It doesn’t make sense.

How can someone achieve everything else they desire but struggle with one particular goal?

This is a question I get asked a lot at my clinic.

Many of my clients are successful women balancing demanding jobs, hectic family lives and busy social calendars.

But despite everything they’ve achieved, when they attend my clinic for the first time, they often say to me “Losing weight is the one thing I’ve not been able to do”.

How can this be?

For example, let me tell you about one client of mine, Rachel. She was the CFO of a large company. Here was someone who had risen to the top of her profession (all while juggling the demands of a young family) and yet every time she applied her efforts to losing weight, she got nowhere.

The Same Old Story

Thing always started off the same. Rachel would be recommended a diet by one of her friends and she would throw herself into it with grim determination.

Salads for lunch? “No problem.”

Boiled vegetables for dinner? “Sure.”

No more chocolate? “Hmmmm, OK, if I have to.”

For the first few days (or even few weeks) she would stick to the diet.

But then, something happened. A crisis at work. A late night. A weekend break away where she didn’t stick to the plan. And the diet would end then and there.

Something would always derail Rachel’s efforts. 

And this happened time and again. With every single diet.

It was SO frustrating. She often wondered whether there was something wrong with her. Why was something as simple as just eating less, so difficult for her to do?

Where Does It All Go Wrong?

I’ve thought about this question a lot over the years since I have seen so many clients in the same predicament.

I’ll never forget a client telling me that her husband’s theory of why she wasn’t able to lose weight was that she “lacked self-control”. This client was an internationally-renowned human-rights lawyer. How on earth could she have achieved everything she had in her career if she lacked self-control? It was ridiculous (and yet after her husband had suggested his self-control “theory” even she had wondered if it was true).

No, for successful women, struggling to lose weight has nothing to do with a lack of self-control. 

In fact, it has nothing to do with any sort of personal failing.

Instead, I’ve found that it comes down to a handful of mistakes a person makes when they try to lose weight.

Let’s explore these now…

Mistake #2: What You’re Doing Isn’t Helping

What if the harder and faster you tried to lose weight…

…the less likely you were to achieve your goal?

This is where weight loss is quite different from most other goals and why many otherwise successful people struggle to lose weight.

Think of this example:

You’re a smart, motivated person in a hurry to lose weight so you decide to starve yourself for several weeks. 

With any normal goal, a concerted effort like this would yield some result, wouldn’t it?

But in this case, cutting back your eating so drastically increases your hunger. It makes you feel deprived.

The more deprivation you feel, the more pressure builds up in the form of cravings, resentment, feelings of denial and frustration.

Then one night, after a long, stressful day at work you suddenly feel an overwhelming desire to have some chocolate.

But it doesn’t end with one piece of chocolate. Your feelings of deprivation mean that you end up binging on all sorts of different snacks.

The diet is over.

Most people would blame themselves for binging. But the mistake was actually made much earlier. Deprivation sets the table for binges. And you create deprivation when you push too hard to lose weight.

Don’t be Good

One of my clients said to me that one of the biggest insights she ever had from working with me, was the idea that “being good” was actually very, very bad.

When you are being good, you’re cutting back, and starving yourself. You’re skipping meals, eating lettuce, going to bed hungry. All the things you’ve been taught are good for losing weight.

But all these things just make you feel more and more deprived. And deprivation ultimately undermines your weight loss efforts.

And I’ve often noticed, the more success-oriented a person is, the more likely they will fall into the deprivation trap.

The Earphones

Have you ever had a pair of headphones that got tangled up?

And have you ever tried to untangle them quickly by frantically pulling at the wires? 

What happens? You’ll know that it makes things worse. Hurriedly pulling at the wires actually makes the knots tighter.

Instead, the way to untangle headphone wires, no matter how urgently you need them untangled, is to do the opposite. Take a deep breath, slow down and let go. Let the wires hang loose and then gently unravel them.

Weight loss is the same. The faster you try, the worse it gets. You end up moving away from your goal. 

Instead, as counter-intuitive as it may feel, as wrong as it may feel, you need to relax. You need to slow down. You need to be gentle with yourself.

Part of my role with clients is to constantly remind them to go easier on themselves, and believe me, most people need constant reminders. 

The things we need to avoid most are feelings of deprivation and urgency. We need to take a long-term perspective, since as we’ve already discussed, losing weight and keeping it off is a long-term goal.

