STOP REGAINING THE WEIGHT YOU LOST

The following is a download of the subtitles to this week's YouTube Vid.

(June 17, 2022)

You know the story.  You were a little heavier than

you wanted to be, and you dieted and you lost weight, 

And then you gained it back and

you ended up heavier than ever.

This is what diet mentality thinking

does to you, my friend. Look around.

Look at your own life.

Look at people in your life.

My name is Meg Meranus.

I also fell into this trap many times

from the ages of 14 to 40.

And in the year 2000, I turned 40 and

I stopped dieting and I've never looked back.

And the way I was able to get and stay

at my happy weight was to develop into an intuitive

eater rejecting diet mentality thinking and instead connecting to the

wisdom that I had all day long.

And so do you.

There are three things I want to talk about this

week, little practices that will help you as you're learning

to become an intuitive eater, to get and stay at

your happy weight without the angst of diet culture.

The first thing is a broad concept that I talk about

a lot, and it is the beauty and power of hunger.

Hunger, if you have food, the ability

to afford food is a gift.

It is your flashlight in the dark, it is

your guide, it is your biological intelligence telling you

what, when and how much to eat.

Yet we've been trained by the

diet industry to ignore it.

I'm telling you, this is dangerous

to your mental health, to your

physical health, to your emotional happiness.

And that is why the start of

this little conversation today is about hunger.

Now, I'm going to say this is not medical advice and I

am not talking to you if you have an eating disorder.

This is for people who have dieted

themselves heavier than they want to be. All right?

So imagine in your life that you have levels of hunger.

And when you're a dieter, you get used to

tolerating hunger, like strong hunger and ignoring it.

So in your head you have connected

hunger and sadness and frustration and denial

and a bunch of negative things.

And that is why you develop in your life

as a dieter, as fearful of hunger, as not

wanting to tolerate hunger, as hunger is bad.

When you become an intuitive eater, this all changes.

And instead, it's like you associate hunger with

happiness because hunger is your cue to eat.

And eating is one of the biggest pleasures

we get to do in our lives.

And that's by design, because it used to be

that it was hard to get food and so

hunger had to be a wonderful thing to gratify.

We still have that.

And you do not have to be heavy because

we are not living in caves anymore, being paleo.

That doesn't mean that you have to

be heavy in this day now.

In this day now, you have to reacquaint

yourself with what true hunger feels like.

And it's beautiful. It's amazing.

And if someone just hops on this video and says,

oh, she says hunger is beautiful, that's so stupid.

No, it's not.

Hunger is a drive like all your

other beautiful drives that you enjoy.

It is beautiful as long as you have,

of course, the means to satisfy it. Of course.

And I will always remind ourselves of how

lucky we are that we have food.

Having too much food is a problem.

No, having too much food is bounty and fortune.

That is not a problem.

But so here when you're becoming an intuitive

eater, you have to disassociate hunger and sadness

and bring hunger and happiness back together.

Because again, when you have hunger, you think to yourself,

oh no, I got to run to the refrigerator.

No, you say to yourself, oh wow, soon

I'm going to have a great eating experience.

Whether it's a small thing because it's a snack kind

of a hunger feeling or a meal hunger feeling.

And you may say, well, what do those feel like?

Well, that's your job to you.

Get acquainted with you as if

you were a scientist studying something. Get a notebook.

That's why I have a workbook.

It's available on our website to go through all this.

So you learn to be a detective and write down

the things that you need to know about yourself and

your hunger so that you can take care of yourself.

Treat yourself like a little child in this way.

Because sadly, we all have to go back to kindergarten

when it comes to learning how to eat, because the

diet industry has trained it out of us, because they

make billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars

doing that, making you a customer for life.

Is that what you want? No.

You want to beat your happy weight, enjoy

your food, love your body, be proud of

your body and move on with your life.

Now before someone says, I'm fat shaming, no, I'm not.

If you don't want to lose weight,

my message is for people who do. If you don't want to

lose weight, beautiful, fine, don't.

But you guys who are out there who are not

happy with your weight and you're not at your happy

weight mentality and you think diet culture is your only

way out, I'm just telling you that that's not true.

Come over here to the land of

intuitive eating, understanding these basic concepts and

you will be on your way.

