Your Ultimate Guide To A New Year, New You & A New Metabolism

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It’s no secret that one of the most popular New Years resolutions of all time is to lose weight.

In my medical opinion, losing weight is not about reducing calorie intake, and it’s not honestly even predominately about what you eat at all. Although making nutrient dense food choices is a crucial part of your long term health, the type of weight gain I see most commonly is actually driven by stress. A combination of poor sleep, high cortisol levels, and a decrease in metabolism all combine to make losing weight, or even staying at the same weight, near impossible.

So this week, as we move into 2022 (wow!) I wanted to give you a ton of lesser known, but extremely effective ways to reset your metabolism so that losing weight is a secondary outcome to just feeling better. Read through this list and see if there are any you feel called to implement — even just one or two of these tips can make a noticeable difference in your health.

Here we go:


 

 

1. Stop negative self talk:

 

The first step is to absolutely eliminate any negative self talk you might be having with your food choices.

Your body functions on the basis of resiliency. It resets again and again and again and again. Adapting, recalibrating, adjusting, and realigning to health over and over again.

The human body is incredibly resilient, and the basis of our existence is that your body is adaptable. Your health is forgiving and intuitive. Your body can return to wellness despite challenges (like that chocolate bar I just ate while typing up this blog post. You might think I’m joking but I am absolutely not.)

Your body can handle you eating unhealthy foods (as long as you have a good nutritional intake otherwise) so much better than it can handle not eating enough healthy foods in the first place. So instead of beating yourself up over having a cheat meal or a decedent dessert or that midnight snack, focus on making sure you are eating all of the nutritional building blocks your body needs to maintain health in the first place.

Stick with making sure you are eating the nutritional building blocks, and your body can handle the extra not-so-healthy things you might consume alongside that. Trust in your body’s resiliency.

In fact, medical studies suggest that it is fat shaming (not obesity itself!) that directly increases a person’s risk for metabolic syndrome and subsequent health issues. Letting go of the internalized stress associated with weight will decrease diabetes risk, heart disease risk and the rate of metabolic disease in general, as shown in this study published Jan 26, 2017 in Obesity.

The Study:

  • 159 patients with an average BMI of 41.1 kg/m2 were clinically assessed through blood pressure, waist circumference, fasting glucose, trigycerides, HDL cholesterol at baseline, and treatment for hypertension, dyslipdemia and prediabetes.
  • Patients were assessed using the Weight Bias Internalization Scale and Patient Health Quesstionnaires to determine how much each patient internalized weight related stigma.

The Results:

  • Researchers found that participants who internalized stress from weight-related stigma were over 40% more likely to have metabolic syndrome than participants who did not internalize stigma.
  • These results were independent of the actual degree of obesity and other confounding issues such as depression.
  • Weight stigma was found to cause a direct physiological stress response in the body, elevating blood pressure and increasing the body’s inflammation.
  • Researchers conclude that weight stigma alone is a form of chronic stress that creates physical disease when internalized.

 

These results show it is not the weight itself, but rather the stress that our society places on larger sized individuals and their internalization of that stress, that increases the risk of metabolic syndrome and puts them at higher cardiovascular risk than they would otherwise have.

This is totally unnecessary. If the stress of being overweight was reduced, so would the disease burden. So stop beating yourself up and instead choose one of the positive things you can do from the list below to care for your body better. This is about supporting your body, not tearing it down.

 


 

 

2. Focus on nutrition, not calories:

 

This fantastic, impressive study (published in Lancet in May 2019) is a global analysis of diet and health outcomes looking at 195 different countries over an almost 30 year span of time. Never before has such a large scale investigation of the relationship between dietary intake and disease ever been conducted.

This one study can replace everything we’ve based our current understanding of the correlation between diet and disease, because all other studies to date have been much smaller and isolated to smaller regions of the world.

And here is the one, overriding conclusion from that study: it’s not about what you are eating, it’s about what you aren’t eating.

