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In my last post, I discussed how important it is to be positive about your body during and after weight loss. 

Now, let’s dive into what it means to lose weight and still be body positive.

If you have listened to the Half Size Me Show podcast, you’re aware that I do not encourage people to take drastic measures to achieve weight loss. 

If you search Google or social media, you’re going to find many different approaches to losing weight, some of which are very restrictive. With many of these approaches, you probably won’t be losing weight from a place of respect or love for your body. 

Removing entire food groups, doing extreme exercise, taking supplements and pills, and eating very little is not showing kindness to your body or a healthy, long-term approach to weight loss. 

When you start making healthy habit changes that produce weight loss over time, you’ve found the right number of calories and amount of exercise for you that still allow you to enjoy your life. This concept of finding what is “just right” for you is explained beautifully by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff in his book The Diet Fix—I encourage you to read it. 

Most diets do not encourage concepts like enjoyment and sustainability. Instead, they focus on getting you quick results. It’s almost never about if you can sustain your effort forever. This is why I encourage you to take back control of your weight-loss journey and make it one unique to you, with a focus on your enjoyment. 

In the past, you might have said, “I want to weigh X pounds,” and then tried to do whatever was necessary to get you there. And you probably made yourself miserable in the process. You need to reserve the order of your thinking. Don’t focus on the outcome—on how much you’ll weigh when you’re done. 

What you want to do is think of two roads merging into one: 

• Road A: This road represents the way you are willing to eat, for the rest of your life, to lose weight and then keep it off.
• Road B: This is the road that represents the amount and types of exercise you are willing to incorporate into your life and stay consistent with for the long term.

The place Road A and Road B converge is where you’ll find your happy, maintainable weight. It’s important to realize that this ‘place’ may be nowhere near the goal weight you once had in mind. However, it is going to be a much (physically and mentally) healthier place than where you are now. 

The way to lose weight and be body positive is to begin from a place of autonomy. 

Don’t aim for a goal or follow a diet plan that were dictated by someone else. All the changes you make and the body weight you achieve should stem from what you want to do. It’s about what you are willing to change without resentment. You have free will and can make the changes and decisions that are best for you. 

So, find where the two roads meet for you.

You may say, “I will not stop eating carbs. I love them so I am not willing to give them up. Wherever that takes me on Road A is fine with me.”

And if you have no interest in working out like a beast in the gym, but you want to walk most days, then see where that takes you on Road B.

You are establishing autonomy by creating your own plan.

When I lost weight for the final time, my focus was on maintenance. I had to like everything I was doing to lose weight. I did this because I knew I would be continuing these habits after I lost weight. 

You know how many success stories there are online. All the great before and after photos. But those are just one moment in time. I’ve been on my maintenance journey since 2012. It would have been difficult to maintain if I felt miserable and restricted. 

As I was losing weight, there were certain things I called ‘non-negotiables’. These non-negotiables had to be a regular part of my life. They included:

• Pizza has to be in my life (which meant I wasn’t going to cut out all dairy or carbs).
• I need to have treats daily, or I will resent the process.
• Exercise has to be pleasurable and something I look forward to (meaning no running for me!).

Once you clearly define your non-negotiables and know what you refuse to give up, you will start making real progress.  Just ask yourself what you are honestly willing to add in, or take away, without resentment. 

I’ve created a way I am willing to eat for the rest of my life, and it has kept me within a certain weight range. This range, by the way, is not my recommended weight based on BMI. I have been maintaining happily at 150–160 pounds since 2012. This is a much healthier weight range for me than when I was over 300 pounds, and, more importantly, I am able to live the life that I truly want—one without unnecessary pain and the freedom to make choices that are not limited because of my weight.

I encourage you to ask yourself, “What am I willing to do for the rest of my life?” Let that be your roadmap to success. Stop searching for what others are doing and start looking at what you are willing to do. 

It’s time to start changing your own life. 

If you need help figuring out what will work for you, please check out my coaching cast, Stop Dieting and Start Losing. Through this engaging and exciting program, I work with you to break the enchanting spell of diets and the yo-yo diet cycle. You’ll learn to build healthy habits into your life over time. 

You will start your weight-loss journey from a place of gratitude and self-respect, so you can reach a place that is healthier, sustainable, maintainable and full of love.

Right now there seems to be a divide between the body-positive and health-at-every-size camps and those who want to lose weight. 

Many argue that if you love yourself, you shouldn’t try to change yourself or your body. Or if you do lose weight, you can’t, or don’t, love yourself. 

