BEE #129: The ONE Thing NOT To Do When You Want to Lose Weight

In this episode of the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast, listen as I challenge the traditional approach of changing one's diet to lose weight. This method is counterproductive and sustains a cycle of weight loss and gain without addressing the underlying issues. 

I discuss how the brain's resistance to change and the creation of desire can sabotage weight loss efforts. Instead, I advocate for understanding the emotional reasons behind overeating and developing a healthier relationship with food and oneself.  By focusing more on the 'why' rather than the 'what' we eat, I believe individuals can achieve sustainable weight loss without the need for drastic diet changes.

If you want to learn more about a non-diet approach to weight loss, get my FREE Stop Dieting Guide. Go to www.kristinjonescoaching.com and click the button to receive my Stop Dieting Guide. 

00:00 Introduction to Emotional Eating and Weight Loss

01:05 The Counterintuitive Approach to Weight Loss

02:03 Why Changing Your Diet Doesn't Work

02:53 Understanding the Brain's Role in Eating Habits

06:02 The Power of Desire and Its Impact on Diet

09:51 Learning to Manage Emotions for Sustainable Weight Loss

13:54 Conclusion and Invitation to Learn More

Connect with me online:

1. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/breakthroughemotionaleating/
2. You Tube channel, Kristin Jones Coaching: https://www.youtube.com/@KristinJonesCoaching44
3 . Website: https://www.kristinjonescoaching.com

If you want to learn more about a non-diet approach to weight loss, get my FREE Stop Dieting Guide. Go to https://go.kristinjonescoaching.com/stop-dieting-guide

Needing more specific and direct support for your emotional eating and overeating? Check out my online course, Stop Dieting Start Feeling, and my personalized coaching program, Breakthrough To You.

If you found this episode helpful, don't forget to leave a review on the platform you used to listen and share it with your friends on your Instagram stories. Also, be sure to follow me on Instagram @breakthroughemotionaleating, and don't hesitate to slide into my DMs to share your thoughts and feedback. Your support means the world!

