Good morning. How are you progressing along this path? The more entrenched I get in helping with the re-set, the more I’m understanding that our relationship to food is at the root cause of a lot of our behaviors and feelings.

Bear with me while I think out loud…

When you’re born, food is the link between you and your mother. Nourishment is what we need from a physiological perspective, but your caregiver has progressed into adulthood and their relationship to food has, in the meantime, also assumed a psychological perspective. Think of a caring grandmother. She expresses love by giving you food. (Here, have a cookie dear)

As we grow, food takes on so many meanings.Your mother has partially transferred her relationship to food onto you. Some moms feed to relieve themselves of their own guilt for being inattentive.
Other mothers starve themselves but will try to make up for this by over-feeding everyone else around them.
My own mother refused to cook because to her this meant that she was the “woman in the kitchen” and she abhorred that old-fashioned image.
Everyone’s relationship to food, and how we formed our relationship to it, is unique. The point here is, that if we have our struggles with it, then it may be a good idea to shine a light on it by looking at how we were raised around food.

Was food used as a pacifier? How much of a big deal was made of it? Was mom educated about nutrition (I lived off Oros and white bread, but I’m fine 😉

Maybe it’s almost safe to say that some shortcomings with our relationship to food, can be related to our upbringing, and that’s ok. We’re all a little dysfunctional in one way or another.
You can take your power back. You can re-wire this relationship. You’re not beholden to old deep-seated habits, which tell you to eat when you’re sad, eat when you’re happy etc.
That’s where, in some measure, I come into the picture. I’m the guy who asks you to leave the Louis Vuitton Food baggage at the door and to kinda just follow a path with me.

The first step of the path, is to know that while the maelstrom of thoughts surrounding food frustrations is raging, we’re going to start with putting less food into you than you’re expending. On the most basic level, you will begin to shrink, because on a purely scientific level, it’s physically impossible to expand, when you’re putting in less than you’re taking out.

Of course, everybody responds differently, and we need to explore your starting point or individual threshold first. This is why we begin with an approximation of calories to be consumed. If your body responds well, then we stay the course. If you find yourself not responding, then we dial the process in. We give you a little less and make you burn more. It really does boil down to this. You can reason this 20 ways, but like the center of town, you will always arrive there, with that basic reality. You’re putting in more than you’re taking out.

This knowledge allows you to shed much of the Louis Vuitton food baggage that well-meaning moms and dads and grannies (grandpa was too busy keeping an eye on the gardener – lol) created within you.
I say the above with total respect to nutritional nuances that make each person thrive.
We live in amazing and highly informed times. A kid on the street knows more about nutrition nowadays than most pre-war nutritionists would have.
My mother recently fell ill and I had to smile as the older guard all called in and advised me to get her to drink “Complan” – probably the first food supplement drink ever invented.

So, I’m gonna ask you to keep it simple. Trust the process. Follow the Insulin re-set.

Stay below your maintenance calories.
Assess your progress. If the weight is not coming off as you wish, eat less and get your sweat on.

If it’s still not coming off as you wished, get more of a sweat on and eat a little less than that.

It’s my role to see that you’re getting the right foods into your system, that your hormones are firing correctly. If you tell me that you’re running low on energy, we tweak your diet, no problem. If you recognize the functionality of food and are able to distance yourself from your prior programming around it, you’ll be able to eat functionally, and you’ll not feel like a failure if you’ve fallen into a tub of ice cream, emerged smiling and Oh dear, 250mg heavier on the scale… Pffft.

Ok, I can’t think out loud anymore, – I need a Tablespoon of peanut butter… and then I’m going to hit the gym for an hour.

Have a beautiful day!