It’s Time To End The “Weight Loss” Quest. It’s Not About Your Weight Anyway.
I can hear you now, “Ok Dr. Sam, I’ll play along. Since it’s not about weight, what is it about?”
It’s about what you’re made of.
I use quotes around “weight loss” because it is a misnomer in and of itself. It’s not the weight that matters, it is what that weight is coming from that makes all the difference.
Is that weight from bone and muscle? Fantastic! Keep it up!
But if that “weight” is coming from excess fat in or on your belly, that’s not so great.
And up to a point, if that excess fat is on your booty or anywhere else, that fat too can be an issue. Too much of it actually jacks with your hormones; the sex hormones, as well as the ones in charge of your metabolism.
Body fat doesn’t just sit there. It is highly active behind the metabolic scenes. And not in a good way.
[[Prefer audio over text? Listen to the audio version on my YouTube channel (Dr. Sam Graber) or click the image below.]]
Question The Advice, Not Your Ability To Follow It
The advice we’ve been given is incomplete for the most part. And some of it is altogether wrong.
If you are someone engaged in her own “weight loss” battle, you know that. Deep down inside you know that after years of following conventional wisdom’s advice, something is just not working.
But instead of questioning the advice, you question yourself. Your ability to “do it right”. Your ability to follow through. And the piece du resistance… your “willpower”.
You question your worth and your abilities.
It’s not you. It’s their advice.
Clean Up On Aisle XX
There are environmental factors that impact your ability to maintain a body composition that promotes health and wellbeing, versus one that promotes disease and illness. The environment in which we live our life adds a massive amount of complication to the mix.
In fact, these environmental factors are part of the reason you pack on more fat than is needed in the first place. You need some body fat on you, by the way.
Environmental factors such as endocrine disruptors in personal care products, microplastics in pretty much everything we eat and drink, chemical additives to processed food, pesticides, herbicides; these are problems. And they are not going away. We are inundated with them.
The list is too long to go through here. Check the Environmental Working Group’s website for more details. They’ll set the record straight. But be prepared to lose your ever-lovin’ mind when you read through their information. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. (LINK: https://www.ewg.org/ )
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way.
You have many more important things to be focused on than your love/hate relationship with the scale. That number on the scale does not define you.
When you end the war with your weight you’ll have so much more time to do important things.
What will you do with all that time? The options are endless!
A way to compress the learning curve and jump straight to the stuff that works is to join us in our CoWorking community: the 12 Week Metabolism Reboot. Join us HERE.
Never again will you count calories.
Never again will you waste countless hours thinking less than loving thoughts about your body; its shape, its size, its appearance.
After completing a 12 Week Metabolism Reboot with yours truly and my posse of rebellious midlife women, you will have a whole new relationship with your body.
Your hormones get back to working the way they’re designed to work. And by “hormones”, I’m talking about all of them. The metabolic ones, the sex ones, as well as others.
It’s Not About “The Weight”
You’ll be able to leave the “weight loss” conversation where it belongs: in the past.
The conversation around “weight loss” is not really about the weight. Weight is just a measurement of how our body relates to gravity at that moment in time. That shows up as a number on some scale. A scale that has no business being on anyone’s bathroom floor, in my opinion.
We make that number mean something. We make it not just the objective measurement of weight, but we make it a subjective measurement of our worth in some way.
The higher the number on the scale, the lower we think of ourselves. Let’s just say it like it is, shall we?
We engage in this personal battle “with our weight” because that’s what we’ve been brainwashed to think matters.
Things I Don’t Care About, Nor Should You
I don’t give a rip what you weigh. I don’t give a rip what I weigh. I care what we’re made of.
What goes into the making of that which is us? Our body? Bone, muscle, skin, organs, blood, and some other goodies.
What is part of our weight that isn’t “our body”?
Things that aren’t “our body” are things like excess water. That has a weight to it. We hold onto some of that excess water to tamp down the damage from the massive toxic load in our system.
Our very intelligent body retains water to mitigate the toxic fallout that would result if the toxins were not buffered by water. The larger the toxic burden, the more water retained to attempt to deal with it. And the more fat we carry around with us.
In addition to the water, some parts of our body will pack on excess fat to house those toxins that our body cannot deal with by sweating, breathing, peeing, or pooping them out.
There’s A Limit. And We’ve Reached It.
Now, sometimes our inborn detox system can’t deal with those toxins because there are just too darn many of them. And then other times it’s because our liver and other detoxification pathways are not up for the job.
Our inborn detoxification system gets bogged down over the years. The sheer burden shouldered over those years is just too much. It simply can’t do it.
Does that mean you give up and buy into the “here take this” mentality of conventional wisdom?
Absolutely not. That is, if you’re anything like me and those drawn to the holistic approach to our menopause and our metabolism.
This isn’t a permanent situation if you don’t want to make it one.
You can chase all the detoxes in a box. You can do the latest challenge or join a bootcamp. And you can choke down supplement after supplement if you choose.
Those are all temporary “solutions”, if they even are a solution at all. So many of those things are just marketing hype.
