Our principles
A key principle that the Ayla Health program is built on is ‘Focus on Health’.
This is an important one. Our program is weight-neutral. A weight neutral approach means that we focus on habits, behaviours and routines that promote long term health for people of all body sizes that do not have the goal of weight loss.
Why do we not have a goal of weight loss?
Your weight is not directly in your control. You can’t decide to lose weight and then just do it. It’s counter-productive to focus change efforts on parts of your life you can’t control. Psychology tells us that.
Why do we focus on habits, behaviours and routines?
Your behaviour is directly in your control. You can control how much exercise you do, how much sleep you get, whether you drink alcohol or eat vegetables. That is directly in your control.
Focussing your efforts here is empowering and you get proper feedback about your progress. You’re either doing the healthy thing or you aren’t and those factors are fully in your control.
It’s important to note that just because you change your behaviours doesn’t mean your weight will change. It does for some people and it doesn’t for others. Also, you might do particular behaviours in one time of your life and you lose weight and you do them again at another time and you don’t. Your weight is the result of a number of complex and interrelated factors, many of which are out of your control: age, sex, genetics… you can’t change these things and they influence your weight.
Sometimes, you do all the ‘right’ things and you don’t lose weight, but that doesn’t mean all the healthy things you’ve been doing are for nothing.
Unfortunately, weight means so much to people that when they don’t lose weight they stop doing the healthy things or they don’t do it consistently or it starts to stress them out and it effects their mental health.
And so, that is why Ayla Health is built on this key principle and we’re excited to show you what this means for your long term physical and mental wellbeing.
If you want to learn more about our approach, book a free 15 minute session with Kate Freeman!
