Ep. 86 Practical Weight Loss Tips

Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I'm Paula Parker and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So where I am right now, this time of year, it's spring and spring is amazing. I think, I mean, most people who doesn't love spring spring spring is the best, right, but it also has that sense of, you know, summer's coming.

And for some of us, That can feel a little stressful because there's going to be, you know, beach holidays or just being at the beach or just more skin exposed. Right. Let's be real. So  I thought we would kind of do a back to basics, refresher things that I feel like you need to know things that I really wished that I had known, you know, deck a couple of decades ago.

So some of this is going to be. Maybe you've heard before some tips that you're like, yeah, I kind of know that already, but my contribution here is going to be one to confirm that. Yeah, you already know a lot of stuff. Okay. So let that give you confidence in what you're doing. But I also want to offer a deeper way of relating to it, maybe a new perspective or just a different way of thinking about it that helps you incorporate it into your strategy.

If you're not doing it already.  And I am one of those people that I don't like rules. I am. I don't consider myself a rule follower. Okay. So these are not rules by any means. These are just things that are kind of good to know strategies that will help you accelerate your progress. Okay. So things that are just going to really are back to basics, things you must know, and then whether you decide to incorporate them or not is completely up to Of course, you are always your number one authority on Your own truth, your own wisdom.

No one knows better than you what you should be doing. So again, take everything with a grain of salt. You get to decide you are the expert. Okay. So let's start with the most basic one, which is just to encourage your body to use its fat stores rather than only food, which gets you know, think of glucose for energy.

So sometimes people will say, well, you know, glucose is supposed to be the best fuel source for your body, gives you the most energy. And just what I want to say to that is, it's not necessarily the best fuel source, but it is the easiest for your body to metabolize quickly. So your body will, Want to use food and use glucose as primary source of energy.

If it doesn't have that, then it kind of like, it's like, okay, begrudgingly, I will go and use the fat stores because it's a lot more metabolic energy for your body, right? Your body's not inclined to do that. Instead it will say, Hey. I'm going to produce some ghrelin and make you hungry so that you just eat some food and then I'll get my glucose right away.

Okay. So just think of it that way. If we want to encourage your body to use your fat stores on your body, we want to be reducing alcohol, sugar, and flour. Just keeping that to a minimum. What that looks like for you is really going to be dependent on what your current lifestyle is. But likely if you want to release more.

Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. You tend to develop sort of like a fear around food and it can be really helpful to decide okay at minimum I'm going to do one serving a week so that I Train my brain to know that I can still release weight off my body and have a glass of wine every now and then Or have some bread or whatever it is that you really like Okay.

That's helpful for your brain to see in real time.  And then secondly, you want to ensure that you are eating healthy fats and protein whenever you eat something. So don't eat carbohydrates just on their own. If you have them, you want to be sure that you're getting healthy fats like avocado oils. I think for a lot of us, who have, you know, started dieting kind of earlier on in our lives, we still have this like fat is bad mentality, which is just so not true.

So if you find yourself buying low fat dairy, like low fat yogurt or no fat cottage cheese, that kind of thing, I really encourage you to, Choose the full fat dairy. So long as you are not overdoing it with carbohydrates, there's going to be no problem with that. And in fact, it's going to help your weight loss because you're going to feel much more satiated at your meals and you won't require as much food.

You're just going to feel more satisfied. earlier. Okay. And also in terms of insulin response,  the more insulin that gets released into our blood from food, then the more, the longer we're in kind of like fat storage mode versus allowing your body to use the fat stores off your body. Fat is going to have a lower insulin response, which means that it's very optimal for weight loss.

Okay. Which for some of us who kind of, you know, learned about, you know, Eating in like the 90s. That's going to be counterintuitive. So I encourage you to eat healthy fats. It's going to be Conducive to weight loss. The next thing is in terms of using fat stores is of course you want to allow hunger So hunger is natural response from your body and it's not something that we need to be afraid of It's not something that we need to immediately respond with food Okay.

