Weight Loss For Foodies Podcast | Ditch The Diet And Lose Weight With Shari Broder

I was listening to an episode of Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugars podcast in which she talked about her experience with Vogue magazine just before the release of Wild, her autobiography about transformation and overcoming adversity. Vogue was doing a piece about powerful women, and they wanted to feature her.  On the day of the photoshoot, Cheryl felt good about how she looked. She didn’t lose the weight she had hoped to lose, but she felt confident and pretty.   When the issue of the magazine came out, however, Cheryl and her husband were shocked at her photo. They weren’t even sure it was actually Cheryl because she looked so different. Among other things, they made her slimmer.  In doing so, the message Vogue gave Cheryl was that despite her accomplishments, she wasn’t enough because she wasn’t thin, and they had to change that to feature her as a “powerful woman” in their magazine.  Vogue and other publications and mass media set the skinny standard for us.  They show us, through photos of rail-thin women, ho

As a weight coach, I see one of my roles as fighting our cultural stigma about body size.  Sure I want to help people be at a weight where they’re comfortable, but weight stigma actually keeps you stuck.  Worse, it is one of the last bastions of what many people still consider an acceptable prejudice. Too many people still think it’s okay to talk about everyone else’s weight and feel free to say derogatory things about people’s bodies. It’s wrong and has harmful consequences.  I often have difficulty finding the right words to use when referring to weight. Even using words like overweight or obese seem wrong. Both involve a judgment.  When we say “overweight,” what are we talking about anyway?  Over what weight?  How do you determine what the right weight is for someone to make a judgment that they are over that? And why would you even want to go there? The most commonly used measure is body mass index, or BMI. BMI is a flawed measure of both your weight and the state of your health. I help women let go of un

In the world of dieting, too much emphasis is placed on what to eat to lose weight. Diets prohibit you from eating certain foods, usually ones that taste really good. The ones you enjoy the most. Some of the most popular fad diets even prohibit you from eating nutritious foods like fruits, vegetables and beans.  All of this emphasis on what to eat and what to totally ban from your life is so misplaced. And very misleading.  It makes you think that if you just do something like stop eating sugar, everything will be just fine.  Or If you could just stop eating carbs, you’d lose all the weight and never have to worry about it again.  Or if you just eat “clean,” whatever that means, you’ll be healthy and slim.  But this isn’t true.  The latest scam of the diet industry, which makes money from keeping you on the diet hamster wheel, is to repackage diets under the guise of “wellness” or a “lifestyle change.” Don’t fall for it. Restrictive diets are not a lifestyle change or about wellness.  Listen to learn why food

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been finding my level of stress and frustration is higher than usual. Notably higher. There’s COVID, which creates a constant undercurrent of stress. There’s a lot going on politically in the US that I find very upsetting and frustrating. And don’t we all have at least one personal relationship that we find difficult? So how do you handle this?  Do you eat?  And eat? And gain weight?  I have a better idea. How about a little purposeful venting?  Some good old fashioned complaining. Consciously, to yourself.  Listen to learn a special technique for blowing off steam consciously, in a way that can be cathartic without getting anyone else involved.  It can unblock your energy and get it flowing in a positive direction again.  Yes, complaining can have an upside! Have you checked out the Weight Loss for Foodies YouTube  channel yet? You’ll find short videos to keep you inspired with tips and strategies for putting your food obsession in the past, and learning how to eat what you l

Who are some of the people you admire most?  They can be people you know personally, or people in the public eye, like celebrities, thought leaders, or artists.  Anyone.  Now think about what you admire  most about each one.  How many of them did you say, “their body?” Although I admire many people, what their body looks like does not make it near the top of my list for anyone on it.   When I think of these people, I don’t think about what their bodies look like. I think about who they are. What they do. How they make the world a better place.  Even for someone like Beyoncé. Likewise, what your body looks like is one of the least important things about you.  I know, that sounds strange coming from a coach who helps people lose weight, but it’s true. Yet a lot of people have low self-esteem because of how they think their body looks.  This causes them to have trouble managing their eating, taking good care of themselves, and  being a healthy weight. They’re stuck  because of how they feel about themselves.  Ar

