How To Lose Weight and Keep It Off

Losing weight is one problem, but keeping yourself from regaining the weight you lost, is yet another, but related problem. And they are actually completely related!

When you go on a diet to lose weight, your body is responds automatically, just as nature intended, by slowing down your metabolism. You body goes into stress when you withhold calories and increase your level of exercise. When you try to lose weight quickly, it actually compounds the problem. That’s what creates the “yo-yo syndrome”, where people lose weight, then gain it back, plus a couple more pounds than when they first started out!

And unfortunately, most doctors are creating this problem in their patients when they tell them: “There is ONLY 1 way to lose weight: Eat Less and Exercise More”. Doctors have very limited training in nutrition in medical school, and their advice can sabotage your ability to lose weight and keep it off!

Losing weight MUST be done slowly, in order to “trick” your body’s natural automatic protective response to prevent you from starving in times when there is less food availability. If you learned to work WITH your body’s natural response, you’d be eating MORE and more often! But, you must also change the type of foods that you eat, especially if you are eating a lot of sugar or refined carbohydrates (grains).

It’s best to start slowly, by adding good food first. And contrary to what the food industry would have you believe, fats are GOOD for you. Those fats are omega 3’s: olive oil, fish oil, coconut oil, flax oil. Those are not the types of cheap oils and fats that are in most processed foods! The food industry has gotten on the “low fat” bandwagon, because good fats are expensive. They have replaced those expensive ingredients with cheap and dangerous sugars: high fructose corn syrup, which they are now trying to disguise because consumers are becoming increasingly aware of it’s danger. Now the manufacturers just call it “corn syrup”.

In fact, the most up to date research that studied by researchers without a conflict of interest, have found that sugar is the worst culprit if you are trying to lose weight. And those sugars even includes “fructose” which is natural sugar found in fruits.

But alas, worst of all is the impact of stress on dieting. Chronic stress has many affects on your body, and has been implicated in the depositing of fat right in the middle of your body: belly fat!

Whereas there have been many studies about the effects of food on gaining weight, there has been precious little research on the effects of stress causing people to overeat! Lack of sleep, caused by stress, sets off release of hormones that make you hungrier, and turn off the hormones that turn OFF your hunger! And the lack of sleep also creates physiological changes in your blood sugar levels and can create insulin resistance, which can lead to obesity and eventually Diabetes Type II.

There’s hardly a person nowadays who hasn’t been affected by stress in some facet of their lives. Indeed it has become a chronic condition for many:
• finding money to pay the bills, the slow economy
• dealing with a difficult boss, or job problems
• relationship difficulties
• violence in the news and media
• health issues
• Name YOUR Stress

And stress, whether real or imagined, has the same effect. Furthermore, some kinds of stress that you may not even be aware of are buried in your subconscious mind, and also make you gain or maintain the weight you have. The weight won’t come off until you unblock the subconscious beliefs that make your body think you need the weight to be safe. Your body is keeping you heavy to protect you.

So what can you do to lose weight?

Realizing that your body is doing what nature intended, and doing it well, instead of hating your body, and feeling betrayed, visualize and think positive feelings, and thank your body for successfully doing what nature intended. Change your mindset. It’s time to make peace with your body, and have heartfelt “gratitude, not fatitude!”

And, if you want to lose weight, do it slowly, by eating more, and more often. Start by adding good food choices first. After finishing that food, check in with your body to see if you’re still hungry. If you are, give yourself a portion on a small dish. It fools your brain into thinking that you have eaten more than you actually did!

But most of all, give yourself a break, and look for opportunities to relieve stress. Emotional eating will never fill your stomach, and it will only make you feel worse.