Category Archives: Inspirations

Every time someone tells me they’re starting a new exercise regimen to lose weight, I cringe. I mean, how often does that truly work? I want to help, and it kills me not to say something. But who am I to crush their optimistic outlook? Besides, this might be the time that it works!

But most of the time it doesn’t. And I know why. I want to tell you the reasons why exercise isn’t the way to drop unwanted weight and how you CAN be successful at getting to your weight loss goal without a punishing exercise regimen. Keep reading…

Someone is gonna hunt me down on this one…

I know – you’ve been told forever that diet and exercise are the way to weight loss. That if you can just find the perfect diet and manage to get yourself in the gym 4 times a week, that the weight will fly off and you’ll look like one of those beautiful people on the cover of TIME magazine.

But I lost 60 pounds and I didn’t exercise. Not at all.

Me before I lost weight…

Me after…

This is a tough myth to deconstruct because there’s so much truth and almost truth mixed up together. As a doctor, it seems like I should never tell anyone not to exercise. I mean, look at all the benefits of exercise! Why would I ever tell anyone not to exercise?

Let’s look at those benefits. First, exercise is wonderful for your mental health and well-being. It’s important to move to get your heart working and staying strong. Exercising is good for your joints, your flexibility, your bone density, and maintaining or growing your muscle mass. It keeps you young and keeps you healthy. Exercise is for moving and enjoying the feeling of movement in your body. It should be used as an act of self-love, not a punishment or weapon against yourself for being overweight.

There are some people who swear that becoming a gym rat or a runner changed their whole life and that’s how they got the weight off. I’m sure that this post is completely contrary to what they believe is true from their experience. But I’m talking to you here. You’re like the rest of us who have tried to get the exercise and diet balance right and have watched not one pound come off and stay off. I was overweight from adolescence through having my first child after residency, so I tried that too. Actually, I was a dancer throughout high school and college and worked out and danced hard for at least 4 days a week, and didn’t lose a pound.

Why doesn’t exercise make a difference in weight loss and why are some people exceptions to this rule? If you really talk to people who swear that their exercise routine is what changed everything, they’ll admit that they also changed their eating while they made their workout a focus of their life. For some people, it feels wrong to eat junk food after they’ve sweated it out in their workout. They feel motivated to eat differently and as they see changes in their bodies they keep adjusting their eating to support their weight loss.

But even more of us find that working out makes us hungry, so we eat more. We also listen to that tiny voice that says we deserve to have a treat, even a “healthy” one like a smoothie or a bar because we worked out, not realizing that we just ate every calorie and more than we burned in the gym. When the scale doesn’t change despite our workout, we get discouraged and stop exercising.

When exercise is the focus of our weight loss efforts, we teach ourselves that we can’t lose weight without exercise. We know this isn’t true when there are people who are wheelchair-bound who lose weight, or when people who can’t exercise have weight loss surgery and they lose weight without exercise. I think we doctors have unwittingly taught our patients to focus on the end goal instead of starting where change happens – at the beginning. It will be wonderful if you lose weight and incorporate exercise in your life as part of your healthy lifestyle, but if you can’t get moving because of the weight you’re carrying, you won’t have a lighter body or one that moves. Now, you can definitely exercise while you’re overweight! It’s just that if you have to focus on the strongest tool to lose weight, it won’t be exercise alone.

When we believe the myth that weight loss requires exercise, we also set ourselves up to dilute our efforts.  This is the most important reason why people fail when they start a diet and exercise plan. Most of us need to change things little by little over time so that our changes last. If we try to change everything at once, we often do well for a while, but then something happens in our lives and we get overwhelmed and off track and we go back to our default options for eating and our exercise routine is the first thing to fall off our schedule. It’s too much, too fast. We can’t sustain sudden change for long without a compelling reason, and for most people that has to be on the level of a life-threatening diagnosis for themselves or their child. Seems dramatic, but I’ve seen it again and again.

Small, focused, sustained changes make a difference. When you make them normal over time, you don’t backslide and the weight doesn’t come back. We didn’t gain the weight all at once either. We did small things over and over that caused the weight to come on our bodies. We can undo it the same way! With focus, it can come off faster than it came on. But trying to make those eating changes and the mind drama that comes with it plus an exercise regimen requirement is too much for your mind to juggle at once for long.

Your brain can be rewired to do things differently. It takes sustained training to do it, but it can be done! That’s the good news. The bad news is that your brain prefers to conserve energy at all costs and will resist efforts to change because change requires energy. The old way of doing things is easier and more energy-efficient. So if you overwhelm the brain with lots of changes at once, you’re setting yourself up to fail. The practice of change takes time and your brain can’t focus on multiple changes at once. The default setting is easier. Your work is to change the default, and this happens one change at a time. This is the reason I recommend focusing on your eating plan and not exercise – you’ll see results faster and you’ll be motivated to keep going. Persistence is what makes the changes become your default action!

