.

Since I made this discovery I’ve been teaching my clients how to flip the concept that you need to “lose weight first, in order to feel sexy second” on its head. By inviting them to pay attention to the “feeling sexy” part first, I’m getting better results with my weight loss clients than ever before.

Allow me to arouse your curiosity and I’ll show you how.

Step 1: Discover Why Sexy is NOT Safe For You

The first step is to understand that in order to achieve a state (such as feeling sexy), you have to experience it as safe. For your body, what’s “safe” is what’s familiar. Meaning any experience you’ve literally “survived,” your body codes as “safe.” Even if it was traumatic or a difficult experience, because your body knows it didn’t kill you, (or you’d be dead!) and brands it as “survivable” a.k.a. “safe.”

On the other hand, anything you haven’t yet lived through and therefore haven’t proven to yourself as “survivable,” your body codes as “unsafe,” even if to your rational mind it seems harmless or even desirable. Anything in the realm of the unchartered or the unexplored–simply by virtue of the fact that it has not yet been proven to be “survivable” –signals alarm to the body as “unknown” and therefore “unsafe.”

What my client Jasmina didn’t consciously realize, as she was vocalizing to me her longing to be slimmer, was that over the years of gradually gaining weight, she’d now gotten pretty familiar, and in a strange way grown “comfortable”–even if she grumbled about it–with not feeling sexy.

She was now a wife, a mother, and full-time professional employee. Although she dreamed of her body looking otherwise than it currently did, when she was honest with herself she admitted her look allowed her to safely “blend in,” in family life and at work, without raising undue attention. Additionally not feeling attractive prevented her from flirting with other men, and she saw this as adding protection to her marriage.

As the pieces fell into place, she realized that even if I was able to wave a magic wand (which I’m not) and make her “cursed” extra pounds melt away in an instant, the “sexy” state she found herself in might not be as comforting as she thought–on the contrary might be quite alarming for her system.

When Jasmina stopped imagining a vague and foggy notion of what losing weight might mean for her, and started painting a clear and specific picture of what the future would hold if she succeeded in losing weight and feeling sexy, unexpectedly, the back of her neck bristled.

Her body, her animal, when visualizing the potential consequences of being that sexy, suddenly felt a little unsafe.

Inside her head, her mind contracted around stressful, worry-ridden thoughts, to accompany the sinking feeling in the belly.

“What if other parents at the school think I looked “too sexy” and looked down at me?”

“What if I make other women feel self-conscious and uncomfortable because I feel so attractive and self-confident?”

“What if men interpret my sexiness as sexual availability and hit on me, potentially arousing suspicion from my husband?”

All of a sudden the image of how wonderful feeling sexy would be lost its charm and it started to feel darn uncomfortable. Jasmina’s body, her animal, began to shift from its previously relaxed state to an agitated stress state. The tension in the room was palpable.

In that moment Jasmina didn’t realize that this low-level state of stress that was starting to creep over her, if allowed to become chronic, would be her ultimate enemy of weight loss. By disrupting the metabolism with constant signals of distress, chronic low-level stress signals to the body to take “protect” itself, in part by holding onto extra weight, and slowing the burning off any excess.
Over the course time, evolution has proven that if you gain weight under stress it’s more likely to ensure your survival than if you lose pounds in the same circumstances. Natural selection has groomed us to be a species for whom 85% of us have a tendency to gain weight in the face of stress, not lose it, a fact every stressed-out dieter needs to deeply reflect upon.

Nature’s strategy is to keep us stocked up with “reserves” of stored fuel, a.k.a. fat, to ensure our survival in a time of danger. And conversely, when times are good, nature designed us to shift the gears of our metabolism to let go of excess weight, as we are safe and there is no need.
Relaxation becomes the most essential ingredient to include for weight loss, and self-created stressful thought-loops the ingredient most important to be rid of.

In Jasmina’s case, she found herself caught in a bind, because even thinking about the consequences of losing weight was cause for her to feel stressed. Her self-created stress about her body was lowering her calorie-burning efficiency, resulting in the body promoting fat storage not fat loss, putting a spanner in the works of her plan to slim down. Before she’d even taken a step in the right direction, she’d unknowingly set a step back.

Jasmina, however, once it had been brought into the light how all of this fits together, was keen to retrain her body and her mind to feel “safe” in the face of sexy.

Step 2: Making Sexy Safe Again

The next step towards feeling fully comfortable feeling sexy is to address the learned shame that comes along with the topic of sex and sexuality in our society, by understanding what lies at its root–erotic innocence.

