Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker. Do you consider yourself a negative person? Now you may be friendly and you may be helpful and productive out there in the world and you think, yeah know most people I know wouldn't call me negative but I know the real me. And the real me is pretty negative. 

Guess what - we all are! That’s our human brain! We have a negativity bias built right into our brains for survival reasons. So that we see where there’s danger and we remember it because it’s important and we avoid it so we stay alive. But for some reason our brain equates an upcoming performance review or the fact that our friend didn’t text us back, or that we missed the ferry and have to wait 2 more hours...with death. (Now that we live on Vancouver island, the ferry schedule and how busy it is, is a major consideration when you want to go somewhere). Yesterday I talked to my sister who lives in another city and after I got off the phone I reflected back and realized just how negative I was being. It was like no matter what she said, I had a “yeah but,” ready to go. My toddler creates huge messes and she pointed out that’s why it’s nice to have a dog to clean up the food on the floor and I was like “yeah but…” and explained how much of hassle it is to keep them away from each other so my dog doesn’t snap at my child. Then we chatted about buying things for the house and how expensive this or that it...it just went on and on. And that’s pretty typical right? I think we often complain as a way of connecting with others too. Or even for something to say, like when we complain about the weather. It’s wet and rainy or it’s too hot or it’s too windy. It’s so easy for us to see how this should all be better or could be better. 

Many of our thoughts throughout the day tend to be on the more negative side of things. I’ve heard roughly 80%. So maybe we think of that as like our default programming. Nice to know there’s nothing going wrong at least. However, when it comes to your weight loss it’s probably not helping so in this episode I’m going to talk about how it commonly shows up when you’re trying to lose weight and how to overcome these habitual negative thoughts so that you are more successful and frankly, feel less negative about yourself and your life. 

Plus if you hear from someone else (me) all of the most common negative thoughts I hear a lot being in this industry, you may feel just a little less alone in this. I want you to know that so many other women are in the same boat.

Okay so the first thing you want to watch out for is thinking in absolutes. By this I mean saying: always, never, everyone, no one.

For example, someone recently said to me, “I will ALWAYS snack after dinner - I just know that about myself.”

But obviously that’s not a fact right. What if she stays at a friends’ place and they don’t have dessert? It’s pretty unlikely she’s going to get up in the night and rummage the fridge. And also, snacking after dinner is simply a habit that’s automatic in her brain right now, but all habits can be broken. It’s actually amazing to me and sad really, when we see ourselves as being so powerless that we can’t control something as simple as snacking after dinner. But I get it, when your brain is hooked like that, it’s going to feel bad both physically and mentally to NOT do it. It’s way easier to have the snack and then make up the story that it will always be like this for me - there’s nothing I can do. Well there is something you can do but it’s going to feel like misery for a little while. Not an easy sell. 

HOWEVER, when you decide it IS possible for you to avoid snacking after dinner say, and you manage to allow the urge for even a couple of weeks, then THAT becomes automatic for your brain. And then it requires no discipline at all. And then when you put your head on your pillow that night you feel all the good feelings of sticking to your plan - staying on track and working toward your goal. 

Some other examples of negative thoughts during weight loss are:

I always quit
I’ll never lose the weight or if I do, I won’t be able to keep it off
No one understands how hard it is for me

Now don’t get me wrong, I know we’ve all had our darker moments of despair and thought these thoughts and or journalled them down. What I’m talking about here is more of your ongoing, running dialogue. Are you telling yourself this or is this going on in the background for you all of the time? Do you even know? This is why it’s so important to be doing your Daily 15 - your daily journaling and getting your thoughts down on paper. 

Because when you have the belief that you always quit, your brain will look for evidence and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that then confirms this thought error. And that one in particular is an easy thought error to spot because you’re not quitting if you’re listening to this right now. You’re still working on it. So it’s definitely not true that you always quit. 

I know a big concern for many of you is that you can’t do it or that if you do, you won’t be able to keep it off. This is one I hear a lot. And then your brain goes to - so why bother? Right? Why even try and endure the deprivation if I’m only going to gain it all back. And we can’t blame ourselves for being skeptical because look at all the evidence. MOST people do NOT keep the weight off. According to Scientific American, 80% of people who shed a significant portion of their body fat will not maintain that degree of weight loss for a year and not only that, dieters regain, on average, more than half of what they want to lose within two years. So yeah, OF COURSE your brain is going down this track. 

And hearing that probably isn’t pulling you out of any negative thinking quit yet, but I have some really good news about that. I would like to offer that the REASON this is the case, is because that 80% and those dieters didn’t change their thinking at all. They focused on the action - on the food and exercise part of weight loss. And they white knuckles their way there, most likely eating in a way that’s not sustainable for their entire lifetime. Now I obviously don’t know the details, but I think it’s a really safe bet. Because as we know, if we don’t change the thinking that created the problem, we are bound to repeat it. If you go into a healthy eating plan with really negative thinking about it and about your capability, and about yourself, you won’t see much in the way of positive results.

And this is why it’s so important for you to take a close look at your thoughts - get them down on paper and then start working to change them.

Okay so I think this is a good time to chat about being positive because I’m sure you’re thinking, well I just can’t erase the negativity and be positive about everything all of a sudden. There is nothing more infuriating than being in a bad mood and someone telling you to think more positive or look on the bright side. And you don’t have to. Nor should you.

