Before we discuss holistic weight loss strategies, it’s important to distinguish between two opposing mindsets when it comes to weight and health.
A weight-focused approach often leads to the following negative outcomes:
- You may attempt an extreme, unhealthy calorie deficit
- Push yourself beyond what is healthy and appropriate
- Develop a strict diet and binge yoyo cycle
- Engage in unsustainable methods
- See few to no results
- If weight loss is achieved, you may gain it back and then some shortly after
- You may develop disordered eating habits
- Feel increasingly stressed
- Your body becomes exhausted and deprived of essential nutrients
- Metabolic damage occurs
- Any underlying health conditions stay the same or worsen as they are ignored
- You begin to see your body as the enemy
- Struggle with body dysmorphia and self-hatred
- Feel discouraged and hopeless
- Give up
A health-focused approach often leads to the following positive outcomes:
- You evaluate your lifestyle from a holistic perspective
- Feel inspired by delicious recipes and fun physical activities
- Build sustainable nutrition and lifestyle changes you can continue for a lifetime
- Incorporate nutrient dense foods into the meals and snacks you enjoy
- Prioritize of daily movement that brings you joy
- Your hunger and fullness cues regulate as you learn how to listen to your body
- Mitochondrial health improves
- Insulin sensitivity and blood sugar balance are restored
- You feel your stress levels go down
- Prioritize your mental health
- Your hormones become more balanced
- Gut health and digestion optimize
- You reach your healthy set point weight
- Begin to see yourself as worth caring for and appreciating
- Feel inspired and confident
- Continue to improve and maintain your health long term
I will only ever recommend, speak about, or write about a health-focused approach to weight management.
Now, moving on to the how-to’s:
How to Approach Weight Loss from a Holistic Perspective: My Strategies
1. Incorporate Gentle Nutrition
Address nutrition first and make sure you are incorporating a lot of nutrient-dense food throughout the day.
Complex carbohydrates/fiber – Whole grains (gluten-free if needed), beans/lentils, vegetables, fruit
Healthy fat – Organic grass-fed beef, organic free-range chicken and turkey (dark meat), wild caught fish, organic full-fat dairy, pastured eggs, raw nuts, seeds, full fat coconut products and coconut oil, olives and extra virgin olive oil, avocados and avocado oil
Protein – Organic grass-fed beef, organic free-range chicken and turkey, wild caught fish, organic full-fat dairy, pastured eggs, organic soy products (tofu, tempeh, edamame, etc.), beans/lentils, raw nuts, seeds
Antioxidants – Vegetables, fruit, herbs, and spices
Some Accessible Steps:
- Swap in whole grains instead of simple carbohydrates. For example, whole grain bread in place of white bread, or brown rice in place of white rice.
- Experiment with fun and creative ways to add vegetables and fruit to your meals and snacks.
- Incorporate a good source of fiber, healthy fat, and protein into every meal and snack, to help you feel full and satisfied until your next meal.
- Add instead of taking away. For example, if you’re craving chocolate, try sprinkling dark chocolate chips on a bowl of greek yogurt with some fresh berries and a drizzle of your favorite nut butter. This turns what you’re craving into a nutrient-dense snack that provides fiber, healthy fat, protein, antioxidants, and will help you feel full and satisfied until your next meal.
- Everything in moderation. Of course, except for food allergies and health-related dietary restrictions. Excessive restriction often leads to disordered eating or out-of-control, binge eating afterwards. For example, if you allow yourself to eat a cookie anytime you’re craving one, and you eat it mindfully, enjoying every bite, suddenly cookies don’t feel like such a trigger food anymore. Your appetite will be able to regulate itself, and you’ll be able to enjoy a cookie here and there in moderation.
- Work with a nutrition professional (like me) to help you undergo an elimination diet to indentify any food intolerances or sensitivities.
- Fermented foods like sauerkraut, yogurt, kefir, kombucha, tempeh, kimchi, miso, and natto can help support a healthy gut microbiome.
- Work towards drinking one ounce of water for every two pounds of body weight, every day. For me, this adds up to about 67 ounces or 8 cups of water. This can come from a variety of sources, including broth in soup/stew, milk, tea, or other beverages like coconut water.
- Some people find they need a whole food multivitamin or single nutrient supplements to compliment a nutrient-dense diet. Naturelo is my favorite whole food multivitamin brand.
If you are eating enough complex carbohydrates/fiber, healthy fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals and drinking enough water, your body’s hunger and fullness cues will able to regulate. Your blood sugar will be able to stabilize.
A well-rounded, nutrient-dense diet is crucial for satiety and for hunger and fullness cues to regulate naturally.
2. Get Some Functional Lab Work Done
Functional lab work can give you a deeper, more comprehensive look into your overall health picture.