Mistake #3: It’s Not Just About the Food

One of the things I say to every client is “the problem isn’t that you eat too much, it’s that you eat too much in certain situations”.

If you think about your own life, you’ll realise that you don’t actually overeat ALL the time. It’s just certain situations that are more difficult than others.

For example:

- Emotional eating

- Mid-afternoon cravings

- After-dinner binges

- Eating at restaurants

A client once told me the story of her visit to a dietician. During the appointment she was given a very detailed food plan that she had to follow.

Towards the end of the session, my client said to the dietician, “I have a big problem with emotional eating”.

To which the dietician replied: “You need to sort that out”

You need to sort that out???

This is such a common attitude. Most diets or weight loss programmes don’t even talk about emotional eating. They prefer to keep the focus on telling the client which foods to eat. And if something like emotional eating ever does come up, they treat it like a petty annoyance to be sorted out by the client on her own time.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that emotional eating or after-dinner binges or mid-afternoon cravings are just side issues. They are actually the main issue. Solve these and you solve the problem of gaining weight.

More about this later. But now Mistake #4…

Mistake #4: Underestimating The Goal

We are all exposed to so many diet marketing-messages every day. And it becomes a problem when you start to believe the hype:

“Lose 10 pounds in 10 days”

“One easy tip to a flat belly”

“A beach body in 3 weeks”

The fact is all of the “lose weight quick and easy” promises are nonsense. They’re not real. They won’t work.

But worse than that, even if you know it’s nonsense, it still starts to seep into your brain, to a point where you start thinking that losing weight is an easy goal. And that makes it even more frustrating when you can’t achieve it.

Well, here’s the truth: Losing weight and keeping it off is NOT an easy goal. In fact losing weight and keeping it off is an EXTREMELY difficult goal. And I suspect you’ve always known this. 

Accepting that it is a tough goal means that you can have more realistic expectations about the effort and time it will take to achieve it.

Mistake #5: The Real Battle

Anyone who has dieted more than a few times, will recognise that dieting is a battle. 

But not a battle out there in the world; rather a battle inside your mind.

“I’m not allowed to eat chocolate”

“But I want chocolate”

“I’m not allowed to eat pizza”

“But the family is eating pizza - it’s pizza night!”

It’s not so simple as saying “I won’t eat that” because there is always resistance. Sometimes a little resistance, often a lot.

What causes this resistance?

It’s your relationship with food. It’s all the thoughts and habits around food that you’ve built up over a lifetime.

For instance:

- You like to eat a particular chocolate bar (it reminds you of your childhood).

- You often eat when you’re bored.

- You have ice cream most evenings.

- You crave sweet foods in the afternoon for energy.

Your relationship with food is specific to you. Your best friend or sister will have a completely different relationship with food. They like different foods and eat them for different reasons than you.

The reason you can’t stick to a diet is because it’s so different to your usual relationship with food.

And this is a major failing of diets. You’re expected to ignore decades of habits around food and suddenly (and flawlessly) follow the diet plan. 

By ignoring your relationship with food, it turns losing weight into a battle.

But there is a better way…

How to Lose Weight and Keep it Off

If you’re making a chocolate cake, you know that if you follow a recipe for making lasagna, you’re not going to end up with a chocolate cake!

Similarly, with losing weight, if you don’t follow the right plan, you’re not going to achieve the goal you desire.

Most clients who come and see me, have been picturing a bright future at their ideal weight. And yet, up to that moment, they’ve been using diets to try and lose weight as quickly as possible. There is a disconnect there.

A short-term fix is not going to be a long-term solution.

As I say to clients, my goal for you is not to be slim for this summer. I want you to be slim for every summer. In other words, our aim is nothing short of permanent weight loss.

And if that’s the aim, then we have to do certain things in a certain way.

1. It’s All About the Habits

Instead of using willpower to force yourself to make the right decisions, what if you naturally and automatically did the right things?

This is the power of changing your habits.

A client of mine once said to me “Other people talk about changing habits but you actually do it.”

A huge part of your relationship with food is down to your long-standing habits. 

For instance:

- The foods you routinely buy

- The meals you prepare

- The thoughts you have (self-sabotage included)

When we change your habits - and these can be changed - we set you up for long-term change.

But the obvious question here is, “Where do I start?”

2. What is Actually Going On?

One of the core principles of behavioural science is self-monitoring:

You can’t change something until you know what it is that needs to be changed.

