Confident Eaters

Should you keep trying to lose weight or make peace with your current weight?
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Georgie: [00:00:00] I couldn't see her face, but I'm a hundred percent sure I was getting a death stare through the phone. I was having a text conversation with a client who was frustrated. I had written to them that "I understood if you don't wanna keep trying for weight loss", and after a long pause she texted back, "are you telling me to give up because you don't think I can do it?"

My mind raced "Mayday! Mayday! Now she's feeling discouraged and like you don't believe in her. Clarify! Clarify!" My brain barked. I typed, "no, not at all. I just want to avoid a situation where you feel like you have made every tolerable change you can make in the name of weight loss, and I just keep pushing you to make more changes. How much would that suck?" She agreed. That would definitely suck. A piece of advice that I got early in my nutrition counseling career is to avoid situations where you want it more than they do, they being your client. I hold that piece of advice close to my heart because it's very [00:01:00] helpful. Today I'm here with Christina to talk about the issue of staying attuned to clients, specifically when they want to keep working toward weight loss, and when they desire to change what they focus on for a goal.

If you've ever been confused yourself thinking, I don't know if I wanna lose weight or if I wanna go after something else, this episode is for you.

Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters. I've seen this dynamic play out in the gym, an imbalance where a personal trainer wants change or results for the client more than the client actually does.

It sounds like a client [00:02:00] protesting or complaining, no, I don't wanna do pushups again. I already did one set, and then the trainer only pushes harder. Come on, do 'em. Do you wanna get that bikini body or not?

In nutrition counseling, it can happen when a practitioner encourages the client or patient to eat less salt, eat more fish, consume less red meat, and the patient is just looking away with a, "yeah, yeah" sort of response. Luckily that's not what was actually going on with my client. She clarified that she was very much wanting to keep working toward weight loss. For a moment, I wondered if I was a bad coach for misreading her feelings and thinking she may want to change goals, but rereading our exchange later.

I can see it was a valuable communication and I'm glad I double checked. It's important to check in periodically and make sure our clients still want to pursue the goal we've been working on, whether it's weight loss or anything else.

Because sometimes the answer is yes, [00:03:00] they wanna keep going, but sometimes the answer is no, and they're having a change of heart. People can and do get tired of trying to lose weight and sometimes they decide to shift what exactly they're working towards.

Christina: One of my clients has said, "it's one or two kilos. Why do I even care about this?" Which led us into a great discussion to explore why or if she did care. I can see why that advice to not want it more than your client is solid. Ideally, we're bringing out a client's motivation, strengthening it, and focusing it on the most effective changes. We're not trying to drag them along into changes they hate. If we push too hard for weight loss, we know it can have the exact opposite effect, making them demotivated and more resistant to change.

Georgie: Right. I wanna be a coach, not a dictator. We have to be on the same team. So if you're putting effort into weight loss, but so far all you're getting is weight maintenance. What do you [00:04:00] do? First, I want to suggest what not to do. Please. Please don't focus on the unfairness or difficulties that you face. You may have read that weight cycling or repeatedly gaining and losing weight can lead to a harder time losing fat. You may have read that hunger sensations appear to be stronger and can remain elevated after somebody loses significant weight. You may recognize that your age or your genetics can make your body store fat differently or be thriftier with your energy expenditure.

This is not fair. However, biology, age, and our personal past are not things we can change right now. I personally dislike these facts, but they remain facts. So let's focus on making the best of what you have right now. You have a life, a body, and a certain amount of time left on the planet, which we want to make as great as we possibly can.

So let's focus our [00:05:00] time and attention on what we can do.

Christina: Weight loss may not have happened yet, but that doesn't mean it's not going to. It could take more time, additional changes to your eating or an increase in your consistency. if you have been working with a coach or working on your eating behaviors for a while, then you may have already made some changes, but there's a range of ways we can increase those changes or consistency if we see that the scale is still not moving. Maybe you are super consistent Monday through Friday, but you find yourself grazing or snacking throughout the weekends and you don't always feel hungry before you eat anymore. Maybe when you're out with friends, you notice everyone else is getting another round of drinks and you think, F it. I don't wanna miss out on the fun either. And suddenly your alcohol consumption or liquid calories is above a level that allows your body to change. Think about the different areas of your life. Are there ways you could stand to be more consistent with your [00:06:00] habits? Or make some more changes without getting into the realm of dieting again? I was actually just having this conversation with my husband recently and we were recognizing that we've been eating like a little bit more treats than we really like to, or need to and feel best when we do.

