What is the best diet?
What are the “good” foods I should be eating?
What are the “bad” foods I shouldn’t eat?
How many calories should I eat in a day?
Do these questions come to mind when you think about losing weight?
What if I told you that NONE of this matters if you don’t have the eating habits to prepare your digestive system for food?
Start with how you eat, not what you eat, and you will build new weight loss habits to achieve your healthy weight.
Weight loss is never just about the food
Did you know that digestion starts in your brain?
When you smell food, it triggers your brain to tell your mouth to get ready. You start to salivate, which tells your gut that food is on the way! Have you ever gone to a venue where they sell popcorn, burgers, or donuts and suddenly you have to have it, even if you just ate? This is your gut-brain connection at work.
As a healthy habits lifestyle coach, I help you focus on your eating habits.
Weightloss begins with digestion
How your digestion process works is important because this is when your brain determines whether to use the food for energy or to store it as fat.
Here’s how digestion works:
Ingestion: This is the process of smelling food, thinking about food, and your mouth watering with saliva to get ready for the taste!
Chewing: This is the critical step often missed as you tend to eat distracted and on the run. You have become accustomed to the habit I like to call the chew, chew, swallow method. Chewing signals your brain to create the enzymes in your gut for the proper breakdown of the food.
Your gut: The food is now in your small intestine, which is now communicating with your brain and liver to know where to send the nutrients, which are broken down, and used for energy, growth, and cell repair.
Most of the nutrients in your food are absorbed here, and enter your bloodstream. Then special cells carry the simple sugars, amino acids, and some vitamins to the liver.
Your liver stores, processes, and delivers nutrients to the rest of your body when needed for fuel. Any sugar that your body doesn’t use for fuel is converted into fat and stored in your liver.
A calorie is not just a calorie; it’s how you digest that counts
Proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, and water are the basic human needs for healthy function. These nutrients are all sorted in this digestion process:
- Proteins: break into amino acids, which are compounds you need for functions such as building proteins, hormones, and neurotransmitters.
- Fats: break into fatty acids that function to store energy and fuel the cells when glucose isn’t available.
- Carbohydrates: break into simple sugars that produce a spike in blood glucose, and provide the body with a short-lasting source of energy. This is why you need to eat carbs!
In the The Ultimate Food Reset Bootcamp and the Weight Loss for Life Transformation Program, I’ll help you create habits of choosing fiber-rich foods that have slow carbs. By pairing those slow-carb foods with healthy fats, and adding protein to slow down the sugar absorption, you’ll avoid the blood sugar spike which causes an insulin surge, leaving you on a sugar rollercoaster.
You may have become accustomed to eating foods that are high in processed carbs. In that case, the sugar that your body doesn’t use for energy is converted into fat and stored in your cells. Let’s change that.
Eat when you’re hungry.
This is a life-changing habit that requires a lot of attention. You wouldn’t head to the gas station for gas if your tank was full, but you overfill your body every day.
Remember how just the smell of the burgers, donuts, and popcorn makes you crave it, even when you are not hungry?
This is a habit you have created by acting on the digestion signal every time you smell tempting food, rather than relying on your hunger signal. Your brain loves pleasure and you have trained your brain to eat just when smelling food.
As a healthy habit lifestyle coach, my 90-day program works to retrain your brain. Identifying true hunger from emotional hunger is hard, and we’ll work on it together.
Today food is abundant, fast, and easily available. Drive-thrus are everywhere, meals are oversized, and you can smell the food in the air when you drive by. This is no mistake, and the fast-food places depend on this to get you to drive thru and make a purchase.
Do you know when you are truly hungry?
Hunger is a natural cue that lets you know your body needs nourishment. When you ignore your hunger signals it sets you up to overeat and make poor choices. Over time, denying these signals from years of dieting dulls them so you become unaware until you are ravenous and ready to eat anything in sight.
Most of you know the typical stomach growling cue, or maybe a headache. But if your signals are dulled look for these signals:
- Fatigue
- Shakiness
- Brain fog
- Gas
- Bloating
- Belching
When you connect to your cues you are creating a connection of nurture, nourishment, and self-care. This connection, combined with habits to handle stress and eating, will strengthen your decisions, making it easier to eat for better health, keeping you out of the drive thru.
Stop before you’re full.
How do you stop before you are full? This is where you may need practice and balance. The habit of adding food, rather than subtracting, is the first step to building the feeling of satiation and fullness.
Truth is, foods do not have moral value, they’re neither good or bad. The diet culture has convinced you of that. The diet mentality has taught you to subtract food from your plate that’s bad, because of too many calories or carbs.
The fact is, food does differ nutritionally and that affects how it’s metabolized and nourishes your body. When you balance your plate, adding protein, healthy fat and fiber, you will be satiated and not need to snack or overeat.
The habit I share with my clients is to visualize a gas gauge in your car. You want to try to stop before you get to the full signal, because this translates to overfull, and stuffed.
Overeating has become the norm, especially when you come from a diet mindset and have been frequently depriving yourself of foods you deem as “bad”.
Food is not cheap and when you waste it, you feel guilty. When I was having this conversation with my client, Linda, she told me a line she learned from Weight Watchers years ago and it has stuck with me: “Let it go to waste before it goes to your waist!”
Habits for not wasting food and a having plan in place can assure you that
food will never go to waste or your waist!
Have you ever had a meal where you ate it all, then later felt so stuffed? That’s because you ate up to the full signal. You were not designed to hold that much food in your stomach and digestive system. Eating to ¾ full will satiate your needs, and leave you feeling happy and energetic and at your healthy weight!
Can you imagine, going anywhere in the world, tasting everything, because you have new healthy habits that allow you eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full!
This is the magic sauce that makes my no-diet approach different than other healthy lifestyle programs.
My clients add these habits to their daily lives and achieve their happy weight and live a healthier lifestyle.
Are you READY for the NO-DIET APPROACH?
You can start to change the way you think about food in
the Ultimate Food Awareness Reset Bootcamp-On Demand
“Healthy begins with a relationship between you and how you nourish your body.”
Ready to take the first step to build healthy habits?
Schedule a free weightloss breakthrough session
