Is Weight Loss A Goal For You For The New Year?

If you are seeking solutions for maintaining your body at a healthy weight for yourself and your clients, with no more dieting, starving or struggling, please read on.

Present studies show that seven million women suffer from disordered eating. We all know what it looks like….it’s snacking late into the night on the couch when we’re sad or lonesome, or eating too much party food over the holidays. We then promise to nip it starting after the weekend, after the holiday, after the New Year, with a ‘diet’. We all begin with our own scenario to gain back our lack of control. A period of strict consumption to get ourselves back on track.

Overeating is a relatively modern problem. For so much of history we have struggled to find enough to eat. Anthropologists use the word ‘foraging’ as the most appropriate description of how we humans obtained food til 12,000 years ago. The next stage was agrarian societies. In many parts of the world, we have maintained a combination of both until quite recently.

A MODERN PROBLEM

The great turning point in our present modern food and weight gain dilemmas, with all the health problems that have come along with it, can be dated to right after World War II. The War Industry converted it’s peace time efforts into becoming ‘The American Food Industry’, a giant conglomerate of companies that moved from making tanks to making food. For the first time in our 1.5 million year time line, science took control of our foods. The 1950’s became ‘The Golden Age Of Food Processing’. Since processed foods have no flavor, a vast industry arose in the United States to make processed foods palatable. Without the flavor industry, many of our favorite food items would not exist (and this includes the ubiquitous label ‘all natural flavorings’, often a cover up for MSG and 50 other chemical additives).

The New Jersey Turnpike, the industrial corridor lined with refineries and chemical plants, runs right through the heart of the flavor industry.

The flavor industry is more secretive then the Pentagon. Here is where various laboratories and pilot kitchens create whole new flavors and adjust the tastes of well established brands. These labs are divided up into ‘The Confectionary Lab’, for chocolates, cup cakes, cream fillings, frostings, ice creams, ….’The Snack Lab’, for corn chips, potato chips, breads, crackers, breakfast cereals….’The Beverage Lab,’ making flavors for bottled teas, popular soft drinks, sports drinks, wine coolers and cocktail mixes, all natural juice drinks, even organic soy drinks…….

We cannot point to any other time in history when we have been willing to consume so many substances that would not be considered whole foods.

THE STRONGEST ENEMY IS THE ONE THAT CAN
GET INSIDE YOUR HEAD

The strongest enemy is the one that can get inside your head. Now how does this apply to the Flavor Industry? One of the components of inventing new flavors is the study of pleasure centers in our brains. Scientists have become geniuses at the addictive brain model. Hundreds of millions of dollars go into scientific brain study to create flavors that make us want to eat more, long after were full and can’t eat another bite. Flavors that invade our days and nights. Flavors that sit on nerve centers in the brain and create nagging obsessions and cravings. Many women will explain bingeing as “I knew my eating was not aligned with my values, but it was like I had another me in my body.” You did: the American Flavor Industry.

GETTING EDUCATED

Women are big business for the Flavor Industry. A whole market has been created for us consisting of what are called ‘fat free’ foods. In our desperation to keep off the pounds, we have turned to sugar free flavored yogurts and frozen yogurts, low fat pizza, low fat brownies, muffins and bagels, lean style dinners, drinks and snacks. Weight loss bars and powders contain synthetic vitamins the body cannot recognize or organize for use. All these foods are stored in the body as unusable wastes. They are low in nutrients and can barely support life. Many of us have been limping along in a disease state from these toxic foods for years. These corporations are counting on us to not get educated. They are counting on us remaining captive and passing these non foods on to our children and their children and their children’s children.

CLAIMING CHANGE

If you have spent a life time of eating foods that are doing you harm, you’re going to have to give the brain a chance to rewire, reset and repair. This will take getting clean. This will mean leaving behind foods created in laboratories, the ones that keep us addicted, overweight and chasing after our health for years. It will mean taking a chance on a new way to eat and live.

Few of us in the Western World have been brought up to trust a diet of, say, 80% Plant based Living Foods, to nurture and sustain us. I myself was 53, a late bloomer to this new way of eating after struggling with my health for years. When it was brought up to me those years ago that all of the wild animal kingdom is thriving on living foods, it was almost more truth than I could bare. There are no fat animals in the wild animal kingdom. They are all their own ‘natural’ weight. How had I not ever noticed? Even as I learned to make Raw almond milk and fresh juices, created home made fermented foods, eaten dairy free cheese and altered my lifestyle, it took time to process that I wasn’t going to die from the change. The irony was my body was doing great. It would take time for my brain to catch up.

WILL RAW FOOD MAKE YOU SKINNY?

There is an extra bonus when we eat our foods from pure natural sources. Those exhausted pleasure centers, triggered daily by eating chemical filled processed foods, relax. Our weight no longer yo-yo’s with the ups and downs of our moods. Our food cravings calm. We get to experience what it feels like to be in a body that belongs to us, the one we were gifted with when we came onboard the planet. With time we heal, we become free, we become whole.

But the gifts do not stop there. It’s then that we get to affect the course of history. As caretakers of generations to come, we put an end to the cycle of self hate of our bodies and our relationship to food. For ourselves, our children, and everyone, we guide and help. When we give back to our communities, as Holistic Health Coaches, mentors, guides and educators, everyone benefits.