Transcript

0:04

Do you want to lose weight but are tired of the restrictions and deprivation that accompanies a diet? Does food provide you comfort when you are lonely, bored, angry, or sad? If so, you are in the right place. My name is Kristen Jones, and I'm a life coach specializing in emotional eating and weight loss. And I'm also a lifelong emotional eater. I want to provide you with information, motivation, and support so you too can learn to manage your emotions and thoughts and develop a healthy relationship with food and yourself. Welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. Hi, and welcome to the Breakthrough Emotional Eating Podcast. My name is Kristen Jones, and thank you so much for joining me this week. Now, I am going to say something that is going to be this, the topic of this podcast is going to be something that so many people will completely disagree with. And in fact, it almost seems to be counterintuitive and go completely against. What we have always been told about how to lose weight. I'm going to ask you as a podcast listener and as somebody who is possibly watching this recorded video on YouTube, when you try to lose weight, do you change your diet? And I'm going to say every, almost every circumstance, in every situation, a person is going to say yes, of course I change my diet. That's what you do when you try to lose weight, is you change your diet. I'm going to counter that and I am going to say that actually is the worst thing that you can do if you want to lose weight and you want to keep the weight off for good. Now, if you just want to keep going back and forth and just bounce back and, gain five pounds, lose five pounds, go back and forth and do that whole game all the time, you can, you absolutely can do that. But there is a different way. To lose weight. And I'm gonna be honest and say that changing your diet is not the way to do it. So why on earth would I say that? Why? What would be the, what would be the premise and what would be the rationale for why I why? I would say that you should not change your diet if you wanna lose weight for good. There, there are a number of reasons. And the first is our brain is so sensitive and it always knows exactly when things are different. When we start doing things differently, our brain is immediately signaled and it gets this little red flag alert that like, Oh, they're doing something different. We need to be, we need to be prepared for something bad to happen because your brain likes status quo. It likes things to be exactly the way it's always been from, from however long you've been doing something, it gets used to the way you do things. And then that becomes the norm and that becomes the routine. And when you start doing things differently, your brain becomes immediately aware that things are different. And again, that's a protective, it's a protective and it's a safety mechanism that we have to keep ourselves safe. But what happens is your brain senses, if you decide, if you have been eating McDonald's, let's use that for example, if you are a person who eats McDonald's and you've been eating McDonald's on a regular basis. And all of a sudden you're going to eat salads all the time. Your brain. is going to become very aware that there is something dramatically different going on, that you are making one, that you're having different thoughts, but that you're also doing things in a very different way. And what that does is that tells your brain, okay, there's a problem. There's something going on. And what your brain will do is it will fight so hard for you to go back to the status quo that you have already established. And so you will start to have cravings. You will start to think about food all the time. You will start to just desire that food so much more. We're going to talk about desire in a minute. Your brain does that because it wants to, it wants you to stay where you are. It doesn't like dramatic changes. And so when anyone thinks about losing weight, that's the immediate thing they do. Tomorrow, I'm going to start over and I am going to start eating better and I'm going to do this and that, and it's going to be great. And in their minds and in their thoughts, that is great. But what happens is when their brain starts to realize what's going on, You It starts pushing back and it's Oh no, this is not good. This is dangerous and we need to do whatever we can to get back to the way we were doing things before. And so your brain will go out of its way to try and get you to go back to your quote unquote normal way of eating. And so that is why we, that's one of the reasons why. It is absolutely the worst thing you can do to dramatically change your eating patterns because your brain will automatically start telling you, no, you can't do this. You can't. This is dangerous. You've got it. You've got to go back. You've got to eat whatever the, the things are that you ordinarily eat. And so you're already fighting your brain's natural tendency to want to keep things the way it is. So that's the first reason. The second reason is that desire for anything, food, a car, a vacation, a lifestyle, whatever it is, a person, desire is created between our ears. It's created in our brain and it's created because of the thoughts that we create about a certain thing. So when we decide that we're going to dramatically give up all of these things because We're going to lose weight and that's going to be the way it is. It's going to be amazing and we're going to do this and it's going to be so easy and we're going to do it. And it's going to be just fabulous. Our lives are going to change. Your brain all of a sudden starts realizing wait a minute, hold on a second. We're not going to, we're never going to get that again. Wait, we're never ever going to have this. So your brain becomes very preoccupied because it's already, it already notices that things are different. So it notices that it's dangerous and that it's not status quo. It starts increasing as a way to get you to go back to the way you've been eating. It creates more desire, because Your brain senses any time you are restricted or deprived, those thoughts start being created in your brain. And it creates those thoughts because it wants you to go back to the way you used to eat. And so it will make you have all sorts of thoughts and desires and preoccupations with any kind of food because it wants you to go back to the way things were. Again, the reason why this happens is when we dramatically change the brain senses something's wrong because there's a huge difference in the way things are, the status quo is no longer in alignment. And so it, it will do whatever it takes and that's what it does is it starts creating more desire for the foods that you're giving up. And that's why when you go on these really drastic diets, all you can think about is food. And all you can think about is. The food that you've wanted to eat, the food that you're going to eat when you get done, and it just creates all of that angst and all of those thoughts. And those thoughts are what then drive you to want to satisfy that, that feeling of deprivation, that feeling of restriction that you've already had, that you've already put in place yourself. It's going to try and do whatever it can to remove that and get you back to where you were before. Again, dramatic changes do not work. Our bodies are not, our brains are not meant to function and to go along. Now, like I said, could you do it for two weeks and lose weight? A hundred percent. Totally could do that. But is that going to be sustainable weight loss? Because you're not really learning how to, one, we also have to think about when we dramatically change our eating, that's dramatically changing our lives. And unless you have a really keen sense and you really have and I'm not even going to say willpower because willpower is finite and you run out of it. Very often you can run out of it. It really is hard to have something be totally sustainable for the rest of your life, forever, without your brain saying, Oh gosh, don't we miss that? We miss, yeah, we miss that. Let's have some more of that. Your brain is going to bring those things back because it's going to remember that those thoughts never go away. So your brain's going to circle back and bring those things back around. And so what the answer is. The answer is to not dramatically change how you eat, but to learn why you eat more food than you need. That's the key. The key is to figure out, like, why do I snack all afternoon? Why do I eat something and I'm physically full, but yet I still want more food? That has nothing to do, it really has nothing to do with even what you're eating. It has to do with emotions, it has to do with feelings, and it has to do with you not dealing with those feelings and those emotions, and food being the thing that you use instead. Allowing yourself to learn how to function and how to eat and how to eat in a way that works for the diet and the lifestyle that you want to have, that's what you need to learn. There are certain foods that I really like. I really like pizza. Do I need to have pizza every day? Probably not. But and when I'm upset about something, do I need to eat three quarters of a pizza? Absolutely not. Can we have a slice or two? 100%. But do we need to eat all the pizza because we're upset? No. That's using food for something different than what it really is. And we don't have to make these huge, dramatic, sweeping changes, and in fact, they're counterintuitive. And they actually are setting us up for failure. And instead, how about figuring out the why behind how you're eating and why you're eating. Deal with that. And then realize that, oh, I can still eat the foods that I really love and not eat a whole vat of them or a whole container of them all in one sitting because I know that tomorrow I have to start over and I have to be good again on my diet, tomorrow. That, we have to start addressing those thoughts because that's what our brain focuses on is we're going to have to be good tomorrow, so let's just eat it all now. And if we can get rid of that as being the go to thought and just accept that food is food and when we need to deal with something, we actually deal with it appropriately and we deal with it like an adult and we deal with it by allowing ourselves to feel the feelings. Weight loss becomes almost a non, it becomes a non issue and you don't even have to think about it because you get to just be and you get to just feel your feelings and you're not using food as a way to get through that. And so again, dramatically changing your diet. If you want a quick fix and a quick temporary fix. Absolutely you can do that. But if you're looking for long-term, sustainable, rational and doable, weight loss and achieving the ideal weight that you wanna be, the dramatically changing your diet just doesn't get us to the point where we need to be because we need to really be looking at that other stuff that's behind it. So that is what, where the focus needs to be and not just on, dry chicken breasts and broccoli and brown rice. That's just not, that's just not going to cut it and it's not going to get us where we want to be long term. So I hope this kind of was a little bit enlightening and I hope that It gives you some food for thought when it comes to do I really need to dramatically change my diet and set myself up for that kind of failure or could I just say maybe I can just eat a little bit less and maybe I can actually start feeling my feelings and not use food as a way to make me feel better when things aren't going well. Get that under control and weight loss is a non issue. It becomes easy. Because you don't even, because you're doing what you need to do to get yourself to make the best decisions for your life. Hope this was helpful. If you want to learn more about taking this non diet approach to natural weight loss and getting to your ideal weight and then staying there and being able to manage it. If you want more information about how, what that looks like. And how you go about doing that, you can go to my website, it's kristinjonescoaching. com, www. kristinjonescoaching, and it's K R I S T I N, jonescoaching. com. And you will see a button that says, Stop Dieting Guide, click that, and we'll send that to you right away. All right? Thank you so much for joining me this week and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode. All right. Take care. Thank you for listening to this week's episode. To take your first steps towards never dieting again, get my stop dieting guide, go to www. kristinnevins. com. Jones coaching. com that's Kristen with an I N and learn a sustainable way to lose weight and develop a healthy relationship with food. I'll see you next episode.