Your motivation isn’t there because sugar and other carbohydrate consumption have robbed you of it. They have an insidious effect on your brain over time. They are laying the foundations for things like Alzheimers disease right now. You want motivation? Look at your kids. Do you want to know who they are at end of your life? Do you want to live long enough to know your grandchildren? Do you want the energy to parent well while they are young? These are all things you are giving up when you choose to have those cookies or eat that pint of ice cream. It’s really not about the 30 pounds, it’s about the quality of the rest of your life.
Habits are very hard to change, but once you change them by replacing them with new habits, the willpower you had to use to employ changing them, is no longer necessary and this way of eating is fairly easy. You just have to adopt the mindset that you DO have power to say no. And say no for good. I asked a friend who was struggling to give up sugar as she had moved into prediabetes, do you smoke? “Well of course not” she replied. Why not? “because it’s really bad for your health!” she said. That hit her. She went Keto this past summer and is down 30 pounds. She only has another 20 to go. And she is almost 50. She did it for her health but is also reaping the benefits of an appearance she is happy about.
Don’t think in terms of weight loss and vanity because that’s not enough to keep you going. Think about what your life will look like as you get older. I am 52. I am in better health than I have ever been in and have more energy than I have ever had. I get compliments from strangers about my hair all the time (it looks fabulous since I adopted this way of eating). People regularly mistake me for about 10 years younger. Back when I was 40 I had people asking me if I were my son’s grandmother! The inflammatory properties of sugar and grain and the oxidizing properties of seed oil will age you faster.
As far as emotional eating goes, I read a great book just about three years ago that gave me a new way to look at stress and stopped anything close to emotional eating I’d been engaging in. It’s called “The Upside of Stress” written by a research psychologist out of Stanford- she shows how we think about stress in the moment we are having it, affects the chemicals our bodies produce and that just thinking about what is going will make stress much more manageable. It’s worth a read and it’s probably one of the most valuable books I’ve ever read - and remember I am old!
Also, what we tell ourselves about ourselves is very powerful. If you are telling yourself that you can’t handle this after a week, because it’s ‘too hard’ then you won’t be able to. If instead, you say “I know that for most people it takes a couple of weeks to break through sugar addiction and I can do this because a lifetime of well being is worth two to three weeks of feeling like crap” you are more likely to succeed.
If you need more motivation, watch “That Sugar Film” or read “The Case Against Sugar”
I sort of eased into this way of eating by default, I’d cut out grain years ago then upped fat three years ago and then cut out all added sugar in March but still had fruit every day. Dropped the fruit this past summer to an occasional treat. Doing this lifted my life long anxiety/depression/ADD. Seriously, what we have been prescribed our whole lives as ‘healthy eating’ has robbed many of us of too much to list. Think in those terms, about what you are giving up by not correcting course right now. You are still in your prime, you have a great opportunity that a lot of us didn’t have because we came to it later.
You need more motivation, go look at the before and after pictures and see people who were morbidly obese who have moved into HWP to slim territory. They could do it. It was hard for them too. You just have to tell yourself that you are worth it. Your well being is worth it! Your health is worth it!
