The Dreaded Boomerang Effect

One of the primary concerns when considering the concept of giving up control around food is the boomerang effect—eating everything in sight and in massive quantities.

The truth is that yes, it’s common to feel the urge to eat a lot of these foods, and it’s also very common to act on this impulse. This can be a necessary part of the process for many people.

Going to town on these brownies

However, it doesn’t last forever, because with a newly formed sense of awareness and connection to our bodies, the desire to eat in a way that isn’t uplifting—emotionally or physically—isn’t enticing.  

The allure of these foods quickly diminishes when we realize and accept how they make us feel, and we also become aware of why we’re making the choices we do. This includes overeating in general, too.

These foods are typically processed foods that have been on our “bad” list for years, but I often see clients fearing fruit, rice, and other natural carb sources too (as I once did) or foods that are higher in fat if they’re coming from a low-fat background. Everyone’s food rules are different, so the roads to unlearning vary accordingly.

 It can be incredibly helpful to be aware of the boomerang effect prior to embarking on a more intuitive way of eating in an effort to reduce the fear of it occurring, as it’s nothing to be afraid of!

It can propel us towards healing much more quickly than “dipping our toes in while still holding on to our controlling ways” ever will.

The caveat here is the necessity of presence, awareness, and connection.

Without these elements, we’re simply acting on the opposite side of the same coin: treating our bodies disrespectfully and allowing our egos to run the show while not learning anything about ourselves in the process.

However, it can take time to develop these skills after years of neglect.

The goal is to learn how to effectively and consistently implement the practices of presence, awareness, and connection while simultaneously unlearning the rules we’ve been told about our own bodies.  

Sound complicated?  It really isn’t once you have an idea of how and where to start! 

Meditation: This is the simplest, fastest, and most widely available way to develop a sense of presence and awareness of both our physical bodies and our internal landscapes.

When we sit in silent meditation, we’re forced to bear witness to our thoughts and any discomfort that arises. As a result, we become aware of our thoughts, emotions, and urges related to food and our bodies. This is absolutely essential to the process.

Pause before, during, and after eating: meditation will naturally lead to greater awareness during daily activities, but making a concerted effort to check in with our physical bodies and our emotions to understand what we really want and need in that moment is extremely important.

It takes time for this to become a habit, so be patient with yourself! Start by checking in before eating, especially snacking, and once you’re consistently implementing this at least 80% of the time, you can then add “during” and “after” to your practice.

Journal: We can evaluate the choices we’re making and their short-term and long-term effects much more effectively and quickly when we write them down and put our thoughts on paper. This enables us to connect the dots and really get clear on how our choices are affecting our bodies (energy levels, digestion, menstrual cycles, workout performance, skin, etc.).

Additionally, and often more importantly, we need to write about how our emotional and internal states are contributing to the choices we’re making. Does stress lead to overeating and eating foods that don’t make you feel well? Are you using food to cope when you feel lonely? Do you tend to eat highly processed foods during the work week because you’re miserable at your job? These are a few of the REALLY important things to understand about ourselves, and even bringing awareness to them is often enough to change our behavior.

Keep an open mind: this may seem obvious, but it’s impossible to “unlearn” rules if we’re convinced that we already know everything there is to learn. I certainly fell into this trap when I first began my journey, as I was all-in on eating according to hunger and satiety signals, but I wasn’t willing to let go of my dogmatic low-carb and paleo approach.

It wasn’t until I accepted that I may have more to learn that I was finally able to fully connect with my body and listen to what it was telling (read: screaming at) me.

The process isn’t black-and-white

The outcomes of these steps aren’t necessarily prescriptive, rigid, or black-and-white, and this can cause a sense of unease with many former dieters due to the freedom involved. And I get it! I’ve been there.

However, while it’s human nature to crave certainty, most things in life don’t fall into this category, and our relationships with food are no exception. This stuff is layered and nuanced—cultural ties, personal memories and emotions, forms of celebration, fuel for performance, personal preferences, suitability to lifestyles, effects on cognitive abilities, type and duration of activity, and many more. 

