Losing weight is so easy

It's true. But if you don't believe that losing weight is going to be easy, you're always going to struggle with it. The truth is that there is no big secret behind weight loss. It's all common sense stuff. Often, eating well is something we began to learn at a young age.

Who didn't hear from their mothers growing up "Finish your vegetables." OR "No more treats. You've had enough." OR "Go outside and play and turn off the TV."

One of my clients just bought another diet (although the author says it's not a diet book but instead a lifestyle book????) titled the "Rebel Diet". So why is diet in the title exactly.

Basically, she recycles information like "Eat more vegetables and protein and less processed carbs". Good advice. She goes into more detail about why common sense not so good for you nutritional choices are going to make you hang onto fat. Great stuff. But again, here I go being annoyed with the re-packaging of common sense stuff and the coining of a new eating trend (which ain't new at all). Maybe I'm jealous because my fitness book never padded my wallet! But if I were to write a weight loss book, it would be titled "Losing weight is so easy".

I had someone call me this week trying to hawk a cleansing product. Because apparently now it is being discovered that toxins make people hang onto fat and water. If you clean you pool, why wouldn't you clean your body? UH duh! Because your body isn't a concrete hole full of water and your body has it's own built in toxic removal system (skin, liver, kidney, bowels etc.). So funny!

Obesity stats in the US are scary. 81% percent of the population is overweight and of that 81% overweight, 30% are obese (BMI over 30).

I just went onto amazon.com and did a search for diet books. I came up with over 53,000 books! Another diet book isn't going to solve the problem.

This is my hypothesis. North American society is moving further and further away from making a search for mindfulness and consciousness a priority.

If we decide to make mindfulness a guiding principle in all aspects of our lives, people wouldn't struggle so much with obesity. If parents behave in a more conscious and mindful way, emotional eating wouldn't be such an issue for so many people. If people stop for a second and determine if a food choice is going to be nourishing or damaging and try to live in the present, excess caloric intake wouldn't be such a problem.

I admit we all struggle with making good choices in different aspects of our lives to varying degrees. However, what will improve our moment to moment choices is a desire to be more present. Things just don't go off the rails so much when we don't fall asleep at the wheel of life. Obesity is merely an outward signal that something is out of balance in our inner worlds.

So losing weight is easy IF and only IF we decide to take care of the big picture and stop burying our noses into repetitive diet books and wake up.

Jane