If you want to lose weight… PLEASE DON’T START ANOTHER DIET!

Did you know about the harmful effects of diets and diet culture? Many people enter this cycle without knowing how diets impact their bodies. That’s why I wanted to share some eye-opening statistics and research that reveal why diets fail and why they can be detrimental to our physical and mental well-being.

Don’t miss this episode because I’ll dive into:

  1. Why diets have a high failure rate and the research behind this.
  2. Learning to listen to your body’s cues of hunger and satisfaction instead of following strict diets.
  3. How eating when you’re hungry and stopping when you’re satisfied can help you develop a healthier relationship with food.
  4. The relationship between emotional eating and stress to understand and address the underlying emotions and stressors that keep you on the cycle of using food as a coping mechanism.

If you’re ready to stop eating your feelings and stress away, listen to this podcast, join my FREE Path To Food & Body Freedom Challenge, and for puppies’ sake don’t start another diet! You can be in control of your health.

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:34 – New Year’s Energy and Reflection

00:01:27 – Learning from Past Experiences

00:02:09 – The Problem with Diet Culture

00:03:43 – The Dangers of Dieting

00:04:14 – Why Diets Fail

00:07:14 – The Statistics on Diet Failure

00:09:01 – The Yo-Yo Effect of Dieting

00:10:48 – The Physiology of Weight Loss and Gain

00:12:32 – The Metabolic Impact of Yo-Yo Dieting

00:13:58 – The Cycle of Restriction and Overeating

00:17:31 – The Cultural Obsession with Thinness

00:19:23 – The Psychological Impact of Dieting

00:22:47 – The First Steps to a Healthy Relationship with Food

00:25:08 – Understanding Hunger and Satiety

00:27:58 – Learning to Say Yes and No to Food

00:30:14 – The Importance of Personal Responsibility in Eating

00:32:10 – The Emotional and Stress-Related Aspects of Eating

00:34:37 – The Food and Body Freedom Challenge Invitation

00:37:17 – Audra’s Personal Journey and Philosophy

Full Episode Transcript:

If you want to lose weight…PLEASE DON’T START ANOTHER DIET!

All right, my friends, welcome to Hello Body Freedom. I’m so excited. You’re here. It is the new year. It is no joke new year. It is at the beginning of January. And I know that this time of the year has such epic energy And already inside of Hello Body Freedom, we did a new year’s reset workshop where we really, looked at last year with detail and how do you say it?

Right eyes, right scene? What do I mean by that?  You want to see clearly the year that you had. You want to look at. All that went right. You want to look at where your challenges and your struggles were, and you want to be able to see them correctly. So I always love using the example of 2015 going into 2016.

I had moved to Barcelona, Spain at the end of 2015. The plan was to stay there. But when I started the new year in 2016, man,  when I looked back at 2015, I was like, this is the worst year I’ve ever had in my entire life. This was the lowest of low. And I remember working with a coach at that time.

And she’s no. You are going to write out at least a minimum of 50 different things that you are proud of. And so when your brain is in the place of everything went wrong. It’s really hard to look at what you’re proud of and what went right. And that one exercise so long ago has completely altered and shifted the way I do a lot of things.

Cause Ultimately, whenever we didn’t get what we want or we are unable to see clearly what ends up happening is you’re just skewed towards just the shitty kind of survival mode mindset thinking. So inside of Hello Body Freedom, we did that. We looked at all the things that went right for 2023, everything that we were proud of.

So that way we can learn and see that we are moving forward in the right direction. And then we go back and look at what. Could we have done different? Like, where did we get tripped up? All right. And so I’m just saying all of this because this really is the time of year where we’re just ripe with the energy of wanting shifts and changes in our life.

I think it’s very normal when one door shuts and another door opens. And when a year ends and a new year begins, I want to really honor that energy that all of us can have on the other side of that. That I think is the shadowy side of it. We are inundated by a multi-billion dollar weight loss and dieting industry that will feed on our insecurities, that will feed on the fact that we’ve probably been eating a lot of, a lot more sugar and processed foods over the last month or so that we normally do.

And they feed off of that insecurity of, Oh, I don’t like my body. I’m struggling with my weight, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the next thing, you land on another diet, in another food plan and another, whatever you want to call it, clean eating, keto, paleo, vegan. I don’t care what you want to call it, but you land on some opportunistic way of completely altering it and changing your life from a diet standpoint, because you so desperately want to lose weight.

