Happy New Year! Ready to start and end 2022 on the right foot? Here are four things you can do to change your relationship with food, eating and your weight so you can lose the weight for good while enjoying your life. Including the foods you love,

Wouldn't it feel amazing to stop obsessing about everything you eat to ditch dieting forever and drop that extra weight in a sane and sustainable way? Well, you can do it and I can't wait to show you how. I'm Shari Broder, and welcome to the Weight Loss for Foodies Podcast, Episode 173: the Four Most Important Changes to Make in 2022.

Welcome back. Thank you so much for being here. Before we get started, I'd just like to quickly thank today's sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional counseling done securely online. BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. Get started today at betterhelp.com. And that's BetterHelp is one word, go to betterhelp.com/shari and receive 10% off your first month.

It has been a tough couple of years for many of us. In this episode, I want to help you make this new year better for you with respect to your relationship with food eating and your weight. So let's jump right in. I'm just going to go right into it.

Here's the first change: 

1. Swear off dieting forever and cultivate an abundance mindset. I believe the biggest thing standing between most people and weight loss success is the fact that they've been brainwashed by the multi-billion dollar diet industry that the only way to lose weight is on a diet.

Now, research supports the total opposite conclusion. And that is that 95-97% of people who attempt to diet will fail to lose weight and keep it off for at least two years. So why suffer through a miserable diet when even if you're one of the few people who actually loses weight? You'll gain it all back and then some in less than two years. Don't let the diet industry make a fool out of you. The diet industry knows that what they're selling doesn't work, but they want you to keep dieting forever because that's how they make money. There's always a new fad diet to get your hopes up and get you spending money to try.

There are those fad foods all the time, new ones coming from who knows where, including those highly processed diet shakes and bars with ingredients that read like chemistry sets. Diets, subscription plans, where you get to eat food that isn't fresh, detoxes, cleanses and all kinds of things that you don't need to lose weight.

I was unable to lose weight until I stopped dieting. And I know lots of other people and have helped a lot of people get to that place. If that wasn't enough to convince you to swear off diets forever then how about this... do you like being on a diet? You hate it, right? It's freaking miserable. You can't live a normal life and go to parties and restaurants and eat normally. 

Maybe you somehow convinced yourself that your overpriced chocolate Isagenix shake doesn't taste too bad, but wouldn't you much rather eat real food with fresh ingredients than drink some fake emulsion? And let's not forget that most of those diet shake companies lure desperate dieters into selling their product through pyramid scheme so they get the product cheaper. So they end up losing money instead of weight.

Have you thought about how dieting is a huge waste of your time and energy? According to Susan Hyatt, who is one of my weight coaches, on the average, by the time you're 45, you've tried 61 diet plans, programs, detoxes, cleanses, or whatever. Susan reported that the average woman spends 31 years of her life on a diet. What a waste of your one precious life. I don't want that for you. I know you have better things to do with your time and energy and money. I mean, diets make you feel crappy about yourself. They make you hate the way you look.

They make you feel worthless and like a failure, but you aren't the failure. It's the diet that failed you. Diets make you behave in ways inconsistent with the needs of your body. They tell you what, when, and how much to eat, and they totally ignore the needs of your very wise body, which has ways of telling you it needs food, like hunger pangs. Even purportedly healthy diets do that. They make you waste your time counting calories and carbs, macros, points, whatever. And here's the most damaging part. They teach you to approach food and eating from a perspective of scarcity. And that's why after you've been depriving yourself of french fries for two months, you feel totally out of control when you decide to eat that forbidden food just this once. 

On the other hand, when you cultivate an abundance mindset, your approach to food is completely different. This is how you look at the world. Wow. There are so many delicious things to eat that are readily accessible to me. I can eat anything my body wants when I'm hungry. That's the only requirement - I have to be hungry.

