Watch Episode #119: The Weight Loss Toll You Aren’t Using

Today we’re talking about the most powerful weight loss tool you already have. It’s your mind.

You know what’s fascinating is that every time we start and stop our weight loss journey, every time we quit or feel stuck, it’s not actually because of what’s happening around us. It’s because of what’s happening in between our ears. And I see this play out every single day with every client. And here’s what I want you to know is that your mind is the only place that can overcome obstacles but it’s also where we create them in the first place. And today we’re gonna unpack exactly how to use your mind to create the weight loss results that you want once and for all. So if you’re crushing it right now or if you’re struggling or maybe you haven’t even started yet, this episode is for you because where you are right now, it’s neutral. You get to decide to believe about what matters to you.

Hey guys, welcome to this week’s episode. Before I get started on talking about your mindset and weight loss, I want to tell you about the spring reset challenge that is coming up. Because you know that feeling right now when winter, it seems to drag on forever and we’re just tired. It’s like the kind of tired where you want to have energy but you just cannot generate it. Meal prep feels overwhelming and this is why I’m gonna do the Spring Reset Challenge because I know this time of year it just feels like one big funk. It’s gonna be a four week journey and it’s gonna change how you show up for yourself this season. But here’s the thing, it’s not a restrictive program and it’s not gonna leave you feel depleted. Instead, we’re gonna focus on what your body actually needs right now in the thick of winter and wishing it was spring. Think about it. What if you could wake up feeling energized instead of dragging yourself out of bed or hitting snooze for the third time? What about if meal prep became something you actually look forward to? Okay, maybe not looking forward to, but you did it and you had recipes and meals for you and your family to eat in the evenings.

And what if your workouts actually left you feeling stronger and more alive instead of exhausted? The Spring Reset Challenge brings everything together that you need. Strength training that fits your life. Yes, even at home. Meal prep plans that won’t have you cooking three different dinners in the evening. And the exact guidance that you need to balance those hormones that have been making you feel maybe not like yourself. And here’s the best part. Everything is designed to slide right into your busy life. The workouts, they’re going to be right on your phone the recipes right in your email backs and quick, simple plus family approved. The support, it’s gonna be right where you need it without overwhelm and another complicated system to learn. So if you’re ready to stop feeling like you just can’t get your shit together right now, because trust me, I hear this all the time and you wanna start feeling the strong capable woman you are, then join us in the Spring Reset Challenge. The Spring Reset Challenge starts early March and I’d love to have you join us. You can head to the show notes and sign up today.

So today we’re gonna talk about using your mind to create your weight loss results because this is the tool we most want to use, but we always avoid using it. This is the tool that will actually get you to your weight loss goals. Even if you have hormonal issues, even if your stress is out of control, even if you have true weight loss resistance and you do everything quote unquote right, and you’re still not able to lose weight, it’s really the belief and your mindset that will ultimately get you to your goals. Because when we’re struggling with weight loss resistance and hormonal issues and we’re doing all the things and nothing is actually changing, when our mind isn’t right, it will be a natural evolution and a natural next step to just quit and to jump ship and find something else.

Because our mind is like we’re not gonna keep feeling miserable without results here lady Like let’s do something else or let’s quit or why do all this work Why say no to the glass of wine when I feel this way anyway, and I’m not able to lose weight I’d rather just enjoy my life with a glass of wine. If you’re saying that to yourself, I want you to stop and ask yourself, do you really want to have a glass of wine? That’s the only important part here, right? It’s not that the wine brings you joy, it’s that we wanna make sure that you are actually living into the being that you wanna be inside of your body. Your mind is the only thing that can overcome the natural obstacles you’ll encounter during your weight loss journey. Your mind is the game changer. And I’m talking about this today because yesterday I had two wonderful coaching calls, I had a group coaching call and then I had a consultation with a client and both of them were centered around the same things. And the client I was coaching in the group coaching call, she was somebody who has been struggling with weight gain for years and years. She wasn’t able to lose weight, she tried the same things over and over again, would always feel frustrated. She would restrict her calories in her food to really low amount, she’d do a lot of intense cardio because that’s what her mind would tell her to do. That’s how you lose weight. That’s how you lost weight before. And she would really get herself to a place that she was just very energetically low. And then she would rebound and she would binge, overeat, fall off the wagon completely because she was just exhausted from trying so hard. And then she’d start it all over again.

