One of the biggest surprises women experience when they start feeling healthier after 40 is that success usually comes from stopping certain behaviors, not adding in more. My clients don't finally lose weight because they become more disciplined or more restricted. In fact, it's usually the opposite.
So today, I want to share five things that my clients stopped doing that actually helped them feel calmer, healthier, and more in control around food. Hello, I am Dr. Orlena. I am a physician turned health coach, and I help women over 40 create a healthy lifestyle that they love and can sustain so that they can lose the wobble, feel fit and strong, and feel confident they are looking after their long-term health.
So what are these five things that I recommend you stop doing? Number one, they stopped emotionally eating. Now, what is emotional eating? [00:01:00] Emotional eating is when you eat driven by an emotion, which might be stress, frustration, boredom, overwhelm. It might actually even be a happy emotion. It might be because you're celebrating.
It might be part of social eating. But it's not because you are driven by a need to fuel your body. And the big problem with emotional eating is it goes very much hand in hand with cravings. So cravings are really very much about sugar. I've never met anybody who has a craving for carrot sticks, for example.
Cravings are really driven by the amount of sugar you have, but they go hand in hand with emotional eating. And it isn't that the food is the real issue, it's the unmet emotional need. So what do we do about emotional eating? If you just restrict yourself and say, "I'm never eating..." whatever it is you eat, chocolate, [00:02:00] cupcakes, bread, pasta, you are restricting yourself.
You're making it hard for yourself. When you have a look underneath and you get the self-awareness to realize actually there's an emotional aspect going on here, it's stress, it's overwhelm. This is the negative emotion. Here's the positive emotion. I want relief from stress. I want relaxation. It might be, for example, that you're feeling tired and exhausted, and you want to feel looked after and cared for.
But once you start understanding what those emotions are, the question then becomes, what-- how can I get this positive emotion without using food? And there's lots of different things you can do. There's no one right answer. It's about finding what works for you. But emotional eating just makes it really difficult to achieve what you want to do in terms of looking after yourself.
Okay, point number two They stopped [00:03:00] letting the scale decide how they felt. So what I see with a lot of people is they become very obsessed about this weight, which means looking at the scale every single day. The scale becomes a mood regulator, a judgment tool, proof of whether they have succeeded or failed.
The scale goes down, hooray. The scale doesn't go down or goes up, "Oh my goodness, it's not working. I am a failure." Now, the first thing to remember is that the number on the scale is not the same as fat. The number on the scale represents your entire body, which is made up of muscle and fat and liquid. And quite often when we see quick changes in weight, that is actually liquid.
So for example, somebody once said to me, "I skipped supper and I drank two glasses of wine, and the next day I was two pounds lighter." Yes, indeed, you were, because you were dehydrated. That was not [00:04:00] fat. And the other point about this is what we want to really conserve is our muscle. We don't want to be losing muscle.
So when you see the scale going down quickly, depending on what you're doing, are you losing muscle? You don't want that to happen. Now, the other point to bring out here is that if you are going through perimenopause or menopause, there are lots of different things that are happening in your body that we need to reverse, such as insulin resistance goes up.
Now, I have an entire video on this called Stop Dieting and Start Thriving, and I will leave a link to it. If you want to know about all of those things, then watch that video. So how do we fix the scale problem? It is about refocusing and thinking about your long-term health and wellness. And I'm not saying you should never look at the scale, because we do need to be objective.
We do need to measure progress. Side note, the scale isn't always the best way of doing it. There are better ways, but [00:05:00] sometimes those things like DEXA scans are not available to people unless you're going to a clinic. So when we focus on health and wellness and really making that our priority and, checking in every now and then to make sure that we're on track, that is when the gold happens, and it's win, as opposed to, "It's not working.
I'm failing. None of this is working." Okay. Point number three: they stopped aiming for perfection. I see so many people who think that the key to success is doing everything 100% perfectly, and they pile so much on their plate- That it becomes unsustainable. And then you start thinking, "Okay I've failed."