So the first step is to write down what you eat and drink every day. 

You might think “I already know what I eat”, but keeping a food diary is about so much more than that.

Because your relationship with food is about more than “What you eat”.

It’s:

- where you eat, 

- when you eat, 

- whom you eat with and of course, 

- WHY you eat.

When I look at a client’s food diary, I can see all the triggers to their eating. 

I see why they make the decisions they make.

And I can see the specific situations that cause the most problems.

As I mentioned earlier, your problem isn’t eating too much across the board, instead it’s specific situations that cause the problems. Do you know what those are? Most people think they know, but the food diary often reveals a lot more.

For instance, one client had always thought of her weight problems as being struggles with willpower. But after keeping a food diary, she realised how much of an effect her husband had on her eating. He was, without realising it, constantly presenting her with tempting foods and undermining her efforts. 

Knowing this information was crucial, since without addressing it, no diet would ever work for her.

3. What to Eat

This is the area that most diets and weight loss professionals focus on. And to be sure, what you eat is important, but it’s not enough to tell someone “just eat this and you’ll lose weight”.

As I have already talked about, you have existing habits around food and we can’t just ignore these.

For example:

- It’s a waste of time for me to tell you to do intermittent fasting, if you hate fasting

- Maybe you enjoy desserts too much to ever tolerate a low-carb approach.

- Perhaps you value sharing food experiences with friends and family (like any normal person!) so weight loss shakes are not a good long-term plan (no matter how many flavours they come in).

You’ll find weight loss much easier, if the “what you eat” plan fits in with your pre-existing relationship with food.

4. When to Eat

When I first started my clinic 11 years ago, I wasn’t aware how important timing was, in a person’s eating plan. It turns out that it’s actually, really, really important.

Since then I’ve seen so many examples of people’s eating transformed simply by changing the timing of meals and snacks.

Do you know your ideal meal-eating rhythm? Do you know which meal of the day is most important for you? It varies from person-to-person, but knowing this can make a huge difference to your eating.

5. Where to Eat

Most people make things harder for themselves by filling their home environment with lots of tempting foods and then trying their hardest not to eat them (often failing to do so).

Rather than fight a battle of willpower all day, the easier thing is to make it so that you don’t have to fight the battle at all.

As I say to clients “You can’t eat something if it’s not there”.

This means taking better control of your food environment.

I’ve seen clients go from over-eating all the time at home to a situation where:

- They controlled their food environment so that there was very little extra temptation lying around.

- They managed to buy things for their family, and children who still wanted the “bad” stuff, but the things they stocked in the house didn’t tempt them.

- They felt more in control and relaxed - without constantly needing willpower to stop them from making eating decisions they’d regret.

6. Health Cornerstones

Everything is interconnected. 

Your eating is influenced by all other areas of your life and in turn influences them.

I’m talking about:

- Stress

- Schedules

- Downtime and rest

- Sleep

- Mental space (cognitive overload)

There are two ways of thinking about this:

Firstly, most people can’t solve their weight problem without also addressing some or all of the above areas. A lot of my work with clients involves addressing these other areas.

Secondly, by solving your weight problem, you will also notice that the rest of your life also improves. There is a positive spillover effect.

I prefer not to look at your weight as just a number on the scale to be achieved. Instead, it’s more of a project of self-actualisation. Your aim is not just to lose weight, but to become the best version of yourself. 

7. Consistency

As I have already spoken about, this goal of achieving permanent weight loss is not an easy one. And certainly not one to be taken lightly.

To achieve it, you will need to be consistent. You will need to make changes to your behaviour and to your environment, building step-by-step over time.

This sort of undertaking requires a systematic and relentless approach.

Most people fail to lose weight not just because they are in a hurry and focused only on achieving a number on the scale but also because they give up too soon.

It’s the consistency that creates a habit. And it’s the habits, once changed, that lead to permanent weight loss.

How to Lose Weight
Without Dieting

“It’s brilliant! It’s amazing! I feel so happy. I’m wearing clothes I haven’t worn in years!

I’ve been on diets before, and it was so hard. With this it’s so natural. And I know I’m not going to put the weight back on.”

Emma P, 44

If you’re ready to finally conquer this one goal that has eluded you, I’ve created a free training video which explains:

– The life-changing alternative to dieting.

– How to create a new, healthy relationship with food.

– How to achieve lasting personal transformation (instead of fragile weight loss that doesn’t last).

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