Every single day there are new diets coming up everywhere. We are getting bombarded with hundreds of “miraculous”, “amazing”, “awesome”, “revolutionary” ways of losing weight. It’s usually down to “3 foods we should never eat”, or “6 quirky habits of slim people”, or “the secret trick only Hollywood stars know” and they will teach you how to “lose weight while still eating everything you like”, how to “lose weight in your sleep”, how to “get a perfectly flat belly in 4 weeks” and that sort of things…
The numbers of people struggling with their weight is staggeringly high and growing and growing. You try a diet, lose a little bit of weight, give it up and put on more weight than you had before. And then you do repeat the process because the next one is “different”. Ooops no, it wasn’t. You try another one, same outcome. And after maybe years of this you end up so frustrated you don’t even notice the latest one that promises to teach you “the secret to instant weight loss as I learnt it from the aliens”.
Ok, forget about all that bullshit. Where do we start?
The bottom line is, that to lose weight we need to consume more calories than we eat. This is true and we all know it. It sounds pretty logical and straightforward, but most of us know all too well that it’s not that simple.
For the mere purpose of weight loss, all calories are the same. But when it comes to nutrients and health, calories are hugely different. So ok, it’s actually true that we can knock off a couple of kilos in a short time, even eating all the wrong foods, as long as we get the number of calories right. But this can only be a quick and silly fix. To lose weight properly, and to maintain the new weight afterwards, we must understand where our calories need to come from.
Five hundred calories’ worth of pasta will make you feel completely different than five hundred calories’ worth of nuts. Hundred calories of oil and hundred calories of lettuce don’t have much in common either. Three hundred calories from fruit and three hundred calories from gin and tonic are two different worlds to your body.
What makes or breaks weight loss, is sustainability.
Eating less than we normally would, is a very stressful thing! We all hate limitations and prohibitions, and that’s the first big obstacle. Add to this, that the body will soon start feeling hungry, and scream for food, and this can make it impossibly hard.
In our “civilised” countries we eat huge amounts of stuff that we call “food”, but simply isn’t, and should not enter our systems in the first place!
It’s full of poisons, and completely devoid of nutrients. So no matter how much we eat, we are still starved for all the important things the body needs. And we keep eating more and more. It’s a vicious circle.
Now, when we decide to go on a diet, and start depriving the already starving body even more, what happens is, it will put up a very efficient defence mechanism, and won’t let go of any weight, because it wants to keep it as emergency fuel for the famine that’s starting.
Next weight loss failure!
So, before we can even think about losing weight, we need to start feeding the body first! And only when that desperate hunger and the fear of starvation start easing off, and we are in a completely different situation than ever before, will we be setting ourselves up for success. We can then begin reducing the food intake — providing we keep up the quality of our food.
So first of all, what is quality food?
Quality food is REAL food! That would be plants in the first place: leaves, roots, stalks, flowers, seeds and fruits from all different plants that we can take and eat, just as they are.
Grains should be eaten in moderation, because we cannot digest them unless we grind and cook them, and they cause inflammation in the body. Grains are a rather recent and unhealthy habit we took on about 8000 years ago. This will probably make you laugh, but 8000 years are a blink of an eye in the evolution of the human race. Real food is what the first humans would be able to find and eat 300.000 years ago, when we started walking the Earth as nomads.
They were gatherers back then, and would occasionally hunt some easier prey, as it’s only as late as about 500.000 years ago, that humans started making their first spears. Before that, they were more likely to make do with the leftovers of big predators.
Dairy is another bad habit, as new and even unhealthier as the grains one. Dairy also causes lots of inflammation in the body. When we digest it, it leaves a lot of acid floating around. In order to neutralise this acid, that would poison us pretty quickly, our blood takes calcium from the bones, which hardly ever gets put back into them, with our modern lifestyle. So our bones get badly weakened.
The food industry has been telling us for decades that milk strengthens our bones, so it’s only fair to ask, why we have such high rates of osteoporosis in all our Western countries, with their huge dairy consumption.
Many people are not aware of any of that. As a society we’re used to buying prepared, pre-cooked and processed things in cellophane, we’ll eat out of tins, we’ll stir up powders with some liquid, we’ll squeeze stuff out of plastic bottles… and most of these things should never, ever, be called food!
The modern food industry with its clever marketing, manipulates us into believing that we need its products. So we get poisoned with preservatives, colourings, flavourings, sweeteners, glutamate, all things that mess up the balance and the health of our bodies in many different, horrific ways.
People think I’m going totally over the top when I say that these are crimes against humanity, but believe me, they are!
Only now that we are aware of these things and have started nourishing the body properly, can we leave the weight loss nightmare behind, and start the weight loss journey instead!
Releasing weight is a real journey made of understanding, of awareness, of self-love, of growth.
Get in touch with me, if you’re ready to embark on the life-changing adventure of gaining that perfect physical and emotional health that Mother Nature intended for you!
