Ep. 36 When it Feels Too Hard

Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. I’m Paula Parker. 

Whether you’ve been listening for a while or this is your first episode, I know from my own experience that inevitably it just feels too hard. I hear from a lot of you who listen to the podcast who don’t even have any weight to lose, but the concepts apply to other aspects of your life. And this episode is going to be perfect for those of you. Because we all have challenges that sometimes just feel too hard, whether it’s a health issue, finding a new job, finding time for yourself or maintaining the passion in the bedroom - there’s always something right? So I think you’re really going to get a lot out of this episode. 

Now for my weight loss people, sometimes it feels too hard to stick to your weight loss plan and sometimes you’re sticking to it - you’re eating healthy, you’re paying attention to your thoughts, processing urges, journaling your food and still, it just feels hard. 

You’re thinking, by now it should be easier. I should be enjoying myself more. Maybe you’re looking over at your friend or colleague and thinking, why does she seem to eat anything she wants. Why is she eating pizza and chips for lunch and she stays so thin. And if I eat like that, my clothes don’t fit the next day? “Why is it so hard for me?” “I can’t stay on this healthy protocol forever. I want to be able to eat pizza and chips for lunch whenever I want.”  Or you’re looking at your super healthy friend who works out all the time and think, “Why can’t I do that?” “Why is it so easy for her?”

All of those thoughts are going through your head right? So what I want to offer is that it’s not the eating healthy or staying on your protocol that’s so hard. It’s all of this type of thinking that’s on top of it that’s making it FEEL harder than it actually is. 

We think we’re just telling the truth. Like, “It’s so hard. I’m being honest, I’m being realistic about what I’m experiencing here.” “It’s terrible to have to restrict food and be hungry.” “This sucks.” “I hate this.” 

But what we’re really doing here is stacking the pain. We’re stacking the discomfort and the difficulty of this challenge. By thinking this way, thinking it’s so hard, which for most of us is automatic, and until today unquestioned, you’re increasing the resistance and making losing weight even more uncomfortable. 

Did that sink in? If you’re newer to coaching you may be like, what’s going on here? Essentially what I’m saying is that it only FEELS hard because of your thoughts about it being hard. I’ll give you an example from my own experience. A few years ago I learned about the benefits of intermittent fasting and decided to try it. At that point I was eating breakfast every day before work at 7am and was super hungry when I woke up. So when I decided to wait until 10am to eat my first meal, I was so, so hungry. My stomach was growling, I was super grumpy. I remember being in a meeting at work and being so irritated at everything. I was very much in resistance to the whole experience and I thought this is terrible - how do people do this every day, it’s not for me. And that was on the first day. And all of those thoughts were automatic. And I didn’t question them. But I did keep it up because I also had thoughts about how effective it was not only for fat loss but overall health and aging so I had enough of those thoughts to keep me going and make it a habit, in which I no longer have the mind drama. 

So what does that look like? Now if I decide my first meal is going to be at 11 or noon or whatever based on my schedule, I can feel the hunger if it comes up and I don’t have any resistance. It’s okay to feel hungry. There’s no drama. I check the clock and say “Oh it’s only 10am, I’ll eat in an hour.” My stomach is rumbling. No problem, I know I’ll be eating soon and I have fat stores on my body for fuel. 

And I just want to make a side note here that withholding food is something that you may have a lot of thoughts and feelings about. What I’m talking about here is not withholding food as a punishment or because you overeat the day before or anything like that. You’ll know if it feels like it’s coming from a disordered mindset around food - your spidey senses will pick up on it. Because it won’t be coming from a place of love for yourself and a desire for responsible eating, it will be coming from shame and punishment. So I want to be clear on that. 

I’ll give you another example that’s not food related. This past summer we had a really intense heat wave and for my husband and I, it felt unbearable - especially at night. Even though we live on an island where it’s usually quite breezy, it was deathly still. I remember looking out our bedroom window at the trees and nothing was moving and it was almost eerie. And we complained and complained about it and our son was only a few months old and everyone was asking us how he was doing with the heat. But I think, and this is total speculation on my part, that he didn’t have nearly the discomfort that we had, if any at all. He wasn’t acting any differently or sleeping any differently. And it occurred to me at the time that my husband I have so many thoughts about this heat and how it’s terrible and how it shouldn’t be like this and how long will we have to endure this?  I can’t go another night like this! So much resistance right? Stacking the discomfort with how we were relating to our experience, but for our baby who had none of these thoughts, maybe he was a bit warmer sure, but seemingly unphased by the entire episode. 

So many of us think that weight loss is too hard to take on right now, at this exact time. Like we have to line up our lives perfectly before we can be successful at it. We have ideas like “I just need to get through this difficult period, then I’m going to be able to focus on it.” “There’s going to be a right time to do it.” As if there’s some point we’ll get to when we’ll have zero stress and can focus all our time and energy on weight loss. I’d say it’s actually easier if you DO have a lot going on. It’s much easier to say, “Okay I’m not eating until 11am” and then have a lot to do and occupy your mind than to be sitting there, simply waiting to eat. 

We also think even if we do manage to lose the weight it’s not something we can sustain. But what’s actually hard to sustain is doing all it takes to lose weight WHILE having thoughts that make it worse - thinking terrible thoughts about ourselves, our bodies and the process of losing weight and how the whole thing is unfair. How it should be different and less hard. 

So if these are simply automatic thoughts in your brain right now, and if at this point you’re listening and thinking, “Yeah but it really is hard,” then I’m talking directly to you. Here’s what I suggest that will change everything for you.