Your health practitioner can help you order:
– A thyroid panel
– A saliva hormone panel
– Vitamin and mineral levels
– Fasting blood glucose, A1c, and fasting insulin, or even a 14-day continous glucose monitor if needed
– Comprehensive gut health testing, if you are having symptoms of gut dysbiosis
– Any other functional lab tests that may be beneficial for you
If you’re having trouble getting the lab work you need from your health practitioner, you can also order functional lab work yourself.
If you uncover any health issues, or you’re already aware of some, it’s important to get your body back into balance first before working towards weight loss.
While it’s possible to do this on your own, it can be really overwhelming.
That’s why I work with each of my clients to determine which functional lab tests may be most helpful for them, and I show them how to ask their medical doctor for the lab work so their insurance covers the cost. When the results are in, I walk my clients through their results from a functional medicine perspective.
After our initial appointment where we go over health history and lab results, I create an individualized nutrition and lifestyle plan for each of my clients, with supplement and herbal recommendations. Together, we create realistic, achievable steps for adding in these diet and lifestyle changes, in a way that works for their unique circumstances.
3. Get in Touch With Your Hunger and Fullness Cues
Take the time to learn a little bit about Intuitive Eating.
Intuitive Eating involves learning how to recognize your body’s cues and listen to them.
This might look like:
- Eating when you start to feel hungry, before you get too hungry
- Stopping when you feel satisfied, before you feel too full
- Eating before you’re hungry because you have something going on and know it’ll be a little while before your next meal
- Choosing to eat until you’re a little more full than usual because you know you’re going to be going longer than you typically do between meals
- Bringing balanced snacks with you so you can eat if you get hungry while you’re out and about
- Mindfully eating until you’re a little more full than usual on a special occcasion
- Pausing to think about what would be satisfying and also make your body feel good before you eat
- Enjoying what you are craving, mindfully
- Not eating what you are craving if you know you won’t feel so well afterwards
- Turning what you’re craving into a balanced snack by adding fiber, protein, fat, and fruit or veggies
- Slowing down while you eat to enjoy the sensory experience and savor each bite
- Savoring another bite after you recognize you’re full, to give the meal closure
- Reminding yourself you can eat again as soon as you’re hungry, so it’s safe to stop eating when you feel satisfied
Eating intuitively and listening to your body take time to get good at. Especially if you’ve lived a lifetime of only consuming food according to diet rules and ignoring your body in the process.
I’ve been working on eating intuitively for 3 1/2 years, and it’s still a work in progress! The benefits of getting more in tune with your body are so worth it, though.
4. Track Your Food Intake in an App
It is true that sometimes, we really don’t know the amount of food we are eating or what a moderate, balanced amount of food for us might look or feel like.
In order to give yourself some information to go on, it can help to track your food intake in an app like MyFitnessPal for 1-2 weeks and make an effort to be very accurate. You can improve accuracy by adding your own recipes, measuring or weighing the portions you eat, and tracking absolutely everything you eat, even down to your last tiny snack before bed.
During the 1-2 weeks you are tracking your food intake, pay attention to your average calories consumed each day, as well as carbohydrates, fiber, fat, protein, vitamins, and minerals.
From there, use an online calculator to determine how many calories you should need per day to maintain your weight. You’re sedentary if you work a desk job and don’t engage in any intentional exercise. You’re moderately active if you engage in intentional exercise for at least 30-minutes, 5 days per week or work an active job. You fall into the lightly active category if you’re somewhere between these two.
Observe any discrepancies. For example, if you see you are eating fewer calories than you should to maintain your weight, but are not losing weight, your metabolism has adapted to be more efficient/slower for one reason or another. You can address this with your health practitioner.
If you notice you are eating more calories than you need to maintain your weight or lose weight, there may be reasons why that you can target in order to help you decrease your food intake without feeling overly hungry or deprived.
5. Keep Your Calorie Deficit Small
You do not necessarily have to count calories if you want to lose weight. If you’re eating a whole food, nutrient-dense diet and moderating your intake of highly processed foods, have addressed any underlying health problems, and are learning to listen to your body’s hunger and fullness signals, that may be all your body needs to reach its healthy set point weight.
If you would like to track your calories, though, for more calculated weight loss experience, it is possible to do this in a healthy way.
Unlike extreme diets with large calorie deficits, small-moderate calorie deficits are sustainable, feasible to maintain, can be achieved through healthy lifestyle changes, and result in slow, steady weight loss that lasts.
Shorter and more sedntary people, especially women, may do better on a small calorie deficit of around 250 calories less than maintenance per day, which results in about 1/2 a lb of weight loss per week. The reason why is because their maintenance calories (or TDEE) are often on the lower side. This makes it difficult to do a more moderate calorie deficit without consuming too little food and causing nutrient deficiencies, metabolic damage, hormone imbalances, and other negative health effects.
If your metabolism has adapted to be more efficient/slower than it should be, you may need to reverse metabolic damage before you can undergo a calorie deficit sustainably. To do this, follow all of these steps, except make sure you are eating the amount of food you need to maintain your weight and not lose. You’ll want to wait until you notice your metabolism increase before you attempt any weight loss.
