If you’ve always struggled to lose the weight for good, chances are that you’re doing one of the three most common things:
- dieting
- focusing on food and exercise
- picking and choosing what you want to do and avoiding the hard things you need to do but fear.
However, taking a more holistic approach will bring you the results you’re looking for.
What most people do to lose weight
When people want to lose weight one of the first things they do is focus on their food and exercise.
In other words, they go on a diet (i.e. aim to create a calorie deficit) by reducing the number of calories they consume and increasing the number of calories they burn through exercise. This often equates to restricting food, quitting alcohol and aiming for 10,000 steps per day, along with daily workouts.
Even though this approach is heavily promoted by the diet industry it never leads to permanent weight loss because it misses the most important thing — habits and mindset.
What happens when people focus on food and exercise?
While food and exercise play an important role in weight loss nutrition and fitness are the last things you need to focus on.
You see, most people believe that they have a weight problem, and so they focus on the two factors they believe impacts their weight the most — food and exercise. However, people don’t have weight problems. They have personal problems (identities, habits, mindsets, beliefs and fears) that reflect in their body. In other words, it’s their personal problems that influence their weight, NOT food and exercise. This means that long-term weight loss is only possible when they address their personal problems.
For example, someone who is a people pleaser spends time doing things for other people and often struggles to put themselves first. This habit causes them to say ‘yes’ to longer hours at work, volunteer for causes they don’t believe in and do things to keep other people happy while compromising their personal goals and physical and mental health.
Even if they have the best intentions, and can use willpower for a while to make time for regular exercise and healthy eating, their habit will get the better of them once willpower fails. We explain why this happens in our blog Weight loss motivation: Why willpower doesn’t work. Their habit of putting others before themselves will mean they won’t have time to prepare healthy meals, prioritise their sleep, and be consistent with their exercise. Instead, they’ll sabotage their weight loss.
When it comes to weight loss, consistency trumps perfection every single time. The bottom line is, if you can’t be consistent in taking action to lose weight, then you will always struggle to get results. We explain this in more detail in our blog Why 52 imperfect weeks is better than 6 perfect ones when it comes to weight loss.
The only way to succeed at weight loss is to stop focusing purely on food and exercise and turn your attention to your habits and mindset. This means you need to take a holistic approach.
A holistic approach explained
There’s a lot of buzz around the word ‘holistic’ and its meaning has been blurred over the years. By definition, holistic means “to deal with or treat the whole of something or someone and not just a part”. Holistic medicine, therefore, aims to treat the whole person and takes into consideration things such as other underlying health conditions, lifestyle factors and mental health issues that may contribute to a particular injury or disease, rather than just focusing on treating the injury or disease.
When it comes to weight loss, a holistic approach examines all the factors that contribute to someone being overweight, rather than just focusing on food and nutrition. In other words, a holistic approach is more than food and nutrition. It involves addressing the habits, mindset and fears that have contributed to weight gain because these are the biggest factors that contribute to a person’s weight.
What holistic weight loss IS NOT
With that definition in mind, it’s worth examining what holistic weight loss is not before we get into what it is. A holistic approach to weight loss is not:
- Meditating or reciting positive affirmations
- Doing yoga
- Drinking herbal teas
- Taking vitamin supplements
- Drinking kombucha or eating other ‘super foods’
- Undertaking juice cleanses and detoxes
- Eating acai bowls
- Eating organic or ‘clean’ food
- Eliminating food groups
- Cutting back salt, sugar, fat and alcohol
- Addressing so-called ‘hormonal imbalances’
- Keeping a food diary
- Visualising your goal weight
- Eating intuitively
While there is nothing wrong with doing any of the above, these behaviours all still focus on food and exercise and fail to address the key reasons why people become overweight in the first place — their personal problems.
So, what does a holistic approach to weight loss look like?
What holistic weight loss IS
Holistic weight loss focuses on addressing the real reasons for weight gain. People are not overweight and unhappy because they don’t exercise or eat well, or because they binge eat, emotionally eat or drink too much. People are overweight and miserable because they don’t put themselves first or make themselves a priority. This crops up from things like people-pleasing and lack of self-worth, which are a result of fears, habits and mindsets, which cannot be addressed simply by eating better and exercising.
However, when you address your fears, habits and mindset, your food and exercise will take care of themselves. You’ll no longer need willpower and motivation to eat well or exercise regularly, which means you’ll become more consistent with your efforts over time, and that means better results for you.
Quite simply a holistic approach to weight loss involves examining and addressing the real reasons that cause weight loss self-sabotage and your struggles with weight. These habits and mindsets are the glue that holds your weight loss journey together. Unless they’re strong, everything will fall apart and you’ll continue to self-sabotage your weight loss over and over again.
Why people struggle to lose weight
If you’re struggling to lose weight, it means you’ve been dieting, focusing on food and exercise and picking and choosing what to do, rather than working on the glue that will hold everything together. The reason you’ve been picking and choosing comes down to fear. It’s much easier to focus on what you put in your mouth, or how much exercise you do each day than it is to address your habits because addressing habits involves moving out of your comfort zone and confronting your fears. This explains why most people try to lose weight through dieting alone, and why this approach never works.
No matter how hard you work on your food, exercise or diet, if you’re not addressing your fears, habits and mindset you’re just wasting your time.
This is why we take a holistic approach to weight loss.
The truth is if you want long-term results, you need to work on the hard stuff, which is addressing the obstacles that are in your way — you need to work on your habits, identities, mindset, beliefs and fears.
If you’re ready to finally lose the weight for good and are willing to take a holistic approach, instead of focusing on diets and exercise, let us help you.