In other words, what makes the most impact on your disease risk isn’t so much what unhealthy foods you are eating, it’s what healthy foods you aren’t eating enough of. Over the past several decades, the medical literature and most diet plans have focused on restricting “bad” foods such as sodium, sugar, processed meats and fats.

But in this largest-study-to-date meta analysis, researchers found that it is actually inadequate intake of essential nutritional components (like nuts, seeds, fruits and vegetables) that accounts for more disease and death than overconsumption of any “bad” foods such as red meat, processed meats, fat, sugar, sodas or sweetened beverages.

In fact, inadequate nutrition causes more deaths worldwide than smoking does.

One of the authors of this study, Christopher Murray, MD, states that “poor diet is responsible for more deaths than any other risk factor in the world.” That means that inadequate intake of nutrients cause the body more illness, disease and death than consumption of sugar or processed meats or trans fats ever do.

The researchers found that inadequate consumption of nutritional building blocks led to more heart disease, cancer, diabetes and death worldwide than did consumption of unhealthy foods.

Do you see the positives out of this realization?

You can stop beating yourself up for the cravings, snacks, and “cheat meals” you eat, and instead simply focus on making sure that you are getting an adequate intake of the absolutely mandatory good nutrients that our bodies need to function optimally for a lifetime.

Here are the study details:

  • Looking at 195 countries for 28 years (1990 — 2017,) researchers analyzed diet and health outcomes. Correlating nutritional intake with chronic disease (conditions like diabetes, heart disease and cancer) and death rates, researchers found that lack of nutrition was far more deadly than consuming foods typically considered “disease causing” like fats and sugars.
  • For example, when researchers evaluated whole grains intake, they found that a diet low in whole grains led to 3 million deaths and 82 million diseases world wide annually.
  • When researchers evaluated low fruit intake, they found that a diet with inadequate fruit consumption led to 2 million deaths and 65 million diseases world wide annually.

If you do want to restrict one thing from your diet, the results suggest focusing on sodium. High sodium consumption was associated with 3 million deaths and 70 million diseases world wide annually.

These three dietary culprits (low whole grains, low fruits, and high sodium) were the top three causes of morbidity and mortality world wide… causing far higher disease rates and death than consuming sugar, fats, processed meats and sugary drinks.

The results suggest that it might be more important to be sure we are consuming adequate amounts of “the good stuff” instead of restricting “the bad stuff.”

What’s the good stuff? Be sure you are getting plenty of servings of:

  • Fruits
  • Vegetables
  • Legumes
  • Whole grains
  • Nuts and seeds
  • Fiber
  • Calcium &
  • Seafood-derived omega-3 fatty acids.

 

Researchers suggest that focusing on increasing nutrient intake would prevent about 1 in every 5 deaths!

The bottom line: Of the 11 million deaths each year that are related to diet, more deaths are associated with inadequate intakes of healthy foods than with superfluous consumption of unhealthy ones.

So today, try to shift your thinking from negative dietary restrictions to positively consuming healthy foods.

Obviously a good diet is important, but this study tells me that even if you just can’t seem to get control over a sweet tooth, or a fatty snack is your go-to stress relief, or you splurge and eat a processed meat product, the things you do eat are not as damaging to your health as the things you don’t eat.

In other words, if you have a bowl of ice cream after dinner tonight, instead of going to bed feeling horrible and berating yourself for your food choices, let the ice cream dessert go and instead consider if you ate 2 — 3 servings of fruits and vegetables today.

 

 


 

 

 

3. Take a very high quality multivitamin to fill in the gaps.

 

Another important thing to consider is that if getting a baseline amount of healthy foods is more important than banishing non-healthy foods, then a really high quality multivitamin makes a lot of sense.

So one idea, beside upping your fruit and veggie and nut and seed intake, is to add on a multivitamin and mineral supplement (especially one that has a whole food certified organic blend of fruit and vegetables right in the supplement) to help cover any bases that your intake that day might have missed.