It's not difficult.

Like, it's not a difficult task, but you have

to stubbornly adhere to it because you get diet

messages pummeled at you all the time.

Okay, so let's go back to this

first thing, I'm talking about the hunger.

Learn to connect hunger and happiness.

When I get a little hungry, I'm

like, oh good, it's a good feeling.

I feel alive.

It's not sad, deprived.

And I'm not talking about losing hunger

to get to some weird skinny weight.

I'm 55, weigh £130 that I have for many years.

That's my happy weight.

I'm just letting you know kind of where I'm at.

I'm not talking about being 55 and weighing

110, but if that's your happy weight, I

mean, that would be very thin.

But I'm just saying we all have different body types.

This is my body type.

This is where I'm happy.

I would consider myself medium, right?

And it's wonderful for me.

This is where I'm happy.

So I know that about myself and I know how

to eat intuitively and I know how to use hunger.

When I first did this years ago and

I was always struggling with that, always struggling

with the last ten or £15.

Occasionally I dip down that I go right back up.

This allowed me to get where I want

to be and stay there and stay there.

And part of this is having a goal that

is realistic for you because like I just said,

we're not all born lanky Great Danes.

Some of us are little boxers,

some of us are golden retrievers.

Some of us are all kinds of things.

And we love all those shapes,

as you should love your shape.

But being at your happy weight is a legitimate goal.

Okay?

But if you're a boxer, you're never

going to be a Great Dane.

That's something you have to understand. I digress.

Okay, so we got this hunger thing going.

So make that a big part of

your commitment to becoming an intuitive eater.

Secondly, just a practical thing.

Put food in your refrigerator and your pantry.

That's easy to get quickly when you're new at this.

And have a variety so that you

learn what your cravings feel like.

So if you get hungry and I don't know what

I want because I'm been a dieter for 1000 years,

I don't even know what I want, I really am

trying to even learn what hunger feels like.

All right, so when you go to refrigerator, if you

just have one kind of thing, you won't know if

that was the thing that your body was really craving.

So have a variety if you can afford to.

It's a beautiful bountiful taking, nurturing,

taking care of yourself feeling.

Have some different stuff in there, right?

And so when you go and you look in your

refrigerator, you can go, yeah, that's it, that's it.

And you will use your eyes to eat diet behavior or

have it go like this and have your meals planned.

Okay, well, that's not very joyful.

I love when I get hungry and

I wonder what I'm going to want.

It's fun. It's fun. Do this. So you go down, you look in

your refrigerator, but again, prepare yourself.

Have things ready that you like, especially

in the beginning, because again, you want

to get that happiness hunger thing connected.

And if you go down to your

refrigerator and you don't have anything made.

And then you jump on into the negative hunger feeling.

When you've gone too far, your gas tank

goes to a quarter and you're feeling good,

you're going to drive a few more miles.

But if you let that get too low, oh, God, panic mode.

You don't want to do that.

You want to feel your hunger go, okay,

I'm going to take care of myself soon.

It's going to be really fun.

When you start tipping over because you don't have anything

in your refrigerator or you didn't make a plan, then

you get units like you're running out of gas.

I don't feel good. This is bad.

And that's that unhappy hunger association.

You don't want that.

Take care of yourself.

And so you're working with your hunger.

You're taking care of yourself by having

a bunch of different kinds of food.

Doesn't have to be a lot.

It doesn't have to be expensive on another video.

I'll tell you, it's way less

expensive to be an intuitive eater.

But that's for another day, so don't worry about that.

This sounds like it costs a lot.

No, it doesn't. All right.

And then the third thing, which I talk about a

lot and which is one of the daily things I

talk about in our workbook, is have food with you.

So I work at home.

This is my home desk.

If I didn't work at home, I would have some

bars, some nuts, some different things always at my desk.

Because if I get into a situation, since I have

a home office, I can go to my kitchen.

But if I'm at work and I wasn't at home,

if you get into a situation where you're trying to

wait for that hunger and you want to bloom, I

love saying bloom because it's like a pretty flower.

Your hunger blooms. It's a good thing.

It's not negative.

And you go, oh, God, I went too far.

And now I've got this meeting

and now I'm really hungry.

Don't do that to yourself. Take care of yourself.

