My Philosophy (and Why I'm Not a Weight Loss Dietitian)

Get to the philosophy behind my work and why I don't promote myself as a weight loss dietitian (even though sometimes the women I work with DO lose weight).

TOPICS COVERED👇 

• [0:47] Who I help
• [2:04] The common denominator behind a broken relationship with food
• [4:29] What my focus is
• [9:37] Summary of why I don't focus on weight loss with my clients
• [12:29] The influences of my philosophy

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Transcript

 Welcome back to the show. If you're not already following, be sure you hit that follow button so that you never miss an episode. And if you love this episode, let me know by leaving me a rating or review and shout out this particular episode if you found it helpful. Today, I'm gonna dig a little bit into the philosophy of why I do things the way that I do and why I personally don't call myself a weight loss dietician.

You're not gonna see that on my website or on my, I. I'm not gonna say that I'm gonna help you lose weight, even though the reality is sometimes clients do lose weight. After working with me, I wanna talk about why that's never my focus with the client and the benefits that I see as a result of that. My ice mushing is like losing it right now in the background.

So if you hear stuff going on, that's why, and I'm not gonna cut it out because I just don't have time to cut every little thing out of this audio. Okay, so something that's really important for you to understand if you're brand new to me and you've never heard of me or heard of the work that I do, is that I specifically help women with healing broken relationships with food more often than not, that also includes a broken relationship with their own bodies.

So when I talk about my philosophy, my approach, what I see as helpful versus unhelpful, that's always the lens that I'm looking through is I have that woman in. With that being said, when a woman comes to me and says, I want you to help me lose X amount of pounds in X amount of time, or inches or whatever, I don't feel comfortable helping them with that and telling them that that's a result I'll help them get to, and here's why they're coming to me with a broken relationship with food and with a troubled body image.

And so for me to. Continue doing what they've already been doing, which is focus on the scale, take before and after pictures, try and micromanage their food so that they can slim their body down and make it smaller. Like that's, that's what they've already been doing and it's really not gonna help them feel better.

Think of it this way, when we've tried every diet. Under the sun and none of them ever work, and we end up gaining the weight back and we just feel worse and worse and worse about ourselves. We have to start to think about why is that happening? And when we do that, we can see that pursuing weight loss, trying to shrink our body, doing whatever it takes to make the number on the scale go down.

That's the common denominator and the crazy thing is that a lot of times now, I'm not saying every time, but again, the lens I'm looking through here is the women who I particularly focus on working with. The majority of the time is that when that weight is lost, it does come back and a lot of times, even more weight comes back than was lost in the first place.

So the more that they try to lose weight, the more weight they end up gaining in the long term. And so we have to retrospectively think about why does this keep happening? And I think the biggest answer in these cases with these women is. That we're constantly pursuing weight loss. That's the common denominator here, is we're trying to shrink the body at whatever cost.

So we're doing all of these things to try and make that happen, but those things aren't sustainable, so we gain the weight back. And so with my approach, it's not that I don't think women's bodies will benefit from weight loss depending on the situation or that I think it'll be a negative thing if they do lose weight after working together.

It's. I just wanna take that common denominator away and I. In these cases, like in the population that I specifically work with, they really need some hardcore healing with their body image, and they need to drastically revolutionize the way that they think about their bodies and about other bodies and about health, the way that they define.

Health. A lot of times women are coming into working with me with this very tunnel vision idea of what health is, and it's the idea that it's been put in their head from society, right? That the smaller we are, the healthier we are. Even if it means we're only drinking bone broth for lunch and we're exercising twice a day and we're totally like torturing our bodies.

It doesn't matter because we're small, right? And so when women come into a working relationship with me with that idea, it's so pivotal that we start to rework how they define health and what they're measuring health by. And the number on this scale is such a small part of. Defining health. What I love about the work that I do is we're taking out that common denominator of pursuing weight loss because that is so triggering for women to.

Not have the right behaviors when it comes to health. So we take that out and now we can focus on rehabilitating those health behaviors, like how they eat, how they exercise, how they sleep, just self-care. We're able to focus on those things more clearly when we're not hyper-focused on losing weight. Let me give you an example.

So a part of my philosophy is utilizing intuitive eating. Intuitive eating is a approach to eating that was coined by Evelyn Trioli and Elise Resh. They wrote a book on it. It's got 10 principles and it's four people who have a broken relationship with foods. So, as I told you at the start of this episode, that's my focus as well.

Therefore, I utilize intuitive eating. With my clients in order to help them achieve those goals of having a healthy relationship with food. So in intuitive eating such a big part of that is really sitting back and listening to the needs of your body and honoring when you're hungry, stopping when you're full, noticing what kinds of things you're tending to crave.

More like that could be your body telling you you actually need more of that. Um, and then, I mean, it gets tricky because there's emotions involved as well. That's why I really recommend working with somebody who's an expert in it so that they can help guide you through the nuances and the trickiness of intuitive eating.

Uh, cuz there's definitely a learning curve, especially if you're coming off of. Being a chronic dieter or doing a lot of diets. But anyway, I digress. So when women are starting to learn intuitive eating, if they are doing it, but they still have this goal in mind of, okay, I'm gonna lose 10 pounds in a month, then.