And I am here to preach as loud as I can on a mountaintop to stop doing that.  Yes. Let’s look at the energy of New years. Yes. Let’s see how we can improve and do things differently with our health and wellness. This is what I specialize in for sure. But at the end of the day, every single time you go on a diet, you end up pretty much messing up your body messing up your psychology, messing up your physiology. And I would like to talk a little bit more about that. I really, even if you don’t believe me, even if you’re like, whatever, Audra, you’re so crazy. What are you talking about? I’m never gonna listen to you again. If I can just have…

Let me at least try let me at least try to change your mind for those of you are like I’m gonna never eat cookies or cake again, and I’m gonna only eat clean for the rest of my life, and I’m gonna Let’s talk about why? Absolutely, you need to never go on a diet again All right, and this is what we’re really gonna dive into today And I’m gonna give you what the alternative is.

I want to be very clear This is the perfect time of the year to do this to have this conversation I think of dieting and diet culture and every diet that’s out there on the planet, even weight loss culture. I think of it like the baby and the bath water. It’s the baby and the bath water.

It has some good qualities to it. There are moments of truth with the latest like diet that triggers you to go try this new thing,  but there’s a lot of dirty, stinky bath water that goes along with it. And that is the problem. In general with dieting, that is the biggest problem is that we have been inundated into a toxic diet culture that says thinness is more important than anything.

That tells us we must hate our bodies and shame ourselves internally until we can reach this, whatever ideal size that we think we’re supposed to be, or that society tells us we’re supposed to be. I specialize in working with women. And so I know that part of this is just another way to keep women focused on this obsession with their body, this obsession with skinny, this obsession with pretty and it’s just this.

Oh, ickiness of just trying to make ourselves smaller and smaller. That is the bathwater bullshit that I’m talking about, right? There’s the baby and there’s the bathwater and inside of diets and dieting and diet culture. When you have been indoctrinated since you were likely in high school and for some of you a lot younger, I cannot tell you how many clients that I worked with that their mom put them on Weight Watchers when they were in junior high school.

That is a very young age to be indoctrinated into the dieting world. But what research shows us is that we would have been better off weight-wise and health-wise if we never would have gone on that first diet in the first place and been indoctrinated into this way of being on the planet, which is ultimately to either be on a diet.

So you’re massively restricting, you’re massively focused, you’re doing all these things, or Inevitably always ends up happening by virtue of this kind of black and white way of thinking in this toxic diet culture is you either like fully on this diet and then eventually your middle fingers fly high and you go F this in one way or the other and then you are completely off of the diet. 

We’re going to dig into all of this right now because I really want to got my notes right here. For those of you who are watching this live on YouTube here we go. You guys ready to rock with this? I’m excited to share this with you. All right. So let’s talk about data points.

Let’s talk about personal experience, but let’s also talk about research as well. All right. So first let’s look at the fact that you can look at like multiple decades of cross longitudinal meta data research that clearly shows humans that go on weight loss diets, 90 to 97 percent of them gain the weight back.

I want you to really hear that 90 to 97 percent of people that go on these weight loss diets. All right. And  I’m going to explain how they work and why they work for a short period of time. Okay.  Yes, you can lose weight on them for sure. But if you were 90 to 97 percent guaranteed to gain the weight back, why would you do it? Why would you put yourself through all the pain and misery for a three to 10 percent chance of it actually working?  And how do I know this? Because I talked to women every single day coming into Hello Body Freedom, ready to get all of this handled. And they always tell me about the diet that worked.

Oh no, this one worked. Oh, but this thing worked. And I go, really? What happened? How did it work? I lost 40 pounds. I’m like congratulations. So why are we talking? tHis thing in my life happened. I got stressed out.  There’s all of these, I don’t know what happened.

A light switch went off and I just wasn’t able to stick with it anymore. There are all of these things that come up and at the end of it, what I try to explain to them, I’m like if it would have worked, then you and I wouldn’t be talking. I want you to really hear that. If you would have been able to lose the weight and stay at that place where you thought would be this place is Oh, I finally made it.

Then it would have actually worked if you stayed there, but it didn’t work. It didn’t work , you gained the weight back. And so when you look at research that flat out shows that 90 to 97 percent of weight loss diets fail. If you got on an airplane  to go across the country  and you knew that you only had a three to 7 percent chance of actually getting there.

Would you get on that airplane? Of course, the answer is no, obviously. But why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we completely just mutilate ourselves and our bodies in ways that are not sustainable in ways that make it so we don’t end up staying where we might end up getting to with weight loss?

All right.  So if that doesn’t help you understand why I’m going to give you some more information. So if 90 to 97 percent of the people gain the weight back, right?  Of all of the people that ended up gaining the weight back, you have a percentage and it’s about one-third to two-thirds. So that’s 33 to 66%.

Okay. That is no small percentage of all of those people. The 90 to 97 percent of people that gain the weight back.  A full one-third to two-thirds gain more than they started. So now you have this yo-yo effect of losing weight and then either gaining it back or gaining more back. And then you get triggered, you get frustrated.

