What's the most effective weight loss program?

An effective weight loss program has three main components.

1. Self-exploration - you need to understand what you need and what feels right to you–that's how it becomes sustainable for you.
2. Weight mastery - focus on permanence from day one. Any diet will help you lose weight; lasting weight loss requires an entirely different approach.
3. Clarity about your environment- how you think about food in general, added sugars, navigating relationships, and what it takes to live at a healthy weight.

"This program is affirming, full of compassion, challenging, hard work that is worth doing and it turns many accepted weight loss practices and principles (that never worked for me and I could never live with) on their heads using well-researched facts."

Before choosing a program, determine your version of success. Fast and temporary or slow and permanent?

If weight fluctuations are a regular part of your thinking, it's time to reset. Diets, by definition, offer temporary weight loss. 

There's an interesting pattern in how people describe their weight over time. Periods of success are defined as weight loss and periods of failure as weight gain. That is incorrect; they are two outcomes of the same problem. There is either deprivation or eating with abandon.

Weight instability is a distressing and unnatural state of being.

This pattern is based on the underlying assumption that dieting is how one loses weight, so if you aren't actively restricting, there's little need to be thoughtful with your day-to-day choices.

Research shows that food restriction just makes you want to eat more. And over the long term, dieting can backfire, triggering your body’s survival defenses, slowing your metabolism and making it even harder to lose weight in the future.

Takeaway: dieting to lose weight isn't success. And, gaining it back isn't failure. They are the same thing.

Regaining cycles are damaging to your mental and physical health. An effective program should address this reality and have ways to help you build approaches based on what you and will do each and every day.

"I honestly do not remember ever thinking of weight loss as something fun or joyful. EVER. It’s always been that tension for me, like speeding on the highway and then slowing down when you see a cop."

Toggling between carrying excess weight and more brief periods of weight loss is a health problem. The ups and downs create metabolic damage and mental health challenges.

How many times a day do you think about your weight? It's not healthy or normal to push away negative thoughts about your body or feel consistently out of control.

The value of weight loss is to keep it steady over time. Please choose a program that acknowledges the long-term challenges and gives you new mindsets and resources to face them.

We teach that anything you can't do for the rest of your life isn't worth considering. It's simply not who you are. If the life you're living can't support that behavior (intermittent fasting, keto, calorie-counting, etc.) and is therefore doomed to end, set it down and never look back.

Here are some truths about permanent weight loss:

1. It doesn't require restricting your food (say no to calories counting)
2. It does require changing how you eat (knowledge over restriction)
3. As you've constructed it, your life is a powerful tool in supporting or sabotaging a healthy weight.
4. Your agency powers change.
5. You have to be willing to face family and friends with different expectations of them.
6. It requires allowing yourself to grow as a person.

An effective program helps you make the lessons personal to your life. This often is missing from the eating and exercise plans offered as weight loss programs.