Most everyone wants to lose at least a little weight. But fad “diets” aren’t the answer. Instead, you have to start in a completely different—and deeper—place to find real health.

I recently had a woman come to one of our Wellness Dinner Seminars. She’d been struggling with her weight and some other serious health concerns for a number of years. She was skeptical if anything would ever work for her, but she was desperate for a change. When she left the seminar, she was excited and ready to enter our Healthful Evolutions program.

But a few minutes after walking out of our office, she walked back in with a worried expression on her face.

When I asked her what was wrong, she said that she thought we had a great program but she was going to try to solve her health issues in another way. When I asked what she meant, she said that she’d talked to some people outside (who had just come to our seminar for the first time as well) and they had convinced her to try a diet they’d just read about. I didn’t press her very hard… but I did want to know what she was going to try. And honestly, I was worried she was heading down a path that would not get her to her goals.

“It’s called the Plant Paradox Diet,” she said. “My friends said it’s supposed to work.” I wished her luck and told her she was always welcome back.

That encounter has stuck with me. Honestly, it makes me sad. Why? Because I know she’s not going to find success with that—or any other—”diet.” (As an aside, if you’re interested in Dr. Stephen Grundy’s Plant Paradox Diet, as well as all the various “lectin blockers” he sells at a premium on his site, watch this—and then read this—first.)

All fad “diets” promise only one thing. That you’ll lose weight. And, often, people do lose weight… but only for a little while.

But, let’s actually dig a little deeper here.

Can losing weight help you’re overall health? Sure, in certain situations. But, does just losing weight mean that you’re healthy?

Not at all.

And that’s what made me so sad about this interaction with this woman. She needed to lose weight, of course. But the weight was just a symptom of deeper issues. And the “diet” she chose to pursue isn’t going to help with any of those underlying issues. If anything, in her situation, that fad diet is probably going to only exacerbate her underlying problems.

When you’re looking to get healthy, to be around longer for your kids, to find happiness and live life to its fullest, weight loss can never be your primary goal.

Why?

For two main reasons. First, going on a fad diet doesn’t work to begin with. And second, that’s not how we’re built as humans.

Reason #1: fad diets don’t work

For evidence why this first reason is true, take a look at the following statistics (all pulled from here):

• The average adult American attempts a fad diet four times per year
• One in four Americans give up after less than two weeks
• More than 97% of people gain the weight back within three years
• 65% of people who even “finish” the diet end up regaining at least as much back

From all of these statistics, a couple things become clear. First, Americans go on fad “diets” a lot. Now, couple that information with the fact that we are only growing more and more obese. Add in the following statistic and you’ll begin to get an idea of why weight loss can’t be your only goal:

The diet industry pulls in $61 billion annually.

Why don’t fad “diets” work? Because they’re marketed to us constantly… and then designed to fail. Every time.

Because, what would happen if they worked?

For one, we wouldn’t be, on average, trying a new one every three months. And, what’s maybe even more telling, we certainly wouldn’t be spending tens of billions of dollars on them if the first one got the weight off and kept it off.

Reason #2: Here’s How we, As People, work

For the second reason as to why weight loss can’t be your main goal when considering your options, let’s just take a quick look at how we all tick.

First, know that I have been there… so no judgement! Newton’s first law of motion goes something like this: For people sitting on the couch dipping into a family size bag of Sour Cream and Cheddar Ruffles, something has to make them get up and decide not to live that way anymore.

(I’m paraphrasing the physics here, of course, but you get the point.)

Meaning: There needs to be a reason you want to lose the weight. We need to connect to a purpose to give up the chips. Otherwise, why not? They taste good!

Now, let’s take a look at some of those potential reasons. For one, maybe summer is coming up, and you want to go to the beach. Or two, maybe that 35th high school reunion is just around the corner, and you want to shed some of the extra pounds before you see your old classmates. Whatever it is, there are plenty of (perfectly legitimate!!!) reasons to want to lose a little weight. Nothing at all wrong with that.

But here’s the question: What happens when that event is over? Nine times out of ten the answer is that you regain all the weight you lost and you’re no better—or healthier—for it.

Why? Because your goal had both a time limit and an expiration date. Once both of those are exhausted? You have no reason left to keep the weight off.

By the way, that’s what the diet industry is counting on. They love the short term. The myopic makes them tens of billions of dollars each year.

Getting back to Newton, the way we as humans work is that to change, we need a reason. And for long-term, life-long change to happen? That reason needs to be a big one.

Going on vacation matters. I totally get that.

But it’s not your ultimate WHY.

WHAT WE DO AT THE WELLNESS TRAINING INSTITUTE

That’s really what separates what we do in our programs here at the Wellness Training Institute from every other program out there.

First, we find your WHY.

And second, we focus on every part of your health. Health is more than weight loss. In fact, weight loss is really just a tiny part of it. If you’re ready to make the changes you need to make, and you do the hard work of making the changes you need to make, of course you’re going to lose weight.

But that’s not ALL you’re going to get. That’s honestly just the start.

Instead, you’re going to take a journey that will change you forever. And along the way, you’ll find happiness, life, health, and community.

Going on vacation matters. I totally get that.

But it’s not your ultimate WHY.

You’ll get out of the dieting loop. You’ll have the freedom to know what your body needs—and why.

