Introducing Goddess: Lisa (Health and Diet)

For those of you who read my piece on Weight and Television, you know that distorted body image, diet, and persecution over ones’s weight are issues that are very important to me, so I asked Lisa Fabrega, my friend and holistic health coach, to share some healthy tips to weight loss and how to change your relationship with your body.

Daryn

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I’ve worked with many women on improving their health and their nutrition over the years, and I can say with 99% certainty that almost all of us ladies have been on at least one diet in our lives and/or struggle with our food and body image.

Over 40 billion dollars are spent every year in the United States on diets and diet products, yet 70% of our population is currently obese and struggling with their weight. In addition, so many women I talk to spend their whole lives struggling with their food, on and off different diets, yet always regaining the weight they worked so hard to lose. They then punish themselves for not being able to stay on these diets and for not having “willpower”. Looking at images of underweight, retouched women in magazines only reinforces the belief that there is something inherently disordered in them for not looking that way. Very often this leads to emotional overeating and the vicious cycle continues.

I can relate—I went on my first diet and spent the majority of my young adult life losing and gaining large amounts of weight in the blink of an eye. The diets started out innocently at first and by my teen years I was taking laxatives and starving myself all day. At night, hungry and delusional, I’d binge on the most high calorie food I could find, even if I didn’t like it. The shame of my inability to maintain my weight and eat like a “normal” person led me to develop a phobia around eating in front of other people. I’ll never forget the time I hid my breakfast cereal inside my grandfather’s roll-top desk only to run down in a complete panic when I heard him opening the desk and finding the food. There was my shame, the fact that I required food to live, being displayed for all to see. As I got older, the diets became more extreme and the 5 pounds I would lose and gain became 40. No matter how much I dieted, the weight always came back with a vengeance. In my mind, my body was disgusting and uncomfortable to be in because it was a visual representation of my lack of control over food that everyone could see.

My relationship with food and with my body, however, completely changed when I discovered what I now call “The P Factor”. I know the P Factor sounds like it should be somehow related to the G Spot and hey, it just might be. But put simply, the P Factor means the Pleasure Factor. Pleasure. Say the word and see how it rolls off your tongue. Try saying it loudly in a public area. Does it bring a little blush to your cheek? Does it make you giggle?

Here’s the thing—as human beings our brains are hardwired to experience pleasure. Yet diets make us do the opposite of what our brains are hardwired to do. For many women, dieting is restriction, self denial. Dieting is punishment. When we diet, we basically send the message to ourselves that we cannot trust ourselves with our pleasure. We cannot trust ourselves around food because it stimulates pleasure. If we don’t diet, if we eat what we desire, if we feel that piece of chocolate exploding like an orgasm on our tongues, we’re afraid that we will never be able stop eating.

But this is actually what dieting does. It puts you in a restrictive mindset. It keeps you small. It teaches you not to trust your instincts. It tells you your instincts for pleasure are making you fat. But the truth is, it’s the diet. In fact, if you followed your instincts, if you really dug in to your feelings, your desires, your innate sense of pleasure, you’d naturally make the right decisions. The amazing woman inside of you doesn’t do well with restrictions. After all, we deal with enough restrictions in our daily societal lives as it is, so, what do you do? You rebel. You rebel by eating everything in sight. You may not be able to control your chauvinistic boss but you sure as hell can tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine by eating that piece of cheesecake you’re “not supposed to be eating”.

So do me a favor—try my top 3 tips to bring the P Factor into your life. I use these tips with my clients to much success, so I know they work!

First, give yourself total permission to eat anything you want. Now, I’m not saying go out and physically eat everything you want. I’m saying in your mind, as you walk down the aisles of the supermarket looking at all of the brightly colored packages of all the forbidden foods you don’t let yourself eat and tell yourself, “I am a grown woman. I make my own money, I pay my own bills and I take care of myself just fine. I can eat any of these foods if I so choose, no one is keeping me from eating them”. Doing this takes the stigma away from these foods and instantly takes away the compulsion of needing to rebel against the rules by bingeing.

Secondly—go out and get a piece of that chocolate mousse pie that you always tell yourself you can’t have. Bring it home in its shiny, clear plastic container. Put it in the most beautiful plate you own. Light a candle for yourself. Sit at the table with no distractions—no TV, no music—and eat the damn thin! Close your eyes, take a deep breath and put that first bite into your mouth. Slowly turn it over on your tongue. Feel the texture of the food, how the flavor silently explodes in different layers in your mouth. Really taste it. Notice how it feels slowly going down your throat and into your stomach. Take another breath, repeat the process again. Allow yourself to have the full pleasure experience. You have my permission to enjoy it. If you’re always eating that pie with a mixture of shame and guilt, your pleasure quotient will never be satisfied, and this is what very often leads us to eat until we’ve finished the whole pie—we keep eating wanting to satisfy the need for pleasure, but our guilt always prevents us from having our pleasure quotient fulfilled. If we allow ourselves to fully enjoy the one piece, very often we don’t need to keep eating it because we’re finally satisfied.

And thirdly, and most importantly, ask yourself how you can find other ways to bring more pleasure into your life. Take that pottery class you’ve always wanted to try. Take a trip to a place that will blow your mind with its beauty. Dance naked in the dark in your apartment. Sing. Take a hot bath. Flirt with a total stranger. Take your lunch break. Take yourself to a movie in the middle of the day. Spend time with your Goddess Circle.

Last, but not least, ditch the diets. Take it from a recovering diet addict—diets don’t work. There’s a reason why 70% of the population is still struggling with weight, even though we spent 40 billion dollars last year to lose weight. It’s time to stop trying to fit ourselves into a box that we were never meant to be in in the first place. If you get in touch with the P Factor in your life, you may just notice one day that you’ve loved your body to its natural weight.

Lisa

Lisa Fabrega is a Board Certified Holistic Health Coach. She works with smart — well, actually, brilliant — women who want to lose weight but will never be skinny minnies. She teaches them to end the diet obsession and actually gain a healthy relationship with food and their bodies so that they can finally balance their weight out naturally. You can visit her website at www.notaskinnyminnie.com.