I was recently at a conference in Phoenix with a room full of mental health professionals. 

We were there learning a fascinating technique to unlink the emotional memory of trauma in the brain. The implication for using this technique in helping my clients overcome stress or emotional eating is more than exciting. 

What this email is about, though, is a conversation I had over dinner with a psychologist who was extremely interested in learning more about my program. She told me that the worst advice she ever gave a patient was to take an intuitive eating course. 

I guessed immediately where she was going with her story, so what she told me next was no surprise. 

Mary desperately wanted to lose weight and had already tried diet after diet, so she took her psychologist’s advice to try something different and she enrolled in an intuitive eating course. 

This course was designed to help her reject dieting and give herself unconditional permission to trust her body to eat whatever she feels like whenever she feels like eating. 

That sounds like a dream, right? And it might work for someone with zero environmental, biological, emotional, and habitual drives to overeat. 

Here’s the problem for the rest of us in one word:

Leptin

What I can tell from their writing is that most intuitive eating coaches don’t believe all of the hundreds of thousands of scientists that have proven over and over that the organ that controls eating is not the stomach but the brain. 

I’m going to simplify this down to its core, so bear with me a moment, please, as I get a tiny bit neuroscientific, because it’s crucial for your health that you understand leptin 101. 

I’ll share leptin 102 in another post which involves a fascinating multi-million dollar scandal in which pharmaceutical companies, not overweight consumers, are the big-time losers. 

Leptin is THE MASTER hormone in the body, controlling all metabolism and also the thyroid gland itself. Leptin wasn’t discovered until 1994 due to of a combination of the newly emerging field of obesity neuroscience, technology advances, and because no one suspected that fat cells could be a crucial part of two major body systems -Endocrine and Immune – and at the end of the day, that those cells can be actually self-perpetuating. 

Leptin’s implications throughout the entire body can’t be stressed enough. Leptin is driving the entire show, which is why it’s super important to understand how it gets messed up as we become overweight. 

Leptin (and other recently discovered endocrine and immune functions of the fat cell itself) is the reason that we lose the argument as to whether it’s possible to be both overweight and truly “healthy.” 

Leptin’s main job in a healthy right weight body is to tell the hypothalamus how much fat we have on the body. The hypothalamus then up- or down-regulates all other metabolism in the body, and the most important task for this convo is that it either turns off or turns on hunger. It quite literally functions as a hunger switch.

From an evolutionary (pre-supermarket by about 500 million years) standpoint, we need just enough fat to continue to reproduce even when food is scarce, yet not so much that we are unable to move quickly and nimbly to escape danger. 

When leptin sends its signal (that there is enough fat for survival), the hypothalamus immediately sends out signals that that we’re full, and we immediately don’t need or want to eat anymore. 

If a little too much fat accumulates, leptin gets really loud and the hypothalamus up-regulates metabolism (enter leptin’s control of the thyroid) and burns that extra little bit of fat off so that we can stay nimble and quick and ready to jump over the candlestick. 

Okay, just making sure you’re paying attention…it’s so that we aren’t carrying excess weight and can therefore more easily escape danger. 

That’s the way the system is designed to work. 

But…however…pause for emphasis. 

Our system was never designed to be subjected to the barrage of sugar and highly palatable foods we now have readily available with as little effort as it takes to rip open a package.

Unfortunately, in overweight individuals, what has happened is that the body has become insulin resistant and the brain has become leptin resistant. 

Leptin is screaming,”THERE IS ENOUGH FAT ON THIS BODY! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CEASE THE EATING!” 

And the hypothalamus is like my three-year-old – it’s absolutely not listening. It doesn’t even register that the fat cells are talking to it. 

The hypothalamus has become leptin resistant and literally can’t hear leptin telling it to send out the “stop eating” signals and turn off hunger. 

The hypothalamus does not see what we see in the mirror, and since it can’t hear leptin screaming, it actually thinks we’re starving. So it sends out, “WE’RE STARVING, CUE THE HUNGER AND CRAVINGS and UP-REGULATE THE DOPAMINE REWARD ADDICTION CENTERS IN THE BRAIN TO FORCE THIS FAMISHED BODY TO SAVE ITSELF AND EAT EVERYTHING IN SIGHT,AND DON’T STOP UNTIL LEPTIN TELLS ME TO TELL YOU TO STOP!”

Poor misunderstood leptin is wondering why in the hell no one listens to her. She’ been screaming so long that her partner, the hypothalamus, has totally tuned her out. Familiar to anyone else’s family!?

So what happened to Mary in her intuitive eating course? 

She went in metabolically imbalanced and totally emotionally discombobulated around food. 

