By in Nutrition

Expect More than Weight Loss

There is an abbreviation I kept coming across on social media, on pages to do with weight loss and health, but I couldn’t work out what it meant, so I googled it. It turns out that the abbreviation stands for “Non-Scale Victories”, and it is something I am actually very familiar with!

Unsurprisingly, my weight loss clients come to see me, because they want to lose weight. HOWEVER, they invariably walk way with so much more: with NSVs! So what exactly is that?

My weight loss programmes encourage slow weight loss for a variety of reasons for the simple reason that fast weight loss has been found time and time again to be unsustainable. If you have ever been on a low-calorie diet, you’ll know what I mean: There are some quick wins, but before you know it, all the weight lost has crept back on and some more on top. That’s because very low-calorie diets prompt the body to economise, to save energy. After all, it cannot tell whether you are choosing to eat very little or whether this is a famine with no end in sight. Therefore, your energy reserves – body fat – may have to last a long time, and to achieve that, energy consumption is reduced and that means you’ll stop losing weight or at least not lose as fast as before. Moreover, you are likely to be hungry all the time and can’t keep it going for long. As your metabolism has now slowed down, all the weight lost will be back.

On my programmes, clients lose on average 1-2lbs per week and sometimes they can be a little disappointed by the slow progress. Yet it doesn’t take long before they experience benefits they had not expected. Here some examples from my clinic:

One client noticed that even after moderate weight loss her joints had stopped hurting. She was now able to walk up and down stairs, even carrying things, without pain.

Another lady had suffered from insomnia for 10 years. Four hours of uninterrupted sleep had been the best she could manage, yet after only a few days after changing her diet she was able to sleep through the night.

Yet another lady suffered constipation her entire life, only going to the bathroom every 2-3 days. After four weeks on my programme, the constipation was history. She was now able to go every day, “like a clockwork”, she said.

And then there was this client who suffered daily headaches. At the beginning of each session, I ask clients to rate the symptoms that affect them most on a scale of 0-6. A few weeks into her programme, I asked this lady how bad her headaches were now. She thought about, then said: “Do you know what? I’ve not had a headache in at least three weeks. I can’t actually remember!” She was astonished that she hadn’t noticed a symptom that had plagued her on a daily basis for years vanishing.

So those are NSVs! Non-scale victories. Benefits that clients experience that go way beyond weight loss.

Although it was the desire to lose weight that prompted them to take action in the first place, they now found that they got so much more than that. Most tell me that their NSVs are worth more to them than weight loss. They just hadn’t gone to seek help for their ails, because they hadn’t thought that diet would make a difference. But it does, I see it happen every day.

Maybe you would prefer more private one-to-one sessions? If you suffer from niggling symptoms that you may even have accepted as ‘part of you’, consider calling or emailing The Body Matters to enquire.

Melanie
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