And so we’ve been working together since early January and she’s losing weight. We’re increasing her calories slowly every couple of weeks and she’s lost, I think about six pounds since early January by increasing her foods, changing her workouts, managing her stress. And for years, her obstacle was, can’t, I can’t lose weight, I can’t do this. And so her brain held on to that as the belief. “I don’t believe that I can do this, even though I’m going to force myself into these things that probably know they’re not good for me, but I’m desperate. So I’m just going to do it anyway.” And so she held on to the obstacle of, can’t for years. And now that she’s losing weight, her mind is going to find a new obstacle. We think that if we start losing weight, that we won’t have any more obstacles, that everything else will be easier. And that’s not true because we have a human mind and your human mind will always look to protect you and to keep you safe. And that looks like focusing hard on obstacles and obstacles that maybe are not even a problem and are very likely not a problem. So now her obstacle is initially was I’m losing weight and that’s great, but it’s just starting to feel really hard. And so I asked her, well, what feels hard? And the things that she listed was the normal things that she should be doing that are the things that she said were hard are the normal things that we do day in and day out and mindfully well that create the weight loss. Nothing that is seemingly hard. It’s just stuff that we do differently to create a weight loss. So tracking her food. And the reason why we track food and mindfully well is because as your coach, I don’t know what’s going on inside of your life day to day every single day. If you guesstimate what you’re eating, I can’t say that that’s right or that’s wrong. And when we track our foods and you have a coach who’s looking at your food journal and seeing what’s actually going into your body, not only how much but what kinds of foods your coach can make informed decisions and can help you make informed decisions from there on what’s our next step. And many of my clients struggle with weight loss resistance, like it’s just not working. So we have to have real data. We have to know what’s actually going into your body to make those decisions. So the tracking of her food was feeling hard. The workouts were starting to feel like not exciting, not motivating. And then her meal prep or her cooking of her food. So it was the thinking of the foods, the putting her foods in her tracker, and then the cooking of the foods, all of those things. Here’s two things that she would be doing anyway, even if she wasn’t losing weight, she would be thinking about food and she would be cooking her food, right? Those are things that we do day in and day out. It’s just now we’re adding in tracking her foods and making sure we’re eating foods that fit within her nutrition protocol and so she can lose weight. But now her brain has decided to find a problem with these things, even though we haven’t really added anything besides tracking her foods, which really just takes about five to 10 minutes a day, because we do it all ahead of time, right? So when you sit down ahead of time, you make the decision, you put it in your track or you follow through and you’re done. That’s actually probably saving her a lot of time because she’s not having to read decide throughout the day. She’s not having to think about it often throughout the day. It’s already done. So it’s not actually hard, right? But her brain wants to find a problem. It wants to find an obstacle with something. And when we think about the fact that her obstacle before was I can’t, she would have given anything to be able to lose weight, to be able to say I can lose weight. And so now we have given her that result, I can lose weight, I’m seeing it, so now I’m going to go and I’m gonna find something else. And it’s hard. But when we break down it’s hard, it’s not actually hard. So we know we actually don’t have a problem here.

That’s what I want you to see is how often your mind finds issues with things that are not actually a problem and you make them to be so big that you actually end up quitting from these things. These seemingly normal things day in and day out that actually aren’t a problem. They’re producing the result that you would have given anything for and now you want to abort mission. The reason you want to abort mission is because you have the underlying belief is that I can’t.

That’s what your mind and your body still believe. I can’t do this. So now that I see that I can, I am proving this to be wrong, but it feels like it’s not in congruence with who I am because I truly believe I’m somebody who can’t lose weight. So I’m gonna go out, I’m gonna find, I’m gonna create problems so that I go back to where I was. Because where I was before, I knew what to expect. I knew what was comfortable. When your brain knows what to expect and what’s comfortable, it feels safe there, even though that’s not like where you really want to be, that feels safe there. And so your body and your mind will just bring you back to where you were. She was so used to the daily struggle of I can’t lose weight that her mind found a new problem and then made that be the reason why now she can’t lose weight because it’s too hard when in fact it’s not too hard. Every time you start and you stop or quit, it’s because of a problem that your mind made up.

So much of what’s in between you and your weight loss goals is really just the thoughts in your mind. Because obstacles can either mean that you should stop or they can actually be the raw material or the frequency or the currency of your success. They can be how you actually reach your goals. Because her belief was, I’m not someone who can lose weight and keep it off. This just isn’t me.

