Ep #42: Old Diet Rules That Are Slowing Your Weight Loss

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 42.

Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, Fortune 100 executive and Certified Life Coach, Shannan Christiansen.

Hello loves. Welcome back to the show. Ladies, so excited to be with you today. We’re going to talk about diet rules and how they really slow your transformation. But before we get into the show, I want to give a listener shout-out to Rebecca Hardy.

She wrote, “You are such an inspiration for me. This podcast has made things so much easier for me. Even though reflection work is the hardest for me, listening to this reminds me not to beat myself up and to see the success that I’ve had. Thank you.”

Thank you so much, Rebecca. Again, another really thoughtful review. Ladies, it means so much to me when you leave these reviews. If you get the time, if you could leave a review, I would really appreciate it.

So, I was putting away groceries the other day and I noticed that I was looking at labels. I started counting calories in my head and I was like, what? Honestly love, it was just old habits of counting calories that still float around in my head.

Even though I have been on this journey for years and years, I counted calories for so long. I had looked at labels to see fat grams, carbs, sugar content. I did this the majority of my life. I’ve worked on my own diet beliefs and changing them has helped me to get off the roller coaster.

So love, I love definitions. So I want to give you a couple definitions. So the word belief is defined as an acceptance that a statement is true or that something exists. I believed for so long that I could only have a limited number of calories in a day that it has become an engrained belief.

But also, a rule. A rule, by definition, is a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. So I had accepted that if I ate too many calories, that was the belief, and then I made it a rule.

It governed me for a long time. So we have these rules around dieting. We have these long histories of dieting. We have lots of rules and we believe them. I had the rule around limiting my calories for so long that it still circles in my head.

I have them floating around like meals can only be 300-400 calories for lunch, or you can only have so many calories a day. The difference for me now and for my ladies is that we’ve challenged the belief. I no longer believe that calories are the sole contributor to weight gain or loss.

Our bodies are complex, and we have a few hormones that I believe have a higher contribution to weight gain or loss than calories. I teach all about it in The Society. There are so many “diet rules” like you must eat breakfast. I was reading a very famous fitness expert, her blog the other day, and she still states it.

She stated that if you do not eat breakfast, you will be hungrier later. For me and my body, it’s just not true. I’m not hungry in the morning. I rarely eat breakfast. It does not make me hungrier later. I find that if I eat breakfast, I am hungrier later.

I work with hundreds of ladies, and I have to say that I find that some ladies, they eat breakfast, and some don’t. It all depends on their own bodies. Everything I teach love, is that we become the scientist of our own bodies. We don’t take on all of these rules and all of these things that everyone has told us to do.

We actually look at what works for us. What if all of our diet beliefs and rules were wrong? What if we could create our own rules based on testing our own bodies? This is what I teach my ladies in The Transform Society. We challenge all of it.

Then we decide what we want to believe and what we want to implement as our own rules. Another rule I see is eating at night. For so long, we were told not to eat late at night because you will gain weight. I have seen this over and over again and it’s just not true.

The actual reason is that for many, they are tired at night and eat more non-fuel at night. That is what’s contributing. They’re eating past full. Not the actual time of day. Another rule I see is carbs and the elimination of.

This is such a huge diet industry belief right now. There are beliefs that carbs make you fat, so we’ve created all these rules around carbs and eliminating them. But love, I eat carbs. Rice, potatoes, veggies have carbs, I’ve lost my weight doing it.

None of my ladies have eliminated carbs and they’ve lost 10, 20, 30, 90 pounds. Diet rules were created by the diet industry. I teach my ladies to create their own rules, to take back control of their own weight loss transformation.

I give them the tools so they can lose weight in a way that they can always do. Not just a quick fix that keeps them stuck on the diet roller coaster. So here are the transformational questions for today. Number one, what are your diet rules? And number two, which ones do you want to stop believing? So good, love.

Love, if you are wanting to take this work deeper, The Transform Society is opening in July. If you want a community of women to help and support you and you’re ready to get off the diet roller coaster for good, then sign up for the waitlist. You will get all of the information on when it opens, free trainings, and a brochure mailed right to your home. You can get it all at bflycoaching.com/waitlist. Bye for now, love.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and want to learn more, come over to bflycoaching.com. That’s B – F – L – Y coaching dot com. See you next week!