You can’t hate yourself thin.  To the contrary, if you want to succeed at losing weight and keeping it off, you must start with a positive body image and be compassionate towards yourself.  Maybe you’re thinking, “how can I feel positively about this body? If I felt positively about it, I wouldn’t want to lose weight.”   You can accept your body and feel positively about it, and still want to improve it.  Truth: losing weight doesn’t mean you’ll have a good body image.  That’s because having a good body image is more about how you think than what you look like.  There are things about your body that you can’t control, no matter what you weigh.  But the one thing you CAN control is how you think about it.  Given a choice between changing your body and changing your body image, I encourage you to choose the latter to start with. Because once you change how you feel about your body, losing weight will actually be easier.  You have the power to change your body image and be compassionate with yourself now! Listen

Do you eat because of stress, to comfort yourself or avoid uncomfortable feelings? Eating for emotional reasons may be the single greatest cause of overeating and weight gain.  It’s the reason why most dieters gain the weight back.  Emotional eating is instant gratification.  It’s a distraction from your pain. But at a high cost.  In reality, emotional eating is a mediocre coping mechanism that not only causes weight gain, but even more importantly, it negatively affects your life in other ways.  But here’s the good news: you can kick that habit, and once you do, the urge to eat for emotional reasons is GONE. Then, losing weight and keeping it off becomes so much easier.  Listen to learn how emotional eating negatively affects your life and what you can do about it.  If you want to learn more about how to end your emotional eating habit and feel the liberation of NOT desiring food every time things are difficult or upsetting, check out my free masterclass Kick the Emotional Eating Habit for Good. 

Do you eat in response to your body’s hunger signals?  Or do you eat routinely when you aren’t hungry? Hmmm. Hunger. Have you checked in with yours lately? Here are some examples of  eating when you aren’t hungry: You eat at set times without even thinking about whether you’re hungry, like having lunch every day at noon, regardless of hunger. You eat when you’re stressed, frustrated, lonely or sad. You eat out of habit, like at the movie theater or while watching TV after dinner. Everyone eats when they aren’t hungry occasionally. That’s no big deal. But if you normally eat when you aren’t hungry, you are likely overeating.  And overeating causes weight gain.  It doesn’t matter whether you’re eating a bag of chips, a cupcake, a smoothie bowl or a salad. If you aren’t hungry, it’s going to cause you to gain weight over time.   Eating when you aren’t hungry is a learned habit. When you were a toddler, you didn’t do it. You naturally ate when you were hungry.  You can learn to eat that way again.  And an added

Are you merely consuming content about weight loss, or are you actually doing the work?   “No great achievement is possible without persistent work.”  Those words of Bertrand Russell are applicable to changing your eating habits, achieving food freedom and reaching your healthy weight. Sure, you can listen to a podcast episode once and hear me explain how to manage your emotions so that you don’t eat when you aren’t hungry.  You can know how to manage your thinking. But if, when you get the urge to eat because you’re upset about something, you don’t coach yourself, and instead you eat to avoid your feelings, nothing will change.  When you’re trying to change lifelong habits, just having the knowledge of how to fix it doesn’t go very far. You can learn many things, but if you don’t put them into practice, you’ll go nowhere. This week’s podcast is about the three keys to success in weight management, good health, and pretty much everything else in life:  commitment, persistence and consistency.  Listen to learn

Do you have issues with food and eating that are rooted in a negative self-image?  Do you hate the way you look?  Is your ability to see all of your strengths and gifts is clouded by your focus on the things about yourself that you don’t like, or that you think are inadequate?  This episode is for you if you focus more on what’s wrong with you than what’s right.  To be successful on your weight loss journey, you have to love yourself.  A poor self-image will make you unhappy, regardless of what your body looks like.  You DO know that being slim is no guarantee of happiness, right? You can lose weight and still be unhappy.  If you don’t clean up your thinking about yourself, you won’t be happy, even if your body looks like Cameron Diaz’s.  In this episode, I’m sharing with you some of Pema Chodron’s wisdom about self love and compassion.  Then I’ll walk you through a process to change your perspective about yourself and raise your self-esteem.   Listen now to learn how to feel better about yourself regardless

