I get a lot of questions about fat loss, family & friends. I guess, more specifically, I hear from a lot of people that their family & friends make their fat loss more difficult.
Today, I want to tackle those challenges (and I do believe they can be simply tackled without trading in your friends or abandoning your family).
A lot of this comes down to personal responsibility & understanding that you are the only one controlling what does (or doesn’t) go into your mouth.
But, I totally know it’s not as easy as simply ignoring other people’s comments, questions or challenges. So today we’re tackling fat loss, family & friends from both tactical & mindset standpoints.
Today we’re having another Primal Potential Book Club episode all about the end of self-sabotage!
I read a lot of books and I’m constantly going through books about health, nutrition & fat loss but I only want to share a book with you when I feel a sense of, “Oh my goodness, they NEED to hear this.” I most recently got that feeling with a book that has nothing to do with fat loss, yet EVERYTHING to do with fat loss.
The book is written for anyone struggling with internal resistance – excuse making, procrastination, quitting – and is perfect for individuals who are trying to get healthy, burn fat or improve their food choices.
In today’s episode I share the passages that moved me the most & discuss how they apply to health & fat loss.
“There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
This is 100% true of weight loss. It’s not the good choice that is hard. It’s the thinking about it. The debating. The internal arguing back and forth and the situations you create and battle with in your head.
That’s the secret that most people who have lost weight know that people who haven’t lost weight haven’t yet accepted: It’s not the fat loss part that’s hard. It’s tackling the junk in your head that is hard.
On the very next page he writes,
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance.
I think if you have any amount of weight to lose you get this. I think you get this if you feel like food is controlling your life.
It’s this sense that there’s the life I am living and the life I plan on living after weight loss. Or, the life I wish I could live if I could just tackle this battle.
What does resistance look like? What does it sound like? As soon as I explain how Pressfield explains it, I think you’ll start to see it pretty clearly in your own life. I know I can. I see it immediately in my clients. It stands out once you recognize it.
“Anything that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long term growth, health or integrity.
Here’s one of the first ah-ha moments I had when I was reading The War of Art:
“Resistance” can be an incredibly valuable tool. If we aren’t sure what we SHOULD be doing – what is BEST for us – look to where the greatest resistance is.
You can USE it in that way. The more important or significant something is, the more resistance we often feel.
That’s so true in weight loss. You know where I’ve seen this most with clients? Alcohol. There is so much resistance to dialing back or working on moderation with alcohol (for some people.)
Where there is the greatest resistance is often a fantastic indicator of where we need to be doing more work,
Now here’s what I think is scary: how does resistance gain strength?
From us. We feed it. We feed it with our fear. It has ABSOLUTELY NO STRENGTH of it’s own unless we fuel it with our fear and our belief and our focus.
We can choose not to do this. We can starve resistance by not giving in to it. When you give in to resistance, it gains power.
One of the most common forms of resistance is procrastination. We aren’t telling ourselves “no”, we’re just saying “later” (even though we know that we don’t do it later.)
I took a picture of the page Pressfield writes about procrastination. Well, just a couple sentences, really.
“NEVER FORGET: This very moment, we can change our lives. This second, we can sit down to do our work.”
This second, we can make a good choice. This second, we can do something that will move us forward.
Pressfield writes about sex as a form of resistance – distraction – but I think his argument there is maybe even more true of food – I’m going to read what he wrote but replace the word sex with food, okay? You’ll love this:
“Sometimes resistance takes the form of food, or an obsessive preoccupation with food. Why food? Because food provides immediate and powerful gratification.
Resistance gets a kick out of knowing that it has distracted us with a cheap, easy fix and kept us from doing our work.
Of course not all food is a manifestation of resistance. In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterwards. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not real, but Resistance.
Uh – yeah, ya think? The immediate and powerful gratification? The hollowness afterwards?
Let’s get on the same page: fat loss is about hormones. We dramatically influence our hormones with the foods we eat.
Food is information. Everything you eat communicates a message to your hormones. Your hormones message you back. There is a constant dialogue happening in your body & I want to help you direct the conversation.
See, it is your hormones that signal whether or not FAT LOSS is allowed. Only under certain hormonal conditions will your body allow fat burning.
We can create those hormonal conditions with our food choices. We can prevent those hormonal conditions with our food choices.
If you want a free, detailed overview of the relationship between insulin & fat loss and specific, actionable strategies for naturally controlling insulin, you can download them for free by clicking below. This is a 5 page excerpt from my ebook on how to balance hormones for fat loss and I am certain you’ll find some strategies you can put to work for you!
In today’s post, I want to hit the highlights & talk about 2 of the most important hormones for fat loss, what they do & how we can manage them via our food & lifestyle choices.
