Good evening, it is June 7th, 2022 and 5:30 pm here in India. I am Dr. Aneeta Madhok, Coaching Psychologist and Integrative Nutrition Health Coach. Welcome to my blog on Integrative health.
I am an Integrative Nutrition Health coach qualified from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in the US. By profession, I am a Coaching Psychologist and I went through a self-healing health transformation a few years ago. I coach people to lead healthy and vibrant lives, with a special focus on diabetes and obesity. Because I am a psychologist, for Health Coaching I focus on the mind-body, Heart and Soul of my clients. Each client is on his or her own journey and the coaching helps achieve many milestones along the say.
You may be looking to gain weight, lose weight, or to maintain weight. Either way, this discussion is for you.
Actually it is not so much about how many kilograms you weigh, or how many inches on your waist, bust and hips, but also about your Body Mass Index which is the ratio of your weight to height. It is also about your height to waist ratio that tells about belly fat. And, lastly a fat scan will help you gauge how much of your body weight is muscle mass, how much is subcutaneous fat, which is not dangerous for health, but can affect the way you look, an most importantly, how much is visceral fat, which is the dangerous fat in our organs like liver, kidney, heart, etc.
Doesn’t matter how you measure it, obesity is now becoming an epidemic with 2.1 billion people of the 7 billion people on this planet being obese and expected to double by 2030. Childhood obesity is on the increase. Obesity is linked to a whole host of health problems and we know that obesity causes co-morbidities in older adults and shortens life.
Countless dietician, nutritionists, health apps, weight loss experts all tell you to count your calories and intake of less calories, as compared to calories burnt through exercise and daily activities, will lead to weight loss. People who go on restrictive diets and crash dieting, or keto diets, or so many fads and fashions, may lose weight one time through sheer will power, but the body needs its calories, and when you go back to normal food, it all comes back again. Counting the calorie intake does not help. This is the reason why the weight loss industry is making so much money, but we know internally that there is almost 80% rescind rate and people invariably go back.
Do you know how fat builds up in the body? New research tells us of the chemistry behind why fat accumulates in the body. And no, it’s not eating fried foods or consuming oils and fats that is responsible for higher fat percentage in your body, but excess carbohydrates that causes fat accumulation.
Carbohydrates are heavily concentrated in grains and of course, sugary sweet things. Research and my personal experience has shown that reduction in consumption of these two things along with consumption of whole ancient grains with a low glycemic index actually releases the fat stored inside the cells and the fat literally melts out.
Why is it so difficult to do this?
Its all in the mind! That is the reason why a coaching psychologist like me added Health Coaching to my work because the psychological and emotional aspects of food, eating, exercising, need to be dealt with to make a health transformation happen, and for people to lose weight and keep it off.
What is your relationship with food and exercise? What is the food culture in your family? What are the emotions associated with different kinds of foods? Why we love toxic food? What is the food environment in your different circles?
And food is only one behaviour, right? Hunger is another that needs to be decoded, cravings, sleep. Did you know that chronic sleep deprivation is associated with obesity and poor metabolism. Less than four hours of sleep, you are 73% more likely to be obese, because sleep deprivation increases ghrelin which is your hunger hormone which turns on the switch for leptin, which turns off your off-switch.
In my six-month program it begins with one bite at a time. And we make progress, and it’s not about perfect health, or perfect weight. As long as you are making progress, you are likely to be better off than before. For example, you may say…. “I don’t want to eat that chocolate ice-cream for dessert” If you look at it, this is a statement of self-denial coming from a desire to be something else. However, if you say instead, “I want strawberries for dessert” and you say it a few times, and add to it that strawberries re good for my skin, for my health, and a by-product of that is weight loss, I can always eat that chocolate ice-cream some other day. You don’t want the food to control you, you want to control the food.
This is a picture of me, before and after losing 18 kilograms of weight!
And exercise, we begin with one small set of exercises a day to meet you where you are! But that is the topic of another blog post by Aneeta Madhok!
