Yeah, kinda, but that isn’t how you keep  weight off and how you stay at a healthy weight for the rest of your life. Focusing on the food is not going to get you there. The key to not gaining  weight back is to address what causes you to gain the weight back in the first place. And so let’s just talk about that. I will get to specifics about food, but first let’s address what usually causes you to regain weight? And I find that there are three things: usually you’ve used a method to lose weight that was way too restrictive; you felt like it was no fun and it didn’t fit into your lifestyle, so, if that’s you, I’m going to tell you what to do about that. The second thing is that you just can’t get traction; you have the best intention, but your life is so full and chaotic that you can’t stay focused on what you need to do for you to get any traction. And so I guess you really never lost the weight in the beginning, but I just want to address that. And the third thing is that you do find some weight loss success, but then you give up for a couple reasons you either give up because you have a weekend or a party or a holiday or something that you feel like, well, I was really great until this event happened and now I’m thrown off and I can’t get back on. Or I see the success and then I sabotage my efforts with thoughts like, I deserve to have a treat, I deserve to fill in the blank. 

And so, yes, I think it’s really important to celebrate our successes, but that doesn’t mean that we have to do them in a way that actually reverses our successes so let’s talk all about that.  The first one is using a method to lose weight that’s way too restrictive, and it doesn’t fit into your lifestyle. The solution, my friends, is learning how to lose weight eating the foods you love that fit into your lifestyle. I know that sounds impossible and if you’ve never heard this message before, I just want to tell you it’s a hundred percent possible. And a hundred percent out there.  That you can lose weight, eating the foods that you love. The weight loss with the holy spirit program is just one method that will teach you that but I really believe that giving yourself permission to discover what works for you now in this season of your life is a beautiful place to start. And I mean that women come to me with a big bag of food rules from their past. And they’re trying to replicate what worked in the past. What worked for their best friend, their mom, their neighbor instead of just giving themselves permission to find what works for them now in this season of their life.  

And so if you find that you are unable to stick to something long-term because it feels restrictive and that you’re depriving yourself. Well, just give yourself permission to discover what works for you now in this season of your life. And if there’s a food rule that used to work for you, but doesn’t work for you now, then it’s not the food rule for you now. It’s just not meant for this season of your life. The second thing is that you cannot get traction or even make any success because although you have really great intentions and you have a very high desire to lose weight; you are thrown off by the stress and overwhelm and chaos of your life, where you just can’t seem to stay focused on yourself or what needs to be done for you. I’ll be doing a podcast coming up called reversing the overextending syndrome. 

And this is what I call when our lives are so dang full, and that we have overextended ourselves past our capacities. And so it’s very hard to even stay focused on the priorities, especially self-care. But if you find yourself in this situation, one of the solutions is to learn how to get through the ups and downs of your life without stress eating. So, yes, your life can be just as full as it is. You can have the same job, the same family, the same husband, the same responsibilities, but learning the skill of how to get through the ups and downs of life without dipping into stress eating is where you want to put your priority. What you want to learn, how to separate your emotions from your food choices.  

And once you learn that skill, then you will be able to get some traction, even though you may not be specifically changing your food or focusing on your food. What you are doing is focusing on dealing with your emotions in dealing with your life in a way that makes your life feel more simple that the downs aren’t nearly as deep and therefore you don’t have to cope with life with food.  And the third thing that causes you to regain your weight is giving up. And giving up either because you feel good, you’re proud of yourself. And you self-sabotage as w women say, which essentially means you just want to celebrate and you just haven’t learned how to celebrate in a way that isn’t food. That’s really all it is and so it actually might not be a bad idea to think about how you are going to celebrate your weight loss successes in a way that isn’t food.  

The other thing is that you might be giving up if you feel deflated because you see no change on the scale and you say to yourself, but I’ve been doing all the right things. And so podcast, I think 31 before this goes through, what are you doing that happens? So if you find that’s you then look and listen to that podcast as well. I want to let you know that this scale cannot measure your success. So many women that I talked to, like a very large amount of women that I talked to give so much power to the scale. The scale doesn’t lie, well, yeah. I’m not going to say the scale lies but it cannot detect all the progress that you are making. It cannot detect that you’ve learned to get through the ups and downs of life without stress eating. It cannot detect that you said, no, I’m not going to be able to volunteer for that committee until next year, because I’m overextended, it cannot detect that you are getting rid of some of the food rules that you thought were hovering over you and controlling your life. So this skill won’t be able to detect those things and those things are necessary for you to not gain your weight back. The other thing that women give up from is they’re thrown off from a weekend, a party. Some sort of event, where they say it threw me off for a whole month. The solution to this is knowing that you can restart at any time.  