My favorite multivitamins are the MyKind Organics daily vitamin line and Pure Encapsulations multivitamin line. Both of these “best-of-the-best” lines of nutritional supportive supplements are waiting for you in my online dispensary under the “General Wellness,” tab.

Click over here to browse multivitamins now, so that you can round out your diet with the nutrients your body truly needs.

 


 

 

4. Allow a few pounds of extra weight.

 

There are survival advantages to being overweight as opposed to underweight… like surviving life threatening infections. Published June 2016 in Critical Care Medicine, the results of this study suggest that heavier weight allows the body to survive overwhelming bacterial infections, even at advanced age, something good to know as this pandemic continues. Researchers looked at the data of over 1,400 elderly people hospitalized with severe sepsis (requiring ICU care) and compared their body mass index (BMI) with clinical outcome 1 year after discharge. The results revealed a 25% improved mortality rate in severely obese, obese and overweight patients compared to normal weight patients.

Another medical study (published July 2017 in Cardiac Interventions) that found that obese and overweight patients actually have better survival rates and less complications after heart surgery (percutaneous cardiac interventions, or PCI) than normal weight and lean patients do. On top of that, the better outcomes persisted even 5 years later, with better outcomes for the overweight and obese patients than for normal or low weight patients.

Another medical study, published in JAMA Oncology on June 21, 2018, found that a higher BMI was associated with lowered breast cancer rates. The highest BMI group had over 4 times lower rates of breast cancer than the lowest BMI group. This inverse relationship between higher BMI resulting in significantly lowered breast cancer rates was particularly strong for hormone receptor positive breast cancers. Young women (ages 18 to 24) who were obese (BMI greater than or equal to 35) developed breast cancer 4.2 times less often than women who were underweight (BMI lower than 17.) This study was very large — almost one million patients — and was a rigorously analyzed. Considering breast cancer is the most common worldwide cancer diagnosis for women, particularly young women, this is very important news indeed.

And this is not limited to breast cancer. Published Oct 2016 in the Journal Of Clinical Oncology, researchers examined body mass (BMI) and metastatic renal (kidney) cancer survival rates. They found that obesity actually predicted improved survival in metastatic cancer… improving both the progression free survival rate and the over-all survival rate. The fact that obese patients have better outcomes in metastatic renal cancer is a real thing — this study had large patient numbers, was reproducible in different cohorts, and is statistically significant. The numbers are actually so significant that now physicians are encouraged to take the patient’s weight into account before sharing information on prognosis with their patients.

Of course, anything that shows there is a wide diversity to what is considered a “healthy weight” is totally hidden by the media. That makes sense, as the weight loss industry is a 20 BILLION dollar industry IN THE UNITED STATES ALONE!!! So, of course the media wouldn’t want you to actually feel good about your current weight or feel there was any advantage in the slightest to having a higher BMI.

But in fact, as I blogged about here, only when a person’s BMI exceeds 35 is there an increase in mortality rates. So… if losing those last 10 pounds isn’t actually going to help you live longer… what defines your “ideal weight”? What defines your ideal weight is how you *feel* wearing the body you wear each day: your energy level, your flexibility, your capacity to get around, to get outside, and to enjoy the things you want to enjoy each day.

The real focus should ALWAYS BE on feeling as healthy and vibrant as possible.

This means focusing on muscle tone.

On heart strength.

On endurance.

On lung capacity.

On bone mass.

On energy levels.

On restorative sleep at night.

On happiness.

On quality time with loved ones.

On meaningful relationships.

On spiritual strength.

And even if you are at 35 BMI or higher? Focusing on energy levels, bone mass, restorative sleep, endurance and other positive health markers will create a path of natural weight loss anyway. So that’s all any of us need to be focusing on, starting right now.

 


 

 

5. If you still do want to diet… fast instead.

 

You’ve probably heard of fasting for weight loss, but most people are not aware of the decades of medical research that show just how profoundly intermittent fasting can boost health in ways that go way beyond weight management.