So if you don't eat your body is just going to use its fat stores and it's not a problem. So I want you to think of it this way. You want to be working with your body. You have some excess fat from previous meals on your body, and now you're using that up. So your body will use them and release the weight.

So that's, that can be very encouraging to know that. You have energy. It's just stored energy from previously overeating. Your body will use that. So hunger is not a problem. Hunger is like an indication that your body could use more energy. You can use that energy from your body, from the meals that you previously ate.

You don't actually need more food. Okay,  the best thing that you can do to encourage your body to use its fat stores is to stop snacking. So that's my tip number two is no snacking.  When you want a snack, opt for tea, coffee with cream, full fat cream bone broth or sparkling water. Something that will help to keep you satisfied throughout the day, keep you energized and hydrated without having to turn to food.

One caveat here is that if you are only eating two meals a day say and you get really ravenous in between those meals then Have a snack have something that is going to make you feel a little bit more satiated so that you can get through your day I don't think that as much as I advocate befriending hunger and allowing hunger for most of us There is usually one time of day when we Okay, so I don't really encourage that if you are starting out, if you are going from someone who eats a lot of flour, sugar to removing that.

Right away, you're going to be, you're experiencing more hunger as you become more fat adapted, you will notice that your hunger subsides, but even then you will likely choose one time a day. Maybe that's the morning or in the evening where you will just invite more hunger in. It's not a problem, but maybe during the day you want to feel more satiated.

So. If that's you, then I encourage you to have a snack. It's not a problem, especially if you're having a snack that has protein and fat, it's going to offset any kind of glucose spike and still you're going to be in more of a fat burning zone, okay? The next is what I think of as a SOS plan for when you do feel really ravenous.

I've talked about this before. If you have a plan for, okay, if I get really, really hungry, then I'm going to eat something no matter what. So this is basically another caveat to the no snacking rule because you know, I hate rules. So,  okay. So if you get to a place where maybe you are making dinner or this is the middle of the day or whenever it is, if you feel ravenous, like you can't even think clearly because you are so hungry, then have a plan for, okay.

what you will eat. This doesn't have to be a full meal. This can be some nuts. This can be some yogurt. It might be some peanut butter and fruit, something like that. It helps to reduce that scarcity mentality that can happen when we're starting to remove snacking and, or you are going to two meals versus three.

Sometimes what can happen is that when you're eating. You're kind of in the back of your mind. You're thinking, well, I have to get all of this food in because I'm not going to be eating again until, you know, six o'clock tonight or something like that, or I'm not going to be eating again until noon the next day.

And then we will tend to overeat because of that feeling of a little bit of panic, a little bit of scarcity. One way we can get around that is just by calming your nervous system down and reminding your brain that if I get really hungry and you get to decide at what point that physical hunger is, then I'm going to have something.

Okay. That's okay. That's going to be in the longterm, much more conducive for weight loss than overeating at most of your meals. The other thing that it does is really prevents all or nothing thinking. Okay. So we can kind of get a little bit rigid. And then that's where we feel really restrictive of like, okay, I'm only having two meals and that's it.

It gives you a little bit of flexibility to be like, well, what matters most is my energy and how I'm feeling and how I'm relating to food, not necessarily just following the rules for the sake of following the rules, this all or nothing thinking. Number four, Drink more water than you think you need.

This is a very practical and very common weight loss tip. We all have heard it a million times. So here's a way that you can kind of think about it. That might help you if you are somebody who  knows that they need to drink more water, but just finds that you don't do it. Okay. So I want you to really notice, just take a day where you're going to drink a lot of water and then have a day where you're not really focused on it.

And I want you just to notice. the difference that you experience. So notice how you feel on the day that you are drinking lots of water throughout the day and you feel hydrated. What you will probably notice is that you have more energy. You have less thoughts or desire about snacking or food. You just feel different in your body.

