The ONLY "rules" you need to follow to lose weight

Tell me if this sounds familiar…  

You hit the point with your body where it IS TIME to lose some weight!  So you find the diet everyone is buzzing about and you make a complete overhaul of your eating.  And it totally works!  You lose weight!

But after a while you find yourself missing your old foods.  This new overhaul is getting really hard.  You don’t have time to do all the special requirements necessary to keep the weight loss up.  

Before you know it, you start going back to your old ways of eating.  And the weight starts coming back.  And sometimes you even end up weighing more than when you started!  (Don’t let that happen, grab my 3 Power Questions!)

Time passes and you do another diet to get that weight back off.  You start to wonder what’s wrong with you...I mean, you know what to do, but you aren’t you doing it!  So you try a different diet, hopeful this one will work….

Nobody likes dieting so much that they want to keep doing it over and over again!  Instead, get rid of the strict rules and start using some common sense and your own body’s signals to lose weight.  

If you want to get to your natural weight, there are only 4 “rules” you really need to follow.  There’s no need to cut out carbs, sugar, dairy, grains, or whatever else the health craze of the moment is talking about!  Yes, you need to create a calorie deficit, but if you follow these rules, you will.  Naturally, without counting calories, points, or carbohydrates!

1. Drink water.  The goal is to drink half your body weight, in ounces, of water.  So if you weigh 190lbs, you need to drink 95oz of water.   

   There’s a ton of reasons why this habit supports weight loss, but I will make it simple: hunger and thirst signals often get confused.  It is easier to overeat or think you’re hungry when you’re lacking water.

2. Sleep.  7-9 hours a night.

   Again, a ton of reasons why sleep is critical to a healthy body, but for weight loss, it’s important because it affects the hormones that signal hunger and fullness.  People that are sleep deprived can eat upwards of an additional 400 calories a day than those that aren’t. That’s a pound of weight loss every week and a half! 

3. Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.  On a scale of 1-10, this means most people are eating when they are around 3 and stopping when they are a 7 or 8.

   This is THE habit.  The previous two habits are to clear out the noise that makes this habit hard.  Your body knows when it’s physically hungry, we just tend to eat when we’re not.  And we tend to keep eating after we’re satisfied.

   The brilliance of this habit is that it works whether you’re eating cookies or grilled chicken.  Yes, it is easier for your body to recognize hunger and fullness when you are eating unprocessed foods, but it’s not like your body stops working when you’re choosing Big Macs and Oreos.

   If you’re like most women I coach, eating when you’re not hungry is the biggest reason they’re not losing weight.  If that’s you, grab this handout!  It’s the 3 questions you need to ask yourself whenever you’re thinking of eating.  It will help you stop the stress, boredom, and reward eating that you’re doing!

4. Daily evaluation.  You need to objectively look at what you did right and what you would do differently next time.

   This is NOT judgment.  Judgment is worthless and will make your weight loss journey HARDER!  

   Evaluation is taking a clinician’s view and simply looking at the facts.  If you wake up feeling like doo-doo because you ate a monster bowl of ice-cream watching Netflix last night, you don’t start asking yourself why you made such a crap decision.  Instead, you notice that eating that quantity of ice cream made you feel terrible.  You ask yourself what you could do differently to not feel terrible?  Is it a quantity issue?  Or something else?
   

Listen ladies, we have been hard-wired to beat ourselves up and look for all the places we’re screwing up.  But if negativity worked, we’d all have the results we desire by now!

So let’s try something different!  Let’s get honest with ourselves about our hunger/fullness.  No “rewarding” ourselves just because we had a hard day at work.  And no constant beating ourselves up for our choices.  Find out what you’re doing right and do more of it!  Minimize the times you don’t like your decisions. 

And if you need help with the stress, boredom, and comfort eating, grab this 3-question handout.  It’s gold!

Grab the Power Questions