Tag Archive for Real Whole Foodie

Need Willpower to Lose Weight? Build Habits, It’s Easier!

5 of us snorkelingI received a couple emails this week that I want to share.  The first one is from a woman named Chris who’s struggling with staying on a plan.  Here goes:

Hi Debbie,

I’ve been reading your blog, and other paleo blogs, and trying to follow the paleo eating plan.  I’m starving and I’m miserable, and I can’t go more than two days without eating cereal, crackers, or whatever is on the conference table at my office.  Is this impossible for someone with no willpower like me?

I told Chris I’d answer her in my blog, because this scenario is very, very common.  But first, here’s an email from Missy, who’s been working with me for a few months now. Missy is a single working mom; the definition of busy.  She’s struggled with food addictions and consistency, but her PERSISTENCE is paying off:

I hit the 10 lb mark on Saturday, already…. without even really thinking about it or concentrating on it other than to not eat grains. my mood and energy keeps slowly getting better and better and i’m feeling very motivated. people are starting to ask me what i’m doing and I go off like a crazy person about eating real whole food. hahaha I usually apologize and give them time to let it sink in and I give them the resources that I’ve found as well as your website and just tell them to inform themselves. be a smart consumer. don’t allow yourself to be misled by big food and big pharma. there’s no magic pill. there’s no starvation diet. one of the best lines in this book so far is “your body can’t tell the difference between jenny craig’s packaged meals and concentration-camp fare.”

I want to shout all this stuff from the rooftops!

I made a new dish over the weekend with spaghetti squash. it was creamy pesto chicken with peas and carrots over spaghetti squash. YUM! I made my boyfriend try it (he stopped at taco bell on the way to his house – I stopped at the grocery store), and he said that he would eat it if he HAD to, but that it tasted funny. haha as we were sitting there watching tv, me satiated and happy, him complaining that his stomach didn’t feel good and that he was starting to get hungry again (already only about an hour after he ate his taco bell), so I offered him some of my “pasta”. he said that he would eat it….. and then I got him to admit that it was good. 😀 I win. he ate a whole bowl!

The book Missy is referring to is one I recommend all the time, The Mood Cure or the Diet Cure, by Julia Ross.  She and I are meeting this week to discuss the protocols and science behind it.  I’ve said again and again, the amino acid therapy this book uses to re-adjust moods, addictions, anxiety, etc,  is incredible, honest.

Back to Chris,.. is eating Real Whole Food possible if you have no willpower?  YES!!  I used to eat literally a few boxes of ice cream a WEEK, and I could finish off a box of Kashi or Mini Wheats in TWO days.  And there-in lies the problem:  sugar, flour, and chemicals are incredibly addictive. You have to give them up if you want a healthy body and a healthy weight.  Unfortunately,  your addicted mind will rebel badly if your addicted body isn’t getting them.  What to do?  Be patient with yourself.  You’re breaking years ( decades??) of bad habits; neural pathways and brain patterns that have been nurtured and sustained over and over again.  You’ve got to build healthy habits!

Here’s a little strategy:  (1) You’re going to have to change the way you think about food.  Do the donuts on the conference table call to you?  Then you don’t think of them as sugar/flour/chemical bombs that cause cancer, diabetes, and heart attacks.  Want to dive into the bread basket?  Then you’re not thinking that the high insulin and blood sugar will give you wrinkles or make you impotent.  Think you’ll satisfy your needs hypnosis slimwith Weight Watchers frozen desserts?  Those chemical cancer factories will in NO WAY satisfy your brains desire for ACTUAL NUTRIENTS, and before you know it, the Rebound Binge happens.  Educate yourself!!  Read my site, read Grain Brain, read Wheat Belly, read Mood Cure.  Stop thinking of food in terms of calories; look around.  Where has the Calorie Myth gotten us?  70% overweight, and everyone’s sick.  That whole line we tell ourselves, “I’ll eat this now and exercise/starve/purge/just eat broccoli.. later”  DOESN’T work.  Ever. Your body is a Chemistry Set, not a Math Equation.