You know? So we're like, we need to kind of dial back the treats a little bit. So it's something you can reevaluate over and over again even when

Georgie: Yeah,

Christina: you do this for living.

Georgie: And it's nice that it sounds like you guys are on the same page.

Christina: Exactly.

Georgie: And I think sometimes when we're in a partnership or a relationship with somebody, we can sort of improve or you know, go downhill in our habits in tandem. So we like develop that ice cream habit or you know, the salad habit. So it is nice when you can chat with your partner and be like, how about we steer this two man canoe in another direction?

Christina: Yes. Yeah.

Georgie: I often see that consistency thing that you just mentioned, like maybe it's [00:07:00] the weekends or maybe it's the holidays, or maybe it's the happy hours. That consistency thing can become a limiting factor for a lot of people when their weight stabilizes or just doesn't seem to get moving. Every week might contain at least one or two birthday parties, other parties, holiday dinners, weddings, funerals, baby showers, housewarmings, fundraising, dinners, work, travel, all inclusive trips, and so on.

If all of these interrupt your weight loss habits, then the habits generally won't work. If you're working on healthy eating behaviors and you're starting to get the hang of, okay, I can do this in my home life, don't stop there. See how well you can make those skills work in other circumstances as well.

It is also important to recognize that some behaviors can result in a day being a thousand extra calories.

So even infrequently, something like a restaurant meal or takeout for dinner can prevent progress. It doesn't take too many days of 1000 extra calories to [00:08:00] offset a modest deficit that you've created over many other days. Smaller things like eating an extra square of chocolate might only put a 50 calorie dent in your plan so you can make them relatively more frequently without stalling your progress as if you're having larger, larger deviations we'll say.

Christina: yes.

Georgie: Another area that can be helpful to look at is your activity. Maybe you've made all the food changes that you feel willing to make right now. But you could increase your activity levels throughout the days and weeks, which generally helps. We aren't saying you need to kill yourself with more intense exercise to see the scale move.

We're big fans of walking and increasing exercise snacks, little tidbits like walking down the hallway and back, or refilling your water bottle or pacing back and forth to the bathroom because you refilled your water bottle so many times. Longer gentler activity stretches can burn more calories than intense short sessions.

For example, using some round numbers, [00:09:00] an hour of very slow conversational jogging might burn 600 calories, where 10 minutes of hard intense sprinting might burn only 150 calories. So look at your activity day to day and see if there are places where you could add in some more walking breaks or body weight movements a few times a day to increase your activity.

The exact same eating patterns that maintain your weight right now could produce a gradual weight loss if you increase your movement.

Christina: But it's important to keep in mind that there will be a point where you don't wanna make more changes and you're being as consistent as possible while still fitting into real life. Everyone is going to have a different stopping point or willingness limit to make additional changes, and you get to decide when you're at a level of effort that feels sustainable and good to you. You might decide to just maintain for a period of time and resume active weight loss at another season of your life.

Georgie: I have known people who did bodybuilding or figure [00:10:00] competitions, and there is no willingness limit to how far they'll go. They will give up on their food tasting good at all. They'll accept being hungry for many hours a day and not being able to sleep. They'll put in hours and hours at the gym admitting that they hate it and they're bored of it, but it's worth it to them to get an extremely low level of body fat.

But that's a real minority of people. Not too many people I know wanna do that. And even for those people who are outliers compared to the majority of the population, it's only temporary. They're only willing to do that for a number of weeks or months.

The clients Christina and I work with are seeking something sustainable for the long term. They're not trying to do something just to get on stage. They wanna balance body composition, progress with quality of life and enjoyment so that they don't hate the rest of their life. If you recognize at some point that the set of habits you have is as far as you want to go, that is totally fine.