We think our belief about ourselves are based on reality, but really it’s just your mind. You can choose what to believe about yourself and your achievements. You can choose what to believe about yourself and your ability to lose weight and keep it off. We tend to think that we don’t have that choice and it is what it is. We tend to think that we are somebody who can’t do it and that’s an underlying belief, but you can simply choose to believe something differently. A belief is just a thought that you’ve thought over and over and over again and so it’s becoming grained in who you are. That doesn’t mean it’s true. You can change your belief. You can choose a belief that’s actually helpful for you. And then you practice that thought over and over and over again until that becomes the new belief. I never believed I would be somebody in a body that was fit and strong and didn’t feel like I always needed to lose weight. I never thought that that would be me. I always thought because of based on how I was brought up of hearing my mom and her friends and her aunt and my aunts talk about once you get to a certain age, you’ll never be able to lose weight. And so in my youth and in my 20s, I thought do not gain weight because you will never be able to lose it.
I never thought that I would be a 41-year-old woman sitting here in a body that I feel proud of, wearing any swimming suit that I really want to wear, not because I think that my body looks, not because I’m gloating about my body, but because I’m just confident in my body and how my body presents itself and how my body actually presents who I am. I never believed that when I was in my teens and my 20s. I was so fearful of gaining weight that often I did gain weight and then I’d lose it and then I’d gain and then I’d lose and then I’d gain and then I’d lose. I never actually found like a sweet spot where I just weighed the same every day or close to the same, right? Like within the same five pounds, depending on where I am in my cycle. I never thought that that was actually possible because it was a belief that you won’t ever be that person that has that. If you maintain your weight, it would be a weight that you don’t like. That was a belief I had. And so it took me many years of doing the same boring things every single day to show myself a new belief that I can be 41. I don’t have to lose weight. I can maintain my weight. I can like the amount of body fat that’s on my body, the amount of muscle, all of that. That’s a new belief and I’ve practiced it over and over again.

Yesterday in addition to the coaching call I had a consultation for somebody who wanted to be in mindfully well and she said at the end of the call we were wrapping it up and she said I just really hope that this is what finally works for me and I stopped her right there because when you come into mindfully well we can’t hope. Hope is not the currency of success. Belief is the currency of success. You have to believe that this is the thing that will work for you because I can prove it time and time again. You know, clients that come in and they’re successful and they reach their goals, there’s absolutely no feasible reason why you wouldn’t reach your goals and mindfully well unless you lacked belief. Because if you lack belief and you’re relying on hope, your subconscious is going to prove that to be true. It’s going to prove that your belief of you’re not a woman who can lose weight and can keep it off and can maintain her weight, and so it will sabotage you to go right back to where you were because you still believe that you are somebody who can’t lose weight. And I asked her, I’m like, why do you hope instead of believe? And she said, well, I’ve only ever lost and gained weight, lose and gain weight and lose and gain weight and staying in that yo-yo cycle. And she looks to her environment for proof.

She said, my mother’s overweight, my sister’s overweight, my cousin’s overweight, all of the females in my family are overweight. And our minds will look to our environment and to our past for evidence on what it believes to be true. It wants to believe in what you subconsciously believe in. It will always prove that to be true. So if you were gonna look to your environment of your unhealthy family members, if you’re gonna look towards your past of yo-yo dieting up and down and up and down, you’re gonna create that future for yourself. Unless you work on your mindset now while you are on your journey and create a new belief, create new thought patterns and create new results. And you can do this. We do this many times in our life. We just never actually give ourselves credit for it. Right? So when we were in second grade, we never believed or thought we would maybe graduate high school. That seemed so far away. That seemed unreasonable or so, like, so far away that we never actually saw ourselves doing that.

I remember thinking when I was a second grader that sixth graders were so old and so mature. And I remember thinking, because I always wanted to be a teacher when I was a little girl. And I remember wanting to be a teacher of little kids and I was a second grader. So I was like, well, I’m a big kid and I would never teach sixth graders, but I would teach kindergartners, right? So notice the patterns we’ve had throughout our life where we’re just, we’re not there yet, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t change and evolve into a new belief. So I want you to see that even though your belief right now is that you don’t believe you can, that you can change that belief. If you’re willing to put in the work and the thought patterns of changing that. And one of the ways that we have to do that is that we have to look at the daily obstacles that occur as normal, as okay, as they’re just supposed to be there. They’re part of the journey, they’re part of the currency of reaching our goals. They’re what has to be done and completed in order to reach the next level.