Fasting has been shown to:

  • Decrease inflammation: Published in the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism in 2007, researchers found that fasting for 12 hours daily decreased all measured markers of inflammation by a statistically significant amount, including interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, and homocysteine levels.
  • Decrease heart disease: A study published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 2009, showed that fasting just one day a month (one day a month!) was enough to significantly decrease risk of heart attack risk by reducing coronary artery disease. In addition to that, a study published in Nutritional Research in 2012 showed that fasting for 12 hours a day decreased blood pressure, and when fasting was increased to every other day for just four weeks, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides were reduced by more than 25%.
  • Decrease asthma attacks: Published in Free Radical Biology & Medicine in 2007, reducing calorie intake every other day by just 20% allowed asthma suffers to lose 8% of their body weight in only two months, decrease their blood markers of stress and inflammation, and decrease asthma symptoms while improving quality of life.
  • Protect your brain: Improved memory, improved mood, decreased Alzheimer rates, and decreased Parkinson’s rates… all from fasting? Yep. Published in the Journal of Neuroscience Research in 1999, the Journal of Molecular Neuroscience in 2000, the Neurobiology of Disease in 2007 (as well as many other studies) researchers have found that intermittent fasting can improve neuronal connections, increase the proliferation of neurons, and even protect against amyloid plaques.
  • Decrease cancer recurrence rates: Prolonging the amount of time spent fasting — skipping evening snacks all together and fasting for 13+ hours each night — significantly reduced the risk of breast cancer, according to a study that spanned thousands of patients followed for over a decade. Published on March 31, 2016 in JAMA Oncology, researchers found that fasting at night for 13 hours or more was found to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence by one-third, as well as drop HbA1C levels and increase sleep length at night. Another study (published in Teteratgenesis, Carcinogenesis and Mutagenesis in 2002) found that alternate day fasting helped decrease tumor formation, while yet another study (published in Science Translational Medicine in 2012) found that a wide range of cancer cells exposed to fasting showed increased responsiveness and sensitivity to chemotherapy treatments as well as directly decreased tumor growth. So fasting for 13+ hours each night is an effective, drug free, holistic, all natural way to decrease cancer recurrence and help boost cancer treatment.
  • Boost longevity: One study (published in the Journals of Gerontology in 1983) showed that fasting had a greater impact in improving longevity than even exercise did! And a more recent study, published in 2000 in the Mechanisms of Aging and Development, showed short term repeated fasting throughout life resulted in a lifespan that was 75% longer. In fact, a study published in Nature in 2009 stated that intermittent fasting is “the most effective and reproducible intervention to extend lifespan” that we know of… capable of significantly extending lifespan by reducing age-related disorders.
  • And of course, encourage long-term weight loss: Published in Nutrition Reviews in 2015, researchers looked at all forms of fasting… including alternate day fasting, whole day fasting, and even simply time restricted fasting (like a 13 hour nightly fast) and all of these techniques resulted in significantly reduced body fat, significantly reduced body weight, and reduced blood lipid levels of cholesterol and triglycerides.

 

I have a blog post waiting for you right here detailing how to start fasting in a very simple way — choose from either a nightly fast (as easy as prolonging the time between your last bite of dinner to your first bite of breakfast) or a 5:2 diet, where you simply pick two days a week to eat lightly and then eat normally the other 5 days:

 

My Favorite 3 Types of Fasting: Nighttime, Daytime, and 5:2 Fasting

 

I also recently made this TikTok to share with you a fasting app that I’ve been enjoying, you might find it helpful too (and hop over here to watch the dozens of other holistic health TikTok I have made for you over the past year!):

 

@laurakonivermd

My top tip for navigating the holidays without gaining weight! #metabolism #intermittentfasting #WeFast #holistichealth #laurakonivermd

♬ original sound – Laura Koniver, MD

If you want to try fasting, take care to stay very well hydrated, get plenty of rest, and when you do eat, make sure the foods you choose are nutrient dense, chock full of protein and healthy fats. And of course, run your fasting plan by your doctor if you have any chronic health conditions or are planning to fast for more than a 24 hour period of time.