I don’t like to feel this way. I don’t like to look this way. And so then you go on another extreme weight loss diet. And then, and by extreme, extreme for your nervous system. So even if you’re like, Oh no, I just eat clean. If you’ve been eating McDonald’s your whole life, and then you just decided to completely wipe out your fridge and only put fruits and veggies and lean meats in there.

Even if you might think that’s just eating clean. It will likely be a massive shock to your nervous system. And so the likelihood of your nervous system getting totally over-triggered and then you going back to these old behaviors, just by virtue of the diet, not because of whatever emotions or stressors that you have in your life, just because you went on this stupid diet.

Okay.  Oh, all right. You can tell I get a little fired up about this, especially this time of the year, because it’s so easy to get triggered.  I’m going to go on a diet. Just I don’t even care. I’m just going to do this one thing. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had where somebody is about to come into hello, body freedom.

We’re talking on the phone and they’re literally like, you know what you could do at Hello Body Freedom is so epic. I really see how this is the missing piece and would change it. I’m just going to go on this really quick diet first and then I’ll come back to you. And I’m like, Oh my God.  And in those moments, all I can do is go.

I’m not in charge of you. You have to do what you need to do for you. But I’ll tell you when people finally come into hello body of freedom, it’s because they’re like, I’m so fucking done. I’m done with going on another diet. I’m done. Not even, I’m super confused about what to eat because each diet has all these very specific rules.

And if you’ve been in this toxic diet culture for so long, it gets very confusing. You’re not sure if you’re vegan or if you’re. Gluten-free this week or wait, am I paleo? Wait, am I eating meat or am I not eating meat? Wait, milk? No milk. Okay. Dairy-free. That’s right. What am I today? Oh, so I can’t eat grains.

Okay. That’s right. Cause I’m paleo. That’s right. Oh, wait a second. But whole grains are good for me if I’m on the Mediterranean diet so I can eat. It’s just a never-ending conversation in our head. And I know this from my own personal experience and just, literally today, thousands upon thousands of conversations with other women of Like I’m so confused about why I wake up and I’m not quite sure what’s right and not right to eat.

That’s another, shit point of dieting. Just a thing, a psychological disturbance. That is not a normal way to be in relationship with food. Okay. Let me keep going. So if 90 to 97 percent of people gain the weight back. Based on long-term research and one-third to two-thirds of them gain even more weight back.

The other problem that we have here is actual physiology. So let’s just look at what it takes to lose weight. So in order to lose weight, and the reason why diets work is because they drastically cut the amount of energy you are consuming. And a lot of them also are paired with you just drastically increase the amount of energy that you’re expending, right? So the diet itself will take your calories down by like between 500 to a thousand a day, meaning like down from what you’re normally eating. If most people eat somewhere between, I don’t know, 2000 to 4, 000 calories, most diets tell you to eat 1200 calories. The worst, most insane ones tell you to eat even less than that.

And then it is, you’re literally, you’re physically Restricting you like biologically you are, you’re putting yourself into a state that most people don’t experience unless they have like actual food poverty. Or they literally are in situations, dire situations where there’s just not enough food that doesn’t happen.

It sure as hell doesn’t happen in the U S. It, it does happen in other countries for sure. But like you’re putting yourself into a physiological state. That is not a normal state to be in. Okay.  Now, but let’s, let me, I’ll get back to that because we want to talk about the psychological restriction and the physiological restriction of what happens and why you end up gaining the way back.

But in this case in particular, it works because you’ve drastically decreased your calories and you probably drastically increased how much, and it’s drastic. It’s too drastic for your nervous system. Okay. Full stop period. That’s how it works. Now,  from this standpoint.  Physiologically, whenever you decrease energy, your body has to metabolize energy from other places.

Hence, you’re doing this kind of very complex metabolic process in the body in which your body now is not getting energy from the food you’re putting in, but it’s getting your, you’re decreasing it enough that now your body has to work a lot harder to go, okay, let’s get into the fat cells. Let’s lose some fat.

Let’s let me metabolize all of this. And when you were on a weight loss journey, it’s not just body fat, especially these dramatic weight loss journeys where you’re cutting out massive amounts of calories or entire food groups. You are you’re losing about 50 percent muscle, 50 percent fat.

So muscle is like metabolic machinery in your body. So yay, you’re using, you’re losing fat, but you’re also very likely losing a lot of muscle at the same time. And you’re doing it really fast, right? If you’re going on one of these diets, you’re doing it really fast. All right. So here you are massively restricting.  And then we’ll talk about why we swing back up. But then what will inevitably happen for 90 to 97 percent of people, we’ve already talked about this. You are going to gain the weight back and weight gain is actually a very easy metabolic process in the body. You’re consuming more food than you need.

