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It’s so much more than numbers.

That little statement has 2 very different meanings. What I really want to focus on in this blog is food… ever wondered why is calorie counting not working? The truth is that food is so much more than just ‘numbers.’ But of course. I can’t go past the conversation that you are also so much more than a number on the scale. So that is where I’ll start.

Firstly, I’d like to remind you that weighing yourself is not an accurate measure of your success or otherwise on your healthy lifestyle journey. Weight is in fact one of the most unreliable measures of whether or not your body is in fact changing for the better. Why? I’m not going to dive into all of the reasons here but in my latest podcast

‘it’s not about the numbers’ I do enlighten you as to why your weight never seems to truly reflect your progress and thus why you shouldn’t rely on it too heavily. 

If you really want to measure physical change, take a few measurements and repeat them fortnightly. I usually recommend bust (straight across the nipple), waist (across the belly button), hips (over the iliac crest), and the top of 1 thigh. Or just 1 of those will do too. But the truth is… the most important measure of your progress towards a healthier version of you has nothing to do with any numbers at all.

Its got everything to do with how you feel. Both inside and out. Looking after yourself and finding a balanced lifestyle is about feeling your very best! Having energy and a zest for life, being comfortable in your own skin, moving better, having less pain, radiating ‘you.’ Its this that we should be focusing on, NOT the numbers that stare back at you when you ‘measure.’ It’s strange really… that we hang so much on a few numbers! 

Ok. Back to the food thing. Food is so much more than numbers. And by numbers I mean calories. It blows my mind that we spend so much time obsessing over the calories in our food when that method is such a small part of the picture when it comes to whether something is truly good for us or not. Here are some reasons why:

Two foods can have identical calories but affect the body completely differently. It’s actually the hormone balance that leads to a healthy metabolism, not calorie intake (metabolic balance focuses on rebalancing these hormones) 

Calorie intake does not take into account how well or poorly the body is actually working.

Weight can most often be a symptom of the body just not functioning properly. And counting calories doesn’t really give us any information about this. Instead, we need to consider the ‘systems’ of the body and how they are functioning. When all the parts that make up the body are happy we tend to get better results with weight and metabolic function. 

Counting calories can result in consuming foods that ‘confuse’ the body.

When we count calories, we tend to focus on the less the better. Which often means resorting to ‘diet’ foods. But these diet foods are often heavily processed with a lot of preservatives, chemicals, and man-made ingredients generally. Do we actually understand what these ingredients are doing in our bodies? How they are affecting us at a cellular level? I think not! Would you put unleaded fuel in a diesel car? Unlikely. So why do we give our bodies food that isn’t really… food? My Back 2 Basics program will help you learn how to fuel your body with beautiful food.

Macro tracking can still result in consuming foods that are highly processed instead of natural, whole food alternatives.

Finally, counting simply leads to stress. And takes any real connection we have to our food away.

Stress is not conducive to weight loss at all. I talk about this extensively in the podcast. Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight is so much about mindset. When we resort our food to numbers, we can’t connect with our food and we don’t focus on the mindset we need for long-term health.

Imagine the cavemen looking down on us and how we approach food these days? They must be having a real laugh at how complicated we’ve made it! 

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