 


 

 

6. Sleep more.

 

I always ask patients who are having trouble loosing weight about their sleep. That’s because a medical study (that I shared with you back in August of 2013) showed that poor sleep caused study participants to gain weight 9 times faster than participants who slept well. Nine times faster weight gain!

Previous studies have shown a link between poor sleep and weight gain, but this was the first study where participants slept in-house in a sleep facility and the actual weight gain was measurably significant after only a handful of 4 hour nights in a row. If healthy individuals who experienced a short period of sleep deprivation gained 9 times as much weight as healthy individuals who get a full night of sleep, what does this predict for folks who are chronically sleep deprived?

Many of us live and function daily in a state of catching only a few hours of sleep a night… not just for 4 days but for weeks, months, even years at a time. This has a huge impact on your weight. Imagine gaining 9 times as much weight over the course of a year of poor sleep as you normally would had you slept well.

If you are feeling exhausted from not sleeping well, than your body is going to urge you to reach for food as a way to sustain your energy. This is your body’s way of ensuring your survival!

So if you are watching your weight or struggling to understand why your best efforts are not good enough to prevent you from gaining weight, examine your sleep. Hop over here for some tips on deepening your sleep at night, naturally.

 

 


 

 

 

7. Truly know it’s not too late to focus on your health:

 

Medical studies suggest that older people in excellent physical health — called the “well-derly” — actually have higher smoking rates and higher BMI’s than expected. Presented March 3, 2017 at the 10th Future of Genomic Medicine Conference, a study on people 80 years old and older (who are free of all common chronic diseases and are in excellent health) found that they smoked more than the general public and that many had higher BMIs as well!

Hallelujah — finally a medical study trying to figure out what people do *right* to preserve excellent health for a lifetime, instead of looking at what they are doing wrong.

When you turn it around to look at survival and why some folks are disease free well into their ninth decade of life and beyond, you get some very interesting and important answers. Part of an ongoing study called the Healthspan Project (which I will absolutely keep you updated on because I am all about positive, uplifting health guidance!) researchers looked at healthy elders and analyzed them for genetic markers of disease.

What they found is that the elderly who were supremely healthy had the exact same rates of genetic markers that would predict disease as the rest of the population. In other words, it’s not that the “well-derly” didn’t have BRCA mutations and other genetic markers of disease, but in fact, they have the same genetic mutations at the same rate as the general population and are just not actually manifesting disease expression.

This study showed that healthy elderly participants had the same rates of genetic risk factors for diabetes, cancers and stroke as the general population, yet remained disease free. And when looking at why, the results were just as surprising, because when compared with the general population, the smoking rates were actually higher for men (61% smokers as opposed to 54% in general population) and equivalent for women (42% vs 43%.). The well-derly did exercise more (67% exercised compared to 44% of the general population) but their BMI was not uniformly lower — there were many wellderly with a BMI of 30 kg/m2 or higher.

Studies like these are so important, because it’s not just longevity but actually healthspan — how long someone lives in optimal health — that give us the most important clues on how to support our innate health potential. This study tells us that even if we have higher BMI’s than we want, or have made unhealthy lifestyle choices in the past (like smoking) we can still find that our health is resilient for an entire lifetime.

Want some quick (and free) ideas on improving your health — no matter what your age — that aren’t even diet related at all? Hop over here to read these articles I’ve written for you:

 


 

 

 

8. Ground your body while you eat.

 

Grounding has a profound impact on your digestion, boosting your vagal tone (which supports the function of your entire digestive tract, from your esophagus to your colon and everything in between!) while meanwhile directly impacting your ability to feel full and satiated, even enhancing absorption by decreasing inflammation, which also helps with recovery after a meal.

From every single angle, eating grounded helps: putting you more deeply in touch with your hunger and satiation, helping you digest and absorb your nutrients better, boosting your metabolism and keeping weight gain at bay, even decreasing discomfort after eating.

