Losing Weight Is an Inside Job: How to Forget Food and Focus On You

By Katy Landis

You've been fed a lie. Losing weight is not just about food. It's connected to what makes you reach for something to eat when you feel overwhelmed, even though afterward, you feel more mise

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781544533612

Katy Landis

Katy Landis is a motivational speaker and nutrition and mindset coach who focuses on the root cause of emotional eating. She has a passion for helping people break the cycle of destructive overeating, develop positive habits, and form healthy relationships with food. She is committed to empowering others to reach their weight loss goals, nourish both body and soul, and transform their lives. She and her family live in the UK.

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Book Description

You’ve been fed a lie. Losing weight is not just about food. It’s connected to what makes you reach for something to eat when you feel overwhelmed, even though afterward, you feel more miserable than ever.

Losing Weight Is an Inside Job is for everyone trapped in a cycle of dieting and self-punishment. After decades of struggling, and having achieved lasting weight loss herself, Katy Landis presents powerful tools to help you lose weight for good. Changing her thinking ultimately allowed her to gain control over her eating. What worked for her can work for you too.

Discover the secret to feeling great about yourself while you lose weight and keep it off. Permanently. Learn to deal with painful experiences without being at the mercy of your emotions before taking the first bite. Forget obsessing over calories. Find out how one small change at a time will improve your mind, body, and life.

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Copyright © 2023 Katy Landis

All rights reserved.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-5445-3361-2

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For those who always want more.

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Contents

Book Description

Introduction

Part One: Awareness, Acceptance, Action

1. It’s All in the Mind

2. The Fear-Eat-Regret Cycle

3. Expectations and Acceptance

4. Respond, Not React

5. Practising Gratitude

6. Extreme Self-Care

7. Connecting to Others

Part Two: The Practice

8. Loving Little You

9. Feel Your Feelings

10. Shame

11. Say No to Say Yes

12. Now, It’s about Food

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

About the Author

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Introduction

When I was pregnant for the second time, I gained about sixty pounds. I was forty years old then, and a lot of that extra weight wasn’t a baby. I was hungry all the time, even though I constantly snacked on cheese sandwiches, cakes, and biscuits. There was no satisfying that hunger, though I certainly tried.

I had been trying my whole life.

With a toddler in tow and the new baby on the way, I kept about my daily tasks as best I could. This included regular trips to the shops, where I had become familiar with the staff, and we would pass a few pleasantries as I paid for my items. One day late in my pregnancy, I waddled in to pick up a few bits. When the shopkeeper looked up from her work, her eyes landed directly on my belly.

Oh my, you’re huge! Are you having a baby or an elephant?

For just a moment, my vision blurred. She was smiling. It was a joke! Just some light humour at the shops.

Oh, how we both laughed together—but my insides were churning. The shopkeeper had taken my deepest shame and said it aloud. She made clear what I, of course, already knew.

I was fat.

Although I don’t think she meant any malice, she also had no idea how she had hurt me. It was only when I got home behind the safety of my front door that I let the tears flow. The problem was not that I felt someone had been unkind to me. It was that I hated how big I had become.

I felt lost about how to change things, apart from another diet. But I already knew how that turned out.

The shopkeeper had no idea that her remark brought me to my lowest point that day. It’s hard to maintain a smile when you are in pain.

And I had been hurting for a long, long time.

Desperation Can Fuel Us

It’s so easy to blame ourselves for failing to lose weight. I should know. I struggled for decades to lose the weight and keep it off, but all I had to show for it was a solid track record of yo-yo dieting and a wardrobe that spanned eight sizes. I could do very well on a two-week diet, or even a six-week diet. I stuck to the plan, starving myself with whatever the fad was this time, and the pounds would disappear.

The moment the diet ended and I was left to my own devices, however, I just could not stop eating.

I didn’t know how to live with food. I was either dieting or overeating. There was no healthy middle ground.

For nearly my whole life, I could not stop eating. I tried to gain control by dieting, but that didn’t help. Whenever I went on a diet, my body was starved of nutrients, so the hunger was real. Even though I was aware that I didn’t have any control over my eating, even though I knew it was self-destructive behaviour, I simply could not stop.

And I wanted to stop, desperately. I wanted to be slim. I wanted to enjoy my time with other people instead of obsessing about the food. When could I eat? Do they know I hate how I look? Do they notice I’ve gained back the pounds?

I worked very hard to keep these thoughts to myself. I managed my facial expressions and made sure to keep up conversations and laugh at the jokes. I never missed a cue. I looked absolutely fine to the outside world, as though my extra weight was of no concern. I would show up to life as if I was okay.

I was not.

You may also be very good at putting up a front. We learn to hide, and soon it becomes second nature.

But it still hurts.

By the time I found myself in my forties, still overweight and sobbing over a shopkeeper’s offhand remark, I knew something had to change. I was stretched to the limits in my personal life, with a growing family, a marriage that needed tending, and an ageing parent relying on me to solve her problems as well as mine. I was also obsessed with my weight and the food that dictated that number: what I ate, when I ate, how much I ate.

Ironically, my battle with food and eating opened the door that led to transformation. My desperation forced me to change my outlook on life. I could continue to fuel the downward spiral I was on, trying and failing again and again to find the diet that would solve my problems for good. But dieting was fueling the madness: I always ended up putting the weight back on, often even more than before.

Or I could choose a different way by looking at what was really going on. I discovered that the root cause of my overeating was in between my ears—it was in my mind. All this time, I had been looking in the wrong direction. I had been looking at the food, not at my thinking. When I changed my thinking, my body also changed. For good.

