· by Cathy Morenzie
Last Sunday we talked about three things you need to stop saying if you want to lose weight: “I just need to…”, “Once and for all”, and “Starting Monday.” Three sentences we say right before we make ourselves a promise we have already broken a dozen times.
Based on the feedback that came back that week, that one struck a chord with so many of you. Several of you wrote to tell me you had said all three out loud in the same conversation. So today I want to take you underneath those sentences, because there is a reason the vows kept breaking, and it has nothing to do with how much you meant them when you made them.
In almost forty years of doing this work, I have watched hundreds of women do everything right for months. Steady. Consistent. Then Thanksgiving arrives, or vacation comes, or a parent gets sick and the month falls apart. One binge, and all bets are off.
For the longest while, I coached those women on willpower. Dig deeper. Want it more. Work harder. I was wrong, and it took me years to see what I was actually looking at. Their bodies had stopped trusting them.
A body that does not feel safe with you will not cooperate with you.
Here is what was really going on. And I will warn you now, I am taking you into a little bit of the science today. Stay with me — I promise to keep it simple, and there will be no test at the end.
Researchers followed contestants from a well-known weight loss competition for years after the competition was over. What they found was not a failure of resolve. Years later, those contestants were still walking around with hunger signals turned all the way up, and their bodies were still operating as though food might not be coming.
Two hormones explain nearly all of it. Think of them as the volume knobs on your appetite. One turns hunger up. The other turns it down.
Ghrelin is the hormone that tells you to eat, and it is the knob that turns hunger up. When you have gone too long eating too little, your body turns ghrelin up and then leaves it there.
Leptin is the hormone that tells you that you have had enough, and it is the knob that turns hunger down. Eating too little pushes leptin lower, so the signal that says you are satisfied comes through faint. You can finish a whole meal and barely register that you ate it.
One knob turned all the way up. The other one barely on. And you in the middle of it, wondering why you cannot control yourself.
Put those two together and you have your answer. After a season of eating too little, your hunger signals get louder and your fullness signals get quieter — and they stay that way for months after you have gone back to eating normally. The diet ends. The dieting body does not end with it. You go back to regular meals believing the hard part is behind you, and your body is still running on high alert.
So when you sat down to eat during the holidays, you were not a weak woman surrounded by pie. You were a woman whose body had been screaming at her for months, and who could barely hear herself say “I am full.” Of course it did not go well. It was never going to go well.
Your body was not betraying you. It was protecting you from a famine it had every reason to believe was coming back, because from its point of view, it always had.
Think about what you would do if someone fed you inconsistently. Plenty one week, almost nothing the next, and no way to know when the next meal was coming or how much would be on the plate. You would eat while the food was in front of you. And you would be right to.
That is why, when you stand at a buffet, your body does exactly what you have spent years teaching it to do.
“The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul.”
Psalm 23:1–3
In the passage above, David was writing about sheep. A sheep will not lie down when it is hungry, and it will not lie down when it senses something in the field. A shepherd who wants his flock to rest does not shout at them. He feeds them, and he removes what they are afraid of. Then they lie down on their own.
Now look at the order in the psalm. Not I have been given a limit. Not I have been told what I am allowed. I lack nothing.
The provision comes first. Then the rest. The sheep does not calm down and then get fed — it gets fed, and calming down is what follows. That is the whole order, and we have had it backward for years. We keep trying to get peace with food by taking food away, and then we cannot understand why we have no peace.
What is true of the sheep is true of these bodies He gave us. God did not build a body that has to be starved into obedience. He built one that settles down when it is fed consistently. You have been trying to shepherd yourself by shouting.
So the work is not to eat less. The work is to become predictable to your own body.
And that means we have to say something about sacrifice, because there is real sacrifice on this journey and I will not pretend otherwise. But sacrifice is not starvation. A woman who is going without food is not being disciplined. She is proving to her body, one more time, that she cannot be trusted with it.
This Month’s Practice — Eating As An Act of Honor
Weight Loss God’s Way is a weight loss guide, and we change small habits one or two at a time. That is the Breakthrough Method — no vows, no overhauls, one principle practiced until it holds.
Your one step this week: notice the gaps.
On an ordinary day, pay attention to how long you go without eating — and to what happens in the hours right after you finally do eat. Change nothing. Count nothing. You are simply gathering evidence about how you have been treating your body, so you can see what it has been bracing for.
You might be surprised by what you find. Most of us have simply been told to watch what we eat, and nobody ever mentioned that the hours in between were worth watching too.
Your body rebuilds trust the same way a person does. It takes a stretch of ordinary days where you did what you said you were going to do. Your body is keeping score of your consistency, and it will settle once the evidence changes.
You have spent years trying to overpower your body. Be intentional about giving it the nourishment it needs instead, and watch how much of what you have been calling weakness quietly goes away.
Not sure where you are in that process? The free Breakthrough Assessment shows you where you are in the five stages and what to practice first — not a plan, a place to start.
