The past few months I’ve been working on my first book. Say Goodbye to Dieting: Reclaim Your Power over Food, Love Your Body and Yummy up Your Life. In the year that I took to test out Intuitive Eating and figure out how to use energy coaching to boost the effectiveness of this non diet approach to eating, I discovered many things.
One of the most important things that I discovered is that weight issues have little to do with food. In fact, your obsession with weight and dieting is actually what is called a Red Herring. A red herring is a smoke screen. It is something that is designed to divert your attention away from something else. It prevents you from seeing something clearly.
For example if you are having marital problems, you may focus on believing that you have to lose weight in order to be happy. In your quest to achieve the perfect body, you scrupulously watch what you eat, you count calories, you spend money to buy special foods, you read articles and search the internet in a neverending quest to lose the excess weight. You struggle with fighting off cravings, you succumb to temptation and afterwards scold yourself for giving in, you deny yourself and try everything you can to lose the weight, yet you can’t because if it is your marriage that is upsetting you, then dieting won’t solve the problem.
Because you’re not attacking the problem at its root. Your weight gain is only a symptom of a deeper issue. It’s not the actual problem, in this example, it’s your feelings about your marriage that are causing the friction in your life that is pushing you to eat when you’re not hungry. By learning the coping skills that you need to handle the upset around what is really bugging you, then you are free to live and enjoy your life. Diets will never work to help you resolve this mess.
They just keep you fixated on the red herring, your imperfect body.
Diets lead us to focus solely on food and never once hint that something else might be the cause of the problem. It’s not about the food…you have to look deeper. You have to let yourself feel those feelings to know what’s bugging you.
In my program, Losing Weight without Dieting, all the women went through an enormous personal transformation. In their quest to make peace with food and end the obsession, they all discovered that they were wrong about what they were led to believe about themselves and their capabilities from years of dieting. They learned how to have compassion for themselves and treat their bodies with love and respect now.
As they began to notice that they had control around food, they became more discriminating and choose not to eat certain foods. Without even trying, that sense of nurturing themselves, begins to ripple out and affect other areas of their lives.
That’s when their marriages start to flourish and their relationships begin to spice up, that’s when they spend more time with their kids and make the decision to do more things they love. Those are the keys to success in losing weight without dieting. It’s not about what you’re eating, it’s what’s eating you.
Take a moment and think about your own life. What would you think about if you never ever had to worry about being overweight again? Share your thoughts here and then come visit my forum and we’ll continue the discussion with other great gals on the same road to Yummyland.