Why is the fear of losing weight, and then gaining it right back, so overwhelming? If that’s been your pattern in the past, like the majority of the population, then your fear is understandable and legit! If you can say that you’ve never fallen victim to a yoyo diet, you’re one in a million and should probably play the lottery! Heck, there’s not many of us that aren’t currently considered, at this very moment, to be a serial yoyo dieter.
Do you start planning out your New Year’s resolution diet, even before Christmas arrives, aware of the inevitable gain that comes at the end of every year? Do you have a big clothes section, and a small clothes section in your closet? If your answer is yes, keep reading.
In all fairness, holidays aren’t the only times that we brace ourselves for the aftermath of eating gone wild. We lose weight to look great for vacation, all the while anxiously anticipating fancy dinners out, and the all you can eat buffets that will last for a solid week straight. By Gosh, you worked hard to fit in those jeans and you deserve every dessert on that smorgasbord right? On the flight back home, we hide our unbuttoned jeans with an oversized souvenir sweatshirt. Big sigh here!
It can be disappointing because an occasional break from the rat race of life should be a necessary requirement! Vacation, holidays, celebrations with friends and family, and of course delicious food is part of what makes life so great! If only the dang effort of dieting again, and the guilt afterwards, wouldn’t play so bad on our emotions!
What if it didn’t have to be like this? What if you knew that you could go on vacation and love the buffet without guilt, or enjoy a week of Christmas cookies without struggling to drop the extra pounds that most people fight to shake off? This is starting to sound like an infomercial, but it’s really not… Promise!
Here’s the catch. In order to even think about splurging, without the stress of fat gain, you need to prepare your body, way ahead of time, with proper nutrition. The right nutrition, that is working for you, instead of against you will allow a ton of beneficial things to happen within your body, and help you process the occasional, not so healthy, food indulges, that we all love to eat.
What would happen if you tried to play a dusty, vintage guitar that you came across in an old leaky barn? For one, you’d be lucky if it still had strings. For two, if it did have strings, it would probably be impossible to recognize the tune that you’re trying to play, without spending a lot of time adjusting the instrument to the correct pitch, if it’s even tunable. After the rats chewed on it, and the rain dripped on it, it might need a repair expert, right?
If you haven’t been consistent with taking care of your body over the years, and you now have a history of health issues and a list of yoyo diets on your resume, you can think of your body like that old guitar.
The busted guitar strings represent the different types of hormones that may be off balance, such as, the thyroid hormone, which helps in controlling body metabolism. You might have unbalanced levels of estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol. All of these can contribute to the control of weight gain or weight loss and effect the body to a great degree.
Each one of the guitar tuning keys, that need repair, represent a depleted organ. Let’s pick on the liver for instance.
Did you know organs can become depleted without proper nutrients?
Without healthy liver function, your body is unable to detox properly, or filter blood coming from the digestive tract to work together with other organs to absorb and process food efficiently.
The guitar sound hole that’s clogged with leaves, is like your brain, which is often in a fog of clog when you’re eating poorly. Your brain is the most important organ, but when its internal communication is in a state of survival conflict, with the rest of your body, it can’t possibly think with clarity.
There’s no way that guitar could be played at a concert today. It’ll take some TLC before it’s paint is flame worthy again. However, if it hasn’t reached a state of decay that’s irreparable, a capable repairman can bring it back to it’s glory. The same effort is needed to optimize full body function in a body that hasn’t had its nutritional needs met, in a long time.
In a state of disarray, the body can’t utilize all foods correctly. When you’re desperate for proper nutrients, and enough of them, your body can’t convert all foods into usable fuel because of the depletion of essential body enzyme production. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a person who doesn’t eat enough food or someone who eats to much of the wrong food. Without all energy making cycles functioning properly, it won’t be possible to produce usable fuel out of all everything you consume.
When you eat a balanced, “clean” diet, your health will flourish and your body will actually start to correctly tune itself, just like that newly repaired guitar. Your body function performance will leap to a different level, as it starts to recognize the tune, until all of your parts work symbiotically, like a well tuned instrument. As long as you haven’t caused permanent damage, your hormones will balance out naturally, and your metabolism will kick into high gear. Plus, things like your organ volume and bone density will be restored, because your body won’t be struggling for the vitamins, minerals and nutrients it desperately needs. You’re ready for the concert and an occasional splurge!
In this state of high function, the body doesn’t freak out when you splurge. Once you’ve become accustomed to utilizing high amounts of nutrients from your daily diet, you’re able to handle a variety foods for a short period of time. Once healthy, the body will be able to detoxify more of the elements in processed foods, and actually use extra fats and less desirable food for fuel, among a plethora of other things without putting enough stress on your system to raise that ominous body failure shut down flag.
This is not to say that you won’t gain weight from a splurge. You might, but the weight won’t stick like it used to. Most of the time, when we splurge, we choose foods that have yummy additives in them that cause inflammation. The body will temporarily inflame for a day or two, showing a higher number on the scale, but once you resume eating clean, the water weight will drop. It’s very important that you realize that there is a difference between fat gain and weight gain. Weight gain from inflammation is just a temporary body response that quickly dissipates once you resume a clean diet. When your body is functioning at an optimal level, you won’t store as much body fat during that occasional splurge.
The benefits to functioning at this level of health are huge! Unfortunately, all good things do come to an end, so remember that there is a limit to splurging. Typically, the average healthy person can get away with about a week of splurging. That is, IF and only IF, you’ve established a solid lifestyle of “clean eating.” Anything beyond that will cause the body to start tweaking in the tune department.
Before you start a nutrition plan, it will help to understand, just what level of stress your body is currently experiencing and in which areas your health needs improvement. A great place to start is with bloodwork. Bloodwork can reveal a tremendous amount of helpful information which can be incorporated into a well rounded nutrition plan, optimizing health and weight loss results. Read more about bloodwork incorporation here.
Jumping into a nutrition plan without knowing your current state of health, is like painting that old guitar without fixing anything else. You need to start at the root of the issue, repairing the each of the parts until that guitar not only has a new fire engine flame on the front, but it also sounds incredible, and is now worth a mint. .
Moral of this blog is to not give up hope. With the right knowledge, direction and a skilled repairman, anything is possible, even for us humans!