It’s totally possible to lose weight without exercise! You can add exercise to your life once you’ve got your eating plan working for you if you want to do it. But you don’t have to in order to lose your weight. Focus is what you need to get those changes locked in. But remember what I said about making changes and mind-drama? That’s real, and it can be tough to find your way out of the drama on your own. I can help! Email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and we can set up a free mini-session to help you decide if weight loss coaching is what you need to finally be successful at long-term weight loss. You don’t have to do it alone!

Here’s your video help for the week!

When we struggle with weight, there’s so much information out there that says that we have to trust a special program or diet or supplement to be successful. That’s how those items make sales! But it’s not true. Sure, there are ways to eat that can help and science supports that. But permanent weight loss can be achieved with eating regular food – I promise! I’m going to share some stories from my life and the lives of my clients to inspire you and show you that weight loss doesn’t have to be complicated and painful. Let’s go!

Hey! So glad you’re here! It’s our first week in our series on Weight Loss Stories, and I thought it fitting to start with wings and pizza. Yep, this week’s story is about successful weight loss on ordinary food. Seems impossible? I promise it’s not. Let me show you…

Last week I told you part of my own weight loss story. I lost 60 pounds in 6 months while my first baby was a year old and while I was working full time as a physician. It certainly seemed like an impossible task at the time! But I was determined. I’d finally found some keys to weight loss that I was committed to following in the midst of my busy life, and they worked! How did I do it? Keep reading…

When I got serious about losing weight, there were a few things I was very clear about, and one was that I wasn’t going to follow a diet. Diets are temporary, and I wanted to be done with the weight struggle for good. I also knew that I wouldn’t stay on some super-restrictive, bland, depriving diet that wouldn’t allow me the room to eat good food. So a “normal” diet was out.

It had to be simple. I was learning to mother a toddler, I needed to split my time between running my home, cooking, shopping, growing up a small human, trying to be close to my husband, and going to see patients at the office, doing surgery, and being on call at the hospital. Any plan that required fancy meal prep or hours in the kitchen or a bunch of rules (that I’d forget) was out.

Simple was the plan. I’d been studying a program that taught about relearning to respect the body’s innate wisdom and follow the signals for hunger and fullness. When I thought about it, I hadn’t been eating because I was really hungry for a long time. There were lots of reasons I chose to eat, but true hunger was rarely one of them! And if I was honest, I regularly ate until I was uncomfortably full. It made sense to me that God designed us as humans with signals of when to eat and when to stop, just like my little one did when I fed her. Most animals in nature didn’t seem to have a weight problem – they didn’t eat on a schedule or have some complicated diet.

I decided to focus on hunger and fullness. I’d eat anything – no food would be off-limits, as long as I ate it when I was truly hungry. I could have anything I wanted! Suddenly, I was free – no more food rules, no “bad” foods, no restrictions. When I considered what I really wanted to eat, the first thing that came to mind was pizza. Made sense to me – pizza has always been my favorite food! But in the past, if I was trying to lose weight, pizza was off the list because it was “bad” for weight loss – all that cheese and bread! But this was my plan, and I was going to be free of the food rules. So that’s how I ate pizza and wings and chocolate and still lost weight. I ate all the foods I wanted, but I only ate them when I was hungry and I stopped when I was full. Sounds too easy right? It wasn’t.

I didn’t really want to wait for hunger all the time…

I’ll never forget one day I’d waited to get hungry. It was a struggle because I really wanted to eat, and it seemed like hunger was taking a long time to come around. But I was committed to the plan, so I kept waiting. When I finally got hungry, I was ready. I had some barbequed wings in the frig and I warmed a couple in the oven. I got out a small plate, got those wings and fries, and sat down, ready to enjoy my food. A few bites in, I started getting this very quiet suggestion that I was full. But I wasn’t done with my wings and I only had two! I was heated – I’d waited like I was supposed to, right? And now I wasn’t even going to finish these two measly wings on my plate? I argued and railed and fussed, but it was clear – either I was going to stop eating or I was going to overeat. I would pay the price on the scale if I chose to overeat.

I dumped the rest of the food in the trash.

For me, it was a hard choice. I was taught not to waste food. I was a committed member of the Clean Plate Club, so scraping food into the trash felt wrong. But what was my option? Eat more than I needed and store that food on my body, or let it go?

It wasn’t worth overeating to clean my plate. I had some serious deprogramming to do. But I kept at it – each day waiting for hunger, paying attention to my body, eating slowly, and stopping when that quietly-full feeling appeared. I learned to put less on my plate. I learned to welcome hunger instead of feeling panicky when it appeared and snacking to make it go away. I learned.

This is how I know a diet isn’t the answer. I’ve gained weight eating “clean”. I went plant-based (for environmental reasons) and didn’t lose a pound. When I was in my holistic nutrition training, as suggested I trialed the macrobiotic diet, the keto diet, all the diets, and if I didn’t observe hunger and fullness I gained weight. You can lose weight on any style of eating that you want to practice, but if you override the hunger and fullness wisdom of your body, weight loss isn’t possible. Sure, there are nuances with hormones and over-hunger from processed foods, but there is no hack to permanent weight loss. If there was I’d have found it! 