Your erotic innocence is the force in your body that innocently moves you towards sensory delight. This aspect of us has evolved since we existed as single cell organisms, when our only contact with the world as experienced either as a “pain”–a subtle contraction–signally the possibility of death, or as a “pleasure”–a subtle expansion–signaling survival.

Coded in its every cell, your body relates all pleasure, though especially erotic pleasure, to its very survival, and in the spirit of self-preservation and the preservation of life itself, your body will give you every encouragement to enjoy yourself.

For your body, being “turned on” is simply another version of “being alive.” Free from the baggage of “manufactured meaning” concocted by the mind, your body’s erotic innocence seeks enjoyment and pleasure purely and simply for your own good, absent of manipulation or complicated agendas
When we are children, we are born with this innate inclination to pleasure. All little children without exception explore their bodies and the world within their grasp for what delights them, and they do so with complete innocence. Long before children have been programmed to know “right” from “wrong,” they simply know what feels good.

Later that impulse matures and individuates, but at its essence it is undeniably the same erotic innocence that’s been within since you were a child. For Jasmina, as she began considering sexuality through this viewpoint, she experienced a deep sense of relief. Framing “looking and feeling sexy” as an extension of her “erotic innocence” made her feel light, and vindicated from any sexual guilt that lay in the shadows of her mind.

Reclaiming her “erotic innocence,” Jasmina allowed herself to feel unburdened by the cultural connotations and mis-interpretations she was starting to realize she’d unconsciously adopted, that being and feeling sexy implied being slutty, stupid or vain.

And as soon as she gave herself permission to experience her sexual desire as fundamentally driven by erotic innocence, she felt a softening and a relaxation. Soon that relaxation extended to others as she realized that any sexual attention she’d attract if she was embracing her “sexy” would also stem from this same innocent origin, and suddenly it didn’t seem so threatening after all.

She found herself able to breathe more deeply and already she felt a bit better about her body. The hairs on the back of her neck that had before bristled at the thought of receiving unbidden sexual attention from men were now at ease. As a side-effect of her relaxation, her metabolism was humming along like a steam engine, her calorie-burning efficiency was increasing, and she was smoothly sailing down the stream to weight loss. Or as I like to say, pleasurable weight loss.

Step 3: Creating a Safe Ecology For Your Sexy

Even with these understandings of the evolutionary origins of sexuality and erotic desire in her pocket, and a whole new map for navigating what it means (and doesn’t mean) to feel sexy up her sleeve, for Jasmina it was still going to take some trial and error to fully transform her silent and subtle fear of being sexy to the other polarity of fully embracing it.

And in a culture that has contorted sex from being an innocent expression of life force itself, into something loaded with guilt, shame and confusion, in order to do it, she would need backup. She would need support. She would to need “tribe.”

Like erotic innocence, the need “to tribe” also goes back to an ancient origin. Back in the days when we existed as small bands of people on the savanna, “belonging” to the tribe was of vital, because not belonging, or being rejected by the group would result in only one thing–sure death.

Back then “belonging” meant the difference between life and death. And to your body, even to this day, it still does.

To keep this spirit, of enjoying your natural sexiness alive in you therefore, it’s crucial that you connect with other people who will support your viewpoint and encourage the germination of your new and improved sex-positive attitude. The new you needs company.

Seek out people who have educated themselves about the benefits of natural, innocent pleasure for body and soul, and who live accordingly. Find friends who enjoy their succulence and their radiance, and and who will clap for your development of yours.

My favorite place to meet these types of people is dancing, especially belly dance and salsa, but any practice that involves embodiment will attract people who will support your endeavor.

Just as an animal in nature has a whole ecosystem supporting it’s existence, your new emerging safety with feeling sexy needs an ecology around it so that it takes root and thrives, and it’s up to you to seek it out.

The last thing you need to know about your “sexy,” your erotic innocence, is that although it may have been misunderstood, neglected, or completely forgotten for years if not decades, it is as resilient as life itself. Arising from within the living, breathing, feeling, animal part of you, the impulse of life itself coursing through your veins—even if forced “underground” by guilt or shame—it can never be lost or destroyed.

Even if you currently feel estranged from your “sexy” altogether and skeptical of ever losing weight, especially in a pleasurable way, by following these steps you can rediscover how to make sexy safe for you again, and despite all odds kick-start your metabolism through the enjoyment of your own body, helping you slim down and feel even more alive than ever.