[00:11:00] Even if you haven't hit your weight loss goal, you might decide to shift to other priorities. That's not quitting. That's learning.

Christina: Beware of the trap of black or white thinking here. If you've been putting energy and effort into trying to make the scale, go down and decide it's not what you wanna chase anymore, you probably wanna ease up on the accelerator, not not swing a U-turn. Most people aren't going to be happy if they just quote, "give up" on managing their weight and completely stop trying to feed their body well. It might be tempting to think about, but in practice it can feel unpleasant to overeat frequently and live on whatever processed food looks tastiest and easiest. So if you decide that pursuing weight loss is not your main goal, consider that you still probably have a lot of reasons to continue to care about your nutrition and eating habits.

Georgie: You might decide to prioritize the results You can't see, instead of just weight or your appearance. You might value setting a positive example [00:12:00] for your children, so they grow up eating a wide variety of foods and a healthy balance, not dieting and binging. I've spoken with one client recently about the example she sets for her children in how she manages stress.

So completely separate from a weight loss goal, she wants her daughter to see her doing things like sharing with the family that something disappointing happened to her that day and talking about it instead of putting on the perma- grin and then disappearing with a bag of cookies later, which is something that many of my other clients actually saw their parents do.

Mom always said she was fine. She was fine, but then they would see her eat emotionally, and so they knew that that wasn't the truth. You might focus on minimizing your risk for chronic disease, if you're getting tired of trying to create a calorie deficit. Nutrition plays a role in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose, and bone density, just to name a few non-scale indicators of health.

While maintaining your [00:13:00] weight, you can seek to improve all of these markers. Even if you stay the same exact weight, you're likely preventing yourself from gaining weight over time by eating healthfully, which is another reason not to quit on yourself.

Weight maintenance is certainly a better outcome for most people and their health than weight cycling, where they gain and lose weight repeatedly, or having a slow, perpetual creep heavier and heavier over each decade.

Christina: I've heard people say Maybe my body is just happy at this weight. Which might feel like a relief or it might feel quite the opposite. Your mind might immediately retort, but my mind isn't happy.

Georgie: I think that discrepancy between what our mind wants our body to do or look like, and then what our body actually is able to do can cause people a lot of pain. I think both Christina and I know the mismatch. It can feel like a war, but it doesn't have to. There can be immense relief in accepting the reality of your body, which [00:14:00] includes some things that will not change.

I'm not talking about accepting the reality of your body, as in I can't possibly lose weight. I'm thinking of it more in terms of accept the reality that your genetics are going to dictate a lot of the characteristics of your body, including how tall you are, your limb lengths. The structure of your torso, the relative widths of your hips, shoulders, and rib cage, as well as your athletic capacity.

Some people I know, they train sprinting and they get better at sprinting. Some people train sprinting and they don't get any better, so it's definitely not like an equal genetic setup for all of us. You can also thank your DNA for the shape of your booty, your bra size, and where your body tends to store fat.

So accepting these realities is the fastest way to end the war of fighting your DNA. You can exercise, you can develop your muscle, you can increase or decrease your body fat, but you have to acknowledge that you're working with [00:15:00] one consistent underlying structure.

Christina: I think body acceptance also plays an important role in the journey because if we are constantly in a cycle of judging and wanting to fix our bodies, it can be more difficult to stick to behaviors that don't have these immediate results that we're after. If you wanna develop better regulation of your eating behaviors in the long term, you must learn to reduce the importance of your body and appearance in your overall quality of life. That's not to say you shouldn't want to change your body, but rather than treating your body as though there is something inherently wrong with it, consider the option of accepting your body for what it is and making the best of it. This perspective will make the journey less of a battle.

Georgie: I can't emphasize enough that this isn't an all or nothing choice between acceptance or the pursuit of goals. Just as you don't have to choose between trying to lose weight, or on the other hand, [00:16:00] not caring about your eating at all. There are significant complexities to self-acceptance, striving to be our best and enjoying the ride. So for each of us, we need to find a blend of all three.

