The Death of Diets

So many women I work with come to me after a long, painful road with disordered eating camouflaged under the innocent sounding umbrella term “diet”. The saddest part for me is the way the predictable cycle always plays out. It starts as the seemingly harmless desire to lose a few lbs, usually as quick as possible, creates temporary results, and quickly leads to an abandonment of whatever protocol was being used, weight regain, a sense of failure, disgust, shame and then the rising desire to do it AGAIN, only BETTER and FOREVER This time. At least that’s what women, who don’t understand what they are really up against (biology) tell themselves.

This cycle always compounds and continues to degrade to low self esteem from a presumed “failure”, continually compromised health like adrenal burnout, hormone imbalance, thyroid chaos (slowed metabolism being one symptom) and nightmare digestive issues. The cherry on top is when medical doctors then tell women who present with all these health issues “Well, have you tried exercising and losing some weight”.
You see there is a massive fundamental flaw with the way women view weight loss and diets, and it’s fueled quite nicely by a fitness industry that’s built on 6 packs and bootcamps, a nutrition industry that recycles one fad diet after another, and a supplement industry that promises all your problems will evaporate into thin air just like those pounds will with their one perfect fat burning capsules. None of these approaches, which are the DEFAULT approaches women take to lose weight address any of the core factors that a woman’s weight (and more importantly health) depends on. What they all perpetuate is a self loathing, punishment based attitude towards your own body and teach you to deny the necessity of nourishing foods, delicate stress management, movement that heals rather than injures, and connectedness to your inner self through your body. The modern world of weight loss tells you to disconnect, detach, deprive, abuse and punish your body into submission if you want to fit into that dress or feel good on the beach.

And let’s just take a collective pole here: Is or has this approach ever worked, for anyone..ANYONE AT ALL? For more than a few weeks or maybe months?
We know the answer, and thus a new question needs to be asked. How do we FIX IT?

Body Positive Disclaimer: While we absolutely do have to build on self love first, which is the key foundation to my work, loving yourself doesn’t mean you can’t seek to lose weight or change your body. There is this odd extreme within the body positive movement that is now shaming anyone who workouts, eats healthy or has a thin or fit physique which is merely a recycling of the same ol crazy shaming ideas of “This is what’s right, everything else is wrong”. This really gets me fired up and as someone in the health space who does help women achieve weight loss, health, and healing I’ve been attacked personally for my work. This is a whole other topic really, but I needed to say it’s OK TO WANT TO CHANGE YOURSELF, but the conventional ways of doing so have damaging effects and there IS a better way. So now that that disclaimer is out of the way, let’s move on to the solution.

That solution to this crazy diet, weight gain, self loathing cycle is to ditch all of the things you think you know about weight loss. Because only when women disconnect from the world of diets and crash course extreme exercise programs will they ever start to see permanent, big change in their life by working on the root of the obstacle, and nurturing the core of the solution.

You cannot hate yourself into changing for the better, you have to love yourself enough first to care, and only then, can the magic of health, nutrition, mindfulness and exercise really start to change your life.

You have to stop looking at diet food, and start looking at soul food.

Stop living by deprivation and learn to tune into desires.

Learn to nourish yourself and listen to what your body is asking for.

Understand there IS some discipline and structure that goes into it but that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and enjoy life, food, exercise etc. You should never feel like you’re torturing yourself.

Find ways of moving and being in your body that empower you and set you free, rather than feel like a prison.

And most importantly, you must cultivate a deep appreciation and connection with your mind and body, help them get on the same page and dwell in gratitude and harmony with them, rather than at war.

This is what holistic life coaching, energy work, sound fitness and nutrition coaching, and various other alternative modalities can help you achieve. Women have decades of programming to undo when it comes to fitness, diets, beauty and self love. It takes a little support and guidance to start that process.

The beautiful thing is that even though initially this may be a hard process to open to, which is because it’s so counter to what you’ve been told your whole life, once you clear away the junk programming that has kept you on the crazy diet cycle it feels like coming home to yourself. The stress and constant tension that used to surround food, body image, self care and exercise dissipate and allow space for something effortless to take its place.

My purpose and passion is to help as many women as possible to find this place.