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How It All Started

drlizgraves@gmail.com (Liz Graves) — Wed, 24 May 2023 04:29:51 GMT

How It All Started

How did Back 2 Real Food begin? It began out of pain, specifically "pain to purpose" as one of my amazing mentors calls it. Here’s the cliff notes version…

My weight had become a lifetime battle by the time I was in my mid-thirties. When I was younger sometimes, I weighed too much and sometimes I weight too little. Once I went off to college it became one big problem where I consistently weighed too much! I tried it all, diets, fasts, detoxes, body wraps, non-surgical med-spa services, extreme dieting, extreme exercise, but no matter what I did the scale would only go down a little bit, and then immediately climb to a new record high. I had no idea I was doing what everyone said was “right” with my diet and exercise, but what was really happening was that I was making my metabolism worse with every diet I started. Then in 2015 I cracked the code to weight loss and started targeting my metabolism using food. That progression led to what Back 2 Real Food is today.

Here's the longer version if you are curious. Puberty for me was marked with weight gain. I was still at a healthy weight for my frame, but being on the higher end of a healthy weight has never felt good to me. When I was 17, I stopped eating for the most part, I lived on diet sodas and maybe 600 calories of food a day. Looking back this was a recipe for disaster, a foundation for lack of nutrition, and the first thing that really wrecked my metabolism at an early age. Looking back at pictures from that time, I was skinny, but I didn’t always look healthy. It never progressed to an immediate danger, but all of this restriction led to the pendulum swinging the opposite direction in college.

When I got to college, I ate! It was college, there was junk food, alcohol, parties, all those normal college things, and I put on weight. I was yet again at the upper end of a healthy weight for my body just like I was prior to starving myself, but this time it wasn’t as easy to get the weight off. Towards the end of college, I started working out, I got a gym membership and I exercised hard. I love kickboxing classes, Zumba classes, dance classes, and I built up a lot of muscle, but no matter how much I exercised I wasn’t losing weight.

I kept the exercise up and added in a new fad diet,“Atkins.” I lost about 10 pounds with it, but then I got stuck and it wasn’t really a lifestyle that was sustainable for me at the time. Between college and chiropractic school I tried a lot of things to lose weight. I did some extreme diets like The MasterCleanse, I did some less extreme things like The Zone Diet, and I tried a lot of other complimentary therapies (detoxes, body wraps that promised lost inches, and even endermologie). Nothing was really coming together for me, I had not found the answer and I kept hovering within the same 10-15 pounds never breaking through to my goals.

Then I went to chiropractic school. I learned a lot about the body, I learned a little in school about nutrition, and I applied everything I knew to do. I tried more cleanses and detoxes, I experimented with vegetarianism and even raw vegan. I kept that gym membership going, but again,I was at a loss for results. There was even a time that I ended up with kidney stones from too much protein and not enough other foods (low-carb can be dangerous when you don’t know how to do it right).

You might know these frustrations yourself if you’ve ever tried to lose stubborn weight. It was especially hard for me being a leader in health, standing on stages speaking to people about health, nutrition, and chiropractic while carrying now an extra30+ pounds on my frame!

I look back at those pictures now knowing that was my “pain to purpose.” I have empathy for our patients, I know the struggle and I’m thankful for the journey. When I say I spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to lose weight, I am not lying. I had to do it all wrong to gain perspective on how to do it right.

Then in 2015 a friend and I decided to start a business venture together, it was a weight loss franchise. I was hopeful that it might work for me, butI was really walking into it as an additional service to provide my future chiropractic patients. Little did I know that would be a big change to the direction of my life.

It turns out, this was a turning point for my weight loss. When I finally broke through that number that had eluded me for 15 years, I was amazed. What was even more amazing to watch was that the scale continued to move down lower and lower until I ended up the same sizeI had been when I was too skinny! Luckily this time I had kept the muscle which filled my frame differently and gave me the healthiest look of my lifetime.

This is what I love helping people find, the healthy weight based on what you want your body to be able to do. I’m wearing the same size that I was when I was 17 years old, but I’m 15 pounds heavier with water and muscle which is what makes it look so much healthier. Also,keeping that good muscle means I can do things I love like wakeboarding, hiking, and yoga. I can lift heavy things and I’m strong and capable.

Obviously, the franchise had some great parts to it. I learned a lot. I soaked up all the knowledge I could from the franchise and then devoured all sorts of additional information to improve the processes above what the franchise was doing. We were getting good weight loss with the basics of the franchise instructions, but I was getting phenomenal results in my office with the new things I was implementing in the “after” the weight loss part, the part that made it easy to keep the weight off.