Or you can just continue consuming it. And then in order to store that unneeded energy as fat, very easy process. All right, let’s just keep storing it and storing it. All right. And so what ends up happening is you lose weight fast. You’ve lost 50 percent fat, 50 percent metabolic fuel muscle.

Right? And then when you start to gain the weight back, you’re not gaining muscle when you’re gaining the weight back, unless you’re like in the gym, hitting it hard. And I don’t know about you, but anybody listening to this is you’re probably a woman and you’re probably somewhere thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, right?

Good luck putting muscle on our body. It takes a lot of energy and work to do that. So very likely all of that weight you’re putting back on is fat. So now you’ve decreased your metabolic muscle mass by going on this massive weight loss journey. And then you, when you inevitably gain the weight back, you are just gaining more fat.

So what ends up happening is your metabolism just gets a little less and a little less, not because you’re hormonal, not because you’re. menopausal, but because you just screwed yourself by dropping down your metabolic muscle tissue just to lose some weight on a, stepping on a scale on the pounds.

And then because you did it with some crazy diet, 90, 97 percent likely you’re going to gain the weight back. You’re just going to be gaining back full fat. And this is the problem with chronic dieting. I talk to women. Every single effing day that they started dieting when they were in college. They started dieting when they were in high school.

They have this epic it’s like the lens from which they see the world is my body is never good enough. I’m never skinny enough. And I am now indoctrinated into toxic diet culture. It’s the bathwater from the baby and bathwater situation.  And they just keep going back to it. Why do they just keep going back to it?

Because it is a multi-billion dollar industry that feeds on our body insecurities. Okay. Now we could go down a whole other loop of how we need to let go of all these fucking insecurities around our body and start to own where we are on our journey. When no matter where we are on our journey and start taking better care of ourselves from like a mindset standpoint and like a flip, flip your middle fingers up to diet culture.

Stop falling prey, but it is easy to fall prey. Isn’t it? Like I’m a big stop that shit. Let’s quit no more falling prey to that bullshit. And man, when you’ve been doing it for a long time, that’s like strong habit loops. In the body, you just been doing it. It worked for you once you’re going to cross your fingers and hope it works again and hope you won’t gain it back.

And I just don’t want you to go on hope anymore. Stop that shit. Stop betting on something that clearly doesn’t work. Okay. Now, whenever you massively decrease your calories, all right, we’re talking about a physiological caloric restriction over a long period of time. Whenever you do these 800-calorie diets, these 500-calorie diets, even these 1200-calorie diets, whenever you like are in a place of eating like 7, 000 calories a day, that is so dramatic for your body.  And just what this is called is an absolute physiological restriction. And what I want you to compare this to is going underwater and holding your breath. Okay. When you go underwater long enough, you hold your breath and you hold your breath. And all of a sudden you start to have an absolute urge, an urge to breathe.

Okay. But you’re like, Oh, can’t breathe. So you’re right. You’re not up above water yet. You’re way down low and you’ve got, you’re like, the urge is so strong. They are just so strong. This is very similar to what happens with your crazy ass diets, right? You have drastically. Yeah.

Drastically decrease those calories so low and you have willpower and you’re just like dealing with it and you’re like, fuck it. I’m hungry all the time. I don’t care and I’m shaky and I’m shitty and all the thing. But eventually, this is why 90 to 97 percent of this shit doesn’t work.  Just like When you finally swim up to air, finally swim up to the surface.

What happens?  You take a huge inhale of air and you just keep breathing and you keep breathing and you keep breathing and you keep breathing, right? Your body is like massively trying to refill the body with oxygen, but nobody sits there. If you guys can hear my dog slurping water, sorry about that.

Nobody sits there.  And calls that person a binge breather. Nobody goes, Oh, what’s that person’s problem? They’re like a, such a binge breather. That’s like stupid, right? I’m trying to make a ridiculous analogy, but here you are doing the exact same thing, except not with air. You’re doing it with food.

Anytime that you massively restrict. Massively restrict. You are going to have a physiological break that is going to send you into overeating. It is science. It is physiology. It is how the body works. Okay.  And so this is not the way to do it. It’s just not the way to do it and you know it you’ve done and let’s just look at the last time you went on a diet.

I bet you started on a Monday and if you, let’s say we did, let’s say you got really excited. You’re hopeful again. Fingers crossed. All right, I’m ready to do this. I’m going to lock in the load. I’m going to follow this food plan. This personal trainer knows what they’re talking about. I really want to look lean and ripped.

