Excess weight is created by over-reliance on food – we often use food as caretaker, parent, therapist, mood-elevator, motivator, punisher, etc. Losing weight permanently requires changing our negative behaviors with food as well as our relationship with food.
Since 2001, I’ve worked with thousands of amazing folks to help them achieve permanent weight loss, and I’ve noticed many similarities in the challenges they confronted in order to make change. It’s no surprise, these challenges parallel the changes I made as I lost over 90 pounds permanently.
I believe revealing these challenges will make your weight loss easier and more direct. It’s a virtual blueprint to permanent weight loss!
This is Part 1 of a 5-Part Series – So, check back for subsequent posts! Or subscribe! You can now sign up at the right of this post to receive new posts via email notification too!
- Stop dieting – Dieting is a false imposition of a food plan; it’s deprivation on every level. It is long proven that 99% of dieters regain and, when they regain, they regain 107% of the weight that was lost. Clearly, there are better ways to get the change you want.
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For someone who battled fat and won, long-term, I learned there are many misconceptions about how excess weight is lost. Unfortunately, what we don’t know can cause great harm, with long-term effects.
Naturally, we want quick results and, with no shortage of diets in the world, it’s very tempting to grab onto a diet for weight loss. Unfortunately, that leads to the condition we now see in our culture: DIETING FATTER every year.
But the human body is resourceful and intelligent, and it perceives a diet as an assault. Let me explain why.
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If you read my blog often, you know that I have lost substantial weight and kept it off since the year 2000. In my seminars and workshops, where I teach the principles of permanent weight loss, I often talk about the two most important factors to lifestyle change that result in permanent weight loss:
Consistency
That’s how you build lifestyle change. It doesn’t come with a diet, or we’d all be thin. Consistency is how you show up in your life, every day. It’s about the quality of the effort.
Consistency is not about “cheat days” or accepting a binge because it’s been a rough week or we got rejected by someone or something. Consistency is about integrity and owning our choices, for good. It’s about busting up excess weight with good behavior with food and exercise executed on a daily basis.
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The popular movie, The Hunger Games, is raking in the profits after capitalizing on the word-of-mouth from readers of the popular teen book and a boatload of publicity.
I wish I had come up with this name for the book I am writing. The Hunger Games – doesn’t it sound like a self-help book for pulling yourself out of food addiction?
Well, here are some REAL Hunger Games we play. Which one’s your favorite?
1. Diet/Avoid Food All Morning and Binge the Rest of the Day
This is the surest road to excess weight. I did it for years. I thought I was “saving up calories” for the rest of the day and exercising my willpower muscles, but I was creating more hunger and programming my body to store fat faster and more efficiently. I was also losing touch with what real hunger felt like and teaching my body I would not respond to its natural hunger cues.
2. Plan Days/Events/Activities Around Eating
OK, my bad on this one. It’s still my favorite example though. I used to choose an Overeaters Anonymous meeting because it was near one of my favorite restaurants. Since I was the one doing it, I can cop to it now. It’s so counter-intuitive, it’s amazing. Many of my clients tell me they hit goal weight in Weight Watchers and have already planned their “reward binge” or mapped out the directions to the nearest fast food restaurant. Yeah, it makes no sense, but it happens. A lot. It’s a sign nothing has changed.
Do you choose events or movies because you like a restaurant nearby? Does “being in the neighborhood” sound like a good excuse to hit a favorite type of food? Or do you say, “Who knows when I’ll get a chance to eat this again?” That’s not a real reason to eat, just a Hunger Game.
3. Eating as Entertainment (Food Focused or Foodcentric Lifestyle)
When you get together with friends, family or a partner, is your main focus eating? A movie is entertainment. A bike ride is activity. Eating is functional. It’s the gas station. Fuel. It can taste great and transport your taste buds, but if it’s your main source of entertainment, it’s time to branch out and see more of life.
4. Fear of Hunger
Many of my clients stash food in their cars, offices, gym lockers, computer cases and bedrooms so they will never be without a fix. What’s so scary about being hungry? Well, it’s usually not hunger we really fear, but the needs underneath. These needs, often subconscious and unexplored, are darker and usually created long ago, in childhood. However, it doesn’t matter if it’s unlikely to happen (running out of food or not being able to get to food in our society???), fear loves to run our behaviors.
5. I’ll Fix it Later
This is my favorite. We live under the illusion, reinforced by the diet industry, that choices today are unimportant because we have the ability to fix our weight later. Have that rich, fat-laden five course meal and promise to run every day next week to make up for it. Turn into the drive-thru – it’s OK because you’re going to the gym tonight.
This is simply untrue. Dieting rarely works, and reinforcing this negative belief (or LIE) of the “quick fix later” just makes it feel true. The truth is, once fat is processed, it’s more difficult to remove and resists dieting and excessive exercise. In fact, the longer you work out, the less fat you will burn every minute.