My advice is don’t pick one side or the other.

I lost weight without learning to love my body. I also tried learning to love my body without losing weight. 

What I discovered was that, for me, neither of these two approaches produced the happy, balanced results I wanted. 

Let me be clear: There are positive ideas to be taken from both of these extremes. However, I believe the truth is found somewhere in the middle, merging weight loss and learning how to be body positive together. 

When I lost 170 pounds, I wasn’t body positive or grateful for my body. So when I reached my goal weight, I was miserable. I still didn’t see a body that looked like the ones portrayed in media. All the lines I told myself, like—”I will like my body once I lose weight, once my body is “fixed”—turned out to be lies.

So was weight loss the reason I wasn’t body positive? 

No. I wasn’t body positive because I never chose to be.

It never occurred to me to like my body where it was in the moment. The idea of “liking my body” was always a future destination: I will like my body when…

So was losing weight wrong? No. My poor health and lack of mobility were making me miserable and preventing me from living life the way I wanted to. I needed and wanted to lose weight to help with chronic back and foot pain. At the time, I knew that as someone in my early 30s, I shouldn’t be having problems getting up and down from the floor while playing with my kids. 

I needed and wanted to lose weight. I stand by that decision and I’m thankful every day that I did it. However, I do wish I’d known that even though losing weight would help with my physical limitations, it wasn’t going to help me love, respect, and be positive about my body. 

In my podcast, The Half Size Me Show, I always ask my guests what advice they would give their younger selves. For me, the answer is this: I would go back to the 30-something me and tell her to build in a daily body-gratitude practice. I’d do this so that no matter what my body looked like in the future, I’d be able to love it. 

I have learned that to love and respect your body is a choice. It doesn’t magically happen from achieving a certain weight or being a certain size. When I got to my goal weight, I fell into a depression for a while because I still saw sagging skin, fat rolls, and cellulite. I’d lost all that weight but I didn’t have a “magazine beach body”.  

But I started changing how I viewed my body. I realized I had a body that didn’t hurt anymore. A body that could do all the amazing things I’d always wanted to do. I shifted my focus to maintenance and to feeling positive and grateful for my body. I started a daily practice of sharing my gratitude. 

This daily act of gratitude helped make me feel more neutral about my body. I was less hateful, less negative, and I stopped obsessing over every “flaw”. 

I made myself a promise: If I couldn’t say something positive about my body, I would say nothing at all.

I’ve taken baby steps toward my own body positivity (and two of these steps I’m still working on): 

• Step One: Gratitude. It is not about how my body looks but what it provides me, my family and the world. (It took me 1 to 2 years to accept this.)
• Step 2: Focusing on the areas I like. I choose to not allow my eyes to go to the areas I find “flawed”. (I’m still working on this one.) 
• Step 3: Learning to like and appreciate those areas I find “flawed.” This is the trickiest step for me. I can and do practice this now. I’m grateful for the rolls on my stomach that housed my three beautiful boys. Thankful for my larger limbs because they are powerful, and my larger calves because they have supported me at all stages of my journey. (I’m still working on this step too.) 

I believe you can lose weight and still be body positive. 

In fact, if you do want to lose weight, I believe you should learn to be body positive throughout the entire process.

If you are limited in mobility, in pain, or saying no to activities you would really love to do because of your weight, then weight loss can help. You should never feel shame for wanting to improve yourself or your life.

Losing weight does not have to be negatively charged. You can choose to be grateful for your body at any weight because without it, you can’t live life. 

Focus on being body positive by showing gratitude and treating your body with respect throughout the process. 

In my next post, I’ll share how you can actually lose weight and be body positive.

Everything—trends, diet programs, fashion—happens in cycles and waves. 

As I write this, it’s popular to give up on the goal of weight loss. The current message is that if you love yourself, you will not diet or attempt to lose weight. I understand the sentiment, but I disagree with the conclusion.

When I set out on my own weight loss journey, it was from a place of love. However, it wasn’t a love of myself or my body. At that point in my journey, I didn’t love my body or myself. It’s sad, but true.

Actually, the love that helped start my journey was the love of the life I wanted to live— love of my future self. It grew from the love I had for my children. I knew the kind of mom I wanted to be and at over 300 pounds, I was limited in what I could do with my kids. 

But instead of approaching my weight loss from a place of harshness and unrealistic expectations, like all of my past attempts, I was finally willing to start from a place of love and patience. 

I committed to do nothing drastic, or painful, or unsustainable. I would only change things that I really believed I could do forever without resentment. And this simple shift in my approach was full of love and self-compassion. 