Her leptin resistance was causing her to feel constantly hungry, be super rewarded in her brain for finding evolutionarily dense foods that would have helped her survive three bad winters with one bite, and insulin resistant enough that she re-entered the “blood sugar rollercoaster of hell,” which added to the cravings and confusion. 

Her coach told her that to lose weight, she must give herself a license to eat any time she’s hungry, to eat absolutely anything she’s craving, and to stop when she gets full.

Are you still with me in this story?

Mary hasn’t felt “full” in over a decade. She has no clue what “full” feels like because it’s not a signal that her body sends since her brain thinks her body is starving. 

She notices when there is zero physical space left in her stomach from- time-to-time, but 5 minutes later she’s hungry again, questioning whether or not she’s losing her mind, and if she needs to be locked in a psych ward to get this under control. 

Here’s how it played out: Mary started off gingerly enjoying some of her favorite sugary foods. I mean, her coach assured her that this was the right thing to do. 

Her blood sugar now thrust her back on the “eat every two hours rollercoaster of insanity.” As her system became even more imbalanced and she decided to honor her nearly constant hunger as she’d been instructed, she dove head first into the most highly palatable and addictive foods she could find. 

She overate partially because processed food is designed to make us overeat, and partially because she was back on the “blood sugar roller coaster from hell,” which drives even more cravings. Yet, all the while, her leptin resistance worsened so that her brain continued NOT to hear the now even louder messages from the additional fat cells telling it to stop the freaking eating already. 

How did the whole thing derail with such good intentions?

Evolution, baby. 

So what’s the solution for Mary and the rest of us?

No amount of intuitive eating work (bring the Doritos in and embrace them) is going to override the true metabolic drivers of overeating, and consequently, no amount of the perfect diet is going to resolve the emotional and habitual drivers of overeating. 

This stuff is cyclical and self-propagating, and it gets too mixed up in our cognitive dissonance between our unconscious drivers of hunger and our rational brain’s desires to live in a healthy right weight body which is free of this eating/diet/body insanity for good. 

How do we fix it? 

So glad you asked. 

In my Wild Woman program, we use the Craving Freedom Matrix to calm, balance, and restore the whole metabolic and emotional system.

First, we have to stabilize the metabolic and hunger hormones with a properly designed low-carbohydrate (think low addiction) diet. (I need to add that most popular low-carb/keto diets are terribly designed when weight loss is the goal.) 

Next, we optimize that diet so that weight is peeling off at an insane rate (this is how we know we’ve started the journey back to re-sensitizing the hypothalamus to leptin). 

Then, we keep leptin and the brain from panicking over lost fat cells by… (well…that, my dear, is a huge part of why my approach is so successful).

Finally, we leverage the cool, calm, and collected state of the hypothalamus, the rekindled connection with our body because it’s behaving well for the first time in 20 years, and the clarity of mind of a low-allergen, high-micronutrient dense, low-carb diet to get serious about unwinding all of the emotional and habitual drivers of overeating. 

It doesn’t matter if it’s the chicken or the egg…we all have emotional and habitual shit we need to dissolve to have long-term success. 

If we don’t dissolve these issues, it’s like we always have a pilot light lit, and the moment life gets a little wonky around us, we lose our newly found resilience and we return back to eating to soothe, distract, or calm ourselves, and this sets the whole cycle off again.  

Once we have all of the hormonal, emotional, environmental, evolutionary, and habitual drivers to overeat balanced, then it becomes totally natural to intuitively eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full. 

Do you have to be hyper-vigilant forever? 

Nope. 

But you do have to understand everything that’s driving you to eat outside of hunger, do the work it takes to get your eating under emotional, hormonal, environmental, and habitual control, and give your body and brain time to allow metabolic healing to occur. 

And now you know why, although I can help you lose a half a pound a day with my Anti-Diet Keto Plan, we absolutely can’t stop there. 

We have to have a holistic, whole body and mind approach to end the roller coaster of diet insanity for good.

Enter your email to get on the list when the Wild Woman Weightloss doors open next.

At risk of being attacked by all of the keto coaches out there, I’m determined to share the truth about the keto diet. 

If you follow a high-fat, low-carb keto diet the way it’s taught all over the internet, you’re unlikely to lose any real weight, and you’re likely to end up actually gaining. 

What!? Does that seem a bold statement from someone who is very pro keto diet?

I hope it does because I really want to keep you from another frustrating diet fail. 

Each time we fail, we disconnect a little further from our bodies, and we lose a little bit of ourselves.

I know because I failed a hundred times. 

