Overweight and Undernourished

If you are overweight, and have a hard time losing weight, I suspect you may be undernourished in one of three ways.  One:  you aren’t getting the proper quantity of food.  Two:  you aren’t getting the proper quality of food.  Three:  Your soul is starving.

Ironically, if you don’t eat enough calories for your body, you will NOT lose weight.  My clients protest vehemently upon seeing a suggested menu, “This is too much food!”  I patiently ask them to trust me, and they return in two weeks having lost a significant amount of weight.  The body is equipped with a magnificent survival mechanism.  It is the same mechanism that kept our ancestors alive through famines, plagues and holocausts.  In order to protect against starvation, your metabolic system becomes very efficient, throttling down to a bare minimum.   A low calorie diet is counterproductive.

Secondly, you may be  starving yourself nutritionally.  Your body is desperate to get the nutrients it needs.  It doesn’t take a lot of broccoli to get your daily Vitamin C, but it takes a whole lot of cheese doodles.  If you insist on fueling your machine with cheese doodles, your body, in deep resignation, will crave lots of them.  Empty calories=too much food=weight gain.

Thirdly, what you may not realize on a conscious level is that what you are really hungry for is not food.  You want peace, not potato chips.  You want fufillment, not fudge.  You want companionship, not cookies.  Getting in touch with what you are really hungry for is critical to reducing the stress hormones that keep you fat and the emotional eating that doesn’t begin to touch the hunger of your soul.  What are you REALLY hungry for?

Remember:  STARVING + DEPRIVATION ≠ WEIGHT LOSS.  The body is not a calculator, but a complex system of organs and hormones and glands affected by the quantity of food you eat, the quality of  food you eat, and the wellness of your soul.

Be well.