Every day, you’ve probably seen some new “miracle weight loss diet” replete with before and after photos. But what you’re NOT seeing is “after” the “after” photos. That’s because for most people losing weight is not an issue. Sure you’ll get to a “plateau” – the place where your metabolism has slowed down so significantly that even the miracle weight loss diet is not working anymore. What you have to do at this point is eat even less, and they’ll also tell you in most cases that you need to exercise more.
The photo you are seeing is the BEFORE photo from a woman who is on an extreme miracle weight loss diet where she has limited her diet to meat and water. GAG ME! Can you imagine a life where every meal is meat and water? It sounds like some new Guantanamo eating plan.
Here’s her blog: I discovered Zero Carb/no plants diet…meat and water. Can’t say I love it, but I like it enough to continue. Cravings gone, no raging hunger every 2 hours, no bloating, no gas/farting, no craziness to create three ‘balanced’ meals a day…plus snacks, because meals weren’t enough. High blood pressure…gone. Temps staying up in normal high range without thyroid or any supplements. Excess fat loss is a breeze, edema I could not get rid of (it was getting scary)…gone. If I had a time lapse camera I could see how my body is changing daily from a lumpy 100 pounds overweight old lady to having a shape even with 80 pounds more to go. My pants fit better (down a size) than the last time I wore them when this weight/size. I can’t remember the weight I was exactly…it’s been a few years, but it almost seems I weighed less and was fluffier. No matter
Guilt From Regaining Weight
You struggled and followed that diet EXACTLY. And maybe you reached your goal weight. You went into a maintenance diet mode- still “watching” what you ate. For 95% of dieters this can happen during your diet or 2 months to 2+ years after you finished the diet, the weight started creeping back. In the beginning you might have ignored it, being exhausted from the strict diet you were on. But at a certain point you realized that the weight WAS coming back! The fear and guilt is overwhelming!
Embarrassed To Show What Happened
You might have shown your before and after pictures on Facebook, Instagram and other social media and gotten so many positive comments and requests for what you did to lose the weight. But at this point you won’t answer anyone. You feel guilty and like a failure. And the diet industry is happy that you feel like that because they know that you blame yourself for the diet failure. They know that you’ll be back trying another diet.
Diet Revolving Door
The bad news is if you try another diet after each diet failure, you will regain the weight, just like before. But the worst part is that each time you rebound and add additional weight from your starting point. And it’s NOT YOUR FAULT. In fact, it’s the sign of a healthy body following its primary directive to prevent you from starving by slowing your metabolism.
Unfortunately for us who have gained weight, the likelihood of losing and maintaining that weight loss is very small. Only 5% of dieters maintain their weight loss.
But there is a way that may increase your possibility of getting into that group. It’s by dealing with STRESS. Read more about it and figure out if you are a stress eater, or have body image issues that are stressful and damage your metabolism.
Stress Causes Weight Gain Two Ways
Much of the reason that diets fail has to do with Emotional Eating. That’s when you are eating from stress. But the other invisible way that stress causes weight gain is from actually changing your metabolism. Your body is responding to stress as though you were under attack. But you can learn how to turn off both ways that stress is affecting your weight.
Get control of stress now and prevent your weight from getting any higher. The other benefit is that this training affects all aspects of your life and makes you more resilient to stress and calm.
Contact me if you have any questions-
Learn to love yourself like your dog does- (even if you don’t have a dog, you’ve heard of unconditional love? that’s it!)
Please share YOUR experiences with dieting- were you able to maintain your weight loss?
Emotional eating is the result of a stress trigger that sets you off. We call the food we overeat or binge on “comfort food”. That explains it exactly. You have stress, and to comfort yourself you grab for a food to make you feel better – or not feel at all. For many people ice-cream is that comfort food. Want to know why? Ice-cream is the same combination of sugar, fat and protein that you had when you were first born: mother’s milk! The original comfort food, when you cried as a baby was almost the same as ice-cream, but it wasn’t freezing!
Instead of comforting yourself with food, the best method is to identify what is stressing you out! Then manage the stress with HeartMath’s® wonderful tools. EmWave is the way you can see in REAL TIME, as you are practicing, that you are changing your body’s reaction to stress! It helps you get calm and more resilient. Then food is not so important because you’ve treated the REAL cause of over-eating, and potential weight gain – it’s STRESS!
When you overeat, or eat because you’re stressed that’s emotional eating. It’s been estimated that 75- 95 percent of people gain weight from eating due to stress. And being stressed can slow down your metabolism and make you gain weight EVEN IF you’re not over-eating!
It’s imperative for you to gain mastery over stress. Lianda’s unique proven programs INCLUDE using HeartMath’s biofeedback type of device: emWave2 Personal Stress Reliever (and HeartMath’s new device, Inner Balance for you iPhone and Android phone) to give you power to stop binging and over-eating. And it will give you resilience to manage stress that normalizes your metabolism, improves your sleep, your mood and even physical symptoms.