All without depriving yourself of anything. All without having to starve yourself.

And all without having to finish your next fad diet only to have to start the cycle once again—and feel the shame the diet industry knows will bring you back, once more, with your wallet open.

You need a plan. You need support. You need a guide.

That’s how real change happens. And that’s what we offer.

The post Why Weight Loss Can’t be Your Only Goal appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.

June 13, 2016

“The diet industry is making a lot of money selling us fad diets, nonfat foods full of chemicals, gym memberships, and pills while we lose a piece of our self-esteem every time we fail another diet or neglect to use the gym membership we could barely afford.”
― Portia de Rossi

I’ve talked about this before but, given what I came across above, it bears repeating.

Our culture has hijacked the definition of the word “diet.” It used to mean “what we eat over the course of our life.” But these days, when someone talks about “diet,” they are most likely talking about restricting what they eat, or only eating certain foods. In general, they eat this way for just a short amount of time. And the reasons for this self-deprevation range anywhere from a burning desire to buy smaller pants, to getting their livers looking all shiny and new again.

What we don’t seem to get in our culture, though, is that the second definition of “diet” is really the wrong approach to take. Anyone who’s lived on this planet for more than a few minutes knows that what appear to be quick fixes for any problem rarely—if ever—end up being a real solution.

Faddy diets are no different.

So, as a health coach, I’ve used a variety of techniques with my clients to help them find a diet—in the first sense of the word—that works best for them, not only for today but also for the rest of their lives.

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Here are a few of those techniques:

1. Crowding
The first technique is called crowding.

Pizza lovers love this technique.

Why?

Because this first step in finding your ideal diet doesn’t mess with your current habits, good or bad.

You like to eat pizza. Awesome. You just keep doing you… all I’m going to ask from you at this stage is that you ALSO eat two servings of veggies.

“Wait, what?” you exclaim, shaking your greasy, sauce-stained fist at me. “That sounds like a trick!”

It’s not. Instead, it’s the best first step you can take to find that healthy diet that will work wonders on your body.

Here’s a question: What’s the scariest thing in the world?

I would argue that it’s change. People hate the unknown, and all change is is the unknown wrapped up in a Snuggie made of inevitability. By which I mean: Change is just the unknown being forced upon you against your will.

So it’s been proven again and again that the best way to change is to do it slowly.

Step by baby step.

If I came in and ripped that giant Meat Lover’s pizza out of your hands and hid it in the dumpster around the corner from your house, two things are going to happen. You are going to be mad at me, and also, you are probably just going to order another pizza.

But if I let you eat the pizza on the condition that you first have to eat a roughly equal amount of vegetables along with it, hopefully you are going to partially fill up on the good stuff and not have as much room for so much bad stuff.

So, yeah. You were right. It is kind of a dirty trick.

But here’s the thing: It works.

Because, as soon as you see what eating less junk and eating more natural, healthy foods does to your weight, your mood, your health, and your general sense of well-being, you’ll be far more likely to begin shifting your daily routines toward living better.

Again, we’re talking about long term eating habits here. This is a marathon. This is also the process of shaping you into the type of person that not only gets to live longer, but also wants to.

(Note: If you aren’t into the whole “counting servings” thing, I explain a different way to think about this technique here.

2. Elimination
Here’s the part where I put your pizza in the dumpster.

Or… maybe not!

The funny thing about people is that they are all exactly the same in one fundamental way: They are all different.

And that applies to diet as well. Some people can eat whatever they want, never gain a pound, and live to 110. While others just look askance at a cupcake ad and instantly gain weight. Everyone’s body is different, which means that what works for Sally next door may not work for you.

That means that we have to figure out what foods your body needs in order to run at optimal capacity. Given all the different types of things you most likely eat on a daily basis, however, it also means that we have to approach the problem with a lab coat and clipboard.

So, what we do is this: We take out one type of food at a time, let the body adjust, and then see what happens. If there’s improvement, we trying taking out something else, all the while keeping the healthy stuff involved in the mix.

This can be a long process, and you might not feel great at the beginning, but over the course of weeks and months, the body begins healing itself, and we can identify which foods are causing the problems.

We don’t take all the problem foods out all at once for the simple reason that your body probably couldn’t handle it. As a culture we are chemically addicted to both wheat and cheese, so doing the old pizza-in-the-trashbin trick with everything would put your body into shock.

So we go slow. And we go smart. Like the good little scientists that we are.

Reintroduction

After we’ve got your body reset and running again (usually a few months out from when we started), we can start reintroducing foods back into your diet.

For the same reason that we took them out one by one, we repeat the process in reverse for this stage. Add a food. Wait and watch and test. Add another. Wash, rinse, repeat.

This technique also gives us the ability to really see what’s going on inside your body. It’s also a great lesson in how you can learn to listen to your own body and figure out what signals it’s sending you. Your body knows what it needs. That’s the way it was designed. And so, when you become attuned to it, that’s when the old habits really start falling away to make room for new, healthier ones.

Which is great news for your future.

Wellness is just another way of describing a life lived according to a set of healthy habits.

These three techniques for finding your ideal diet are designed to do just that. And the best way to build those habits into your life is to start slowly, and also, to start now.

The post 3 Steps to Finding Your Ideal Diet appeared first on Wellness Training Institute.