(2) Set yourself up for success.  If you’re hoping that you can keep your trigger foods in the house and ignore them, you’re wrong.  No One In Your House needs those foods.  Kids DON’T need sugar, flour, or chemicals, it has the same destructive effects on them as it does on you.  The average disease takes 20 years to manifest.  Just because your kids are slim now doesn’t mean poison food isn’t affecting them, because it is.  Toss that excuse out the window.

You MUST start planning your week; ask your self:  when can I shop, when can I cook, when can I pack?  What can I freeze and use later?  Then plan it and write it down on your schedule.  It’s a mind set.  Go into your office on a full belly, have a great lunch packed, know you’ll be eating Real Whole Food for dinner, and junk food at the meetings won’t call so loudly.  Out running around all day?  PACK!  and not stupid diet food, but Real Whole Foods, and those toxic fast food/gas station restaurants won’t be tempting.

If you’re persistent with your self education, and consistent with your planning and scheduling, change happens.  New habits form. The best thing?  Willpower, which uses up a lot of energy, is quite draining, and completely limited, isn’t necessary anymore.  Do you look at a dirty cigarette on the street and ever have even a tiny desire to put it in your mouth?  No, because you think it’s gross.  There’s no effort whatsoever involved with that decision.  Keep learning, stay determined, and pretty soon, there’s very little effort involved with your food choices.  You’ll just choose delicious food that you know your body needs to thrive.  You’ll become a Nutrient Seeker to your very core, and then the issue of willpower isn’t even an issue anymore.

Chris, and everyone else struggling out there, please don’t give up on yourself.  Real change, Brain Change, takes time. You’ve had a lifetime of hypnotizing by BigPhovernment that CaloriesInCaloriesOut works, and now consciously, you know it doesn’t.  It’s your subconscious that needs work.   If it’s important to you, then schedule a few minutes every day to fill your brain with the thoughts you want to think.  It’s not going to happen with luck; our life is what we make of it.  If you need help with your habits and consistency, get in touch with me.  I can help you understand your Biology and give you tips for your Psychology, to turn you into a Real Whole Foodie. ***** REMEMBER, TESTOSTERONE LADDEN GUEST POST BY MARK ON APRIL 13, TUNE IN FOR A MAN’S PERSPECTIVE ON BEING HEALTHY AND LEAN. *****

Inspiring Success Story; and How To Be a Real Whole Foodie

lunch on beachOh gosh, I love reading my email!  Here’s another great Success Story that will absolutely inspire you:)  I know this woman and she is fit and healthy and looks fantastic.  How eye-opening that even young, beautiful women who honestly don’t need to lose a pound, stress over their weight.  That’s because we’ve been conditioned since birth that a normal standard of beauty is a Victoria Secret model.  Or, if you’re in the fitness world, a Victoria Secret model with great muscle definition and a few slight veins showing through the abs.  It’s awful. It’s unattainable for most, or if it is attained, it’s impossible to stay there for very long.  And…it fills your headspace with worthless thoughts about food and calories and weight and data that are so completely, totally un-important.  That’s what Dieting and Calorie Counting do though.  They mess up your brain and actually interfere with Real Life.

Don’t let that happen to you. Don’t let Dieting sabotage your brain and your energy and your focus when there’s so many other worthwhile things you could be doing.

How do you start?  Differentiate dieting from health; then realize that dieting never works (more than 95% of the time). Acknowledge that Dieting is an Industry, a Business, and it’s business agenda is to make money by promising you the secret to weight loss. ( Can you think of any other business in the world that continues to fail over and over and over and yet makes more money every year? )

I’ll tell you the secret:  Eat for health, and weight loss will be a side effect.  Look at food for it’s nutrient value, become a nutrient seeker.  Learn to cook if you don’t know how already.  Get out a notebook and plan, then shop, chop, cook and pack.  That’s it.  That’s the trick.  You are what you eat.  If you eat crap, you’re going to feel and look like it.  Eat good meats and proteins, tons of vegetables and fruits, lots of healthy fats, some dairy if you can tolerate it, and you’ll exude health.  If you need help with this and want to work with me, get in touch.  It’s not that hard to shift your brain patterns with a little guidance.

