A Healthy Approach to Weight Loss Without Dieting
The question so many of us have asked: “How can I achieve weight loss without dieting”? This conversation will reshape the way you think about nutrition, well-being, and the journey to a balanced lifestyle!
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with the amazing Jenn Trepeck – an expert in optimal health coaching, a podcast host, and a business consultant. She's the host of the podcast "Salad with a Side of Fries," a name that so brilliantly captures the idea of balancing a fulfilling life with well-being. Unlike the typical health space, which often dictates extreme dietary choices, Jenn's approach strikes a happy medium. She understands that health isn't about strict limitations; it's about finding harmony.
A Refreshing Perspective on Weight Loss without Dieting
Before we delve into the details, let's take a moment to appreciate the unique perspective Jenn brings to the table. Her approach is all about finding the sweet spot between living life fully and prioritizing health. Instead of subscribing to extreme dietary rules, Jenn advocates for a more holistic and intuitive way of nourishing our bodies. After all, who wants a life devoid of indulging in fries?!
Jenn’s Path of Discovery
As Jenn shared her personal journey, I couldn't help but be captivated by her story. Growing up as the slender one in a family focused on diets and being a former dancer, she was acutely attuned to her body's movements and changes. Like so many of us, her transition from high school to college brought weight gain, which felt especially uncomfortable given her dance background. Drawing from her family's history of dieting, she embarked on various diets, experiencing the ups and downs like a relentless roller coaster.
Sound familiar? What sets Jenn's journey apart is the shift she experienced when she learned a new perspective that freed her from the cycle of dieting! This new knowledge unveiled the nutrition insights we all should know but were never taught. She learned things like how food interacts with our bodies and prioritized the "how" of eating over the "what." This revelation transformed her relationship with food, shifting it from an emotional struggle to an intellectual understanding. This clarity marked the turning point where she could finally declare victory over her food challenges. Jenn's mission became clear: to share this knowledge and empower others.
It’s time for a mindset change
So many of us have been so deeply influenced by diet myths. Many individuals, especially postmenopausal women, continue to struggle with food restrictions that disconnect them from their body's natural cues. It's time to break free from these constraints and listen to our body's signals with intention and compassion.
It’s not uncommon to see gym bros or fitstagram accounts toting mottos like “move more, eat less” or “calories in versus calories out” as if those four words encompass all you need to know about nourishing yourself and living a fulfilling life. But that’s just not the case. If it were, everyone would have their “ideal bodies”.
Instead of trying to force ourselves to follow diets that never work, let’s change the script! Let’s learn to lose weight without dieting by learning to listen to our bodies to give them what they need so we can have healthy lives that we can actually enjoy.
Decoding Hunger and True Nourishment
So many of us experience anxiety when adjusting our eating habits. Jenn says she sees this in her clients all the time. This type of anxiety-driven hunger often stems from years of adhering to restrictive diets and always setting our sights on weight loss rather than nutrition or taking care of our bodies. Traumatic experiences and the fear of hunger can create emotional roadblocks that hinder our journey toward holistic health. What this anxiety boils down to is the relationship we have with food and eating.
We’ve been on this roller coaster of diets for so long that we no longer know how to hear our own hunger cues, how to understand our cravings, or even what basic nutrition looks like.
We’ve been misled to believe that eating less and suppressing our hunger is “healthy eating”. But our bodies NEED fuel! We need fuel to be able to walk and think and play but we also need fuel to make sure our internal systems are operating correctly, including our endocrine system that helps balance our hormones.
We need to learn how to respect rather than ignore our bodies' hunger cues so we can properly fuel ourselves. This mindset shift is so important but also really hard. We’ve been conditioned that listening to hunger cues means we have no willpower and that we’ll never reach our “goal weight”. But if we treat our body as an ally instead of an adversary, if we engage in a dialogue with our bodies to understand the messages we’re getting we can not only create a healthier and more intuitive relationship with food, but we can also find and maintain our body’s natural, healthy size.
How to Tell the Difference Between Hunger vs. Cravings
Jennn’s advice to all of us is to initiate an open and compassionate conversation with ourselves, asking, "What is my body trying to tell me?" This shift in perspective enables us to align our choices with our body's genuine needs.