You’ve made a bunch of changes to your eating habits.  You’re listening to your body, eating when you’re hungry, stopping when lightly full. Eating consciously without distractions. You’ve stuck with it for weeks or even a few months or years.  You’ve lost weight, feel great, and discovered the liberating feeling of eating in tune with your body’s signals.  Then something throws you off course.  Maybe it’s something big like the Pandemic.  Or something more usual, like the occasional exception that you’ve been making to your plan becomes more frequent. Or maybe a change in your life interferes. A new job. You get sick.  Something takes you out of your routine.  Suddenly, you’ve fallen back in your old groove, the one that you’ve worked so hard to get out of.  This is normal! It happens to everyone!  The important thing is what you do AFTER you mess up. Listen to learn the 6 steps for getting back on track after backsliding.  Are you ready to learn how you can eat what you love without feeling out of control a

How often do you choose to eat for a reason that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether your body is physically hungry?  Maybe you want to eat because a certain food looks or smells good. Or because you’re worried about whether you can pay your bills. Or because you’re lonely, or are having difficulties with your spouse or partner. Maybe it’s to reward yourself for working too hard.  Perhaps you’re in that hamster wheel of seeking pleasure from food, then feeling miserable because you overate, frustrated that you’re gaining weight, and your doctor told you that your cholesterol has gone up, all of which make you more upset, so you eat some more. A very vicious cycle, isn’t it?  Or maybe, like one woman posted on social media recently, you cling to food to get through your pain.  Underneath all of that food that your body doesn’t need, and often stores as fat, is something going on in your life that wants to teach you something about yourself when you’re ready to learn.  Here’s an unarguable fact:  food can

Your emotions are super important. Emotions are your body’s way of trying to get your attention. Were you taught to ignore them or squash them down?  Did your parents expect you to not feel or hide your anger, frustration, boredom or whatever other uncomfortable feelings you had?  Maybe you learned that  expressing these emotions was wrong. When you ignore your feelings or bury them under a lot of sweets or chips or whatever, you are ignoring yourself, your body and your needs.  Ignoring your emotions is downright unhealthy. Eating to avoid feeling them is a very temporary remedy.  It may make you feel better for a short while, but whatever caused those feelings  you’re eating to avoid will still be there long after the food has left your mouth and the pleasure is gone. In this episode, I’m introducing another tool for managing your emotions so that you don’t eat to avoid them. This method, which was developed by psychologist Julia Colwell, helps you experience the emotion, learn from it and let it go. It’s s

A report issued within the diet industry around 2002 stated, “In 2002, 231 million Europeans attempted some form of diet. Of these only 1 percent will achieve permanent weight loss.” If that isn’t proof that the diet industry is well aware that what it is selling doesn’t work, I don’t know what is.  But here’s the real question I want to talk about today:  Why is it so hard to lose weight and keep it off? I’m not saying impossible. Just hard.  Once I stopped dieting and changed how and why I was eating, my extra weight, which I’d struggled with for decades, came off pretty easily.  Because I changed my eating habits, the weight stayed off.  But this episode is not about why change is hard.  It’s about the ways in which our bodies seem to work against us.   It’s about the physiological reasons why it’s difficult to lose weight, especially after being on the diet hamster wheel.  The problem is largely one of metabolic suppression. Dieting exacerbates that problem. Listen to learn how dieting  predisposes people

Do you focus on what’s wrong with your body, rather than what’s right with it?  Do you focus on what  your body can’t do, rather than what it can and does do?  Our bodies are truly awesome. They are incredibly intelligent.  Our bodies receive and process millions of bits of sensory information every second--they process way more information than our brains can.  Your body performs thousands of functions automatically every single day! You don’t have to do anything. Your body knows what to do.  And our bodies connect us to our own wisdom when we listen to them.  But so many people ignore their bodies and the messages their body is trying to give them. When they aren’t doing that, they’re being critical of their body.  What if you moved your focus away from criticizing your body, to gratitude, love and appreciation of your body for how it supports you and allows you  to experience life on this planet?  Learn why fighting against your body, hating it, criticizing it and wanting it to be different impedes your ab

