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Wellness Coach Deborah Kesten explains why women cannot maintain their weight loss while dieting.
Deborah Kesten:
Diets fail to help women maintain weight loss because of a traditional way in which we relate to dieting. It’s about food deprivation, and it’s about eating in a way that is not particularly enjoyable for many of us. It’s eating in a way, eating foods that are not particularly our food choices, and it’s eating what is not normal and comfortable.
There’s an expression I learned when I was growing up, “Well, it doesn’t feel good, but it feels familiar and comfortable.” And so dieting doesn’t feel good, but it’s familiar and comfortable, and again, the optimal way of eating, I always ask people, “Share your most memorable meal with me.” And it’s always, ”I was eating some fresh delicious food some place.” It’s always with people around them whom they were enjoying, and it’s always some pleasant atmosphere. It was never, “Gee, I was on a diet. I couldn’t go out with my friends and so I stopped and I got, I don’t know what, a pint of cottage cheese, and I had half a serving at home in front of the television by myself.”
Dieting is a very lonely, isolating, I don’t know, way of life, and it’s very normal for most of us.
About Deborah Kesten, M.P.H.:
Deborah Kesten, M.P.H., is an international nutrition and lifestyle researcher and educator, with a specialty in preventing and reversing obesity and heart disease. She was the nutritionist on Dr. Dean Ornish’s first clinical trial for reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, and Director of Nutrition on similar research at cardiovascular clinics in Europe. More recently, she has created the pioneering Enlightened Diet, a “whole person” optimal eating and weight loss program, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing. With more than 200 published health articles, she is the award-winning author of The Enlightened Diet, Feeding the Body, Nourishing the Soul and The Healing Secrets of Food, a comprehensive, evidence-based nutrition program about the power of food to heal physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially.
Visit Deborah Kesten at her website