That was fifteen years ago. I lost over sixty pounds. I did this without going hungry, taking medications, or exercising every day. Instead, I accomplished the weight loss by healing and by addressing what was really going on inside.

And I discovered how to feel good again—how to love and care for myself so completely that I no longer need food to do it for me.

Now I have a different way to deal with painful situations and difficult emotions. I have tools based on nurturing, love, and understanding. And by using these tools, I can find a deep peace and healing that leads to a full life, not a full belly.

And this book will help you do the same.

Life Starts Today—Not Tomorrow

If you picked up this book looking for a way out of your weight struggles, I want to help you. You know you are carrying extra weight. You also know the pain of constant dieting, and that desperate hope that this time, somehow, it will be different. Past experience has shown you that the minute you come off the diet, however, the weight comes back, often leaving you bigger than before you went on the diet.

Every experience has shown that diets don’t work, yet we keep coming back to them, hoping for a different outcome.

This book is not a diet plan. It’s a life plan.

There’s that nagging feeling that life—the good life—is going to begin sometime in the future. It’s somewhere over there, just out of reach, that magical day when you’re in a slim body. And should you actually reach that day, it doesn’t last long, because the seduction of food and the obsessive need to keep eating wraps its arms around you and pulls you back in.

And who do you blame for all of this pain? Usually, yourself. You blame yourself because you think the problem has to do with your own lack of willpower. If only you tried hard enough, everything would be alright.

My friend, that is simply not true. You have been duped. Diets are not sustainable—yet we blame ourselves for something our willpower and our bodies cannot sustain. We want a quick fix, and instead, we are left with guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy.

Until now, no one has shown you that there is another way to be healthy.

And it has nothing to do with food.

A Process, Not an Event

Food can numb, punish, and even comfort us, all at the same time. It can be your best friend or your worst enemy. There’s no in-between. Moderation doesn’t work for people like us. This idea that we should be able to open up a packet of biscuits, eat one, and put the rest away for later? I mean, who does that? Not me, that’s for sure. On my best days, I might have been able to eat half the packet and stop, but then it would just call me back again and again, until it was all gone.

But why is the food calling you in the first place? That is what we will explore in this book. When you get to the why, you will finally be able to work through the how of better eating. But it turns out that the why almost never has anything to do with the food itself.

If the food is calling us and we are not actually hungry, what is really going on?

That is what this book is about. Together, we will explore the thoughts and emotions that drive your eating from the inside. We’ll work to understand why we turn to food, and how we can heal ourselves from years of suffering to move forward into the life you deserve.

It’s an inside job. This work will require a willingness to open up and be honest with yourself. It can be painful, but we will approach it carefully, in three steps: awareness, acceptance, and action.

First, we will become aware of all of the reasons you may eat—reasons that hide below the surface, deep in your mind. Once you learn to recognise why you approach food the way you do and understand what’s really going on, you can work towards accepting yourself the way you are.

And with acceptance, you will finally be ready to act. It is only once we understand ourselves deeply and accept ourselves fully that we can make better choices. These actions, when they come from a place of healing rather than a temporary diet, will transform us.

Change is a process, not an event. It takes time, and it takes work. If you are in the never-ending cycle of pain—not wanting to overeat, but still hurting yourself with food and then hating yourself even more for your perceived weakness—you are in the right place. I can take you on this journey for one reason: I have been there myself, and I’ve come through the other side.

This is not a book based on just theory, but a transformation that has been felt, experienced, and lived. I spent decades searching for the quick-fix to my weight problem, my food problem, and it turns out that the quick-fix doesn’t exist.

There is another way that doesn’t involve calorie-counting, going hungry, or dieting. It does, however, require the courage to approach your life in a different way.

You want to lose weight and keep it off. By looking within to identify the root cause of what is really going on, what is really making you reach out for the food that you don’t want to eat, you are making an active choice to live differently. Permit me to walk you through, step-by-step, until you have mastered everything necessary to get results.

The bottom line is that you will have to deal with being yourself—and that includes coexisting with uncomfortable feelings without turning to food. Instead, you will discover new tools, new coping skills, and new joys. You will stop berating yourself for all your past mistakes. After all, they have brought you to where you are today. They have brought you to this moment, and you are ready to change. You are ready to embrace the life you’ve been waiting for.

Turn the page—tomorrow is here.

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Part One

Part One: Awareness, Acceptance, Action

You can’t begin to change your life—much less your body—until you become fully aware of how your emotions cause you to act out in unhealthy ways. Losing weight is an inside job, so the work begins with understanding your mind and all the ways it tricks you into trying to numb your feelings with food. Becoming self-aware can be uncomfortable and even painful, but it is a journey that will lead you to full acceptance of who you are as a person.

This self-acceptance is something that most of us have been putting off, as we are so used to looking towards a future when we are finally slim. But ironically, it is only when we begin to accept who we are that the weight can begin to come off. Even though weight loss is your goal, it is actually the side effect of the larger healing. Once you embrace awareness and acceptance, you can finally take actions that will open the door to the life you’ve always wanted.

Let’s begin.

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Chapter 1

1. It’s All in the Mind

I was on my knees, folded over in despair, surveying the carnage of wrappers, tins, and bags.

I had eaten the entire contents of the mini fridge in the hotel: crisps, chocolate bars, biscuits. It was all gone.

As I held the letter from my mother, I felt myself getting sucked back down into the downward spiral that had defined so much of my emotional life at that point.

This time, I really mean it—I’m leaving him for good.

The letter had been waiting for me when I checked in. I was so excited to receive it! I