If you’ve been on the roller coaster of new diets, trying to find the right combination of foods or a schedule of eating that will unlock weight loss for your body, I get it. You want to believe that if you just find the right plan the weight will just fall off and you’ll finally be thin. It just doesn’t work that way. Weight loss happens in the mind. The body follows. 

If you’ve decided that you’re done with the roller coaster and you want help getting your mind and body on the permanent weight loss track, I’m here to help! Email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and we’ll set up a consultation. You don’t have to figure it out alone!

Here’s your video help for the week!

It’s time to get back on track! 

We’re in that season of wrapping up the school year, getting ready for camps, and hoping to take a breath as the long, hot days of summer approach. And in the back of your mind, you’re wondering how the results from your New Year’s weight-loss resolution got away from you. It’s swimsuit season and you wanted to be excited instead of dreading shopping for a new suit. Sometimes weight loss can just feel hopeless…

But it’s NOT – and I want to inspire you by bringing back some stories from my work as a weight loss coach! You can look at my clients and see that even with tough situations, busy lives, and no personal chef or trainer, success with permanent weight loss IS possible. So join me and visit these stories as you get recommitted to your weight loss plan!

Here we go!

I want to apologize…

It’s taken me a minute to realize that I haven’t let you in on what I’m doing. Some of you are new to the blog, but many of you have been around for years, reading these posts, seeing my recipes, watching me help my family go plant-based, and now I’m talking about weight loss and coaching and I never explained why!

You know how sometimes you’re too close to a situation to see clearly and it all makes sense and seems obvious to you until you talk to someone else about it and they’re completely confused? That’s what happened to me. I’m all gung-ho about my weight loss coaching, telling people that I’m a certified coach, offering to help, and when I share I realize they don’t know what I’m talking about. Not really.

It’s easy to get it when I say, “I’m a doctor.” You know that means I went to medical school and residency and I take care of patients. But a coach? Coach of what? How do I help?

I’m going to be more clear. So I’ve decided that the best way to explain what I’m doing as a coach is to tell you stories. Fun, right? For the next several weeks I’m going to tell stories about people I’ve helped in their weight loss journey so you can see the lasting impact that coaching can have on weight loss.

Let’s start with my story…

After my first baby…

Ever since I can remember and probably at least since puberty, I was overweight. I don’t recall any time in my adult life when I was at a normal, healthy weight. All through high school and college I struggled with weight, negative body issues, shame, and self-hatred. It was tough. I tried crazy metabolic diets, Weight Watchers, whatever I thought would help.

I was a dancer in both high school and college. I was always the biggest girl on the stage.  Moving and performing were pure joy, but putting on the tight-fitting costumes wasn’t a fun experience.

Things didn’t improve when I got into medical school. I lived alone and studied my days away. Snacks were an easy way to break up the monotony and keep from falling asleep on the books. Medical training also taught me to eat whenever I had a chance even if I wasn’t hungry because I wouldn’t know when the next chance to eat would be. Residency was even worse. The constant snacking and “I deserve it” eating became an ingrained pattern.

After training was over and I had my first baby, I was almost 200 pounds. I was exactly the same weight I was when I started the pregnancy. Trying to breastfeed and stay covered was hard because I was pretty big up top. I wanted to be one of those pretty young moms pushing a stroller, looking fit and energetic, but in reality, I was exhausted, heavy, and uncomfortable in my own body. When I started avoiding being in any pictures with my daughter because I hated how I looked, I knew something had to change.

I lost 60 pounds in 6 months. After a lifetime of living in a body that didn’t feel comfortable, I finally felt full of lightness and energy! It was exhilarating! I wanted everyone I knew that struggled with their weight to have the same success and feeling I had – but when people asked me how I lost the weight, I didn’t know how to explain. No, I didn’t do a diet. No, I wasn’t starving myself or exercising to exhaustion. No, I wasn’t taking pills or shots. People looked at me sideways when I said I was only eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was full. Yes, but how? And what else?

After four babies…

I didn’t know how to say it then, but what had changed was my mind. I was thinking about food, my body, what I would and wouldn’t do around food in a completely different way than I had my whole life. For the past more than 15 years that I’ve kept off this weight, I knew my mind had changed, but I didn’t know how to give that transformation to someone else.

So I became a certified life and weight loss coach.

Now I’m able to help other women make decisions about their life and weight that get them unstuck. I help my clients see how their thinking is creating the life they have now. Coaching allows me to help my clients create the results they want in their life and reach their goals. I get to use all of my physician’s brain and my coach training to help people to find the health and wellness that they want. It’s a wonderful place to be!

If you know that what you need to get to your weight loss goal is a transformation in your thinking, I can help! Email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and let’s set up a consultation. I can help you get a jump start toward your goal in one hour and we can work together to reach that goal!

Come back next week to learn about successful weight loss on chicken wings and pizza…

Here’s your video help for the week!