If we’re being honest, we all want to be healthy and feel fabulous, however sometimes it can feel like our body has other plans and we missed the memo. We can put a lot of effort into investing in our health and at times, it can feel as though there is very little reward. And truth be told, there really is only so much kale you can handle before you start to wonder if it is really all it’s cracked up to be.

Then there’s the other issue, of watching your bestie follow the exact same regime as you, day in, day out, yet she’s looking fit and fabulous and your favorite jeans have you feeling like everything is spilling out. It’s fair to say, something isn’t going to plan.

The good news is that for many of us (almost all of us) there are a few tricks that you may be yet to discover when it comes to healthy weight loss. We’re here to say, it’s not about starvation, deprivation or slogging it out at the gym.For us here at Your Tea, we’re all about your health and wellbeing with gentle, simple and practical truth bombs to really take you to the best, healthiest and leaner version of yourself.

Let’s blow a few myths out of the water shall we?

Truth Bomb #1.

Salads may be behind your weight gain.
According to Chinese Medicine, we seem to do a few things backwards in the west. Take ‘diet’ for one. We’ve been taken through the wringer over the past 50 years about what’s what in dieting. First there was less is more, then there was low fat, we moved through macrobiotic phase, small regular meal phase, the keto diet phase, the low sugar… and we continue to do so. Throughout all of this time, TCM has stood solid in its love and sensibility toward warm, cooked foods that are easy to digest and place very little stress on the gut. It was kept simple and one thing we know is that simple works.

If it is raw and cold, it is extremely congealing. If it is warm, it moves easily. For this reason, tucking into a huge cold and raw salad may take you from happy to crappy pretty quickly, especially if your digestive system is already weak. How do you know if it affects you? Ask yourself how you feel after consuming cold and raw foods like smoothies or salads. If you find yourself bloated, facing the mid-afternoon slump and your bowels play funny business, it may be time to switch things out for something a little kinder. From TCM theory, if your digestive system can’t do its job, it can lead to damp accumulation within the body leading to weight gain.

Keep it simple. Keep it warm and reap the benefits. Yet another reason we love tea.

Truth Bomb #2.

Over exercising may lead the scales astray.
We’ve all been there. We’re excited to get dressed into our fave pair of hot pants, we pull them up only they don’t feel as comfortable as they did yesterday, more to the point they look pretty uncomfortable too (hello camel toe). What happened overnight? We then may look to the outside world to get answers and often conclude we’ve spent too much time shoveling food in and not enough time sweating it out. Turns out, slaughtering yourself at the gym may make matters worse. This may be for a few reasons. For those of us with an unhappy thyroid (that’s your body’s master controller), over worked adrenals and a tonne of stress to boot, excess exercise is only adding more stress to the already huge stress pile.

Stress can be so many things, but this kind of stress, the type that keeps your adrenals peddling and your thyroid unhappy can also result in climbing oestrogen in the body. Oestrogen is an anabolic hormone, and unfortunately it feeds our fat stores. More oestrogen results in more fat and more fat makes more oestrogen – it’s a brutally cruel cycle. But know that exercise itself isn’t the enemy here, since exercise is a great way to move stress through the body and keep you healthy. The trick is getting it right. For most of us, that’s best in short sharp bursts rather than long grueling workouts. My suggestion – switch to 20 or 30 minute workouts, regularly and reap the rewards!
Plus all this extra time you’ll have on your hands will allow you to engage in other activities that help you manage your stress better too!

Just a few simple adjustments to your daily routine can have a profound influence on your health. The best part, these little additions are easy, they don’t require a special gadget or phone app. All you need to do is be you and let the little things take you towards your better self.