It will take time to discover how all of these layers stack up and align for YOU, but the beauty of this tailored approach is that it’s created by you, for you—with your own body and intuition as your guide.

The boomerang effect might be part of your journey, but it certainly isn’t the last stop. It’s merely a byproduct of unlearning everything you’ve assumed over the years, and freedom is surely on the other side.

In Defense of A Drunken Night Out

So you’ve had a late, booze-filled night out—potentially with some late night pizza involved—and you wake up the next morning wondering what the hell happened to your motivation to live a healthy lifestyle.

I used to adhere to a rigid approach with alcohol, but similarly to food, the relationship should be fulfilling on a holistic level. Not just physical health.

How the hell did I get here?

I uttered those words to myself every Saturday and Sunday morning for years, and it was as though I had no control over my decisions the night before. The reality is that I fully participated in the decisions that led up to my over-consumption of alcohol and junk food, but I just wasn’t ready to face that fact.

This feeling of lack of control—being on hamster wheel of overdoing EVERYTHING after loosening the reigns just a little—was a major source of my discontentment every morning.

It wasn’t the choices and uncomfortable aftermath, both physical and emotional, that led to my internal battle, but rather the feeling that I wasn’t the one making those choices. The feeling that something or someone else was in the driver’s seat of my life—it was unsettling AF.

After finally accepting the adage of “nothing changes if nothing changes”, I embarked on the journey of reframing my relationship with food, exercise, and alcohol.

Little did I know these were all directly related to my relationship with myself. 

As I worked on uncovering the motivation behind my self-destructive patterns, I started to realize that I could in-fact trust myself to make balanced choices, and that my version of balance could include consciously choosing to go overboard when I wanted to.

Discovering this involved a process of trial and error for about a year.

I would drink too much because I was caught up in what everyone else was doing and completely lost sight of what I wanted for myself (old patterns I slipped into).

On the other side of the spectrum, I would strictly adhere to my pre-determined drink limit despite my soul calling for a night of letting loose with some extra drinks.

To my surprise, the feeling of ignoring the internal pull to throw caution into the wind and have a drunken night out was often just as unsettling as a hangover I didn’t truly sign up for. 

This threw me for a loop, and I was incredibly confused. 

Wasn’t booze in excess the cause of so many of my previous internal battles?

Does this pull towards excess every-now-and-then mean I’m slipping into old patterns?

Is my intuition leading me astray? 

The answers to these questions, I discovered, was no.

The source of my internal battles was the use of alcohol (just like food) as a replacement for an internal void that I needed to attend to or a complete lack of connection to my body, intuition, and emotions.

As I explored my relationship with the concept of choosing to drink in excess consciously, I realized that there is absolutely nothing wrong with making this choice. It’s not indicative of an addiction, a lack of discipline, immaturity, or of an unevolved human being.

When made consciously and with a sense of discernment and connection, these choices are simply a part of the human experience!

And what a shame it would be to live life so rigidly in the middle that we miss out on meeting our edges again. 

This may seem contradictory to my thoughts about how our extremes help us find our own middle and definition of “balance”, but balance doesn’t have to mean one mode of operation at all times.

It can mean periods of less alcohol when needing to feel more grounded or less social (if we choose to drink at all).

It can mean having a drink every night for a few weeks or months simply because it feels right and it still makes you feel physically and emotionally well overall.

It can mean an entire season of drinking more every weekend because you’re yearning for carefree social time, or simply because that’s the experience your soul is calling for.

If living a life of pure moderation isn’t one that aligns with what you want out of this life, THAT IS OK!

It’s not one that I want either, and I wish I had been given the permission to truly create my own definition of balance at the beginning of my journey of self-discovery.

Your definition of balance, health, and a fulfilling life doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.

The key is to ensure that you’re the one in the driver’s seat—in tune with what your body and soul are calling for.

“All things in moderation, including moderation.” – Oscar Wilde

We Can Use Our Past Extremes to Our Advantage (Before & After & After & After Pics)

The exploration of our edges and living in extremes can be incredibly valuable. For most who struggle with their relationships with food and their bodies, they’ve inhabited one or both ends of the spectrum. I sure have spent my fair share of time on both ends. 