You feel maybe light, airy. You feel healthier. If healthy was a feeling, then that's how you feel when you're really hydrated. Okay. So when you get in tune with how that feels, you'll be much more inclined to drink when you're not thirsty. So if you were waiting until your body gets thirsty to drink water, you're already dehydrated and you're probably you could be potentially mixing up hunger cues for when you're actually just thirsty.

Okay. So drink lots of water. It'll be, you'll feel better and it will help with weight loss. Number five is plan your food ahead of time. Okay. So this can really freak people out. This freaks me out because again, I'm not much of a planner. I am  in some ways I am, but in a lot of ways I'm not. So like if I go on a holiday I will not plan what we're doing.

And I know some of you out there are, if you plan a holiday, you have like an itinerary and you have all the things planned in advance of exactly what you're going to do at what time you have spreadsheets, all of it. I am definitely not, not that person at all. Like I land. In the new city. And I'm basically Googling things on the spot.

Like, what are we going to do? What are we going to do now? I just don't default to planning. So for me, planning my food  is a challenge. It's does, it's not something that I naturally want. to do. So I've had to do some work on this to make it work for me because I've noticed that for me, I've noticed this with my clients, people who plan ahead of time when it comes to their food are much more likely to follow through and much more likely to see the results that they want to see.

It's kind of like, you know, for most of us, we know the essentials that we need when we go to the grocery store and we don't need a list, but there are some things that we will forget. Like maybe laundry detergent or dishwasher detergent is one for me. I will never remember that. And so there, for some things I really do need to make a list and I make a list that I know when I go to the grocery store, I'm not going to be distracted by what the kids are doing or, you know, probably listening to a podcast.

I will need a list as a default. Okay. So I don't want to always rely on my memory, even when it does serve me most of the time, it's kind of like that, right? So it's like not something that you need to do necessarily, but it's going to really stack the odds in your favor. What does this look like for you?

You may be somebody for whom you will get really specific and the more specific you get,  the more it will help in terms of reducing that mind drama.  You can think of this as leverage. This is how I've kind of switched gears in my mind about it, is especially when you're feeling hopeless, defeated, or lost.

All you have to do is plan what you're going to have tomorrow, follow that plan, and you will be that much closer to weight loss. You will at least be one day ahead, right? You'll be one day closer to weight loss.  It can really be that simple. So just notice how you might feel calmer just by remembering this.

All I have to do is plan what I'm going to do tomorrow. Usually it takes five minutes. What am I going to have? The more specific you can be, the better in terms of what foods am I going to have? Now, quantity is another issue which I won't get into here, but essentially You want to more likely, I mean, it really depends.

It depends on if there's a food that you tend to overeat, that's a really good opportunity to plan ahead of time. The quantity, if it's more like, okay, I'm going to plan for a salad or I'm going to plan for protein, then you can decide for yourself is planning the quantity going to serve me. Or is that going to feel just more rigid than I want it to feel?

And in terms of fat loss, it's not going to make that much of a difference. So I want the flexibility with that. But there might be something that you're planning on having like peanut butter or something that you tend to overindulge. Then that might be something where you're like, okay, I'm really going to set myself up for success.

And I'm just going to add a guideline, like add a limit to how much of that food I'm going to have. I hope that helps with quantity. Another thing that can come up with planning ahead of time is you feel defeated before you've even started because you either are worried you won't follow through or you just know you're not going to follow through, right?

So check in with yourself.  Take a look at your plan. Is it a reasonable food plan? If so, then you might have to experience some negative emotion in order to follow through. So think of that ahead of time. How much negative emotion are you willing to experience?  You might have to experience some, and that's okay.

That's going to require you to grow as a person. That's why weight loss can be a very valuable personal development tool, because it's going to require you to change. It's going to require you to learn how to process your negative emotions. But if you take a look and Any, like most people that you would show it to you would say, that's pretty restrictive and not doable.

