Few people understand the array of lifestyle factors that impact on metabolic rate and weight loss, and typically there is no examination of the health of our most intimate relationship.

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.

Your Most Intimate Relationship – Why It’s Important

Intimate partners have all kinds of sex, from “fast-food” sex, to “perfunctory” sex, to “charity” sex, to “gourmet” sex. All these different expressions of physical intimacy have one thing in common, they are communicating the state we’re currently in, and the state of the relationship itself.

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!

Are You Talking the Same Language?

Do you and your partner share the same sexual “language”? If you don’t you may be mis-communicating, or misunderstanding each other, leading to disappointment, hurt, or resentment.

This is not so much to do with technique, but rather with things like the amount of eye contact, the facial expressions, or the noise you make (or don’t make). In conversation “body language” accounts for a very important 70% or more. In sex, it’s practically all about body language.

What happens when you take the time to really notice your partner’s non-verbal expressions and mirror those back? What difference does it make to the quality of the experience for both of you?

Being Compatible

It’s true that not everyone is compatible. If he can only become aroused between the hours of 3 am and 6 am, and she is not a morning person, you have a basic incompatibility! There’s not much you can do about a body clock!

Perhaps she is like many women who tend to feel the cold and who sleep so much better wrapped up in flannalette pj’s. If he finds the flannelette a most unsavoury companion and can only become sexually interested if she’s wearing not much at all, there is also a problem!

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 that brings us to .

Honesty

So many relationships stagger on with very little sexual honesty. I’m not talking about infidelity here, but the sexual dishonesty of holding back one’s true thoughts and feelings about sex, and in a cowardly or resigned way, giving up on making that all it could be. And the longer it goes on like this, the harder to face up to it, and the harder to now communicate the truth.

Nevertheless, that’s what is necessary in order to build a truly fulfilling intimate relationship.

There’s a joke that goes “women may fake orgasms, but men can fake whole relationships” and in fact in the intimate relationship, faking an orgasm is faking a relationship. It is not a “white lie”. More usually it is a deliberate deception to bring to an end a boring or unsatisfying sexual experience.

And unfortunately “faking” soon becomes the closest the woman will get to orgasm because in terms of behaviour theory, she has trained herself to associate this “fake” state with sex. I knew one woman who decried the fact that she even faked orgasm during masturbation!

So “settling” for unsatisfactory sex, and particularly faking satisfaction, is good for neither the relationship nor the individual.

One way to deal with this that many people find easier than a straight-out confrontation is to take your courage and write out:

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

I know this can seem very confronting to think of diving in like this, so you might like to do some reading about easier ways to pre-frame requests, and how to consider and then accept/reject criticism (or perceived criticism), as well as ways to ask for what you want in ways that are more likely to be accurately understood. All of these things are covered in my book “Intimate Partners”.

Getting Time Out

The intimate partnership is intimate partly because it is exclusive and private. If the parties don’t have that privacy, don’t fully experience that exclusivity, then it can be difficult to maintain the intimacy, and certainly it can become difficult to stay in touch with your and your partner’s sexual needs.

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.

Sorting Out those Sex Issues

Adult beings need and are entitled to a deeply satisfying sex life, just as all humans are entitled to clean air and water, or need nutritious food, in order to function optimally both physically and mentally. But too many couples put up with unhappy sex lives because they don’t know what to do about it. That scenario isn’t good for the relationship, isn’t good for the people in the relationship, and isn’t good for people who depend on 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.