Swearing not to eat until I felt faint, vomiting, insane amounts of exercise to burn off and earn my food, only eating foods from a specific list, intermittent fasting on top of an already restrictive diet, swearing off all coffee and alcohol, and trying every diet known to man.

Around 2006 - Before my weight was brought to my attention for the first time in high school.

2007 - After several months of restriction, I was LOST. Zero period & absolutely miserable.

Circa 2008. I went up and down several times per year in weight during college, which the highest being 15-20 lbs. more than today.

Binging until I physically couldn’t move and was in so much pain, eating in secrecy, anxiously eating while hungover or drunk after days of restriction, eating chocolate chip cookies every time I passed through the kitchen every Thanksgiving break, stuffing myself with food—didn’t matter the type—and eating well beyond what my body wanted, binge drinking until I blacked out multiple times per week, drinking so much coffee I nearly induced panic attacks, and not moving my body for days.

Post college 2012-2013! Still boozing until I blacked out a couple times per week, eating garbage all weekend, and being incredibly strict during the week.

After returning from three months abroad in Asia in 2014. My body dropped weight without giving it a second thought after I committed to only listening to my body and doing what FELT good and true to me. Major turning point for me.

Last weekend! Letting my intuition guide my choices, which aligns with the season of life I’m in.

Like a pendulum, I swung from one extreme to the other, and looking back, I learned a lot while I inhabited both.

• Restriction and living according to rigid rules are soul-sucking.

• My body doesn’t subscribe to a playbook, as it doesn’t have the same needs day-in and day-out. I need flexibility with how I eat and move.

• Someone providing me with rules about how to live instantly makes me anxious. I hate nothing more than being told what to do, especially arbitrarily.

• Overdoing it on things that are “pleasurable”—like processed foods, booze, significant amounts of food, sitting on my ass for too long—makes those things unenjoyable. In fact, it makes me resentful of them.

• Spending all of my time thinking about food, either how little or how much I’m able to eat, is a substitute for feeling something deeper; a distraction.

• Inhabiting one end of the spectrum for too long will—without a doubt—force me to the other end.

• My body doesn’t feel alive, energetic, or like it’s my own when I’m under or overdoing it with food or exercise.

• It’s nearly impossible to overdo it with too little or too much when I’m present. Disconnection—both mind and body—is necessary for us to live in extremes.

• I’m most myself energetically, physically, emotionally, and mentally when I’m balancing pleasure and discipline, and these two things aren’t mutually exclusive.

• Going to extremes on rare occasions can be nourishing for the soul, although rarely for the body. It’s OK to make this sacrifice when I’m actively choosing this, and the choice is coming from a present, centered, and grounded place. I.e. I’m not using it as a distraction.

This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, and I wouldn’t have been able to discover these valuable nuggets of information without exploring the edges of extreme behaviors and states of being. 

Does everyone need extremes to live in balance? No. But if you have a personality type similar to mine, where you “have to touch the stove to know it’s hot”, as my dad used to say to describe me, then it may be best to view these experiences with gratitude.

They teach us our limits, and they allow us to know ourselves on a much deeper level. The facilitate our growth, and they put us on the fast track to self-discovery.

This is all contingent upon us being ready to accept the lessons by establishing a foundation of self-worth and respect, of course, otherwise the motivation to cease the cycle of self-harm won’t exist.

However, sometimes the birth of this foundation is derived from hitting rock bottom. From being so obsessed and controlled by food and our inner demons that we have no other choice but to make changes.

Regardless of where you are in your journey, don’t be afraid to reframe your “negative” experiences and use them to your advantage. Make a list of everything you learned, the things you’ll no longer tolerate, and how those moments will benefit you going forward.

Perspective is a magical thing, and the lens through which we’re viewing ourselves, our past, and our future is everything. How can you use your past to inform your present and future?

