I’m going to say something slightly controversial, weight loss is easy. There, I said it. A lot of you will not agree but I encourage you to read on so I can explain myself.
Weight loss is easy, if you have your nutrition on point, you’ve got your exercise right, you’re sleeping well, staying hydrated and you’re positively dealing with stress, weight loss, or fat loss, should happen.
If it isn’t, keep adjusting those key points and see how you go. The most likely is that you’re eating more than you realise, not doing appropriate exercise or your stress levels are blocking you.
Getting your nutrition right is not rocket science – there’s enough information out there to support the basics of eating a diet that is as clean and natural as possible, along with reducing your sugar intake. Minimise your packet/processed foods and maximise food prepared at home. Focus on whole, natural foods and made-from-scratch meals. Remember that a meal made outside the home has been made with profit in mind, likely using cheaper, less healthy ingredients. A quick browse of pretty much any packet item on your supermarket shelves will illustrate this. Look at 2 or 3 packets of slightly/lightly salted chips/crisps and you will notice 3 ingredients from some manufacturers versus 5 or more from others.
Second tip is to learn to listen to your body’s natural signals telling you when it needs to be refuelled, and when it has had enough. Your body will tell you when you are hungry, and giving yourself space to learn those signals will allow you to manage your appetite in any situation.
Some of my own personal signals are that I start thinking about food: it is some time after that I feel hunger pangs in my stomach. I should qualify that my thoughts of food when I am hungry, are healthy, nutritious foods. For example, if I am physically hungry, I will consider eating a chicken salad, a vegetable curry, an apple with some almonds. If I notice that I want chips or chocolate, my drive is usually an emotional one such as I’m bored, I’m anxious or I’m lonely.
Once you have identified your experience of hunger, learn the levels of these feelings. For example, you might use a rating out of 10 where 10/10 indicates being so full you need to unbutton your jeans and lay down, and 1/10 indicates being so hungry you would eat anything you got your hands on. Once you know all your levels of hunger and fullness, you are then in a stronger position to know when you should eat and how to consume an appropriate amount of food.
When you know how hunger feels, you might start to notice how other emotions feel in your body. Some emotions are felt in the stomach and can easily be mistaken for hunger. It can be easy to reach for food at this time and if we are rushing and not eating mindfully, without an actual feeling of hunger, we may not experience our usual trigger of fullness and this could lead us to over consume.
Give yourself time to identify the difference between true hunger and other emotions that you might feel in your stomach. With this knowledge, you are then able to decide when it is appropriate to eat, and when it is appropriate to do something else to soothe the emotion. Food can only solve the issue of hunger.
If we eat to soothe guilt, loneliness, anger, we are ultimately only adding to our emotional issues.
If you’re curious to learn more about emotions, you might benefit from looking at an Emotion Wheel or a Feeling Wheel. These colourful wheels describe emotions and can help you to name your feelings. Having the words to describe precisely how you feel is empowering and opens the door to finding solutions. As a tip, one of the best ways to deal with negative emotions is through action – talking to someone, doing some exercise, getting busy with a hobby or taking time out for a bath or massage.
When you are able to identify your feeling of hunger, understand that your day should be punctuated by these feelings, cycling through hunger and fullness, as your body churns through the energy you take in and then requires more. Don’t be afraid of hunger, it is natural, and it is there to help you eat the right amount of food. Our ancestors would not have gazed at the position of the sun, realised it was midday and decided to eat. They would have listened to their body and eaten when they felt the need for more fuel.
Think of your stomach as having a petrol gauge that moves with your hunger and fullness. After eating, the needle is up. As time passes, the needle goes down. Ideally, you want to keep the needle from dropping to the bottom and avoid sending it to the top. In other words, going back to the out of 10 rating scale, never get hungrier than about a 2 or 3 out of 10, and never get fuller than about a 7 or 8 out of 10.
Now I will return to my opening statement, weight loss is easy, and give you the qualifier; it is the discomfort surrounding weight loss that is hard. From learning new habits and putting them into practice which takes effort and energy, to the physical experience of hunger, it is uncomfortable.
It can be supremely uncomfortable to be hungry, and we have had years of hearing people from the weight loss industry telling us that if we try their diet, we won’t be hungry. Being told you shouldn’t be hungry when you diet is missing the point. As I said, hunger is a natural process, a natural signal that your body uses to tell you that it is time to refuel. We shouldn’t be avoiding it. Just as we follow the petrol gauge in our car, we should be following our hunger gauge in our body.
We can disrupt some of the hunger by switching from a diet that is full of empty, quick release calories, to a diet rich in fibre, vegetables, protein and healthy fats. These foods fill you up and take longer to digest so this can curb some of the hunger. But don’t be afraid of hunger when it knocks on your door. You will notice that it ebbs and flows, it can feel overwhelming one minute and disappear the next. Get comfortable with the discomfort it brings but don’t beat yourself up if that discomfort is too much for you at any particular moment in your life.
If you find yourself struggling to lose weight, and your nutrition, exercise, stress management, hydration and sleep are all on point, stop for a moment and look at your life. Take a moment to consider everything you have on your plate, all of your daily discomforts that you have to deal with. Is there really room for more?
You might think back to when you were younger and think it was easier to lose weight back then. As we get older, life becomes more uncomfortable with more family stress, work stress, financial stress. All of these discomforts add up and make us less capable, less able, less willing, to voluntarily take on discomfort that we actually have control over – hunger.
You might have a myriad of other discomforts that you deal with on a daily basis and adding the discomfort of hunger, the discomfort of changing your grocery shopping routine, the discomfort of changing your routine around food and meal preparation, the discomfort around starting an exercise regime, all these discomforts might feel like too much on top of everything you are already dealing with. Why add another thing to your list?
The thing is, all of these discomforts, will help you to manage the general discomforts of life. Start with one small thing and once you have that routine, pick another, and then another. Don’t focus on the bigger picture, focus on the individual pieces of the puzzle that, once put together, will give you the bigger picture.
Please understand that I am not, in any way, suggesting that you starve yourself. That has been proven time and time again not to work. I am suggesting that you allow your body to work in the way it was intended, to guide you intuitively rather than watching the clock to time your meals. If you need your meals to happen at certain times, you can experiment with the quantities that you eat – if you notice that it takes hours for you to feel hungry after eating a certain meal, try eating less of it the next time. Over time, you’ll learn to adjust your portions so that your body uses each meal and is ready for the next.
This also makes social occasions more achievable. There’s no need to turn down invitations; go to social events being switched on to your stomach and its signals. If you are hungry, if you need refuelling, eat, but if you aren’t, don’t eat. If you have a family that strongly encourages you to eat, make sure you attend social events with an appropriate level of hunger so as to manage the occasion without offending anyone but also without over indulging. If you have over indulged, listen to your body with regards to when you need to refuel again.
Portion controlled meals are the most effective solution for fat loss. Learning how to work out portions sizes for your individual needs is your most powerful tool to manage your weight.
Personal Trainer Lucy B 