Here’s the reality that hardly anyone understands: 

The original ketogenic diet like everyone is trying to follow was originally designed to control epilepsy in the 1920’s and was designed to be a weight sparing diet, and not a weight loss diet. Let’s call this Keto E for epilepsy. 

If you’re not familiar with the history of ketogenic dieting, let me share the cliff notes version. 

1) We evolved into the big-brained human species we are specifically because of our ability to slip into and out of ketosis (i.e. to move from glucose to fat metabolism) based on the availability of food (which means… we didn’t perish when food supplies ran low, because of ketosis).

2) Before Dilantin (a drug used to control seizures that was widely used from the 1920s and on), the only way to control epilepsy was with a high-fat ketogenic diet. This diet is still the only way to control a couple of drug-resistant types of epilepsy. 

Very few people were obese in the 1920s, let alone someone clinging to their life with uncontrolled epilepsy. 

In case you missed it above… The original ketogenic diet like everyone is trying to follow now was originally designed to be a weight sparing diet.

Anytime you limit a major macronutrient, it is going to result in weight loss for some people… namely, those overeating that macronutrient to begin with. 

But that doesn’t mean that it’s a weight loss diet for all. 

Getting into ketosis and losing weight in ketosis are not usually the same thing.

But how would the experts touting this way of eating know that? 

90% of them have never been overweight, so there is no way they could actually know what it truly takes to take the weight off for good. 

Diet theory is one thing. 

Just look at the misguided low-fat craze that landed us fatter than ever before. 

Diet results are totally another. 

It just takes a little common sense to dial the diet in for rapid weight loss.

A ketogenic diet is a phenomenal healing tool, but for weight loss, you’ve got to get it right!

And you’ve got to eliminate the emotional drivers of overeating too – you know, those little buggers that have absolutely nothing to do with diet and everything to do with why you didn’t stick to the last one you went on…

Combining the metabolic reset of a properly designed keto diet with a food/brain makeover just happens to be my magic and what I teach in the Wild Woman Weight Loss program.

If you’re anything like I was, you keep this tape running in the back of your mind that says, “I know what I need to do, I just need to come up with the willpower to stick with it…”

But…if you’re honest with yourself, haven’t you also realized by now that willpower is totally unreliable when it comes to sticking to a healthy eating plan?

Studies on willpower show that it’s a finite resource and gets depleted really quickly every day. 

Which means that willpowered dieting only works in a vacuum. 

The vacuum being a perfect world where there is nothing else remotely touching your limited supply. 

No stress, no meetings, and no other decisions that need to be made.

Which is why no amount of well-intention, positive thinking, or “this time it’s going to be different” mantra stands a chance when you’ve had a stressful day at work, your kids need to be 12 places at once, your spouse is running late, and you end up going out to eat. 

Enter the cycle of shame and guilt as you wonder, “Why in the heck am I so weak?” 

Which is followed by, “I’ll start again Monday, so might as well go crazy until then” all-or-nothing thinking.

Enter an extra ten pounds and the vicious blood sugar induced brain hunger cycle I described yesterday. 

So is it hopeless to ever take the weight off?

Absolutely not. 

We just have to understand what’s happening in our brain and not rely on unreliable willpower.

Or else we’re setting ourselves up to fail and ain’t nobody got time for another trip down “beat yourself up for failing” lane. 

Trying to willpower yourself thin is like trying to build a house with thumbtacks instead of nails. It’s not the right tool for the job!

So what works if it’s not willpower?

To begin with, when you work with me, we recognize willpower’s weakness and take decision making on the fly off of the table. 

Next, if you’ve read my musings, you probably already know the answer. 

We need to stabilize your hunger hormones with a properly designed low-carbohydrate diet then physically rewire the craving brain to set you up for a lifetime of living healthy and thin. 

If you did manage to somehow get the weight off with willpower, you’d never be able to let up and live life. 

Nobody wants to have to be hypervigilant about every morsel that goes into their mouth forever. Talk about not sustainable.

On-the-other-hand, if you leverage the clear thinking of my eating plan and rewire your brain with my Keto Mind Method, you’ll restore your natural and easy relationship with food and never have to rely on willpower again! 

Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? 

An effortless way to drop the weight off in which keeping it off becomes a simple and natural daily habit like brushing your teeth?

Let’s make this happen. Jump on the VIP list to join the next Wild Woman program and we’ll fix this for good!

“Michelle, even with her multi-millions, Oprah can’t even get results like your clients are getting…” 

My online colleague and friend, Julie, passed away very suddenly a few months ago and I’d love to have had a chance to sit for an hour with her face-to-face and tell her what she meant to me. 

We have these divinely-designed opportunities and it’s our job to say, “Yes” from a place of deep knowing that has very little to do with what our head says and everything to do with what our intuition says (link to blog on no no yes yes).