Inner Balance for iPhone
Lianda goes even further with giving you “the skinny” on reasons you are having trouble losing weight and keeping it off. “Tap” into your heart’s power with EFT and HeartMath- the perfect combination to get off the yo-yo diet cycle and start eating and enjoying the food you like and need.
No promises about weight loss- but this is what happened with a beta group of people who went through the program. Working on STRESS RELIEF, and NO DIETING…. Was it because the stress relief lowered cortisol levels, improved participants sleep, or gave them tools to manage their emotions instead of stuffing them with food?
In just six weeks on this stress relief program participants’ group weight average decreased by an impressive 5.2 pounds, though a number reported approximately 12-pound losses. The average waist circumference dropped 2.1 inches and hip circumference 1.78 inches. Participants also reported increased feelings of calmness. These results were accomplished without any direction in regard to food or exercise but rather focusing on taking care of their emotional well-being first. In other words: they practiced daily stress relief & lost weight!
Want to get started? Contact me to get your emWave or your Inner Balance (now blue tooth!) and free training session and consultation.
A successful (because she’s making lots of money- not because her clients are maintaining lost weight) weight loss doctor did a three hour program explaining how the reason you can’t maintain weight loss is all in your brain: your lack of will power. I listened for a while, but got so angry that I wrote this letter to her. She even suggested that instead of eating you should help the hostess serve and clean up the food at a party to keep your mind off eating.
This program is not only flawed, but it’s insulting. Do you REALLY think that over 95{5b8e831512cf0c284f7edae7fc403e9a09e5b1736c5b1d60e4451a29dc064ebe} (the speaker quoted an even HIGHER percentage) of people have no willpower?
Diet Gurus way to BLAME YOU for THEIR Lies
Yes, will power is a factor to help make choices in life- but it’s not the factor in weight loss. I’m so saddened for Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson who believes that having a slender body is worth giving up the part of her life of enjoying food, eating with her friends and every other aspect that thin people don’t have to compromise about to maintain a thinner body. Is it her belief that only thin people have will-power?
Our society has developed a bias against people who don’t conform to being the “right size”. It is such an internalized preference that it makes them unable to SEE truths! “Believing is seeing”. They will argue unceasingly, that being past this acceptable weight limit is unhealthy- DESPITE REPUTABLE research that is done by actual scientists who don’t “gain” monetarily by finding that being fat is bad. Yes, the diet industry makes at least $60 BILLION a year marketing a product that has a success rate of less than 5{5b8e831512cf0c284f7edae7fc403e9a09e5b1736c5b1d60e4451a29dc064ebe}!
Heavier People Live Longer!
“Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. And recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people.”
But women, primarily, are willing to starve themselves to achieve these standards – that they will NEVER be able to permanently maintain! In fact women questioned about the importance of being thin said that they would be willing to shorten their lives 10 years to be 10 pounds thinner! This is a disgrace.
Besides genetics and epi-gentics being a fundamental issue regarding adult weight, there are many studies showing that conditions that a child 0-age 6 lived under will also be a large contributing factor in weight in their lives (ACE long term studies). Twin studies show that twins separated at birth, never knowing the other twin, weigh within a pound of each other and not the family with which they were raised. Even economic factors play a large part in an adult’s weight. You don’t see many “over weight” rich people do you? And they have not only access to, but exposure to fine foods, parties and events where they are not helping the host clear away dishes in order to prevent themselves from eating!!
And finally the real issue: Although it is CLEAR that stress affects the metabolism: (for examples see studies from Robert Sapolsky, Ph D. regarding stress with baboons); and stress is a primary factor in economically challenged or poor people; and stress is the factor in epi-gentic findings that the pregnant mother’s stress level affects the fetus; and stress is a factor in the ACE studies of childhood upbringing; and stress is the factor in people being rejected and scorned and laughed at by society – and of course I could go on…. Dr. Thompson thinks we should just “say no” to nurturing ourselves with food – even though life doesn’t offer nurturing of any kind to the person who is plump.
There are programs that deal specifically with STRESS RELIEF that impact people with weight issues: but promise no guarantees of weight loss, no dieting, no foods to avoid, no denying oneself when hungry. For some people, they will lose weight. But for many, their bodies are their bodies, and they will never be thin. The profound stress that is relieved is from trying to fit into other people’s standards in order to feel like a worthy human being. For me, I think that is the most important thing in life- accept yourself the way you are. The people who judge you are mean and shallow – or seeking to make a buck on your misery. Don’t become like them and judge yourself harshly because your body doesn’t conform to society’s standards of beauty.
Is dieting a stress in your life? Is dieting contributing to your inability to manage your weight and live a happy, productive, and successful life? Let’s talk about it and end that issue!
How you’re going to avoid those “devil” foods that you struggle to not eat? (chocolate?)
How much you have to exercise to burn off those calories?
How to avoid eating the things you want to eat?
How your weight is holding you back in life?
That’s why I’m so grateful for coaches like Isabel Foxen Duke, founder of Stop Fighting Food — the ultimate resource on “ending the crazy” around food and one of the most unique and talented emotional eating coaches I know.