Even if you eat completely organic, fresh, dairy-free, gluten-free, best-diet-in-the-world you can easily still have irritable bowel issues, or indigestion, or bloating, or pain.

That’s because you can’t fully resolve bowel inflammation without being grounded.

Because of the scientific evidence that grounding supports our digestion, I ran a study of my own patients because I wondered if, by boosting our digestion and metabolism through touching the earth, we would see a change in weight over time. So I personally enrolled a dozen overweight patients into an informal private study on grounding and weight loss. I followed them for 10 weeks, measuring weight, energy, mood, sleep, and pain, with weekly weigh-ins and assessments.

Their instructions were to touch the earth outside directly for 15 minutes a day, and that was it. I told them not to change their diet at all. I wanted them to eat everything they had eaten before in the same quantities and in the same fashion. I told them not to start new activities or to change their activity level at all. I wanted to see metabolic changes from short periods of daily grounding over time. Following those patients with weekly weigh-ins and weekly assessments was very, very interesting.

Most of the patients lost a clinically significant amount of weight — 60% of them losing between 4 and 15 pounds in the 10 week study period — doing nothing more then adding in daily grounding for just 15 minutes a day.

Hop over here to watch a video I created for you to explain why adding grounding to your daily routine is the quickest way to heal your digestion. At the end of this free article I wrote for you, I share tons of ideas on how to eat grounded outside — pick one each day and watch your weight self correct effortlessly.

For more tips on how grounding profoundly supports your health from head to toe, and how to easily incorporate grounding into your daily life to see profound results, grab my book The Earth Prescription, available as a paperback and digital book right here.

 

 


 

 

 

 

9. Recognize your emotional eating style

 

What I’ve noticed as a physician examining health outcomes for the past 20 years, is that most people eat emotionally instead of nutritionally.

To help you focus on what matters most (which is consuming nutrient dense foods) I have developed a list of the top 7 emotional eating patterns I see over and over again. If you can develop insight into why you eat the way you do, you can reframe your mind away from eating emotionally and instead eat intellectually, based on what supports your health best.

Stop worrying so much about what treats and indulgences you crave and instead figure out why you crave them.

Look over this list to see if you can identify which emotional eating pattern describes you best and get some tips on working with your eating patterns in a healthier way:

 

  • FOOD IS SECURITY For some folks, food represents safety and security. So when they are not eating, deep fears of safety and panic may arise. There may be worries about food scarcity and needing to know when and what your next meal will be. If you notice you overeat, it may be an attempt to feel secure and reassured that all is well. You may crave comfort foods such as casseroles and home cooking and baked goods, or foods that remind you of childhood. If you tend to eat in this way, it is perfectly reasonable to feed your body foods that comfort it, but the goal is to have reasonable portion sizes. One way to provide comfort and a deep contentment to security-type eaters is to include lots and lots and lots of fiber, so that you feel full, satiated, safe and grounded for longer.

 

  • FOOD IS PLEASURE For some folks, food isn’t just about the nutrition, food is about the entire experience… the smell, the feel, the texture, the flavor, the delight in chewing it. Food is pleasurable and even sensual. If this is your style of eating, you may find you are eating because you want the feel of food in your mouth, not because you are hungry. You may also find a love/hate relationship with food… often pleasure-seeking eaters have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) or lactose intolerance or celiac disease and need to find a balance between the foods they love and the foods their body hates. One great idea for pleasure eaters is to enjoy drinking (coffees, teas, water, fresh squeezed juices…) or chewing gum throughout the day to experience that sensual pleasure of having sensations in the mouth without necessarily reaching for food.

