Wellness Blog

Losing weight has never been a particularly easy thing for me to do. Even as a teenager who was very active (doing ballet for 90 minutes three times a week), I had a tendency to gain weight more easily than many of my peers.

I remember one summer that I decided to focus on trying to lose a little extra weight and to tone up. I spent that summer eating healthy (more fruits and veggies and lean meats, very little processed food or junk food) and working out very regularly.

And yet at the end of several months, there was no difference on the scale. Zero… Yes, I had possibly gained a little but of muscle and therefore offset any weight loss but I still felt like a failure on some level.

I remember from this relatively young age wondering WHY it was so easy for some people to lose weight when I was doing all the right things and yet nothing changed.

I knew the story of my mom’s best friend who also struggled with weight her whole life and it was only when she was in an in-patient weight loss clinic eating around 500 calories a day that her body could start losing weight. That was pretty messed up, I remember thinking, but I didn’t really understand WHY that was.

Throughout my adult life, I have continued to struggle with a difficulty in losing weight. Let me just say that I do not believe in crazy fad diets, miracle pills, and things of those sort (so please don’t come talking to me about those kinds of things- because I have ZERO interest). I have always just focused on eating well and moving my body, yet nothing has changed.

In fact, in the almost 5 years since I’ve been together with my husband, I have gained more weight and I have tried several times over the past 2 years to lose the weight but once I have lost about 10 pounds, if I don’t keep up a very focused way of eating, it immediately comes back again…

About a year or so ago, one of my mentors in the BodyTalk system, Dr. Laura Stuve, started talking about how she has had tremendous success in using BodyTalk tools (which she strengthens with her own background as a PhD scientist) to help both herself and her clients successfully lose weight.

I was immediately both excited and intrigued! While I couldn’t take her hormones of weight and metabolism class when she first offered it in 2017, I put it on my wish list for 2018 and I did take that course last October!

In the class, we learned a great deal about things like:

• how traditional diets actually mess up our metabolism MORE, making it even harder to lose weight
• how the calories in, calories burned model that has been dominant for years is flawed because it doesn’t take into account the QUALITY of the calories you are eating
• how the experiences of our ancestors (like food shortages and famines) can actually affect our metabolism today, making our bodies think we also need to be prepared for food shortages
• how imbalances in the gut microbiome (that community of good bacteria in our digestive system) can contribute to weight gain or difficulty losing weight
• and so much more…

I have been diving into using the new tools I learned from Dr. Laura with a small group of clients for several months, and also I started getting BodyTalk sessions on this topic from Dr. Laura herself.

It is my intention to blog a bit and share my own journey with this process and so this is the first entry in that documentation.

Since my first session with Dr. Laura on December 30, 2018, I have already lost about 6 pounds in 2 weeks.

This isn’t through some crazy restrictive diet but instead through making a few key tweaks in what I’m eating (which was customized based on what MY specific body is requesting) and also adding more exercise into my life (with the requirement the exercise must be FUN, not something I don’t enjoy).

So I am working out now 6 days a week, many days doing NIA videos since I love dancing and this way of movement feels fun and also good to my body. I’m changing what I eat for breakfast and cutting way back on eating potatoes to only  once every 2 weeks, per my body’s request. I’m eating less sugar and more fiber, again per my body’s request.

It feels good to finally be shifting this long pattern of mine, which for me actually runs back through my mom and that side of the family. I’m doing this in a healthy, balanced way, and a way that honors my unique needs, which will make it sustainable.

Through BodyTalk, Dr. Laura is helping reset underlying imbalances in hormones, the brain centers that know whether we are safe to lose weight or if we are in danger of starvation (including those ancestral patterns I mentioned above), my gut microbiome, and so much more.

I look forward to writing another update in a few weeks!

And if this is an area that you are interested in exploring support and healing for yourself, reach out as I’m launching this as another focused offering of my work. I truly believe that losing weight shouldn’t have to be hard, require starving ourselves (that actually won’t help you lose weight), and it isn’t “your fault” if you’ve tried things and haven’t been successful. I’d love to help you have a different experience.