I want to feel healthy. Great. I wanted those things too. I want to feel lean and ripped. I want to feel healthy. I want to eat better healthy foods. Yes. I’m not saying I don’t want that too. But when we decide. That we’re going to start it all. We’re going to clean out the fridge and we start on Monday and we look at that list and we see.

There are definitely foods that we cannot eat. We are not allowed to eat this food. We’re not allowed to eat that food. Oh, that’s a lot of vegetables. Okay. Okay. Okay. I’m ready for it. I’m ready for it. If you’re going to start that diet on Monday, what do you do Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday before you start that diet? 

I know what you do.  I know what I did.  You eat every fucking thing that you aren’t allowed to eat. You’re like, no. Okay. Okay. I’m going to get this out of my system. I’m going to eat. I’m going to eat. And what research actually shows is that you end up like, again, you would be better off just not going on the diet.

In this situation, you end up massively overconsuming calories before you massively decrease because you’re following this exact food plan. And now in this situation, you are. Physiologically restricting, but you are also psychologically restricting because you’re literally like, I can’t eat those cookies.

I can’t have cake. I can’t have bread. Oh, God forbid. I eat bread, right? Can’t eat this. Can’t eat that. And so the psychological restriction  and the physiological restriction, 90 to 97 percent of all humans will end up right back where they started gaining the weight back for one-third to two thirds. A little bit more. 

Have I made a point yet? I’m really wanting you guys to get on board with me here because the shit is awful. It’s not good. This is awful. Okay. Now what else do you do instead? What the hell do you do, Audra? What what’s the answer? What’s the answer? Okay.  It is to stop dieting, stop the mentality of dieting. 

All right. And start focusing slowly. On like slowly better, healthier habits. This is where like pharmaceutical industry can’t do anything about it. There’s nothing sexy about doing this, but at the end of the day we have to look at what we want and what we don’t want. But if I sit here and tell myself I can never eat a cookie again, I can never eat ice cream again.

That is a psychological restriction which will absolutely lead to me overeating ice cream and cookies and ice cream and cookies.  So the very, very first step in this, if you just want to talk about pure. Letting go of diets, dieting, diet culture, all right, is getting back in touch with your own body’s cues.

Now, this is a little tricky especially if you’ve got I’d say probably maybe it’s over 50, definitely over a hundred pounds where you’re feeling like. Struggle with the body. I really need to lose these 50. I really use 100 when you start getting maybe closer to the 100 mark  1 1, 000 percent your hormones are all jacked up feeling like hues of the body can be very confusing because you can feel hungry all the time because your leptin and ghrelin is all confused, right?

You could never feel satisfied because these particular hormones are a little wackadoodle, but the truth of the matter Is that if you are able to wait long enough and you are able to really decide, I’m going to learn how to eat based on listening to what my body is telling me from a body cue standpoint, hunger and enough, even though for those of us who are holding onto a whole lot more weight, even though.

Those are skewed. Even though those two things are going to be a little funky compared to how more refined they will get as you lose the weight. We all still start here. This is called normal eating. A normal right relationship with food is not to eat at the whims of every emotion and feeling and sensation and urge and craving.

Right. relationship with food is there is hunger. Hunger is the right reason to eat.  And then there is enough.  Enough is the right reason to eat. Now we’re not going to go so deep into these things right here. I will do more episodes on this. I probably have already done episodes on this, but like really understanding hunger and enough.

And then that in between middle piece right there is is how we are able to get to the other side in a non diety sustainable way.  Learning how to feel hunger and honor it, which means that you don’t ignore it anymore the way that you did with dieting and diet culture. And you also don’t eat when you’re not hungry, like that can be really hard because if you’ve been overeating and overeating for a long time and you finally just decide I’m going to wait for hunger, your body literally will probably wait a while and you’re going to be now all of a sudden the emotions come up, Oh God, what if I don’t eat?

What if this happened? Oh no, I missed lunch because I’m not hungry.  Trust me, your body will like  every human on this planet has, yeah.  Can feel hunger and can feel satisfaction. Every single one of us, if yours is a little often skewed right now, don’t worry, it’ll come back. It always does. It can. And it will. 

So that is your very first step. If you want to get into right relationship with food, it is eating it because of hunger and stopping at satisfied enough. Okay. Now hunger is usually the first thing that people are able to experience. And that makes sense because hunger is uncomfortable, right? There’s a sense of emptiness inside of us. There’s maybe growling or like pain in our belly, right? There can be maybe lightheadedness or a little like maybe a headache or not quite the energy’s kind of funny. You can be shaky. There’s all of this kind of quote-unquote negative sensation that can be connected to hunger.

