Rules. Losing weight seems to have a lot of them. Rules are one of the things that trips women up in their efforts to release the weight . . . for good! You feel like you have to follow them. You feel restricted and deprived because of them. You chafe and resent them. You b(eat) yourself up when you break them. You can’t get back on track because it feels too overwhelming and you give up. Here’s what I know. You’ve got to break the rules. If the diet and exercise rules you are following are too rigid, you are almost certainly doomed to fail. You are not creating a healthy and sustainable lifestyle that keeps you at your optimal weight AND lets you love your life. If the rules worked, there wouldn’t be so many of them. (There are over 74,000 hits on Amazon.com when you search for diet books!) If the rules worked, researchers wouldn’t estimate that 2/3rds of diets result in gaining more weight than you lost. If the rules worked, you would already be at your optimal weight. Now I’m not suggesting that you go eat everything you want and expect to lose weight. But I am suggesting that unless you have health issues that need to be addressed: You don’t need to cut out entire food groups. You don’t need to deprive yourself of eating your favorite foods ever again. You don’t need to be so perfect that one mistake means you’ve blown your diet. Instead, all you have to do is consistently follow 5 general guidelines. They are: 1. Drink A LOT of water. And I mean water. Not tea, not coffee, not diet soda. Water. Pure, clean, life-giving water. If you were to do 1 thing to begin creating optimal wellness, […]