If you’re looking for how to lose weight WITHOUT dieting, you’re in the right place. This is our speciality. People are waking up and seeing the collateral damage that dieting causes and are looking for more holistic approaches to lose weight so they can change how they think about food, which ultimately will change unwanted eating behaviors and help their body lose weight naturally as a bonus bi-product of finding peace around food.
Here are recommended steps to lose weight but without counting or tracking one more damn point or calorie:
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#1 Educate Yourself About Why Diets Don’t Work
This will create a paradigm shift you need to ensure you NEVER EVER get sucked into the dieting world that only keeps you stuck and makes your unwanted eating symptoms WORSE. If you don’t know the psychology and biology behind why diets don’t work, it’s hard to get on board with any other approach to lose weight naturally that doesn’t involve dieting, leaving you caught up in the on again off again dieting cycles. Get involved with anti-dieting resources and books as these will likely contain clinical facts about the negative impact dieting has on your mind, body, and spirit that the diet industry doesn’t want you to know.
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#2 Enjoy Your Food
This might sound like a weird step, but it is one of the most important because dieting causes us to forget that we are wired to like food. If we didn’t like food, we wouldn’t eat, and our species would die off. It’s that simple. But today we get so caught up in numbers and the fast pace of the day we don’t even bother anymore to check in to even see if we are enjoying our food, leaving us feeling deprived, and our mind and body stressed (literally). When it comes to trying to lose weight without dieting…
How are you going to not feel deprived if you don’t even like what you’re choosing to eat daily?
How are you going to sustain your success if healthy eating feels like a chore?
If you don’t enjoy what you eat day today, it’s going to make everything harder, trust me. Be honest about what you’re eating. Nutrient rich or not, if you don’t like it, replace it with something you do.
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#3 Identify and Meet Your True Needs
Emotional eating and binge eating are our loudest symptoms that are trying to get our attention that we are not meeting our true emotional or spiritual needs. From the need to find other means of entertainment, ways to relax or destress, or act on what our soul and gut are asking of us, emotional eating and binge eating get our attention in a big way. When we don’t meet our emotional or spiritual needs, we often use food to substitute, but food can’t fix our feelings so therefore we keep eating, and the cycle repeats itself.
To lose weight without dieting, it’s time to stop and bring awareness to what it is that YOU need. Sometimes it’s not even anything deep, like if you’re eating because you’re bored, find another way to entertain yourself that has nothing to do with food. If you’re tired, how can you rest more? Other times it does go deeper, like maybe you don’t feel heard, need a new challenge, or feel a void because you don’t do anything pleasurable for yourself? This is the time to get curious, and honest. The more you can meet your true needs, eating symptoms will naturally dissolve (along with your waistline).
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#4 Practice Intuitive Eating
Intuitive Eating is a gentle, specific framework that (re)teaches you how to create a healthy relationship with your food, mind, and body–where you ultimately become the expert of your own body about why, when, what, how, and how much to eat. When you become your own nutrition expert, you won’t need to depend on any diet app, meal plan, or quick fix to lose weight EVER AGAIN!
Ultimately, you are the expert of your body. You were actually born with all the wisdom you need to be able to eat with trust, but the problem is simply that you have become disconnected from this wisdom. The framework of intuitive eating (which we teach) helps you reconnect to this wisdom.
One of the first action steps I have my clients practice to reconnect with their body is this one: Shift your intention of eating to feel better AFTER the meal than before you started, no matter what you choose to eat. Can you imagine how things would shift for you if you were to truly explore this new eating intention? It changes eating from “being good” to “feeling good” with food, naturally helping you lose emotional weight around food, feel less reactive around food, which will only help you with your physical goals too. To capitalize on this intention, you’ll find you’ll feel best after eating when you eat when you’re hungry, so be willing to explore listening to your body and relearning its innate, gentle hunger cues that communicate with you when it needs fuel.
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#5 Adopt a Growth Mindset
If you have zero compassion or support for yourself and are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, forget it…losing weight naturally without dieting is not going to happen for you. You must change your way of thinking to be that of a growth mindset instead of a fixed, negative, glass half full mindset. This is literally a non-negotiable MUST.
