I have some more amazing and inspiring client feedback for you this week…
What I’m going to share with you lights me up because when I hear this kind of stuff it makes me realise that profound results can happen in such a short space of time with just a few simple changes…
‘Simple’ in the sense that the actual changes aren’t a big deal in practice, but I will acknowledge that for the client to break long-standing habits and beliefs, that this can be a really big deal and much of my coaching is often around supporting them through that process…
So just to set the scene, this is a client I’ve been working with for about 6weeks now, and he has struggled with his weight and food for the majority of his life.
What now transpires through our conversations is that his Mother always did the cooking, yet she’s not actually very good at it and often bought processed ready-made food when he was growing up.
This meant that once he left home, my client had no real awareness of real cooking using fresh ingredients and because of this he wasn’t in great shape health-wise due to consuming a lot of substandard processed food which lack many vital nutrients.
As you may have heard me talk about before, lack of nutrients in food often leads to nutritional deficiencies and also if your food is lacking real punch taste-wise then emotionally, from a satiation point of view, you’ll have cravings for other foods… but often not healthy ones!
So, in summary: he wasn’t in good shape, he generally felt bad all the time and he continued buying and feeding himself the same kind of foods he’d grown up on because that’s all he knew.
At a point in his twenties he moved to India for work.
Although he loved India, coming from London, he was also shocked at the level of poverty and by some of things he witnessed and dealt with on a daily basis whilst there. Over time this traumatised him and a result of that emotional turmoil led to him to stop eating and he lived off ice cream and sodas for about 3 months! (…Unbeknownst to him at the time, he’d actually developed a serious eating disorder!)
He told me how he just focussed on his work, didn’t feel hungry, ate ice cream and drank sodas all the time and then a few months later when he was on his way back to the UK, he put on his old jeans that he wore over there and he found that he could fit both legs into one leg of the jeans!!!
What’s really sad here though, beyond the fact that he was clearly deeply traumatised and starving his body … Is that many people said how good he looked when they saw him looking so slim and looking back he can see now how this gave him a (false) sense of pride and happiness that he’d lost some weight.
…Unfortunately, this is very common when people lose weight, even if they are unhealthily slim because many people don’t know the back story in how they got there and being thin is still glorified so much in our culture…
It happened to me when I was in my late teens and hugely restrictive with my food (a story for another time), but in those days I worked at the Gap on Kings Road here in London part-time around my degree and I often used to be put on the front of store to meet and greet the customers walking in… I loved their jeans in those days and people used to say to me how good I looked in them and how I had “a perfect models’ figure”! …Yet little did they know that I was severely malnourished and that my diet also gave me really bad skin, major digestive issues, made me deeply unhappy and was in no way healthy or naturally slim!
Just as a side note, because this is important … I’m around the same size now without any dieting or deprivation and I maintain that whether or not I exercise! So there is another way!
But going back to my client…
He settled back in to London life and returned to his previous known eating habits. Soon after he married his now wife who is traditional like his Mother and she took control of the kitchen and did all the cooking. So once again, my client didn’t have to think about food prep much.
Yes, he was eating a little better because his wife cooked more freshly made meals, yet he was often on his own running his business from home whilst she was at work and so whenever he needed to prepare his own food he resorted to bad quality convenience foods and snacking.
This of course led to weight gain, he then felt worse about himself and his body and thus started an awful cycle of feeling so confused about food and weight loss that his way of dealing with it was simply by stopping eating for a few weeks like he did in India!
When we met and started working together I was sure he was very close to type 2 diabetes.
His eating habits and food choices were terrible, he never ate a proper breakfast and would have some sort of really sugary cereal if he had anything. He drank about 8 cups of tea with sugar a day… LOTS of squash every day and snacked on biscuits and crisps and sweets throughout.
Then when his wife made dinner he ate a really small portion, so that in his mind, he made up for the fact he’d been eating so much cr@p all day!
…This is where the diet mindset makes things all the worse because when he ate a proper meal he was thinking only about calories and fat; not even how hungry he was, what he felt like eating or that the ingredients would nourish his body!!
Diet mindset = restriction and control = unsustainable and unhealthy
So, when he came to me, my first very simple rule or first commandment as I like to say was:
You are committing to eat three decent sized meals every day.
He’ll be the first to admit he was scared to do this at first… So, we had to do a lot of mindset work around fat, calories and I had to educate him on the importance of blood sugar balance and of nourishing his body.
He also had to trust me, which again, was hard for him, but then as I reminded him – his only other option in his mind was to starve himself, and he knew he wanted out of that!
I also had to explain how bad that actually was and what kind of serious health complaints he would most likely be facing very soon if he continued on this path.
So, he took the leap of faith and he took my advice … and now only a month later I want to share with you what he said to me on our session last week:
“I get what I have to do now! Before I didn’t see any option and I felt completely stuck and the only thing I thought was to stop [eating] … but I can see what’s possible now!”
“I only had one cup of tea today and that was unheard of 4 weeks ago, yet I haven’t even really been consciously controlling that”
“What’s so different for me is I haven’t pushed to the extreme, I’ve focussed on the basics and yet they make such a difference”
“I thought I was too far gone, at the beginning I didn’t think you could probably help me…But now I realise how wrong I was”
“I’m not thinking about food all the time now”
“After only 4 weeks I feel completely different”
“I did eat some chocolate the other day and I ate a little too much, but I didn’t feel guilty because I feel like I’m on the right path anyway. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel guilt with chocolate or sweets!”
“I didn’t want to exercise, I thought I was too big, but now I feel like I can”
… I want to share these comments with you because, just as the subject of this blog goes:
You don’t know what you don’t know!
My client didn’t know how simple it could be to feel so much better, to see the way forward, to not feel guilt with food and to simply feel happy eating lots of food!
He had no idea such simple changes to his routine and mindset would lead to these results and in such a short period of time. And more than that, much of what we’ve implemented are actually things he previously thought would lead to weight gain!
If you identify with any of the comments my client made above, for example:
You feel too big to exercise
You feel like you have to go to extremes for anything to change
You feel you are too far gone
You think about food all the time
You feel guilty whatever you eat
You think you can only lose weight through calorie control
You feel so confused you have no idea what to do and you feel awful
You feel completely stuck
… Or anything else where you just don’t know what to do…please understand that it may just be that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Consider that you simply don’t have the relevant knowledge, awareness and probably also the confidence to believe that it might be so simple?
Plus, I want to highlight that it is highly likely this isn’t even your fault!
Like my client and countless others, this has likely come from familial conditioning and the diet mindset that has been so prevalent over the past 2-3 decades teaching people that being healthy and slim comes from deprivation and extremes. And that your body is not to be trusted.
If you are in a similar place to where my client was, I hope this email has given you even just a glimmer of hope? If you’re ready to do something different or if you simply want to talk through your situation and options, I’m here for you, so please reach out.
Lastly, I want to say that this is not just about weight release, there are many people in a similar situation who are slim but feeling the same as my client and who feel trapped maintaining their weight through restriction and control. In both cases, the work we do is very similar because we’re bringing the body back in to balance and changing the way you view food, health, your body and how you feel about yourself.
With hope and possibilities…
Love,
Kate x
