Weight Loss Goals: Healthy Eating Tips From a Top Health Retreat
If you want to achieve your weight loss goals, check out these healthy eating tips from an expert. Marsha Hudnall is a dietician and the Director of Green Mountain at Fox Run, Vermont - a healthy weight loss retreat for women. Here, she explains why diets don’t work for weight loss - and she offers tips for healthy living and getting slim (and staying that way!).
Before you read her weight loss tips, check out this quip from Gwyneth Paltrow:
“Make your life good. Invest in what’s real. Cook a meal for someone you love. Pause before reacting. Read something beautiful. Treat yourself to something. Go to a city you’ve never been to. Learn something new. Don’t be lazy. Work out and stick with it. Make it great!”
I especially like the part about treating yourself to something - and a fantabulous treat would be Fox Run! That may be a lovely reward for achieving your weight loss goals. Here’s some insight into how they think: “The book I’m currently recommending is Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth about Your Weight by Linda Bacon,” says Marsha. “It was just published this fall, and offers a wonderful review of research on dieting and weight.” Click on the book cover for more info about Health at Every Size - which says that fat isn’t the problem…dieting is. And, read on for Marsha’s healthy weight loss tips.
Weight Loss Goals: Eating Tips From a Top Weight Loss Retreat
Marsha, why don’t diets work?
For the vast majority of people, weight loss diets don’t work in the long run. And the long run is how we measure effectiveness. For the past half century, people have been ‘successful’ losing weight on many different diets, but when it comes to keeping lost weight off, it’s a different story.
A major reason weight loss diets don’t work is because a focus on weight loss backfires for most people. Weight loss diets teach people how to diet to lose weight, not how to eat for long-term health and healthy weights. Achieving your weight loss goals should include learning how to eat for long term health benefits.
Weight loss diets often have rules that promote misguided beliefs about food, eating and healthy weights - what people can and can’t eat, what’s “fattening,” the number of calories or points they should stay under each day, etc. - that end up making people feel like a failure as they inevitably are unable to stay true to these beliefs. Even when people are no longer following the diets per se, they often continue to try to follow the rules and continue to fail. The self-defeating feelings and behaviors that result aren’t conducive to long-term success at achieving and maintaining healthy weights. Instead, repeated failure creates feelings of inadequacy and poor self esteem.
Weight loss diets turn people into restrained eaters who manage their eating well when things are going well. But when difficulties arise, their eating falls apart. That’s because they learn to rely on self-control for eating and no longer use their internal cues to guide their hunger. They begin to ignore and/or distrust their internal cues, which sets up lifelong struggles with eating. This frequently leads to developing the habit of emotionally overeating, which won’t help you achieve your weight loss goals. Studies show restrained eaters tend to overeat in response to difficult situations or emotions such as depression, anxiety and anger.
Because weight loss diets are about weight, the focus on the scale dominates; other measures of success, like how you feel, whether you are getting stronger, sleeping better, etc., fall by the wayside. These other measures of success, however, are much more reliable indicators of healthy lifestyles that lead to healthy weights. Actual body weight fluctuates due to a host of reasons; it’s not always about how much or what someone has eaten. So, to achieve your weight loss goals, set the scale aside.
We encourage mindful eating, which means eating mainly to address physical hunger, being thoughtful about our food choices (considering sensual and nourishing aspects of food) and paying attention while eating to fully appreciate food and identify when we are comfortably full.
Marsha’s Take on the Mediterranean Diet
Though Marsha believes most weight loss diets don’t work, she also says, “The Mediterranean Diet is one of the most effective of the diets out there today. Why? It’s not a weight loss diet.” To achieve your weight loss goals, stay away from diets!
This diet prescribes a healthy and tasty way of eating that people can adopt without feelings of restriction or deprivation, which means they are much more likely to be able to continue it over the long term - which will help them achieve their weight loss goals.
The Mediterranean Diet also provides the good nutrition that’s important to support a healthy lifestyle. The solution to healthy weights is eating well (Mediterranean diet-style, if desired) as part of a healthy lifestyle that includes regular physical activity and stress management, in particular to help control emotional overeating.
This type of diet educates Americans on how to eat well. We have in a sense lost our way with healthful eating in the face of busy lifestyles that don’t make a priority of feeding ourselves well. This has been complicated by weight loss diet rules that confuse people about what healthy eating really is. To achieve your weight loss goals, learn about nutrition and healthy eating!
About Green Mountain at Fox Run. A healthy weight loss retreat for women only, this is a proven program based on adopting a healthy lifestyle - learning how to eat instead of starving, moving bodies for pleasure and physical well-being, and managing stress and negative self-image for health and healthy weights. In operation for 37 years, Green Mountain pioneered the non-diet approach to achieving and maintaining healthy weights. Learn more at www.fitwoman.com or www.aweightlifted.blogs.com.
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Comment by Blogging tips and insight on 3 December 2008:
Thanks for the head sup. There are lot of things to do.