Why Your Diet's Not Working
Do you find yourself skipping meals, trying popular diets and turning down foods you love in an attempt to lose weight? Avoiding meals and jumping from one diet to another with little success can often make you feel worse than when you started. It’s easy to take this path and get to a point where you believe you’ve tried everything.
As nothing seems to make the number on the scale go down, depression sometimes follows. Unfortunately, you simply haven’t found what your body needs to become balanced. Balance is what keeps your weight down, your bones strong, your muscles active and your metabolism working well.
Not for Everyone
As I firmly believe, nutrition is highly bio-individual. Lifestyle, heritage, activity level, mindset, medical history, age, genetics, medications and other factors all go in to how your body will work best. It’s the case for weight loss, for symptom relief, and for improving overall mental and physical well being. This is why the most talked about diets may not work for you. They simply can’t work for everyone and when they do work they don’t always teach you how to maintain your weight loss long term.
What if everything you’ve learned about losing weight was wrong? What if I told you that losing weight isn’t all about calories and isn’t about cutting down food intake so you constantly feel hungry. No trendy diets needed. What if it’s simply about knowing what foods make you feel good, how to prepare them, how to combine them with other food, and about finding enjoyment rather than stress in choosing food and eating it. Sound too simple? For most people, it actually is that simple.
Too Much, Too Quickly
Restrictive diets ask too much from you too quickly and most people don’t succeed this way. Don’t become discouraged by them. Instead try a different approach; start where you are, with the food you currently eat and go from there. Slow down and take it one bite at a time, challenging yourself slowly. Success comes when you’re not in a hurry. When you adapt to things gradually, your body becomes more accustomed to the changes and you adapt mentally to variation without much stress. That’s why adding new foods in to your daily diet helps your body adjust to more variety and as your body benefits from these varied nutrients it doesn’t mind leaving behind the foods that don’t make you feel so well. Try taking the “add in” approach instead of cutting things out to start.
Fear of Food
The most common denominator among clients that I’ve worked with is their fear about what to eat and what not to eat. You need to rid yourself of the fear that too many choices has left you with. Sometimes that’s not easy if it’s been ingrained in your psyche for a long while. Eating should not be complex and once you realize that it doesn’t have to be, you will be much better off.
Simple Thoughts to Get You Going:
Eat Real Food. There’s no arguing this one. Every year approximately 17,000 new foods come into our markets, if you actually call them food. Most are comprised of ingredients that you need a dictionary to define and resemble chemicals more than food. This challenges your body to figure out how to digest all the unknowns. When you stick to primarily real food, the kind without an ingredients label, your body will likely know how to utilize it effectively. Everything is less complicated when you know what you’re eating and love what you’re eating.
Drink Water. Hydration is vital to keep everything working and moving through your body. It moves the good nutrients in and helps eliminate the toxins that weigh you down.
Move, Move, Move. Every way you can. You have to keep your body building muscle with movement. When you are mostly sedentary, you are not building muscle you are just building fat.
A Good Night’s Sleep - Notice the next time you have a bad night’s sleep. Chances are you will feel hungrier and have more cravings the day after.
Timing. Don’t let yourself feel hungry for prolonged periods, especially if you have a blood sugar imbalance. If you feel hungry two hours after you eat, you probably didn’t eat the right combination of protein, fat and carbs to meet your needs. Reevaluate and add a bit more or less next meal to find what keeps you satiated.
Don’t Stress over Food. Stress will never help you, whether it’s physical or mental. Too much stress just gets in the way of your body doing what it needs to do to rid itself of excess fat.
Skip the Sugar Before the Good Fat. Your body turns the sugar you don’t need into fat. When you eat good sources of fat you give your body nutrients that help you think clearly, balance your blood sugar levels and burn calories.
Try the “Add in” Approach. By adding in more variety of whole foods, you’ll find that eventually letting other foods go, if needed, isn’t that big a deal.
Balance
Food is life, food is joy, food is medicine, food is the one thing in this world that we all need in the right balance to live fully, active lives. Try not to complicate it too much. Keep it simple and try to notice how you feel after you eat. Your body sends you signals. When you teach yourself to notice those signals you allow yourself a clear gateway to finding the balance you need and the weight loss you desire.
Memon AN, Gowda AS, Rallabhandi B, Bidika E, Fayyaz H, Salib M, Cancarevic I. Have Our Attempts to Curb Obesity Done More Harm Than Good? Cureus. 2020 Sep 6;12(9):e10275. doi: 10.7759/cureus.10275. PMID: 33042711; PMCID: PMC7538029.
Benton D, Young HA. Reducing Calorie Intake May Not Help You Lose Body Weight. Perspect Psychol Sci. 2017 Sep;12(5):703-714. doi: 10.1177/1745691617690878. Epub 2017 Jun 28. PMID: 28657838; PMCID: PMC5639963.
https://health.osu.edu/wellness/exercise-and-nutrition/that-diet-probably-did-not-work