But the good news about that is you can really go, Oh yeah, this is like legitimately hungry. I can tell that my body is hungry. Okay, cool. That can be a little easier to find if you’ve been overeating. And if you’ve been dieting, this is a very important, this is another just fucking slammed a diet culture literally teaches you to ignore your hunger.

And then because 90 to 97 percent of people end up gaining all the way back or more, and they do this because you’ve been. Psychologically and physiologically restricting to such extremes that now you’re ignoring hunger. Then what ends up happening is you end up overeating and overeating because you’ve been doing this for a lifetime.

This pendulum swing, what ends up happening is that from a hunger and enough standpoint, you really can only feel hungry at like extreme levels. And then the sense of satisfied and enough. You don’t really sense that like satisfied and enough on the other side is usually too much food quite frankly, right?

And so to learn how to play with hunger and enough so for instance If you’ve been dieting forever learning how to honor hunger in a more reasonable way Not until you’re like so hungry you’re hangry and you end up eating everything, right? That’s wrong relationship with hunger and then on the other side of that the way that you start to play with enough and Satisfied and like getting to that place of this is good  Is really what you do in the middle part, like the actual eating itself is usually a problem that we need to work with that.

So what do I mean by that?  I mean that what most of us do is we say we’re only allowed to eat certain food. We’re not allowed to eat other foods. And so when you finally inevitably eat the ice cream or eat the cookies or eat the chips or the crisps or whatever the hell or eat the lasagna, right?

All these things that you just like the pop, whatever the thing that’s, I’m never allowed to eat it.  What you end up doing is overeating it. Over and over again. And so whenever you make this middle part of I know I’m hungry. The hunger is here full stop I’m going to figure out what is the right thing to eat for me in this moment?

What is the yes? What am I saying? Yes to and what am I saying? No to in terms of eating whatever this food is. And I want to be really clear here. This is different than an intuitive eating model because an intuitive eating model, it can be really hard for people that have a lot of weight till you lose because at the end of the day, all you go is bitch, if you’re going to really tell me all I want to eat is going to be cookies and ice cream and chips.

Okay, I guess I’ll eat that all day. An intuitive eating It says, do that and do that. And then eventually you’ll stop wanting to do that. And I 1000 percent agree with that.  I also think you can jump ahead of the learning curve when you can start to take ownership over your own decisions and practice.

And so this middle ground of learning how to say yes to food and no to food, because sometimes the answer is yes to ice cream, but sometimes the answer is no. And I would say with we have to really play with that. So if you tend to. Air on the side of a lot of processed food, a lot of white flour, white sugar.

Then what you would want to do is play with and practice not giving it up, not saying I’ll never eat it again, but start practicing. How do I learn how to say no to that in a meaningful way where I’m creating a loving boundary? And then how do I learn how to say yes to these other things that I sometimes maybe would think, Oh, broccoli, if he wants to eat that or salmon, what if I learn how to say yes to certain things? I wonder how that would make me feel right  on the other side of that. If you tend to err on the side of massive restriction and massive restriction, I’m never going to eat anything sweet ever.  You likely need to learn how to say yes to foods that are a bit more fun food and no.

It not no, but like really open and expand your repertoire of food so that you can come into a much healthier relationship with food. Okay. And see how this is see how it’s not like exact. This is how everybody should do it. No, it’s a little different for everybody on any given day. My yes to ice cream is a solid yes and I can eat it and I’m not guilty and I don’t feel like shit and I don’t gain weight.

And my yes to a kale salad. Is an absolute yes. And I want it and I desire it. It’s exactly right. Learning this skillset in the middle really matters. And just to take it back to how much I fucking hate diets and diet culture, what you have been doing is your whole life. You’ve literally been.

Following somebody else’s food plan. Every time you decide that doctor knows what they’re talking about or that personal trainer knows exactly what you’re supposed to eat and eat these exact macros and follow this, these points to the T and you can only eat this many points per day and you literally are like learning how to not trust yourself.

You’re literally saying, I don’t know anything about my body or anything about what to fucking do, but all of these outside people and energy they know everything. So let me default to I’m shitty and I don’t know anything And let me just default to everybody else and then what makes that so  Enticing for people.

I’m just gonna own it We’re gonna talk about the shadows here. Is that then like it’s not your fault when it fucks up it’s that their fault. That diet didn’t work. No, bitch. It’s like our fault. We have to like, learn how to take responsibility for ourselves in this way,  right? And if we aren’t willing to do that, then nothing changes.

If we just keep putting responsibility to other people’s hands. Oh, let me, I guess I’ll just follow that food plan. I’ll just stop it. Like legit. Stop it. Not going to work. Okay. So learning how to say yes to food and no to food in just the right balance will change your fucking life. It will change your life and you’re going to get it wrong.

