Why You Should Hire a Life Coach to Help You Lose Weight
The struggle is real. You diet for a while, and it works. The pounds come off pretty quickly, and you feel good about yourself and the direction of the scale. But, it gets a bit harder as time passes, and the weight loss slows down. Pretty soon, you find yourself unmotivated and off track. Then, when you go back to “normal” eating, you gain back all the weight and some extra.
I hear this story from women over and over again, and I am here to tell you:
- There is nothing wrong with you.
- Diets don’t work!
When we do restrictive dieting, our bodies don’t know when we will fuel them again. So, they slow down in order to conserve energy. As a result, our metabolism gets slower. We use willpower to try not to eat, but willpower only works for so long. Soon, we find ourselves eating everything in sight because we are so hungry. Since our metabolism slowed down during the restriction phase, we gain even more weight back when we go back to eating what we had eaten before the diet started. I know. I have been there.
This isn’t any way to live, and it’s not your fault. The media (and really good marketers) have tricked us into thinking so many of these fad diets work. And they do for a while — until they don’t. But, when we fuel our bodies properly and get our mindset right, we can maintain a healthy weight.
What do I mean by mindset?
Everything we have ever been taught, accurate or not, affects the way we think and the beliefs we have about ourselves. These thoughts lead to the emotions we feel and the actions we take.
Perhaps as a young child, a relative told you you were overweight, and it was just in your genes. Most likely, as an adult, you still hold on to some of that belief, and how you live your life reflects that.
When I was a young teen, my best friend’s mom told me, “I wasn’t fat; I was just stocky.” What? What is the difference? She wasn’t the first to speak down on me, but I remember feeling embarrassed about my body. And, of course, it impacted the way I showed up in life. Because of the shame, I started eating less in front of people and devoured food alone because I was so hungry.
Please be careful what you say to young impressionable teens, especially girls. But that topic is for another blog post.
My point is that everything we think and believe impacts how we treat ourselves, our bodies, and how we show up in the world. If you are struggling with your weight or constantly yo-yo dieting, you need to dig a little deeper and figure out what is really going on.
A life coach can help you identify why you are, or aren’t, taking certain action and ultimately why you are getting the results that you are.
For many long-term dieters, emotional eating comes into play. Perhaps you find yourself downing a bag of chips after a stressful day at work or digging into the ice cream after a fight with your husband. It feels better in the moment until you realize what you have done. Perhaps you feel horrible about what you have eaten, so you eat even more. It can be a cycle. In the coaching industry, we call that buffering. It means covering up our emotions with something that only makes us feel better in the short term. Unfortunately, false pleasures only work temporarily, and most often, we feel even worse after we give in to them.
You are not alone. And you don’t have to live like that. A life coach can help you process your emotions and bring you to a place where you are not using food as a coping mechanism.
Whatever issues you are facing around food, a life coach can come alongside you and help you work through them. Overeating is rarely the problem but most often a symptom of something bigger.
I help women get off the crazy train and teach them how to stop dieting and start living. I would love to work with you and help you figure out what is holding you back. Contact me today to learn more.