There's never a need to keep eating until I feel stuffed or to eat crappy Chips Ahoy cookies because someone brought a bag of them. When I eat pleasure foods like baked goods or chocolate or chips, I only want to eat the most delicious stuff. I'll pass on those packaged doughnuts they're giving out that were fried months ago. And when I'm really in the mood for a doughnut, I'll get the best one in town and really enjoy it because I deserve the best. That's what the abundance mindset looks like. When you incorporate an abundance mindset into your life, and eat using the hunger scale, which I'll talk about next, you can enjoy any party, holiday buffet, or whatever, without overeating or gaining weight. Really! You stop feeling like you have to eat those foods that you love like it's your last meal.

To help you ditch your diet scarcity mindset and cultivate a mindset that will help you lose weight, sign up for my free seven day "Change Your Food and Eating Mindset" challenge, which is on my website, sharibroder.com.

So the second important change to make is to eat using the hunger scale. The hunger scale is a much more important tool for shedding your extra weight than the bathroom scale. It's the key to knowing exactly how much food your body needs for you to drop down to your naturally healthy weight and stay there.

Your hunger and fullness sensations are your body's brilliant mechanism for telling you exactly what it needs. You even have a whole system of hormones that tell you when you're hungry and full, but unfortunately you've spent your life dieting or living in our culture of overeating so you probably don't tune into those signals when making your decisions about when to eat and how much. Maybe you eat because it's time for breakfast or lunch, or because the ad on your TV told you that you obviously want that hot pizza dripping with enormous amounts of cheese, and encourages you to call some pizza delivery service. Or maybe you're at the movie theater and you're eating popcorn and candy because that's what you do there after you've eaten a big dinner. But the problem is that when you eat but you're not hungry, your body doesn't need the food and it'll store that energy as fat. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, it's important to get back to eating in tune with your body's hunger and fullness signals. Doing so will literally change both your body and your life.

Now the hunger scale gives you guidance about when you should start and stop eating, you can download a copy for free from the episode three Podcast Think Sheets on my website, or in my free Facebook group, Ditch the Diet Tribe. You can access the Podcast Think Sheets on the podcast page on my website under the free resources.

The hunger scale goes from one to ten. The lower numbers are when you're hungry and the higher numbers are when you're full. I recommend starting eating when you're at a three, which is when you're just hungry enough to be distracted by your hunger. Now, if you wait until you're at a one or a two, which is hungrier, you'll be too hungry and that will set you up for being less discriminating and maybe even making poor choices. You may get into starvation mode and start acting desperate and eating anything.

When you're at a three on the hunger scale, choose to eat something that you enjoy. Never eat food you don't like because you think it's going to help you lose weight. It's ridiculous. It's so unsatisfying. Then stop eating when you reach a six. A six is when you feel sated and comfortable. It's about 80% full.

You'll feel light and energetic and not weighed down with your stomach distended. You should not have to undo your jeans after a meal. That means you've gone above a six or maybe your clothes are way too tight, but it usually means you've eaten too much. Now there are lots of reasons for stopping at six, which by the way is something I rarely did before I worked with a weight coach. I used to overeat all the time. You feel so much better when you stop eating at six though. I love that wonderful feeling of enjoying a meal and not feeling stuffed. I really hate that stuffed feeling now. And it's funny to think that that was how I ate for most of my life. 

Secondly, you are giving your body the precise amount of food it needs to fuel it when you eat from three to six on the hunger scale. And stopping at six is so much easier on your digestive system. I spent so much of my life dealing with digestive problems, even being incorrectly diagnosed with IBS, but once I stopped overeating those problems disappeared. And many of my clients have had the same experience.

When most people start eating in tune with the hunger scale, they find that their body only needs about half or two-thirds of what they've been eating. So you eat less and then what happens? You lose weight. And because you eat that way for the rest of your life, you don't gain it back again. And you don't miss the extra food for the reason I'm about to tell you. 

3. Eat consciously and slowly and savoring every bite. There are two reasons for eating. One is for nourishment and the other is for pleasure. The problem is that so many people who claim they love food miss the pleasure or most of it because they eat while multitasking.

