I spent most of my life on a diet. I was miserable. I was also very fat. I lived in a world of food obsession, always “on” or “off” and never feeling like I had control over food. I never felt amazing. I was always stressed.
Can you lose weight on a diet? Sure! There are hundreds of ways to lose weight. But for most of us, losing weight isn’t the goal. We want to lose FAT MASS (not just body weight) and most importantly, we want to keep it off. Bonus points if we enjoy the process (which is totally possible and a huge part of being able to keep the fat off!)
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One of the primary reasons diets don’t work (in the long term) is that they emphasize RULES, not TOOLS. The truth is, we live in a world where we kinda like to be told what to do. I can’t tell you how many emails I get each week from someone requesting a shopping list or meal plan.
I think that’s a problem. There’s a reason I don’t provide those things. Could I? Sure! Could I monetize the heck out of them? Absolutely! But they keep us mindless.
Diets & their prescribed rules prevent us from really paying attention our bodies and that’s where change and improvements come from: not in blindly following someone else’s guidelines but leaning in to what works for us, what makes us feel great, and what our bodies respond to.
When we’re always looking to someone else’s rules, there will always be another distraction a second a way, tempting us with a new set of rules and a fresh new start. Someone will always have a new set of rules. This approach has massive built in distractions via the next “shiny thing”.
There’s no restarting when we’re looking for tools to help us understand our bodies better.
You don’t need to restart. You just need to pay attention.
Diets foster an all-or-nothing mindset. With dieting, you perceive that you’re either on the wagon or off the wagon. Dude, there is no damn wagon. And our quest in life isn’t to be “on” all the time. The goal, as I see it, is to feel amazing every day. I know that I can feel amazing while having a couple glasses of wine in a week and enjoying a cupcake every now and again. That’s not a diet. That’s the quest to feel amazing. No diet can prescribe rules that are as effective or as personalized as our own quest to feeling amazing.
Most diets emphasize some variation of “eat less, move more” which completely ignores the reality of how fat loss actually happens in our body. Fat loss is faciliated or prohibited based on hormonal signaling. These signals aren’t controlled by calories. These signals are controlled by what, when & how much you eat. Most importantly: they are different for every single one of us. When I’m working with my clients, I help them understand their unique hormone signals and how to optimize them. We are all getting signals from our hormones every day (hunger, cravings, energy, mood, sleep, skin, etc) and we just have to learn how to work with our bodies instead of against them. Most dieting approaches do not teach us how to work with our bodies. Instead, they want us to blindly follow the rules.
There is so much more to why diets don’t work and I’ve gone into so much detail on how our bodies respond to the eat less move more approach as well as how to begin breaking the chains of dieting and creating a sustainable lifestyle that works for your body. For some of those detailed resources, check out these episodes of the Primal Potential podcast. If you have any questions or suggestions, let me know!
The other night I hosted a free, live webinar to share 3 specific changes you can make TODAY to make creating change in your life easier. The reality is, we’re making it too hard. Maybe we don’t even realize there’s an easier way, but there is. If you take the time to watch this presentation, I have no doubt you’ll make faster progress and it will feel like less of a struggle or fight against yourself.
The other night I hosted a free, live webinar to share 3 specific changes you can make TODAY to make creating change in your life easier. The reality is, we’re making it too hard. Maybe we don’t even realize there’s an easier way, but there is. If you take the time to listen, I have no doubt you’ll make faster progress and it will feel like less of a struggle or fight against yourself.
On Tuesday I shared with you guys that I’m doing a 7-day fast. That means 7 full days of nothing but sea salt, water and black coffee. If you have questions about fasting, definitely check out the episodes of the podcast I mentioned in that post.
If you’d rather listen to this post than read it, please click play. Otherwise, keep reading below.
When I made the decision to do this fast, I had to think about what I’d include and exclude. For example, was I going to drink coffee? Yes. Black coffee is definitely included. But another interesting thing made the list of inclusions:
Joy.
I know, it sounds so cheesy but hear me out.
When I did my 5 day fast last year, I very much made myself a victim of it. I went into it with doubt and dread. Though I made the choice to do it and could absolutely have chosen to not do it, I was totally in victim mode.
I complained about being hungry. I complained about being tired. I complained about being grumpy and lacking focus. I complained about seeing food pictures online.
There was zero joy.
And honestly, I think a lot of us go through life that way.
We complain about our jobs. We complain about responsibilities we took on by choice. We complain when we’re single and we complain when we’re in a relationship. We complain about food. We complain when we’re hungry and we complain when we’re stuffed. We complain about our bodies. We complain when we’re tired and also when we overslept. We complain about other people, even people we love and have in our lives by choice!
It’s kind of exhausting. It’s exhausting to be the complainer and exhausting to listen to others complain.
We’re a victim of our own circumstances – circumstances we created. We’ve turned our blessings into burdens and become accustomed to participating more in our problems than in solutions to our problems.
So. I choose joy.
I choose to be joyful in this fast. I choose to be joyful as I go through my work day. I choose to be joyful as I respond to emails and joyful as I update my accounting records.
I chose to do this fast. I can choose not to at any time. I refuse to make myself a victim of my choices and circumstances.
If I don’t like something, I’ll participate in the solution. Otherwise, I choose joy.
One of my favorite parts of my 12 week coaching groups is when I get to chat on the phone with people, talk about where they are at and collaborate on creating solutions.
Last week I had a powerful conversation about how our thoughts & words are like a compass – the point us in a given direction. We can really accelerate our progress when we consider the direction in which a given thought or declaration points us.
In this conversation, my client shared that she was often writing in her journal, “The day is already off to a bad start.”
Given that all declarations are directional and that declaration is a compass – which direction does that declaration point to?
Certainly not the way she wants to go…
I think you’re really going to enjoy this conversation!
