Dr. Erica Steele – Losing weight can be a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. My name is Dr. Erica Steele. I’m a holistic doctor in family practice. I hold six degrees in my field. They’re all in the natural health care space. I am a drugless doctor and I went to school. So you don’t have to. All right. So let’s discover how to balance your body, your mind and spirit for optimal weight loss results.
And we want to do this holistically because I’m Melissa doctor. All right. So what does it mean to have a holistic weight loss process? It’s really about creating a healthy balance with all aspects of your life to achieve those sustainable results that last years and years. So in this video, we’re going to explore some of those key principles for having a holistic weight loss lifestyle and how you can use them to achieve your actual goals.
All right. So what is it about? Holistic weight loss is really about creating that balance and holistic medicine in general is about creating that balance where we always look at the relationship that one organ system has to another, or this aspect of our. Humanity has to do this. We look at humans, I treat humans for a living all day long, and so one thing may affect another. And it may be surprising if, for instance, your mental health, if it’s not addressed, is going to affect your emotional health, which in turn is going to affect your physical health and wellbeing.
So we look at all of these different components when we’re working to really balance and help people to reclaim their health. Mindfulness is that first step. So we’ve talked about it. Many times before in many videos, but I cannot stress the importance of mindfulness that’s being fully present to your thoughts, your feelings, your actions in the moment. So if you have a lot of feelings coming up
And it’s not related to something going on in the actual moment. That’s a lot of past emotions that needs to be processed and needs to be dealt with. Also, there’s a lot of thoughts. So our minds are racing. We’ve got all kinds of things going on. And so we want to put these thoughts on a leash and begin to think clearly, right?
Because our thoughts create our feelings and then our feelings create our actions and our actions create our behaviors over a long period of time. So many of us have work to do when it comes to being mindful because we’re constantly thinking about things. You’re thinking of emotionally suppressing or avoiding, and then that is going to lead to inaction, which is going to prevent us from achieving our healthy weight loss goal. Meditation, yoga, prayer can all be super helpful for us to be able to discover that.
The second step. His movement, of course, we want to move our bodies sometimes. The reason I put it second in this particular video is because sometimes movement can be motivating. A lot of times we have stuck stagnant energy in different areas of our body emotions that have been stored for so many years.
And so when we begin to move our bodies and breathe consciously like with yoga or Pilates, or or even just simple body weight movements, if we start to feel into our bodies, we can feel where it’s stuck and stagnant, and that can really give us clues. And insights into what emotions are bothering us. Do we have a chronic shoulder that’s responsible? Do we have throat stuff? That’s communication. Do we have heart stuff? That’s grief or sadness?
Do we have belly stuff, that’s fear, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are a lot of different connections and a lot of different resources, which I’ll talk about in other videos of how we can make that mind, body connection and movement can really help us to see where our body is. It’s like a check engine light.
All right. Third step nutrition. So eating is balanced in nutrition. Eating a balanced and nutritious diet, is essential for your healthy weight loss focus on consuming whole unprocessed foods. Just like I’ve said, if it’s God made, eat it, if it’s man-made stay away from it, if it’s in a box or bag it’s processed, probably shouldn’t go into your body. It won’t digest while your body won’t identify it well, so really make sure that you’ve got things that are growing your fruits and your vegetables low-glycemic whenever possible, your proteins.
So chicken breasts, Turkey breasts, white fish. Lentils black beans, kidney beans. Those low-fat beans are really good sources of protein and you want to have protein every single meal. Let’s say if on average you need a hundred grams of protein, just take that number that you need and divide it by how many times a day you’re going to eat.
And then set that as your goal. I typically first start with water, making sure patients are drinking half their body weights and ounces of water, and then we go secondary to their protein. So we go, okay, make sure you get half your body weight in ounces in water. Get that into routine. I know for a lot of people they’ve been dehydrated for so long.
They’re going to go to the bathroom a lot in the beginning. And that’s actually a good thing because that’s the body just cleansing itself. It’s going, oh my gosh, thank God we’ve given her water. And so it’s going to take awhile to balance and don’t be afraid of that. You need to be able to eliminate it over time. As you become hydrated, as your cells become hydrated, the bathroom trips will definitely calm down. So be aware of that. Once you get the water down, then add the protein, make sure you’re subdividing it out. I tend to get smaller doses of protein than larger doses of protein.