You’re going to mess up. You’ll think you’re getting it right and you’ll have a, and then all of a sudden you’re like, what just happened? I got that wrong. And then what do you do then? Do you fall off the face of the planet? Do you decide eff it, I’m going to throw my middle fingers up and get all rebellious and go eat everything.

Or am I going to start to get all militant and force myself on another diet? It’s God,  your sustainable weight loss journey  starts with this very normal way of being in a relationship with food, really connected to hunger. Really connected to enough and satisfied playing with both in a way that leaves room for curiosity and compassion and kindness and playfulness, right?

Some levity even. All right, I’m figuring this out. I’m figuring this out, right? And this is what we do in hello body freedom for sure. for sure. This is a huge part of it. This is really what it means. This is not a diet. This is called, how do I learn how to be a normal right relationship with food?

And when you can figure this out, and it does take time, right? I would say for the first like three to four months inside of HelloBodyFreedom, it is a real it is a real journey. It is a journey into your relationship with food. Here I am talking about this middle thing about saying yes to food and no to food, but we haven’t even touched on what most of us do in this middle part is we don’t even look at our food.

We don’t pay attention to it. We sit in front of the TV, right? We like, we shove it in our face as fast as we can before we even know if we’re satisfied or not. Like it’s like there’s so many intricacies about what it means. If you really want to come on a sustainable weight loss journey where it fits in with your life, where you’re on a sustainable weight loss journey on vacations.

right? During the holiday season, right? For birthday parties, for weddings, for celebrations, for all the things that happen in life, for when shit hits the fan, when your stress is so high, right? Like, how do you do that? That is real. That isn’t, I’m going to like. Take this like aspect and I’m just going to go on this very particular diet and I’m going to, and I’m going to live this alternate life that’s separate from the way my family lives, separate from the way that I actually want to live in my life.

And I’m just going to force myself onto this diet.  It doesn’t work. Like it doesn’t work. It’s one of the reasons it doesn’t work. Cause eventually you’re going to have a party to go to. Eventually it’s going to be a birthday. Eventually there’s going to be a vacation. And because you have this like massive black and white all or nothing way that. 

Fucked up diet culture has handed you and handed me and handed us.  It’s just, you’re just going to stay fucking stuck. We got to get out of this fucking loop. So please don’t go on a diet now.  The last thing I want to say is two things. Number one, if you want help with this go to hellobodyfreedom.com. Go look at the food and body freedom challenge. It is a five-day intensive, exploration of all of the pieces, what we just talked about today is one piece. It is one little piece of the puzzle. It’s a very important one. It is the structure from which everything else happens inside of Hello Body Freedom.

Because if you just keep like popping on a diet after diet, none of this other shit works, right? We have to start to untangle the bath with the baby water bath and baby water need to be get untangled. And I guess let’s talk about that. So what is the baby in this analogy? Yeah, we’re not going to say no to eating healthier foods, right?

We’re not going to say no to eating more nutrient-dense quality foods that might be the baby. In the diet culture of, or or healthy habits that help along. So that way we feel better. There’s none of us can, without a shadow of a doubt, none of us can argue when we eat like incredibly nutrient-dense foods, how fucking great it makes us feel.

None of us can argue when we get good sleep, how great it makes us feel. None of us can argue when we stay hydrated. None of us can argue what it means when we get a regular movement practice in with our body. Absolutely fucking nobody can argue with any of these realities. These realities make you feel better.

Okay? And these realities are very often baked into whatever fricking diet plan or diet thing that you’re deciding to go on. Okay?  These are the things that we don’t throw out with the bathwater. But all the other bullshit, the extreme caloric decreases that end up physiologically restricting.

So you end up massively overeating the cutting out of entire food groups. So you end up psychologically restricting, which just means you’re going to eat all that shit way more of it than you ever would have on the other side of it. The insane culture of thinness of never being small enough of just chronically going from one diet to another that creates this just like inner all or nothing mentality and just really blocks us from living a life that is healthy and free.

It creates such obsession over mind, obsession over food, obsession over body. It’s shitty. I have lived it. I have been there and it was the shittiest time of my life. The level of obsession. I had no mental or emotional energy for relationships, for people. All I could fucking think about was my size and my weight and my body fat percentage.

And if this food was good and if that food was bad, and I’m sorry, that is a fucking shitty way to live. And I just absolutely  am against it. And if you like that, if you like living in that like fucking cage of obsession, then you are definitely in the wrong place. Cause or maybe stick around if you think maybe I’ll, maybe some things will start to untangle for you.

But I’m telling you the best thing I ever did was solve this. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. I am like 12 years on the other side of it. I have the most epic.  I would say neutral relationship with food. I went from super unhealthy fast food to packs of cigarettes a day, massive sugar addiction, all that insanity in my twenties to like the opposite end of that, like hyper-crazy health nuts.

