Ep 66- Stop Dieting Without Gaining Weight
May 15, 2025
If you’ve ever thought you had to pick between becoming an intuitive eater or losing weight, this episode is going to blow your mind.
I’m breaking down a coaching session I had this week with a client who was terrified to give up dieting out of fear of gaining weight.
Spoiler alert: You don't have to choose between food freedom and a healthy body. They’re actually the same path!
Tune in to hear:
Why dieting doesn’t work for weight loss
How natural eating can still lead to weight loss (without obsession)
The real reason “listening to your body” failed before
Why you CAN trust your hunger and fullness signals (yes, even with chips and cookies!)
How I lost 30 pounds eating dessert every day 🍪🍰
TRANSCRIPT:
All right. It is 7:00 PM on a Friday night, and I just got back from the gym. I changed into my pajamas, and I am here recording a podcast for you because I cannot stop thinking about this client that I coach today. And I just wanted to share it with you so much on this podcast that there's nothing else I'd rather be doing on my Friday night than me podcasting with you and hanging out in my room.
So I am going to talk to you about this client and what we coached on today, because I know so many of you can relate where you wanna give up dieting, but you are absolutely terrified of gaining weight.
Okay? So if right now where you want to become this natural, intuitive, confident eater, but you are so scared that that means you are going to be at your current weight or you are gonna gain more weight.
Now, the first mistake that people's mind. Is making when they make this assumption is that you can only take one of two paths. You can either take the natural eater path or you can take the weight loss path, and you now have to choose which one you want to choose and be on.
That is a thought error. The good news is you are actually on the same path. Whether you want to be a natural eater or you want to lose weight, I am going to give you the exact same coaching and the exact same advice.
It is not like someone comes into me and says, Hey Amber, I wanna lose 20 pounds. Like, can you coach me on that? And then someone else comes into me and says, Hey Amber, I wanna eat more intuitively and listen to my hunger and fullness. Can you coach me on that? No. They're gonna be the exact same coaching and here's why.
If you want to lose weight, what you need to do is stop overeating. What you need to do is listen to your hunger and fullness, what you need to do is eat mostly whole foods with some yummy, delicious foods in amounts that feel good to your body and to move your body in a way that feels really fun and easy.
That is going to be the same either way, but I don't know where people get this idea in their heads that I'm either going to lose weight or I'm going to have food freedom, because these two things are not separate. They are one of the same, and that is really good news.
Now, if you have been dieting for a while and you are just so nervous of what happens if I listen to my body and I keep gaining weight? Or what if this is my natural set point weight and I'm just here forever?
And to that, I want to tell you my friends, I know how scary that is. I have been there too, where I was much heavier than I am right now, and I was absolutely terrified that I was just gonna have to accept my body and be there forever.
Now, you do wanna love your body and you do wanna be kind to your body throughout the whole process, but when you are binge eating, you are not at your set point weight, okay? Because you have been binge eating, that is not the weight that you were meant to be at forever. That is a weight that is much higher than your natural weight.
So you can only tell me I am at my natural weight once you have been listening to your hunger and listening to your fullness for at least a couple of months, 90% of the time. We're never gonna be perfect eaters. I do not listen to my hunger and fullness a hundred percent of the time perfectly. But if you are overeating right now frequently and binge eating, I promise you you're not at your natural weight, which is very good news. Let's take a minute to remember too, that what got you into this mess in the first place was dieting. If dieting had worked by now, you would be happy and healthy and at your natural weight, and you would not be listening to this podcast with me.
So remember that dieting is not working for you. You need to try something new. And if you have told yourself, but I've tried intuitive eating, but I've tried listening to my body and it didn't work. You probably didn't have the right support. You probably didn't have the right mindset. You weren't doing the internal mindset work. You were just trying to do things. You were just trying to action your way out of it without looking at the underlying thoughts. That's not gonna work.
But you haven't actually tried listening to your body if you've been overeating, if you say, well, listening to my body didn't work and I gained weight the whole time, that's because you weren't listening to your body. That's 'cause you were still listening to your urges. And you weren't stopping at fullness.
Sorry, this might be kind of a tough love episode, but I'm on fire and I need to tell you guys these things before I end my workday officially and start my weekend.
Okay? So the other thing me and this client talked about was, I'm so nervous to eat things like chips and cookies and candy because I don't think I'll be able to lose weight if I do. I think that in order to lose weight, I'm gonna have to be good all the time. I'm having to take the hard path. I'm gonna have to give things up.
How many of you have thought that before? I know I sure did. That if I was gonna lose weight, I wouldn't have to eat the boring chicken and broccoli all day long and I was gonna be no fun and I don't want that.
And here's the good news, you don't have to do that. You know why? Because there are examples all around the world of these people who are the calorie counter crew, we'll call them.
