I spent most of my adult life jumping from diet to diet, plan to plan. Looking for the next ‘quick fix’. The next diet that would WORK.
So I would lose that weight that kept coming back and feel better about myself. So my life would be happier.
Does that sound vaguely familiar?
I need to share some vital info…
There is no quick ‘fix’.
Yes, there are plans and protocols that will help you drop half a stone in a week or two, so you feel better in a bikini or in that dress you want to wear for your friend’s wedding.
And it might stay off for a few weeks – or for as long as you can sustain the (highly likely) unsustainable diets. But it will come back on if you go back to your previous habits.
Until the next time you want to lose it, when you will try something else.
So, is it any wonder you feel exhausted, overwhelmed and fed-up of being on this constant cycle of lose the weight, put it all back on again?
Is it any wonder you find it hard to trust people like me, who are here to help you to get to where you want to be without the marketing BS? Because all the other plans and programmes failed…
Let’s unpick this a bit, shall we?
First, let’s look at the biggest problems with most of the commercial diets, plans and programmes out there…
You need to remember that all these companies are businesses – and they want you to continue using them and their products for as long as possible.
What this means is they will take the simple science of energy balance, calories in vs calories out, or calorie deficit (whatever you want to call it), and they will cover it in marketing; adding their own terminology to fit their own products and plans.
So a mashed-up banana becomes a syn.
A slice of bread becomes X points.
Rice, pasta and potatoes are free foods on one plan and completely banned on another!
Don’t even get me started on the companies that replace your meals with shakes and juices and all the other rubbish they sell you at extortionate prices….
The result? You follow the plan and, if you can stick to it, you will likely lose weight because, one way or another, the plan has put you in a calorie deficit. There is no magic.
Cutting carbs will put you in a calorie deficit.
Drinking shakes and juices twice a day instead of eating real food will also put you in a deficit.
Hell, having gastric surgery to reduce the size of your stomach will put you in a calorie deficit!
So how do they keep you in the mechanism of the business? By hiding this calorie deficit under their terminology, they make it really hard for you to know how to maintain your weight loss when you stop paying for the programmes, plans or products.
This means: when you stop and go back to normal eating habits…..the ones that got you to the point of needing to lose weight in the first place…..you start putting the weight on again.
Back into the cycle you go. Either blaming yourself (and therefore punishing yourself) or blaming the diet – then trying the next one.
What about the things that got you there in the first place?
There are lots of reasons why people eat. Stopping eating is not actually the problem. You KNOW how not to eat. You just don’t eat right. It’s the ‘stuff’: the reasons and the emotions that lead you to food and drink – that is the tough stuff to fix.
People overeat because of trauma, stress, anxiety, loneliness, sadness, and depression… I could go on. The majority of the Mums I help do some kind of Emotional Eating. It’s common.
Now, if you have had a particularly stressful week at work and the kids have been a nightmare and the other half is being useless and you have found yourself head first in the biscuit tin, then you go stand on Sally from Slimming World’s scales…. Will Sally give you any help, advice or support for that Emotional Eating? Is she equipped and qualified to do that?
No. Sally will just tell you to try harder next week. To not eat the biscuits. Cheers, Sally!
Did you know that slimming club consultants get about 8 half-days of training? Is it any wonder that the only advice they can give is ‘try harder next week’?
Sally can’t help you with emotional eating, with the stresses and strains and overwhelms that life as a busy working Mum brings. She isn’t qualified to do that.
90% of the work I do with my clients is around their mindset. Helping them to deal with whatever else is going on in their lives. Because that is the stuff that gets in the way of you making progress.
What is all this doing to your relationship with food and, more importantly, your body?
Most people eat because they enjoy it. There are a few outliers who eat because they have to (I am NOT one of them). When Mums come to me, they have normally spent years cutting out this and that (normally carbs and fat). They think that fruit is bad because it has sugar in it. They are confused about what they can and can’t eat and, when they get invited out for dinner, they go into sheer panic mode.
Then there’s the poor body image that is reinforced by diet culture, social media and the never-ending narrative of what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food and how we should look… You tell yourself you are failing at every single opportunity and you hate looking in the mirror. Because you are forever in flux between punishing your body with near starvation, gruelling exercise regimes and treating it like a dustbin when you ‘fall of the wagon’.
Instead of being grateful for your body, you hate and despise it and pick it apart at every opportunity.
What are these diets, plans and clubs doing to reverse this? Nothing. They actually reinforce it.
That’s not right.
I want every single Mum who works with me to learn to love her body and ultimately herself; because that, to me, is true freedom.
So you see, there really is no quick fix for these long-term problems.
They all take work, commitment, investment of time and often money (because you sometimes can’t see the wood for the trees and need support). It is uncomfortable to look inside and challenge the things you have told yourself for years.
But I promise you this: it’s worth it!