Permanent weight loss requires unpacking your ideology and rethinking your automatic behaviors.
When you order an entrée and it comes with “free” soup or salad, do you ask yourself if you want a soup or salad, or do you just go with the flow, accept and eat it because it is free? Would you have gotten the soup or salad if you had had to pay for it? If your entrée and soup or salad arrived at the same time which would you tackle? Do you eat whatever is on offer first? And the million dollar question “Why?”. Would you eat those delicious food samples at the store if you had to pay 25c? If your soup or salad arrived AFTER your entrée, as it does in some countries, would you still eat it?
Are you mindlessly putting food in your mouth and swallowing?
Or are you making conscious food choices?
Do you only eat the salad because of the dressing?
Would you eat the dressing without the salad?
Watch what you do – you will be riveted by what you see. Be curious enough to watch yourself and interested enough to find out why you did it. Doing this will put you in the driver’s seat of your weight loss AND your life.
Eating soup or salad may sustain you for a couple hours, but if you are grabbing the most toxic convenient food within easy reach to get you to the next meal, then maybe that soup or salad is not the best strategy. Soup, especially one with a lot of broth, dilutes digestive juices. Does that help or compromise your digestion?
Each new insight you acquire is grist for your mill
What order of food consumption has you eat less, and leaves you more satisfied? Maybe you are instantly satisfied by eating a little piece of organic dark chocolate before you tackle your meal.
What food choices, and in what order get you from one healthy meal to the next, without a hitch or a glitch? Be experimental then track what happens. Tired or sluggish? Bloated? Heart burn? Itchy skin? Twitching muscle? Lack of focus with more mistakes? Edgy and argumentative? Or something else. Zero in on the possible culprits. Have the courage to retest and verify your hypothesis deliberately. People who figure out they are lactose intolerant avoid lactose because THEY want to. And remember, just because a food is an organic whole healthy food doesn’t mean your body will love it the way the media trends tell you it should.
When your choices are personally appropriate (quantity, type and order)
your body will be as quiet as a mouse and as happy as a clam
By the way, that is the goal, a body that is quiet as a mouse and happy as a clam
A screaming body is begging you to track possible problems, rethink your approach and make adjustments. Its screams may express themselves via constant food thoughts, food consumption every 30-90 minutes, a compromised digestion, mood swings, energy surges-crashes or other distractions that keep you from enjoying your every moment. Screams are hard to block out, but the ever so subtle whispers from your body are just as important to hear and heed.
Screams and whispers from my body are as alarming to me as is an unusual noise or vibration from my car. Leaving either unchecked is like letting a time bomb run its course rather than detonating it.
When you give your body what it needs, your body will do what you can’t
Eating healthy for weight loss should enable you to glide from one healthy whole foods meal to the next comfortably, satisfied and with stable energy
Fresh fruit juice has a time and place, but not for weight loss, nor for sugar related health concerns. Eat whole fruit instead. It is quick and easy to drink a glass of apple juice, but would you have eaten the 5-6 apples used to make it? Probably not. Whole fruit offers the fruit fibers. These have nutrients, slow blood sugar uptake, feed healthy bacteria and allow safe removal of harmful body and environmental waste through their absorbing and binding qualities.
Use your love of fruit and a possible sweet tooth to your advantage by adding fresh fruit to green salads. You will end up with some rather seductively sweet experiences if you do. Pears, apples, figs, berries, papaya, citrus or even cooked fruit such as baked apples are amazingly delicious in salads. Or what about grilled fruit? The fruit sweetens the greens, and the greens further slowdown the body uptake of the natural fruit sugars which stretch out and stabilize energy levels.
Get daring, mix salty, sweet, bitter, sour, mild and bold flavors with varying textures such as smooth, coarse, crunchy and soft. Consider all the food groups for your salad – vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy, nuts, seeds, eggs, beans, grains AND leftovers such as roasted vegetables. Have fun with it. How about using plain yogurt with a touch of olive oil as a dressing? Your food choices only need to please your palate. The more elements you have and the smaller the pieces, the more satisfying it is for your brain and taste buds.
Track what you do and what you eat – then track how your body responds
Your body is the expert – it knows
Let your body’s responses trail blaze the way for you
Be flexible like water, not rigid like poured concrete. Be curious. Do things totally differently and see what happens. What happens is neither good nor bad it is simply a response. I dare you to ask for your free soup or salad to be boxed up for take-out before your entrée has even arrived on the table. Go ahead and make the uncommon request that will make you look like that sensitive picky person. Have fun with it. Feeling awkward, looking dumb and being confused not only keep you awake and paying attention, they keep your personal development high, improve your humility and add a beautiful laugh factor to your life.
The grass roots of your body and common sense know the secret for your weight loss success. But sometimes you are simply too close to it to see it. If you need someone to help you step back to see the bigger picture then give me a call. I will recognize where you are stuck and have the questions and techniques to bring the right direction into view.
Warmest,
Krista
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