 

  • FOOD IS POWER For some folks, eating food is an issue of control or power. These control-based eaters are the ones most likely to try to strictly monitor what they eat and submit to horrible restrictive diets that they absolutely hate! And as you read about in today’s medical study, healthy eating is not about what you restrict but rather what you eat. So for people who see food as power, diets are particularly offensive because restricting food intake feels like a loss of power or a loss of control… two things these types of eaters hate! One great idea for control-based eaters is to drop the diets and instead focus on choosing easily digestible foods like soups and pureed foods that are easier on your digestive organs (liver, pancreas, stomach) and eating frequent, smaller meals, grazing all throughout the day instead of a few large meals. Focusing on high quality foods and eating them more often, instead of restricting quantity, tends to be kinder than dieting and allows your body to feel healthier.

 

  • FOOD IS LOVE Some folks enjoy food that releases endorphins and provides a rush, similar to falling in love. Any of my blog readers who know how often I blog about eating chocolate will recognize… yep, I’m this type of eater. Romantic foods like oysters, red wine, chocolate… it’s not so much that these eaters care about food, they care about the way the food makes them feel. Dieting feels atrocious for love-seeking eaters and restricting food is equivalent to being dumped by a lover. One great idea for love-seeking eaters is to focus on enjoying the people you are eating with more than the food — if possible, avoid eating alone (which typically leads to over-eating) and instead really focus on making eye contact with the people you are enjoying a meal with, the conversation. This will allow you to enjoy what foods you do eat — for example, appreciating a lovely glass of wine and a small piece of dark chocolate instead of three plates full of food you do not actually love or even enjoy. Or, focus just as much on creating a lovely place to eat as you do what foods you are eating. Add a fresh flower to your kitchen table, bring your lunch outside to eat in sunshine the middle of a work day, or browse thrift stores for beautiful, vintage glasses and plates to mix and match, or hand sew some beautiful cloth napkins to use as a treat.

 

  • FOOD IS JOY Some people just love to enjoy a wide variety of foods and this is one of their wonderful strengths with eating. My son is a joy-based eater and he is amazing at trying foods most children wouldn’t even think of… exotic foods, spicy foods, unusual vegetables that kids traditionally hate. He is open to trying it all and gets so excited as he watches me prepare an interesting meal from scratch. Because joyful eaters are so open to food, dieting or any type of food restriction at all feels like a huge loss and may even bring deep sorrow. My favorite recommendation for joy-based eaters is to focus on trying new and unusual foods to satisfy their cravings, instead of over-eating a large quantity of boring foods. Keep a stash of different spices, hot sauces and healthy seasonings to make each bite taste exciting and invigorating instead of needing larger portions to bring joy. Joy eaters also tend to actually enjoy preparing food, so if you are a joy eater build time into your day to focus on trying new recipes, browsing new cookbooks, and preparing healthy meals from scratch. Joy-based eaters can feel guilty that food brings them joy — but I say this is a strength! Food brings joy! So choose your food selection based on how much joy it brings you and do not waste your time (or calories) on food that does not bring joy.

 

  • FOOD IS ENERGY People that eat for energy may need lots more fats and more protein than other eaters. These people have so much energy output that each bite needs to be calorie dense and their body knows this. Although they get the message to feel bad about eating fats and eating dense protein (after all, eating a light salad seems so much more social acceptable) this leaves them feeling depleted and desperate for a pick-me-up later. They may even feel a sense of shame about eating something that their vegetarian friend (who is not an energy-eater) would not touch. Instead of feeling guilty, energy eaters need to know that they are honoring their bodies by feeding their brain lots of healthy fats (organic whole fat dairy/butter/yogurt or coconut, avocado, fish oil…) and protein (organic, ethically produced meats, organic eggs, organic nuts and nut butters.). My daughter is an energy eater, and I can honestly say that she is one of the healthiest people I know. Glowing skin. Gorgeous hair. Beautiful radiant soul. People who are energy eaters need to feel good about their intuitive food choices that make them crave protein. Not everyone can feel their best on a strictly vegetarian diet, so please be non-judgmental towards yourself or your friends who need to eat ethically sourced meat routinely.

