Will I Lose Weight if I Stop Dieting?
What to expect from your weight in food freedom.
You already know that losing weight without a diet is possibly the only way to achieve a long-lasting and healthy result, but you still get lost on how to make it work?
From experience, I know that the idea of stopping dieting is scary, especially if you want to lose weight. But stopping dieting is effectively the ONLY way to lose weight once and for all, without a rebound effect.
Diets have a failure rate of approximately 95%, meaning that almost all people on a diet to lose weight gain weight again — often gaining a few extra pounds as a bonus.
This is basically because your body does not understand aesthetic goals, it wants to protect you. And that implies that what you are doing to try to control your weight and the way you eat (restraint and control) is exactly what is making you eat more.
Why do you (really) want to lose weight?
A healthy body is not necessarily a thin body like the ones we see on magazine covers. In fact, many of these bodies within the “standards of beauty”, are not in the slightest adjusted to health standards.
Healthy bodies, in my opinion, are not just those that show good results in blood tests. But those who are happy: who eat in a variety of ways, exercise, have fun, love, work, rest, laugh, cry and learn not to live obsessed with food.
They can have totally different shapes, because each body is unique.
When we start to dive into the process of Food Freedom, it is very common for people to be anxious for quick results in terms of weight loss. Thus, it is important to understand that Food Freedom is a new way of living, eating according to the needs of your body, neither more nor less. This means that you will preferably eat when you are hungry, in an amount suitable for you.
If you are used to eating without hunger for emotional reasons or having many episodes of binge eating and food restriction, your body will likely carry an extra weight that you will lose as you manage to change these habits.
But if you live hungry, restrict many food groups and exercise very strenuously, your body may need to adjust to a slightly larger weight.
The big question is to find a food balance that you are able to maintain carefully, but without so much effort for the rest of your life. And this balance will always have nuances, because the body is constantly changing.
What changes is your security in relation to your self-care to let your body act as it has to act: in the most compatible way for your quality of life.
Weight loss without a diet means partnership.
This is not about more willpower or more self-control.
It’s about more partnership, honoring, and working together with your body. The race is long, you would rather have him as a partner than as an enemy.
It’s about taking your body by the hand and asking without judgment: what do you really want? How can I make you feel better? Now that we can eat anything at any time, what do you really want to eat? What will nourish you the most? What do you think will make us feel better.
These answers are not in your head.
They are not in the app that you count the macros of what you ate.
It has nothing to do with glycemic index or grams of carbohydrate or number of calories.
These answers are not outside of you. These answers are within you.
It is your intuition that shows you what you feel in your belly. Look inside. They will ensure the sustainable weight loss you are looking for because your body will be willing to release fat.
And finally, I want to draw your attention to this word: release.
To release is to relax, to surrender, to breathe. Releasing is not holding on, forcing yourself tooth and nail to follow a plan that is not natural for your body.
So let your body relax. Allow it to be in a physiological state so that it feels safe to release the weight you want to eliminate. As long as it thinks the world is a bad and scarce place, it will not allow that to happen and will do anything to keep you from losing your extra weight. Give it a chance. It’s dying to be your partner.
I am a Brazilian girl (living in Sao Paulo with my fiancé — and other 20 million people). I love coffee, books, and good food. I also really enjoy studying and learning new things that allow me to further develop myself both professionally and personally. I have a degree in Food Science and hold a Ph.D. in Agri-food Marketing. In addition, I am a Certified Nutrition Coach and an enthusiastic Nutrition student.
After 15 years of living in war with my body and with food, I found freedom through mindfulness and intuitive eating, practices that allowed me to overcome yo-yo dieting and binge eating.
I’m passionate about helping women rewrite their food and body histories so they feel free and confident to live their lives to the fullest.
There is a power that comes alive when women free themselves from the food prison in which they have learned to live, when they realize that they are capable and deserving of feeling fantastic in their own bodies, and that confidence is a state of mind — not a body lotion which you get the right to use when you reach a weight-loss goal.
My work is dedicated to nurturing, celebrating and sharing this message.
