Break free from yo-yo dieting and lose weight for life
Let’s talk about how to break free from yo-yo dieting once and for all and lose weight for life. This is for you if you’ve been on ALL the diets and you’re thinking of trying just one more…
You can watch the video I made about this below, or keep scrolling to read the full blog.
It’s time to try something different. Rather than going on a diet losing the weight, then putting it all back on again and building up a really crappy relationship with food. Time to break free from yo-yo dieting once and for all.
This is for you if you have a really shitty relationship with food, where you jump from diet to diet. Now you’re bigger than when you first started, but you’re thinking about going on another diet. You’re tempted coz you think you need to lose the weight. Honestly, if you’ve done all the diets and wish you’d never started in the first place – going on another diet is the worst idea ever. Another diet will make it worse. You’re more likely to more obsessed with food and end up with more issues around binge eating and comfort eating.
Time to ditch all that dieting once and for all
Instead love yourself first; try and accept yourself as you are. Then instead of focusing on the number on the scales, focus on doing things to look after yourself. Do the things that will make you feel well rather than doing it to get the results.
Here are some tips to break free from yo-yo dieting and lose weight for life
Step 1. Make a decision to ditch dieting forever
Decide right now that you’re never going to go on a diet ever again. Make a promise to yourself to stop dieting, even if you want to make changes to eat better or exercise more. Ditch all that dieting language where you talk about “trying to be good” or say you’re dieting or slimming. Forget this whole idea of ‘going on a diet’, it’s kind of like ‘going on a bus’ – at some point you get off. Instead of thinking about doing something short term, focus on those forever habits. It’s all about your habits rather than following a plan. No more dieting, instead look at building healthy habits for life.
Step 2. Make sure you ACTUALLY want to change
First of all you need to be clear on your goal. What is it you’re aiming for, where is it that you want to be? Is it about your weight or your dress size? Or is it about how you feel about yourself or your eating habits? How will you know when you’ve reached your goal? What is it you actually want to achieve?
When you know what you want to achieve, ask yourself – do you really want to be there? Is it actually important to you and is it realistic for you to be there? Say you want to be a certain dress size, but you’ve never been there before, is that actually realistic for you? Maybe you’ve been that dress size before, but the habits you followed back then, aren’t realistic for you now? Or it could be those habits weren’t healthy, like you were skipping meals and exercising way too much. Think about what you need to do to get there and is that realistic within your current lifestyle? Also do you really want to make those changes to your eating/exercising habits?
If you don’t really want to get there and your goal isn’t that important to you. Or you really don’t want to make any changes to your eating habits. Then it’s always going to be an uphill struggle. I give you permission right now to just not do it if you really don’t want to, but if you do want to change… keep reading!
Step 3. Keep it simple
Before you make changes, you need to get clear on what your normal day-to-day habits are. How do you eat normally? How do you exercise normally? Think about your normal habits then ask yourself how you could tweak those habits. Small changes, little adjustments to what you do normally, can make a really big difference in the long term. You don’t need to follow some big drastic plan or change everything. You might have a whole list of changes you think you need to make, but you don’t need to do all of it. Just tweak it; pick one or two things to change.
Focus on your first step; the first change that you could make that would make a big enough difference, but is easy enough to keep going long term. How could you make it easy for yourself to build that habit for life? Would it be easy enough to fit into your life or is there something else you could do instead? If you make it easy for yourself, you’re more likely to build it up as a habit for life. But it takes practice, so you’ve got to keep doing it over and over again, before it becomes a new habit. You need to be prepared for it to take practice and it helps to make sure it’s something easy that you want to change.
Step 4. Give it time
When you’ve done diets before you’re used to getting fast results. You might’ve lost weight fast, but then you put it all back on again, because you were making too many changes. When you change too much too quickly, it’s not sustainable. When you break free from yo-yo dieting and make changes to lose weight for life, it’s about being prepared for long term effort. Whatever you do, you need to do it forever, but also recognise that slip ups are a normal part of changing habits. Relapse is not only normal, it’s inevitable, but it’s about recognising when it’s happening and looking at how to get yourself back on track as soon as possible.
Relapse is something I help my VIP clients with frequently, because it’s a normal part of making changes to your behaviour. It helps if you go back and check your goals are important to you and make sure you really want to make changes. Building new habits takes time so you need to be patient with yourself and avoid focusing on the results.
You’ll also need to be prepared to persevere when things get tough, coz they will get tough. It can help to have a buddy or someone to support you, whether it’s a mentor, a coach or somebody you can have a chat with. Make sure they’re someone you can trust not to tell you to just follow the latest diet or refer to it as slimming or dieting.
Not sure what tweaks to make?
Check out my super simple guide to making healthy eating easy – you can download free here. Have a look at what I recommend then think about what stands out compared to what you’re doing. If something stands out to you then that’s probably your first step – the first tweak you could make.
The first step to break free from yo-yo dieting and lose weight for life, is making that promise to yourself. Decide you’re never going to go on a diet ever again. Then be kind to yourself and make sure that you actually want to make those changes. Keep it all simple and give it time, because it does take time, but you can do it!
You CAN ditch dieting forever, because you absolutely deserve better.
Need help to ditch dieting forever?
Want to eat normally again AND lose weight healthily? While still enjoying the cake & chocolate? Hell yes!
I will help you ditch dieting forever, either with my 1-2-1 support. Or if you prefer to work independently, you will learn all the skills I teach my 1-2-1 clients, on my ‘No More Diets’ online course.
Special ‘No More Diets’ Bundle
Save £68* and get one of my ‘Kick-Start’ 1-2-1 sessions PLUS unlimited access to my ‘No More Diets’ online course, with the special bundle price of £299. Get in touch with me here and ask about the special bundle price.
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My Weekly Round-up! AKA; what I’ve been up to recently…
- Tea of the week has been English Breakfast. Although I don’t think I’ve had many this week!
- I’ve just about kept up my walks and exercises – maybe not been as regular this week, but I’ve had a few distractions. Will aim for 3 walks and doing my exercises 3 times next week.
- We celebrated completing our little family challenge ’22 Hills In 2022′ by going to a new veggie café. I always love going out for lunch and the food was nice… although it wasn’t amazing, so we probably wouldn’t go out of our way to go back.
- We got a little creative at the weekend. I had almost forgotten that I had a little badge-maker – one of those impulse buys about 15 years ago that I used once! Genevieve was excited to make a couple of little badges – she made herself a couple of Harry Potter style prefect badges.
- I quite missed going for a walk up a hill, but it was nice to chill at home. We did manage to get out for a walk along the brook to a play park that Genevieve loves that we haven’t been to for ages. That was a good walk and made a change.
- Bird Nerd Report: On our Sunday walk we saw a heron flying past which was amazing. I’ve only seen a kingfisher a couple of times, but I also saw a cute little grey and yellow wagtail pretty close to me. Also saw quite a few treecreepers on one walk along the brook.
