When I first decided to stop dieting, I was terrified.
Diets had been a trusted friend since my early teens. Each new diet came with an elaborate promise that often came true. I’d lose some weight, get high on the compliments & feel like a whole new person. This was it!
And then…the inevitable happened. Eventually, I’d put the weight back on and feel my new-found self-confidence vanish. And every single time, I’d feel more & more like a total failure.
Of course, the diet was never to blame. It was my fault! My internal flaws, my lack of willpower & my weakness for chocolate, crisps
Or so I thought.
I NEVER thought to question the diet or the diet industry itself. They were my trusted, reliable friends.
Off the back of my obsession with diets, I became a Personal Trainer. This included nutrition coaching which supported this approach – calorie counting, carb cycling, high protein diets, low carbs
I was encouraging my clients to diet, just like I had. I know some of you will read this and will think, yep I was one of those people. I’m genuinely sorry I didn’t know any better at the time.
I knew how to get short-term results for people, just like I did for myself. But I didn’t know how to make those results stick for longer than that season, the wedding or the holiday. I thought I did, but it’s glaringly obvious now that I was wrong.
Embarrassingly, I would play along with clients who blamed their willpower or some other internal ‘flaw’ for putting the weight back on. Again – if that was you, I’m genuinely sorry. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, as they say.
One of my best friends said to me this summer that she will always remember me saying “Nothing tastes as good as thin feels”. In hindsight, I cringe. Actually, I’m mortified. And this certainly is NOT the kind of example or legacy I want to leave to my children.
Finally, I decided this just wasn’t working for me and others. I became interested in the psychology of change. And that’s when the massive realization hit me – that the diet industry had me firmly in its grips.
Around that time, I also had 13kg I wanted to lose. My twins were 2 years old & I felt I could no longer blame it on the baby weight.
I desperately wanted to go on some kind of starvation fad. But those early years with the twins were a whirlwind. I was struggling with my self-identity as a mother and as a personal trainer (with 13kg to lose), struggling with my self-confidence and my general professional direction in life. I KNEW things needed to change.
And when I stopped blaming myself and looked at the restrict/
It wasn’t working because of the list of unsustainable rules I was following. It wasn’t working because as soon as I couldn’t have something, that was ALL I could think about. It wasn’t working because none of these diets took into account my very real and normal life.
I was obsessed with food in a way that non-dieters would never be, always researching the latest diet in search of a magic pill.
If it was an extreme diet (and many of them were), my body was just fighting to get the weight back and overcompensating at that.
This is the body’s natural response to any starvation cycle. It will ramp up the production of regulatory hormones to ensure you are hungry, and that you eat the food that has just been in short supply.
I would tell myself “oh, it’s just a little booster
The misery and sacrifice of the diet would be quickly followed with a serotonin boost when my skinny jeans fit again and someone would fling me a compliment (it’s no wonder diets are so addictive, right?!).
But dieting is also exhausting. It batters our self-esteem every time we ‘fail’ and the weight goes back on. We eat ’forbidden’ or ‘bad’ foods & tell ourselves we are such bad people, giving ourselves labels that further wreck our self-esteem. Fat. Lazy. Weak.
Dieting is also stressful. It encourages an increase in stress hormones in the body which are not only
I was a compulsive dieter. And worse than that, I was part of the problem, because I was encouraging other people to follow in my footsteps.
In the interests of self-compassion and forgiveness, I have to draw a line under my naïve ways and move on. Because now I know I really DO transform lives. I help bring control back and ditch the emotional rollercoaster of diets, that so many of us women are addicted to.
98% of diets fail. The statistics are not good when it comes to the long-term success of ANY diet.
Yes, I know. I’m sure we all have a great story about Sharon who weighed 200lbs and lost 70lbs doing keto, or Atkins, or calorie counting or some other diet and she never put it back on. But let’s get real here. There are not many Sharons in this world!
When I speak to clients and women at the start of their journey, many of them are very (very) reluctant to give up the diets and quick fixes. I get it. I was addicted too.
The fact is diets DO fulfill a need. Short-term weight loss. And for some reason, we convince ourselves that short-term success will do.
It’s doesn’t HAVE to be all or nothing…
There IS a middle ground here. It doesn’t have to be the ‘all or nothing’ approach to eating, that truly doesn’t serve you (from a weight, health or mental health perspective).
Here are five vital areas to pay attention to, if YOU want to break free from this never-ending dieting culture.
- Mental Challenges
A healthy life doesn’t start in the gym. It doesn’t even start in the kitchen. It starts in your mind. To make sustainable changes in your life, you’ve got to set up the right mental foundations. Understanding your deep motivations, your psychological barriers and even your identity are all important steps that must be explored for long-term success.
- Listening to your Body
Years of dieting makes it hard to really tune in to hunger and satiety cues. When you start listening to your body, it becomes a whole lot easier to maintain a normal healthy weight.
- Good Nutrition
It’s not just about intuitive eating – good nutrition is a huge factor. The closer we eat to nature, the more likely we are to be able to listen to our body’s natural cues. If all you do is eat junk 24/7, then no matter how intuitively you eat, you’ll always crave the junk.
- Habits
It doesn’t even end there. You need to create habits that really work for you in the long-term, to make it easy for you to feed your body in the best way you can.
- Other Lifestyle Factors
Stress, sleep & relationships are all part of your health and weight loss journey too. We need to examine them closely, so we can work out what we need to change for our own success.
Long-term weight loss – that’s sustainable for the
If you can’t eat ‘normally’ with your friends & family, it’s not real life. You can keep it up for a few weeks, maybe even months or a couple of years. But real life always takes over in the end, you ‘fall off the wagon’ and the weight goes straight back on.
If you’re over the fads and the yo-yo dieting – and you’re ready to take back control of your relationship with food – then please do get in touch.
I promise I have your best interests at heart and I don’t want you to get addicted to my program either, never able to break free. This is about supporting you to make the changes you need, to go off & live the rest of your life on YOUR terms.
Or come & join our Facebook group, full of like-minded, intelligent women who are ready to break the diet cycle too – Healthy Life ME – The Weight Loss Tribe.
Until next time,
Fran x