The partnership dissolved and we went our separate ways, but through this time I had found that I loved this avenue of health. I do weight loss from the chiropractic perspective. The core philosophy of chiropractic is that the body will heal itself with the right support. I know the body is capable of healing itself with the right nutrition. I see it all day long. I see people healing from gut problems, diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiac conditions, immune disorders, and many more.

I have continued to make improvements to the protocol along the way. As of today, I am able to get better weight loss and better maintaining of weight loss than ever imagined with the franchise that started this all. I still have a passion for learning more about how food can impact the metabolism, overall health and longevity of the human body. The Back 2 Real Food plan is solid, reproducible, and leads to consistent results when followed. We now also offer monthly workshops to level up the learning and not only lose weight but allow our clients to learn more about how to use food to heal their body.

Back 2 Real Food work for me (and thousands of others) because I stopped approaching weight loss as a weight problem and started approaching it as a metabolic problem. Heal the body, restore proper metabolic process, and teach the person to fuel their body with the foods for health and the weight will come off on its own.

How Metabolism Affects Weight Loss

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 16:15:41 GMT

How Metabolism Affects Weight Loss

Even the grandest weight loss efforts don’t garner results for some people. Many don’t understand why one weight loss program could work for someone else but not for them.

The unfortunate reality is that no two bodies process food and exercise in the same way. Even though all bodies have the same internal systems, your metabolism can contribute to weight loss inconsistency.

What is Metabolism?

Metabolism is the rate at which bodies use energy and expend calories. The body converts food into fuel for the body’s cells through a series of biochemical processes.

An individual’s basal (resting) metabolic rate is determined by several factors , including:

Body size and composition – Larger people and those with more muscle burn more calories, even at rest.
Sex — Between men and women of the same weight and age, men tend to burn more calories due to their lower percentage of body fat.
Age – Muscle concentration can decrease as people age, and if this happens it will slow down calorie burning.

Ways to Keep Metabolic Rate Up

Sleep

Keep your metabolism functioning properly by ensuring you get enough sleep each night. Sleep deprivation will increase your body’s cortisol (a stress hormone) levels and interfere with blood sugar control. Lack of sleep can also mess with the hormone levels that control hunger promotion and suppression.

Adults should try getting seven to nine hours of sleep each night, according to the National Sleep Foundation.

Water

Dehydration throws most body processes out of whack, including your ability to burn calories. The problem with just drinking more water for many is that their body may not absorb it. If you are drinking more water to speed up your metabolism, this could be the problem. Body water absorption can be measured with a body composition analysis.

Exercise

Aerobic workouts can temporarily boost your resting metabolic rate, but the boost will only last for a short time following the exercise, this is why they can be very ineffective in your weight loss goals.

Strength training, on the other hand, can have a lasting effect. By increasing your body’s muscle mass, your metabolism will also improve. While muscle and fat weigh the same on the scale, compact muscle tissue burns calories faster than fat.

It takes about 1 month of strength training to gain ½ a pound of muscle, so you must be patient and consistent with this approach of improving your metabolism, it may take 6 to12 months to start seeing the effect.

Diet

We have all heard the saying that “abs are made in the kitchen, not in the gym.” More of your weight loss will be impacted by eating right than exercising.

Here are three helpful tips to get more out of your kitchen:

Eat clean– This means eating food in its natural state – the less processed the better. If it has a label on the back, it shouldn’t have very many ingredients and if you don’t know what an ingredient is, then it’s probably not something that should naturally be in your food.
Avoid artificial sweeteners – Artificial sweeteners are addictive and can cause you to become resistant to weight loss over time. Start weaning yourself off them now if you can.
Eat healthy fats – Healthy fats will sustain energy longer and are good for your brain.

Fad Diets and Metabolism

Diet has a profound impact on the metabolism, but only when people eat properly. Some dieters resort to drastic measures when trying to lose weight, but these will slow your metabolism down.

Start Your Weight Loss Journey With Back 2 Real Food

No matter your weight loss goals, the team at Back 2 RealFood can help you lose the weight and naturally kick-start your metabolism withour comprehensive services .

We use a clinically based weight/body analysis that accountsfor every weight loss factor, from your hydration levels to how your bodystores fat. We are focused on supporting you with expert nutritionalinformation and guidance geared for your body type to provide you with resultsyou’ll love.

Book your new client consultation online or call us at (833) 668-4883 today!