Any woman who has struggled with her weight and has gone through multiple rounds of diets before has heard the term “starvation mode”.
But how do I heal myself from starvation mode?
That’s kind of a big curly question that a lot of women get really stuck on.
It’s like they know there’s havoc and crisis and chaos happening inside their bodies – but they don’t know what to do about it.
Essentially, starvation mode is a really great descriptive mode that many people refer to when their body just seems like it’s shut down, it’s just hoarding all the fat, it’s hoarding all the calories, it’s slowed down the metabolism – and no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to get a result on the scales or in how your clothes feel.
As a result, it feels like you have to try so hard to just get a tiny weight loss result, whereas other people can seem to change their full cream cappuccino into a skimmed milk one and drop 5 kilos in a week.
It feels really, really frustrating.
In this video I’m going to show you the steps that you need to take to flick the switch.
So instead of your body being primed to store fat really stubbornly and have a really sluggish metabolism, you can go the complete opposite and be primed towards a lean, healthy physique, and gravitate towards healthy nourishing foods, and just have the inside out radiant health and that body and figure and size and level of tone of your dreams.
And, yes, no matter what your gene pool, no matter how hard you’ve tried, how long you’ve struggled for, there’s nothing so magical about losing weight – and there’s nothing so broken about your body that this can’t be true for you too.
You’re at the long line of natural selection evolution. The innate healing wisdom of your body is your birthright and you can tap into it when you know how.
As a personal trainer, as I started graduating into being a mind body weight loss coach, I first started learning about this principle with John Gabriel who’s a leading expert in the field of mind body weight loss. He calls it the fat and temperature switch, the FAT Switch – but you’ll also hear this philosophy hard in Deepak Chopra’s work, in the work of amazing naturopaths and holistic nutritionists, as well as the course content in the Institute of Integrated Nutrition.
This isn’t just something that I made up. These are the other methods and the steps that work now and always have.
With my clients, when we start working on the 4 planes of manifestation and not just looking at diet and exercise alone, they get really pleasantly surprised at how different their body feels, looks, the significant drops they get, especially around their waist, thighs and jowls.
And they can do all this without that punishing exercise and restrictive dieting just by adding more nourishment into their diet – not just restricting – and enjoying their life more.
How good does that sound?
The 4 main problems that high-performing women in business experience when they’re struggling with their weight and they’ve got some form of benign in starvation mode is that they feel really exhausted and sluggish, so their body doesn’t naturally gravitate towards wanting to do energetic exercise, moreso just want to flop on the couch at the end of a really hard day.
Stress creates a lot of emotional eating triggers. And that’s never for broccoli and steamed fish, right? That’s always to high-calorie, fat-laden, sugar-laden foods.
This overtime starvation mode slows down your metabolism because it thinks it’s in a famine.
All those past diets, all those failed attempts, those rebound attempts and all that sporadic eating now, actually slows down your metabolism and makes your body want to store fat really stubbornly, especially around the waist, the thighs, the butt, the jowls, and even the upper arms too.
It can just be really frustrating because you don’t have the time to put in all the work, don’t have the time to do all the research – and the effort that you do put in doesn’t seem to reap the rewards that have in the past and it becomes really demotivating.
The steps that I recommend you take is to address this excess weight in the 4 planes of manifestation.
Firstly, we’ve got to look at the physical. Looking after your gut health is vital – and adding in as much protein, vitality and omegas to help you nourish your body well is so critically important.
Next we need to move onto the emotional plane. If somebody’s in emotional famine or their emotional state is tripping off that FAT Switch, it’s often expressed in low-level chronic anxiety. It means that you might be eating your feelings instead of feeling them. Or there might just actually be a lot of trauma from the past holding you back and trying to keep you safe and keep you protected from that scary thing outside of you or out in the future that might exposed to you if you were suddenly that ideal weight that you’ve always wanted to be – and the best way to keep me safe is to keep on these extra kilos.
The best way to defrag from that is with meditation, with mindfulness, actually bringing yourself away from your desk, getting out in nature, and having some more trust and presence in the moment. As opposed to always flipping back to the past and the fear of past mistakes, and then always trying to flip into the future and trying to control everything that might happen in the future so you don’t experience the pain of the past.
That also leads us into emotional famine, emotional triggers for the excess weight.
The fourth is addressing it from a spiritual perspective. This really is about being connected to the true you, the real you – and often these excess outer layers means that it kind of feels like the body that you show the world doesn’t truly reflect who you actually are – the confident, kickbutt, talented, hardworking and driven person that you really are.
And if you’re going through that physical, mental, emotional famine, then absolutely, you’ll be missing the joy out of life, the deep spiritual connection that you have with yourself and your surroundings.
It’s only when you can start to fill up on the deliciousness of life so that all your strategies aren’t actually about bringing in external pleasure through your mouth to bring you some kind of internal pleasure… It’s only when we can start to rebalance that imbalance that you can start to see a change in your physical manifestation.
Now if it’s a mental famine, if it’s a mental trigger that’s kicking off this FAT Switch, it’s like you never have a break from constantly running a to-do list in your mind. It’s just always switched on. It’s like there’s all this white noise in there. As a result, there’s just all this sort of stress happening – and it’s enough to make the body or your cavewoman brain think, “Oh my god, there’s a threat, there’s something that’s a threat to my survival!”
What we’ve been talking today is all about the FAT Switch, which is in the foundational phase of this Body Confidence Blueprint. This is the exact system that I use to help high-performing women in business go from feeling frumpy and frustrated and out of control with their eating habits to feeling in control and beach body confident all year round.
These are the exact steps that my clients used to drop anywhere from 5 to 18 kilos in 90 days without just giving up all the foods they love or spending hours in the gym – and going about it in a way that’s sustainable and cements their success so it’s long-term results.
If you would like your own copy of the Body Confidence Blueprint, you can do so for free by clicking the link below. There’s also a free training that goes along with it that I think you’ll absolutely love.
After suffering a fairly serious breakdown I was unable to cope with life in general. My body felt broke, old and frail – I didn’t just feel middle aged, I felt half dead. I hadn’t realised that my body was self destructing and I was doing it to myself, working long hours, too much alcohol, lots of bad food and absolutely no exercise.
After six months of working with Bianca, I no longer need my blood pressure medication, anti depressants and my cholesterol is in a safe zone. I have lost 2 dress sizes and more than 26 kilos. I now have a life outside of our business and can see a happy, healthy future for our family. I hope the person I became never comes back as I like this girl so much better.
I had heard of Bianca through some magazines – it was an investment but I had tried and failed so many times but in six short months, 20 kilos melted off me and it had a massive and unexpected effect on our styling business. While working with Bianca we secured a national gig, increased our prices to a level we previously thought no one would pay, AND we were booked out weeks in advance.
The majority of this 20 kilo weight loss has only been 5% diet and exercise, the rest has been an emotional journey. Bianca confronted me and called me on my BS and challenged some of my most deeply help beliefs about who I am. And the results are undeniable. I haven’t completely quit drinking, I still get to eat chocolate, I’ve had the best year in my business EVER – and perhaps the most important thing is how differently I react to things emotionally.
Who knew that taking it slowly and being kind to yourself could get you the results that yelling at yourself couldn’t.
Before working with Bianca I was super stressed and I thought it was too hard and I didn’t have the time to be slim AND successful. But I was surprised at how easy it was to implement Bianca’s system – I haven’t counted calories and I still pig out on foods I love. It’s been no coincidence to me that as a result of the new clarity of mind I’ve actually doubled my business at the same time I’ve made these changes to my body.