APPETITE SUPPRESSANTS VERSUS ANTI-SUPPRESSANTS: WHICH ONE'S BETTER?

A recent post on Facebook got me thinking.

A “friend” who sells a popular MLM product that promotes weight loss listed “appetite suppressant” as one of the benefits of using the product, which prompted me to ask, “Why would you want to suppress your appetite?” Interestingly, she never answered me back.

Millions of products on the market hail the virtues of suppressing your appetite as an effective way to lose weight, but I beg to differ. To the contrary, I believe that strategy will only further disconnect you from your body and using your innate ability to know what your body wants to eat and when.

Herein lies the root of many weight loss issues for women. They are simply so out of touch with their bodies that they have no idea where to begin. As a result, they become vulnerable to gimmicky ads and marketing, hopeful for a quick fix, and deduce that the so-called experts must be right and entrust the process to them entirely, never trusting what their bodies tell them instead.

Coupled with feelings of shame, remorse, guilt and any other self-defeating emotion they pile on, plus a burning desire to rid themselves of excess fat as quickly as possible, they fall victim to what is known as the old paradigm to weight loss , reasoning that if they just stopped eating so much and exercised more, the problem would be solved.

But would it?

My personal experience on this topic dictates that that approach only gets you so far for so long and is never a lasting solution in and of itself, because what I never realized was that if I kept avoiding the underlying reasons why I was eating out of control in the first place, or how I was conditioned to eat, (= learned behavior from outside, uninformed influences), no matter how much I tried to restrict my calorie intake or force myself to work out, anything that triggered my unconscious beliefs and caused me to feel unsafe would override my efforts and I’d ultimately succumb to failure, or rather what appeared to be failure, which is precisely what happened every time I lost weight. Regardless of how long I’d been eating right and exercising, which could have been as many as 2 or 3 years or more, my weight would shoot back up when presented with the right stimuli, and I’d consequently blame myself for having no willpower.

Willpower has nothing to do with it when your life is in overdrive 24/7/365, or when your values conflict with your desires. I always wanted to look a certain way, but money and career took precedence, even though I wasn’t consciously aware of it, because when my job was in flux and at times slower than others, affording me extra time to focus on my health and nutrition , and then other times demanding more time and attention, I automatically abandoned my what-I-thought had become permanent habits in a mere instant. Literally. No longer than a week’s time.

What I failed to recognize was that although I desperately wanted to attain and maintain my ideal weight and body, I didn’t make it a priority but rather an afterthought, as in, “If I have time, I’ll do something about it.” In other words, my values conflicted and I had no concept of it. It wasn’t until I did did my priorities shift and I stopped pushing it to the bottom of the list when other parts of my life demanded more from me.

Gaining weight is not a reason to panic. It’s actually valuable information from your body that something’s out of alignment, not just with your body, but your career, your relationships, or anything in your life that’s significant to you. And ignoring your appetite will no more work to realign you and help get the weight off long term than full blown starvation will.

It’s time to wake up and acknowledge that going on another diet does nothing to encourage intuitive eating, thereby allowing you to get back to the part of you that never has to question what to eat or whether you’re truly hungry or not. When you were a baby, you never ate out of frustration, boredom, loneliness or sadness. You just ate because your body told you to. Even up to your preteens, it’s likely eating was just for nourishment and a natural response to your inborn appetite.

It’s 100% possible to eat that way again, despite your age, lifestyle, or how much weight you have to lose.

These concepts are what women often overlook and more so, aren’t even are of when it comes to losing weight. I wasn’t for most of my life, but I was coached into awareness, which was a key turning point for me on my journey to rediscovering my intuitive relationship with my body.

If you’re tired of dieting and are ready to find the missing link between lasting weight loss and short term success, then let me coach you into figuring it out too so that you can put the pieces together and make peace with the process of losing weight, and even find it pleasurable.