You feel guilty. You think that things don't work. And here's the truth: consistency is way better than perfection. When we think about that tiny little gap between, yeah, we're [00:06:00] doing reasonably well to perfection, it doesn't actually move the needle that much. As opposed to when life is busy life-ing, what happens to a lot of people is they slip back to their old ways of basically not doing any of the habits that they are trying to create.
And actually, if you can have a midway point, "Okay, I can't do things perfectly 'cause life is happening, but I can maintain one or two things," you're actually pushing the needle much more than if you ever got round to changing to perfecting the perfect. Healthy women aren't perfect, they just keep coming back.
Point number four: they stop relying on discipline. I hear so many people say to me, "I know what to do, I'm just not doing it, and it's because I don't have discipline." And then you feel guilty and blaming yourself and find [00:07:00] yourself turning to the fridge for comfort. The thing about discipline is putting yourself in a difficult situation and expecting yourself to make the right choice.
And at some stage, discipline is going to fail you, when you're feeling stressed or tired or overwhelmed or hormonal. Think of it like this. Breakfast, your choice is healthy or unhealthy. You choose healthy because you're feeling motivated. Lunch, healthy or unhealthy? Let's go with healthy again. Dinner. At some stage, whether it's today, tomorrow, few months' time, you come back, you're tired, you're stressed, you're exhausted, and you just say, "I do not care.
Give me the unhealthy option. I just need to eat something." Now, it's not about being disciplined. It is about setting up a system, routines, habits. You want things to grow into a habit so that it's just what you do naturally. [00:08:00] Reminder. If you're interested in systems and what I recommend as a system, go and watch the video Stop Dieting.
So it talks about what is going on and how to change it, what you need in your system. Now, when you have a system that works for you, your choice becomes like this: breakfast, healthy or healthy? Lunch, healthy or healthy? Dinner, healthy or healthy? So instead of that time when you get in and you're exhausted and you don't know what to do- Your system picks you up and your system's "Hey, this is for dinner.
You've already made it. It's in the fridge", or it's in the slow cooker or whatever it is you've done. You're like, "Yeah, this is just what I do." It's just automatic. The goal isn't to become more disciplined, it's to need less discipline. Point number five: they stop depriving themselves and they stop blaming themselves.
It is not about restricting yourself and saying, "I must never have this." It is about reframing this [00:09:00] and finding a way of enjoying things. And once you start enjoying healthy living, it becomes so easy. If you can find healthy foods that you enjoy eating, and you don't have to say, "I'm never eating certain foods."
You just eat them in moderation. Find a way of exercising that you enjoy. And when you start doing that, all the gold happens. So instead of focu- focusing on deprivation, you're focusing, for example, on nutrition, protein, fiber, plant diversity, enjoyment. The women who succeed long-term stop trying to eat as little as possible.
It isn't about depriving yourself and really restricting yourself. So let's just recap. We have five behaviors that my clients stop in order to get to what I [00:10:00] call healthy, amazing you. Stop emotional eating. Stop letting the scale rule your life. Stop aiming for perfection. Stop relying on discipline. And stop depriving yourself, and stop blami- excuse me, blaming yourself.
Now, my sixth bonus one is actually all of this can be summed up in how you perceive yourself. And this is an exercise that I do with my clients called an I am statement. Once you start seeing yourself as I am somebody who prioritizes my health and wellness, it becomes easy. It is just routine. It's just what you do, and you don't think about it.
And that doesn't mean you can never eat donuts or ice cream or chocolate or whatever it is. So it's more about moving away from punishment and moving towards partnering with your body, finding ways that you can do things that enjoy yourself. So [00:11:00] reminder, stop dieting, start thriving. If you would like to understand more about the system, then watch that video.
And I will see you in a couple of weeks. Goodbye.