Never Miss a Monday Workout? I Call Bullsh*t

I used to be ALL about the sentiment of this slogan, but this didn’t just apply to Mondays. I was militant about my workout regimen, and never once did I stop, sit with my body, do a fully body scan, and ask what would be best for her.

Nope. Sick, injured, run-down, stressed—none of it mattered.

I would anxiously think about my workout for the entirety of the day if I was planning to complete it in the afternoon (often the case), and I quickly learned how much I enjoyed morning workouts, as my mind was then free for the remainder of the day to think about other things.

It never occurred to me that I wasn’t actually happy in this pursuit, and I certainly didn’t consider the health of my mind or body during this time.

I was so far down the rabbit hole of hustling for a sense of worthiness—either through body composition changes or pushing through an intense workout—that I didn’t know which way was up.

This behavior encapsulates the peak of my obsession with exercise and controlling my body, but I continued to move through many other iterations as I progressed towards healing.

Not All In, but Still Too Much

Just three years ago, I was still convinced that as long as I was taking two full rest days, then it was impossible to be behaving in a neurotic or disconnected fashion. Note that these were primarily CrossFit workouts.

This frequency can certainly work well for some, and it’s largely dependent on a variety of factors—sleep, stress, nutrition, intensity and duration of activity—but it didn’t work for me. The fact that I was actually taking rest days didn’t mean shit to my body, as it was still stressed to the nines.  

I was allowing my strictly disciplined mind call all the shots and was greatly disconnected from my body.

My ego (or monkey brain) continued to play puppet master, and my body, mind, and soul were paying a serious price.

We can argue the nuances of different personality types, various life circumstances, and different goals until we’re blue in the face, but the fact remains that there are still MANY good reasons to miss a Monday. Or any planned workout, for that matter.  

• Feeling physically run down due to emotional or mental stress

• Illness or imbalances (such as hormonal), chronic or acute

• Lack of adequate fuel, so it will only serve as an additional stressor

• Injury in various degrees and forms

• PMS

• A general lack of downtime and rest (i.e. living in masculine energy)

• Going to happy hour instead

• Simply not wanting to

Some of these can be labeled as excuses, and depending on the context, they very well may be. We are the only ones who hold the answers for ourselves.

However, for those of us who are perfectionists at heart (recovering or otherwise), who often thrive in the masculine energy of constant productivity, who function with high levels of discipline, and who receive great pleasure from intense physical activity and success, these are anything but excuses.

These are legitimate, life-giving reasons that may serve us far more from a health perspective than an additional workout ever will.

Before you give credence to another #nevermissamonday social media post and throw yourself into a shame spiral for not being disciplined, hard-core, or productive enough, sit with your body and ask her what would be best for her.

Our bodies hold greater wisdom than we often give them credit for, and through this stillness, we’re able to tune into the needs of body and soul.

 Our habits and mindset related to exercise are the perfect opportunity to practice establishing and deepening this relationship.

You don't have to pursue weight loss right now

I love everything about the Fall and Winter seasons, which means taking full advantage of all festivities and everything they have to offer! As long as I'm feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally balanced, then I'm good.

The fall is almost upon us, and with this time of year comes football, holidays, travel, and festive gatherings. Essentially, really good food and booze start to roll in, and there are often plenty of reasons for us to celebrate.

This isn’t to say the Summer season isn’t filled with the same, but people tend to be more conscious of their choices due to the clothing attire accompanying the season. The colder months usher in heavier food (and hopefully red wine), and I’m allll about it!

Many of the women I work with are beginning to fret about the upcoming seasons.

• “I love Fall and Winter foods, and I tend to eat more of them.”
• “Football season is my favorite, and I love to eat the snacks and drink the beer.”
• “I really enjoy my wine nights in the Winter.”
• “I bake so many seasonal treats during this time of the year, and I really want to enjoy them.”
• “Holiday parties are my favorite!”

To anyone not stressing about their food choices or their weight, these statements seems innocent enough. All of these statements should be celebrated, right?

