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The major players in the weight loss game have a scam going on. Did you know that only 5% of the folks who lose weight ultimately keep it off? Why?
Primarily, the problem is that these programs are thought of as a diet, something you start, do until you reach some goal, and then ditch like a bad habit. Who wants to count points or eat prepackaged food for the rest of their lives to keep it up?
Another problem comes with low calorie dieting. The more time we spend eating too few calories, making our body think it is starving, the lower our metabolism drops, making it harder to lose weight the next time. Eliminating one food group, such in the Atkins Plan, where most carbohydrates are eliminated, essentially forces you into low calorie mode.
Low calorie dieting, makes you feel deprived, and it also leaves you hungry most of the time. I have been on that road many times, I have skipped breakfast, counted points, tallied calories and starved myself on weigh in day so that I would be the “big loser” at that particular meeting. I have stuffed my cart with prepacked “diet” foods in an effort to manage portion control. I did the “low-fat” thing, thinking that if I ate almost no fat, I would lose weight. None of this works in the long run!
If you buy into the “reduce calories and do cardio exercise craze”, you will find yourself being able to eat less and less, and having to workout more and more to continue to lose weight. By the time you reach your goal, you will be at starvation mode calories, and working out hours a day in order to maintain your weightloss. Is this something you can maintain for years? I don’t think so….
The diet industry has us duped into believing their plans, only to have us run from one plan to another when the weight starts to come back on. In my lifetime, on various plans, I bet I have lost a few hundred pounds. Funny, I never had that much to lose, but by being a “chronic dieter” and losing the same pounds over and over again, I have accumulated quite a boatload of weight loss!!
So what is the answer? How did I lose 70 pounds and manage to keep off most of it for 7 years? Ok, I fluctuate by 10-15 pounds, up and down, usually gaining it in the winter and losing it in the summer, but for the most part, I hover between 160 and 175 pounds consistently. Which at 5’7″ is not skinny, but it is a good weight for me. I feel strong and comfortable at this weight, fitting into about a size 10. Nope, you don’t need to be a size 2 and you don’t need to be rail thin. You can eat, you can workout a normal amount of time, and you can find your set-point weight and be happy.
Here in a nutshell is the answer.
1. Start with a few weeks of an elimination diet- Find a good elimination diet that takes out sugar, grains, dairy and “processed” foods. Follow this diet for a few weeks, then start adding back things into your diet. This allows you to assess if you have any food sensitivities or allergies that have been causing you to hold onto weight.
2. Eat whole foods most of the time- no prepackaged anything. No macaroni and cheese from a box, limit cookies, cakes and the like. Eat real veggies, fruit, meats and whole grains. Once you are past the elimination diet phase, you can start to bring other foods back into your diet gradually and create an eating plan that works for you. You can start to figure out a way to eat out at restaurants and make snacks to take with you when you travel, based on the foods that work with your body.
3. Get moving!- Work out 20-30 minutes most days. With a combination of stretching, strength training and cardio work, you can minimize your workout time, but maximize your workout effort.
4. Journal everything you eat- Not to count calories, fat and carbs, but to access how you feel, what moods make you want certain things and start to work through issues with food and fitness that may have manifested over your entire life.
5.Add meditation and yoga to your daily life- 10-20 minutes a day….that is all it takes! 5-10 minutes to meditate and 5-10 minutes to stretch, with hopefully a once or twice per week class to keep you on track and help you to learn new poses to add to your stretching sessions.
6.Face your demons-If chocolate is your downfall, make sure to acknowledge that! In order to be successful at long-term weightloss you need to be able to handle cravings in a different way. Perhaps in the chocolate example, by purchasing the one ounce squares (one serving!) and putting them in your freezer. Allow yourself to have an ounce of dark chocolate each day! Everything is ok in moderation, is the thing you need to keep in your mind.
7.Find a coach- Finding someone to guide you and help you on the journey is paramount to success. This is a person who can hold you accountable, keep you motivated and point you in the right direction when you are falling off the track. I can coach you through Beachbody Just go to the site and sign up as a free customer. I can also coach you personally with a personalized program, set up just for you. Email me at simplicityquest@gmail.com to set up a time for your free personal consultation. I will spend some time with you determining what your goals are, what things you have tried in the past, fitness level and current diet. We can then determine a plan to start to get you on track!
Here is to finding your long-term solution to your health and weightloss efforts! No one wants to do it twice! Find a system that works for you for the long haul….
Namaste,
Jennifer
This is a HUGE topic, so I am just going to touch the surface of it in this blog. If you want more information, or would like to schedule a consultation after reading it, please email me at simplicityquest@gmail.com
We have become a society that likes things to happen RIGHT NOW. Instant gratification is the word of the day. If we have a headache, we want it solved with a pill or shot that works instantly. If we are hungry, we want something that can be popped into the microwave and be hot and ready in 2 minutes. The same is going on in wellness, weightloss and health!