Understanding how the body works is the key to ending the Hunger Games in your life. Being consistently healthy is simpler and more effective than playing games too.
If you (or anyone you know) is ready to end the Hunger Games in life, share this post with them and check out my next enLIGHTen Your Life! class starting soon! Click here for information.
Huge topic here. TRUST. In my role as on-air life coach for NBC-15 here in Madison, I spoke about trust this morning.
I’m interviewing potential students for the enLIGHTen Your Life! course, my mastermind permanent weight loss course, and I’ve heard several people make statements like “I’m afraid to try weight loss again. I can’t trust that I will lose weight and keep it off.”
When I ask them to explain, they mention trusting a diet, or a “plan.”
I like to gently point out that is not even a point of trust.
To lose weight and keep weight off, we only need to trust OURSELVES.
You have never failed at a diet.
I repeat: You have never failed at a diet.
Diets always fail and always will. If you’ve let the weight loss/regain process erode your trust, there’s a bigger issue here to address. If you’ve forgotten how to do that, come join the course!
Learning to trust is part of the process of re-educating ourselves for long-term success. Non-diet weight loss is so much easier than the alternative and leads to permanent weight loss because we create a new lifestyle and the kind of deeper change that has positive effect on behavior.
Why Trusting Ourselves is Important
- It’s up to us. We are responsible.
- Trust is essential to the process of developing natural eating and activity patterns based on your own, unique body cues.
- Attitude is the most important aspect of weight loss. This requires “rewiring” the circuits in the brain. It can be done and it helps establish or re-establish trust.
- To lose weight permanently, we have to learn to cut through subconscious emotions that sabotage progress; trust is vital to this process.
- Trust, once present, goes EVERYWHERE. You don’t just suddenly leave it at home one day and abandon your deepest wishes. It’s part of you, portable, accessible, and, therefore, powerful.
Think back to the times when you trusted yourself and really stepped into life.
Trusting may have felt a little wobbly at first. It’s a leap.
But the leaps in life are important – that’s where we get to show up and put it all on the line. That’s exciting and it’s memorable.
Today, I celebrate 12 years of sustained weight loss. If you are new to this blog, after years of yo-yo dieting, I set out to lose weight permanently. My initial weight loss of 74 pounds was an incredible journey for me, an education in life I never expected.
After losing that weight, I was determined to “keep” the results. I knew from my research that permanent weight loss is defined by the medical profession as weight loss sustained for 5 years and more. I also knew, sadly, it is very rarely achieved.
I had to keep learning and growing in order to maintain the weight loss. In the last two years, I’ve lost more weight. Today, I’m 92 lbs. lighter.
As I was thinking about this anniversary, it occurred to me that I got what I wanted. How many times can you say you got exactly what you wanted (and more) in life?
I don’t call it amazing anymore, because I know the work that was involved. It’s no miracle. I literally “grew myself up” out of food addiction. I found, for me, most addiction theories don’t work. To me, they just get a person addicted to a program, instead of freeing them from the addiction.
In essence, the entire medical and therapeutic community says, “You are damaged and will always be addicted. Here, be addicted to this, which we deem healthier, rather than that substance (food, alcohol, drug, sex).
That just didn’t work for me.
What I wanted was freedom. Freedom was a huge value and driver of my behavior. In fact, as a weight loss coach, it’s something I hear practically every day from a client, or two, or three.
“I just want to be free to eat what I want.”
It’s perhaps the most common derailer of the average diet, and why diets don’t work long-term. When I was in the throes of addiction, the minute anyone told me “you can’t eat that” or “at your weight, is that wise?”, you could be damned sure I was going to eat it! That’s the freedom value showing up.
Well, today, I am free. I’m free of the compulsivity of addiction, feeling as though my actions are occurring without my permission.
I am free of excess weight, which hindered my movement, my self-expression, my comfort in the world.
I’m free of a host of medical problems.
I’m free of my excess weight making, refusing or coloring decisions for me.
Once I grew up, I discovered huge gifts: Choice. Opportunities. Meaning. Connection. Self-esteem. Love.
And true freedom.
A recent blog post by Shay Sorrells, who was on Season 8 of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” inspired this post.
I couldn’t find a place to comment on her blog, but I wanted to share my perspective on her “lessons.”
Do these people look like they will find their essence in those apples?
Shay called her post “The seven biggest mistakes I made after Loser” and they went like this:
- I stopped measuring… [food]
- I took a break… [she says another person suggested she do this and she listened]
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I made a big discovery in the land of permanent weight loss yesterday. Even after maintaining my weight loss for five years (which signals “permanent weight loss” in the medical community), I still struggled at holidays. And, in my coaching practice, clients bring their struggles into their coaching sessions and holidays are often a very tough time for them when they are addressing their excess weight.
Now, however, 12 years into maintaining weight loss, this holiday season is remarkably different.
Instead of forecasting and planning, which I once felt helped me
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