68. Siobhan Key on Sustainable Weight Loss

Aug 4

Losing weight is difficult in our American society. We face constant temptation no matter where we are. Dr. Siobhan Key joins me to talk about breaking up with the American diet and creating sustainable, lifelong weight loss.

Small, Sustainable Changes to Boost Weight Loss

Reduce your fat intake
Do a longer fast in the morning
Focus on listening to your hunger and satiety signals

Listen to Episode 68 Here

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About Dr. Siobhan Key

Dr. Siobhan Key is a Certified Life & Weight Loss Coach, an expert in emotional and binge eating, and a practicing Obesity Medicine Physician. She is the host of the internationally renowned Weight Solutions for Physicians Podcast and helps physicians across the globe manage stress and lose weight.

Siobhan is passionate about helping physicians who struggle with stress or binge eating. She helps her clients go from feeling overwhelmed and ashamed of their eating to be confident in their ability to lose weight and find peace from the constant brain chatter around food.

The Intersection of Weight Loss and Life Coaching

Dr. Siobhan Key talks about her own experience with weight loss. She explains how she knew the science behind it, but still found herself giving in to some of the food urges and desires she knew wouldn’t make her feel good.

But her approach changed when she discovered the intersection of weight loss and life coaching. Delving into the psychological reasons behind weight loss was the catalyst Siobhan needed for herself, and it’s now something she works with her clients on, too.

The second piece for weight loss is that you need to completely detach yourself from the average American way of eating. Our society relies on fast food, deep-fried, and sugar-laden foods. Overall, it doesn’t lead to a healthy diet or one conducive to weight loss.

Weight Loss for Life

Siobhan explains the secret to losing weight for good: Find a way of eating that works for you that are sustainable in the long term. The key is finding an eating plan that you can and will stick to for the rest of your life.

The key is in finding that sustainable plan. Part of this search will include figuring out what foods don’t make you feel good. When you reframe, for example, that you don’t binge on a bag of chips because of the added calories, but instead because you don’t feel good the next day, it’s so much easier not to eat them.

Finally, we talk about those dreaded weight loss plateaus. Siobhan asks us to look at our plateaus logically and ask: have we actually stopped losing weight? How do our clothes fit? She also talks us through some of the reasons our weight loss maybe has slowed.

Homework for Women Physicians

Have you found a sustainable way of eating you can stick to for life? What foods need to keep a place in your everyday diet? Let me know in the comments below!

In This Episode

Why the combination of obesity medicine and life coaching works [6:15]
How to disconnect with the normal American diet [7:30]
How to lose weight for good [8:45]
What happens when you reframe your approach to why you don’t eat certain foods [18:30]
How to approach a weight loss plateau [23:00]

Quotes

“There has to be a better way. We have to actually know more about weight loss than what I was taught. I started studying obesity medicine and working on my own weight, and that helped. I did lose about half of my weight doing that. But there was still this element. I believed in lower carb eating, I knew it worked well for my body, I knew if I followed it consistently, it worked. Yet, there were still these inconsistencies. Still, these were times where I would find myself eating the food I knew didn’t work for my body and I felt powerless to stop eating it. I needed other tools and that’s ultimately how I found the life coaching.” [5:37]

“I believe that if you’re doing this, you need to create yourself a customized approach that works for you, your preferences, your life, and your body. And that feels good. If it feels hard, takes work, or a ton of effort, it’s probably not going to be sustainable. There will come a day when you won’t have the energy to put into that. Design a custom way of approaching weight loss, let it not be perfect, and know that it can be imperfect and still be effective. It just has to be consistent.” [10:36]

“It doesn’t have to be a big investment in time. You don’t have to take a couple of hours for yourself every single day. Giving yourself permission to have some moments to yourself every single day to give yourself what you need at that moment can make a difference to your eating habits.” [21:47]