Fitness
The Weight-Loss Secret I'll Never Forget
And it has nothing to do with fitness.
Hye Jin Chung
Food coaching was never a life goal. It basically happened to me, rather than me chasing it. I developed my own way of eating and looking at food from studying with a wide range of teachers. My body transformed, the excess fat fell away, my ailments disappeared, my energy soared. Actors in my acting classes saw my waist shrink and my skin begin to glow, so they started asking me to teach them my secrets. I figured it would be a way to supplement my income while I pursued acting. I blended several systems together and created a plan based on my experience. I didn’t know sharing it would teach me things I’d hold onto for the rest of my life.
Becky (not her real name) found me right at the start, when I was written up in Daily Candy, an email newsletter that was popular for a bit. She lived in another state and it was pre-Zoom, so we did all of our coaching by phone and email. I talked to her every week and I was really happy for her that she was making great progress. Her only goal was to lose some weight. Not a lot really but she wanted to feel like she used to feel about herself before 25 extra pounds had crept on and stuck around for way too long. She was ready to let them go.
The first 10 fell away quickly, as she implemented many of the foods I told her to add in. She marveled at how the pain (she had not mentioned) in her hips and back disappeared. Then it seemed like no matter what I suggested, her scale would not budge. Week after week went by, and she tried shifting her portions and eating more of certain vegetables to increase fat loss. Nothing we tried seemed to make a difference.
Was she lying to me to sound like a good student? She liked muffins sometimes instead of oatmeal but that alone would not inhibit weight loss. She seemed to eat less than I did at lunch with her salads and sandwiches. Was it that? Not eating enough so her system was stubbornly hanging onto what it had? Could there be an undisclosed pint of ice cream being eaten before bed? She told me “no.” She wasn't eating even one of the healthy ice creams out there like my favorite coconut milk-based ones.
“Let’s go back to the beginning,” I said. Tell me what a typical day is like right now with breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. That’s when she finally told me she was eating cookies in the afternoon. She previously told me that she'd had one or two little sandwich cookies sometime between lunch and dinner but lately it was more like five or six every single day. Sometimes she'd eat a whole sleeve. I was fairly certain that was a big culprit, but why? What was driving this cookie binging? When I asked her, she said she was just so darn angry at her husband.
“He’s sabotaging me,” she complained. “He tells me he loves me and we’ve had a good marriage but then he’ll do things that make me so mad and upset." When I pressed for details she told me her husband bought her some energy supplements, which she thought meant he was trying to control what she did. He also gave her a gym membership that she felt was his way of saying he didn’t think she could lose the weight — so he was going to fix it for her. Everything he did, her take was that he was against her. He even bought her a gift certificate to get a new bathing suit that she felt was him pushing her and that wasn’t nice at all.
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In most of my coaching I usually agreed when women told me about the controlling or abusive things men in their lives did. One woman had literally been hit in the face. That was not the case for Becky. Becky’s husband sounded to me like he was doing whatever he could think of to be supportive and she was misinterpreting his gifts as a form of oppression.
Her rumination and anger were not good for her well-being so I said, “Even if this has nothing to do with you holding onto a little extra weight or eating more and more cookies … humor me. Go talk to your husband and see what he says. I’m not a therapist but from what I’ve seen with others, anger is a big reason we might crave foods for comfort. What if a simple conversation clears the cookie cravings?”
The following week, Becky sounded like a different person. “You were right!” she gushed. I feel like I’ve let go of a ton of weight just from having that conversation,” she said. It turned out that the husband’s intentions were purely to support her, like I thought. He loved her with all his heart. “He was so sincere,” she said. “You should have seen his face when I asked him if he was trying to fix me.” Apparently, the husband was horrified that she thought he was unsupportive. He truly just wanted to see her happy and he loved her no matter what size she was.
Becky taught me to notice when my eating was related to my emotions and question my interpretations of events. It has definitely made life sweeter.
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