What if I told you that the number on the scale is actually the least interesting part of your weight loss journey? Today in this episode, we’re going to talk about what you really gain when you lose weight. And it’s not just about the fact that you get to wear cute jeans again. There’s so much more that you’ll gain in your weight loss journey. But before we get to today’s episode, I also want to let you know that Mindfully Well is officially open for enrollment.

Mindfully Well is my six month signature program that will help you balance your hormones, reduce stress, and finally lose weight for good in midlife. You can go to the show notes and click schedule consultation to schedule your appointment with me, or you can go to my website, www.mindfullywell.com slash mindfullywellprogram and it will get you to exactly where you need to be. Enrollment is open until this Friday, January 24th.

So let’s talk about the first thing that you will gain in your weight loss journey. And at first you’re gonna be like, this is very obvious. Like, why are we talking about this? It’s energy. But it’s not just energy that we’re talking about. It’s what you actually do with your energy that is the gain. But first of all, I wanna talk about the reason why many times we don’t gain energy when we’re trying to lose weight or why, guess what? This week is actually

known as Quitters Week. It’s the week that most people stop their New Year’s resolutions. They’re like checked out, they’re done. And it’s because they’re relying on willpower, because they actually have depleted energy, because they’re not doing things the right way, right? They’re cutting deep into their calories. They’re trying to make it to the gym like five, six, seven days a week. They’re exhausted because they’re relying on willpower.

But here’s the thing, when you don’t have to rely on willpower and you get to create your energy, now you’re gonna see this long term, right? So if you are not in mindfully well, and if you don’t have a consultation schedule, then you are trying to lose weight and you are considering quitting, I want you to think, do I actually have an energy problem instead of a willpower problem? Because when you understand the difference between the two of those, is this willpower or is this energy?

willpower, you’re going to make it mean about you. You’re going to feel really shitty about terrible willpower. You’re going to be like, I can’t get it together. Why can’t I do this? I can never see things through like all mean girl talk, right? When it’s energy, now you can actually find a solution for that. Now you can actually know what to do to create your energy and you don’t have to make it personal, personal and like be mean to yourself about this. Right? So I want you to think about that.

You don’t need to be a quitter this week. It’s not a willpower problem you have. It’s an energy problem with how you are trying to lose weight in the first place. But let’s talk about the energy that you do get to have when you do it the right way, especially when you’re in my program, mindfully well. When you have energy, you…

because you are fueling yourself properly, not only with the right kinds of foods, but the right amounts of foods as well. We don’t need to go into a deep calorie deficit in order to lose weight. And we’re working out in a way that actually energizes you and it doesn’t deplete you. Then it results in you sleeping well at night. And then the next day, your stress is well managed, right? This is the ripple effect that we have when we focus on what’s important and we leave behind what isn’t important.

but I wanna talk about the ripple effect that you have in your life and those around you when you have energy throughout the day. Because when you have energy throughout the day, you’re actually doing things that you love, that you want to do. When you don’t have energy, you’re either buffering your way throughout the day, which means that you’re trying to avoid doing things because you’re so tired.

You’re trying to find a way to feel better throughout the day because you feel miserable in your body and you’re procrastinating. And all of these are terrible feelings. When you know that you have to do something and you don’t want to do it, you’re going to try and because you’re so tired, you’re going to try to buffer your way out of this. That means you’re going to try to find ways to feel better about it in ways that don’t actually get the thing done. It’s just you avoiding it and trying to feel better about avoiding it, which actually

Feels terrible. We all know that feeling, right?

But when you have energy and you are now able to do the things that you actually wanna do, what do you end up doing? You end up spending purposeful time with your family instead of sitting on the couch and scrolling on your phone and just waiting until bedtime or scrubbing the kitchen floor because you just don’t know what to do with your time. And that’s the only thing that you know how to use your energy for.

when you are

or maybe you’re binging a Netflix series and because you’re too tired to do anything else. And then the next morning you’re like, I just wasted like three hours of my life watching that stupid show when I could have been, I don’t know, doing something that you actually want to do. How often do you sit down and watch a show and you’re like, I want to do this.

Maybe you do. I don’t know. I’m just not that person that I sit down and I’m like, I really want to watch this show. I’m very excited. And maybe it’s because I don’t have any shows I like to watch. So maybe I’m an anomaly here. for me, I’d rather do something that feels so much more purposeful. Right? So playing a game with my family because I know

When I’m tired, the last thing I want to do, and when I have no energy, the last thing I want to do is sit down and play a card game with my kids and listen to them bicker at each other, which is also normal, right? That’s just normal family dynamics, just normal children behavior to bicker at each other during a game. But when you have low energy, you just don’t have the tolerance or the resilience to be able to listen to that. But also, you’re losing out on very precious time.