It's not sustainable,  especially given where you are currently at in terms of your capacity. So given maybe other factors that are going on in your life, then. Change that plan. Give yourself a little bit more leeway. It doesn't have to be extreme. Again, we don't want to go into all or nothing, but you might need to add in either a little bit more flexibility, a little bit more choice, or you might just say, listen, I'm not gonna be so focused on eliminating all snacks.

Like where I'm at right now, I need, you know, three meals and one snack or two meals and a snack, whatever that is for you.  Number six, don't worry about not eating enough. This surprisingly comes up a lot for people, but I want you to know that your metabolism is not going to plummet from a few days of eating less.

Even if you are eating a lot fewer calories than you would, you know, foreseeably in the future. If you just have a few days where, for whatever reason, you are just really not that hungry, or maybe you're a little bit sick, or anything that's coming up for you personally, and you're just not eating that much, or you just notice that you're just not that hungry, and you just don't need the food, Do not worry about not eating enough.

Your metabolism is going to work with you. It's, it's going to be fine. Okay. Don't worry about that because notice how the fear of not eating enough keeps you in that mind drama around food and potentially overeating because you're not trusting yourself and you're not listening to your body. Number seven, be prepared for some physical withdrawal from sugar, flour, and alcohol.

So if you are going from a time period in which you are consuming a lot of these things, and then you go to minimizing them, oftentimes you will experience not only an emotional withdrawal, but physical symptoms as well. So this was something that somebody DM'd me. So thank you for that suggestion to address this because they were going through this.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about it. When you lose weight fat breaks down and toxins are discharged into your bloodstream. This is because environmental pollutants and other toxins are stored. They're actually stored in your fat cells in that fatty tissue. So what might you experience? What you might notice are headaches muscle ache, some nausea, irritability, even anxiety, fatigue, brain fog, and just general trouble focusing.

This is temporary. For some people, a little, it'll be a little bit longer, depending on how you're feeling. How much you have in your body for some people, it will be less, but most people when they change their diet will experience this to, to some degree. So just know, just anticipate that. And, and that's not a problem, right? 

If you stick with it, you will ride it out. I know that for a lot of people, when they start intermittent fasting or switch to two meals a day,  they will notice some interruptions in their sleep. I noticed this, especially when I started inviting hunger, After my dinner. So after my last meal, I wasn't overeating at that last meal and I wasn't snacking in the evenings.

Prior to that, I always went to sleep with my full, like a full belly essentially, and I just got used to that. And then when I started to experience more hunger, I would. During that time, more physical hunger, just meaning that my body was empty of food.  I had trouble sleeping, but it was only temporarily.

And then it went away. I think it was hard in the beginning, one physiologically, hormonally, but also because there's two components to hunger, right? There's the physical feeling of emptiness in your belly, but there's also the desire of food. And I think that's, those two elements comprise hunger. So if you say like, I'm physically, you know we've all experienced that time when we're physically empty but we don't want food.

Maybe that's because we're heartbroken and we're going through something. We're physically empty and could use the food, but We don't, we're not actually hungry because we have no desire. And then other times we know for sure that we experience hunger, but we're actually not physically hungry, right? But we have the desire for food and we interpret that as hunger.

Okay. So just something to keep in mind there in terms of hunger,  when you start changing your eating patterns, you're going to have some physical sensations. That's not a problem. Number eight. When you do have sugar or flour, you can offset the glucose spike by drinking some water with a couple tablespoons of apple cider vinegar.

Or if you despise the taste, like I do, you can take a couple of Apple cider vinegar pills about 20 minutes before you're eating, or even within 20 minutes after you're eating. I learned this tip from a book called the glucose revolution. If you haven't checked that out, I invite you to check it out. It's been really helpful in terms of when you do want to indulge, just how can you offset that glucose spike a little bit again, don't fall into a trap of thinking, well, This just gives me free reign.

It just gives me license. Now I can overindulge with no consequences. That's, that's not what this is about.  Instead, I invite you to think of it as simply, you know, another tool in your toolbox that is helpful, but one it's not required and it's not like get out of jail free card. Okay. So what's going to matter most is how often you are having these kinds of indulgences, how much you're having of them.