Passive wellness activities are those where you are not physically moving or engaged in the process. You are there, being touched or worked on, but you do not need to do anything to receive the benefits of the process.
Passive wellness includes many very good modalities including massage, Reiki, reflexology, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), herbal or vitamin supplementation and others. Some will argue that you are involved in the process and in some ways you can increase the effectiveness by being engaged in the process, but you can just be there and receive the treatment. All of these methods are awesome, if combined into an overall plan for wellness. There is another avenue of passive wellness or healthcare in the allopathic or western medical realm. These things include drugs and surgery. Unfortunately, typically drugs and surgery address the outwardly manifested “symptom” rather than looking for the inwardly manifested “cause”.
For example, if we are overweight is it because we overeat, or is it because we are stressed and too busy to cook the appropriate foods, we aren’t involved in physical activities or because the foods we eat are not providing the proper nutrients that our body needs, making our body think it is starving, thus requiring more food to try to meet the nutritional goals? Are we overeating to fill a void (emotional eating) that we can’t seem to get filled any other way? What part of that does gastric bypass surgery solve? Only the limiting food part. What part does a diet pill solve? Again, only the limiting of the food intake. These passive methods do not fix the underlying cause of the problem.
Active wellness on the other hand includes, yoga, meditation, walking, running, biking, eating well….and a myriad of other things that you are physically involved in. Active wellness is hard. It takes effort and is sometimes a difficult mode to get into. Let’s say for example, that I could tell you that if you eliminated gluten from your diet, that your migraine headaches would go away? OR, you could take a pill everyday for the rest of your life that would accomplish the same goal? Which one would you pick? But then, let’s add the other unfortunate problem of side effects, and the continual increase in dose of the medication? Now which one would you pick?
Let’s say that you are suffering from chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, and it is determined that you suffer from a candida overgrowth that can be corrected with a special diet and anti-fungal medications, or that again, you can take a prescription drug that will cause strange side effects and will never truly correct the underlying problem of the candida overgrowth?
Now let’s examine weight loss. This is a tricky subject, because in most cases, it isn’t just your food intake that causes the problem. Actually, only 2% of people who undertake a reduced calorie diet and lose weight, manage to maintain that weight loss once they discontinue the program. Why is that? It is impossible to starve yourself forever. At some point, you fall off the bandwagon. You can’t spend your entire life hungry and you can’t fill up that void caused by stress or frustration if you never get to eat enough to satisfy you again!
Unfortunately, the diet program world has made reduced calorie dieting, eliminating certain food groups etc into really big business! Why? Because they know you will be back again and again, when you fail and need to start over. I have even seen it on a couple of ads for Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem! “I did it in 2004 and then I did it again in 2007!”. Why would you need to do it again if the method was successful at creating a lifestyle you can live with?
So what is the active wellness answer to weight loss? The answer to that question is different for everyone. First, you need to determine why you have a weight issue? Do you emotionally eat? Do you have a thyroid or adrenal issue? Is stress making you hold onto weight? Are you eating to few calories, making your body think it is starving, so your metabolism has slowed to a crawl?
Once the cause or causes can be figured out, a plan can be put together that includes a whole foods eating plan, active and passive wellness activities to help you achieve your goals and maintain them. Perhaps in your case it is a stressful job and marriage that are creating your eating issues. The eating plan is devised, followed by meditation, yoga, daily walking and counseling to start figuring out how to deal with the issues that need to be dealt with. Is a job change in order? Perhaps your spouse needs to know how you feel in order to start to work through those problems.
By starting to fill your diet with whole, natural foods, you will start to feel better immediately! By eating enough quality calories to sustain you, your metabolism will start to readjust itself, helping you to start to lose weight naturally. You won’t lose it quickly like you will with Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig or Weightwatchers, but you will lose it for always! Yes, you will need to eliminate some things like artificial sweeteners and white flour, but you will be replacing them with natural fruit sweetness and whole grains.
My personal journey started with yoga, but yours may start somewhere else. Yoga helped me to start to focus in on the needs of my body, guiding me to quit smoking, start walking and start eating better, so I started to lose weight naturally. Your journey may start with walking, or with adjusting your diet…wherever it starts, let it develop!
Active wellness is a challenge. It involves working through the symptoms to get to the underlying cause of your health problem. Then an active plan needs to be devised to help to eliminate the underlying cause, thus eliminating the symptoms. It is a cycle which can take longer than popping a pill or having surgery, but that in the long run will be of great benefit to you.
