Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker, a life and weight loss coach. It’s been a little while since I’ve recorded a podcast and I’ll tell you our family has been going through a tough time trying to teach our little guy to sleep without his soother. It’s been a very challenging time and taken up a lot of our mental and physical energy. And so for me that can be when my protocol goes off track. It’s like we get stressed and we just say - I have enough to deal with right now, I can’t be bothered feeling deprived or hungry too. So if you’ve ever been in this scenario, I want to share with you a journal exercise for self reflection that I do to help me through it and get me back on track. 

So first I’m going to make the case WHY it’s crucial for releasing weight. And then I’ll teach you when to do it and how to do it so that it’s super simple and easy and your brain won’t put up much resistance to ACTUALLY doing it and getting all the benefits. So if you’ve listened to the podcast and haven’t yet tried any of the self coaching exercises yet, this might be the perfect one for you. 

Okay so Why is self reflection is crucial for releasing the weight?

A Harvard Business School Study showed that evaluating your efforts had the following results:

• You were more productive,

• You felt more confident about achieving your goals

• You felt more motivated

Why would this be? I think it’s because we can intentionally manage our brain around it. When we evaluate, we get to see everything that’s working and not working and make changes. Most weight loss programs will NOT have this as an element in their program. And here’s what happens. 

The typical scenario when we overeat is that we then feel crappy both physically and about ourselves so we  vow to change. Then we go into it feeling bad - with a sense of dread, scarcity and lack of confidence. We’re relying solely on willpower in this scenario. 

And we know what happens right? The result is we feel terrible and act as if our plan is a punishment. We are the toddler and the diet is the parent who we only want to rebel against. We fight it the whole time with the underlying thought being that it’s unfair. 

This is VERY normal. We all do it. What I really want you to understand is the REASON this happens is because we are turning to action to solve our problem. The action being the diet. 

And this is why it fails, because when we take action without changing how we’re thinking, we only have willpower to rely on - because NOTHING has really changed. 

The only way to CHANGE is by FIRST changing the thoughts you’re having about yourself and your plan and only THEN take the actions - to make healthy choices, eat responsibly, and be physically active. 

Here’s what really made the difference for me - it was when I understood that you can take the same action but it can have different results based on the thinking with which you did it.

I’ll give you an example. Imagine two clients who have 50lbs to lose. Client 1 sticks to her plan all week because she thinks her body is disgusting. Every time she gets on the scale in the morning and looks in the mirror she silently berates herself for being overweight. 

 Client 2 sticks to her plan because she respects her body. Before she gets on the scale in the morning she mentally prepares herself, reminding herself that this is only a number - an indication of what’s happening with her weight and it’s temporary. When she sees herself in the mirror she might notice extra weight but she says, “you know what that’s okay right now. I’m loving myself in spite of it.”

Now who do you think over the longer term is going to be successful in reaching their goal? It’s obvious isn’t it? But I know that most likely you are letting your brain run the show unmanaged and it’s opting for old patterns of beating yourself up. Most people are client one. That’s not a problem, it simply means we have work to do.

So how do you change old thought patterns around your weight loss struggle? How do you go from telling yourself you’re fat and you suck to you love yourself? It doesn’t happen overnight. The first step is to be AWARE of the thoughts you’re having. Notice what you’re telling yourself when you get on the scale, look in the mirror, when someone brings in warm donuts to the office.

The next step is to examine how your current thoughts might be serving you WHILE creating your current result. Let me say that again because you might be like what did she just say? I want you to really look at what your current thinking is DOING for you. How it’s actually serving you. Maybe it’s allowing you to say yes to the donuts and have that immediate pleasure. Maybe it’s keeping you from going outside of your comfort zone or requiring more of yourself.  Your unmanaged brain is trying to keep you safe and comfortable. That’s it’s job. Look at how it’s doing that when it comes to food and your weight. 

Often we take actions without EVER knowing what thoughts we’re having. I want to share with you some really common underlying thoughts. If you recognize any of these, that’s really good, it means you’re aware and you can be on to yourself. 

The food tastes too good to resist

Hunger is bad

I know I should eat healthy, but it’s too hard

I shouldn’t eat this or that but I just need it right now

I shouldn’t overeat, but I want more.

I really want this food and eating it won’t make that much of a difference anyway.

All of these thoughts create an overdesire for food. It gives food more credit than it deserves.

The food is not the problem. Your desire for food isn’t even the problem. That’s healthy. It’s healthy to desire food when you’re physically hungry. It’s the OVERDESIRE and your patterns of reacting to that overdesire that’s the problem.

When you understand what that overdesire is all about, you’ll know WHY we keep overeating and you can change it.

And there’s no understanding unless there’s self reflection. Otherwise you’re simply doing the same thing over and over again without learning anything new. 

Another benefit of self reflection is that as soon as you do it, it pulls your out of avoidance. It’s a fresh start. When we self-reflect it signals to our brain that that was the end of something (overeating) and this is something new now, (responsible eating). 

For our purposes I want you to think of self reflection as simply careful consideration. And there are two scenarios that require careful consideration. The first is after we’ve indulged or eaten off our plan. 

As I mentioned when this happens, we typically focus on food, not on why we overate in the first place - the overdesire. If we can understand that, we’re conscious of what we’re doing. If it sometimes feels automatic to you to overeat, self reflection will bring in that awareness piece you need to get back in control. 

When we are AWARE, eventually we’ll be so on to ourselves that the pain and discomfort of overeating and betraying ourselves in that way is MORE than the discomfort of not having the food. This tipping point only happens with practice, but once you get there, it’s so, so much easier to leave the past behind and get excited about the future and what’s possible. 