The “Easy Button”
You can opt to push the “easy button”. But buyer beware, some of those “proprietary” shenanigans do more damage than help.
In stark contrast to the “quick fix quest”, you can heal your body at a cellular level with real food, cycle coordinated fasting*, gentle movements to restore motion, and a heaping helping of mindset work. Because without your mindset on board, everything is just a temporary Band-Aid, and at best a “quick fix”. A “fix” that’s more like a drug hit than a true fix.
The “quick fix” fixes nothing.
*Cycle coordinated fasting is proactively choosing the timeframe that you are not eating so your body can do the behind-the-scenes metabolic clean up it needs to do. When we follow conventional wisdom and eat every 2-3 hours, our body never gets a break from digesting food, except overnight. Nor does it get a reprieve from releasing insulin to deal with all the glucose taken in.
How To Turn It Around
A few years back I introduced a program called the 12 Week Metabolism Reboot. At that point in time it was focused for anyone with human DNA.
I’ve now dialed it in specifically for women. I show you how to coordinate your metabolism with your female sex hormone cycle. From about our late 30s on, there are so many things that can hijack that cycle.
Our female hormone cycle is greatly influenced by a metabolic machinery that runs everything. And most of that ties back to our cells and their relationship with insulin and cortisol.
When it’s a functional relationship, all systems are “go”. When it’s a dysfunctional one, such as the one most of us have, all systems are not “go”.
Phooey, I Got The “Go To Jail” Card
It’s similar to when we draw the “Go To Jail” card in Monopoly.
- You “Do not pass ‘Go’.”
- You do not “collect $200.”
- You “Go directly to jail.”
That “jail” is an adipose cell, AKA body fat. When that jail gets too crowded, you build another one. And another one. What’s behind the bars, so to speak, is the toxic load we carry around thanks to the environmental factors mentioned earlier.
The “weight loss struggle” starts with insulin and cortisol. Unless we address those two gals right there, anything you do to “lose weight”, if successful, is temporary. Very temporary.
When whatever it was that kind of worked stops working, we chalk it up as another failure. We then armor up and walk back on to the internal emotional battlefield.
It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way.
Enrollment in the 12 Week Metabolism Reboot opens a few times a year. As a member, you have access to the time-tested approach. Though I dial the Reboot in to the female sex predominantly, men can benefit too.
Whether you are actively having a menses or not, you are a “long cycle creature”. I go into more about what that means in the Reboot, but in short it means different things for the different sexes. If you are female, your body has a longer cycle than somebody who is male.
Male and female bodies have to go about resetting their metabolic machinery differently. We have to go about everything physiological differently. Especially as we get into our late 30s and beyond.
A Tiny Male With Breasts And A Uterus?
A female is not just a tiny male with breasts and a uterus. Some of us are not all that tiny to begin with.
I’m just shy of 6-foot and maintain a fair amount of muscle. I’ll never be petite, or tiny. Nor do I want to be. Seriously, if you look at me and think, “man, she’s one thin chick”, there is something uber not bueno going on. Throw me a grass-fed, grass-finished steak and a vat of butter and get out the way!
For far too long we women have been excluded from scientific research because female bodies are “complicated”.
You’re darn right they are, but they’re not an unsolvable mystery!
Let’s demystify this whole process, bring it out into the open, and get you the information you need to take action upon.
Now when you resist taking that action, and you will, even when all the science supports it, we have got to dig into why you’re having the resistance. Where is that struggle coming from? This is where that heaping helping of mindset work comes into play. And where having a community of others navigating similar waters comes into the picture.
A Collective Of Women Pooling Our Wisdom
When you join us in the 12 Week Metabolism Reboot, you are invited to our weekly CoWorking sessions. They happen every Monday evening rain or shine, holiday or not (minus the major ones). Therein, you join a collective of people putting in their own inner work. A gathering of women (and a few men) who rebel against the status quo because they know they’ve been misled by it and are now choosing to approach their health and wellbeing from a holistic point of view. They want different results; and they know they need a different approach.
[Details at 12 Week Metabolism Reboot ]
I go into this topic as well in ‘Lose Weight’. Another phrase to retire in 2022:
LISTEN: https://drsamgraber.com/podcast/episode-029-lose-weight-another-phrase-to-retire-in-2022/
READ: https://drsamgraber.com/lose-weight-another-phrase-to-retire-in-2022/
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Samantha “Dr. Sam” Graber is an author, podcast host, keynote speaker and Holistic Transformation Coach for women ready to stop sacrificing their health in their pursuit of success. She focuses in on the powerful transition of menopause, from pre- to peri- to post-. For it is here that a woman has an often missed opportunity to fully tap into her truest and highest Self.
After a multi-decade career as a holistic chiropractor, she orchestrated her own transformation from burnt out doc to impassioned community curator.
Her CoWorking Community is where women connect and pursue a more holistic approach to their changing bodies and minds with a focus on their midlife metabolism and menopause, from pre- to peri- to post-. Through masterclasses and co-working sessions, they cultivate more meaning in their individual lives while tapping into the collective wisdom of women.
Learn more about Dr. Sam and the community she’s curating at drSAMgraber.com.