To the chronic dieter or food obsessed, these are relayed with a sense of stress and panic. Wanting to enjoy the season to the fullest is the ultimate source of internal conflict—

I want to change my body, but I also want to live my life!

I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to pursue weight loss right now. You can actually take a break—permanently or temporarily—from pursuing body changes.

For many, living in a state of constantly thinking about diet manipulation is the norm, so to consider actually living life and thinking about other things is absurd. But there are certainly some benefits.

• Eating more food will allow your body to reset hormonally if you’ve been living in a chronic deficit.
• You can crush your workouts with the extra fuel.
• You may actually find that the weight loss you’re so desperately seeking isn’t what you really want—it’s giving yourself permission to actually live your life.
• You get to experience everything the season has to offer to the fullest. 
• You’ll give yourself the opportunity to enjoy your favorite foods and booze in a way that aligns with your physical well-being—not an aesthetic goal. This means honoring a balance between enjoyment and nourishment. Essentially, this is an opportunity to practice.
• You can utilize this time to get crystal clear regarding your priorities. If you find that enjoying the season is more of a priority than changing your body, then that’s extremely valuable information.

That last point is important, as we often don’t take the opportunity to look up and ask ourselves if our autopilot manner of thinking is what we really want for ourselves.

Do I really want to be sacrificing the seasonal food, wine, beer, or the social outings? Or am I blindly following the societal programming I’ve been given that tells me I should constantly be moving towards a better physique?

If you answer these questions honestly, you may in-fact find that you don’t give a shit about changing your body right now, and that’s more than OK!

It’s tempting for us to feel ashamed when we’d rather eat and drink than lose weight, but that’s simply a product of societal conditioning. YOU get the make the choices you want for your body and your life, and you also get to change them whenever you feel necessary.

There’s nothing that says we have to be in a constant state of betterment of our bodies.

There isn’t anything that says we need to feel shame in response to wanting to change them either. My only suggestion is that you ask yourself if NOW is the time to do so. Is pursuing aesthetic goals really in alignment with your true desires at the moment?

If not—let it go. The opportunity to pick it back up will always be waiting for you if you so choose. In the meantime, go on and live your damn life and enjoy the wine, the festivities, and the heavy food to the fullest.

Focusing on Food BEHAVIORS & Why Decreasing Intense Exercise is Helpful When Healing Our Relationships with Food

Yoga and walking were the only activities I did for a few months while I honed and solidified my eating behaviors.

I distinctly remember my first foray into intuitive eating. I was living at home in Albuquerque, NM with my parents after graduating college while I studied for my CPA exam, and my body and mind were utterly exhausted from years of binge drinking and obsessing over my body and food.

After years of following rules, counting carbs, starving then binging, and soaking up every latest-and-greatest celebrity diet, I decided to turn inward. I declared that my body would be my guide while I leveraged a few loose (very loose) guidelines.

My main prerogative was normalizing my relationship with food, so I focused on my behaviors:

• Eating when hungry; stopping before I was full
• Bringing awareness to when I was eating out of boredom or another emotion
• Paying attention to my habits of mindless eating and snacking
• Asking myself if my choice now was worth the consequences later (it certainly was at times)
• Only engaging in calming and stress-free physical activity, which included yoga and walking

That last item is key, because had I engaged in my usual exercise routine of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) and long runs, it would have been much more difficult to practice and solidify the aforementioned behaviors.

Intense physical activity can be a hell of a lot of fun, but it forces us to pay more attention to our food, lest we risk feeling like crap, throwing our bodies out of balance, and experiencing subpar or decreasing performance.

If we’re demanding a lot out of our bodies, it makes sense that we have to fuel them appropriately via adequate calories, protein, carbs and fat. This means paying more attention to our food, not less.

For someone overcoming obsessive and neurotic food behaviors, this isn’t ideal.

Where to Start

Overdoing exercise often works in tandem with restrictive food behaviors, so releasing both at the same time can be unsettling.

However, trust me when I say that this puts you on the fast track to understanding your body, normalizing your relationship with food, and then being able to return to your usual fitness habits (if you so choose) with a much more enjoyable counterpart: the fuel.

