Want to lose weight naturally?  Then I suggest never going to Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers again! They’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but I’m gonna say it anyways because it’s true.  DIETS DON’T WORK! You may have heard it before, but here’s why.

Traditional diets only focus on 1 component of your life – actual physical food – and neglect the other aspects of life that are what really feed you.  Things like healthy relationships; fulfilling careers and physical activity are non-food sources of nourishment that are primary over secondary foods such as beans, grains, and vegetables.   If your primary foods are out of alignment, so too will be the food on your plate.

Think back to when you were a kid and you were running around outside playing, enjoying the sunshine, fresh air and camaraderie of good friends.  Then suddenly your mom called you in for dinner but you didn’t really want to eat.  You weren’t even thinking about food because you were getting all the nourishment you needed from life itself in that moment.  You get the gist?

Diets also fail to address the underlying imbalances that lead to weight gain in the first place, which include hypothyroidism, insulin resistance, and hormonal imbalances.  If you have a low functioning thyroid for example, you’re fighting an uphill battle with your weight until you get the situation under control.  About 40-70% of Americans nowadays are hypothyroid and don’t even know it!  It’s an epidemic that’s sweeping the nation and few even realize it.  You could eat nothing but celery sticks and exercise all day but if your thyroid is off, your body will constantly reset itself back to where it wants to be until you restore function to it.

Another reason diets don’t work is because we’ve gotten to the point where we are very distrustful of our bodies, so we set ourselves up for failure from the get go.  The truth is our bodies are unbelievably intelligent.  They are performing hundreds of thousands of functions every second that we are not even aware of.  And believe it or not, the most definitive nutritional expertise is literally found inside you.

It’s called the enteric nervous system, or the ENS.  The gut brain. It contains over 1 million neurons – more than the number of nerve cells in the spinal cord.  So we’ve got some serious intelligence in our guts!

When we teach ourselves how to tune into our gut brain, it will actually tell us exactly what it wants.  So think about it.  Animals in the wild never question what they want to eat. The lion doesn’t leave his den every day wondering if he should eat the caribou or the zebra, and is concerned about staying away from the hippopotamus because it’s too fatty, right?  No, he doesn’t.  Lions just know what to eat.  And so do we.

The problem is that we live in concrete jungles where it gets very confusing!  Advertisements, TV, the latest diet fad all bombard us on a daily basis claiming that they know what we should eat when in reality we know better than any of them.  We’ve just fallen victim to very slick advertising campaigns.

No Jenny Craig consultant I know ever taught me that.

Your body may cooperate with a diet temporarily, but in the long run, the more you restrict yourself, the more you can expect a backlash.  Never underestimate your body’s own intelligence.  It is always seeking balance, in every given moment of every day, and it will crave and crave and crave until it gets there.   Getting in tune with what your body really wants is the key to attaining natural weight loss.

To learn more about how to lose weight naturally, contact me at angela@wellnesswithangela.com.