stress management – Here's What I Think…

I’ve done this. I’ve seen this with a number of persons I’ve had the privilege of coaching. I’ve seen the stories members of our Caribbean Keto Tribe have shared in our Facebook Group. You start off with a fervent desire to lose weight and improve health and your energy matches this desire. Meal prep is done with gusto. You press through the initial uncomfortable days of the “keto flu” and you celebrate with joy & relief with the first 8 pound loss.

Woo-hoo! Your clothes are fitting better and your energy is through the roof, you feel positive and you just KNOW that you’ve found your key to losing weight and feeling good. Then after a few weeks, sometimes it is even a few months, you come off plan for any variety of reasons.

…And then that one cheat meal becomes a cheat weekend, which becomes a cheat week, which becomes a cheat month and before you know it, despite your most fervent desire to return to the heady glory days of your first experience with keto, you remain stuck. You remain unable to consistently eat low-carb even though the weight is creeping back on, even though your energy has dipped, even though you KNOW eating low-carb really and truly worked for you.

First of all, you are not alone!

In my last post “Are Cravings and a Snacking habit getting the better of you?” I explored why we crave the foods we do, why we snack and what giving in to said cravings and a snacking habit could be doing to your health and your livity. If we’re keeping it a buck fifty, the foods we crave all tend to be high-carb, highly processed foods: chips, cookies, ice-cream, bread. And we established that there are valid physiological and psychological reasons at play. You’re not weak neither are you greedy. These hyper-palatable carbohydrate rich foods trigger pathways in our brain that simply make us feel good and when we remain in constant search of that feel-good place we simply repeat the behaviour that led to it in the first place: dependency or addiction.

This dependency on high-carb, hyper-palatable foods for many, many of us negatively impacts our health (we gain weight or we have difficulty taking and keeping off weight), we get bloated and live with various gut-issues like acid reflux & general discomfort, and we are simply trapped in a vicious cycle of having to be constantly thinking of what next will we eat in order to avoid “hangry” states throughout our day. Sounds familiar? Ok. So what next? Do we simply cut out these carbs and flourish? Easier said than done, right? If there is an actual factual dependency on these foods at play, HOW do we break the dependency and how do we meet the need that gave rise to this dependency in the first place?

Tag: stress management

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Food Cravings & Emotional Eating: Practical Approaches for WINNING: Part 2