Have you ever asked yourself:
+ Have you been searching for answers for the following:
» can starvation cause obesity? Is obesity considered malnutrition? obesity vs starvation
» can obesity occur without eating or overeating? why am i gaining weight when I'm eating less and working out and I barley eat? I keep gaining weight but I don't eat much and exercise? what do obese people eat?
» hunger and obesity? Does hunger cause obesity? do obese people eat more?
» can obesity occur without metabolic syndrome? is it obesity or metabolic syndrome?
» will obesity ever end? and when did obesity became a problem?
» obesity facts: where does obesity come from? how is obesity is caused? why obesity occurs, what obesity means and is?
» what can obesity be the result of?
» why is obesity increasing and why obesity is a problem?
» how to prevent obesity?
» is obesity a chronic disease or not? mental disorder? a personal choice? public issue or personal choice? lazy/weak/lacks willpower? a global epidemic? or NONE of these?
» Are we just normalizing obesity with obesity vs body positivity vs body neutrality?
» Is it good to starve yourself for a day?
» have you had a history of food restriction, chronic dieting, weight cycling, diet-binge-purge, exercising everyday for 2 hours, bulimia, cut carbs, disordered eating, eating disorder, food obsession, food addiction, etc?
....Then you're in the right place!
After this article, a lot of clarity will occur from what we're going to talk about today.
In the diet recovery process (a process of rehabilitating the metabolism after a period of dieting), when one is gaining healthy weight while their metabolism is healing, people will often say:
Sound familiar?
So there are several reasons why people can become obese, outside of diet and over exercise Recovery.
First, I want to preface by saying that just because someone has extra fat does not always mean they're unhealthy, miserable, or unhappy. Just as someone with abs or at a size 0 or 2 doesn't mean they're healthy and happy.
You never know what's going on inside and can't judge by just looking at someone.
It's all relative to the individual.
So if we can first get rid of this assumption and judgment, that would be great. π
People's main fear when in diet recovery is that if one quits their diet and does not restrict foods, or exercise a couple hours a day, that things will spiral out of control and they will eat and eat until they are 500lbs without an end.
This is because of a cultural fear from the widespread obesity epidemic and a misunderstanding around one big contributing factor to weight gain.
Those who carry this belief and fear, then apply this fear within their recovery and fear that they will become obese from letting go of restrictive eating, their meal plan, calorie counting app, etc as they finally listen to and surrender to their constant extreme mental and physical hunger / cravings that controls their mind.
This "obsession with food" that starts to control them looks like:
…these kinds of things.
They do not believe there is an end, that this type of extreme mental and physical hunger is just a part otheir life, and they'll have to fight this battle with their body and fight food and their cravings forever.
Which is not the case.
They think they have to start restricting or watching what they eat again once their weight is restored to their prior weight before losing weight on their diet or once they get their period back...
But this type of thinking will keep people in quasi recovery or half-ass recovery for YEARS.
It's not a matter of one saying: "okay, now I'm at a BMI of 23, so now I need to restrict again to keep the weight from getting TOO out of control now."
No, it's more like: "okay, I'm at a BMI of 23 now. Great I've made tremendous progress. I'm proud of myself. I never thought I could do this!!
Now, if one's body continues to gain weight, has intense hunger and cravings, and still hasn't recovered their period (if it was lost), one needs to continue to listen to their body and eat to fullness, regardless of where the bodies weight is at.
If this isn't followed, the body will think it's still being threatened and therefore will stay in semi-starvation mode, and the cycle won't end, and one won't break free.
I trust in my body, and therefore the body will eventually trust me again too."
Trust-building takes time on both sides.
So give yourself but also your body time to rebuild trust after years of distrust and betrayal via dieting and pushing the body to lengths that threatened its survival and livelihood.
And I get it because this was me before finding diet Recovery.
I didn't trust the body, and it was hard to learn how to trust again. It's hard to trust that there was a way out of this prison.
But now I know it's not a life sentence.
It's what you do from here on out that depicts your future.
Your actions now will manifest as your reality in the future.
The person coming from a restrictive eating past is not to be compared to the person who eats past satiety, choosing to ignore their fullness either via ignorance or out of conscious awareness or overeats to run away from stress or emotional trauma.
*Studies show that emotional eating is a direct result from restrained eating. I speak more on this in my program Find Your Balance.
Remember, you have literally starved and restricted your body for years, and your main job right now is to eat a shit ton of food and gain weight, not fear the weight gain, and let go of the fears that you'll eat until you're 500+ lbs.
This isn't the case.
And if you'd like to read more about if you think you have obesity "genetics" read this post here.
But know that your body WILL self-regulate, your body will heal, and your body will trust again.
You have to commit and make it your purpose to get your body out of starvation mode, for the sake of your future and quality of life, for a life of freedom and your body's survival.
You have permission to eat and gain weight without fear.
Trust that you will gain weight, yes, but you will not become obese, and you will not stay at a super high overshot weight forever.