And more importantly, your overall experience with them. So how in control do you feel?  Okay. And then this is my last point. Instead of thinking of food as something you need to budget. So like numbers I'm talking about, like calories or macros, which can lead to more mind drama and less connection with your body and what it needs and what it doesn't need.

I invite you to think of. food in terms of how it will impact your body. So both immediately and longer term. So this way of relating to food really helps you make choices that come from an intention of working with your body rather than trying to trick it or punish it or ignore it. Okay. So think about how you want to be feeling immediately and in the hours after you're eating.

Okay. Okay, so that might be energized, nourished, grounded, comfortable, settled, satisfied. And then how often you might be eating where you feel discomfort that might be caused from a particular food or a quantity that you're eating. Maybe you're experiencing dry mouth, a sluggishness, even a sour taste in your mouth can often happen.

A pressure in your torso, you might be feeling tired and heavy. I want you to think about when you're making choices about food, how am I going to feel immediately after and longer term?  That's going to help you make decisions from a place of, okay, I want to work with my body. I want to what I prize more than anything is how I'm going to be feeling in my body.

And what you'll notice is you actually don't need to know the calorie count, especially if you're just trying to go from not overeating to releasing weight, to eating in a way that supports your body. Now, when you want to become more precise,  I still don't encourage you to go with calories, but for some of you that really works.

And I do encourage you to become more precise. And I think I will do a podcast on that. But that comes more with in general, just. Increasing vegetables, protein and fat and reducing exceptions and allowing hunger and really being much, much more precise on how satiated you want to feel and not eating one bite more on satiation.

And then of course, extending the timeline for what you expect of your body, right? Extending that timeline to allow that natural process to occur without that pressure. Okay. And then of course,  You want to be thinking also longer term, how is this food going to impact my body? So eating anything is going to have an impact on your body one way or another.

If you're overeating, then it's simply going to be stored as fat on your body. If you're listening to your brain, who's telling you that you really want that cinnamon bun, just know the truth of it. Okay, when you say, I want it, I just want it know that what you are also saying is that you want all of it.

So you want not only the taste and pleasure of that food, but you want the impact on your body as well. So you are wanting how it's going to make you feel immediately after eating and its impact on your weight loss goals, your impact on your body. Further on. Okay. You are wanting all of that. So that's fine because sometimes you really do want it But just know that you are also when you say that you want all of it.

You want all the implications of it Okay, you want the full impact of it on your body? Those were my I think nine tips for practical weight loss If you are implementing these and you are struggling, then you are a great candidate for coaching on the struggle. Okay. Doesn't need to feel like a struggle, but if it does, then you might really benefit by working with what is creating that struggle for you.

How are you thinking? And, and how are you relating to your, to your emotional world inside of you that is creating that struggle because weight loss should be very simple and straightforward. If it isn't, you want to repair that relationship that you have with yourself, with your body, with food, and with your life overall.

So that it can be better. It can be a very rewarding and even fun experience, fun at sometimes, right? It's still hard work and that's okay too, but it doesn't have to feel like a struggle. So if that is you, if you feel like, you know, I want to check out this coaching thing, I'm currently accepting private clients.

So feel free to go to my website and sign up for my free resources. You can start that way and, or contact me and we will have a quick chat to see if coaching is going to be the right next step for you.  I know it can be kind of intimidating to sign up for what you think is a sales call like I know nobody wants to be sold to I totally get that and it's not about that.

It's really about deciding for you what your next steps are and I really want to guide you through that process. In terms of what that will look like for you, whether that is coaching with me, whether that is some other program that you're considering or just next steps on your own. I'm really starting to think of those calls now as next step calls.

Okay. So like, what are the next steps for you? The whole point is to help you make a decision and move forward. Okay. So I want to offer that to you. You can go to my website at mindfulshape. com and I will talk to you again soon. Okay. Thanks. Bye.