The First Ever UK Metabolic Effect Fitness Summit Day 2 Jill Coleman of JillFit presenting the Mindset of an Automated Eater.

How many times have you started a new plan with excitement and huge intent…. only to find that after a short time it’s hard, it’s tiring and you can’t stay compliant?

How many times have you lost weight and felt great only to slip right back into bad ways in hardly any time at all?

How many times have you set about starting a new plan only to obsess about food before you even start?

How many times have you felt deprived and miserable on a diet?

How many diets have you ‘started’ and are you feeling even fatter than you did before you started dieting years ago?

Yet we continue to do the same thing over and over even though it never works. Isn’t that the very definition of madness?

Enter Jill Coleman of Jillfit.com

I have been a huge fan of Jill Coleman’s since I found Metabolic Effect. As a keen weight lifter myself, I was always interested in leaning up and learning new ways of keeping as lean as I could. I was lucky enough to meet Jill a couple of times before and spend the day with herself, Jade Teta and Gary Leak when I undertook the ME Group Exercise Instructor Qualification way back a few years. I was so inspired by their honest approach. I have since undertaken a couple of on-line programs run by Metabolic Effect and Jill, where I learned more awareness of how important mindset is for attaining and sustaining fat loss.

I have been following Jill’s journey through JillFit.com and have seen some of the gradual transition in her approach to eating since her competitive years as a Fitness Model and Physique Competitor.

Forget the all or nothing approach! The new way is ‘navigating the middle!’

Long gone are her days of hard dieting and being ‘on’ plan to lean down for a competition and blowing up 20lbs when she went ‘off’ season and the diet. This resonated massively with me.

My journey started out as a serial dieter through my teens swinging wildly from being perfect and compliant to the low calorie, low fat and high carb diet plan and then all the way to full on bingeing on everything beige and dead. I lived all through my teens obsessing about food, diets and being over weight. I was ALWAYS dieting, starving and depriving myself yet I was NEVER able to sustain the weight loss for any length of time and slowly got fatter with each passing year. I got more and more depressed and my self-esteem plummeted to the ground. Self-loathing is the best word i can use to to describe my feelings back then.

Like Jill, my early career in fitness centred about being the proverbial cardio queen! The more cardio the better, the less calories the better! But despite teaching what seemed liked endless classes and clients every week, I never obtained a six pack and was never ‘tight’ or as lean as I yearned for and I was ALWAYS battling hunger and cravings. My answer? To train more and to eat less! OMG!

Can I see myself eating this way forever?

I would spend Monday through to Friday eating like a bird, training like a demon and then the weekend eating anything that stood still. It was exhausting both physically and mentally. I became a social pharaoh and bore! I became holier than though and preached to anyone who would listen that I had found the answer to weight loss! Yet food ruled every waking moment. After a time I became physically worn out. I could no longer sustain that level of training. Something had to give.

Learning a different way that was sustainable and enjoyable was the key to my success and it took years of learning about myself and reading countless books. Jill has brilliantly perfected and broken down the process into four main parts to enable a balanced approach to eating and she enlightened us with her take on it:

#Moderation365

The most important point covered was this… if you can enjoy the process you can sustain the process. In other words if you feel deprived from the word go you will instantly resent the process. This approach also encourages us to think ‘on’ or ‘off”. We can learn an approach that enable us to have some of the things we love, but in a manner that sustains and maintains weight loss without the negative associations with ‘bad’ foods.

If your plan has foods in it that have a high satisfaction factor for you, then you are much more likely to stick with it and enjoy it. This is where ‘navigating the middle’ comes in. In other words we don’t expect to be perfect, but instead find the middle ground where you are much better than you the worst you could be.

#Mindfulness

Being aware of what foods you don’t want to live without and then finding a way to fit them in is a powerful tool to enable you to feel like you are not on a diet. For me I know a few squares of dark chocolate or a glass of wine in the evening will help prevent the urge to reach for poor food choices. Giving yourself permission and trusting yourself is incredibly empowering. But this takes practice!

Practising mindfulness gives you more time to make better choices and stops the irrational and impulsive behaviours that often lead to overindulgence.

#Abundance mindset

Deprivation of food will lead the eventual overindulgence. Learning that food is everywhere, you will never run out and learning to recognise that you can eat it an ANY time lifts the lid on obsessively thinking about what you CAN’T have when on a diet. It stops the see-saw effect and inevitable all or nothing thinking that dieting promotes.

#DNC – Daily Nutritional Commitment

If you can release your brain from obsessing about food and calories, cooking and eating you will have more energy in your life. Your will power batteries will stay full. What things can you do habitually or ritually that will free you thinking and energy to focus on the other areas of your life. What rules do you live by and are a given without effort or thought? Examples might be:

• Have vegetables with every meal
• Always prepare lunch the night before
• Have a protein bar or protein powder and shaker handy at all times
• Carry a water bottle with you everywhere
• Get up an hour earlier to prepare dinner for the evening
• Pack your gym bag the night before
• Plan your food and food menus for the week and get it delivered

You might like to choose 2 or 3 that you can start with and make a commitment too. All these things can free energy up for other areas. If you are constantly having to think and stress all the time, you will tire out your will power battery and you won’t sustain the changes.

The take home message was ‘can you make the process effortless, enjoyable and effective? Because if you can find a way then you are much more likely to sustain the changes for the long term.

I love Jill’s posts and I really hope she publishes a book. Make sure you follow her blog JillFit.com!

Next I will cover Keoni and Jillian Teta’s talk where we learn about anti-ageing protocols and the huge importance of gut health to health and fat loss. If you missed the summary of day 1 with Dr. Jade Teta you can check it out here:

Big love, small tummies!

Jill – The Fat Controller

p.s. I have set up a FREE support group where I share lots of information, recipes and ways to banish the beige dead food and eat MORE real food. I will teach you how to eat great, feel great and lose weight ALL without using the diet mindset! Join us here: www.banishthebeige.com