For people who are taller, active, or male, sometimes a moderate deficit of 500 calories less than maintenance per day can be a sustainable option as well. This results in around 1 lb of weight loss per week.
If you’d like to stick to a smaller calorie deficit, measuring or weighing your portions and tracking your food intake in an app like MyFitnessPal can help you achieve your goal. This is because with a smaller calorie deficit, it’s easy to lose your entire deficit in a day with something as small as a few extra tbsp of salad dressing.
It is unfortunately easy to use food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal in an unhealthy way and start feeling obsessive about your food intake. To avoid this, remember it’s completely fine if your calories or macronutrients are somewhat over or under your goal. Daily fluctuations in food intake are natural. There’s no need to stress if you have days where you are hungrier or have a celebration and eat more.
6. Prioritize Physical Activity That Brings You Joy
Finding ways to be physically active can be tough with chronic illness and autoimmune disease. It’s incredibly beneficical if you can find creative ways to work it in, though. Physical activity increases endurance, builds muscle, benefits mental health, and increases the amount of calories you burn in a day.
I know from personal experience, it’s really easy to focus on and be discouraged by what you can’t do.
Try asking yourself instead, “What can I do? How can I incorporate physical activity into my day that brings me joy and helps gently build my strength?”
For me, this looks like 20 minutes of strength conditioning seated or lying down and a moderate 20-minute walk. I make sure to take breaks to rest and deep breathe in between exercises. Occasionally, I also enjoy short 30-60 second bursts of slow-moderate dancing. These forms of exercise bring me joy and work with having POTS.
If you have a health condition like EDS, a heart condition, POTS/dysautonomia, or asthma, you may need to work with a health professional such as a physical therapist to incorporate physical activity safely.
7. Improve Your Lifestyle Sustainably
There are a million ways to go about this, and what works for one person will not work for the next one.
Take the time to experiment and figure out how you can slow down and live mindfully, in the present.
What are some realistic, achievable strategies you can adopt to reduce your stress? Some of my favorite methods include somatic therapies like 4-1-6 breathing, progressive relaxation, vagus nerve techniques, self-EMDR, EFT, and listening to delta waves.
How can you prioritize your sleep so you’re able to improve your sleep hygiene, align your circadian rhythm, and calm your nervous system and get the deep rest you need?
Are you engaging in any unhealthy coping mechanisms that need to be replaced with healthy strategies? For example, perhaps you need to allow yourself to feel your emotions and truly work through them, rather than reaching for ice cream to numb yourself.
You can reach out to a mental health therapist to get the help you need, if you find yourself struggling mentally.
Sometimes, it’s too overwhelming to work through your roadblocks and successfully change your lifestyle on your own, and that’s okay.
Working with a certified health coach can give you the support you need to find the strategies that work for you. I work with my each of my clients to create realistic, achievable steps for adding in personalized nutrition and lifestyle changes, in a way that makes sense for their unique circumstances. Of course, I’m always there to troubleshoot setbacks and adjust the plan along the way.
8. Work With a Health Coach or Nutrition Professional
If you find yourself hitting roadblocks, struggling to improve your nutrition and lifestyle on your own, or are not seeing the progress you would like, working with a nutrition professional or certified health coach may be exactly the partnership you need.
Take a look at my Guide to Finding the Right Health Practitioner, or you can contact me!
Together, we can work through your unique, individual trouble points and help you build sustainable nutrition and lifestyle habits that will transform your health and last for a lifetime. When you contact me, we’ll set up a day and time for your complimentary 20-minute consultation where we discover if we’re a good fit to work together.
Tracking Your Progress in a Healthy Way
Weight and BMI often don’t tell the full story.
Tracking your body fat percentage and measurements can be a much more accurate way to determine if your lifestyle changes are making an impact on your muscle and body fat.
While there’s no 100% accurate way to track your body fat percentage, two reasonably accurate methods are an online calculator based on your measurements and a biometric scale, which can measure your weight, body fat percentage, and muscle mass all at the same time.
When you weigh yourself, it’s important to do it mindfully. Your weight will fluctuate from day to day and throughout the day from hormonal changes, eating food, drinking water, bowel movements, and clothing changes. None of these have anything to do with body fat gain or loss.
To avoid obsessing, aim to weigh yourself no more than once a week, and do it in the morning before you’ve gotten dressed, eaten, or drank water. For women, skip weighing yourself during the final week of your luteal phase and during your period. Hormonal changes during these times cause a lot of non-fat related weight changes, so they’re not the most accurate times of the month to track your progress.
Finally, your healthy set point weight may not always fall where you want it to.
You may find that you have to adjust your expectations.
There are quite a variety of weights, shapes, and sizes that all fall into a healthy range.
You may never find yourself outside of the overweight BMI range, and it’s okay to find peace with that. People in this range can have a perfectly healthy lifestyle and excellent health biometrics.
