It’s only partially about the number on the scale.

I’m sure you’ve heard the age-old question, “What would you do if you could not fail?”

I’ve heard that a million times throughout my years being self-employed.

Yet it never totally resonated with me until I realized that I had the answer so many women were looking for and I started helping women navigate the insanity that is being overweight.

The magnitude of lives not fully lived because of extra weight coupled with my knowing what the answer is fuels me forward day-after-day.

I visit daily with women every week that reach out to me and ask for my help in getting to the bottom of what’s really keeping them from reaching their goal weight.

At least, that’s what it would look like on the surface to someone looking in.

I’ve talked to thousands of women struggling with their weight and you know what they’re really asking for my help with?

They’re asking for help finding freedom.

Freedom from excess weight is the goal they can put their finger on.

When we actually connect to visit, though, it’s a totally different story.

It’s freedom from the worry about health issues that they know they are careening towards.

Freedom from being totally pissed-off and disconnected from their body, and wondering why in the hell nothing they’ve tried works.

Freedom from weight being the one damn place in their lives they can’t quite get it together.

Freedom from the nagging feeling that their weight is the one thing keeping them from living the life of their dreams.

This all makes them wonder if there’s some reason (that isn’t clear to them but they’ve spent years looking) that this is just their burden to carry.

Which takes them out of being present in the moment.

From truly connecting with their partner.

From engaging with their children and grandchildren fully in the moment.

From showing up fully in life.

While life marches forward and they think… tomorrow… Monday.. .I will figure this out.

Enter the new diet excitement high…

They grab that magazine off of the newsstand. Turn to Google.

They piece together something their doctor said with something their best friend said, and add a tiny piece of their own intuition, then sign up for the next greatest eating plan that they just know is going to be the key.

They get excited for a few days.

Cancel a few social events knowing they need to set themselves up for success.

Spend time letting themselves know that by God this time they are doing this.

No amount of temptation can take them off the tracks.

Maybe they pin a picture of their goal on their fridge (again).

Throw away the “no” food.

Get all of the “yes” food on hand.

Their family goes with it; they know it will blow over within a week.

They let them know that damn it, this time it’s for real and share all of their new insight as to why this one is going to work.

They feel on top of the world for a few days.

Hungry, but that’s not an unfamiliar feeling. In fact, that means they’re really doing this.

By day 5, their resolve starts to waffle.

They realize this isn’t remotely a sustainable way to eat.

They start to question their commitment.

They start to entertain ways to stick with it yet bend the rules.

Their restriction-induced survival instincts hijack their rational brain.

Just one bite turns into just one bag.

Their feeling of determination disappears with each new bite…

It doesn’t even taste good anymore, but they’ve already blown it so might as well eat the whole thing…

And now the sweet/salty binge begins.

They fall into bed in a carb-induced stupor to wake up totally disillusioned with themselves, even more disconnected and pissed-off at their body, 5 lbs. heavier, and mentally exactly where they started, once again.

The judgment voice inside starts yelling, louder than ever, “Why the hell can’t you get this figured out?”

Instead of noticing the sun shining and the world around them, they narrow their existence even more and ruminate about this situation and what it will really take to succeed.

My email hits their inbox and, even though they desperately want it to be just about the food, they know it isn’t and they know that what I say makes sense.

So they reach out.

I explain exactly what’s driving them to eat. The biological/hormonal reasons, the emotional/unconscious reasons, the habit/automatic reasons.

Because no amount of the perfect diet can override the emotional/habitual drivers to overeat. And no amount of emotional eating work can override the biological/hormonal drivers to overeat.

The only way to stop the diet roller-coaster-from-hell is to tackle this from all three angles.

Yes, WHAT you eat matters.

But so does HOW you eat, and WHY you eat.

I’ve been where you are and my goal in life is to help you achieve peace around food/body/weight for good.

So you can step fully into your beautiful, messy, real-life that’s been going on around you all along.

If you’d like my help in taking care of this for good, hop over here and get on the list for the next time I open the doors to the Wild Woman Weight Loss program.

I wish you absolute peace around body, food, and weight so that you can put this behind you for good and get back to the business of truly living your life.

My son is very sheltered at 5 because his kindergarten is located in his preschool and we don’t watch TV…Yep, I’m “that” mom. 

