How You Can Lose Weight Successfully and Keep it Off By Lowering Your Body’s Natural Weight Set-point.  Sustainable Weight Loss.

So if dieting hasn’t worked for you and you found that you haven’t been able to find a long-term solution to help you
manage your weight in the way you’d like to, you’re not alone.   This is something that affects everybody.
And unfortunately,  the way that we’ve been taught to think about our weight and address issues associated with
weight management hasn’t been particularly helpful.  And all of the research is confirming this.

Link Between Strict Weight Loss Dieting and Eating Disorders

Has Your Natural Weight Set-Point Increased?

Psychological Impact of Strict Weight Loss Diets

Weight Loss Maintenance Affected by Lowered Metabolic Rate

Take a Holistic Approach

Focus on Well-being First

Assessing Body Composition…Scales, Tape Measure, Clothes-O-Meter?

Use Different Strategies Depending on How Much Weight You Have Gained.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to healthy weight management.

The strategies that you use to help will partly  depend on how much weight you may have gained.  If you’ve only gained a small amount of weight and you really are quite close to a healthy weight for your body type,  you’re going to use different strategies than a person who has gained more weight or feels they’re significantly above their most healthy weight.

Prevent Future Weight Gain

So if you have only gained a smaller amount of weight, the best thing you can do initially is prevent further weight gain.

And actually this is true for everybody. Preventing future weight gain is crucial and and particularly for women.  So choosing strategies that don’t lower the body’s weight set-point is crucial to preventing that slow progressive weight gain that can occur over a longer period.

Listen to Your Body

It’s crucial to listen to your body.  Your body will tell you what’s going on.  Research in nutrition changes all of the time.  There was a lot of research a while ago looking at the low-fat diet.  There was a lot of research more recently you’re looking at the low carb diet.   There’s a lot of research currently looking at the low FODMAP diet.  There’s a whole range of different dietary approaches.

We know that nutritional information is always changing.  If, instead of relying just on this information,  you can instead learn to listen to your body and eat in response to the signals your body’s sending you,  it’s of great benefit.

If you’re above your most healthy weight and you want to change the situation now, one of the most important things you can do is awaken or come back into connection with the sensations of physical hunger and physical fullness that your body’s sending you.

Reduce Non-Hungry Eating

Reducing non-hungry eating is a really easy initial strategy that you can put into place.  If you have been eating to energy excess and consuming more energy than your body requires it means that at some stage you’ve switched off to that signal that’s telling you’ve had enough.

It’s important to reawaken that signal and become aware of when you’re doing non-hungry eating and try to minimize that as much as you can.

So what I would recommend is that you figure out what that feels like for you.  What does it feel like for you when your body’s physically hungry?  What does it feel like for you when your body’s had enough to eat, when you feel satisfied?  If you can identify those signals and try eating accordance to those signals you will naturally start to reduce some of the non-hungry eating that you may have been doing.  This is a really useful tool.

Eat Slowly and Enjoy Your Food

In order to get a really good grounding in these signals,  it’s also important that you slow down your speed of eating.  If you eat really quickly,  it’s almost impossible to recognize the signal that your body’s sending you when you’ve had enough to eat.  And it’s really easy to overeat so that you end up over full.

At the same time if you let yourself get too hungry, it’s very hard to eat slowly.  And it also means that it’s very easy to enter up at the point where you’re over full, where you’ve had too much.   Because you miss that signal that your body is telling you that you’ve had enough.

So try and work towards slowing down the speed of your eating and and start to recognize when your body is sending you a hunger  signal or when you’ve had enough.

Conversely,  if you are a woman who has used strict weight loss dieting to lose weight,  one of the ways that your body will try and get you back up to that higher set-point (remember our bodies are working against us in this situation) is to increase feelings of hunger.

So if you’ve used strict weight-loss dieting your reliance on those signals of hunger and fullness might be a little bit different. Because one of the ways our bodies tries to get us back up to that higher set-point weight is to increase hunger.  So this is just something to be mindful of.

And as we continue along I’ll let you know about some specific changes that you can make with the types of foods you’re eating to help to reduce that overriding feeling of hunger that sometimes develops when you’re trying to reduce your food intake in order to lose weight.

Pulsing For Sustained Weight Loss

Dealing with Food Cravings

Foods can be Addictive

Increase Dopamine in the Brain to Reduce Food Cravings

So dopamine is an interesting chemical in the brain.   There’s a lot of ways that you increase dopamine that are not  food related.   So if you feel as though you’re above your most healthy weight and you want to change that situation. see what other things you can do to help to increase your dopamine levels.   That’ll give you that same feeling  which will naturally help you reduce some of the food cravings.

Massage therapy is fantastic for increasing dopamine in the brain.   So if you’re about to embark on  a period of health rejuvenation and especially if you’re concerned about your weight management I would definitely recommend including some massages, especially in the early days when you’re trying to transition from a more addictive diet to a less addictive diet.  You’ll find that as you progress along that pathway and you’ve made those changes and you’re eating less addictive foods, the cravings for the foods that are highly addictive will naturally start to reduce.

Increase Protein Intake

Choose a Low to Moderate Palatability Diet

Be Kind to Yourself

Always be kind to yourself as well.  Whenever we’re changing any habit it can be difficult, especially in the world that we live in.   We live in a world where we’re surrounded by these highly palatable, highly addictive, highly processed foods.  We’re absolutely surrounded by them.   So just be really kind to yourself.

Sometimes Foods and Everyday Foods

It’s normal to eat every type of food some of the time but it’s not normal to have a diet full of highly processed, highly palatable foods all the time.

A helpful way to think about it is the way our kids are learning about foods at school. Thinking about foods as sometimes foods and everyday foods.

There’s some individual variability here too.  For people who are highly addicted to those highly addictive foods, even having those foods sometimes can start to trigger a lot of food cravings again.   But for many of us, having those foods occasionally seems to be okay.   We can manage that and we can deal with it.  So sometimes foods and everyday foods is a really great way to think about it.

Ask For Help, Especially if You are a Survivor of Childhood Trauma or Abuse