6 Sep 2020

2 Comments

ending yo-yo dieting

Are you tired of the bumpy rollercoaster ride of yoyo dieting? Good news: I promise it’s not your fault and there is a better way.

The real problem is that the old way of restrictive dieting, calorie counting or cutting out carbs just doesn’t work. I know, first hand. Nearly a decade ago, I was struggling every day with the belly fat that hung over my clothes. I hated the feeling.

For years, I jumped from diet to diet: eliminating carbs; measuring my food; counting calories; taking diet pills; even drinking my meals as juices or shakes. Nothing worked. The scale would move down a few pounds, but it always crept back up.

It was a vicious cycle of dieting, bingeing, and feeding my emotions with food. And always feeling guilty. That’s when I decided no more. I would no longer live like this.

All of the tools and skills I learned through years of trial and error and a formal education in nutrition launched me on the most incredible life-changing journey.

I discovered that I wasn’t a failure at dieting. I simply had no idea how to eat the proper nutrition to keep my blood sugar level stable. I wasn’t listening to my body or separating my emotions from eating.

The Two Main Root Causes of Weight Gain

#1 Counting Calories.
Calorie counting leads to yoyo dieting, a slowing of your metabolism and halting weight loss.
If you struggle with uncontrollable cravings, can’t stop eating once you start, or can’t seem to keep the weight off, you probably do what most of my clients did. You diet! You restrict your calorie intake or limit your food to certain categories.

When you restrict your food intake, your blood sugar level becomes imbalanced, which slows your metabolism! This leads to fat storage around the belly and feeling moody and fatigued.

When blood sugar levels are off, you also experience cravings (especially for sweet foods) and lots of hunger, followed by giving in to your cravings, which leads to overeating (or bingeing) and sending your blood sugar level sky high. You think you lack will power. You don’t. Diets set us up to fail because we haven’t fixed the root problems.

When you don’t know the proper nutrition to eat, how to eat it, when to eat it or what combination will best keep your blood sugar balanced, you risk sending your metabolism on a yo-yo rollercoaster – and your mood, emotions and stress levels go haywire.

As if these physical and emotional symptoms aren’t enough, if your blood sugar remains imbalanced too frequently, the body goes into what’s called insulin resistance, which leads to permanently high blood sugar levels, which can also cause additional weight gain and can eventually lead to type 2 diabetes.

#2 Lack of intuitive eating skills.
Blood sugar imbalances lead to false internal body signals. This means we give in to unhealthy cravings or emotional eating and we can’t listen to our bodies’ cues.

So we eat – out of stress, boredom, or loneliness, rather than because we’re hungry.

Stress causes your physical hormones to elevate, which increases your blood sugar level. Stress sends a message to our body to hold off on functions that are not essential, such as digestion, until the stressor has been removed and our body is safe to rest and repair. This means that those functions constantly take second priority, leaving us more vulnerable to weight gain and disease. And if our blood sugar levels are imbalanced, we are more susceptible to grabbing unhealthy choices to temporarily alleviate the pain of stress.

The Solution. Keep your blood sugar level balanced by eating nutrient-dense foods (veggies, wild-caught fish, cage-free eggs, beans, raw nuts and seeds, grass-fed lean meats and poultry and ancient/whole grains) in the right way. Listen to what your body needs. Finally, heal your emotions. With this formula, you will be able to lose weight without dieting and live a healthy lifestyle of positivity, happiness and abundance.

Latest posts by Jessica Kishpaugh (see all)
By: ,