INSULIN
Insulin is a critical fuel delivery hormone. Insulin is appropriately referred to as the “master fat loss hormone” and is dramatically influenced by our food choices.
Let’s take a look at what insulin does, how it works & how it impacts fat loss.
Think of insulin as an usher. It responds to fuel (nutrients) in the blood stream & ushers them to the cells to be used as fuel or stored. Without insulin, your cells would starve.
The presence of elevated insulin levels tells the body, “There’s plenty of fuel. I’m finding a place for it to go. Don’t add more fuel into the pipeline.”
Insulin’s message of “there’s plenty of fuel” temporarily prevents fat burning.
Think about it – when there is fuel in the blood & insulin is busy finding a place for it to go, why would the body break down body fat? It won’t!
Body fat is burned in response to a lack of fuel in the blood. Body fat is burned to give the body needed energy. The presence of insulin prevents fat burning because extra fuel is not needed.
Fuel storage and fuel breakdown are opposites. They don’t happen at the same time, just like you can’t throw a ball up and down simultaneously.
Insulin puts the body in fuel storage mode. Fat burning is a fuel breakdown mode. They cannot and will not happen at the same time.
That does not make insulin the enemy. Again, without insulin, your cells starve.
However, many people spike their insulin levels every time they eat. They will keep you out of fat burning mode.
We need to manage insulin via our food choices. The macronutrient that drives insulin most is carbohydrate. This is why the right carbohydrate strategy is essential for fat loss. That’s not suggesting we need to eliminate carbohydrates – I do not believe that at all. We do, however, need to focus on:
Eating fat, protein & fiber from non starchy vegetables with meals and snacks.
For more detailed information on how insulin works & how you can avoid having it impair your fat burning, download the free insulin overview & guide. Implementing these strategies will help you increase your energy, accelerate your fat loss & decrease cravings.
CORTISOL
Cortisol is another critical hormone when it comes to how we can balance hormones for fat loss. Cortisol is one of many stress hormones & works very closely with insulin.
One of the primary reasons that cortisol impacts insulin is due to the type of hormone it is – it belongs to a class of hormone known as glucocorticoids.
What word do you see in there? “Gluco” refers to cortisol’s ability to increase blood sugar independent of what you eat!
Yup, when cortisol is elevated, it can break down proteins in your body to form glucose, elevating blood sugar (even if you aren’t eating carbs!)
This is actually part of your body’s natural survival mechanisms but our diet & lifestyle may cause it to work against us.
See, in times of physical stress or danger, your body wants to make sure extra glucose gets to your muscles so you can escape danger.
Unfortunately, many of us live in perpetual states of physical and/or emotional stress and therefore our cortisol levels are on overdrive, increasing our blood sugar & elevating insulin (keeping us out of fat burning mode.)
To help control cortisol & prevent it from impairing your fat burning potential, consider the following:
Practice relaxation and/or meditation
Limit “chronic cardio” styles of exercise like distance running
Do not eat within a couple hours of bedtime
Get plenty of sleep
Avoid sugar & processed foods
There are many hormones involved in the fat burning process but you don’t need to know & do everything. You only need to know & do the highest impact things. This free insulin overview & guide will tell you everything you need to know & do without overwhelming you will all you don’t!
I used to talk myself into indulgences & exceptions by saying things like, “This one thing won’t hurt” or “it doesn’t make a difference.” But the small choices can hurt and one thing does make a difference. In today’s episode we’re talking about how to make the small choices count.
One of the tough things about food choices is that they don’t usually have immediate negative consequences but they do often have immediate positive consequences.
What do I mean?
Well, if you have a handful of M&Ms, your pants aren’t immediately tighter but you do get an immediate sugar rush.
Imagine if our bodies responded to food the way Pinocchio’s nose responded to lies. Whoa. Game changer, right?
Even though we can’t see or feel immediate negative consequences, that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Today’s episode is a short one but helps you see that nothing is without consequence, nothing is free and everything is either an investment in our health or costs us our health.
Today we’re talking about some of the best vegetables for weight loss & how they make fat loss easier!
We start off by exploring how you can determine which vegetables are the most (or least) fat loss friendly and then we take a closer look at cruciferous & allium vegetables and the ways they support fat loss.
Allium vegetables & cruciferous vegetables support insulin, metabolism, detoxification & much more. They are certainly some of the very best vegetables for weight loss.
Allium & cruciferous vegetables contain sulfur. In this episode we talk about the incredible benefits of sulfur including:
Insulin production
Detoxification
Cell health
Metabolism
Allium vegetables are also great sources of chromium which supports blood sugar balance & insulin sensitivity.
We also talk about the importance of including some raw cruciferous vegetables in your diet & explain why there are additional benefits to raw consumption.