Don't let that hunger make you unhappy.

And a few bites, my friends, you will be surprised when

you get into this, how few bites you can down a

little bar of something or some nuts very quickly.

And that can be all it takes not to totally squish

your hunger and maybe not completely satisfied, but to take you

out of that red zone where you're feeling unhappy.

You don't want to get to that red zone.

And another reason you don't want to get there

is because when you ignore your hunger, your hunger

stops talking because your body is like, oh, wow,

she can't eat, he can't eat.

So I'm just going to be quiet and let

them go work to get some food somewhere.

And I don't want to obviously, being very lay person

about this, but this is what it feels like.

I can tell you if you let yourself get too hungry.

And especially you guys, again,

not for eating disorders here.

This is for people who've died.

Because if you are someone who just hears these

words and go, okay, I'm not going to eat,

I'm going to really that hunger grow and grow.

No, that's not what I'm saying.

Not what I'm saying.

When you do that, you lose your

hunger because your hunger stops talking to

you because you're not listening to it.

So you're just right here hunger, you're neutral.

After you eat, you're neutral and then

you start feeling a little hunger.

Let that bloom a little bit. Let it bloom.

That's when you're in that good mode

of burning just a little bit.

And also that's why this is

slow because it's a little bit.

Because if you jump down there into like

hangry red zone, all that, your body is

going to experience that as trauma.

And you will not keep any weight off that.

You lose that way because you will get

rapid rebound weight gain signals with massive hunger.

You don't want that gentle.

Again, you're satisfied.

After you eat, you just dip into that,

okay, I'm going to need to eat soon.

And then you get just to that feeling of

where the thought of food makes your mouth water.

There's lots of signs.

You're going to have to determine

your own because we're all different.

And you bring yourself right back up. It's a gentle.

If you're in here, you're not here

like really hungry, really full, really hungry.

No, you just live right here.

Tolerating a little hunger, bringing it back.

Tolerating a little hunger, bringing it back.

It's a beautiful way to live.

That's why you take care of yourself

with food, because this isn't good.

I'm hungry now.

I need to because I've felt hunger for a while.

It's not going away because hunger can be cyclical.

You can feel some hunger, and then it

can go away for a couple of hours.

I mean, that happens to me.

I think I'm hungry and then, oh, no, kind of goes away.

Okay, well, it'll come back and then it does.

And then I eat, right?

So you just want to hear you're

neutral hunger, okay, bring it back.

Hunger, okay, bring it back.

But it's not like hunger, okay, give it a chance

to give yourself a chance to feel the hunger.

Because then whatever you eat, whether it's a

nuts or in your drawer or a bar

of something, the food is amazing.

It's way better that way.

So listen, friends, don't get yourself in this

trap by dieting where you start here and

you end up here instead of here, right?

If you've never dieted, you'd probably

be thinner than you are now.

If you've been dieting and gaining weight through dieting, I

know that would have happened to me for sure.

So you can do this calm and steady.

Enjoy your hunger.

Use it as your guide.

Associate happy things with hunger and weight

loss, friends, it is not fast, because

if it's fast, you gain it back.

Cardinal rule, fast weight loss, fast rebound weight

gain, gentle, calm, loving, compassionate weight loss.

It's gone for good. Okay?

You can do this.

Please, like, share subscribe.

Help me get this message out there, because you know that

a lot of people need to hear this, and it's a

very hard message to get out there, because when I say

the weight loss isn't fast, people tune out.

But I'm never going to lie.

But I'm telling you, I have so many people who

come to me, come on our website, start this, and

they leave, and then they come back, and then they

make their stance as an intuitive eater because they realize

there's no fast way out of diet culture and there's

no fast way to lose weight.

It's slow, but it's permanent.

And this isn't a thing you're going on.

This is you for the rest of your life.

And it's beautiful.

And you've got lots of years ahead of you.

And your future self thanks you for being patient

and learning how to eat intuitively instead of lining

the pockets of those money grabbing diet industry people.

All right, thank you for being here.

Again, I'm going to say this again.

You can do this.

If I can, you can.

All right, have a great week.

And if you go on our website and

you see something, please, and you have financial

hardship, please email me, mega diets or fattening.com,

and I will be back next week. Thank you for being here.