Emerge from COVID feeling great | Optimum Health Essentials

Emerge from hibernation with a spring in your step

Dr Matthew Bourke

April 24, 2020

Hands up if you’ve had enough emails in your inbox about a certain current pandemic? Do you want to focus of something else, just for a little while?

How about making use of this time to prepare yourself for coming out of it the other side in better shape?

I have helped people lose weight since 2003 when my husband put on rather a few too many kilos over the Christmas period, due to Christmas cake, fudge, chocolate, pudding….only to find he couldn’t get into a new pair of shorts I bought him in January. He said I’d bought a size too small. I hadn’t. He lost 13 kg in 12 weeks and we wrote a book about it, called The Weekday Diet. Ever since then I’ve worked with thousands of people to guide them through the seemingly endless array of diets available to us helping them to lose that excess weight, in fact my kilo weight loss tally is now reaching that of a 10 tonne truck!

Do you ever wonder where that fat goes? Well, it goes into the air as water as you breathe out, through your sweat and urine.

Are you confused about which diet to follow? There is the low carb, low sugar, ketone, time restricted fasting, 5/2, carnivore, low fat, fruit fast, vegetable fast, Celery juice, The Weekday Diet, meal replacement drinks plus the drops diet I’ve been using with many of my patients lately.

The problem I see in clinic is people are so confused, that they take a little of this one, then a little of that one and inevitiably it doesn’t work. Largely because we have to be single minded when it comes to weight loss and stick to one regimen. They all work, the trick is in finding a plan that suits you and is sustainable.

It’s quite straightforward. If you diet and go back to normal eating, you’ll go back to your normal body, you have to find a way to eat that you like in order to keep the weight off. Then you are never on a diet, you just eat according to how you want to eat and not how others want you to eat.

And that’s a big issue. Common feedback I hear from clients, that destabilises their success, is the impact of other people and social gatherings – well-meaning friends, relatives, functions, conferences, holidays, and largely one’s social life, can get in the way.

Which is why if you change your tastebuds and find new food that tastes delicious, you will be able to stick to it longer term. Plus, if you manage to change your set point for weight, (i.e. where you brain says ‘sorry this is your weight, tough, I’m taking you right back to your start point’), you can have food that doesn’t suit you some of the time, and your body will be able to deal with it without putting the weight back on.

The strategy behind The Weekday Diet, which I use when we achieve your goal weight, is to have your treats every weekend, and still keep the weight down, and even lose it, in some cases.

And I do mean we get you to your weight. Sure you put the food in your mouth, but I bleed for you if you struggle and I’m sitting on your shoulder whispering, ‘choose that one, you’ll feel so good’.

Whilst I usually don’t recommend people diet in the winter because it’s a time to cocoon (healthily), I’m doing a back flip thanks to COVID-19. Now seems to be a perfect time to change habits – we’re changing the way we live, after all.

So what do you think? Is this a good time to start thinking about shedding extra kilos? Given we are not tempted by beautiful restaurants, cafes, being entertained by our wonderful friends who feed us sumptuous, but perhaps weight gaining food, why not use this extra time we have for our own good? This could be a time when we reflect and do what suits us, so we come out the other side with a spring in our step, rejuvenated with a lighter, brighter body. Not to mention a wardrobe of clothes we feel great in.

So where do we start?

Losing weight is the easy part, keeping it off is the more difficult part. The most popular diet that I’m working with at the moment teaches you how to keep it off once the diet is over. It’s a 6 1/2 week program. The first 3 weeks is where you lose the weight, the second 3 weeks is the most important part – learning what types and quantities of food will keep you at your goal.

There are two versions of the diet. If you did the diet some years ago, I now have an easier version for the weight loss stage. Most people who have done it recently have found it relatively easy, the exceptions are where the weight loss is emotional and then we need to add on techniques like neuro emotional technique (NET) from our amazing chiropractors, hypnotherapy, meditation, all of which help resolve the triggers to sabotage.