Summer Is Coming - Don’t Fall Into This Diet Trap
Guys, summer is coming.
And just like every year in the past, I’m watching so many people go down the same road of quick-fix diets right now.
They’ve been overeating through the winter, in part because they knew this moment was coming. Better get all the good food in before the diets start, right?
But now the fun is officially over.
All the delicious winter indulgences are being replaced by “eating clean”, “being good”, and “getting serious”.
But what they really mean is restriction, restriction, and more restriction.
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I’ll give these BS restrictive diets this – they do tend to work in the short term…
The reason people go back to restrictive diets again and again is because of the initial high they get from the quick results. In a relatively short period of time, you might be able to drop a couple pounds, feel a bit lighter, maybe zip up those too-tight jeans again.
The problem is that these diets never work long-term.
They’re simply not sustainable, especially for women who love food and don’t WANT to feel deprived.
The success rate of restrictive diets (defined as losing any weight at all AND by keeping that weight off for more than 5 years) hovers around an abysmal 2%.
That means 98% of people who are starting up yet another restrictive diet right now won’t get the results they’re hoping for. Many will end up heavier than when they started.
And yet, we blame ourselves when these diets fail, and we punish ourselves by going back to them time and time again, hoping that THIS time we’ll be able to summon enough willpower to create lasting change.
But it was never our fault that those diets didn’t work. They didn’t work because DIETS don't work. They set us up to fail.
Restrictive diets teach you *one way* to lose weight – dramatically restrict calories, swing wildly from eating all the foods you enjoy to eating nothing but sad, soulless diet food overnight, top it off with a bunch of punishing exercise, and boom…weight loss.
And *maybe* that weight loss could last if you can sustain a life where most of your meals are boring and you rarely get to enjoy the foods you truly love.
Can you do that? I sure as heck don't want to.
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What restrictive diets DON'T do is offer any support at all regarding critical things like:
Why you have the desire to overeat
How to enjoy the foods you like AND the ones that make your body feel good in balance so that you never have to feel deprived
How to feel and process emotions so that you don't need to numb out with food and wine after a stressful day
How to listen to your actual body to tell you how much food is enough, rather than taking your cues from some cookie-cutter plan
How to approach your slipups with curiosity and compassion, so that you can learn from them and move on without self-loathing
The answer to those questions is where sustainable, permanent weight loss happens.
It doesn't happen by changing everything about who you are and how you eat overnight.
It happens in understanding how your brain can either work for or against your weight loss, and in normalizing and neutralizing ALL foods, so that you can reach any goal you set without depriving yourself of what your body needs OR what it wants.
This is the work we do in my Weight Loss for Women Who Love Food program, and I would love to share it with you.
If you want your plans for summer to include finally feeling in control of food and your weight, without restriction or deprivation, and especially without starvation diets and silly gimmicks, I would love to help.
Click the button below to book your free Discovery Call.