Like your kids are only gonna be as young as they are today. And if you’re too tired and you’ve got to be sitting on the couch in the evenings, you’re losing out on that very precious time. And you can also be working on, when you have sustained energy throughout the day, like producing high quality work that you want in this world. And you’re spending time with people that you want to spend time with, even if it’s not your family, maybe it’s your friend group.

Maybe it’s coworkers after work and you’re just experiencing more joy and presence in the day. Because when you have energy, you’re not only more physically active, you’re also more mentally active. When you’re depleted, you have nothing left to give at the end of the day. And the end of the day is likely when you have your free time. And so you’re ending up spending your free time just hoping to get to bed sooner.

just waiting for the day to be over. But when you have energy and you have free time, now you’re using your life in a way that you want to live it versus just sitting on the couch and scrolling TikTok, hoping the government doesn’t take it away, right? At this point, think, when this podcast airs, we’ll know, is it gone? Is it not gone? Who knows, right? But I know that I…

just show up so much differently and I’m just so much happier when I have energy, right? And that is one of the things that you get to gain when you lose weight. It’s not just about losing something, it’s about gaining something. It’s about gaining the energy so you can have the experience that you want to have in your life instead of just waiting for the day to be over.

The second thing that you gain is trust and food freedom. This is the, one of the things that in Mindfully Well that I can say hands down is the thing that I see truly transform women is that they not only trust themselves, that they do what they said they’re going to do, that they can see it all the way through to the goal that they have for themselves.

but they also experience freedom around food because many times you’ve done diet after diet after diet and that is food jail. That’s telling you, you can do this, you can’t do that. There’s lots of rules here. Do it all perfectly and then you’ll achieve your result, blah, blah, blah, right? But when you start to trust yourself around food based on your actions over and over and over and allowing you to practice that,

Now you have that deep and engrained trust that you’re like, I know what to do. I know how to make good decisions for myself. I know how to eat well inside my home. And I also know how to eat well outside of my home. I know how to eat well in social situations. I know how to order out at a restaurant. I know how to go on vacation and not come back 10 pounds more miserable.

Right? That’s the freedom that you have within yourself and also knowing that you don’t have to actually fear any food out there because you trust yourself that you know how to make the decisions that help you feel best in your body, that help you create the energy in your body. And when you do that, that is freedom that you like, you can’t put a price on. You can’t exchange it for anything else. Like it is.

just so invaluable to have that freedom with yourself.

because when we’ve dieted over and over in the past, we have created a lot of mistrust because dieting has basically told us that we’ve just done it all wrong, right? Because like, okay, here’s the new rules in the diet, follow the diet, then you lose weight, then you’re done and then that’s it and that’s all they teach you. And what that teaches you is that everything you’ve done in the past has been wrong, do this and then it’s right. And then also we can’t actually stick to the diet because for one,

Nobody is actually making a diet that fits your lifestyle. And two, nobody’s addressing the mindset portion that actually is the thing that ties it all together. And then you fall off. You fall off of that diet. You don’t do it anymore because you’ve ran out of willpower and you can’t continue to see it through. then you look at yourself and you’re like, well, I’m bad again. I can’t trust myself again because I’ve gone into old patterns.

And so you do this over and over and over again and you just don’t trust yourself whatsoever to make any great food decision. But when we give the power back to you on food decisions, now you’re teaching yourself how to trust yourself. And the way we do this in Mindfully Well is that…

We work with macronutrients, so I teach you about protein, carbs, and fats because that’s how we create blood sugar stability. That’s how we make sure you sleep well at night. That’s how we put muscle on your body and keep muscle on your body, and it’s how we create energy. So we do track your macronutrients. We do understand what blood sugar stability is so that you are stable, mable throughout the day and you’re not having lots of highs and lots of lows, which leads to hormonal imbalance.

And when I give you that freedom to say, you you can really eat whatever you want within these macronutrients and with these blood sugar stability guidelines, like it just gives you some structure, but you have a lot of leeway to make your decisions. And when you make your decisions and then you make results, now you are putting the two and two together that you actually know how to make decisions. You know how to follow through and you know how to create the results.

You’re creating evidence for yourself that you know how to do this. And now you trust yourself. You don’t need someone to tell you exactly what to do. You don’t need a meal plan. You don’t need someone to be like, don’t eat this food group, but eat this food group.

and you just build your trust over time with that pattern, right? Deciding what you’re gonna eat, follow through with what you’re gonna eat, and then you create the result. One of the ways that I do this in Mindfully Well is through pre-planning of your foods. And this is actually a non-negotiable in my program for the first four weeks because what we need to do is that we…

need to use our prefrontal cortex, which is the adult portion of our mind. makes fantastic decisions. just, for some reason, humans don’t use this part of our mind to make food choices. And that’s why we end up the way we are.

