The Power Of Your Body

Diets ignore how powerful you are.

Your body is going to do everything it can to keep you alive.  When you starve yourself on a diet, you put your body on high alert.

First, your body adapts.  Have you ever noticed that just a few days into a diet, your appetite is less and you tolerate less calories  better than the first day of your diet?

This is your fantastic body, which is on “your side” adapting to help you.

Think of you living 2000 years ago and having to endure a famine.  It would be helpful if you were able to tolerate lower calories because you would be able to go on with with your daily life, including hunting or gathering or whatever you needed to do.

In addition, under extreme circumstances, your metabolism slows.  So when you diet, your metabolism slows.

Again, this would served you well 2000 years.

Guess what?  Our bodies are still fighting for us.  And our bodies don’t recognize the difference between a self imposed famine (diet) and a real famine.

I have gone over all of this in blogs before.  But I want to keep reiterating how illogical it is to fight your biology.  Work with your body, not against it.

And how do you work with your body?

You listen to it.  Your respect it.  You should, it is the best “thing” you will ever have.

And if you are wavering, thinking that maybe you just need to diet because you and your body just can’t be re-synchronized, do yourself a favor.  Write down all the diets you have been on.  Write down how much you lost.  And then write down how long it took to gain it back.

Then look at that list and ask yourself if you are really going to do that again.  Why do we ignore the dots that connect dieting with weight GAIN?

Whether you gain and lose the same 5 pounds, or whether you weight fluctuates much more than that, the problem is still dieting.

Free yourself.  Get thin by behaving thin: eat what you crave when you are hungry.  Respect your body enough to listen to it.  (Oh, yes, it will talk to you.  But after being ignored for so long, it is just a whisper, but it will get louder and louder. I promise.)