Again, fad diets have taught us all the wrong things. The idea that “10 calories is 10 calories” is so far off base. 100 calories of M&Ms versus 100 calories of broccoli is vastly different. It’s up to us to listen to our bodies' messages to understand what kind of hunger we’re experiencing and how we can, at any particular moment, feed ourselves and our bodies in a way that is both satisfying and nourishing. Now this can look different depending on the day or even the moment.
Jenn shared an amazing exercise that she uses to understand her hunger, primarily the difference between “head hunger” and “stomach hunger”.
Stomach Hunger
If lots of different foods sound good to you in a moment like broccoli sounds great, a salad sounds great, fries sound great. That’s probably stomach-hungry. Quality nutrition is what we’re looking for when we’re stomach-hungry. This is when you want to give yourself nutrient-dense, balanced meals.
Head Hunger
On the other hand, if the only thing you can think about is that ice cream bar in the freezer, that might be head hunger. This is a particular craving because something is tasty or you’re responding to an emotion or stressor. Usually, this hunger will pass if given enough time or if your only options aren’t that particular item.
Head hunger is not something we should ignore. Instead, we can assess the hunger and the situation to understand what else we might need given the circumstances. This is where Jenn suggests asking yourself the question, “Where am I not being fed? What am I actually looking for?”
Sometimes you’re just looking for a break. A lot of us are conditioned that we can only take a break from work or a hectic day if we need to eat, so those wires get crossed over time and you associate eating with resting. Or maybe you’re really stressed out or frustrated and eating is a pleasant distraction from those emotions. So asking ourselves what we need, what we’re really looking for, and what else is going on, will help us hone in on how to better care for ourselves.
And sometimes this mindset shift is a process. In the beginning, you might realize, “Yeah, I’m eating my feelings right now.” And that’s all you can do is recognize it. Then down the road, you’ll be able to recognize it and have an apple with peanut butter instead of a cookie and call it a win, even though you’re still eating when you’re not actually hungry – what you do choose at least has some nutritional value.
And then in time, we can look at the situation and decide what we could do that would actually be appropriate food for that particular hunger. Appropriate food for stress relief might be fresh air, sunlight, a walk, music, meditation, and breathing. Sometimes the appropriate choice will be choosing to eat that piece of cake because it’s a moment of joy in your life. Or sometimes it might be choosing to sit in the sunshine for ten minutes of uninterrupted alone time instead of running to McDonald’s on your break.
When you're ready to shift to better ways of addressing head hunger, create a list of enjoyable activities. If it's music, specify the song. Write down five or six options on a post-it note and place it where you'll see it frequently—on your computer screen, coffee table, or even on top of a tempting food item like ice cream. This reminder can help you pause, choose an activity, and break the cycle.
And many times, a sugar craving is actually a protein craving. So if you’re craving something sweet or carb-heavy like bakery items and you haven’t eaten in a while, try having a protein-rich snack and see if that satisfies the craving. This is something that will start to retrain your brain to help you understand your hunger cues and cravings better.
And pairing sweet treats with protein and fiber can help get you off of the cravings roller coaster. This is all to do with your blood sugar balance. Learning about and managing blood sugar was such a game-changer for me. If you’re new here, be sure to check out all these resources we have about balancing blood sugar - it’s so, so, so important and we’ve covered it in pretty great detail already so I won’t get too into it here! :)
The Willpower Myth
Ever felt caught in the cycle of thinking you need willpower to resist indulgent treats, only to find your resolve waver? Weight management and willpower are interconnected in a complex way. Willpower depends on stable blood sugar levels, yet we often believe we need willpower to avoid eating, which can lower blood sugar. Not to mention the stress of it all can then spike our blood sugar, so not at all stabilizing!
Think of willpower like a refillable cup – every decision you make draws from that cup. You're probably using willpower in more ways than you realize, from choosing your outfit in the morning to navigating billboards and daily choices. What's essential to recognize is that every choice you make consumes a bit of that willpower. It's not that you lack willpower; it's that it's being utilized in various places.
And a lot of times, instead of using the willpower for the big stuff, which is really important, it’s being used for the smaller things that drain our cup. And then by the time we need to make a choice for dinner, we choose the easy, less nutritious option and think that we suck as humans. But that’s not true, we’re just setting ourselves up for failure because we’re depriving ourselves of nutrition in the first place in order to “eat right” by eating less which negatively impacts our blood sugar which then leads us to making poorer choices because we literally don’t have any energy left in our tank to process the choices.