If you are ready to start your journey to health through active wellness and holistic passive wellness, send me an email or give me a call!! I would love to help you start on your path…..
yogajen
The Biggest Loser was a huge disappointment this time around. Helen, the winner, let her overweight child go home. This wasn’t something most mothers would ever be willing to do. If it was me or one of my children, the child would ALWAYS come first, no matter what. I lost respect for her when she did that, and felt sorry for a child who had to know that her mother let her go home when she so desperately needed to be there.
Another problem was that Helen was one of the most self-centered people I have ever seen. I realize this is a reality show, where each participant was out to win, but Helen was a true disappointment.
The biggest problem, was getting to 117 pounds. This looked to be unhealthy and unnatural, potentially bordering on an eating disorder or perhaps some kind of addiction to weight loss. This show is intended to help people start to find a healthy balance. It was almost a deterent to weightloss to see her get SO skinny that she looked sickly. How to lose weight, get fit and find good health should have been the goal. It was unfortunate that Helen was the ultimate role model of this show.
Weight loss, taken as a slow and methodical process, will create a lifelong lifestyle change, where the weight can stay off long term. I would really like to know, overall, how many of the people who have been on this show have managed to maintain the weight loss.
Fitness too, needs to fit the persons lifestyle. Being on the ranch is such a controlled environment, having only the things available that will help with weight loss. It eliminates work, children and any other of the distractions or normal living experiences that we all must deal with. A better approach may be to help people workout in their “real world”. Help them eat right while cooking for a family and how to fit wellness into their day. Most of us will never have the opportunity to leave our lives behind in order to get healthy. We need to do it in the real world.
Eating right and working out can fit into our daily lives, but it does take some work. Some of the best programs I have found are at Beachbody.com where you will have the opportunity to pick from a variety of fitness programs that come with eating programs as well. You also get the opportunity to work with a virtual coach to help you find wellness on your terms, in a way that fits your lifestyle.
I would love to help you find fitness and wellness. If you are ready to get fit and lose some extra weight, take a look at Beachbody programs and let me know if you need help picking out a program. I am here to help you succeed and find your healthy weight! I would love to help you lose weight at a healthy pace, and learn to eat well!!
Are you ready???
yogajen
I promised to detail my exercise and eating each day in order to stay accountable to myself, so here is the first installment of yogajen doing the Chalean Extreme Plan!!(click here to get your own!!)
Today went pretty well, with only one small eating glitch, that I don’t think was to terrible. So here are the stats of the day:
Exercise:
3.6 mile walk around an icy lake, wearing studs on my shoes…awesome glute and ab workout!
75 minute yoga class
Food: (b)2 eggs with cheese and salsa (s) yogurt, walnuts, banana (s) cheese and whole grain crackers, (d) salad with tomatoes, guacamole and homemade vitality dressing. Salmon with dill
Do you see the problem item?? First, I inadvertently missed lunch due to not being home and then I ate crackers, but they were whole grain, and they were seeded, so not as bad as some things I could have picked! Plus the cheese was a raw organic cheese too!
So day one went pretty well…of course I still have a few hours before I go to bed….
yogajen
Each new year is an opportunity to reflect on the previous year. What you accomplished, what you didn’t accomplish and what you hope the new year will look like.
Today I start the first phase of Chalean Extreme, not necessarily because it is the new year, but because the program just became available, and my copy arrived just before Christmas. Not an excuse, but the holidays got the best of me, and I accomplished virtually nothing!
So to keep me on track, I will be posting my workouts and my eating here, at the end of each day. Now, I will not be following the program exactly for a couple of reasons. First, I teach yoga three nights a week, and all three contain a power class, so that suffices for my resistance training on those days. I am also training for a triathlon, so I need to swim and bike as well, so I need to fit those in.
I do plan on getting in three Chalean Extreme workouts per week, I probably just won’t do them in the prescribed order that the book suggests.
If you are only doing Chalean Extreme, then I strongly suggest using the program as outlined! It was designed that way for a reason, so in order to get the best out of it, it is important to follow the plan! Do you want someone to keep you on task? Order your copy of Chalean Extreme from my website (click here) and I will be your coach to help you every step of the way!
So today the plan is to start the burn eating plan from Chalean’s guidebook. I have learned over the last few months that cardio workouts do not help my particular body type to lose weight. Once I started doing resistance training, and eating fewer simple carbohydrates, I was easily able to drop some inches and pounds. Chalean’s food plan involves just that, removing the simple carbohydrates from your diet. It still includes plenty of fresh veggies, salads and fruit, just limits grains and increases the protein.
You really need to get your hands on a copy of this program. Not only do you get a whole range of workouts, but you get the meal plan as well, which is outstanding!
Later today, I will post the results of my day! I am hoping that being accountable to you will help me be accountable to myself! I deserve to feel good, and I deserve to do this for me!!
Have a great Sunday!
yogajen
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