Having just reached the end of the first full week of the new year, how are you feeling? Are you ready to move past 2020 and the indulgences of the holiday season?
I’ll bet you have been inundated this week with messaging—social-media posts, commercials, etc.—for gyms, at-home equipment, weight-loss plans, extreme diets—the full push always happens during the first two weeks of every year.
And this year it’s probably even worse.
With many people at home more during the lockdown and bored, overeating became a habit for many of us, and people put on extra pounds.
But let’s say you’re truly ready to make changes in your body this year. Maybe you’re willing to go the distance, long after January is done and people have turned their Peloton™ bikes into clothing racks.
With the chorus of messages out there, how do you know where to start? I always recommend, at the beginning and with baby steps.
You may not know this but I am a Certified Weight Loss Coach as well as Master Coach and Psychotherapist. This is good news for you because I can help you with a range of concerns you might be having including weight and body image. It’s also good news for me because I absolutely love teaching these skills and I know they are the best available out there to help you lose the weight you want and maintain that weight deprivation free! No dieting involved, it’s about a total mind shift change for life. Sound amazing? It truly is.
I love helping my clients get to their goal weight and feel good and love their bodies and selves no matter where they happen to be along their journey.
As women, we need that so much! We are bombarded with images of how we should look and there is so much criticism out there. I empower women to learn the skill of how to love their bodies no matter where we are! That is priceless.
I’m going to do a series over the next month to help you learn the skills I will teach you when you decide to do weight loss coaching with me – schedule a mini session to get started. But you can take these skills now and start applying them before we work together, or even if I never get the chance to work with you. I think every woman should know these skills to empower herself in this area of life. So here we go babe.
Let’s start with the basics: HUNGER and the HUNGER SCALE.
Many of us are detached from our bodies. We don’t know when we’re truly hungry or full, so we don’t know when and how much to eat.
We’re in this position because we may have lacked the coping skills to manage our emotions when we were younger, so we learned to numb ourselves, disassociate from our bodies, and overeat. So now, when we feel anxious or stressed, we eat to dull the emotions.
However, if we teach ourselves to truly gauge our actual, physical hunger (***sensations of hunger not feelings but physical sensations of hunger***), we can fuel our bodies from a place of science, nutrition, and healthy hormone functioning instead of unmanaged emotions. To this, I like to use what one of my mentors calls the Hunger Scale.
Here a snippet from the workbook my private coaching clients get when we work together, it’s the worksheet called psychical hunger scale.
It goes from negative 10 to positive 10 on a line, with zero being neutral, and the goal is to start identifying where you are in terms of the sensation of hunger. And hunger will not be some vague concept—it is literally as simple as:
My stomach is growling, and my belly feels empty.
I have a headache from not eating, and it’s time to fuel up.
Please know that different types of food can make you feel more or less hungry based on what it’s made of.
Processed food, stuff with lots of refined sugar and flour, really messes with glucose in your body. It makes blood sugar drop to the point where you can feel like you're hungry even when you're not.
One of the best ways to make sure you have a calibrated hunger scale is to eliminate all sugar and flour from your diet for a period of time (a week or two) so you can get a true sense of your hunger. If you feel like you're hungry ALL THE TIME, or you can’t even tell if you’re full or hungry, it's probably because you're eating a lot of sugar and flour.
The reason you want to get rid of these things in your diet is that they wreak havoc on your hormones, which can cause you to stay stuck and no matter what you try you can’t lose weight. That is so frustrating.
And just a warning if you give up sugar and flour you’ll likely go through a withdrawal period. This is where a coach can really help you master your mind and this skill so that it becomes doable and easier. I don’t want anyone to think it’s the new lifestyle, and give up before completing the process. So, hang in there!
Let me be clear THIS IS NOT A DIET.
Most diets fail because people feel crappy due to withdrawal, restriction, and perceived failure, and give up before they complete the process. So, hang in there!
It is a lifestyle change and that requires some new thinking and feeling on your part but it is so worth it! You’ll feel better and be healthy for yourself and your loved ones!
Again, THIS IS NOT A DIET.
It is a total mind shift change using cognitive behavioral thought work, science, optimal nutrition, and hormone balancing based on your unique body.
It’s a new way of understanding what fuels your body. It’s kinda like when you get a new car. You need to know what kind of fuel to put in the tank. You’re not going to put diesel in it if that would kill the engine. The same goes for our bodies. We have NOT been taught how to fuel our bodies. This is ludicrous when you think of how essentially important this is to our mental emotional and physical well-being.
It is not your fault if you are not sure what to eat and how to take care of your body, so if you have any shame, there really is no need. This is a judgment-free zone!
What you will learn is all of the best leading-edge techniques and technologies of how to fuel and care for your particular body, deprivation-free. I can’t wait for you to join me in this program I have developed specifically for strong independent women who want to get rid of the mind chatter around food, weight, and body image and focus more on other things that truly matter to them.
This week, if you’d like give it a try, focus on removing sugar and flour from your diet, lean more on protein, fruits, and vegetables (whole foods), and try to identify where you are on the Hunger Scale when you eat (keeping in mind your scale is not yet calibrated). Consult your doctor with specific concerns.
If you need more support, I work with clients on these issues all the time and can help you find your center in all this messaging around weight. Want to jump on a call (mini session) and get to know each other? Either way, I’ll see you right here next week for more in this series!