All of my earlier attempts were about punishing myself to reach the goal, no matter what. I was super restrictive. I didn’t allow myself treats. I’d beat myself up, and withhold food to make up for perceived mistakes. 

This last (and final) time losing weight, however, I decided to be kind. To make smaller changes. To find the middle ground between wanting to lose weight and treating myself with respect.

A Parent’s Love

I see losing weight and building healthy habits as a type of parental love. I love my kids, so I don’t allow them to do whatever they want, whenever they want. My husband and I have created healthy boundaries around computer time and treats. We encourage good habits like daily movement. These types of boundaries aren’t to punish. They come from a place of love. 

People thrive when some boundaries are in place. When we are allowed to do whatever we want, whenever we want, it doesn’t lead to a balanced life. For example, consider college students who are finally on their own as legal adults. They explore their new limits. Many will gain weight, abuse alcohol, try drugs, stay up too late, or party excessively. Of course, not all do this, but many do.

It is totally normal to test our limits. But as we mature, we realize we can’t continue to live that way. 

If you want to actually make progress in your life—financially, physically, emotionally—you actually have to work at it. This realization and the establishment of healthy boundaries is an act of parental love—for yourself.

It’s unrealistic and unkind to expect perfection and immediate change from yourself. But what if you start from a place of love, looking at your current habits and behaviors?

Are you treating yourself with love? 

Do you have healthy boundaries?

Think like a parent. Would you let your kids or pets eat whatever they want, whenever they want? Would you let them not do their homework because they don’t feel like it? Would you let them wear the same clothes every day because they don’t feel like taking a shower?

You need the same loving boundaries that kids and pets need. Boundaries like:

• setting limits (but not bans) on treats
• planning nutritious meals to help you perform your best all day
• taking time to cook for yourself
• getting enough sleep so you can thrive the next day
• knowing what you need to feel pleasure or happiness, and 
• making sure your needs are met so you don’t get burned out

A successful balance between weight loss and self-love is consistently doing a little something every day so you make a little bit of progress. This will lead to big changes. 

Focus on treating your body with love and respect by feeding it well, giving it enough rest, and caring for your emotional needs. 

You can have both weight loss and self-love.  

You can build a weight-loss approach that combines and balances self-love and the desire to change your body. But you need to slowly build in healthy habits and loving parental boundaries with yourself. 

If you find this idea challenging and you need more help with it, please check out my Stop Dieting and Start Losing coaching cast. I will work with you to start building these healthy habits and a loving relationship with yourself. 

“I am struggling with emotional eating. I really want to lose weight, but I find my emotions get the best of me and I eat to comfort myself. What should I do?”

Emotional eating can manifest in many ways. You have a wide array of emotions—you might eat when you’re bored, lonely, sad, joyful, happy, anxious, or every other emotion in-between. Food can play the role of friend, entertainment, stress relief, time out, and escape. 

I’ve personally struggled with emotional eating. I’ve also helped many of my coaching clients deal with it. One of the best tools I can suggest is to journal your emotional eating so you can start becoming aware of the what, when, and why of your emotional eating. 

What’s the context (what was going on around you or happening externally)? How were you feeling (resentment, anger, frustration, boredom, etc.)?

From there, you can determine the things you actually have control over:

• advocating for your own needs
• telling your loved ones and support system the best ways they can help you
• modifying the stories you tell yourself
• changing your expectations
• establishing your boundaries

Here are a couple more ways you can get control over your emotional eating:

Start to build emotional awareness. 

If you can’t communicate your needs clearly to others, you fall into the trap of expecting that other people “should just know what I need.” This expectation will leave you feeling disappointed and frustrated. 

Emotional eaters are “importers”. They import food into their mouth as a way to shove down their emotions and needs. Instead, of being an importer you need to become an exporter. 

As an “exporter,” you speak your truth. You become more self-aware. You care for yourself enough to advocate for your needs, just like you would do for your child, pet, or elderly parent. 

You will change your relationship with food when you start to understand your emotional needs and share them. 

And when you make this change, food can just be food again. Something you enjoy and that gives you sustenance, but is not a solution to your problems. 

Don’t make your problems worse. 

I call this compounding your problems:

• You are angry about work/ home/ school/ etc. (Problem A)

So…

• You eat to feel better, which actually makes you feel worse. (Problem B)

Of course, you haven’t solved Problem A and you’ve added Problem B. Making things that much worse for yourself.

