Elements for Sustainable Weight Loss
The following guidelines are designed to shift your eating habits to ones that both help you reduce the extra weight you are carrying now but also settle you into the lifestyle you will continue with once you've reached the weight you wish to maintain for the rest of your life.
Creating Change
Almost more important than how we eat and move is what we think and how we feel. We've been taught that weight loss is about what we put into our mouth and how much energy we use living and moving, ie exercise. Calories in, Calories out' But we are mind, body, emotion, spirit... far far more complex and alchemical than past truisms would suggest. Creating alignment among our four essential elements is the best way to create lasting change.
Mind and Emotion, the cycle:
To an astonishing degree, we create our personal reality. Our beliefs and thoughts lead us to actions that reinforce those thoughts. If we stay asleep to this cycle we can end up blindly headed in the direction of fears and worries and worst outcomes. The good news, of course, is that a shift or intervention anywhere along this cycle can take us instead to the places of our greatest hopes and happiness.
Elements for sustainable weight loss
Spirit and intuition:
Connecting to our inner selves, our intuition and the universe, to see how all things connect, is, in some ways, the secret sauce. And the place where we often lose touch and get derailed and lost.
Body and the Insulin theory of weight loss:
Insulin is a hormone of growth, most known and associated with glucose and its role in moving glucose from the blood into our cells.
Insulin resistance is when our cells resist the call of insulin to open up and allow the glucose in
Hyperinsulinemia is the response of the pancreas to make more insulin to overcome this resistance, leading to higher levels of insulin in the blood.
These two disorders of the body are at the root of chronic illness and disease.
What causes Insulin Resistance and Hyperinsulinemia:
Stress and elevated cortisol will create insulin resistance
Inflammation
Hyperinsulinemia itself ie chronic and constant consumption of high levels of processed carbohydrates.
High consumption of linoleic acid (soybean, canola and corn oil)
What we can do about it:
Focus on when we eat (and a little on what we eat)
Ensure we have periods of the day (and night) when we are NOT eating (eat all our food during mealtimes)
Watch out for processed carbohydrates and seed oils (focus on using olive and avocado oils and butter or ghee)
Most important to remember--if you have insulin circulating you CANNOT use your own fat stores!