Popular Weight Loss Advice That Sucks, and why you don’t have to listen
Posted on 07. Jan, 2010 by Susan in Weight Loss
Celebrities are hired to glam up crappy packaged foods and poisonous “fat blocking” pills. Pick up any “health” magazine, and you’ll find a newly-fit, slightly-famous woman declaring dieting words of wisdom that include earth shattering tips like, “clear out all tempting foods and eat only carrots.” Google “weight loss” and you will receive 426,000,000 results. Most of it is full of damaging lies that separate you from your money, your natural body weight, and your own power.
As a former yo-yo dieter, I’m passionate about reconnecting women with their inner wisdom and the handiest weight loss tool around — their very own bodies. I’ve selected three popular weight loss tips that I invite you to drop. They don’t create lasting weight loss or inner peace.
Clean Sweep
You’ve seen these segments on TV. A weight loss “expert” will go into a dieter’s kitchen and fill a dumpster in their front yard with all their mayonnaise, Cheetos, bread, hamburger meat, and basically anything that contains more than 100 calories. The dieter cries, the “expert” tells her to suck it up, and the cameras capture this “motivating” encounter to “help” us understand that we are powerless to the fat gram. We need to clean out our fridges and pantries and purses if we ever hope to stuff our muffin tops into skinny jeans. We can’t be tempted.
After the camera crew leaves, and the dieter has had enough white knuckling, eating lettuce, and chewing on the baseboards, a tsunami of binging and self-flogging ensues. The dieter wonders what’s wrong with her and why she can’t lose weight. The truth is that deprivation just doesn’t work. You can’t hide from food. Food isn’t the issue in the first place. A lasting weight loss journey begins with understanding the thoughts and emotions that are creating the need to overeat in the first place. YOU can become your expert. So, what are you hungry for really? When you cure boredom with a plate of brownies, or stuff down anger with pizza, or create your entertainment through wine and cheese, notice it.
Three Square Meals
We’ve become a nation obsessed with eating according to external cues. We eat by the clock and abide by the rules of the Clean Plate Club. The Clean Plate Club does not allow snacking between meals, eating after 7 p.m., before 5 a.m. or on Sundays. I recently saw a very famous wellness guru Tweet to eat three 400-calorie meals a day with no snacking in between for successful weight loss. Is there no wonder why Americans SUPERSIZE our portions when we think we’ve got to get all we can in three meals? The truth is that your magnificent and miraculous human body is equipped to alert you when to eat and when to stop. This usually results in eating 5-6 times a day and a naturally thin body. It doesn’t matter what time of day that is. If you eat when you are hungry, and fuel your body according to its signals, you can bag all the crazy rules. Visit here to download a free Hunger Scale Guide.
Eat This Not That
Surf around on enough weight loss web sites, and you’ll be warned that you should not eat carbs, meat, egg, boysenberries, and actual real food. You can’t be trusted with any of them. Just go ahead and buy frozen, fake food so that you can control yourself. Ridiculousness! The truth that I have learned by honoring my own body, and working with hundreds of other women and their unique bodies, is that your very own body will TELL you what foods feel good and bad in your system. Guess what? Eggs, and orange juice, and cottage cheese feel just great in my body. They energize and fuel me. Not so for some of my clients. These foods feel sickly in their stomachs. It’s not a one-size-fits-all thing with food. Learning how to pay attention to how different foods actually feel inside your body through food journaling can free you from these crazy rules. Visit here to download a free Food Journal worksheet.
The diet industry has a lot to lose if you take back your power. In a $60 billion industry, it’s counting on you to continue using food in unhealthy ways. I challenge you to start your very own personal body revolution. It’s not about counting calories, weighing food, and over exercising. It is about learning how to think. You can do that. You can live at your natural weight. Just take the first sane and rational steps.
Join Martha Beck, PhD and best-selling author of The Four Day Win, Brooke Castillo, Master Coach and author of If I’m So Smart Why Can’t I Lose Weight?, and me for a weekend designed to help you lose the drama and the weight — January 22-24 in Phoenix, Arizona. Get all the details and register at www.weightlossforsmartwomen.com.
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