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.