So, where do you start?

By slowly scaling back your intense activity and replacing it with more stress-free movement:

• Slow walking (no power walking)
• Yoga (no sculpt or intense power yoga)
• Strength training (that doesn’t go to failure and leaves plenty of rest between sets)
• Leisurely hikes
• Any mildly strenuous outdoor activity, like skiing, snowboarding, or rock climbing. Bonus points for the calming effects of nature!

If you’re currently exercising five days per week intensely, replace three of those days with one of the activities mentioned above. Please note that this doesn’t mean walking for hours either—the goal is less, not more!

Notice I’m not asking you to completely remove your favorite activity—simply to scale back temporarily.

Utilize this time to reconnect with your body and SLOW DOWN. It’s really difficult to connect and listen when we’re moving a mile a minute. Which I understand is many of our baselines, but try to keep your eye on the long-term goal here:

To be able to return to your intense activity with a newfound understanding of your body, how to fuel it, and your food behaviors—all while approaching it with a sense of calm, trust, and ease.

Weight loss is often an ancillary result of this approach too, which is shocking to most clients (as it was for me in the beginning too).

We’re taught that more is better, both in volume and intensity, but that simply isn’t true. Our bodies aren’t mechanical machines—they’re independent ecosystems that are always trying to find a place of peace and balance.

It’s amazing what can happen when we finally meet them there and decide to be on the same team.

Sounds pretty nice, right?

Before you jump into tracking macros or trying another restrictive diet that promises to provide all of your answers, ask yourself if your behaviors around food are sound.

These are the building blocks for any changes you’ll make going forward—take the time now to build your foundation.

As my dad used to tell me as a child after I attempted every short-cut in the book during my first go-round:

“Do it right the first time, and you’ll save yourself so much time in the end.”

-       Bill

Maintenance Caloric Intake - What It Is & Why It's Magical

The concept of eating at maintenance caloric intake is a tremendously underutilized tool, particularly for women.

In fact, when I ask women what it looks and feels like to eat at a maintenance intake, most look at me like I have two heads.

What the hell does maintenance even mean?

We work harder by cutting more and more calories, but this backfires at some point.

This is the caloric intake at which our bodies are neither gaining nor losing weight. In the land of dieting, we often forget about this magical state. We’re brainwashed and/or misled into thinking that if we’re not restricting and actively dieting, then the only other option is to gain weight.

NOT true.

Eating at maintenance provides a slew of amazing benefits, and this is especially true for women who have been dieting for extended periods of time and aren’t seeing the results they want in the gym.

1.     More energy and brain power

Under-eating, or eating below maintenance caloric intake, can cause symptoms that begin to become our new normal if we do it for long enough. A notable one is experiencing low energy in the form of brain fog or general physical fatigue, and the positive effects are often immediately felt after increasing food intake to maintenance levels.

2.     Gains in strength, muscle mass & performance

As someone who already struggles to put on strength and muscle mass (and let’s be real—most women have a far more difficult time putting on muscle than males), this is especially important. Have you been working your ass off in the gym, only to have nothing to show for your results?

I’ve been there, and it took a LOT of convincing myself to finally increase my food intake in an effort to see some gains. (Full disclosure: this didn’t happen until about 2 years ago, and progress is still super slow). However, it just isn’t possible for many of us to eat at a deficit and gain muscle mass unless we’re fairly new to training.

This is why it’s common to see transformations of women who are new to healthy eating and resistance or strength training. They lose fat and gain muscle at the same time—however, this occurs less frequently the longer we’ve been training consistently.

Aside from gaining strength and muscle mass, improved performance in conditioning workouts (such as Crossfit, Orange Theory, HIIT, endurance) can be felt almost immediately.

3.     Restoration of metabolic and hormonal function

Our bodies evolved to protect us from starvation, so hormones increase or decrease (depending on their function) while when we’re in a calorie deficit, and our metabolisms slow.

This is essentially done by decreasing our NEAT—non-exercise activity thermogenesis—i.e. we move less throughout the day. 

