Are you someone who weighs themselves? Do you track your weight on the scales or are you not worried about your weight at all?
If you do look at the number on the scale this Christmas, then question what underlying things might be happening in your body that are actually out of balance. What isn’t functioning optimally? What can we do to help you heal? Use that, and be curious, be investigative, work out what is happening in your body. Don’t beat yourself up about it, but use it as a tool in your toolbox to see what is happening with your health. Get empowered, get informed and get help if you need it. Life is too short to be inflamed and not feeling your best YOU!
Go into the new year feeling amazing, energy-wise, your hormones in balance, sleeping well, with your weight where you want it to be, your digestive system working properly, no joint pain, well-formed sausage poos every single day. Use your symptoms to work out what’s happening in your body, what is out of balance in your body. Let us help you if you need extra help.
Just before the year ends, I wanted to cover something that’s really important and makes me so upset when clients come into clinic. Somewhere along the way, we have been told that balancing less calories in, with more calories out, is going to equal weight loss. That is a hundred percent correct IF you are overeating. You are overeating whenever you eat and you are not hungry. We’ve all been there and we’ve all done it. I like to refer to it as the Christmas Day feeling, where you’re feeling so full and stuffed to the brim you physically couldn’t eat anymore. A hundred percent, that is a case where you will be holding onto more weight because your body can’t utilise all that energy.
I want to tell you this, as we approach Christmas, because I see so many women beating themselves up and being so mean to themselves, restricting calories, pushing themselves harder, and making themselves feel really bad when they just can’t lose weight.
What I see in clinic is, it’s not a case of less calories in that is going to equal weight loss. Most clients coming into clinic, and most people reading this newsletter, like you right now, know that. You know that you’re not overeating currently, that you couldn’t be eating any less if you tried. Sometimes I think to myself, “This client could be eating fresh air and they wouldn’t lose weight. Because it’s not about the calories in and out, it’s about the fact their body is inflamed.
The reason it’s not calories in and calories out with a lot of people is because when your body is inflamed – when you’ve got bad gut bacteria, parasites, fungus, mould, heavy metals, toxicity, when you’re not digesting your fats properly, when your gallbladder and liver aren’t working properly, when you don’t have enough hydrochloric acid, when you’re not sleeping properly, when you’re not parasympathetic before eating, any number of these reasons – it’s putting stress on your body. Stress equals inflammation, inflammation means you won’t lose weight, you are going to to hold onto weight instead.
You know my story, in terms of how I worked out the second time that I’d been exposed to mould was because overnight I put on a couple of kilos. It wasn’t physically possible with what I was eating. Now, that story is not unique to me at all. As I always say when you first come in, inflammation weighs more than the number on the scales or the amount of food that you’re eating on your plate. Clients look at me very sceptically until that starts to change, until the way that they’re eating, calorie-wise, is still the same but the number on the scale is going down. At that point, they believe me. Or, the other time that they really believe me is, when their diet is really fantastic, they get inflamed, whether it’s something’s going on or they’ve been exposed to a metal or something else toxic, and ‘suddenly’ (and I say it in inverted commas), their weight has increased overnight. Then they realize what a myth we’ve been sold.
It breaks my heart that we believe this myth because it puts so much pressure on us and we think that we can calorie restrict our way to getting weight loss. For some people, that is correct, but that’s not the story for most of us.
As we start to think about the end of the year, as we start to go into 2021, I use weight in clinic as a measure for what is happening with your health. I said to a client this week “This time, from our appointment to the next appointment, I expect your weight to shift. Why? Because we’re supporting your gallbladder and liver now so I expect your body to be able to detoxify toxins. I expect the fat that you’re eating to be broken down into bile and bile will eliminate the toxins into your poos. If you’re not pooing every day, you won’t be eliminating toxins because our poos are fiber, plus toxins, plus water.”
I said to this client, “If you haven’t shifted a kilo or two between now and your next appointment, we know that we haven’t gotten to the root cause of the inflammation yet.” But her diet is perfect, we’ve already removed the foods causing her inflammation, so now we have to look internally and look at what systems aren’t working correctly. As we restore function to her body, she will start to shift her weight.
Weight, for me, is a tracker of what’s happening in your body, but this whole calories in and calories out just brings so much sadness and it just winds me up so much because that’s not the reality for most of you reading this newsletter and for everyone coming into clinic. Please bear that in mind this Christmas. Be kind to yourself, and use the number on the scale if it’s not shifting for you pay attention to how you feel.