The main reason you are struggling with weight loss?
Why do you have trouble losing weight and keeping it off?
We have all been there, started a diet with excellent intentions, have the motivation and really believe this time it’s going to work.
We have our meal plans ready, our shopping list is made, our gym gear ready, and a gym timetable stuck on our fridge door. We wait for Monday because diets always start on a Monday, right? Every time!
We have weighed ourselves and measured our body fat and have a goal in mind, and we tell ourselves this time, I’m gonna make it work. I need to be more disciplined and have strong will power, and I’ll lose weight.
Trouble is invariably, the diet always fails. Think back to the last diet you went on? How did that go? Did you lose the weight permanently? I’m guessing the answer is NO.
But why, why didn’t it work, and why do you keep gaining back the weight. It’s so frustrating, and most often than not, we give up until another diet comes along and lures us under false promises.
Wraps that claim to lose the inches, pills that obliterate fat in your body, so you excrete it out, shakes that claim to lose the inches within a week, sounds great!! We have all fallen prey to these wild claims and spend our hard-earned money to fail once again.
The challenge is that most women focus only on diet and exercise to lose weight, and it’s, unfortunately, leaving out a key component…
Marc David mentions that 95% of diets fail. We are dieting using the method of calories V calories out. This is very outdated science because if this worked, we would only need to diet once in our entire lifetime. We’re doing it all wrong. Dieting creates a tyranny around numbers.
We worship the numbers on the scale and become obsessed with fat grams macros or calories. We give religious value to our weight loss number, we let numbers rule our happiness and self-worth, and we end up dehumanising ourselves without even knowing.
Did you know 6 out of 10 women in the UK are overweight, the average dieter spending a cost of £30,000 a lifetime on weight loss attempts? The weight loss industry is worth 2 billion, so why are we not slimmer? With all these resources, why are we getting fatter? Sadly, what most women are turning to doesn’t work. Most women leave out the key component.
Let me ask you this? Have you ever been stressed out because of work, a relationship that’s ended, or about how you feel about yourself and the way you look and reach out for some comfort food? You know stuff like cookies, cake, ice cream, crisps, pizza, basically anything that’s not on your healthy diet and ended up overeating and bingeing.
So, what are we not being told?
It’s that dieting doesn’t address the stress levels in your life.
Stress triggers a flight or fight response in your body. This response releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Adrenaline prepares your body to take action and minimises your desire to eat. Once the adrenaline wears off, cortisol, known as the stress hormone, hangs around and temporarily suppresses non-essential functions, such as your digestive & immune system,
It literally turns off digestion assimilation and slows down calorie-burning activity. You could eat the healthiest food in the world, but if it’s eaten under any degree of stress, we have literally decreased the nutritional value of our meal. Stress can powerfully impact our bodies. The physiologic stress response can even be activated by thoughts such as I’m not good enough, I’m not lovable, I’m too fat, I’m not perfect, things should be different.
YES the toxic words we tell ourselves are actually making us fatter. Eating in a rush, eating while multi-tasking, skipping meals and food deprivation can activate the stress response. Marc David discusses this further in his groundbreaking book, the slow down diet.
On an emotional level and soul level
chronic dieting keeps us small
Our negative emotions have an enormous impact on biologically in our bodies, the stress, the anxiety, and the overwhelm you deal with when you try to lose weight. There is a myriad of hormones coursing through your body. When something stressful happens, or you start thinking about something stressful, within seconds, the part of your brain called the amygdala (the almond-shaped part of your midbrain) tells your body to release specific hormones.
Adrenaline and cortisol (often called “the stress hormone”) flood your body, shutting down the creative problem-solving parts of your brain. And this causes two noticeably big problems for somebody trying to lose weight.
#1 — It slows down your digestion. And anytime you slow down your digestion, it makes it harder to, you guessed it lose weight!
#2 — It constricts your blood vessels along with a few other key biological changes that control how you think, how your body and brain function, how strong your food cravings come on, and how quickly your brain can react to a given situation.
How does stress affect my weight?
Stress also decreases your nutrient absorption, so even if you are eating well,l you won’t absorb them. It also increases salt retention making you bloated, affects your cholesterol levels, impacts your immune system, nervous system, endocrine system. Your body cannot cope long term with high levels of stress, and what’s worse, stress literally creates a hormone that makes you fat and is directly related to abdominal fat!
Reducing stress in our everyday lives is a difficult thing to do. We are increasingly adding things to our to-do list, working faster, and treating our bodies like machines rather than thinking of ourselves as actual human beings. We could be dealing with a death of a loved one, relationship breakdown, loss of a job or any other challenging life changes.
High stress levels may also lead to changes in your behaviour that contribute to weight gain. Here are some of the most common dietary changes people experience when they're stressed.
Does stress affect the way we eat?
Food cravings
The foods we crave during these stressful times seem always to be sugary carbohydrate’s? Why is that? Carbohydrate-rich foods increase brain concentrations of an amino acid called tryptophan, the building block for serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that brings about feelings of calm, happiness, peace, and satisfaction when released.
