Lose weight naturally

So, the holidays have come to an end finally, and you are ready to slip back into normal life again, and to slip into normal work clothes again… Well, until you discover that slipping into your work clothes is more like squeezing into them. The board shorts and t-shirts that you have been wearing pretty much all day long over the holidays have covered up the truth for you; that there is a lot more to cover up around your waist now than before Christmas. All the Christmas goodies and all the lying around on the beach, in the hammock, and on the lounge has had its effects; you have put on weight. And now you want to take it off again. You want to lose weight. Naturally.

You have done it before… Or have you? Come to think of it, haven’t you simply ended up buying bigger sizes clothes as you gradually, year after year, have grown in size around the waist (and other no-need-to-mention places)? Seriously, have you actually found that dieting to lose weight works? That the weight stays off after you have gone through a bout of dieting? And for that matter, how many of the people on The Biggest Looser do you think lose weight and keep their weight off? Well, according to one of them, who came to see me as a client, just about all of them fall back into their old habits and shape soon after the show is over.

Try this to lose weight naturally:
Eating-Mindfulness and Intermittent Fasting

Are we, perhaps, designed to just get fatter and fatter as we age? Well, possibly to some degree, but surely not to the degree that we do now on average in the Western world. To a large degree the problem may simply be that we no longer have the time, nor the skills, to fully appreciate what we eat. We eat on the go, and we eat without fully experiencing the texture, fragrance, and flavour of the food we eat. Maybe we have to learn new eating habits, not only in regards to what we eat, but also to how we eat.

I suggest that this is so, and that you may find it worthwhile to begin to occasionally practise Eating-Mindfulness. I have not collected data in a stringent research approach, but my observations have been that Eating-Mindfulness practice can make a huge difference for someone who is wanting to rebalance their eating habits and lose weight naturally. [ Read an article about Eating-Mindfulness ]

The current trend in dieting otherwise is the Intermittent Fasting approach, which has been attributed to Dr Michael Mosley, the author of “The Fast Diet.” In this approach you cut down your calorie intake to 500-600 Calories for two days a week. The rest of the week you eat as usual. While I’m not a dietician, and cannot make any claims on expertise in such or other medical matters, what I can say is that I have seen excellent results from this approach.

I can also say, that from how I understand the human being, we are supposedly “hunter-gatherers,” i.e. we are meant to be out hunting and gathering food intermittently, not just go to the supermarket and pick it up in convenient packaging. It therefore makes perfect sense to me that we have one or two days a week when we eat markedly less, even if we don’t go out hunting and gathering so much. Not just for a period of “dieting” either, but on an ongoing basis. I have in fact started practising this myself, and nowadays have a eat-very-little day each Monday, and it feels good to do so.

If we disregard the few cases where weight problems have medical causes, I would think that adding Eating-Mindfulness practice to Intermittent Fasting may be the optimal way to restore natural eating habits, where the waist measure doesn’t keep increasing with time. Of course, there are other factors that need attention too, like your attitude to exercise or some kind of daily movement beyond lifting the fork to your mouth. You can find a few very good points about exercising for weight loss in Helen Sanders’ article “How to lose weight fast: 5 evidence based steps anyone can follow.”

Also, as I often find when I coach someone toward their ideal body-mind-self, (over-)eating is frequently driven by emotional reasons more so than by needs for nutrition and energy. So that is another area to take into consideration if you find yourself stuck on the weight see-saw, or even worse, if you are just continually putting on more weight even when you want to lose weight.

Restoring a healthy weight is one of the areas where I have been able to be of use to many clients in the past, so if you think this year it is time for you to finally get on top of this issue, then by all means, don’t leave it for another year – contact me today!

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