Now if you're one of them and you think you love food, why are you distracting yourself from it by watching TV or a movie or working or reading, playing app games, hanging out on YouTube or Tik Tok or whatever? There are lots of problems with distracted eating. One of them is that you don't pay attention to why you're eating so you don't notice when you've had enough. So you're more likely to overeat. Don't rush through your meals, take your time and actually taste and enjoy your food, pay attention to the flavors. And you'll also give your stomach a chance to send that "I'm full" signal to your brain before you've eaten too much. 

The other problem with distracted eating is that you don't fully enjoy and appreciate your food. I mean, how many times do you munch down a bag of chips while doing something else and suddenly you realize that most of the bag has gone and you've barely tasted them? Now, if on the other hand, you ate the chips slowly and consciously, you would enjoy them more and you'd be satisfied with less. You might even get bored eating them.

I mean, really, when you have to make a choice between eating and doing something, you're more likely to consider whether you're truly hungry. So let's say you have lots of work to finish and you want to snack – decide between the two. If you're really hungry, you'll choose the snack, which is only going to take around five minutes or so to eat anyway, so it's not like it's going to prevent you from completing your work. How much time do you waste during your workday like me? I know there's plenty of that. If you're not hungry, you'll likely choose to keep working. Just by making these choices, you'll likely eat less, eating slowly and consciously. You'll feel so much more satisfied that your cravings will go away. Seriously. Speaking of ways to eliminate cravings, that's number four.

4. Eat the foods you really enjoy and have no forbidden foods. Meaning don't have lists of good foods and bad foods. Eating consciously means letting your body tell you what it wants. You have to tune in and listen, you have to pay attention to the effect the food has on your body. This may require you to learn to trust your body again, but it isn't your body that's been deceiving you anyway, it's your brain. Your body wouldn't tell you to eat a half a gallon of ice cream because that makes your body feel horrible. If you want to stop bingeing and be in control in any food situation, you have to get rid of your lists of good foods and bad foods.

Food is just food. Yes, some foods are more nutritious than others and your body is going to want mostly those. If you just listen to it, if you give yourself permission to eat anything, you will not eat cookies 24/7 because you'd feel awful. Your body will tell you to stop doing that and it'll cry out for some carrots or nuts or hummus or something that's better fuel for it.

Yes, sometimes it may want chocolate too. Remember that abundance mindset I told you about earlier. When you approach food and eating that way, you really can make peace with food and not overdo it. But you have to get rid of your good and bad food lists if you want to stop feeling out of control around food, because that's the scarcity mindset at work.

Now I can tell you from firsthand experience that allowing myself to eat any food really took me away from that serpent in the Garden of Eden tempting me to eat things I thought I shouldn't. I used to never allow myself to eat french fries because they were too fattening. Then when I ate them, I tended to eat too many and I felt yucky. Now, you know, I order fries occasionally if I really want them. And I know that if I eat too many, I won't feel good. But if I listen to my body, I can really enjoy them, savoring every bite and I'll feel totally satisfied. Rarely do I eat the whole order. I mean, french fry orders are so big. They give you a mountain of them because it's inexpensive. You can learn to do that too.

So to summarize, today's Four Important Changes to Make in 2022 are:

1. Stop dieting and cultivate an abundance mindset;

2. Eat using the hunger scale as guidance;

3. Eat consciously and slowly savoring every bite;

4. Eat the foods you really enjoy. Don't have lists of forbidden foods.

So thank you so much for listening.

I hope this is the last year that you're even going to have to think about this because you'll get it down, and eating this way will become your habit. And you will save a lot of time and energy because you won't be obsessing about food and eating. 

Have a great week. Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to subscribe for regular motivation and inspiration and head over to my website, sharibroder.com to grab the free resources I've created to help you practice what you're learning on the podcast. I really appreciate your help spreading the word by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. 

See you next time.