When we follow our intuition, we’re saying, “Yes” to the universe handing us exactly what we’re searching for on a silver platter, even if it doesn’t look the way we expected or come packaged as we imagined.

I had hired Julie to help me take my network marketing business to the top of the company… or so I thought…

I knew where I thought I wanted to go and I knew that I had no idea how to get there myself. That’s when I hired a coach.

I’ve hired many coaches in my life; I love being led to new discoveries and I love the insight I get when someone else points out the obvious: that truth that I’m too close to the situation and too “in my head” to see. 

What I knew at the time was that what I had done to achieve the rank of one step from the top of the company was something I was no longer willing to do to get me to the top. I was destroying my sanity, my health, and my family in the process, and something had to change. 

Julie was a business strategist and facebook ads expert, and I reached out to her because she was incredibly genuine in her marketing and I felt like we spoke the same language when I heard her talk. 

Now I know that I was drawn to her because she was radiating empowered and balanced energy and I was radiating wounded energy. If you’d have told me that at the time, I would have thought you were cuckoo and I would have backed away slowly before running in the opposite direction. 

At the time, all I knew was that she was an expert in something I knew nothing about (facebook marketing) and I was drawn to her energy. Maybe the Facebook algorithm actually is as intelligent as it is creepy. Or maybe she was as good at her trade as I had hopes of her being. 

Either way, Facebook placed her ad in front of me. I watched her webinar and booked a call with her. I said, “Yes” when she offered me a chance to work directly with her, and then I promptly resisted most of what she was trying to teach me. 

The reality was that my heart wasn’t in network marketing. I’d originally built my business to pay for two adoptions (a.k.a. I needed to come up with 60K fast) and once my family was complete, my motivation tanked. I started to feel like the business had destroyed the very thing that I had set out to build, which was my family. 

I get now that my time in network marketing was preparing me for the amazing opportunity to help women overcome their limiting beliefs around health, but at the time, I was in emotional turmoil – which always means that something is trying to get my attention or come through. The more we resist being open to whatever is emerging, the more painful it feels. Can ya relate?

I became an accidental health coach when I lost an insane amount of weight really quickly. And I was fairly visible on account of my rank with this company. 

When you see someone in the front of the room in December and they’re a size 16 (which should have been an 18 but I refused to buy more clothes) and then you see them in February and they’re a loose size 12, that really gets your attention. 

I had so many people beg me for help in losing weight, that I opened up a little Facebook group and I taught them what I had learned about how to actually design a keto diet for women for weight loss (which is not remotely the way it’s taught all over the interwebs of recycled thought).

Little did I know that diet would be only part of the Total Weight Loss Equation™ but the diet part is what I knew at the time (plus I have a degree in exercise science), so that’s what I taught. And the weight peeled off. We’re talking 60lbs in 4 months. Diabetes disappearing. Women having hope for the first time in decades that they could reach their goal weight once and for all. 

Julie was curious about what I was teaching so I added her to my little weight loss group. 

Fast forward a few months and I was freaking out at the bottom of a bottle of wine at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday because Facebook had shut my ad account down. 

I messaged Julie for moral support, and as she was known to do, she invited me to jump on a video call. I knew Julie well enough to know that she wouldn’t turn her camera on so it didn’t matter if I showed up in my husband’s old ratty t-shirt turned pajamas.  

I really should have declined the call. I was in no shape to be having a business discussion at 11 p.m. after drinking too much wine. By the time I jumped on the computer to meet with her, I was certainly speaking in cursive.  

Side note: It would take me another two years to kick the wine habit – I did it using the exact same Self-Sabotage Solution™ tools that I teach in my the Wild Woman program.

We jumped on Zoom and the conversation we had would change the trajectory of my entire life.

Rather than figuring out my ad account, Julie gently and kindly told me that I needed to stop being blind to that which was right in front of me, get over my own self and my own limiting beliefs, and share my message with the world. 

She told me that I was being selfish by not sharing what I’d figured out, that millions of women are suffering in debilitating shame over their bodies, and I needed to help. 

I protested, certain that I couldn’t possibly be called to do this as I didn’t remotely feel like I had my own shit together around body, weight, and diet.  And to this she responded, “Michelle, even with her multi-millions Oprah can’t get results like your clients are getting. Who are you not to help?”

Gulp.

Then she went on to tell me that I had an obligation to charge big time for my program so that people would take it seriously, and so that I could help the kind of women who will go out and change the world when they quit letting weight hold them back. 

Double gulp.

This was not what I expected when I jumped on Zoom that night with her. 