Like I don’t typically eat one meal a day unless I’m fasting or doing some sort of spiritual practice. So there’s all kinds of different ways that we can. Maneuver for that. All right. Four steps sleep, You want to get quality sleep. You want to make sure that you’re sleeping restfully. If you tend to ruminate before you go to bed, just put a simple notebook by your bed and write everything down. Like data, dump everything on your brain. I don’t typically recommend things like melatonin because it can affect your serotonin.
But if you do need something to help calm you down. I love Gabba as an amino acid. I love Althea. Holy Bazell can also be helpful too. And it’s nice and mild valerian, nice and mild. We are, we don’t need to knock yourselves out. We just need a nice gentle sleep. We also don’t want to skip sleep. We don’t want to do four hours a day, five hours taking a lot of naps.
We want to get, have that nighttime routine and have that restful sleep that so many of us need to be able to repair and heal. The fifth step is stress management. We talk about this a lot on this channel about emotional stress and emotional wellbeing, and really validating an honor. There’s a lot of different modalities out there EFT tapping there’s NLP, which is neuro-linguistic programming. There’s hypnotherapy, there’s meditation, there’s mindfulness.
There’s a lot of different modalities reading books can even really help you too. Understand and validate your emotions. We all have them, whether you’re a man or a woman, we all have emotions. And it’s very important for each one of us to validate our emotions and how we actually feel. So we want to ensure that we give our emotions space, even if it’s difficult, even if it doesn’t feel good, it’s important to honor those difficulties.
And let’s say uncomfortable emotions before we just shoo them away and try to affirm them away. We want to really sit with this discomfort and be comfortable. With this discomfort and honor that emotion before we’re ready to transform it into something healthier. Mindful eating. So that’s eating consciously. That’s knowing your macros, what you’re eating for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack, making sure that you’re aware, present to where, where your food is coming from. That’s an even deeper connection to mindful eating. Are you growing your food? Are you buying your food?
Where are you buying your food from? Where does that source come from? Because that’s all energy. So if you are buying foods from different places and you’re not aware of them, you’re not truly mindful. Eating, because you’re not fully present to what it is that you’re eating and why you’re eating it. So really connecting in and commuting with yourself because that’s how you’re nourishing yourself. That’s how you’re healing yourself in essence.
Gratitude is my seventh step. And that is really being grateful for what you currently have. I know a lot of people like gratitude, And if you have a difficult time with gratitude, that’s actually a symptom of resentment, frustration and lack of forgiveness of self. And so you may want to look at and consider doing some practices around forgiving yourself, giving your anger some space, giving your resentment some space, learning to be with them, maybe doing some tapping around.
Around that, and really work on committing yourself to bringing up all of those feelings in a safe container and processing them so that you can get to the other side with gratitude. I can tell you, you will not get gratitude. If you’re holding onto resentment, they bump heads and they don’t work because how could one be grateful if they feel like the world is out to get them or beating them up or whatever.
So just be mindful of that. Lastly, we look at your support system. So that is your network of friends and family. I strongly suggest you take an inventory of those people just because their blood doesn’t mean that they need to be in your life. And you want to make sure that the people in your life make you feel good and you feel motivated now. It’s not necessarily.
Their responsibility is to make you happy, but also to be there. Practicing healthy boundaries with you. Do, when you communicate boundary, do they respect that boundary? Are they loving and kind when you communicate that boundary? Are they highly reactive? Are they demotivators? Are they jealous of you?
How do they respond to you? Excelling? Let’s say you get a promotion or something really incredible happens. Are they happy for you or do you feel almost. Afraid to tell them because you don’t want them to feel bad. A lot of us, who have been through trauma, have deeply codependent relationships and, that’s B and it’s masters empathy, because we are always assessing our environment to make sure that the people in our environment are happy. Because if they’re happy, that means we’re happy, but that is codependent relationships.
I can be happy or not happy and you can be happy or not happy. They’re not interrelated. I can actually be happy and you’ll be unhappy. And we will be okay. And so understanding the support. Court system and how those dyed relationship dynamics work is really important to your overall health and wellbeing when you’re balancing yourself. All right. So balancing your body, mind and spirit with a holistic approach is certainly key in my opinion.
To optimal weight loss. And by incorporating these steps into your daily life, you can achieve your weight loss goals forever. It’s not a quick fix. This is a lifestyle and you can improve your overall health and wellbeing and lead a happier, more fulfilled, more wholesome life. I definitely am living proof of that. So if you want to start your holistic weight loss journey with me today and see the results for yourself, please click on the link below and we’ll be welcome to have you in our next upcoming holistic weight loss program.