Instead of soothing yourself with food as a way of dealing with Problem A, what if you spoke up for yourself? What if you told someone what the problem was and tried to seek solutions to fix it? What if you took positive action and felt empowered, speaking your truth, advocating for your needs?

Emotional eating takes time to get over. 

Even now, I have to remind myself to identify what my problem really is and how I can take positive action to overcome it without turning to food. It is a choice I make daily. 

If this is something you also struggle with, I have created the End Emotional Eating teaching toolkit for you. I made it to give you a framework and skills to determine your emotional needs. 

Following the lessons, you will learn how to communicate your needs to others and how you can view your life circumstances differently. 

Isn’t it time you felt free to eat food because you wanted to, and not because you thought it was going to fix or soothe your problems and emotions? 

If you would like even more help with this, please check out this webinar recording I did on ending emotional eating.

This question is the part of my job I find the most heart-wrenching. 

I get emails and messages from people all the time who have lost weight but then gained it back. 

And because they’ve gained some or all of the weight back, they share with me that they feel like they’ve failed. 

The truth is we are not guaranteed to keep off every pound of weight we lose. 

That’s why I encourage you to find a maintainable weight range you can live with. If you have gained back a substantial amount of weight after losing it, and you’re not feeling good about where you are, there is hope. You can get back to where you want to be! 

I’ve been in your shoes. I actually lost 80 pounds in high school. But then, throughout my early twenties I ended up gaining back all of the 80 pounds I’d lost and added an extra 90 pounds to my frame. 

It was a very hard pill to swallow. I’d done all that work. And then to have gone completely in the other direction. 

So, please know that if you’re dealing with weight regain: you are not alone. 

What we need to do is reflect on this as a learning opportunity. Ask yourself: why was your previous weight loss not sustainable? Maybe you’ve always picked diets and were able to adhere to them for a short time. Then, when life got difficult or you felt too deprived, you fell back on old habits. Or maybe you had some major life disruption that drastically altered your healthy habit behaviors in a way you didn’t expect. (I talk more about this in my “Which diet is best for weight loss?” blog post.)

Your habits constantly need fine-tuning. As our life evolves—we change careers, family members get sick, illness, or any other major change—our healthy habits are impacted. To avoid this, you need to evaluate what broke down in your weight maintenance system. This is what caused you to regain the weight.

Once you’ve lost the weight again, you don’t want to fall victim to those old behaviors. By understanding what caused the weight gain, you know what to watch for in the future. 

The next step is to stop approaching your weight loss the same way you always have. Often, people who have regained weight desperately want to get back to their goal. So they immediately start doing the same diet or program that helped them lose weight the last time. 

It’s understandable why someone might think this is the way to go, but it really makes no sense. 

Think about it: Whatever you did to lose weight did not prepare you for whatever caused your weight regain. You need to start to approach this situation differently if you want to get different results. 

Have you ever tried to maintain your current weight on purpose? Here’s what I mean: Let’s say you lost weight and got down to 160 pounds, But now you are 200 pounds. The knee-jerk reaction is to get back down to 160. But wait! Have you learned how many calories you need to maintain the 200 pounds on purpose? 

On purpose means you are not restricting your foods or binge eating. It means you aren’t only tracking and eating “on plan” Monday through Friday, but then eating whatever you want on the weekend. 

It does mean you should find a calorie amount that allows you to maintain your 200 pounds. Then, when eating at that calorie level, on purpose, and tracking your food every day, you’ll discover you can maintain your current weight.

But I can hear you now, “Heather are you crazy? I don’t want to maintain 200 pounds on purpose!” 

I get it. 

And when I was in my yo-yo dieting days I would have had the same response. But the problem is you are in a panic to get back to where you want. You are trying to rush back to what “worked”. But are you being honest about where you are now? Are you setting yourself up for success if you go down the same path you’ve gone down (many times) before? 

What happens on the day you can’t hit your weight loss calories? Do you have any other options for what to do? 

No, you don’t. And that’s because you don’t know your maintenance calories. If you’re going to lose this weight again, and keep it off, you have to take a different approach. 

Remember the definition of insanity? 

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

This is why I created the teaching toolkit Fight the Weight Gain. It’s an eight-step process to get you back on track losing the weight, but with a different approach than you did before. 

Let me help you the way I’ve helped others. 

Please know that this is possible, but you’re not going to be able to use the same methods you always have if you want to get the weight off and keep it off permanently. You’re going to need to learn from your past experiences and that’s what I want to help you do.

If you’d like to hear more about my teaching toolkit, Fight the Weight Gain, please listen to this episode of Half Size Me: Episode 385.