How many times have you heard this saying? “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Yet so many people have difficulty reaching their weight goals because they’re stuck in a repetitive pattern of doing the same thing that doesn’t work, over and over again. As the columnist Molly Ivins said, “The  first rule of holes: When you are in one, stop digging.”  In this episode,  you’ll learn  how to stop digging yourself deeper into that overeating hole. We’ll explore how a simple change can break your patterns of overeating or emotional eating.  Because every time you repeat a habit that moves you away from your goals, you’re reinforcing that pattern in your brain, and thereby make it a little harder to break the habit.  I’m so excited to make available to you my Free Video Masterclass, Kick the Emotional Eating Habit for Good. Hop over to my website, sharibroder.com, and take advantage of this free resource. You can access it instantly! No need to be available at a sp

Approximately 91 percent of women report that they are dissatisfied with their bodies.  This body dissatisfaction starts early because half of teenage girls and a quarter of teenage boys report being dissatisfied with THEIR bodies.  Pretty alarming and sad stats, huh? This is contagious. How we approach food, eating and our weight gets passed onto our kids. That’s why it’s so important for you to have a peaceful, sane relationship with food.  Even if you’re a work in progress on that front, you can still do right by your children.  You can help your kids avoid having the same struggles you’ve had.  There’s lots of research confirming what you shouldn’t do with your kids with respect to food, eating and diets if you are concerned about their weight and health.  Like that you should never put your kid on a diet.  I’m sharing the dos and don’ts in this episode.  Learn what you can do to help your child develop an abundance mindset and a healthy, peaceful, sane relationship with food, eating and their body.  The

Do you have a voice inside your head that can be really negative at times?  Does it diss you about all kinds of things?  Tell you that you suck?  You’re a failure?  You can’t do whatever?  We all have that voice to some degree, some of us a lot worse than others.  We all experience it a little differently.  Maybe your voice that tells you that you will never be able to lose weight because you’ve failed so many times before.  Whatever it’s saying, It's that voice that holds you back and keeps you stuck.  If you’re not careful, if you don’t learn how to manage it, that voice will play in your head all the time.  The big problem is that you may be confusing this voice with who you are.  We think we ARE our thoughts.  But here’s the truth. You are NOT your thoughts.  Listen to learn some simple steps for turning off that voice--disconnecting from it--and get out of your own way!

Are you confused about how to tell what your body wants to eat when you’re hungry?  Why eat when you’re hungry anyway? Your body’s hunger and fullness signals, which are controlled by your hormones, are there to tell you precisely how much food you need to be your healthy body weight.  If you aren't hungry when you start eating, you won't know when to stop.  You will be out of sync with what your body needs.  You won't know what to eat or when to stop. If you eat when you're hungry, you  know to stop eating when you’re no longer hungry. That’s the easy part! Listening to your body to decide WHAT to eat involves learning the difference between head hunger and body hunger.  It involves learning what your signs of physical hunger are.  The first step in deciding what to eat is tuning into the body. Learning what your body wants can be more challenging for people than simply getting to know your hunger signals.  Listen below to learn how to tune into your body’s hunger signals and give it what it needs.  Remember

In Episode 111, we learned  what causes resistance and how cultivating a growth mindset is a major approach to breaking through it.  Today, in part 2 about resistance, we’re talking about how to investigate where your resistance comes from so that you can get to the bottom of what’s causing it, untangle it and get it out of the way! Yoga has a word for bits from our past that we hold inside us that keep coming up, and interfere with our ability to see what’s happening now. They’re called Samskaras. Samskaras can come up and you don’t even  realize it, but they will cause you to react in a particular way based upon your past.  Samskaras may be a trigger or conditioning. The problem with samskaras is that they prevent you from experiencing things in the present moment. Samskaras are a form of resistance.  Have you ever thought about what it actually is that you’re resisting by staying where you are?  Join me in learning how to  get to the bottom of what we’re really hungry for. Because I can assure you that whe