From the time I was 11, I was the overweight kid at school. I was bullied and hid in the shadows. From that point on until I hit 40, I had tried almost every diet out there and “failed”. At least that is what I thought. I had no problem losing weight but where I failed was, I never could stay on that diet for very long, or I would even gain the weight back and more.
What I now see is why diets don’t work for most women. It is that we try to follow this “perfect” meal plan but everyone is different in what works for them and what will not. When I finally figured that out and got tired of trying yet another diet and chose to take a deeper look at why I “failed” all those times that is when I learned from all my “mistakes”.
Did you know there are no mistakes, they are just stepping stones to us learning and growing but at some point it is our choice to decide what we want to do with all those stepping stones. So I gave up following that perfect diet and truly started to eat the way my body wanted to be fed. This takes practice because I was so disconnected from the true sensation of hunger in my body. I thought I would die from that hunger I was feeling but what I didn’t realize was there are 2 types of hunger:
The first is the true hunger, the sensation that starts in your stomach and sends the signal to your brain that you need to eat.
The other hunger that ruled me for way to long was the thought and feeling of hunger. That sensation starts in your mind and travels to the body, this was the one that was telling me I needed to eat the majority of the time. This is not a hunger that will help me to lose weight, it actually had me eating way more and and way more often then I needed.
HUNGER IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. It was the thought and feeling that I had that was causing my over hunger. I practiced this so well that it became such an unconscious habit of mine. I fully and completely believed that I was actually needing food all those times. Realizing this hunger coming from my mind was something I had to first become aware of and then listen to but most importantly not respond to, that took practice. It took time and being patient with myself but I did it. I kept focusing on that for over a year and lost 100 pounds!
