Here's how your values have been influencing your yoyo dieting

When's the last time you went to a cafe and ordered, "50% protein, 10% fat and a side of carbs"? Probably never. 

When I was 40 pounds overweight, I used to wonder why dieting seemed so complicated. Like learning how to speak Penguin. Shouldn't being a glorious slender Diva just come, naturally? Was Mother Nature really this mean?

I kept wondering why most health information I found would be about about counting, tracking, and measuring, if we aren't born with the ability to use our senses to identify nutritional content on a conscious level. But regardless, I became an expert tracker yet still wasn't getting results that made me have an outer satisfaction AND an inner peace. 

If we're not training for the Olympics where small dietary changes make a difference in our performance by a hundredth of a second, then why do we approach our diets with the same level of analysis?

It wasn't until I moved to Tokyo and and saw slender women eating rice and noodles and not power-walking with 2 liter water bottles under their arms, that I realised that there was something missing in my approach. In the West, there is a ton of amazing health information, but the implementation is really the part where people miss out on creating a lifestyle with food that resonates not just with your physical goals, but with your soul. 

So, let's rethink our approach. 

Now, I'm a health coach with a background in western and eastern lifestyle ideologies and I want to share with you two ways that your values have been influencing your yoyo dieting.

1) You don't need more motivation.

If there is one thing I hear the most from yoyo dieters, it's that they feel that they need more motivation. But let's take one step back and ask ourselves why we feel the need to be in control of our bodily functions.

When you were a kid growing up, your needs were met almost immediately by your mother. If you were hungry, she'd feed you. If you had to go to the bathroom, she'd pull the car over and knock on a random stranger's office door to ask if you can use their bathroom. If you were sleepy, you'd just fall asleep. On the spot. No matter the time of day, and no questions asked. 

But then, something happened.

You started going to school. You told your teacher at 11am that you're hungry, and instead of giving you food, she told you that you have to sit and be patient for another hour and a half until lunch time, just like everyone else. So you sat. And squirmed. And tried everything you could to think about something other than food. You learned, from that moment, that feeling hungry is an inconvenience to your schedule. 

Or how about going to the bathroom? You'd have to raise your hand and ask permission to go. And while you usually were granted access to the toilet, there were those moments in the middle of a test when your teach would tell you that you're not allowed to go. So you learned that Mother Nature's call was not as important as not interrupting a class. 

And then, there's sleep. From grade school, you learned that it is more important to finish work and complete tasks than it is to prioritize rest. You'd think to yourself that it's such an inconvenience to be sleep when you have so much work to do.

So here you are, as an adult, still trying to control these aspects of your natural needs for eating, going to the bathroom, and sleeping. You think that if you could just have motivation to suppress your feelings, that you'll create a body that you can be happy with. But squirming under control is not the way to happiness. Responding to your needs, is. 

You have two options: You can either tend to your need for eating, going to the bathroom, or sleeping when the need arises, or you can choose to put a delay on it to feel like you have a sense of control over your bodily functions. The need never goes away - but the timing in which you choose to act on responding makes all the difference in how your body responds, and the experience you have when you finally give in. 

So to recap, your experience growing up and interacting with society has trained you to believe that your hunger needs to come at the right time, your desire to go to the bathroom can wait another hour until you get home, and that your priorities are more important than sleeping to rejuvenate your body. This is a great way to set yourself up for bingeing, constipation, and sleep deprivation - all of which affect your body chemistry and lead to a host of health issues. 

2. More Effort doesn't necessarily mean More Reward

I used to think that if I just worked hard, I would achieve whatever I wanted. And for the longest time, this was true.

But when it came to exercise, that model didn't seem to work. I used to be an ice hockey player training up to two hours per day, and on my days off I would force myself to go to the gym and do everything from running to high intensity training to weight lifting to kick boxing. Anything that would give me a good sweat and make me feel like I was working toward my goals. 

I told myself that I'm different from everyone else, and that I would just have to continue to stick to my intense routine just to maintain my weight. And I feared having to put in even more workouts into my schedule just to feel I made a dent in my weight loss goals. 

But then when I was in Tokyo, I saw a sumo wrestling tournament for the first time and it completely changed how I thought about exercise. Sumo wrestlers skip breakfast, spend all morning doing intense training so they can lift and push their heavy components. They have a big lunch, followed by a nap and then wake up and repeat in the evening.

Likewise, I had been exercising like crazy and it made me feel ravenous. Regardless of the nutritional content of my meals, I would eat more than I needed without realizing it. Then I’d feel tired from the workout and warm from the meal, so I’d go to bed. On one hand, I was building muscle and stamina, but I was also adding a thick layer of fat on top of all of the muscle.

One way you can tell if you’re overdoing your workout is if you find yourself hyperventilating. Calm breathing indicates to your body that “everything is OK,” so it’s geared towards targeting the fat on your body for energy. But if you’re stressing your body out, as indicated by gasping for breath, then you’re likely triggering your body to use quick energies in the form of sugars. So, those times when you go home and tell your loved ones not to talk to you until you’ve had something to eat because you’re so hungry you could practically eat your arm off? Those are good indications that you’re overdoing it.

So to recap, in most aspects of your life, you know exactly how to achieve what you want with more work.You knew back in school that if you studied hard for a test, you'd increase the chances of getting a high grade. You also know that if you increase your performance at work, you'd increase your chances of getting a raise or promotion above your colleagues. 

But this this isn't exactly how it works with your body. When it comes to diet and exercise, putting in more effort is not always the answer. The right answer is understanding what kind of results the exercise you are doing will bring, and it's better to do a small amount of the right things than a large amount of the wrong things.

If you've been spending years, decades going back and forth from sticking to a system to giving up, it's time to rethink where your thoughts about food came from and to strategically think about how your exercise is serving you. Because deep down, that inner child that still exists underneath your adult mindset, knows the answer.