Christina: You may have done some exploration of your own body image journey in life, but anyone who has felt dissatisfied in their body at some point or another can benefit from body acceptance. We only have one life to live and so much of it can be spent feeling dissatisfied in either wishing for what was or what never has been, instead of enjoying the life that we have now. It may not be what we wanted, but maybe this is still good and can get better. That's also a reason why we work with our clients on clarifying what their values are because we can understand reasons for eating healthy, exercising, and caring about all of this in the first place for many other reasons besides changing our physical appearance or weight. All of those results we listed [00:17:00] earlier are vitally important to keep in mind. Why would we continue to do any of these things if it weren't for our weight changing? Because it's how we are taking care of ourselves.

Georgie: One concept, which has been researched and promoted to help improve body image is focusing on your body's functionality instead of its appearance. If someone has been preoccupied with their looks, their shape, and their weight, it can be a refreshing change to appreciate that their body can run five kilometers or do more pushups today after six weeks of strength training.

This is known as transitioning from an ornamental body view to an instrumental body view. In other words, my body can do cool stuff instead of my body's nice to look at.

Christina: While this is a positive step, we have some clients who are managing certain chronic health issues, so taking a purely functional approach to appreciating your body can be disconcerting if you have arthritis, for example, which doesn't allow you to [00:18:00] exercise. Or if chronic fatigue makes it difficult to manage your household tasks, accepting and loving your body clearly necessitates something more than appreciating what tasks your body can accomplish in a given day.

Georgie: As I've aged through, you know, the last several decades and my body has been able to do less things at times and more things at other times. You know, I hate to think about the rollercoaster that has gone on and could have been even worse about judging myself based on my capacity and my ability to do things.

and I think that, you know, parallels what a lot of people experience. As we get older, our body function tends to decrease. We're going to start not being able to run as fast as we could in high school or lift weights as heavy as we could when we were 20 or 30. And I think it's a nice transition to focus on what's the experience like of living in my body.

So that's what I often ask clients. What's it like to live in your body? If my client is [00:19:00] telling me about their body in terms of, well, my hips look like this and I don't like this about my saggy belly. I try and change their perspective and ask about their body from the interior, actually. How does your body enable you to enjoy the world?

How do you interact with the world through your body? If you were buying a car, I'll tell people, would you just stand there on the outside and choose based on walking around the lot and picking the car that was the nicest to look at? Probably not. 'cause your experience of the car is so much more than what it looks like.

You wanna get in it, you wanna drive it. You wanna feel the seats, hear how the sound system is. That whole experience is going to be a much bigger impact of your enjoyment owning that car than just walking around and being like, I like the yellow one. And that experience perspective on things can guide our eating decisions as well.

When we think about what food choices make this body a good one to experience the world [00:20:00] in, It's going to draw our attention to options that leave us feeling energized or strong, and it might steer us away from the eating behaviors that leave us bloated or dragging. If your efforts to lose weight, leave you hungry and cold all the time.

Dizzy, weak, too lethargic to enjoy exercising clearly, you're pushing too hard. Your life experience will probably be better if you ease up on that restriction and accept what your body looks like when you're working with its hunger and satiety cues, feeding it mostly healthy food and not trying to override or ignore or force your body into something else.

Christina: I think we can all benefit from making sure that the habits we adopt to lose weight don't cost us our happiness. Trying to diet your body into a shape that falls outside of your genetic programming is a recipe for frustration. On the other hand, taking care of your body [00:21:00] to help it be at its best is something we can all achieve. There's a lot of peace that can come from focusing on what you can control versus what you can't control, and with that comes freedom for you to focus on taking action on what you have control over.

Georgie: Ultimately, it's up to you to think of your body and your nutrition goals in whatever language feels right. If it feels right for you to focus on losing weight, we support that and it may improve your experience of your body. If you find chasing weight loss is only making you crazy, you might instead set your sights on becoming stronger or developing your athletic ability.

If it feels better to focus on your health, self-love, and treating your body with respect than keep those ideas in the forefront of your mind. We are here to help you discover and go after whatever it is that makes you happy.

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