I genuinely believe I overshot as high as I did to a BMI of 30 because...
I recovered my period back and gained 50 lbs back, but then I relapsed and yo-yo'ed again and stayed in this quasi type of recovery for quite some time.
Why? Because I feared the weight gain was "bad" and "unhealthy" and that I had to get it off ASAP!
I feared it was never going to stop gaining. But that only set me back and lowered my metabolism right back down again because through the yo-yo'ing that time, my body didn't release any weight...
It held onto every pound and maybe only lost 5 lbs at the most, but overall it held all of the fat gain for dear life from the initial bingeing and weight gain in the first six months of recovery,
**So, this lowered my metabolism again.
When I let go of the yo-yoing and committed to full recovery (which I explain in details step by step in my program so I won't go into detail here) and surrendered to letting go of all restrictions and excessive exercise, my body overshot and raised the set weight point even more than initially was needed.
This was a rebound effect to the continual semi-starvation after it had already gained a bunch of weight and got my period back.
I hope this makes sense.
Try your hardest to stay the course and not yo-yo as much as you can, but also don't beat yourself up if you do yo-yo because often that's just a part of the letting go process.
But each time, you'll get more and more fed up with trying, and you'll get so exhausted to the point of literally giving up and saying the hell with going back to dieting and restricting...
You'll get to the point of being SO DONE that you'll be so committed to whatever you have to do and let the body go wherever it needs to go to be free from that life in restrictive dietary prison and guilt and shame.
This is because people can slowly increase their set weight point higher and higher over time from yo-yo dieting and perceived healthy diet trends that are restrictive. If you want to know more about the set weight point, you can either read it in my book damn the diets or listen to another video on my youtube channel of mine that I have on that.
So there are people, by continuing to diet and restricting that they, therefore, continue to lower the metabolism as a result.
The body lowers the metabolism to conserve energy by extracting as many nutrients as it can from the limited amount of energy or food that comes in and stores it all as fat because it thinks it will be continually starved.
And there are so many types of diets and forms of restriction that go on these days. The majority of the population worldwide is on some form of a diet as a result of diet culture and the weight loss industry.
So whether that's restricting a food group, such as:
-carbs, fats, sugar, grains, gluten, dairy, meat
or restricting amounts of food such as:
-limiting calories in general
or whether it's of using laxatives to purge calories or calorie compensation and calorie -purging by over-exercising or throwing up orally
-or eating less the next day or meal or exercising more to earn calories or burn calories,
-or whether that's they go all day without eating because they claim to be too busy at work to eat are doing intermittent fasting, so they make that an excuse to justify them not eating but then binge at night to make up for the lack of food coming in all day...
So they continue on this never-ending cycle to lose weight by dieting and over exercising, and then they binge eat, and they gain all the weight back, plus more…
Then they go on a diet again to try to lose the weight, but each time it gets harder and harder to lose the weight, and the body tries its hardest to hold on to the weight.
Each time they fall off the bandwagon or binge and can't maintain their willpower or self-control anymore, they raise their weight point even more because the body senses that it's in this continual threat that the body won't be fed. So it's going to be continually starved.
For these people their metabolism isn’t broken
And they can get back to a normal set weight point in which their body wants to be at is it and is naturally designed to be at, it just may take a bit longer because they have been in this process for a lot longer than someone who hasn't been continually raising that weight point.
It is possible. It just takes a while for the body to trust again because, for many years, it has been conditioned not to trust and to store fat to survive.
It's not until they are consistently feeding themselves and their body sees and trusts over a long period of time that it will be fed consistently, whatever it's asking for and whenever it wants.
Over time the urges to binge and the extreme cravings or extreme hunger begin to die down as the body no longer has to send this cry for energy.
The body always wants to go to where it feels comfortable, but it will do whatever it needs to do and whatever it takes to survive, and it will go to whatever lengths to make sure that the body survives. Once it survives and it feels safe, it will not feel threatened. It will feel safe and return to where it feels normal and healthy, being a normal abundant environment again.
——————-x———————
So we've talked about why people can increase their set weight point over time via continued restriction...
But now I do want to talk about how:
Like people who under eat to feel in control or feel comforted or suppress or distract from emotions that they don't want to deal with, such as anger, jealousy, stress, anxiety, getting hurt, and things like this.
Stress, for example, is a big one.
People also can overeat past satiety ignoring their hunger cues. They ignore and do not tune into thebody'ss satiety cues that the body is full.
As a result, they overeat to feel comforted or to distract from stress or run away from situations that they need to deal with or run away from emotions that overwhelm them. So they use food as their coping/numbing/distracting mechanism.
Just like someone who would turn to drugs, alcohol, sex addiction, workaholism, shopaholic-ism, whatever.
In this case, the body is not asking for the amount of food the person chooses to over-consume, and the body is not from a restrictive background. Therefore you can eat past satiety for these reasons and gain a bunch of weight from overconsumption that the body does not need nor is asking for.