Isabel’s running a free video training series this month that I’m very excited about. This training shares some of her most critical insights on emotional eating, binge-eating, diet-binge cycling, and “generally feeling crazy around food.”
Isabel won’t only address your emotional eating patterns — she’ll help you end all the crazy-making food and body thoughts that instigate those patterns to begin with.
Knowing Isabel’s work myself, I can attest that she knows what she’s talking about and produces serious results in the emotional eating world — if these are issues you struggle with, I highly recommend that you take a look and sign up for this free video training series.
Help yourself stop the craziness about food! Stop fighting and start enjoying!
Dieting and exercise will not let you achieve a permanent weight loss. It doesn’t work for 95{5b8e831512cf0c284f7edae7fc403e9a09e5b1736c5b1d60e4451a29dc064ebe} of dieters. And it’s not your fault. We’ve all been brainwashed – including your doctor who tells you that you have to lose weight, and tells you to go on a diet. But they are just as ignorant as the general population that has been fooled by a diet industry that KNOWS the statistics, and uses dieter’s low self-esteem and desperation to keep them “hooked”.
If you are overweight the most likely reason is that stress caused you to binge eat (stress eating) AND changed your metabolism (increase of the stress hormone cortisol). So now you try to diet eat tasteless low calorie, low fat foods that leave you hungry. You try to exercise your ass off (but that is actually stressful, and MAKES your body automatically hungrier until all your thoughts are about your next meal). But NEITHER eating less, or exercising more will increase your chances to lose the weight permanently!
So how can you improve your chances of actually permanently losing weight? By eating MORE, and more often. Because eating less automatically slows down your metabolism within 2 days, the opposite is also true. When you eat more often, you maintain a feeling of satiety (fullness) and stabilize your blood sugar levels. It makes your brain happier, gives you more energy – and actually increases your metabolic rate!
Have you ever tried forcing more food into your mouth when you are full? It’s really hard to do- and can actually be painful. In fact many people will vomit. It’s an automatic response of the body to TOO MUCH food! But when you’ve been chronically under-eating, it’s hard to get your body to feel comfortable with more food in your stomach. So start slowly. Increase the number of meals you eat. Carry fruit or energy bars with you to give yourself a boost in the afternoon. You get tired in the afternoon, not because you need caffeine, but because you need FOOD!
It will take some time to break old habit of under-eating. But it will happen when your body is ready. Everyone is different; so accept and honor your own needs. Eat more, and then you will find you’re feeling better mentally, physically and over-all. When your stress levels are lowered, that’s the time that your body will release the extra weight it’s been carrying around.
To learn more about why dieting is a “losing battle”, and the ways to allow your body to drop weight effortlessly, read my book: Diet Industry Lies that Make You Gain Weight. It was an Amazon #1 Best Seller!
Weight issues don’t appear out of nowhere. Your body gives you all the information you need to know how much to eat, to drink and to sleep. The problem of over-eating can be because you are missing the signal that you are full if you are multi-tasking. Humans will typically over-eat when a lot of food is put in front of them. It’s just how your brain is wired from the times we lived in caves, and there were times of feast and famine. As a species, we learned to eat a lot when it was available, so we would have extra fat stores when there was times of low food availability. That’s why you over-eat when you’re at a buffet, or at Thanksgiving.
Another reason for over-eating is missing cues of satiation when you are multi-tasking- like talking to friends, reading, driving somewhere, or texting. Your brain can only focus on one thing at a time, and as in the previous example, you’ll over-eat if you’re not paying attention to your body’s signals that you’ve had enough..
The other reason that people over-eat is due to stress. The food that’s chosen when you are eating from stress is even called “comfort food”! But it doesn’t comfort you, can make you gain weight and feel guilty.
One of the biggest causes of weight gain is BINGE EATING.
That’s the result of telling yourself you “shouldn’t” eat some food you love that you assume is fattening or bad for you. When you’re stressed out, that “devil food” is the thing you go for. The stress lowers your ability to continue to deny yourself. You NEED to give in to comfort your stress. Your body craves sugar, salt and fat which actually “treat” the stress! Eating those foods lowers the stress response.
What’s the best way to deal with over-eating and binging? It’s not by trying to prevent yourself from eating by fighting with your desire. That just causes more stress. The best and most effective way to deal with binge eating is by relieving stress! There are so many choices for how to lower your stress level and the resulting high cortisol levels. And believe it or not, MINDFUL EATING is one of the best ways!
Mindful eating is about paying total attention to your food, stopping multi-tasking or doing anything other than eating, and treating yourself to slow, relaxing gastronomical joyful experience. When you do that, you will be able to discern your body’s signals of being full. You end up enjoying your meal, and probably eating less. You are doing two things at a time: Stress Relief and eating what you want! That’s a win-win situation.
The bad news is if you try another diet after each diet failure, you will regain the weight, just like before. But the worst part is that each time you rebound and add additional weight from your starting point. And it’s NOT YOUR FAULT. In fact, it’s the sign of a healthy body following its primary directive to prevent you from starving by slowing your metabolism.