We avoid any camps or activities that would deliberately throw him in with 12-year-olds for now…

He’ll go to a regular grade 1-6 Montessori in the fall, so I’m enjoying his total innocence while it lasts.

However, it only took one trip to the playground recently for him to pick up two (ridiculous for a 6-year-old to be using) words: bro and dope… 

Turns out his grandma, dad, and sister don’t care to be called Bro… I’m still Mom, for now.

His constant use of the word dope, as in, “That’s so dope, Bro,” keeps reminding the science geek in me that I wanted to fill you in on the hormone dopamine…

Because it has a whole heck of a lot to do with overeating and food addiction.

Did you know that MRI studies of obese individuals show that when exposed to highly palatable foods…

The exact same pleasure center part of the brain lights up as happens when drug addicts are exposed to their drug of choice???

The pleasure center of an obese person is more similar to a drug or alcohol addict than the pleasure center of a normal brain. 

Walter H. Kay, M.D., Director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of California, says,

“Food gives you a modest physiological response via the same pathways that drugs give you a tremendous response.”

So what exactly does that mean? Well, it’s a dope prob, Bro… dope meaning… dopamine. 

And the problem is that instead of being more sensitive to the dopamine release from eating tasty food, we over-eaters are actually LESS sensitive.  Let me explain:

Dopamine is responsible for learning from both pleasure and pain, and it is implicated in all compulsive (addictive) action, including gambling, drugs, alcohol, and food addiction. 

An article in Scientific American summarizes it well by saying, “In many substance abusers, there is a low level of dopamine receptors, either from the outset OR caused by the behavior…

Which means they increasingly have to seek more dopamine-inducing substances to reach a level of neurochemical reward they can enjoy.”

WE HAVE TO EAT MORE THAN A NORMAL EATER TO FEEL THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT OF PLEASURE. 

Symptoms of dopamine deficiency, according to Dr. Jockers, include:

• Lack of motivation/drive/enthusiasm
• Depression/apathy
• Trouble waking in the morning
• Cold hands/feet
• Impulsiveness
• Low sex drive
• Fatigue regardless of sleep
• Lack of concentration
• Restless legs
• Carb cravings
• Parkinsonian tremors 

Common lifestyle factors that alter dopamine include poor blood sugar regulation, alcohol, drug abuse, poor gut function, adrenal fatigue, and brain inflammation.

So whether it’s the chicken or the egg… no matter how it begins… excess food intake can trigger actual physical changes in the brain…

Overeating (i.e. totally screwing with your blood sugar) propagates dopamine issues, and dopamine issues propagate overeating, and it quickly becomes a vicious cycle of compulsive urges, overeating, guilt and shame and the cycle repeats.

Here’s the good news! I’ve got you, love, WE CAN FIX THIS!

My Wild Woman Weight Loss Program is designed to heal your body and rewire your brain. 

The diet portion helps repair the gut, totally stabilizes blood sugar, controls sugar/alcohol cravings, takes the pressure off of the adrenals, and reduces inflammation overall.

Meanwhile, we work on the emotional drivers of overeating and I teach you techniques proven to physically rewire your brain to become more like the brain of a thin person than the brain of an addict. 

The metabolic healing that occurs when you learn WHAT to eat coupled with tackling HOW and getting to the bottom of WHY you eat make this program sustainable like none other. 

I always talk about the necessity of a micronutrient-dense, hormone-calming, low-carbohydrate diet…because then, and only then, will your body peacefully trust that you aren’t starving and begin to give up the excess fat storage. 

But that’s not all she wrote….

I so badly wanted weight loss to simply be about discovering the perfect diet.

Don’t we all?

I studied nutrition for years, and when I finally discovered the exact diet that would allow my body to drop up to a pound a day of fat, bloat, and toxins week after week without stalling out, I then realized…

CRAP…diet is only half the battle.

I was cruising along like nobody’s business – I went from a veeerrry tight size 16/18 to a comfortable 12 in a month… and then WHAM…out of left field came the doubt, the worthiness, the fear, the stories, the memories, you know, basically… the same shit, different day.

Self-sabotage set in. I started to tell myself stories based in fear, not in faith. And I started to derail myself.

