Why All Weight Loss Plans Work (with a few ifs, ands or buts)

Sometimes when I meet with a prospective client, I’m asked if I think a particular diet or weight loss plan works. And my answer is almost always a resounding yes!

Followed by a pause…and a few ifs, ands or buts.

Here’s why. When I first decided to become a wellness coach, I spent a lot of time researching various popular diets or ways of eating. In fact, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where I studied, included this as a core part of our curriculum. We studied more than 80 dietary theories in practice around the world. And what I can say without qualification, is that ANY diet or weight loss plan can help you lose weight.

You can choose The Zone or the South Beach Diet, Atkins or Pritkin, Perricone or Scarsdale. You can do Weight Watchers or Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig or Optifast, Ayurveda or Body for Life or P90X.  And you can always find testimonials from happy followers explaining how well a given program worked for them. But the truth is, there’s no real magic in any of them. In fact, the advice in one theory often directly contradicts the advice in another, yet they all can work.

But there’s an IF. They only work IF they motivate you to burn more calories than you consume.  That’s it. At the end of the day, it’s the one common denominator to weight loss.

AND, not all of these programs will help you lose weight in a healthful way. Some of them, in fact, could be downright destructive to your health. They may lead to weight loss, but not without unwanted side effects.

Finally, all of these diets have worked for some people, BUT they may not work for YOU. Why? Because you are a unique individual with a unique biological makeup and a unique lifestyle that requires a unique plan. If I believed there were a one-size-fits-all approach to eating, I wouldn’t be a coach. We wouldn’t need coaches, in fact,  because we’d have one perfect system which would work for everyone. We’d all recognize that and follow it, and weight loss goals would be a thing of the past.

It would be so much simpler if that were the case, but it’s just not reality. We’re far more complex as individuals than that, so discovering what works for you requires a highly personal journey…no ifs, ands or buts about it.

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A (semi-failed) vegan experiment

My husband is very cooperative with my healthful eating experiments. VERY. He will cheerfully try anything I make and 99% of the time he finds something good to say about it. However, he met his match with the Vegan Pizza I tried last week. Poor guy.
Here’s the story. I had a Groupon for Whole Foods about to expire. I decided to use it on all the things I THINK about buying but rarely actually do. Things like:
You get the idea. Things a little off the beaten path. So one night, I whipped up a vegan pizza. Vegan crust, tomato sauce, Daiya vegan cheese (mozzarella style, so the package claimed), diced fresh vegetables, a few olives. Heated up the pizza stone. Popped in the pizza. Made a salad. Set the table.
We all thought it looked great as I cut slices for everyone. This cheese’s big claim to fame is that it stretches like mozzarella. Which it sort of does. So after saying grace, we each took our first bite with anticipation. But for at least one of us, the first bite would also be the last.
Now, in full disclosure, our three-year-old loved it. Seriously.
My 6-year-old said it was not as good as our usual “pizza cheese,” but nonetheless happily chomped through her slice.
I said that if I ever WERE to be a vegan, I could eat this. But I’d certainly prefer mozzarella.
The baby didn’t get any. Just gnawed on her plastic spoon in teething bliss.
My husband quietly ate his salad and left his slice with one big bite taken out of it on his plate. All the way through the meal. Never picked it up again! He was excruciatingly tactful so as not to give the kids license to do the same. But when I asked him what he thought, he simply said, “I’m not eating that.”
In our entire ten-year marriage, I believe this was a first! For him the deal breaker was the texture of the cheese. It was creamy, sort of like cream cheese, instead of stretchy and chewy like mozzarella. It just didn’t work for him.
So, since we’re not vegan, and since I value harmony in my marriage, mozzarella will clearly remain the cheese of choice in our house.
That said, what’s the lesson? If you think it’s “Don’t make vegan pizza”, you’re missing the point. The point is to keep experimenting. In ten years, this was the first experiment that proved inedible. And that was only for one of us.

Experimenting in the kitchen is fun. You have your whole life ahead of you and if you live it with only the same eight dishes currently in rotation at your house, you’ll miss out on so many wonderful foods. Think about all the things you tried for the first time in the last ten years and actually liked! Keep experimenting.

And while you’re at it, I highly recommend the Cocoa-dusted goji berries. Yum.
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A Little Bird Told Me

A while back, someone introduced me to an online community called The Brave Girls Club. They do a number of pretty darn cool things, but my primary engagement with them is my subscription to their daily email called, you guessed it, “A Little Bird Told Me – Your Daily Truth from the Brave Girls Club”. It pops into my inbox first thing in the morning with a dose of uplifting inspiration that I just adore. Often I read it and think, “How did they KNOW that I needed to hear EXACTLY that on EXACTLY this day?!” Synchronicity in action.

As an example, here was today’s email:


Dear Unique Girl,


Everyone has a different journey. So different, in fact, that new lessons can be learned every single day from each other’s journeys. Your friends’ journey are different from yours. Your children’s are different, too. Your parents also went on an entirely different journey than the one that is meant for you.

That is why it is so important not to compare, criticize, or complain. We often have the tendency to compare the worst of what we are living through with the best of what others are enjoying. Everyone has the exact path, with the exact battles and the exact joys that are meant for them. We all learn in different ways, and we can all learn so much from each other, too.

So live YOUR life. Love YOUR life. Make the most of YOUR life. And whenever you have the chance to meet another fellow traveler along the road of life, lend a helping hand whenever you can. An encouraging smile or a kind word or two. Be happy when good things happen to others and show compassion when difficult things come along. Remind those you know that ALL of it is good. ALL of it.

All of it is meant for our growth and our ultimate joy.

Keep being the fabulous YOU that YOU are.

xoxo

“A little bird told me” – your Daily Truth from The Brave Girls Club – http://www.bravegirlsclub.com
See what I mean? Check it out for yourself. Subscribe. And when that first email arrives that you swear was written JUST FOR YOU, you’ll be so very glad you did.
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