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Did you know that I’m a certified weight loss coach?
Yet…how many blogs have I written about the importance of protein?
How often do I ask you about your carb intake?
How many podcasts have I done talking about paleo, intermittent fasting, or your macros?
Zero.
What do I talk and write about?
Your thoughts.
Your goals.
Your passions.
Your struggles.
Why?
Is it that I’m not concerned with your physical health?
Nope.
I’m intensely concerned.
It’s because I know that your physical health has more to do with your mindset and mental health than our society gives credit to. Weight loss has more to do with our thoughts and our habits than any family history or gene pool.
Further, when I work with clients to address what they like to do, what they’re here on this planet to do, what lights them up, they rarely mention counting calories or measuring the size of their bellies.
Warriors, there is so much more to life than our weight. 
In our podcast interview last week, Susan Hyatt spoke of a study that showed that by the time a woman reached age she had spent 31 years of her life on a diet.
Are you kidding?
There’s so much of that study that triggers me.
Not only the fact that 95 percent of people who go on a diet gain all the weight back or that diets increase the stress hormones that slow our metabolism or even that dieting directly affects our confidence….
What really bothers me?
The amount of mental energy women (including me!) have spent on this.
The mental power we’ve wasted thinking about our bodies rather than our brain;
The time we’ve spent contemplating our thigh gap instead of the wage gap;
The amount of money that we’ve given to the diet industry (largely led by men);
The amount of power that we’ve given to others to link our worth with our weight;
The generations that have passed down the lesson that what you look like is more important than what you are like.
I don’t have many regrets in life yet boy do I regret the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about my weight and food. I deeply regret the years that I linked my worth to my physical appearance.
As with all lessons from the past, it’s important to live and learn. I now understand why I linked my worth with my weight. I also now choose to use my voice and influence with women and teens to blaze a new path.
Internal Wiring
My story is telling yet not unique. I am the oldest of three daughters, a pleasantly plump mother, and……a sad dad who fastidiously monitored what we ate and how we looked. He was an insecure man who was more concerned about what the neighbors thought of us than what we thought of us.
I remember him routinely saying: “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips”. He restricted the foods the females in the house were allowed to eat while he hid “his treats” up in a cabinet that none of us could reach. He would constantly point out women who were “attractive, tall and slender” as positive and appealing. He would pinch or pat my mom’s extra curves and say disparaging things in public and private. It was crystal clear that my mom’s body type was anything but attractive to my father. He sent the message that she was letting him down.
The minute I hit puberty and my body started to get the natural female curves, I went on a diet to stop it. Curves? Yuck! For the first time that I can remember, my dad started to praise me: my progress, my restriction of food, my body’s shape, my over-exercising. I always excelled in school yet my memories of him complimenting my physicality are what I remember. My intellect or creativity didn’t matter but my body sure did. I don’t need a degree to figure out that my dad’s insecurities (he almost failed out of college and never excelled in the job his father had gotten him) were being taken out on us. My stay-at-home mother was highly intelligent yet not once was she praised for her brain, her knowledge…actually I can’t remember him praising her for anything! As they say, hurt people hurt people. This isn’t about him or my family, rather an all-too-common illumination of the twisted emphasis that is placed on female beauty.
Time To Change
Warriors, this will not change until we change our internal messaging. From the thought model we know that nothing external will create an internal feeling. What that means when weight is involved is that, regardless of what you weigh, you’re going to feel what you feel based on the thoughts you’re thinking. This is why one 5’5” 150 pound woman can feel confident and happy about her weight while another feels like a failure and is depressed. Same weight. Different thoughts.
This month let’s take some steps to stop this nonsense.
How?
Awareness is the first step.
Period.
The first step to having a healthy relationship with food and your weight is to become aware of what you’re thinking about food and your weight.
The Journey Begins
Tune back into yourself.
What do you want?
What feels good?
Does it feel good to eat a donut?
Then eat it.
Does it feel good to go on a run?
Then go on one.
Does it feel good to sit and read a book?
Then do it.
Our body has the answers.
Our body will tell us if we haven’t moved enough.
Our body will tell us if we haven’t eaten enough.
Our body will tell us if we’ve eaten too much.
Our body will tell us if we living out of alignment of our goals.
Jump Off the Treadmill
Over the years we’ve jumped on this treadmill of life, powered mostly by men, telling us how to value ourselves.
It’s time to evaluate how that has that been working for us women?
I’ll tell you what; I’m done.
It’s time to hop off.
For ourselves;
For our mothers;
For our daughters;
For the future.
Our collective brain power is needed.
It’s time warriors.
If you want something to be different, we need to be different.
START HERE:
I do what I do because I want to help people live lives they love. Lives that feel good no matter the number on the scale. Join me this month in the Warrior Women Community. We are walking through Susan Hyatt’s book BARE in an effort to re-wire some of our messaging and ditch the diet culture. We’d love to have you join.
If you’re a man and want to get support on your journey, sign up for my newsletter here: http://bit.ly/2gYQMlA
