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.