Wine and stress are not helpful when you’re an emotional eater. True confession: I got off of that call and ate 4 slices of my kids’ gluten-free bread slathered with butter and honey.

And then I went to bed. It would take me another year to develop a craving technique that would have been helpful that night (before I opened the bottle of wine :).

The funny thing about a seed is that once it’s planted if it’s viable, it’s absolutely positively going to grow. 

By the end of that year, it had become nearly impossible to even fake enthusiasm for my network marketing company. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s inauthenticity and that’s how I’d started to feel. 

I’m a big believer in jumping and then building my wings on the way down, so although it was scary as hell, that’s what I did.

And then of course… I stalled. I worked on every single aspect of the business except the act of putting it out there for anyone to see. I brainstormed, I masterminded, I tossed, and I turned. And then little by little, I got out of my own way. I put one foot in front of the other, even with all of the unknowns, and the fear, and my desire to know the end before I begin. 

My friend Julie died a few years later with so much inspiration still in her. Hardly a day passes that I’m not reminded of our conversation that night and my heart is filled with gratitude for the not-so-subtle urging she gave me to step into my greatness and share my message with the world. 

If you’re needing a little love tap to step more fully into your essence and shine more brightly, I’d love to share my Wild Woman Weight Loss Roadmap with you. Hop on over here and get your bunz on the list for the next time the program opens. 

A major “exercise guru” turned “business guru” turned “diet guru” sent me a video about mindset.

I know that getting your mindset right is 90% of the journey to health, so I watched to see what she had to share.

This size 2 woman is well-meaning and she’s honest about the fact that she’s never been overweight or dieted…

She’s turned her success in making exercise videos into an entrepreneur coaching business and now somehow that makes her automatically an expert in dieting…

Thousands of women have enrolled in her diet program simply because she has minor celebrity status.

They must have glossed over the video she sent us on day one admitting she’s never actually dieted herself…

Yet, she’s an “expert.”

Okay, I digress… that isn’t really what this email is about, but one of my pet peeves is someone who has never struggled thinking they have the answers for everyone else.

Back to her video on mindset…

She started off by saying, “If you don’t believe that something will work for you, it likely won’t because beliefs drive action.” Now that is the absolute truth.

Then, she goes on to say that the reason she doesn’t respond to emails from people asking if her program will work for them… is that they don’t believe in themselves…

Okay, that is somewhat true. When they’ve failed at enough diets, and worse, been blamed for their failure, most women start to wonder if the problem is not that they’re using a broken system but that they have a weakness within themselves.

Here’s the deal. Typical diets (even most low-carb diets, gasp!) are destined to fail.

They’re broken.

What you eat is only 1/3 of the weight loss equation (and the other 2/3 has nothing to do with exercise).

But no guru in their right mind would blame their program, so they blame the dieter for being weak, not being able to stick to the plan, or some similar thought that drives society’s underlying belief that overweight people are somehow weak-minded.

This is the exact opposite of reality. Chronic dieters are the toughest-minded women I’ve ever met. They’ve been doing their best to navigate a broken system for years, and they’ve refused to give up on their belief that they can find an answer. Anyone weak-minded would have given up long ago.

Finally, she goes on to say that she doesn’t write them back because there is NOTHING she can do about their beliefs!

Talk about what is SOOOOOOO damn wrong in the weight loss industry today.

She’s dead wrong in thinking that as a coach, we can’t help people with their belief system.

In fact, that is exactly where we have to begin if we ever truly want to help people succeed.

She’s totally wrong if she thinks that her program will succeed UNLESS she finds a way to help women reprogram the limiting beliefs that are driving limiting behavior and keeping them locked in an endless cycle of yo-yo dieting.

On top of that – she’s basically pre-blaming the client for not getting results in her program… because their belief was wrong.

I hate that.

Instead of admitting that her program is flawed, she’s going to be like all of the other coaches and gurus out there and blame the client, not her approach, when they inevitably begin to struggle.

When they begin to struggle is exactly the moment that our clients need us the most.

Helping a client through the struggle is where real, lasting, life-changing transformation takes place.

Teaching my clients to drop the story and take another step towards health is part of my magic because we’ve all given up with the first bite of a cookie way too many times.

There will be cookies, there will be pizza, but one bite, one piece, or even the whole pizza doesn’t have to equate failure when you learn to accept the information your body sends you simply as information and learn simply take another step toward health.

Every single person that has ever made lasting change has had to change the exact beliefs that created the old results that they didn’t want to have to begin with.

If you’d like to bust through your limiting beliefs about weight loss and learn to simply take another step forward, be sure to get on the list for the next time the Wild Woman Weight Loss program opens!