Weight Loss: Feel empowered, feel strong

Weight Loss: Feel empowered, feel strong

It’s important to understand that while guilt is fattening and stress is fattening, feeling guilty about being stressed is the most fattening of all! So get massages this week, take a hot bath in lavender oil, try to take your cardio outside at the beach or a park, and be prepared with your food because it is what will coast you through. I once had a client who, with great anxiety, told me that he was almost all the way through a pear he had grabbed as a quick snack when he realized he was in Phase 2. “I panicked!” he said. Don’t panic; just be prepared.

During week two, make a conscious effort to let stress and guilt go. Stress evokes hormone responses we don’t want right now, so if you have slipped or mixed up phases, don’t stress. Just move forward with greater consciousness. The best thing you can do for yourself, besides sticking to the plan, is to keep feeling great about what you are doing. Feel empowered, feel strong, and if you make a mistake, forgive yourself and move on. Feeling guilty only compounds any slipup.

These common feelings are usually based in fear about what just happened the week before and disbelief that you can actually enjoy eating and still lose weight, or thinking last week was a fluke and there is no way that it can happen two weeks in a row. Sometimes, I even see this type of thinking begin to happen at the tail end of week one.

Listen to these very important words: True metabolism repair happens when we have stability and consistency in our repair process.

Every phase in this plan is intense and focused, which is why it requires a lot of energy from the body, and why we can only stay on it for a short period of time. If we do a phase for too long, the body gets exhausted and can’t do the necessary work. This is why we change the phases in the way we do. But you can’t mess with them or start improvising, or the process is going to stop working.

Week two is your chance to nail down the rhythm that you established in week one. It is definitely not the time to start changing anything. Stability and consistency reduce stress in all aspects of your life, physiologically and mentally, so your body feels that it’s okay to burn fat because it’s no longer necessary to hoard it. Just stick with the program. It’s all going to work out great.

So, during week two, you may be thinking, “OMG, I have to change something to keep this going,” or “OMG, I have to change something to slow down this run-away weight-loss train,” but stop. Take a deep, calming breath. Week two is about not making any drastic changes.

Instead, what I would like you to focus on in week two is celebrating what you enjoyed from the previous week, and maybe being open to trying new and different foods you didn’t try last week. It’s also a good week to get a little bit curious about what is happening in your body. Approach it with wonder rather than fear. If the first week was about trusting, this week is more about being inquisitive and staying open.

Try not to have a knee-jerk reaction to what happened in the first week. Approach it with an open mind. Your body is responding to some pretty amazing metabolic changes, so in week two, you have to convince your body that: Yes, we’re really going to do this and yes, we really have everything we need. We have enough fruit, enough fat, enough carbs, enough protein. I’m not going to choke you by putting in too much and I’m not going to starve you by taking too much away. We will have enough. This is what your body needs to feel, and the best way to transmit this message from your brain to your metabolism is by calming down, paying attention, and towing the line.