Let me guess what keeps you awake at night!

It’s the same routine every night. As you get into bed, you pull the duvet over you and as you close your eyes and try to fall asleep the same thoughts keep you awake…

Feelings of hopelessness, disappointment and frustration with your body flood your thoughts.

You think back to the chips you had for dinner which were definitely NOT on plan! You fire questions at yourself, demanding to know why you’re so weak-willed when it comes to food? Why can’t you just stick to your diet? Why are you always so greedy? The self-berating, turns into self pity as you ask, WHY, no matter how hard you try, can you not have a figure that you’re happy with? Why is everyone else so lovely and slim? Why am I so fat?

You’re tired of diets. You’ve tried them all! From Slimfast and WW to Slimming World and Lighterlife. Sure, you always lose some weight but it never lasts. Eventually you always get back to square one and feel even heavier than you did before. Perhaps they work for everyone else but clearly you are a lost cause! Or at least that’s what YOU believe. You feel even worse about yourself than when you started.

You are desperate to lose weight and keep it off but you just can’t go on yet another diet. You are done! You are sick of feeling deprived. You just can’t eat another jacket potato with beans (this was my go to lunch when I was a slimming world member) or a burger without the bun even if your life depended on it!

You feel sad at the prospect of never being able to become the healthy, toned, vibrant woman that you so desire. unless you stay on a miserable diet for the rest of your life!

You feel stuck in a vicious cycle of dieting and regaining. Each time this happens, a little more of your confidence is chipped away. 

You find comfort in food to feel a little better and for a few short minutes, you actually feel soothed but then the guilt kicks in and before you know it, you’re eating even more to suppress your rapidly escalating feelings of guilt and resentment!

It’s time for something different!

I have the best news for you!! If you think that you’re a lost cause because you believe diets are the only solution to successful weight loss, then let me stop you right there!!

Contrary to what the marketing behind the dieting industry would have you believe, there is a way easier, less emotionally-fraught way to feel healthy and HAPPY!

To get started, you’ve got to make a commitment to yourself to STOP dieting and START working on your beliefs, habits and behaviours instead. Willpower is not the only tool available in your arson! I will explain more about why willpower alone, is not going to help you win the weightloss battle, further on!

Relying on willpower to look and feel good is not a good strategy!

Despite everything you’ve ever learned and been conditioned to believe, you must understand that dieting is only making the problem worse.

Why? Well, most of us rely heavily on willpower to stick to a diet and achieve weightloss, which is fundamentally flawed! The reason for this is that there is only ever a limited supply of willpower to us and it depletes at an alarming rate. So if your supplies of willpower are low (usually towards the end of the day), you are left with little or no control or inclination to stick to your diet and all your good intentions fly out the window at the sight of the biscuit tin. I’m sure this sounds familiar?!

Whilst the caloric deficit of diets will allow you to lose fat, this is not sustainable long term. The more you do it, the more you are setting yourself up to fail because you are putting unnecessary pressure on your willpower to keep you on track. It’s like asking a small child to hold a heavy pan up above their heads and keep it there without dropping it. Before long, the child’s arm is going to get tired and inevitably they will drop the pan. And it’s the same with willpower. It will eventually give!

So after you’ve failed to stick to your diet for the 5th, 10th or even 200th time, your confidence and self respect dwindles a little bit more until one day you find yourself unable to care what you are putting into your mouth. Your willpower has used up its reserves and you are almost out of control of your choices.

What happens next, will be familiar with so many of you. It certainly was a common stage in the cycle for me;

You begin eating uncontrollably to numb the feelings of guilt and disappointment and you achieve a short-lived hit of joy. You feel good. You feel defiant of the diet that has deprived you of the goodies you enjoy eating and made you miserable. You have taken back control and it feels good!

But then almost as soon as you have finished the food, the feelings of guilt kick in and you feel sick. So the cycle continues on. The diet starts again on Monday and the behaviours repeat themselves again.

Save your willpower for creating new empowering beliefs and habits instead of sticking to a diet!

Most of us believe that we need to focus on the practical ways to lose weight like dieting and hitting the gym hard and we ignore the inner work on our beliefs and the creation of intrinsically healthy habits and behaviours, which is the key to long-term, sustainable health.

Here’s how to get started!

1. What you want to do is to map out the things you’d like to do as second nature which you know will allow you to lose weight and keep it off. For example, reducing your portion sizes or making time for a healthy breakfast. Then get to work on embedding that new habit. The key to this is to focus on the consistency of your action rather than what you are actually eating. That way, you won’t be wasting precious willpower on sticking to low calorie food.

2. The one thing you need to do, above all else is to reconnect with yourself as a PERSON and not just a BODY.

3. You need to release all the memories of the diets that went wrong and the subsequent beliefs that you can’t do it and replace them with thoughts and beliefs that you CAN do it! These make up the foundations to a healthy lifestyle and ultimately a healthy body AND mind!

4. By creating automatic behaviours or habits you will dramatically reduce the need for willpower to make the healthy choices for your body. You will feel free and in control!

5. ACCEPT YOURSELF NOW, in this moment. Don’t wait until you’re thinner/more toned/lighter etc!

Are you are ready to transform your beliefs, habits and behaviours to finally crack the code and lean in to the healthy, vibrant women you deserve to be, without dieting or extreme deprivation?