Weight loss and Self Trust
Have you spent days, months or years tracking calories in an app such as My fitness pal, stuck to a specific calorie range or even macro count and still failed to lose weight? Have you lost weight this way but have gained it all back once you stop tracking, or worse, have you gotten to the point where you don’t trust yourself to eat intuitively? Food and calorie tracking can become a way of life for people and letting go of this can be quite difficult. If you decide to take on a diet that counts macronutrients or gives you portion control options and tiny plastic containers, you are setting a mathematical average to your unique body and a one size fits all outlook on yourself. If it worked for her than it has to work for me! Realizing that you are probably doing more harm than good to your metabolism and overall health both mental and physical is when we can finally decide to make the switch.
First off, let's agree that all diets are different and what works well for one person may have no effect or even a detrimental effect on another. Portion control and food tracking can be done to gage and count calories, as well as macro and micronutrients. Food tracking, in particular, is an incredibly useful tool for assessing nutrient intake.
A calorie is in short, is a unit of energy used to make the temperature rise in one gram of water by one degree Celsius. The problem is that counting macros and calories gives you QUANTITY as opposed to QUALITY. For example, most people are well aware that a sweet potato is a carbohydrate, regular sugar is also a carbohydrate. There is roughly 4 tsp of sugar in one large sweet potato. The calories in consuming that 4 tsp of sugar may be the same as eating one large sweet potato, but those calories are void of the fiber, vitamins, and minerals that the sweet potato possesses needed to metabolize the sweet potato. Thisis where the term “Empty Calorie” comes from. Processing also dictates how we absorb food, for example, the calories in whole peanuts are not fully absorbed due to fiber content, the fat in peanut butter, however, is more readily available as energy because it is already broken down for you. Digestive health will also determine how much of the food you eat is used and absorbed properly, as well as your hormones and metabolism. Everyday hormone levels fluctuate, mood changes, sleep is altered, and we expend different amounts of energy.
If you think about it from a numbers perspective, your BMR or basal metabolic rate is the number that is needed for most adults to perform basic metabolic functions in a sedentary state (without leaving our beds). For most women, this is around 1,200-1,500 calories! This is number touted by many diet andnutrition professionals as the “magic number” for weight loss...... This number of calories is not enough to sustain even adequate bodily functions while maintaining day to day activities let alone adding in exercise. Yet some people eat this number of calories every day and are still unable to maintain a certain weight, or worse, have developed some form of chronic disease, hormonal disfunction or GI problems due toinadequate nutrition. A chronic caloric restriction that is too low has been seen to lower your body’smetabolism, meaning you need fewer calories to survive, which could be the reason why most dieters gain the weight back when they add in more calories. In short, doing the math will not teach you how to survive, let alone thrive!
Listen to your body and ask yourself, is this sustainable? Is my health less important than a number on a scale? Am I ready for a lifestyle change and not just a diet?
Once you have decided to and the switch no longer single-handedly support the diet industry as I once did, what is the right way to look at the food to lose weight a healthy way and to maintain it? Our foods most important characteristic overall is its micronutrient content. Micronutrients provide energy and are responsible for every biological function in the body. The standard American diet better is known as SAD which includes heavily processed and modified foods that have completely taken out the most important component. Calories are needed to carry these micronutrients into the body to complete all theseprocesses, if your diet is limiting calories or full of processed “diet” foods, you are not able to complete these processes. To sum it up, calorie restriction actual equals nutrient restriction.
To break I down, this is the exact opposite way of thinking to a dieter’s mentality. The opposite of calorie restriction and portion control is a diet full of nutrient-rich whole foods and unprocessed macro and micronutrients that can start to turn on your body’s natural signals of hunger and satiety. These are that hormones that teach you to eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full. Processed foods and caloric restriction can cause the body's natural intuition to turn off because they are void of the micronutrients and minerals your mind and body crave. This creates a constant state of hunger and the inability to recognize these natural cues.
To finally ditch the dieters mentality takes the proper full sources nutrients your body needs, trust that your body knows what it needs and grace to permit yourself to let go of restriction and allow yourself to heal and live! Self-trust and self- compassion are the only ways we can allow ourselves to finally get off the diet merry go round and start enjoying our lives and the food we eat, without guilt or excessive thought.
Change that is sustained comes from listening to your body and to what it needs not from will power or adherence to specific guidelines. We are more than a set of numbers on an app or a scale, we are unique individuals each with different needs. When we listen to you our bodies, we can learn who we are and what we are capable of.