And the calorie counter crew is telling you, you can eat donuts all day long, and as long as you eat less than your body needs, you're gonna lose weight. And that is the truth. Plenty of people lose weight eating donuts all day or at least some donuts in their diet, they lose weight eating desserts. You don't have to be calorie counting either to know this because we have a natural calorie counter inus, that is our hunger and fullness.
You and I did not get here today because our ancestors did not listen to their hunger and fullness. We would've died, we would've depleted our resources from our natural environment if we were overeating all the time. So we actually have been listening to our body with our hunger and fullness, with listening to our hot and coldness in our body with so many other signals for so much longer than you can imagine. And it is literally built in our DNA to be able to do this.
Now you might be telling me, but Amber, there weren't chips a thousand years ago. Yes. No, there were not. You were right on that, but that does not mean your body's still not equipped to figure out how to handle processed corn. Your body can figure that out.
It still understands that there's calories in it. It still takes into account those calories. It still understands that there's carbs in there, and it will tell you when you are done with them. And if you feel like, well, I eat all them and then my body doesn't feel good after that, is information from your body letting you know that amount of chips does not feel good to you.
And we can use that information to say, Hey, my body does have that wisdom. It tells me that when I eat the whole bag of chips, it doesn't feel good. So your body is communicating to you.
Have you ever heard of the Special K diet where people just eat special K for like three meals a day? I mean, what a money maker. I wish I sold this special K Diet. Like that's like the most genius idea ever. But people lost weight on it. You know how? Because they're eating less than their body was expending and so they lost weight.
In my journey, I lost about 30 pounds eating dessert every freaking day. Yes. Eating dessert. And you know how it's because I healed my relationship with food, it's because I stopped telling myself that dessert was poison and was going to make me fat every time I ate it. Because when I did that, what happened was I went into all or nothing thinking and I said, screw it.
I'm being so bad. I just want the dessert. I'm gonna be bad all week now. And then I would binge. 2000 calories of dessert and I would end up so much heavier. And so when I learned how I could just eat these foods in moderation, which I teach you how to do in my Confident Eater program, I teach you how to include these foods in a very slow controlled way, that you are going to use your body to decide how much feels good.
You're also going to learn how to dismiss your urges around these foods so you're not listening to your lower brain and your habit brain around these foods. But when I did that process. I was able to literally change how I interacted with these foods, and then I was able to have them in moderation. I promise you it's possible. Me and hundreds of other clients have done it. Go listen to some other testimonials if you want some more stories around it. But I know that, you know, logically, yeah, I can have these foods, these processed foods and amounts that feel good and lose weight, but sometimes our diet brain gets in the way.
And what I want you to do is I wanna take any other dieting thoughts that are coming up for you today, and I want you to put them in a box and store them away. And if in six months from now. You really give it your all by doing my methods or joining the Confident Eater Program. And if by the end of it you are like, this is just absolutely not working, you can pull up those diet thoughts and try again.
Sometimes it's helpful to just tell our brain, Hey, if we wanna go back to thinking these foods are bad and unhealthy and restricting them, we can't. We can do that fully giving yourself permission for that. But if we've been trying that for the last 10, 20, 30, 50 years and it hasn't worked, why don't we try something new?
Why don't we try a different approach? Why don't we take the leap to learn how to trust our body? And again, I recommend doing this with guidance because my friends, I listened to a lot of podcasts too. I read so many books. I watched so many YouTube videos, read so many articles online, and it didn't help until I got a coach who could target my brain and help me do this. Okay? So I can help you with it too.
All right. Anyways, this is the end of my rant today, but I just want you to know that dieting is not the only solution and is definitely probably not the solution, and that you absolutely can lose weight on this natural eater journey and I guess before I log off, I will tell you too, I don't think it's helpful to make weight loss your main priority because then you're obsessing over and number on this scale that literally does not matter that much.
What matters more is you feeling happy and healthy and having your dream eating habits. Imagining waking up in the morning and not feeling heavy because of your binge last night going into a restaurant with friends feeling calm because you're not worried about what's on the menu. 'cause you know you can see anything in moderation.
I went out to dinner with my family to Mexican the other night. And I had like three chips because I genuinely didn't want them. That was not the case before. I was not always like that, but I just wanted to save my hunger for the meal. I was so excited for the meal.
So you don't need to choose between do I wanna be a natural eater or do I wanna lose weight? Focus on your natural eating habits, and I promise you, your body will end up where it's supposed to be.
Trust yourself. Trust your body. Because that is the way to permanent, long lasting food freedom.
All right, my friends have an amazing rest of your day. I'm gonna go enjoy my weekend. I'm gonna go skiing this weekend. It's gonna be so much fun and it's gonna be even so much more fun because I don't have to worry about food. And this is possible for you too.
I 100% promise you. Okay. Love you guys all so much. Bye.