Writing down your thoughts and working to change them is about getting you to see what is happening for you. It is not about trying to change your state. You simply want to see what’s really driving your behaviour so that you have the full picture. When you have the thought, Well I will always want sweets for the rest of my life,” you can ask yourself if you want to keep that thought OR if you want to change it. Now if you decide you want to change it, you probably won’t feel positive but you MAY feel more neutral. We can’t eradicate all our negative thoughts but we can get curious about them and then see where we want to spend some time changing them IF we want to, over time. 

Now that you see that even though you’re trying to reduce or cut out sugar, what you really think is that you’ll always want them, you’re signing yourself up for a lifetime of deprivation. No one wants that. So it’s no wonder you don’t stick with it. 

But you can also decide that you ARE going to figure out how to NOT want sweets for the rest of your life. How do you know this is possible? Because there ARE people who used to always want them and now rarely want them. The difference is they learned how to curtail that OVERDESIRE for them. The psychological and physical overdesire. That’s what I do with my clients. 

Another habitual negative thought is that your negativity shouldn’t be happening. Like you shouldn’t be feeling negative so much. So when we feel negative and it’s an unpleasant experience we resist it. We feel bad about feeling bad. I do this a lot and it’s one I’m working on. But why do we think we are supposed to feel good all the time? When we’re running on less sleep than we need, when we have a bad headache, when we realize we’ve missed an important deadline or got into a fight with our spouse...it’s pretty human to feel negative right? Have you ever met someone who is just over the top positive all the time? You just know they’re in denial right? Like they’re about to explode or something. It’s false. Something’s not quite right with them. Because no one has a perfect life and has a positive outlook on EVERYTHING. 

So I think the key is to start being okay with some negativity. I think often when we resist it, we don’t want to feel bad about something - that’s when we turn to food to numb out.

Have you ever wondered why when you have negative thoughts about your body, you actually overeat more? Or when the scale doesn’t go down, you don't stick to your plan that day? On the surface it makes no sense, but you don’t have to look to deeply to see why. 

Negative thinking, like thinking your body is too fat, or your plan isn’t working because of the number on the scale,  is going to make you FEEL badly and when we feel badly about ourselves, about life in general or something specific that’s stressful, we’ll turn to food to modulate our emotions. It’s simply a loop. 

The takeaway here is that ironically overcoming negativity means embracing it rather than resisting it. When we are okay with feeling negative sometimes, we aren’t using up our energy fighting or feeling bad about it, it passes through so much faster. 

Now was it fair to my sister that I was completely focussed on the negative during our conversation no matter what she offered? No. We also need to practice self awareness enough that we’re not spuuing our negativity onto everyone else indirectly. I was just in a mood and we’re all human. Work in progress here.

But instead of our negativity coming out like a wildfire, we can manage it like a controlled burn. And how we do this is by examining the facts and then identifying the thoughts and feelings we’re having. Oftentimes we think our thoughts are the truth and maybe it is but it’s important to question it first. Okay lots of theory here so let’s go back to the last example: No one understands how hard it is for me.

I think it’s true that everyone does have their own unique experience that on one level we can’t possibly ever know because we’re not them. HOWEVER, I also think we have more in common when it comes to our psychology than we give ourselves credit for. I think this is especially true when it comes to food and body image. I say this because I hear the same things over and over. I don’t feel good in my body, I don’t feel confident with my partner during intimacy, Nothing in the closet fits me anymore, I’m too fat to go to the gym. We really do have a lot of the same thoughts and feelings on this one. Sure, there are nuances, but it’s the same stuff: thoughts of not being good enough (either according to your own standard or someone else's). 

Okay a bit of a tangent there but getting back to no one understands how hard it is for you. It’s hard for all of us. I mean just look around. Sure I KNOW you have friends for whom food and their weight has never been a ‘thing’ for them. Maybe you have a number of them. So yeah, maybe they don’t particularly understand this exact flavour of struggle, but they aren’t living their lives without struggle and challenges. And there are so many women who DO understand how hard it is because they are living the same thing. They might not be the exact same size or have the same weight goal, but they know what it means to start a diet over and over again. 

Let’s bring it home now. Stop calling yourself a negative person because you have a normal negativity biased brain. We all have negative thoughts - probably the majority of the time. I’m tired, it’s too cold in here, I have too much to do, etc. etc. 

When it comes to losing weight we can look at the absolute thoughts we have that aren’t serving us. Ones like, I’ll never NOT want sugar again, or I just snack after dinner - that’s who I am. These are negative thoughts that have no upside to thinking them. That said, it’s healthy to feel negativity some of the time. My coach says 50% of the time. 50% of the time you’re feeling good, 50% of the time you’re not. That’s life. It’s a helpful framework because it lets it be okay when things are negative. What adds to your pain is when you think you SHOULDN'T be feeling anything negative. Janet Jackson who suffered from depression said once and I’m paraphrasing here but, that nothing is sadder than having everything and still feeling sad. Just because you’re privileged and you may have champagne problems, doesn’t excuse you from feeling negative. So don’t feel bad about feeling bad.  This is why it’s so important to do your work - do your thought work, or talk to a coach or therapist who can help you sort out your thinking and process your emotions. Often what triggers us, what we’re feeling negative about is exactly where we have the most growth to do. It’s there for a reason.