Weight Loss Therapy
Weight loss doesn’t have to be so hard!
What bothers you most about weight loss — how hard it is? What type of diet to choose? Whether or not you should detox? The difficulty of setting your goals? Staying away from your favourite foods, or feeling like you’re losing out? Or stopping the weight piling back on after your diet?
Why it’s hard
People commonly assume that weight loss is simple: Calories in, calories out. “Eat less, exercise more.”
But, your body is far more complex than that.
When you restrict your calories, and exercise more while reducing your intake, your body rebels: It slows down its metabolism to compensate. What’s more, your body remembers this for future. Each time you diet, it reinforces your body’s memory of these times.
That’s why, after a diet has ended, your weight goes up again, often to past where you were before your diet!
Dieting also goes against some of your most basic instincts. When you diet, you’re not only fighting your fat, but also fighting your own body and your own brain. Your brain will work at figuring out ways to make you sabotage yourself.
Have you ever wondered why weight loss has to be so hard?
Overeating or binge eating
You see, trying to diet, to stop overeating or bingeing, involves making food your enemy. Food becomes not only something that you must have — otherwise you’ll starve to death — but also an enemy to be avoided at all costs!
No wonder dieting is so confusing.
What causes the problem?
The big issue with overeating, or eating poor quality food, is that people overeat for a reason. You don’t just wake up one day and think, “I’m going to overeat from now on!” That’s not how it works.
What happens is that when you eat, your brain produces “feel good” chemicals that make you feel good. So, if you haven’t learned how to deal with the stress and anxiety that life presents to you, you might be tempted to eat in order to get some kind of relief, to feel better about you and about your life.
This is how overeating starts, and how it continues.
What if there were a better way?
Surprisingly, food isn’t the problem
A better way
What if there were a better way — to change the way that your brain automatically responds to food, so instead of seeing it as an enemy that you can’t resist, it becomes a friend that nurtures you without being needy and suffocating?
When you and I work together, we get you to see food in an entirely new light. When you struggle with the stress and anxiety of life, instead of turning to food to make you feel better — and then overeating — you learn how to leave food as something that you do with pleasure when you’re genuinely hungry. You will learn new skills to cope with life instead of turning to food for comfort.
A life where you can deal with problems as they come, solving them, learning from them, instead of just “swallowing” your emotions, allows you to live a more fulfilled life.
Speaking of which, do you know when you are genuinely hungry rather than emotionally hungry? If you don’t, don’t worry — you’re not alone. That’s something that we work on.
Food becomes your friend, not your enemy
Anxiety
The leading problem that I find with people who overeat is anxiety. That’s why we work together to let you learn coping skills and new ways of looking at the problems that face you. Helping you with anxiety is an important part of the process that we go through.
Biology
More and more researchers and weight loss experts have been realising the role that biology plays in weight gain and weight loss. There is a fairly complex play between inborn traits, i.e. your genetic components, and epigenetics, i.e. ways in which your body changes in response to your environment. (Did you know that how you mother ate while pregnant affects you to this very day?)
Most importantly, though, is the fact that how you eat affects how your body responds. When you constantly switch between overeating and dieting, it confuses your body, and it adjusts by wanting to hold onto fat. In other words, they very thing that you do to lose weight (dieting) is the very thing that makes you overweight in the long run!
Addiction
People who come to me for weight loss sometimes also have an addiction such as too much alcohol or another recreational drug. If this also applies to you, it would be a good idea to work on this at the same time as working on weight loss — in fact, it is critical to your long-term success.
By the way, overeating stimulates the same parts of your brain as an addiction. No wonder it’s so hard to stop doing this!
Birthdays, weddings, Christmas, Easter…
What about those special days when you suddenly stop your diet and go mad?
Well, the good news is that once you have changed your relationship to food, with you and food treating each other as friends instead of enemies, the whole “I gotta eat more” on special days simply disappears. If eating is a pleasure every time when you eat, you won’t want to change how you eat on special days, because it’s already special!
So, if you are struggling with anxiety and need some help, call me in complete confidence to discuss your problems and how we might be able to help.