I was able to maintain my weight loss but ONLY because A) I recognized what was happening and took immediate action to overcome my own self-sabotage and B) I could not deny that I’d finally discovered the perfect diet, and I felt crappy whenever I strayed too far from it.

Thank goodness I had done a TON, and I mean an enormous amount, of personal development work over the years. The challenge was to translate business motivation to the very emotional loaded topic of weight.

It wasn’t until I cracked the code on how to overcome it that I was able to move forward.

Then I realized that 98% of people in my program were having the EXACT SAME PROBLEM.

They were dropping weight faster than they ever dreamed possible.  But then they began to trip themselves up by questioning their black-and-white results, which resulted in sabotaging their own success, and doubting their worthiness to live at their healthy right weight.

I knew that I had to find a way to translate the inner work I’d done over many years into a concise program that my ladies could learn BEFORE the self-sabotage set in.

There is a TON written about emotional eating, so I dug in.

But honestly, even though I’m a massage therapist and plenty “woo woo” around the edges, the “think yourself thin” approach wasn’t going to cut it for me. 

I’d tried that many times and knew it wasn’t my thoughts that were the problem – it was my underlying beliefs that drove those thoughts that needed an overhaul.

I needed science. I needed facts. I needed research. I needed data.

I needed to figure out the exact scientific process to tame cravings, to be able to not resort to eating under stress and to unwind the underlying beliefs that were always bubbling under the surface.

I’m not going to lie – it was NOT easy. It took me two years to weed through the fluff, get to the science, and test, test, test everything I’d learned.

What I finally realized is that we have to address not only WHAT we eat but HOW we eat, and WHY we eat.

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The most perfect diet can’t override emotional drivers to eat, and no amount of emotional eating work can override the hormonal hunger caused by an imperfect diet.

It takes a balanced approach to both.

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People see the rapid weight loss results my ladies get and beg to have the diet plan, but I refuse to share it unless they are willing to do what it takes to keep the weight off once they lose it.

The hormonal and metabolic healing of the diet is super important in keeping the weight off – but so is reprogramming the craving brain.

And that, my love, is a fairly simple process that almost no one else is teaching and what makes my program so effective.

Understanding the physical wiring of cravings takes the shame out of being overweight and puts the power to change squarely back in your court.

If you’re ready to tackle this for good, join us at wildwomanweightloss.com

I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s simple though and so very worth it.

🦋

One of the biggest issues with losing weight is total confusion as to where the heck to begin.

Back in the day…(I’m talking pre-internet….GASP) there were waaaayyyy less options out there to overwhelm us.

If you were in rural Montana like we were, you had to rely on what your friends had discovered or on newspaper advertising.

Today, we’re bombarded every two minutes with the latest “get skinny fast” scheme.

And that’s bad because a confused mind says, “No thank you” to even the most helpful offers to get this figured out.

I struggled from analysis paralysis for years.

I dibbled, I dabbled, and in the back of my mind, I always thought that if I just applied myself wholeheartedly…

You know – if I would just stick with a plan 100%, then I could finally take the weight off.

But here’s what I learned:

Restriction leads to binging 100% of the time.

It’s biology, baby. Pure survival instinct.

We have a number of mechanisms to keep us from losing weight but none to reign in weight gain because we were never designed to be exposed to this much crap food.

Our body responds to restriction with an overwhelming hormonal cascade with one and only one goal:

To drive you to eat.

To return to baseline. To return to homeostasis.

And while we’re at it… just in case you should encounter another famine (who cares if it was self-induced), let’s add on a few extra pounds to be safe.

It’s so frustrating and there’s only one way around it.

It’s not calorie-slashing, points counting, or a new gym membership.

It’s not thinking yourself thin, fasting, or cleansing (though there actually is a place for all of those in a well-designed healing approach).

There is certainly an emotional component to overeating.

What it actually takes is to make peace with your body and fill in all of the nutritional gaps with a micronutrient-dense, hormone-calming, low-carbohydrate diet.

Then and only then will your body peacefully trust that you aren’t starving and then it will begin to give up the excess fat storage.

It’s a beautiful thing when your body finally “acts normal” and starts effortlessly dropping weight after years of struggle.

Only then do things like intermittent fasting make sense. Until then, we’re just asking for a binge.