When you play Super Mario Brothers, like back in my day, when you played Super Mario Brothers, you had to achieve a lot of obstacles to get to the next level. You couldn’t get to the next level unless you completed all these obstacles. And also, you really couldn’t beat the next level if you never learned how to achieve the obstacles of the previous level. You couldn’t go beat Bowser. Was that his name, Bowser? You couldn’t beat Bowser in the last level if you never learned how to beat that little mini dragon guy. I like played four video games in my life, like 10 times. So I really don’t know what I’m talking about, but for some reason, those are coming to my memory today. You, and that’s the same thing that happens in your weight loss journey. If you become really busy with extra things, like let’s say you have a work project that’s requiring you to go in a little bit earlier and stay a little bit later, you have to learn how to still do the things with less time in your day. You still have to learn how to get up. You still have to learn how to get up in the morning and not hit snooze even when you feel like you don’t want to and you’re tired because the day before was more stressful or required more of you. You still have to learn that you’re going to figure out when to do meal prep, even if you have basketball tournaments on the weekend, or decide how you’re going to eat your healthy meals during the week if you can’t meal prep. Those are all obstacles that our minds will find problems and think we have to quit. We can’t keep going because this is too hard. It’s not too hard. It’s just an obstacle that you need to learn how to accomplish.

When you sign up for those races, that like there are 5k races and you like jump over bars and you climb things and you swim in mud puddles and things like that. can’t like what are they? I don’t remember what they’re called off the top of my head. You have to tell me. It’s on the tip of my tongue like mad mad something. No, I don’t know. Anyway, you know what I’m talking about. You are not surprised when you get there and you have to jump over a bar and you have to go under the tires and you have to jump through a mud puddle and you have to climb a thing.

Because you told your brain ahead of time, these are the things we’re going to have to do in order to complete the race, in order to get the accomplishment feeling of achieving this race because I did these things. But we tend to go into our weight loss journey thinking that the only obstacle I have right now is that I can’t lose weight. And once I don’t have that obstacle and once the scale starts moving, then any obstacle I have won’t be as big of a deal. And that’s not true. Every obstacle you meet, your brain will say, this is a problem.

And it’s a reason why I should stop. It’s a reason why I should start backing off of the things that are working. And you have to remember that none of these obstacles are actually a problem. It’s just your mind making it a problem. It’s not a problem. Because all the obstacles that you encounter, all the feelings of it feeling hard, those are neutral. They’re not good. They’re not bad. They’re not a problem. They’re not excitement or motivation. They’re just neutral. Your weight gain and your weight loss, it’s also neutral. It’s just a circumstance.

But when we tend to give it more weight, now we’ve made an obstacle a problem and we stop. So whether you’re on your journey right now and you’re kicking ass and the scale is moving or you’re on the struggle bus and like sometimes it’s working and sometimes it’s not, or maybe you’re just not even on the bus at all, it’s all neutral. The power of your mind over your current situation is what makes you able to change the trajectory of your weight loss goals.

You can choose to believe something different. You can choose that you will succeed and you can choose that this will be the last time you’re gonna lose weight. You’re gonna figure out how to lose the weight and then maintain the weight. And you change your beliefs with that conscious choice. Your mind can overcome anything as long as you’re willing to listen and feel the emotions that come along with it. Your emotions are the thing that will get your attention. So when you feel or when you have the thought of this is hard or when you have the thought of I can’t lose weight, you’re feeling is going to feel stuck. It’s going to feel angry. It’s going to feel frustrating.

And that’s the thing that’s gonna get your attention because it’s something that you actually feel inside of your body. You’re not usually walking around saying this is hard. You’re usually walking around feeling frustrated. And so if you are okay feeling frustrated, but doing it anyway and learning how to feel frustrated and doing it anyway and learning how to feel overwhelmed and doing it anyway, and learning how to feel anger and doing it anyway, you are overcoming the obstacle that your mind is creating. You are proving yourself to be the woman that can lose weight and keep it up. You are proving and creating a new belief by the action of not giving in to the frustration or the feeling of stuck and doing things that keep you stuck.

If you can be willing to feel any emotion, negative or positive during your journey, you will be able to lose weight and keep it off. Hands down. Because the ability to feel any emotion, negative or positive, the ability to feel it and not run away from it, not push it away, not wish it wasn’t there, not thinking it’s a problem, you will be able to accomplish everything that you want to accomplish, not only in your health goals, your weight loss goals, but anything you want in this life, if you can feel any emotion.

So decide what you want to believe and why. Refuse to quit from your obstacles, just see them as a normal part of this and nothing has gone wrong. If you can walk around all day and you can put me into your head and you’re gonna say something over and over again, it’s gonna be nothing has gone wrong. Decide what you want and why and believe that you can do it. Refuse to quit from your obstacles, refuse to say it’s not the right time, refuse to believe in your doubt. Because if you can do this, you can use your mind to do anything you want in this life. You can use your mind to achieve your weight loss goals, your career goals, your family goals, your love goals, your relationship goals, all of that. And you can decide that I will believe that I can do this. Decide what you want. Refuse to quit when obstacles appear. Refuse to wait for the right time. And refuse to believe your doubt.

All right, my friends, that’s what I have for today. You have a fantastic week. And I will see you next week!