 

  • FOOD IS OPTIONAL Does this sounds familiar: forgetting to eat, not making the time to eat, feeling dizzy because you skipped lunch, reaching for a quick snack and then getting right back to work, forgetting to hydrate? Some folks find it easy to ignore their bodies needs or lose track of time. While sporadic eaters are usually not so bothered by going on a diet, the danger here is that they often don’t take the time to eat healthily so that when they do eat, they are ravenous and don’t make smart food choices, or they don’t even get the needed nutritional building blocks at all. The best thing these eaters can do is to schedule in their eating so that they eat at regular intervals, stay hydrated, and make great food choices… instead of not eating all day long and then binging in a drive through on the way home. Another great tip is to carry water with you at all times, so that even if they you not taking the time to properly eat, you stay well hydrated. This goes for everyone, but to sporadic eaters most of all.

 

 


 

 

10. Reduce Stress

 

Gaining weight (or losing weight) unintentionally is a common response to chronic or acute stress.

In fact, a recent poll conducted by the American Psychological Association found that most of us have experienced a significant weight change in the past year, thanks to the overwhelm that the 2020 & 2021 brought our way. The poll revealed that 60% of Americans report undesired weight changes as a result of this pandemic. 42% of us gained a significant and unwanted amount of weight and almost 20% of us had an undesired and significant loss of weight.

But I’m here to help. You can definitely reset your body to it’s ideal, healthiest set point again, and it doesn’t have to take as long as you think. And it absolutely isn’t about dieting. No amount of dieting, monitoring your food, and bullying yourself into losing weight will reduce your stress and re-align you with health.

Stress affects your body from head to toe, and can have a tremendous impact on your weight, as the poll above reflects. Studies show that sress can cause changes in eating patterns and they also suggest that cortisol reactivity is one of the reasons why.

So instead of monitoring your eating, maybe what we should be monitoring is your cortisol and stress levels. Cortisol is produced by the adrenal glands and by supporting your adrenal health, you can normalize your cortisol levels. Stop the focus on weight and instead focus on reducing your body’s stress hormone output. In fact, releasing your weight struggle and embracing your adrenal repair instead may be the best way to stop unhealthy food consumption that is due to stress, which is what is triggering this change in the first place.

If you think some of your unwanted weight changes is actually due to increased stress, here is a blog post I wrote for you about 17 ways to reduce stress:

 

17 Ways To Naturally Decrease Your Stress + Free Printable Tools To Help

 


 

 

Want More Support? I’ve Got You

 

If you want even more support to safely, easily, and effectively lose weight in a way that supports your innate health, I’ve got you. We can work together to directly support your weight loss goals in my upcoming online health class.

Join into my upcoming 5 Day Weight Release & Reset Online Class right here.

 

“I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed the Weight Reset emails and videos! I looked forward to each and every day. Your class gave me so much hope!” — C.C.

“This was AWESOME!! I loved all the information — the medical studies to back it up and the daily reminders. Plus — I love that you can do this at your own pace. Thank you!” — C.W.

“I got a lot out of the class. I was surprised at how many different things can affect your weight and when you talked about them in the class… it was like a bell went off. I would definitely recommend the class to others.” — S.G.

 

Together, we will go over the 5 pillars of sustainable, feel-good weight loss. One pillar a day for 5 days. Simple and sweet.

I’ve based this course directly off of the medical literature and my 20 years of experience helping to support my patients with their weight loss goals. You’d be surprised that your body naturally knows what weight is the perfect one for you, and it can sustain it at this perfect weight effortlessly once you naturally align your metabolism. I’ll show you how in a very non-threatening, supportive, uplifting way.

It’s not about being rigid or militant or hard on yourself, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. The harder you are on yourself, the harder it is to align with your healthiest version of you. It’s not even about your diet and exercise plan — there are actually several other things that are even more important than what you eat and how you move… and without knowing what those things are, you just can’t lose weight.

Understand the things that sabotage weight loss and the weight releases, naturally.

Class starts Jan 10th and I’m excited to get started with you. Hop over here to sign up and reserve your spot today:

 

 

To your resilient, natural health!

xoxox, Laura