This premium newsletter took 3 hours of writing and a lifetime of sorting through nonsense to serve you.
If you find benefit in reading it, please support the work through a paid subscription, and if you already do, thank you!
I say dismantle because this is incremental work, much like sustainable weight loss.
You dismantle each time you notice an unhelpful thought. I used this method to rewrite my internal script and avoid negative self-talk. It's literally how you rewire yourself for long-term success.
Here are the steps:
- Take a pause. There's often an anxiousness that accompanies self-destructive thinking. Use that thought as a prompt to slow down your actions.
- Get curious and gently interrogate your thinking.
- Align your following action to your deeper intentions.
Any change of consequence is not a one-and-done affair. These thoughts, programmed by the litany of bad ideas we're served on the regular, are often not our own. Yet we act on them, and therein lies the problem.
They become an operating system. In this case, pushing you into diet-brain even if you actively don't want to participate in restriction schemes.
Diet-brain, a term I made up while writing this, is approaching your health, weight, and eating through the restriction schemes of diet culture.
Read last week's edition, 'Is this a diet?'
For example, one of the effects of calorie counting is that it turns you loose in the world to evaluate everything by calories. Talk about taking the joy out of eating!
That becomes how you decide the merit of a food. Not if you're hungry, how much the food's been altered in processing, how nutritious it is, or its satiation properties.
This further disconnects you from your body's signals, creates weight cycling, feels miserable, and makes you dumber–whether or not you're on the diet.
And that, my friend, is an operating system.
The good news is that you can create an operating system that results in a healthy weight, is simple to execute, and you like doing it!
It's impossible to teach all that in one newsletter (check out my upcoming Lose Weight Without Dieting Live for that specific help). Still, you can begin questioning your thinking when faced with food decisions, and that's a considerable step toward deprogramming yourself from diet culture while making headway toward a stable, healthy weight.
It's also a far cry from intuitive eating, which advocates a breezy approach of 'giving your body what it wants.' I've written extensively about why I think that's a well-meaning, lousy idea and did a podcast episode on the subject.
|
The bottom line is that you don't simply walk through an obesogenic world eating whatever if you want a healthy weight. That's precisely what lands you in the arms of yet another diet.
Back to the dismantling part!
Noticing and reframing are potent tools for extricating yourself from weight cycling. It's the very definition of intentional eating.
Here's what I mean:
A sample Q & better Q to reframe your thinking.
Question.
- Does this meal have too many calories? ❌
Better questions.
- How hungry am I? ✅
- How much processing has this meal undergone? ✅
Question.
- Does this have too many carbs? ❌
Better questions.
- How much fiber does this food have? ✅
- Are the carbs refined, and to what degree? ✅
- How hungry am I? ✅
Question.
- Am I eating too much right now?
Better questions.
- What's in this meal that's compelling me to eat past hunger?
- Am I stressed, and would a short walk help with that?
- Do I need a satiating meal (fiber + protein) to calm my hunger?
- Have I consumed some sneaky sugars that are now affecting my hunger?
- Did I eat a sweetened/refined carb breakfast?
How to work with me:
- Learn intuitive, real food cooking–without recipes, gadgets, or hours of prep 🥑
- Apply to the LOSE WEIGHT WITHOUT DIETING LIVE cohort beginning in March
- Take my sugar course 🍭
- Individual coaching sessions (one or three)
It's a myth you need to go into a 'calorie deficit' to lose weight. Or, frankly, even think about food as calories at all.
There are much healthier, joyful, and long-lasting ways to change your eating (and therefore your weight), and I'm teaching them in four LIVE sessions with loads of time for talking it through and community support.
Stop blaming your body and learn to work with it. Doesn't that feel better already?
Click on the photo for more information.
What I'm reading.
I love Pilates, but let's not turn it into a white-lady-thinness cult, k? As someone who also had cancer at the height of my fitness, this piece deeply resonated with me. I had a real light-bulb moment reading about how these ideas apply to health, which will be the focus of an upcoming edition 💡
Help me thoughtfully build this community.
Send this email to a friend. They can sign up here ⤵️
 |
Yours in joyful eating and living,
Rebecca ✌️
PS. I'm creating a daytime retreat at this gorgeous farm. The working topic is using joy as an organizing principle in your care (even when the world is a mess). Tell me what you think!
