The dip, the cliff & the Cul de Sac. The remarkable benefits of quitting weight-loss & what to do instead
Have you, noticed how lots of folks are starting ‘health’ goals to lose weight they’ve gained during covid?
As I watch these smart, amazing people tell the world what they are up to, my heart sinks. I want to take them in my arms and say, darling, there is a much better way to get what you want. You want to feel free, right? You want to feel like your body is a good body and you fit your clothes
beautifully and you’re alive and healthy and full of energy.
I get it. Feeling like that in our body is joyous. I’m not denying that.
But I am going to debate whether the pursuit of weight-loss will get you there. I say it can’t. However, I know a way that can.
Weight loss, for the vast majority of us, is only going to end in two ways. A cul de sac, or a cliff.
There is a way to find freedom in your body that doesn’t require weight-loss but it involves a dip. We’ll get to that later.
The Cliff
For many, weight loss is intoxicating. The start line brings a high. The very thought of the body we will have one day soon gives us energy and light and excitement. This time, we’ve got it.
The first few days or weeks or months are divine. The scale starts to slide, the joy starts to grow, the compliments come in. It’s fantastic until one day it’s not. Suddenly our will power ends or our body just stops losing weight even though we’re still restricting and we become so despondent we stop and it’s off the cliff we go.
The way down is fast, it’s pathed with shame and the loss of the promise of the end goal heartbreaking. Before we know it, we’ve put on more than we’ve started.
This experience is not only common, it’s also the most common outcome of weight-loss pursuits.
And those that don’t fall off a cliff, instead find themselves in a Cul de Sac.
The Cul de Sac
Those who are in the Cul de Sac are living with a continuous background fear of weight gain. It drives these folks to make most of their decisions about what to eat based on whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for them and living in a state of ‘managing’ what they eat with a fair amount of energy. This type of restrictive eating doesn’t have a start and end date per se (so doesn’t feel like a ‘diet’) but has very little true joy or freedom attached to it. It’s often called wellness but doesn’t lead to long term health.
There is no experience of falling off a shame cliff in the Cul de Sac, but there is very little joy or acceptance of their body either. Mothers who come out of the Cul de Sac, often talk about the low-level despair they had, that they didn’t even know was present, until it was gone.
This way of living, having to manage and control and restrict and be conscious of what we eat is a remarkably common one. So common, in fact, the disordered nature of it is almost entirely normalized.
But there is a third, almost never talked about approach to eating and our bodies that results in true freedom. It reunites us with the easiness we had in our bodies at birth but lost somewhere along the way.
Warning, though, it requires a dip.
I’ve experienced all three. The cliff, the Cul de Sac and the dip. While the dip is tough at first, I never ever want to go back.
The Dip
In order to reunite ourselves with our innate ability to eat exactly what we need and feel at home in our bodies, we have to unlearn almost everything we’ve ever been taught about health and weight and food. Then we need to learn to trust ourselves again.
This path requires work. It requires quitting weight loss, learning to eat intuitively and make peace with your size. This will feel worse before it feels better. You will go through a dip.
But on the other side of the dip are extraordinary benefits.
The extraordinary benefits include…
… space in your brain. Where food once felt addictive or the thoughts about it dominated you, now you will almost never think about it.
…dressing with freedom and ease because you dress as an expression of who you are not as a way to hide yourself.
…joy and gratitude for the body you have, not the one you used to fantasize about getting.
…demonstrating body confidence to your kids. This. It is almost impossible to teach your kids to feel okay about their body if you’re stuck in the Cul de Sac or going up and down the cliff.
If you’re ready to quit weight loss and go through the dip to get these extraordinary benefits for yourself and your kids, I hope you’ll come and explore my group coaching program. Early bird special ends in 10 Days.
It’s a brilliant first step on the road to a body confident future.
I’ll bring all my advice, guidance and knowledge to you during the 4 sessions.
Explore the group program here.
Emma x
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