Emotional eating & Overeating
At the moment, it serves a great purpose. It makes us feel great until the side effects set in. Shortly after your sugar rush, your insulin levels drop, and you feel exhausted, which triggers a craving for more sugary carbohydrates to get you back to the sugar high. It’s a vicious cycle!
Emotional eating is a way to suppress or soothe negative emotions such as stress, fear, boredom, sadness and loneliness. Major life events or more commonly the hassles of daily life can trigger negative emotions that lead to emotional eating and disrupt your weight loss effort. It’s a way to self-medicate.
No amount of food keeps the feelings down. Eating away our emotions doesn’t work. Emotional eating can lead to overeating since that void that we are filling never gets filled. It’s a way to self-medicate to numb and run away from the emotions we can’t face.
We overeat because our brain is looking for pleasure!
Skipping meals & food restriction
Cutting out your favourite foods, forcing yourself to follow a diet that’s restrictive and sometimes eliminating whole foods groups (huge red flag) to lose a few pounds. Drinking substitute meals instead of real food, running away from food to lose weight is not the answer.
What usually happens is after a few days or weeks of ‘good eating’, your stress levels hit the roof. Before you know it, you have inhaled half a packet of biscuits and didn’t even notice what you had eaten. The stress took over your body and inhibited your ability to think clearly and make good decisions.
What also happens is it slows down your metabolism. When you eat fewer calories a day, your body works to preserve its resources by going into "starvation mode," which is basically a slowdown in metabolism. A few things happen to cause this slowdown: Not eating restricts your calorie intake, leading to weight loss.
While you do lose fat, you also lose muscle. Muscle burns calories, so less muscle tissue means a slower metabolism. Additionally, thyroid hormone and catecholamine levels, which play a key role in the metabolism, decrease when you don't eat. Also, your body burns fewer calories digesting food because you're eating less.
Eating too fast
So picture yourself anxiously rushing from your home to the office while munching on a muffin or grabbing a fast lunch while your overloaded with work and thinking about everything but food. Or eating a meal when you are upset, shovelling your food down because you have to get somewhere quickly, or haven’t given yourself enough time in your busy schedule to factor in eating properly.
I used to stand in the kitchen, I’m a chef and wolf down my food because I was too busy to take a break. During these moments, the body hasn’t a clue that what your experiencing is not life-threatening because it is genetically programmed to initiate the fight or flight response the instant the brain perceives stress.
This means that depending on the intensity of the stress your experiencing, each of the physiological changes that characterise the fight or flight response is activated, including some degree of a digestive shutdown. So, if you’ve ever eaten in an anxious state and had the feeling afterwards that food is just sitting in your stomach, that’s exactly what it’s doing.
It's waiting between several minutes and several hours for the body to kick back into normal digestive functioning.
Wouldn’t it be great to finally take control of your life and live with more ease and harmony, gain control of your body and brain to use it to make better decisions about healthy food & exercise?
So, in what ways can we reduce stress in our lives?
Using EFT ( emotional freedom technique), read my previous blog on how EFT can help weight loss. It has been a huge gamechanger for my clients. Since it activates the part of your brain responsible for the fight or flight of the amygdala, you can reduce the stress by looking at the underlying reasons that trigger stress and by resetting your nervous system by tapping on the energy meridians familiar to EFT.
By slowing down and relaxing
Taking at least 30 minutes to eat each meal without distractions, take your lunch away from your desk, away from the TV and eat mindful, fully savouring each bite, chewing thoroughly. How we do food is how we do life, so if you’re a fast eater, slowing down will activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the opposite of the fight or flight response.
Meal planning
This is something I teach my clients if you're not organised and are busy then chances are you will grab something on the run that may not be as healthy as you would like. Take snacks to work like fruit, nuts, and rice cakes, so you always have something healthy available, if you struggle to sit down to eat 3 meals then maybe eat micro meals 4/5 times a day.
That way, you’re not skipping meals which makes your blood sugar levels drop, leaving you hangry.
Plan the meals you want to eat during the week ahead and compile your shopping list at the same time. Write a chart and pin this to your fridge. Batch cook foods and freeze. so when you don’t have time, you can grab something out of the freezer in the morning as it will be defrosted in time for when you get home.
Slow cooking is another way to ensure you get a fresh, home-cooked high-quality meal. Throwing some ingredients in the slow cooker and leaving it to cook slowly during the day is a great way to minimise time spent in the kitchen.
Exercise
It is a key component of stress reduction and weight loss and something beneficial for your well-being. Exercise releases the feel-good hormone serotonin, which will help you feel less agitated and increase your energy. So, taking a walk on your lunch break or going to the gym to work are great ways to incorporate into your schedule.
Relaxation techniques
Try yoga, meditation, essential oil, massages, stretching, and Epsom salt baths and make this a regular routine. We still need to look after ourselves after a gruelling day.
Look at your life's high-stress areas and evaluate their role. How can you reduce that? Can you look at the situation from a different perspective? If the stress is something you cannot eliminate, how can you learn to handle the stress differently? Do you need to slow down in life? Take a break, learn to say no, know your boundaries, be kinder to yourself.
Use this information and take away things that will work for you.
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