Have you been committed to struggling for a long, long time?Have you hopped from one diet to the next, trying every new slimming drink and weight loss pill on the market?
Have you been denying your body and yourself everything you desire but you still don’t lose the weight you want to get rid of?
Well, then it’s about time you realize that chronic dieting just doesn’t work. Ever. You’ve been doing it, right? You’ve been trying it, right? You’ve been so committed to it, right? Because your happiness, your career, your future husband, sexiness and kids depend on it!
Or so you think.
But for some reason, your biggest wish is just not coming true – despite your tremendous efforts.
So, you feel like a failure, you beat yourself up, you tell yourself you’re just too darn lazy, lack willpower and just don’t deserve to be as thin and beautiful as everyone else already is.
Here’s the thing though: dieting won’t get you what you want and chronic dieting sure as hell won’t get you to a place of body-confidence and body-love, which is what you need in order to truly get what you desire.
But these are topics for another post.
Today, I want to share 5 reasons why chronic dieting is so so bad for your body and will always inhibit weight loss, happiness and joy in life.
You’re at war with food
You fight it. You believe it’s the enemy. Hunger and appetite are even worse. They force you into doing something that will ruin all your plans, your “good” behaviors and your carefully structured day.
Thing is, this is just completely insane. We must eat just like we must breathe.
Denying your appetite is like saying “starting today, I just won’t breathe anymore” or “I’ll just reduce my breaths to 3 a minute”. It’s crazy.
There’s a reason why our mouths begin to water when we smell cake in the house. There’s a reason our body loses energy or gets tired when you’re not feeding it for hours. There’s a reason we require food. And it’s a good one: it enables us to survive.
So, when you decide that food is your enemy, you’re in a constant physiologic stress response, which ensures that cortisol and insulin are increased. This in turn signals the body to hold on to weight and to burn fat as slowly as possible.
And holding on to weight because of your thoughts is exactly what you don’t want, right?
Your body is merely surviving
Another big reason why chronic dieting doesn’t work is the fact that when you artificially restrict your calorie intake day-in, day-out over years, the body goes into a so-called “survival response”. This is similar to the physiologic stress response that I talked about above, in that your body thinks that it’s going to starve any minute now because there seems to be no food around.
So, what does our brilliant brain do? It tells the body to please hold on to weight, store all the fat it possibly can, do not build muscle under any circumstances and burn calories very, very slowly.
You’re denying yourself pleasure (and kinda worship pain)
Pleasure and weight go hand in hand. If you believe that once you allow yourself to enjoy food and life, you’ll go crazy and are completely unable to control yourself, you don’t just miss out on life and so much fun, but you’re also working against your weight loss goal.
Our brains, however, are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. And when it doesn’t get enough pleasure, your brain signals the body to seek more food, to eat more and to find pleasure in every way it can. This, of course, drives you into feeling anxious and oh so stressed and your body – in turn – feels oh so deprived.
I don’t have to tell you once more – or do I? – that because of that, the body shifts into the physiologic stress response and everything you want to achieve by eating yucky Lean Meals or drinking even worse Slim Fast Shakes is turned on its head.
You’re not eating enough fats
Fat in my diet = Fat on my body.
Ever heard that one or thought that one? It’s so so false that I can’t even handle it. It’s unbelievable to me that this outdated piece of science is still being shipped around and it’s hurting millions of women around the planet.
The truth is that fat, especially EFAs, are essential for life. You cannot have a thriving body when you’re living in clinical or sub-clinical fat deficiency. And you cannot expect your body to lose weight when it hardly has enough energy to do its daily (hard) work.
You’re going against the bio-circadian rhythm of your body
Most dieters either skip meals all together or they eat weird portions at wrong times of the day. So, if you believe that skipping your breakfast (also called intermittent fasting) or eating the biggest meal at dinner time is the way to go to get the body of your dreams, you are wrong.
The peak time for calorie burning, optimal assimilation and digestion is when the sun is highest in the sky. Why? Because our metabolism (and essentially our entire being) is closely connected to nature and influenced by light.
So, don’t skip lunch and always eat your breakfast to get the metabolic fire burning throughout your day.
Can you see how you’ve been working against your body the entire time instead of forming a beautiful unity with it to move through life together? Can you see how much you’ve been hurting yourself and wasting your days?
If so, then stop these behaviors now and instead move closer to your body with the right tools and in the right ways in order to get to optimal health and well-being.
Because a life on a constant diet is not a life worth living.
Are you ready to stop dieting and start living?
Are you ready to finally dig through the b.s. and get to the truth about what you want, when you want it, and figure out how to get you there?
If something in you lights up at the idea of loving your body from the inside out, treating her with respect and living life on your terms and eating what you when you want without fear, guilt or shame, book a chat with me here: https://meetme.so/Anne-SophieReinhardt
No strings, no commitment, just you and me, chatting about where your relationship to food and life is, where you want it to be… and how we can work together to get it there. Give yourself this gift, you and your wellbeing are totally worth it.
