Why Your Sex Life Matters If You're Trying to Lose Weight

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Why Your Sex Life Matters If You're Trying to Lose Weight

Written by Christine Sutherland

by ChristineSutherland

Weight loss is not just a matter of energy in, energy out, as most diet companies would have us believe. Just as important as these 2 factors is our metabolic rate, but few people understand how lifestyle factors, including sexual relationships, impact on metabolic rate.

There is no doubt that a healthy metabolic rate requires a healthy lifestyle, and a healthy sex life is part of that for almost all adults. If you are working toward weight loss, it's sensible to consider that this area of life might also need improvement.

The reason why diet companies fail to help nearly 100% of their clients is that they fail to understand the reasons for the weight gain in the first place. But when lifestyle factors all support health, overweight and obesity disappear - no dieting or harsh exercise routines required!

Although there are a myriad of lifestyle changes that can add immeasurably to your health and your enjoyment of life, and make important contributions to weight loss, this article has been written to help you understand and work through aspects of your most intimate relationship.

The Importance of Your Most Intimate Relationship

From "fast-food" sex to "gourmet" sex, intimate partners usually have a range of sexual styles or experiences but what they all have in common is that they are expressions of intimacy that non-verbally communicate the state of the relationship as well as the wellbeing (or otherwise) of the partners at that time.

Sex is as much about communication as is any other interaction that you, as intimate partners, could possibly have. And the same considerations apply to sex as apply to purely verbal communication!

Being on the Same "Wavelength

When intimate partners don't share the same sexual language, or aren't on the same "wavelength" they risk destructive fallout from misunderstanding each other. This can be as mild as a feeling of disappointment or confusion, or as devastating as actual hurt feelings or burning resentment.

In sex this isn't really about technique (although of course that's important!) but about the non-verbal communication that you both engage in. When are you silent, what sounds do you make, what eye-contact do you have, what facial expressions? Are these similar, or is there a big mismatch?

Practice being more aware of your partner's non-verbal expressions; mirror those back and notice what happens to the quality of your interaction as a result.

Are You Actually Compatible?

It's quite possible for partners to be sexually incompatible even though they may match well in other ways. For example she may tend to be aroused only in the early-to-late evening and tend to be irritable if woken in the wee hours of the morning. If he seems to experience arousal only in the hours before dawn, there is a serious problem!

Many women wear little or nothing to bed in their younger days, but become very sensitive to the cold as they age and need to be wrapped up snugly in flannalette in order to sleep well. If the husband perceives this as a turn-off, then there is also an incompatibility!

Perhaps she needs verbal interaction to feel relaxed enough to become aroused, but he needs deathly silence.

Or perhaps he likes to wear women's clothing but she perceives that as being unmasculine and not in any way sexually interesting to her.

I'm not saying these problems are the end of the relationship, but each of them does present a very big barrier to the enjoyment of a good sexual bond between the partners. It takes a great deal of love and commitment to work through and resolve these types of challenges.

Left alone, left unspoken, these types of incompatibilities can cause raging resentment that eventually implode the relationship. If you have these kinds of incompatibilities, then the best thing to do is to be very honest and open about them, very respectful of each other's differences, and work, if necessary with a therapist, to resolve them happily.

I do wish that society were healthier so that people didn't grow up so ignorant about the variety of human nature, and so that people didn't feel they have to hide these things from others, or even from themselves. We'd avoid a lot of damage to individuals and families if only that were the case.

And of course that leads to .....

Honesty in Relationships

There is so little sexual honesty in so many relationships. I'm not referring to outright lying or cheating here, but a betrayal just as insidious: the holding back of true feelings, the silence in the face of inadequacy, the "giving up" on the whole deal. Sadly, after years of "settling" for fairly lousy sex, it can be enormously difficult to now be open and honest.

However if you want to build a deeply fulfilling intimate relationship, that's exactly what you must now do.

Have you heard the old joke about women faking orgasms but men faking relationships? Well really they're one and the same when it comes to unsatisfactory marriages. A faked orgasm is a lie, pretending that an encounter is fulfilling when it is anything but.

This faking has more consequences. Practised often enough it can become so habitual that the woman is unable to achieve the real state.

So you can see that "settling" when it comes to your sexual relationship is not good for your relationship, or for you personally!

One of the best ways to deal with this is to take courage and actually write down (because it can be more comfortable to write it than say it):

1) What is not happening during sex that you want to happen, 2) What is happening during sex that you don't want to happen, 3) What words you might actually say to your partner, or what things you might actually do, to communicate the changes you want

For most people this is very unfamiliar territory and it could help your comfort to practice a little first. You might benefit from reading chapter 4 of my book "Intimate Partners", where you learn to pre-frame a request (and also respond resourcefully to criticism) and chapter 6, where you'll learn to ask more directly for what you want!

Time Out Alone

What makes an intimate relationship intimate is it's exclusivity and privacy, so without sufficient experience of privacy together, and without that feeling of exclusivity, intimacy can struggle to survive.

With all the busy demands of daily life, particular where there are new babies or small children, the challenges of intimacy may seem insurmountable. Keep in mind that the world, including your children, must turn around YOU. Together you are the solid foundation to their lives and it's up to you to keep that foundation intact and healthy.

Help for Sex Issues

I believe that adult human beings actually need to have immensely satisfying sex, much the same as they need to breathe good, clean air, or to eat good-quality nutritious food, in order to function well physically and mentally. And yet many couples are tolerating a less-than-satisfactory sex life because they just don't know what to do to make it any better. That's not good for the relationship, and it's not good for the people in the relationship.

This article can't possibly hope to be a complete sex manual for every issue that might impact on your sex life, and even if I were to present you with hundreds of pages of information, it might not be quite what you were looking for. That's why it's important to seek out specific support if you decide that this part of your life could do with an overhaul.

With your sexual life in great shape, you know that's one aspect of your life that is certainly supporting your general health and wellbeing, and definitely performing as a plus when it comes to naturally maintaining that ideal weight.

About The Author:

Christine Sutherland is an Australian expert on weight loss, particularly in relation to lifestyle factors that are crucial to effortless and permanent weight loss. Her free book "17 Solutions" is must reading for anyone who seeks a permanent answer to weight problems.

Kindly provided by 4Girls.dk You are welcome to use this article on your own website, if you include this link.

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