And that’s why we end up the way we do because we’re just so reactive around our emotions and we have free access to foods all day long. High-sugar foods, highly palatable foods and foods that just don’t help us be healthy. And so what I have you do is I just have you pre-plan your foods all in one day in advance and then I have you stick with your plan.

This allows you to use your prefrontal cortex, which is the adult portion of your mind. It makes fantastic decisions and it will make a plan for you that makes sense for you to reach your goals. And it also allows you to have freedom in your food choices. You get to decide what you’re going to eat. You get to decide when you’re going to eat. You get to decide how to make it make sense for your day. And that is giving you the authority and the agency that you need in your life when it comes to your food choices. And when you do this ahead of time,

Guess what? You’re the one creating it. It all came from your brain. And that will help build your trust with yourself that you are proving to yourself over and over again that you know how to make great food decisions. You know how to follow through on food decisions and you know how to create your results.

And lastly, the third thing that you get to gain because you have energy, because you trust yourself, is that now you have confidence. You have confidence that you will follow through on what you said you would do. Many times we don’t have confidence because we haven’t proved to ourself that we can do it. And when we build that trust with ourselves within our food freedom, the natural effect of that is that you have confidence.

that you know how to make those food decisions. But not only making food decisions, you also show up so much differently in your body, right? Because you’re creating results and now you’re seeing the changes that you wanna see. So now you start to get dressed differently. You start to wear new clothes. You start to see maybe some cute jeans that you have been wanting to wear.

But you said, I can’t, I don’t have the body for that. I’m not the type of person who wears that because you don’t feel confident. But when you build confidence through your actions and you get a result, now you show up differently. Now you show up and you’re willing to be seen. You’re willing to.

now you’re willing to be seen. You’re willing also to be…

I can’t make it.

I wish I could rewind on this. can’t because now I don’t know where I was. So I’m going to start over.

And the third thing that we gain because we have trust in ourself is that now we have confidence, right? That’s the side effect of building trust with yourself on around doing what you said you would do, right? Becoming the woman that follows through with what she said she would do. We practice that every single day with your food choices and what you will end up to be is confident.

not only confident that you know what to eat, but also confident in your body, confident in your mind, confident in how you show up. And this is gonna look like you wearing clothes that you maybe weren’t wearing before. You start to feel like you can quote unquote pull off things, right? I don’t know where that came from. Like I can’t pull off those jeans or I can’t pull this off. Here’s the story for you is that I remember

very vividly as I used to work in this clinic. And she was like the nurse practitioner I worked with, which is so cool. She was so cool. And I just, I kept being like, I could never, I could never do that. I could never wear what she wears. She drove this really cool Jeep. I was like, I could never drive a Jeep. just not that person. I’m just not.

I just couldn’t pull it off is what I would say to myself. And I’m like, what the hell were you even thinking? But when I think back to it, I was not confident at all. I was very like in confidence, like self-confident to the max is what I was. And as I built confidence in just becoming who I am, not because of necessarily one specific thing, but just becoming more of who I am, I ended up buying a Jeep. I drove it for a couple of years.

I wear whatever I want to, whatever feels like me, and I decide what I’m gonna pull off based on me, right? It’s not about looking at somebody else and wanting to be them or thinking they have something that you don’t have. It’s about becoming more of who you are, and that’s what confidence is. And when you become more of who you are, you show up differently in this world.

You will carry yourself differently when you walk into a room. You will carry yourself differently around your family. Your family will see you being a grounded, confident woman, and that changes their perception on not only you, but it changes their perception on moms and women in this world. And these are little people that are watching you.

and you are teaching them how to show up in this world. And especially for little girls out there, they need to see you be confident so that she can be confident, so that she can go out and she can change her world too. Because there’s gonna be a time and point when she’s the adult, she’s the one taking care of us, and she’s the one taking care of the next generation, and she is gonna need to be competent, just like we.

need to be confident right now. We need to show up for ourselves so we can become more of who we are supposed to be. And that’s what happens when you lose weight. It’s not because you’ve lost weight. It’s because of who you’ve become on that journey. More of you. More of the person that you want to be.

Because when you are in the process of losing weight, let’s be honest, it can be kind of hard sometimes, which is why we struggle to do it, right? The day in and the day out and the boringness of it and the repetition of it and the emotional discomfort of it at times as well. And when we work through that time and time and day and day after, we become a different person because of that journey.

And that’s why we do this. It’s not to wear certain jean size. It’s not to see a number on the scale. It’s so that we can feel like our body is ours. We can feel like we are at home in our body. And then we show up as the version we want to be, more of who we are.