(Oh, about the Victoria Secrets mags:  I have 4 daughters.  I don’t let those magazines, or any woman’s magazine, be in our house.  They tick me off and I didn’t want my girls comparing themselves to the airbrushed, starving women in them.  It’s worked.  My girls are ardently opposed to women’s magazines and love to talk about how demeaning they are!  See Moms, we do have influence!)

Now you have to read Mandy’s story, she’s a hoot!

“All the eye opening knowledge I’ve gained from you and your website has TRULY changed my jaded outlook on food…you have no idea how much better I feel not constantly trying to figure out what “diet plan” I’m going to try next. I eat ONLY whole foods when I’m hungry, no measuring, NO CALORIE COUNTING…It’s like I’ve been released from diet prison.  Being in the intense martial arts training I had with a traditional Korean instructor, I was forced to get my body down to certain weights for certain fights and the constant reminder of “lose weight; train harder; eat less” gave me a HUGE complex. I’ve struggled with body image and eating disorders practically my whole life and you have definitely played a big role in healing my mind from that.

I’m by no means a picture of perfection haha but I have definitely come leaps and bounds from the jaded health (aka dieting) I used to obsess over.  It’s all about the REAL health now…I could kick myself repeatedly for the horrible things I’ve done to my body in the past, but I praise God that the veil has been lifted from my eyes at a young age. I hate that we live in a world where no one can see what real health is….It’s just not fair.  Having worked as a bartender/food industry for 10 years I’ve seen it all….low carb menus…Skinny cocktails…fat free dressing….diet coke with rum to watch your calories….HOLY COW…I struggle to keep my mouth shut, so I don’t sound like a know it all, cause I’m definitely not. The way I NOW see it is… “low carb” cheesecake=pancreatic cancer….preparatory binge cocktails..”fat free” but God bless your liver to process it…..and I don’t honestly know what’s worse rum or diet coke…. probably diet coke…If I was stranded on a desert island I would drink the rum not the diet coke.” 

Well, you could use the rum to kill bacteria if you were stranded on an island – I know that from watching Reality TV.  And Jesus drank wine but He never drank diet soda, so the rum over soda is probably a solid choice:)

Seriously though, Mandy puts forth a brilliant statement:  “We live in a world where no one can see what real health is..”   YES!!  That’s my message!! Dieting doesn’t give anyone “health”, but we’ve been conditioned to think of “skinny” as healthy.  It’s not. Healthy means that you have great energy, your immune system can fight off invaders, your arteries are clear, your digestion rocks and you poop every day, your skin glows, your joints move well, you can handle stress, your blood sugar stays normal, you think clearly.  That’s real health.  That’s Real Health.   Eat to support all that, and your weight will be perfect.  Be a Real Whole Foodie.

Dieting Makes You Crazy

future of nutritionAre any of you listening to the free, on-line lectures this week via either Future of Nutrition or the Paleo Con?  They’re great!  What a wealth of information, motivation, and inspiration.   If you want to improve your health or lose weight, you’ve got to change your brain.  To do that, you’ll need to fill your brain with thoughts outside of your normal thought patterns.  If “diet mentality” has dominated your thoughts, then listening to totally different perspectives, over and over again, will help you shift to thinking of food as medicine/information/how we feel/chemistry; not math/calories/our enemy.  These conferences are turning the Diet Industry paradigm on it’s head; I love it!   paleo con

Can you think of one other industry on earth that Fails so regularly, completely, perpetually, and yet is promoted, advised, trusted, and believed over and over and over again?  Every year people spend BILLIONS of dollars on diet foods, diet pills, diet potions, diet programs, weight loss surgeries, and every trick in the book, to either lose weight and gain it back, or not lose weight at all.  It doesn’t make sense:  fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Diets don’t work.  Ever.  One of the speakers likened Dieting to holding a volleyball underwater:  as soon as you let it go, KaBoom!  He also said that when you’re a Dieter, you either have Good Days, or Bad Days.  Who relates to that?? How many times have you said that to yourself: I was bad today. ?  That’s a sure sign you’re in Diet World; you’ve either stuck to your low calorie diet magic foods, or you’ve blown it.  You were either Bad or Good.