Your thoughts trigger feelings and urges, which then trigger your behaviors, so shifting your thinking patterns HAS to happen if you want to see and do food differently. What you focus on, ultimately does become your reality, even if it is a false reality. Your brain therefore has the power to destroy you, or save you. You get to choose. But here’s a warning: if you don’t choose, your brain will choose for you, and by default it won’t choose the positive path as that takes more effort and consciousness. Your brain will always take the path of least resistance, the negative path. As in the movie the Matrix, do you want the red pill, or the blue pill? Choose wisely. Here are examples on how to reframe your unsupportive thinking into that of a growth mindset:
Fixed Mindset: I’m never going to be able to do this! –> Growth Mindset: I’m in the process of learning, I’ll get there.
Fixed Mindset: I overate again, see? I AM a failure! –> New Mindset: What can I learn from this that will help me move forward?
Fixed Mindset: Avoiding a challenge –> New Mindset: Embrace an opportunity
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#6 Slow Down
It’s becoming more and more normal to function at a faster and faster pace in everyday living. Great if you love to cross off as many things possible your daily to-do list, NOT so great for feeling at ease around food and weight loss. When you have a biochemical warfare going on internally from being in the fight or flight, many things happen that are NOT in your favor when it comes to losing weight without all the crazy dieting:
- Increased cortisol
- Lower metabolism
- Decreased sensitivity to pleasure (which means more cravings)
- Appetite deregulation
- Reactive vs mindful mindset (especially around food)
- And more…
Slowing down works with your body rather than against it. It doesn’t mean you stop being productive during the day or that you are lazy. Are you lazy or unproductive when you sleep? Absolutely not. If you didn’t sleep, you’d be a train wreck, proof that to be productive in your life doesn’t mean you always have to keep going like the energizer bunny. Slowing down can be just as productive and is one of the most overlooked ways to feel good around food and lose weight. Your body is NOT designed to get rid of protective body fat during times of crises and stress. So do your body a favor and work on your boundaries and slow down a few moments a day. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#7 Remove Toxic Social Media Influencers
This one is pretty simple. Would you go sit into bars if you were trying to get sober from alcohol? Exactly. So stop following all the people or groups that trigger your wants to lose weight instantly using some ridiculous diet and replace them with only influencers that empower you to embrace and nurture your physical and emotional needs without having anything to do with restrictive dieting. This may also include removing the scale for the time being. It’s my number one rule at the beginning of my coaching with clients. Get rid of it until further notice. Doing so puts them in a better mental position to stay focused and tuned into their inner GPS and body. It’s amazing what you can learn when you just give yourself this permission and opportunity to check in.
How To Lose Weight Without Dieting:
#8 Hire An Eating Psychology Coach
The steps above might seem straight forward, but each step has some layers, and what might sound simple isn’t always easy. That’s why my final recommendation to help you lose weight without dieting is to hire a competent, experienced coach that has experience and eating psychology expertise helping others with their relationship with food, NOT a dieting coach. Why try to figure this all out on your own when someone else has already been there and can help you reach your goals 10x faster??
A good coach provides a clear path to success with timely and authentic support along the way to help you unlearn unhealthy habits and food rules faster and more efficiently than you ever could do on your own. It’s not uncommon with our private coaching that we can provide an 80% improvement in one’s relationship with food in only 8-10 weeks, and that’s after DECADES of trying and failing diet after diet!
And can we be honest? We are not the nicest and most supportive of ourselves and don’t do the best job of cheering ourselves on, therefore a mentor plays a crucial role in emotionally supporting you until you build the strength and skills to better support and love yourself, unconditionally.
This is what we live and breathe for, help you get your head straight around food and lose the weight for good, but without all the tracking, weighing, and annoying unsustainable dieting tactics. We naturally combine ALL of these steps mentioned above into easy to follow road maps for you! Here is more information about how our amazing coaches can help you reach your goals and show you EXACTLY how to lose the weight without dieting, literally step by step.
In Closing…
Don’t panic about having to do ALL the steps above at once. Just start with ONE that feels right for you. Just one of these steps is a HUGE step forward to helping you lose weight – without dieting!