They don't feel they're contributing to anything outside of themselves in life, or they're not growing in any way. They are in their comfort zone. They aren't challenging themselves, so they are not growing or bettering themselves. So because of these lacks in their lives, they overeat to try to fill these voids or become alcoholics, sex-o-holics, or shopaholics to try to fill these voids.
So that's another reason for the obesity epidemic, as the modern world is full of new stressors that many people don't want to or know how to – deal with.
But that's not typically who I deal with.
I deal with people from a restrictive background who need to eat a lot more than they are eating and a lot more variety than they are eating. Their body is asking for more food, but the person ignores those communication signals to eat more.
So whether that's restricting carbs, fats, sugar, protein, gluten, dairy, meat, or pizza and cereal cravings. Or restriction in the form of strict paleo, raw veganism, gaps, whole30, intermittent fasting, ketogenic, and all these kinds of trendy diets.
Whether that communication comes in the form of:
You know, it could just be body structure from genetics such as a European background or Eskimo where they needed a lot of fat on their body for cold winters, like polar bears.
Realize that body diversity on this planet is real. We're not all meant to look the same or eat the same or exercise the same.
So ask yourself:
Or
having healed your metabolism and able to eat whatever, whenever, and maintain healthy body weight for YOU, without real effort and not being a slave to ever looming food thoughts day in and day out.
I promise you, this is the natural cycle and that the body is a self regulating machine that is biologically designed to regulate fat and water according to the environment in which it thinks it’s in.
If the body thinks the environment is scarce, and it feels continually threatened that it won’t have access to food day in and day out from dieting, the body will adjust accordingly, by ramping up the food obsessed thoughts and it’s main focus will be to get food.
If you're in diet recovery and you're scared that once you start gaining weight that it won't stop and that you're going to become obese,
Just because you gain some weight doesn't mean that you don't deserve to eat anymore – you're not going to become unhealthily obese because your body is asking for a shit ton of food and the only way out of this is to feed your body consistently.
Even if you're bingeing and facing extreme hunger even after gaining your weight back and getting your period back, you still have to eat, even if this means going over a BMI of 25 and remaining there for a while until your body trusts again.
In diet recovery, some people may need to overshoot their natural set wait point for the body to feel safe from a future famine. So it may stay here for a while, like I was saying, until it starts to release the weight, to make sure that you're not going to starve it again and start restricting again just because you gain some weight back.
Eating will stop it.
Again, you won't keep gaining forever if you don't:
and instead to:
The body shows up for you every single day.
Now it's your turn to show up for your body.
You do this by surrendering to your body, honoring your body by listening to your body.
What are you listening to? The body's communication signals via non-verbal communication. In this case, the main signals are:
The body has this covered.
The metabolism will change over your recovery.
You are in recovery, and you need all of the food you're craving. That's why your body is asking for it so desperately!
That's why you feel so uncontrollable, obsessed, and crazy around food.
Now, if this makes you anxious and you want someone to lay out what EXACTLY this looks like, I'd like to invite you to my masterclass on how to stop feeling obsessed with food. Then, you'll have an opportunity to work with me from that class.
You have to do whatever it takes now for your survival and trust in the process and trust in your body, and let go of trying to be in control – your body needs you right now.
Overall, this is from my personal experience and what I've learned working with others to recover in my online courses and private consulting.
If you're in overshoot right now, if you're gaining any amount of weight, if you're getting close to being over-shot, remember, it's what your body needs from a suppressed metabolism and restrictive past vs. the people "without" dieting past or people not dealing with stress properly.
Things WILL balance out if you stay true to yourself, not the E.D. brain. You do what you need to do, you tune out the noise, and do you. Stay consistent, persistent, and committed to finding your own balance and freedom that only you can define for yourself.
*****
I will note on children who are or who have parents who fear body fat or fear that their kid will become obese...
If the parent puts them on weight watchers at such a young age and makes them feel horrible for being "chubby," this does not help long-term weight loss. Instead, it promotes long-term fat gain and fat storage.
It promotes childhood obesity but, more importantly, long-term adult-onset obesity and fat that will be hard to reverse.
Consistently depriving a kid and saying no no no to everything, having more off-limit foods than okay foods the majority of the time, the child is going to want that thing even more.
Like an adult who diets or deprives themselves of food that is cut, off-limits or wrong, the brain will perseverate on that bad or off-limit food until it is fed that food consistently and not restricted any longer.
Once you stop controlling food, food stops controlling you.
And that goes for children as much as it goes for adults. If you want to prevent obesity, don't diet, don't yo-yo diet, don't over-exercise, and do high-intensity workouts every damn day. This stuff is highly stressful on the body, and you will run into problems eventually. Biology will end up winning.
I hope you enjoyed this article!
With love,
Kayla Rose
Holistic Nutritionist
P.S. I have a special complimentary resource that maps out How to Stop Feeling Obsessed With Your Weight; click here to get your copy!
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