Staying Slim, an Art?

What hasn’t worked

Have you, like me, had  it with overdependence on counting, weighing, and measuring?  These tools can be helpful as you relearn and get back to basics of hunger and satiety, yet when they rule the knife and fork and lock us into food jail, they can create unnecessary preoccupation and disconnection, not to mention disassociation, with our minds and bodies.

And what about exercise?  I found myself at a place, not too many years ago, where I was needed to exercise 1 1/2 hours a day and whittle my calories to unreasonable levels;  and I was still slowly, as I got older, gaining!

The Problem with Diets

The diet industry would like us to believe that failure is due to our lack of will power, self control and discipline.  Perhaps the failure is due to the diet?!   Diets can be equated to food jail:  telling you when, where, and how much to eat, indefinitely.  The assumption is that our bodies have no internal mechanism worth trusting in this regard, and must be watched with a firm hand lest we go totally out of control and eat all the wrong things until we blow up.  You may laugh, but really, isn’t that what all the dietary controls imply?
Diets infantilize us.  The power of choice and decision are taken away, further distancing us from our own intuitive ability to become adaptively trim while eating the foods that we love (which is entirely possible to do!)  Wisdom and pleasure can go hand in hand in solution! 

There must be a better way!

Intuitively, you KNOW there must be a better way. And so did I.

Why should the trail to a trim physique be rife with suffering and deprivation! You never seem to be able to maintain it for long anyway, and end up fatter and more frustrated than ever, once you lose your resolve.  Is there anything more miserable than being overweight, hungry, and out of control at the same time?

In my book, this means two very important components of eating behavior that need to be addressed when one desires a healthy, lean, and energetic body, without the ravages of a dieting lifestyle.  These fall into two major categories, technical and behavioral.  BOTH of them can go through changes, as we learn to clarify hunger and satiety and as we learn to divest ourselves of diet thinking and behavior.

1. Technical:  These generate physical adaptives responses in your body.
       

• HOW we are eating: eating behaviors.  This is about the timing of eating and why and how much we eat.
• WHAT we are eating:  variety and balance, pleasure and satiety, and quality.

2.  Behavioral:  These have to do with conditioned responses and are more affective in nature:

•  THINKING: In what ways has our conditioning to diet-thinking disturbed and disrupted our ability to eat naturally in the technical realm?   This can require us to detox our diet thinking, overcome fears of foods and eating normally.  Even simple "reckless" eating can start initiate cascade.
            
• DIET DETOX:  "Deprogram" from diet-thinking.  At the face of it, everyone agrees we don’t want to “diet”.  But do we know, those of us with long and colorful diet histories, how NOT to?

And when it comes to exercise.....

As I moved into and through my forties, as a fitness professional, teacher and educator, and someone looking for the best solutions for myself, I continued to research innovations in exercise.  I had the sense that working out longer, harder, heavier, _____ er, was somehow not the best solution.  I knew that when it came to exercise, as well as diet, there MUST be a better way!  It was about that time that I discovered Piliates-based movement, and began teaching that, almost exclusively.  However, I still continued educating myself in the field and that's when I came across T-Tapp.

T-Tapp promised "2-3 workouts a week" to maintain optimal conditioning and shaping;  without strict dieting.  Within days of my discovery of this approach, I was on the phone with Teresa Tapp - for a good hour or more, on that first meeting - and the connection with what I was looking for, its relationship with my previous training and knowledge, and Teresa's focus on health, well-being and education set me on the path of my studies of and certification as a T-Tapp Trainer.

Enter “The Art of Staying Slim”

My approach invites you to give up the war with your body.  It beckons and requires us to become more highly attuned to our needs for fuel and sustenance.  It demands that we learn to feed our bodies appropriately, and avoid looping into starvation metabolism.  It invites us to embrace a healthy respect for our likes and dislikes, and use them to create satisfying repasts! 

My absolute turnaround with regards to all things eating began over 25 years ago when I first read an article that suggested that dieting itself may be the problem.  Imagine! Yet I wasn't ready to hear the message. It took another 15 years, until I encountered Jean Antonello's work regarding the ravages of the feast/famine cycle.  (You can find her books in the "Books/CDs" section of this site.)  This information created a profound shift for me.

Since that time, I have had deep experience with coaching, teaching, and training others in their quest to gain the freedom that I have been able to achieve.  Clearly, not everyone is able to simply abandon the dieting lifestyle without insightful examination of how we happen to be in this dietary mess, and how to move beyond and become happily trim in the process.  It has come to my attention that many can benefit from a structure that invites us to make change that can work with our schedules and lifestyles. Thus I have continued my study, research, and practice to meet the needs of those with a variety of schedules and needs.

Though I continue to advise and coach people who desire to become "body-controlled eaters" as presented in Antonello's work, this approach can generate too much fear for many.  Jumping from the tight structure of diets to the open structure of eating totally according to body signals, regardless of our schedules, can be far too challenging and overwhelming for those seeking weight loss or freedom from diets.  I'd like to note that the adventure can be immeasureably enhanced with purposeful, healing exercise such as T-Tapp.

Thus, I offer, in addition, another way.  A middle way.  You might call it a "Baby Bear" approach:  not too cold (strict dietary regime), not too hot (drop everything you are doing whenever you get a hunger signal and eat until you are full), but just right:  create beauty, wonderful taste and balance with your meals.  Meals that will allow you to get to the next without overwhelming hunger, yet sharpen your appetite for another good repast. 

And that's just the technical part.  What about our attitudes, behaviors, and conditioned responses? Part A can't happen without Part B.  We need to be ready and willing to give up the story of seeing ourselves as someone "with a weight problem" and invite our bodies to change along with our minds.

My approach is an eclectic blend based on my own experience along with the influence of the expertise of other experts in the study of eating behaviors arena.  As for exercise, I continue to be astonished - and pleased - with the power of really quite moderate amounts of T-Tapp exercise needed to maintain health, well-being, and superior body shaping. Then, one can enjoy all and other forms of movement for a healthy lifestyle, and just for the fun of it!  An orchestration of these influences is what has become, and which I call, "The Art of Staying Slim".

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