The second scenario in which to self reflect is when you DO follow your plan. This is one we often gloss over completely. We think that if everything is working there’s nothing else to be done. Simply carry on right? But there is just as much valuable information HERE as when we go off plan. When you understand the components that are involved in your plan working for you, you can repeat them over and over.

If you don’t do this work, your brain won’t think it’s that important and you will forget. Then you’ll go through a hard time, be stressed out and you’ll go off plan and think - how was it so easy for me before? And you’ll feel frustrated with yourself. 

So if self reflection is the key to understanding and solving your problem, why aren’t you doing it? It’s all very rational. We avoid it because:

• It hasn’t occurred to us before now

• We don’t think it’s important

• We think we don’t have the time

• We think it’s tedious and a lot of work

• And the biggest one: We don’t want to examine our overeating because of the negative feelings of guilt and shame

But ask yourself, are those good enough reasons to stay where you are now? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet if you’ve made the effort to find this podcast and listen this far into it, you want more for yourself than what you currently have. So to help you with that, I’m going to share with you a very simple self reflection exercise you can do in your journal. 

Ask yourself these three questions:

• What’s working?

• What’s not working?

• What will I do differently?

You can do it every day, at the end of the day or whenever you normally do your thought work. You can also do it once a week for the entire week. You get to decide what’s going to work best for you.

The language here is important because it’s neutral. It’s not what went right, and what went wrong.  Feeling anxious or bored and then overeating is not wrong. You are not wrong or bad for doing that at all. But reacting to feeling like that by eating food doesn’t work for weight loss. No big deal, it just simply doesn’t work. It’s a terrible strategy for dealing with your feelings. 

When you’re answering these questions, What’s working, what’s not working and what will I do differently, watch how your brain might start judging. And it’s okay if you’re not feeling amazing when you’re looking at yourself going off plan. All emotions are welcome, but can you say:

- yeah know - I’m learning.

-  I’m not perfect, but I’m making SOME progress.

- I’m doing the best I can right now.

You MUST write what’s working first. Again, our brains will gloss over this and say it’s not important because of our negativity bias, we’ll want to focus on what’s NOT working. That will be very easy to spot. I encourage you to work to override this impulse and teach your brain to find what IS working.

Right now I’m listening to an audiobook by Mel Robbins. It’s her latest one called The High Five Habit and I’ll link to her website in the shownotes because she has really helpful, practical advice on behavioural change and self esteem. In her book she talks about the Reticular Activating System - which is a network of neurons located at the brain stem. It’s job is to filter what’s coming into your brain and organize it and make sense of it. If we didn’t have this, we’d be bombarded with information overload simply be stepping out our front door. But the cool thing is that we can start training our brain to see what we want it to see. Mel talks about how she sets the intention to find heart shaped objects all around her and guess what happens, she spots them almost on a daily basis. So to test it, and see how powerful our brains are at filtering information, I did the same thing. And it worked that very day - I started seeing hearts everywhere. 

So you have those three questions and here’s a bonus one for you overachievers out there. 

What will the impact be on my life and on those I care about when I’m at my natural weight and feel in charge around food? 

Here are some more question prompts to help guide you:

• How will I show up for myself and others

• How will in contribute differently

• How will I experience getting dressed on a daily basis

• How I feel about the future?

• How I feel about myself - my self confidence?

When you answer those questions honestly, you’ll see what’s truly at stake if you don’t make some changes. It’s not about fitting into that old pair of jeans you’re dying to get into again. That’s fun for sure and let that excite you. But I promise you, you can use this weight loss game to be about so much more if you look at it that way.  It’s your relationship with yourself. It’s about how you think about yourself and what you think you’re capable of in this life. 

So here’s some tough love for yeah. If you’re not giving it 100% - going all in, you’re making a terrible trade off. You’re experiencing all of the down side for only temporary pleasure and relief. You’re choosing the long term pain of being overweight and being in food hell over the short term pain and discomfort of being with the negative emotions that come up when you don’t overeat. 

When you can figure out what’s REALLY going on, you’re still going to experience pain, but it’s in service of your evolution as a person. Your growth. Permanent weight loss is personal growth in disguise.

So do this thought work - answer the 3 questions: What’s working, what’s not working and what do I want to do differently. Self Reflection is key because we won’t change our thoughts in the moment of overdesire. It’s nearly impossible to turn down a warm donut if we haven’t thought about what we REALLY want and our reasons beforehand - with our prefrontal cortex ahead of time.

The real change comes before and after the moment of overdesire and then manifests as action or non action (eating the donut or not).

If you would like the handout that goes with this episode that has all of these journal exercise questions on it and a few bonus ones I didn’t mention, you can get that for free on my website. Go to mindfulshape.com/resources. 

If you would like to try coaching with me by doing a 30 minute session that I’ll feature on the podcast, go ahead and contact me either by booking in my calendar or you can email me directly at paula@mindfulshape.com and we can set something up. You can come with either something very specific around food and your weight that you’re struggling with or if you simply want clarification with why you can’t keep the weight off, we can coach on that too. 

And lastly if you are worried about the holidays coming up and sticking to your plan, now is the time to get support! Don’t wait until you’re in holiday mode and it’s a free for all. Let’s set up a call now so that you can continue to lose weight throughout December and into January. Yes, it IS possible to continue losing weight during the holidays while enjoying them too. You can go to my website mindfulshape.com or simply email me to set up a coaching consultation. Again that’s paula@mindfulshape.com 

Thanks so much for you attention today and I truly hope you found this helpful. You are right on track - keep going. I’ll talk to you again soon.