And then in between all of that starting dieting and then all of a sudden, whoo,  swinging up and swinging down with the weight and swinging up and swinging down with my mental health and the obsession and cleaning all of that up and finding this neutral ground that is a middle ground that feels like such a beautiful foundation.

To building a truly healthy, happy, free life in a body that feels truly comfortable and y’all I’m like pushing 50 now, right? So it is the best thing I’ve ever done. It is the best thing I’ve done for my own health and sanity and what that has done for my capacity to be present in my life, present to my clients, present to my family, to the people who I love, the people who I want to be so connected to, because that’s what life is all about, right?

And so to be able to do that from a beautiful place. , I think we have to throw dieting and diet culture out the door because there’s just too much nasty, shitty ass, stinky ass bath water. And we got to throw that out. We got to keep the places that are like these babies, right? The P that we don’t ever want to throw a baby out with the bath water and move forward from there.

So you can go to hellobodyfreedom.com and when you do that, you will see the food and body freedom challenge. You literally can start right now. You can get in there and start, get your ass in there and go. It is yours for the taking. We have your, a challenge mentor in there with you, like you literally it’s just, you are going to see what it all takes now with all of that said the reason why everything I just talked about from hunger and enough and that middle ground of eating what you want, learning how to say yes and no.

The reason why this very normal relationship with food. Wouldn’t work would you would still be getting blocked? And what do I mean by that? You would still be consuming food outside of physical hunger Consuming food outside of understanding the parameters of focusing on body and that is a combination of emotional eating and stress emotional eating and a nervous system that has been dysregulated To a point where the stressors of that sympathetic part of your nervous system, that autonomic nervous system are not resolved.

It’s a very like body-based intensity that we feel in the body that disconnects us completely from being able to connect to hunger and enough. And so for those of you who know what it feels like to feel like incredibly stressed, incredibly anxious, incredibly lonely, you don’t even, it doesn’t have the word incredibly doesn’t even have to be there.

It could be real small. It could be anything that would activate your nervous system into levels of intensity and emotions can do that because a lot of us lack. The ability to feel emotions, process emotions there’s a whole lot of reasons for that, which we go over in the challenge and what I will say is that being able to work with both at the same time, being able to really work with what I call my food freedom formula, what I call what we just talked about here.

Like ditching diets and dieting culture, but then at the same time being able to work with and process all of these other reasons why you’re using food when you’re not hungry, all of these other reasons why you are having urges and cravings to eat when it’s completely not connected to physical hunger or enough. 

And when you combine these two, this is the magic. This is the magic of Hello Body Freedom. This is what we do. And it is a really powerful, beautiful container. So with all of that said, if you are ready for real, like to really get this handled,  go back and listen to this a million times so you can start to deprogram your diet culture brain and then go to hellobodyfreedom.com and join the free. It is completely free. It is 100 percent free. You have a workbook that there you have you have coaches in there that are holding your hand, helping you answering your questions. There’s a lot of one on one support in there as well. And it can be like an absolute life changer.

Even if you never do anything else in Hello Body Freedom, even if you never become a client if you never buy one of our courses or anything, if all you did was take this five-day food and body freedom challenge, you would have so much more understanding of why you stay stuck. Now, today, what we went into is really the stuckness of you continuing to do the dieting.

But again, that level of stuckness is like step one.  We got to get out of really the bath water. We gotta throw the bath water out and that takes time and that takes a very different approach than what you have ever likely done. thAt is the first step. 

And on top of that I can’t fit everything into this podcast. I can’t believe we’ve already gone as long as we have, but at the end of the day, like  there are a lot of reasons why you’re blocked from unresolved trauma to inability to process and feel emotions from just going straight from stimulus to response, right?

Instead of being able to connect to this middle thing that happens, this inner experience in your body and being able to process from that level. And this is what we do that. I think that’s what our specialty is inside of Hello Body Freedom. Go jump on that challenge, get in there. If you are going to do anything this new year, don’t start another diet.

If you want something to do something to make you feel like I’m doing something, I’m taking care of something, then by all means jump into the five day food and body freedom challenge. It is completely free. It is yours for the taking. Go to hellobodyfreedom. com. If this is on if you’re looking at this on any of the social media platforms, you can go to the link in the bio.

You can just click hellobodyfreedom.com  And you’re there and you’ll see it and you can start immediately. There’s no waiting. So get on in there. Thank you guys so much for joining. This was so much fun.  And I hope you have a beautiful, amazing rest of your day and week. And until the next episode of Hello Body Freedom is out. 

I’ll see you then. Bye everybody.