Listen on iTunes | Listen on Spotify | Listen on YouTube | Review the Podcast
Weight loss isn’t one of my favorite topics, but it is important. I decided to answer the question of how to lose weight in a way that helps you understand why the traditional way hasn’t worked and what will.
There are many ways to lose weight, but not all are healthy. If you want to keep it off, you must choose the healthy route from an expansion form of health, not reduction.
Body fat, like all biological components, serves a purpose and is necessary for our well-being. However, it’s all about balance. Excess or insufficient body fat can lead to issues. The key to achieving a healthy weight lies in understanding the purpose of body fat. This knowledge will help you comprehend why your body might be reluctant to let go of excess fat.
In this podcast, I explain how to lose weight, where it goes, and what a healthy body weight looks like. You’ll also learn why doing hard things is important (because your body thrives in work).
Listen to the podcast to get all of the details.
How To Lose Weight
Your body does nothing without reason. It doesn’t hold onto and use what it doesn’t need, including storing excess body fat.
Body fat protects you and plays a role in your survival. The only way to lose body fat is to stop giving it a purpose. But that requires you to understand the role body fat plays in your health.
The five roles of body fat (and why you store excess body fat) include:
- Energy conservation and energy protection (body fat is one of the best places in the long term to store extra energy. The more your body feels threatened, or your energy feels scarce, the more fat you will store.
- Body fat is an excellent insulator and storage site for unsafe or harmful chemicals and byproducts your body can’t process (this includes chemicals from food, beauty products, cleaners, or even unprocessed emotions).
- Body fat insulates against the charge of emotions, especially those you feel consistently (I think this is one of the most fascinating concepts you can learn more about here).
- It helps you hide or become invisible. I know it might make you larger, but it is a form of hiding (generally stemming from trauma).
- Body fat ensures you have enough energy to reproduce (which is one of the most critical elements of the human species; we were designed for procreation). To ensure fertility, you must maintain a necessary level of body fat.
I like to think of body fat as a bodyguard. It protects you, and the more threatened your body becomes, the more reason it has to store, hoard, and conserve body fat. Body fat is a great body protector.
If you want body fat to leave, stop giving it a reason to stay.
What Is A Healthy Body Weight?
The understanding of body fat and the look of the human body has morphed nearly every decade. Like everything, we tend to rotate through the extremes of super thin and “healthy at any weight.” I don’t want to discount either phase, for what is healthy for your body is very individual.
However, it’s equally important not to favor one extreme over the other. Whether you’re underweight or overweight, an imbalance in your body is always detrimental to your biology. Extremes place a heavy burden on the body as it is always working for balance.
Homeostasis is the goal. How can you help your body regain balance?
Yet, it’s crucial to remember that what constitutes balance for you may differ from others and can also evolve with the stages of your life. Instead of fixating on a specific number, focus on other aspects of metabolic health, like body temperature and energy levels.
How your body functions on a day-to-day basis is the most reliable indicator of your internal conditions, whether they’re healthy or not. You might be healthy at 140 pounds or 180 pounds. That’s dependent on your body.
Signs Your Body Is Thriving
The most common signs your body is thriving is based on your metabolic output (metabolism is the great regulator of energy and safety). One key area that helps distinguish the health of your metabolism is your body temperature. Heat is a by-product of energy flow. In a healthy state, you will maintain a homeostatic balance of 98 degrees.
If your metabolic output is unhealthy, your body temperature will be low, signaling it is also conserving, storing, and hoarding energy rather than generating it.
If this is the case, you can almost always distinguish you have some work to support your biology.
Learn more about body temperature and get a FREE tracker here.
Other signs of a healthy and thriving body include:
- Stable and even moods
- Strong libido
- A healthy amount of muscle mass
- Healthy skin, hair, and nails
- 1-3 bowel movements a day
- Warm hands and feet
- Healthy social connections
- Deep sleep
- Relatively consistent energy throughout the day
- A strong immune system
- Maintaining a healthy weight
- Great digestion
- High tolerance to life
Of course, health will never be perfect. You will occasionally get sick and feel down. The goal is not perfection but consistency. Noticing these outputs consistently is a sign your body is thriving. And if your body is thriving, it’s working towards or already existing within a healthy weight.
A healthy body weight is more of a feeling than a number. The goal is to feel light, energized, and vibrant. If you don’t experience that, do something to get there.
Weight Loss Takes Work.
We may have escaped hustle culture and settled into our rest era, but excess rest is just as damaging as too much work. Health is a balance.
Your humanness loves extremes, but you need balance. Life is a series of pushing your body pulling back to rest. It will take both to lose weight.
Weight loss takes work.
You have to engage in hard things, challenge your body, and push it. But results come when you also nourish it. Don’t neglect hard things. Do them in addition to nourishment because they add to your life.
Stop living with a reduced view of health and adopt the expansive form of health.
Health should add to your life. It should not take away from your life. Are you experiencing health in that way?
Reductionism leads to conservation. Expansion leads to life.
If you want to lose weight, you must do hard things but in ways that expand your energy so you don’t feel the need to protect it.
I teach you all about this in the podcast and share why you should do hard things.
Is your body bored?
Are you looking for a challenge? Is your body craving work? Learn how to do the work and nourish your body to experience results in the Nourish30 Challenge.
Learn more and get started with the free challenge here!
Do you want to learn more about weight loss?
I have some amazing tools that teach you about metabolism, healing, and how to lose weight that you will like. Dive deeper in understanding weight loss with these resources:
You will also enjoy these free resources:
