.png){kind=logo}
The #1 Issue That Keeps You From Reaching Your Ideal Body
Why do you think 95% of Weight Watchers participants regain the weight they lost?
Why do you think people who start a diet in January are no longer following it by the end of February?
There are many challenges when we go on a diet.
What do you do when you want to lose weight?
You follow a one-size-fits-all approach that you saw somewhere. Your friend did well on a juice cleanse. Your favorite celebrity killed it with spinning classes. Your boss went vegan and you're on it now too. You do well for a while, but then reality hits. You have cravings, you're hungry, you are tired and you feel it's getting one-sided or boring. Before you know it, you cave in and have an indulgence that went way overboard. You beat yourself up for it and head right back to your old habits that you wanted to change in the first place and quit. Sound familiar?
I spent years of my young adult life doing this rather exhausting procedure. Until one day I could not stand the pain of yo-yo dieting, deprivation and self sabotage with the guilt anymore. I decided to take massive action by studying psychology and nutrition, taking self development courses, learned about what makes humans change and decided to tackle things in a different way, stopped the all-or-nothing mindset and started learning about balance in food, in my mind and in my life. Now I can spot the women a mile away who go through the same story I went through. It's become my passion and my mission to stop their suffering and instead empower women to feel happy in their bodies.
Just like my client, who put in the work to change her mindset big time:
"Ariane,
Thank you so much for your entry into my life and guidance during this brief but profound 6 week journey we've taken together.
Before we met, I spent more than a decade being a victim to control and body image issues around food (and sometimes alcohol and cigarettes). I had never been able to transcend the relationship I had developed with carbohydrates - sugar in particular - using them to simultaneously reward and punish myself, caught in the cycle of indulging and then hating myself. I felt I was a helpless victim to the ensuing mood swings, exhaustion/fatigue, ever-growing band around my midsection, guilt, and extreme thinking. Even writing about it now makes me feel sadness and compassion for my former self.
But I'm also awe-struck and appreciative that I was my "former" self and that I can make such a claim.
Entering your program seriously changed everything for me. While I had done therapy, spiritual coaching, acupuncture and wellness coaching for years, and acknowledge that they were crucial for me to get to a place where I was even prepared to let go of the emotional crutches I had formed with food, alcohol, etc., I think nutrition and understanding the body's chemical reaction to food was a fundamental gap in my work.
Investing financially - and more importantly - checking in with you on a daily basis, sometimes nervously because I knew I hadn't practiced the healthiest habits - forced me to be accountable. Gradually but surely, through experimenting different food types based on your recommendations, talking about my choices with you, and decreasing the quantity/frequency of eating based on emotion, I was able to wean myself off of my old habits and develop new patterns to set myself up for long-term success. It also helped to see the results in the mirror - my skin was clearer and I had a glow - and to feel them - I was so much less moody and tired. Fights decreased with everyone around me. That and I received positive feedback from my friends and loved ones - who complimented me on my physical and emotional progress.
Now that I'm on the other side of the bridge, I am awed to proclaim that I am no longer a prisoner to carbohydrates, and am 85-90% of the way to not eating based on emotions.
I want to thank you a million times over for helping me progress so much in so little time, I will always be grateful and never forget.
With warmth and gratitude, Maya"
The thing with most diets out there is that they prescribe one approach for everyone. Take, for example, the Whole 30 Diet. You cut out all grains and dairy, limit your fruit and focus on protein and veggies. Makes complete sense, right? It works. But, does it work for everyone? All 8 billion people on this planet?
Would it have worked for the woman who sent me this email? No, of course not. We are all as unique as our fingerprints. Not just genetically, but also our personalities differ, our lifestyles, our activity levels, our health and our mindsets are all uniquely different.
So, why in the world would you then expect that one approach would work for everyone? Diets give you ONE approach to lose weight. The rest is up to you and we all know that compliance to diets is downright awful. I mean, for how many days can you eat just protein and veggies without craving something different or wanting to break out of the mold as a rebel?
The issue that makes or breaks a diet or nutritional lifestyle (as I prefer to call it), is how you handle the challenges that come your way. There are many:
Social events and eating out
Stress and sleep deprivation
PMS cravings
Hormonal changes, such as menopausal issues, being a new mom, breastfeeding,
Emotional eating
Appetite spikes
Diet books don't teach you how to move through them unscathed. Instead we feel bad and guilty if we can't keep it together and lose it over the weekend brunch margaritas.
If you want to make lasting changes, you have to understand how to manage your appetite and your cravings, how to manage your energy and how to eat based on different situations (hormonal changes during the month, stress, increased or decreased exercise, cravings, etc). If you apply the same approach day in and day out, it's no surprise that you won't last.
If you learn to understand your body's signs and what it needs day in, day out, you can then make the proper choices. You'll use the structure of a diet and make it uniquely yours by being flexible with it. It's the scariest thing for someone who is a perfectionist and aims for the 100% perfection approach, but it's the thing you must work through and transform in your mind in order to see your body go from so-so to badass.
Whenever I have my nutrition clients come back for their follow-ups in my office, we repeat starting measurements. I want to see where they have lost inches (it tells me if they worked with their hormones or not, if they were stressed, if they lowered their carbs or not, and if they strength trained according to the workout plans I designed). I also check for body fat changes as that tells me so much more than the number on the scale. And, I do a full symptom check-up to ensure they haven't just reached their fitness goals, but also their health goals and their digestion, sleep, energy, cravings, appetite, energy, and blood work is in order. I always ask them how much effort they put in nutritionally on a scale from 1-100. Guess what their answer is! No, it's not 100. It's somewhere around 80%. How is that possible? Well, they accounted for 20% of flexibility and put in 80% of consistent effort. That's what it takes.
What happens to the perfectionists that aim for 100% perfection? They lose it quickly and deal with binges or emotional eating episodes, guilt and beating themselves up because who can be 100% all the time without feeling as if the goal is just not achievable! They quit and go back to 0 and at 0% effort zero change happens.
However, in order to see great changes, people need to first understand the impact foods have on their appetite, their cravings and energy. And that's different for everyone, even though the research is quite clear on it. It's not something that a diet book will teach you, but it's the missing link between you being a yo-yo dieter and you eating like a badass athlete.
Now, I hope you're starting to see that physical change is about more than dieting. It's about understanding nutrition science and your own relationship to food and how all that applies to your unique lifestyle. That's what the woman in the email did. She did the work and we changed the operating system she was on and that in turn changed everything. Is she done with the work? No, by far not. Health and fitness are a life-long effort. She will continue to practice what she learned, but it will get easier with all the tools she has learned.
The reason I created the Slim & Strong Online program is because when people have the knowledge, they can take matters into their own hands instead of relying on others for guidance. I teach my participants what works, so you can stop following a one-size-fits-all approach.
The program is 6 weeks long
and starts January 10th.
It includes a focus on nutrition, effective workouts, mindset coaching, metabolism science and female hormone management, among many other topics that will create a life-long lifestyle change.
REGISTRATION is NOW open
Capacity capped at 100 participants.
Comments