Even if you were thrown off for a whole month you can restart, but that’s not going to prevent it from happening. Preventing it from happening is going into vacations, holidays, events, parties, weekends with a plan. And part of that plan is what you’re going to do at the end to “get back on, how will you resume your normal eating? How will you make sure that’s possible? Does that mean that if you’re going into a big holiday weekend, like Thanksgiving. When we plan for Thanksgiving, part of our planning is on the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday after Thanksgiving, to make sure that we’re taking care of ourselves, because that is part of the holiday plan. That is part of the recovery from the holiday plan.

I’m sure some of you are already planning events, but I also want you to plan for the day or two after how you will recover from that. Meaning your energy. Maybe you will plan some more simple meals. Maybe you’ll have some things in the freezer because you’ll be exhausted  after, just depending on the size of the event. You may have a dip in your energy and so how you can support your future and put that as part of your plan. Okay, so like I said, the more appropriate title of this podcast would be what to eat while you’re learning how to lose weight and not gain it back. Right because the truth is, you’re learning all of these skills but you still have to eat.  

And so what should you eat? I have two food rules that work for everyone that are extremely counter cultural and counter intuitive, but stick with me because I think they will make sense once I explain it. My two food rules are that you eat food you love and that you feel good about.  And the reason why I have you eat food you love that you feel good about is because then it will minimize the effort you’re putting into food choices. It will allow you to have more space to learn the skills that will make sure that when you lose weight, you don’t gain it back. So people will say to me, Denise, I just had a client say this to me to this day. If I ate the food that I love, then I would be eating: bread and cake and fried chicken and chips all day. Really? And I just don’t believe that. I think our brains want to say that but the second part is what you feel good about. Because if you ate bread and cake and fried chicken and chips all day made you feel good, you’d be doing that now, and you’re not, so you do know there are foods that you feel good about. And, you know, we could get into the nuances of, is that a food rule? Am I dieting? Am I not? But friends it’s truthfully coming down to this, it is an act of honesty and connection with yourself. Do I like this food? Is it pleasurable to me or do I think I should eat broccoli? 

Well, if you think you should eat broccoli because we don’t plan any should foods or foods that “lead to weight loss just because they lead to weight loss.” So you just have to be very honest, about why you’re choosing that food? Is this a food I like, do I enjoy this food? Do I feel good when I eat it? And this is a practice that will feel so odd at first. But the reason why I do that and why I always say, please do not plan to eat should foods. I should eat that or foods that lead to weight loss because the truth is at the end of the day. If you eat foods like that, or plan to eat foods like that over and over and over I see women sabotaging themselves that way ’cause when they get to the end of the day, they feel deprived, they feel restricted, they think that wasn’t even the food that I wanted, and so what do they do? They go over, eat the food that they could have planned in an amount that they felt good about. And that would have prevented that sort of rebellious eating that happens at the end of the day. Does that make sense? So that’s the kind of food that I recommend that you do eat. I also recommend that you plan it, and you plan to eat those foods that you feel good about, that you like at the beginning of the day, or when you have a good thinking brain, because guess what? We all know we get into those vulnerable times where our emotions want to take over and dictate our food choices. 

And what you’re doing by this practice is trying to separate my emotions from my food choices. And when you practice this I can’t, it’s a skill, but the more we practice this, the more we can actually tend to our needs, our emotional needs in a way that’s healthy and life-giving for our emotions. And we can make food choices based on what we enjoy and that we feel good about.  And later down the road because you have developed that skill of separating your emotions from your food choices. 

If we want to have greater weight loss and need to manipulate our food choices, we can do that with so much freedom because you no longer are making food choices based on emotion. Now you’ll be making food choices based on the goals that you really want, because you won’t need that food to cope with life. I hope that makes sense for you, so I encourage you to plan your food either at the beginning of the day or the night before. Your brain will want to not make this plan. Your brain will be telling you lots of things like, I don’t know what I should play on, it’s too hard. So let me go through a couple of things in address that, that you can tell your brain, hang on brain this is not that hard; what if this were really easy. It’s funny  our brains want to think  that knowing what food we like is hard. Is that hard? Do you know the food you like? How about how much of that food that you feel good about? Is that hard? Or do you know that you feel good about three Oreos, but you don’t feel good about eight. Do you know that? Is that hard? No brain, we can do this. So, like I said, you’ll plan your two food rules, food you like you feel good about; what we will not plan as we won’t plan anything where our brain says we should eat that. That will lead to weight loss because that’s just not the phase we’re in right now, where just learning how to eat food that you like, that you feel good about to remove one of the things that cause you to regain your weight. And one of the things that will cause you to regain your weight is losing weight in a way that’s restrictive and that you can’t maintain. 

