When it comes to food, do you trust yourself? Or even more importantly, do you trust your body?
Do you feel like you have spent half your life questioning your choices, be it food or other, that you have always looked for the next plan/program/person to change your life, your weight and/or your body? Are you constantly thinking about what you have or haven’t eaten, exercised or not exercised, binged or not binged? Is this the daily thought process you use to try to control your body and ultimately weight because you don’t trust your body to lose weight on its own?
I know that learning to trust your body isn’t always easy. For years we may look externally for answers, never wanting to let go of the tight control we have (or don’t have) over food and exercise, for fear our body will fail us. Society seems to tell us, we need to push through, toughen up, follow this person or program for ultimate weight loss results and if we don’t we will never get the body we want. We will never be happy. The reality so often is that there is a battle between what the world says you should do and what your body is telling you.
Somewhere along the way we have stopped looking internally for answers, we have stopped trusting in our own inner wisdom. However, there is only one constant that is with you every single day of your life, from the day you are born until the day you die: your body.
Everything you ever have done or will do relies upon your body to some degree. So, why does the world give us the message that we should ignore what our body is telling us?
As women, we’re taught that our bodies are unreliable, and our hormones make us irrational. Well I’m here to tell you that ignoring our bodies and the information it’s telling us is simply not sustainable long term.
When you trust your body to tell you what it needs and when it needs it, things change in unexpected ways. You'll be amazed at how well your body’s systems can function when you make this shift. How many times have you found yourself urgently needing to pee because you put it off? Even with this simple, necessary body function, we don’t listen to our bodies. We wait and stall and keep working until we are in dire straits, racing to the bathroom.
Have you ever considered this - as children we eat when we are hungry and we stop when we are full, regardless of how far through our food we are and how delicious it may be. As children we trust in our body to regulate our food intake based on what we need. Somewhere along the way to adulthood, we seem to lose that innate ability to trust.
As we age we are being taught that the only way to manage our weight is to track our calorie intake. And perhaps this has worked for some of us when we were younger, when life was simpler, or when we didn’t have the daily demands we have today.
However the stark reality is that relying solely on calories to control your weight doesn’t work in the long term. Moreover, this thinking keeps people small, feeling trapped and fearful; and ultimately gaining and losing the same weight often repeatedly.
Here’s the process - does this sound familiar?
You restrict your calorie intake and start to lose some weight which probably feels pretty good – and it gets you hooked on the low calorie diet bandwagon. But over time your metabolic rate adjusts to meet the calorie reduction which results in weight loss slow down/stall and ultimately you need to reduce your calories further to get any more weight reduction. This leads to the body screaming hungry and often you end up binging and feeling like you’ve “fallen off the wagon” and questioning your inability to stick to a diet.
In addition to this, your body is also under additional stress due to the restriction in caloric intake and the body starts to store more body fat. This is the natural physiological response of the body when it feels like it is going into a “starvation period”.
Generally by now the initial weight loss starts to creep back plus some due to the increased stress hormones you’re producing. So then you think the only option for weight loss is to restrict further, and unfortunately so the cycle of weight loss/gain continues.
However, let me tell you - Your body has superpowers and can do incredible things. But first, it needs you to listen. Your body is your most trusted ally – when are you going to start believing it?
It’s time to reclaim your body’s voice.
How about giving this a try – for one week, let go of your diet rules, your calorie counting, your plans and programs and just notice what happens at meal times. What is your thought process? What is your body telling you? Ask yourself what do you need in this moment? How do you want to feel when you eat/after you eat? Can you go internally, tell yourself you are going to eat slowly and mindfully, respect your fullness, ie stop when you are full and notice what happens. Can you do this for every meal/snack/. How do you feel after a week?
If this resonates with you, know this: it’s entirely possible to get off this diet train and learn to trust your body again. Your metabolism isn’t ‘broken’ it just needs some retraining, and this isn’t as difficult as you may think. If you are ready to trust yourself again and let go of the constant dieting, click the contact me button and we can talk further.