On top of it all, the world has, for some reason, assigned moral value to foods. There are good carbs and bad carbs and superfoods and junk food. And if you choose the wrong food then you’re “being bad” for eating a piece of cake at a birthday party. But birthday cake is part of being alive! It doesn’t make you a bad person.
Food isn’t good or bad, it’s just food.
It’s all about balance and joy. It doesn’t have to be that hard. We want to get a good balance of fiber, fat, protein, and carbs. If you have to count anything or calculate anything, pause. It does not need to be that difficult.
Choosing Momentum over Motivation
Motivation is another buzzword we often hear, especially in the “diet” space. But Jenn offers a game-changing twist. She encourages us to shift our focus from motivation to momentum. Instead of waiting for motivation to strike before taking action, consider this: are you motivated because you're already taking action? It's a chicken-and-egg situation, and Jenn emphasizes that motivation often follows action.
“Am I doing the things because I'm motivated? Or am I motivated, because I'm doing the things? 9 times out of 10 motivation comes after the action. We're motivated to do it because we've seen how we feel and we enjoy that.”
Feeling the positive effects of your choices can drive your momentum. Motivation isn't always about pushing through from a place of frustration or negativity. We see this a lot with weight management. We start from a place of shame or frustration. And we start our weight management process with motivation from this darkness. But part of the process is shifting your motivation toward energy, vitality, and feeling good. Those are things that can give you momentum rather than motivation and it’s this momentum that will get us through discouragement and plateaus that are bound to happen along the way.
If you started from a place of negativity and self doubt, when you hit a bump in the road or when your progress inevitably slows down, you want to rekindle that original motivation. But when that motivation was beating yourself up, you continue that cycle which is counter productive. What’s the point of this journey if you’re constantly unhappy and only finding motivation through misery?
So if you're feeling discouraged, and you're trying to figure out the motivation, just pause for a hot second and think about what you want. And then think about one or two things that help you feel that way. And just do one of those things – schedule it, prioritize it. Find joy or at least some peace in the process.
The Truth about Fat-Burning
Now, let's dive into the juicy topic of fat burning – without the need for extreme diets like keto. Jenn's approach to weight loss without dieting is rooted in blood sugar balance. When our blood sugar is too high or too low, fat storage happens.
Fat-burning is like a grocery store checkout…
“Think of it like a grocery store checkout. You have this conveyor belt and you have the cashier and you have the bagger who is bagging it all up. The conveyor belt is going at a nice even pace, the cashier rings it up, it goes to the bagger, and the bagger is putting things in the bag in an organized way, putting the heavy things on the bottom, soft things on the top. They’re putting the cans under the bread instead of the cans squashing the bread or breaking all of your eggs.
When your food and fuel come at a nice even pace, our body produces insulin. Insulin carries all that fuel to our muscles to be used. Our cells can only take in so much fuel at a time. And then close up when they’re full. Excess insulin gets stored as fat because our fat cells never close.
So when we eat too much, when we start with the breadbasket at the restaurant and spike our blood sugar, it's like pushing the button, speeding up that conveyor belt. The cashier just starts to do everything as fast as possible. The bagger throws everything in any bag. Our body is doing the same thing. And we're storing all that excess as fat.
In the other extreme, when we go for long periods of time without eating or when we don't eat enough, our blood sugar is too low. And our body, in its infinite caveman wisdom, thinks we’re in a time of famine and says you will not kill me. I will survive. And how it survives is to store anything you eat for use later on and to burn as little as possible. So when our blood sugar is too low, we're also storing fat.”
The key is to keep our blood sugar in the middle zone where our body doesn’t have a need to store fat.
How do we keep our blood sugar in the middle zone? We eat regularly. We eat protein, fiber, vegetables and quality fat. It's science. But I do think a couple of things feel magical. So one magical piece is when we're consistent with keeping our blood sugar levels stable and within a healthy range, our body will naturally release the fat stores its been holding on to because we're never adding to them. Our body is basically saying, “Wait. It's never a time of famine. I don't need all of this that I've been holding on to; I can let it go”.