And so you’re preventing and removing that obstacle. You’ll also want to plan for the woman who will be eating the food. And what I mean by that is you typically like to have different foods for breakfast than you do for dinner, then you do for after dinner, then you do for an evening snack. So just plan to eat the food that you like to eat at the specific time of day. I have said this over and over, but I don’t think I can say it too frequently. I really suggest you plan an evening snack that you like, and that you feel good about and so if you really like ice cream at the end of the day, and you like three scoops but don’t feel good about half of the container. Then plan three scoops because planning that three scoops will prevent you from having half of the container. Do you see the logic in this? It just makes sense. This is just called living in reality. Now if you plan one scoop well, what’s one scoop? Is that really enough? Is that really how much you want to have?  

You’re like well no, is two enough? What if I said three and you’re going to be able to feel in your body Oh no, that’s too much or, okay yeah, that sounds good. And that doesn’t mean forever. It doesn’t mean you’re going to eat three scoops forever, but right now you’re learning this practice of giving yourself permission to eat the food that you want and the way that you feel good about. And your brain might think it’s more of a serving “should have”, which means stop that rule. That’s a food rule. We’re not going to plan food that way. I was just talking with a client of mine who said, Denise, I make my plan, but I just can’t stick to it. One example was she was planning two tablespoons of hummus in the afternoon with carrots. And I was like, but is that realistic? Is that really what you want to be eating? What if I said you could plan half a cup of hummus with carrots and pretzels, is that easy to stick to? and that’s really honestly, the measure  if it’s an “effective plan”, is it easy to stick to? And if it’s easy to stick to, yay! Yay because that’s what you want to be eating while you are learning how to lose weight and not gain it back. Because you do have to feed yourself while you’re learning these skills. And I want your effort to be put on learning the skills not on these complicated programs and macros and the counting. It’s just a lot more simple than that. Like I said, your brain will want to be confused and I pose this question to your brain, hey brain if I gave you half a million dollars to write down a plan of food that your kids would want to eat, today.  

This is what they’re going to have for a snack. This is what they’re going to have for dinner, that they’re going to sit down and be like, oh, thanks, Mom. Could you do that? What if I give you a million dollars to do the same thing for your husband? I know he’s going to want to eat this in the morning and I bet he’d want to have this snack at 10. And then I bet he’s going to want to have this for lunch. Oh, and he would love to have the snack in the afternoon. And this dinner, he would be like, oh, cool. And then he’d want to eat this after dinner, could you do that?  For a million dollars, could you do that? Yeah. You know, you could. And so use that to tell your brain if we had a million dollars to guess what I’m going to want today At 3:00 PM, could I guess?  

And then just to make it easier for your brain, I’m going to give you options where you can write down two to three options. Like, hey, we’re going to have one of these things and your brain is like, yeah, but what if we don’t want that? I just want to promise you, you can’t do this wrong.  You can’t do this wrong and if you make a change that’s not a problem, it’s information. But this isn’t everything you guys, but that is what I suggest that you eat while you are learning how to lose weight and not gain it back. And for each meal and snack that you plan, you’re going to ask yourself two questions. Is this easy to stick to? Like that woman who said two tablespoons of hummus and carrots, is that easy to stick to? And the second question you want to ask, if not, what needs to be changed. And she probably needs to say I need to plan more hummus, a third of a cup, a half of a cup and I want pretzels with that too, darn it.  

You see, the goal of this is to help you get off that yo-yo dieting and learn how to be at a healthy weight for the rest of your life. And that’s why it’s important for you to put your effort into learning how to overcome what has always led you to regain the weight, because all of you listening to this I’m pretty sure are really good at losing weight, you’ve done it before. It’s the regaining of it that we are preventing here. Helping you get to a healthy weight for the rest of your life. And here’s the thing is that once you’ve removed those obstacles to gaining the weight back, and you’ve started to eat food that you like in the amounts that you feel good about, that doesn’t mean that we won’t later manipulate your food plan, but at that point you will be so excited to do it and your life will  feel so much more simple, that you won’t be using food to get through life, that you will feel free to start to manipulate your food plan and we’ll do some troubleshooting, but that’s later down the road my friends. But you know, what is not down the road is summer. And you guys, I know that you think losing weight over the summer sounds like no fun, and that you won’t be able to eat the treats you want and I just want to tell you that is not true. I’m doing a special workshop called Summer Slim down where I’m going to teach you how to lose weight, eat all of the summer treats that you want, have a ton of fun and also not caving under social pressure.

Social pressure is normal no matter if it’s summer holidays or just living as a human being in life.  But I’m gonna teach you how to stick with your goals and not cave. So go to weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com. This workshop is May 3rd, 11 am Central, 12NN Eastern, and 9am Pacific get your spot today.