The problem with that is that now because they have that goal in mind, they're in restriction mode, they're restricting their food to a certain amount. Even if they don't have a specific calorie amount or macro amount or portion size, they're still subconsciously thinking, I have to eat less in order to lose weight.

So, That really interferes with the intuitive eating process because now when there's hunger present, if that individual thinks they've already eaten enough for the day, and if they continue to eat more, then they won't lose weight like their goal was, then they're not gonna honor that hunger. And so they're not intuitively eating anymore.

And. I will say that for a lot of clients, intuitive eating, once we start to honor the body's requests and needs, we see changes in metabolism. Our metabolism starts moving along. Now it's like grateful that it's not constantly in restriction mode anymore, and so it can speed up and women have more energy and they're able to build muscle more easily.

A lot of the women that I work with, and so, especially when you're coming from a place of being, uh, someone who struggles with binge eating where there's a lot of excess calories consumed, then intuitively eating where you're stopping when you're genuinely full, you're not stopping, you're not waiting to stop eating until there's just no food left, or you're way too sick to eat anymore, but stopping when your body's actually had.

That can result in weight loss because we're just consuming fewer calories. But again, I am not your body. I can't read your genetics, so I don't really know for sure, and that's again why I never promise weight loss as a result of my clients working with me because it's just not what I'm about when I'm about is the holistic approach to healthcare and not the weight centered approach to healthcare because yeah.

I mean, for all the reasons that I've said in the last 10 minutes of this episode. I just think when we focus on our weight, we start to do things that aren't so healthy anymore, and we're crash dieting and we're over exercising and we're mentally unwell because we're so focused on the number on the scale and the calories in our food, and it takes away from our.

To enjoy life and be present with loved ones, and that's what life's all about. It's not about being a size two or whatever it is that your goal is. Heck, that could just be being in the normal category of bmi. You know, like life is too short to be hyper-focused on getting to a specific bmi. We need to be enjoying our life, living our life while taking care of our health and present preventing those chronic diseases.

And we can do that without focusing. Losing weight. So just to close things out, the reason that I don't focus on a weight loss with my clientele is because that is usually the common denominator that ends up making them gain weight. Additionally, it makes it very difficult for them to learn the intuitive eating process, which is important for healing our relationship with food and honoring the body with a nutrition it really needs in order to thrive and prevent chronic disease.

And lastly, our weight is a result of our behaviors. And so I'm more about getting to the roots of the behaviors, getting to the heart of the issue, and making behavior change the focus rather than having the weight be the focus. Well, and I need to make a quick correction here. It's the result of our behaviors, plus our genetics and our environment and so many other things.

So if our weight has changed as a result of the behavior, Then we need to focus on the behaviors. If our weight is a reflection of just our genetics and where we're at in life, then we don't need to change anything. Sometimes our weight can give us a clue into what's going on with our health and if our behaviors are serving our body, whether it's going up or down or whatever it is.

But it's not the end all be all. Measure of health, and there's so many other things that we have to consider, and I just think it's more helpful to look at the behaviors that we have with food and exercise and just all those health related behaviors that's more important to me than. Taking progress photos, doing waist measurements, looking at the number on the scale, and I will say if a client comes to me and their weight has progressively been going up and up and up and up as a result of something like binge eating, then we can logically say that that behavior is causing something in the body to change.

And that's data for us to notice and be curious about. So yeah, if my client comes to me and says, I haven't binged in a month and I'm starting to lose some weight, then that's something that I'm like, cool, that's good to know. That means we're going in the right direction. Getting your body back to where it was before you started binge eating and moving it back towards where it feels its best, because it's not gonna feel its best if we're b.

So I think there's a gray area in noticing what's going on with the weight and how a body weight is responding to behavior change. But again, I don't think it's helpful to be focusing on it, and that's why I'm not a weight loss dietician. That's why when a client comes to me and says, I won't be happy unless I lose weight, I send them somewhere else because I know that my approach is not something that they're ready for and that they're just genuinely not gonna be happy with.

Because if they have to focus on their weight and see weight loss in order to be happy. And they don't care about all the behaviors, then this isn't the right thing for them. My philosophy is heavily influenced through the training that I had in being an eating disorder provider and helping women heal from eating disorders by using a weight inclusive approach.

Um, health at every size. Being anti-diet or non diet, and I think all of those approaches to healthcare are very pivotal and very helpful in women healing their relationships with food. There's nuances to those. Uh, movements and approaches that I don't always agree with or I'm not always happy with.

But at the end of the day, I know what best serves. My client is not focusing on the number on the scale because they need to heal from the inside out and focusing on that ridiculous number or the size on their jeans or the circumference around their waist. It's just continuing to fuel the fire. Of behaviors that aren't helping them because that was the common denominator with those behaviors in the first place.

If you have any questions about what working with me is like and how we will get to the roots of the behaviors you have and heal from the inside out so that you can make lasting healthy changes, check out the show notes on how you can connect with me. Feel free to send me a DM on Instagram, and I would love to chat with you and get to know you more and see if this is a good fit and if I can truly help.

Um, there's also tons of other resources in the show notes that can hopefully be helpful for you. Don't forget to leave me a rating and review. If this episode gave you some light bulb moments that you really needed to hear today, I would love to know about it.