And the other thing that I think is magical is that when we're consistently keeping our blood sugar balanced, we are better equipped to handle the occasional spike and the occasional drop, which means we're not going to go the rest of our lives without eating birthday cake. But next year, when you eat your birthday cake, it doesn't impact you the same way as it might right now. It's about rehabbing your metabolism. You don’t need to do keto or intermittent fasting or any of these crazy diets to get your body to burn fat - your body will release fat, when it knows it can.
So if you're one of the women who goes, “I smell a doughnut, and I put on weight,” you are the person we're talking about that doesn't eat enough food! Jenn sees this all the time when her clients are eating so much more than they were before, but are finally losing weight. Because when we nourish our bodies, we’re getting the minerals and the nutrients they need, so our bodies can do what they are designed to do.
So remember - the key to weight loss without dieting is maintaining stable blood sugar levels. Here's the magic formula: Regularly consume protein, fiber, vegetables, and quality fats. Keep your blood sugar in the sweet spot, and watch as your body releases stored fat because it doesn't feel the need to hoard it anymore.
What about portion control?
One of the gems Jenn shares is the importance of recognizing that your body regulates nutrition, but struggles with food-like substances and chemicals. We don’t need to count the number of almonds we’re eating. Our body will let us know when we’ve had enough. If you're focusing on nourishing your body with whole, nutrient-dense foods, you can trust that your body will manage quantities and cravings more effectively than if you’re eating primarily processed foods.
“If we look at chips, pretzels, a lot of these foods are formulated such that it turns off our brain's ability to know when we're full. There are hormones – leptin and ghrelin – that tell us when we're satisfied and when we're hungry. So the same way that we can become insulin resistant, we can be resistant to these hormones that tell us when we're done eating. It's all these pieces that rehab the metabolism to function. So if what you're eating is something with nutrition, I promise you, the quantity will take care of itself. Your stress over the quantity is doing more harm to the metabolism than the food itself if the food has nutrition.”
Shifting the Conversation Around Food and Dieting
Instead of counting calories, over-exercising, or relying on fad diets and fasting, we need to focus on nourishing ourselves.
As Jenn says, “Protein and fiber at every meal makes removing fat no big deal.”
At every meal, we want clean protein, fiber, vegetables, and sometimes fruit. Plus a good quality fat a couple of times a day. If we’re focused on feeding ourselves, if we’re focused on these foods, the rest will fall into place.
There is no one-size-fits-all serving recommendation. The portion sizes each person needs are unique. People often ask me to share what I eat, but I always say no. What works for me may not be right for you. It's important to take back your power and not rely on someone else to create a diet or nutrition plan. Instead, focus on how you feel after eating. If you're still hungry, it's okay to eat more. It's simple, really. We tend to make it more complicated than it needs to be.
And again, focus on blood sugar balance! It has so many benefits like improving mood, regulating your menstrual cycle, preventing that "hangry" feeling, avoiding energy crashes, and even better sleep!
Research keeps telling us that how we feel mentally is all about our neurotransmitters. And these little messengers in our brain are influenced by the things we eat. They need stuff like vitamins, minerals, and specific amino acids to do their job right. Handling stress well and getting good sleep also play a big role – they help keep these important nutrients in check. Surprisingly, even things we might think of as just being “all in our heads” actually have a lot to do with chemicals in our bodies.
All these roads lead back to our metabolism. Nowadays, studies are showing that many health issues are connected to how our metabolism works. Nourishing our bodies is about so much more than just weight loss. When we start to focus on the whole picture, we’ll improve our health and so many aspects of our lives that are more important than our pant size.
Consistency, Not Perfection
As we wrap up, it's crucial to emphasize that lasting change isn't about perfection – it's about consistency. Jenn and I both agree that the journey to holistic health is paved with small, sustainable shifts. If you want to have sustainable weight loss without dieting, it's not about drastically overhauling your life overnight the way so many of us have tried with fad diets. Instead, it’s about making intentional choices that resonate with your body and overall health and wellness goals!
Learn more about using nutrition to regulate your periods inside the FREE Painless Period Prep Guide!
The recommendations presented in this blog are not a substitute for medical advice from a qualified doctor. Before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle, please consult with your health care provider.
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