I had been actively dieting since I was 11 years old. Why in the world would I hire a Nutritional Counselor? I knew what I was “supposed” to eat! You name the diet; I could tell you the food rules of that diet and how long you had to follow the rules. The problem was when I wasn’t following a diet, where did that leave me? I’ll tell you…I was like a light switch either “on” a diet obsessing about the rules or “off” a diet and breaking every rule that had been imposed upon me in the last diet.
Why Would I Hire a Weight Loss Counselor?
When my Nutritional Counselor at The Hungry Heart asked me “what would a healthy life look like?” I stared at her as if she were Linda Blair from the acclaimed movie the Exorcist. Was my Nutritional Counselor’s head spinning? Was that pea soup coming from her mouth? Healthy? What was she talking about?!? Wasn’t my commitment to every up and coming new diet “healthy”? Wasn’t my diet world healthy? How about the diet that told me to eat all the fatty meat you can find, but stay away from the “dreaded fruit”? Or the diet that had me taking uppers in the morning and depressants at night so that I could sleep, oh that’s right…that diet lead to heart failure and a friend of mine actually died.. Was my Nutritional Counselor telling me that living off of lemon juice, molasses, and cayenne pepper for 21 days wasn’t going to lead me to the promise land of “happily thin ever after”? As I took a leap of faith, I looked at my Nutritional Counselor and acknowledged that “after years of compulsive dieting, I have no idea what a healthy life style would look like for me.”
I needed to break free of the diet insanity that had become my idea of health. As I explored improving my health with my Nutritional Counselor, I realized the difference between a lifestyle of “quick fix” diets that lead to weight gain and what a healthy relationship with food and exercise could look like. A great Nutritional Counselor will find your strengths and weaknesses, and help you find success through balance. A great Nutritional Counselor will guide you in the direction of better health and give you the space to discover a better version of you without beating you over the head with a diet plan and making you feel that you have failed because you didn’t follow the rules. Instead, a Nutritional Counselor will be your loudest cheerleader, a supportive life coach, and will help you achieve the life that you thought you could purchase in a bottle of diet pills or in the latest top selling diet book that never seemed to pan out.