This means we need to decrease our intake, or increase our deficit, to continue to see fat loss. Eventually, we find ourselves in a hole, where our caloric intake is quite low, we’re not losing fat, we’re not gaining muscle, and we feel like total dog shit.

We may also experience low libido, missing or irregular periods, low thyroid function, poor digestion, and awful sleep.

At this point, the only way to go is up, and you may just gain back your hormonal and metabolic vitality. HUGE win!

4.     Establishing body fat set point

Our bodies tend to find “set points”, or body fat percentages where they’re comfortable and don’t easily fluctuate from.  Some experience this by not being able to hold a higher weight, while others experience the opposite.

The longer we remain at any given weight while consuming an appropriate number of calories (i.e. this won’t work if we’re always under-eating), our bodies adapt and re-establish the set point. This means we have more flexibility with our take when our bodies feel safe by way of adequate intake, as opposed to constantly feeling stressed.

Note: this appears to be largely anecdotal at this time, but many experience this phenomenon.

5.     MORE FOOD

I think this speaks for itself if you love food like I do, as this girl has a big ol’ appetite.

If you’ve been undereating consistently for a long period of time, as many women have been (and I did), then it can be scary to eat more out of fear of gaining weight. But it can also be magical, as your cravings will likely decrease, and you’ll settle in to a more consistent and fulfilling relationship with food.

This might include keeping your “standard” choices the same, or keeping your meals consistent, but adding in dessert more often, enjoying more cocktails, etc. OR you may want to beef up each of your meals OR any combination of these two approaches!

Overcoming Fear of Fat Gain

One of the biggest complaints I hear from women regarding this concept is the fear of gaining fat. There is absolutely nothing wrong with gaining fat, and someone women actually need to for health reasons, but we don’t have to increase our calories to the point of fat gain if we don’t want to.

How does one accomplish this feat?

By slowly adding food back. This is much easier if you have somewhat of a routine already in place when it comes to food, as you can simply add 100-200 calories every week to your daily total.

Please note that this is different for everyone, so this is very much a starting point. You will have to pay attention to the feedback from your body! A few lbs. are completely normal due to increased water and food mass—i.e. it doesn’t mean fat gain. Start with 100 calories per day, and if you’re relatively weight stable, begin to add more and repeat until you observe fat gain via the scale, clothing, mirror, etc.

Time to Build Your Balanced Baseline

After increasing calories to maintenance, we want to ensure we’re developing sound habits. After under-eating for extended periods of time, many women have skewed perspectives of how much food they actually need to eat, so re-establishing an appropriate intake is essential.

I discuss strategies to find your balanced baseline here, and it’s important to take the time to discover what this looks like for you.

Why?

Because you’ll be enjoying life while spending less time and precious mental energy thinking about your food, and you’ll also feel a million times better. What’s not to love, right?

Once you have remained at this caloric intake for several months, your hormones should be normalized—if not optimized—your energy is high, your mood and sleep are great, digestion is rocking, and gym performance is on par with your goals (or at the very least you feel great during and afterwards).

You are then in a much better position to make changes to your body if you so choose.

Want to add muscle? Great—start with 100-200 calories per day and see how your body responds.

Want to lose fat? Great—start by decreasing your intake by 200-300 calories per day and increasing your activity via walking a couple times per week and see how your body responds.

By discovering and hanging out at maintenance for at least 3-6 months, your body will be primed to make changes down the road.  This is starkly different from continuing to decrease your current caloric intake when you’ve been trucking along at a notable deficit for months or years on end, only to binge, rebound, and develop a tumultuous relationship with food.

Is this approach sexy? Not to the mainstream, as we don’t see physical fat loss results in 12 weeks.

More often than not, we’re staying the same (if not gaining a couple) BEFORE we can see fat loss results down the road.

But an elevated mood, physical performance, optimized hormones, better cognitive function, and a stable and nourishing relationship with food sound sexy as hell to me.

As much as your current thought patterns will attempt to convince you otherwise, I encourage you to play the long game. Your future self with thank you!