You’re just trying to find the answer to, “If diets don’t work how do I lose weight?”
And everyone has their medical opinion. Great.
But I’m just a woo-woo psycho-spiritual weight loss coach with a radical opinion.
Instead of focusing on medical reasons (which is the tip of the iceberg), I focus on the psychological causes of overeating, which is 90% of the problem.
So if you want to know how to lose weight when diets don’t work, read on!
I’ll talk about how stress literally wrecks your digestive system, and how to lose weight by mastering your psychology.
Why Diet’s Don’t Work
I’ll use an example from my own life to show you why diets don’t work. (Oh boy.)
Before I recovered from chronic dieting, I had a mental list of restricted foods that I couldn’t have like carbs and burritos.
Whenever I wanted a burrito, I used to make myself have something else. All the “lighter” options would rarely fill me up though.
I would then graze on some healthy snacks to get by, but it wouldn’t hit the spot. As a result, I would wander through the kitchen and graze and graze and graze…
Once it was late at night, the psychological and PHYSIOlogical desire to have that dang burrito would get the best of me, and I’d binge eat one in a blur.
So, at the end of the day, I ate the dang burrito along with a bunch of other food that I never wanted in the first place.
This overeating obviously leads to weight gain. But it doesn’t stop there…
How Stress Prevents Weight Loss
To make matters worse, the stress from all of the mind-games completely wrecks your digestive system.
It slows down your metabolism and shuts digestion down. (If you want exact science, I recommend The Slow Down Diet by Marc David – don’t worry, it’s not a diet!)
And then the vicious cycle continues like so:
- Trying not to eat something creates anxiety and slows down your digestion
- Restricting leads to bingeing where tons of food enters your slowed digestive system
- Bingeing leads to weight gain and further anxiety and restriction
Have you been here before?
Have you tried restricting certain foods only to find yourself overeating and, at the end of the day, bingeing on the very foods you were trying to avoid?
Like, maybe carbs, sweets, and – oh yeah – burritos?
I’ve certainly been there. And that’s why diets don’t work!
So, what does work?
How to Lose Weight
My anti-diet, psycho-spiritual approach to weight loss is a cure for recovering chronic dieters. Specifically, hippie-friendly recovering dieters. : )
Psycho-spiritual weight loss helps you rebuild a normal relationship around food and end the restrict/binge cycle.
The steps to get there, however, are not sexy. They work, but you probably won’t like how it sounds…
Because it involves eating what your body wants, even if it’s a pizza, cupcake, burrito, salad, etc.
And this can be terrifying for all my recovering dieters out there! Trust me, I was terrified too.
How to Feel Normal Around Food
When you give yourself permission to eat whatever your body wants, it actually serves as revers psychology.
Once you’re now allowed to have the burrito (or whatever), you don’t really want the burrito anymore!
This is how you can stop dieting and still lose weight.
Giving yourself permission, and thus building your self-trust, makes it much easier to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full (i.e. follow the psycho-spiritual eating guidelines).
“Letting yourself loose” around food can feel absolutely terrifying for those who currently restrict their diet, though.
It certainly took me a long time to give up dieting. But when I did, I didn’t even gain weight!