Ugh.  Please please please, if you’re stuck in that world, you’re doomed to weight gain, lots of failure, and missing out on life because food, dieting, and weight hi-jack your thoughts. Low fat, low cal dieting also makes you fat, sick, and potentially crazy. Look around.  Look at the evidence.  70% of the U.S is overweight.  70%.

Go back to when I said that the Diet Industry fails time and time again, yet continues to profit (greatly) and be promoted by main-stream medicine as the solution to your problem.  Here’s an except from WebMd from googling, “how to lose weight”:

“You can safely lose 3 or more pounds a week at home with a healthy diet and lots of exercise, says weight loss counselor Katherine Tallmadge, RD.

How to Lose Weight Fast

If you burn 500 more calories than you eat every day for a week, you should lose about 1-2 pounds per week.

If you want to lose weight faster, you’ll need to eat less and exercise more.

For instance, if you take in 1,050 to 1,200 calories a day, and exercise for one hour per day, you could lose 3-5 pounds in the first week, or more if you weigh more than 250 pounds. It’s very important not to cut calories any further — that’s dangerous.”

Do you see the insanity of this line of thinking?  It’s NEVER worked.  Science has proven for years that reducing calories and withholding nutrients sends our body into STORAGE MODE, not burning mode.  Even hours of exercise won’t work, trust me.  Exercise for health, not weight loss.  Besides that, 1,050 to 1,200 calories a day?  Can you say, “starving frenzy”??  I mean, talk about a rebound binge waiting to happen.

When you reduce calories/diet, the body and mind become “stressed” because famine is perceived; when this happens, stress hormones like Cortisol are released into the blood stream.  Cortisol increases triglyceride production, it inhibits sensitivity to leptin and insulin, it shuts down digestion, it prohibits the body from burning fat, it turns muscle tissue into sugar/glucose for fast energy.  When that glucose isn’t actually used to “outrun the sabertooth”, then the body repackages that excess glucose into fat, and stores it in the belly area.  (This is the connection between stress and belly fat.)

I’ve had two emails this week expressing sadness over saying goodbye to favorite foods.  Expressing sadness over anticipated, up coming hunger and deprivation.  This doesn’t have to happen.  Eating a Real Whole Foods/Paleo/Primal type diet isn’t about low calorie, or low carb, or low fat, or hours of exercise. It’s not about small plates, counting calories, putting your fork down, or counting your chews.  It’s about deleting processed foods and eating good sized meals of meats, fats, vegetables, some fruits, some nuts and seeds, and some whole fat dairy if you can digest it.  It’s being a “nutrient seeker”.  If you’re actually hungry, then you need to eat more at your meals.  If you did eat adequately, then recognize that your hunger isn’t “hunger”, it’s just your brain wanting pleasure from the foods you’ve been spoiling it with, or it’s crying for the constant stimulation it’s used to.

That might sound a little harsh, but it’s the truth.  There’s an upside to that though.  Our body, our brain, our taste buds, our neural nets – they’re adaptive.  They won’t adapt to starvation, or actually, they’ll adapt with negative patterns, habits, thoughts, and results, but they will adapt beautifully to a lifestyle that focuses on feeding yourself sufficient nutrients to build your cells, repair damage, fight virus and bacteria, and have normal, healthy levels of neural transmitters like serotonin and dopamine.   You know, before “dieting” became a “thing” in the 1970s, very, very few people were overweight. It’s time to throw off the diet yoke. It’s never worked for anyone.  Quit making yourself crazy, and focus on re-aligning your brain to accomodate planning, packing, and cooking.  Start looking at food, even fat, for the nutrients it provides.  Start looking at processed foods as the toxic chemical poisons they are.

You are not destined to be overweight, sick, or tired.  You can be a healthy weight, unbelievably well, and energetic.  Eat foods that nourish your mind and body.  Be a Real Whole Foodie.