Encourage yourself to say yes to the process, all of it. Especially the hard stuff. Instead of getting caught up in the idea that it sucks and is unfair, adopt a “bring it on” attitude. You do this by allowing yourself to WANT the challenge. So when your brain says, “ I don’t really want to workout today,” or “I don’t really want to get on the scale, or journal my food, or eat on my plan,” pay attention. In that moment you could embrace the truth of why you DO want to do those things. 

I used to find myself saying, “I don’t want to go to work tomorrow.” And I would just feel defeated about it. And my coach reminded me that I was a grown woman. I didn’t have to go into work. Sure I’d have to deal with the consequences, but I was in charge. And I would push back and say, “Well I need to go in because if I don’t go in they could fire me and then I couldn’t afford my bills.” But that’s still an option right? I didn’t want that scenario - I wanted to be able to pay my rent so I DID in fact want to go into work. My brain was lying to me about what I really wanted. Maybe I didn’t FEEL like going in the next day, but at least with this new perspective, I felt ownership over my decision and my life. 

So say yes to wanting all of it. When it comes you’re overeating, you’re saying yes to all of that by default. You’re saying yes to the pleasure of the food in the moment AND you’re saying yes to the weight gain, to not feeling comfortable in your clothes, to putting off your natural weight another day, week, month into the future. Whether it’s 10lbs or 100lbs - being overweight comes with it’s own set of  challenges. The important difference is that those challenges are forced upon you. We don’t consciously choose the challenge of having nothing to wear because we’ve outgrown our clothes, or the challenge of health issues associated with weight gain.

On the other hand, losing weight is a challenge we choose. So there are two types of challenges: forced and chosen. Both require the same effort on our part to overcome. And both will require us to grow and change to overcome them. 

The problem with a challenge you choose, that’s optional, is that you can quit. There’s an escape button - you can just quit when it gets too hard. Or rather, when you THINK it has become too hard. You’re not forced to grow from that. But if you choose not to quit, you get stronger. 

The question becomes - how will you use this challenge to help you become MORE of the person you want to become?

I want you to think of a version of yourself whom you may think of as your highest self, or your best self. This is the fullest expression of who you are. And I’ll bet this version is at her natural weight. Now between who you are now, which is already complete, whole and perfect, and the fullest expression of yourself,  are a lot of challenges to overcome. 

So when you’ve been working at weight loss and you start thinking, “Man haven’t I been doing this long enough? Hasn’t there been enough challenge for one lifetime?” Maybe it’s not time to settle with your current experience with food and your body. Maybe you can embrace this continual challenge because it's a necessary step toward the fullest expression of yourself.

When any challenge comes your way - you can let it bring out more of who you want to be or less of who you want to be. There’s an opening up or a closing down. When you say, “Well what I really want is to overeat”, that’s a closing down because you’re not open to the pain - the discomfort of going without the overeating.

What if it’s good that it’s hard? It’s supposed to be hard and nothing is going wrong. Because it’s the challenges that change us. And if your shoulder just slumped a little in disappointment or you felt the need to sigh, even hearing that, know that you’re not alone. 

We often have the idea that the goal is to avoid challenges, minimize our challenges and to get out of them as quickly as possible without being affected by them. We want the easiest path to get what we want without any challenges. 

Maybe you can think of someone who’s had it pretty easy, not very many challenges and then something really big happens and it devastates them. Why? Because they’ve never faced real hardship before. But no one goes through life without challenges - no one. 

And on the flip side you can imagine someone who had many challenges and in facing them, became really good at it. I had a friend growing up who was faced with numerous challenges in her childhood, teenage years and then again in her early twenties and yet she was successful,  so positive and open to life and I asked her point blank, “how is it that you’ve been able to get through all of that?” And she said it’s because of all of those challenges that she can be successful. She said she saw herself overcoming them and it fueled her to keep going. The fact that she had and was overcoming all of the crap life had thrown at her, helped her see herself as resourceful, resilient and strong. 

But for many of us, when challenges come our way, instead of getting good at overcoming challenges, we turn away. We buffer with food or alcohol or tv. Now that I’ve got the food thing under control I notice I tend to want to watch tv when I don’t want to feel my emotions. The other day I didn’t feel like working, so in my procrastination I scrolled social for a bit, saw something that made me jealous and then I REALLY didn’t feel like working and felt a very strong desire to watch Seinfeld bc it’s now on Netflix. Fortunately I’m on to myself and I got to work. Because maybe you’ve noticed this, when you have work to do, you don’t even enjoy the show anyway do you? It’s so much more satisfying to do the work and watch afterward when you can truly enjoy it. 

For a while I had an aversion to any type of challenge. I remember saying, why would I want to do a 30 day yoga challenge when life is challenging enough already?

But what if our life was supposed to have challenges? What if we were supposed to seek them out in order to change us? In the way that we choose. So that we change to grow and change to evolve as a human and become MORE of who we truly are rather than less. 

When we look at challenges like this, it changes our weight loss journey doesn’t it? It really gives us a new perspective. So now when it comes to food and our weight as the challenge that we choose to work on, we don’t have to  constantly try to minimize the challenge. 

Aren’t we always trying to find the easiest way to do it? Like there’s some magical method of weight loss in which we won’t feel any deprivation or negative emotion? And so we just keep looking for that in different diets and when they don’t work we get really discouraged. We think it’s too hard for us.

Or we just want to rush through it with a white knuckle approach until we reach our goal weight and then by magic, we’ll go back to how we were eating before and somehow maintain our weight loss. We’ll just figure that out then, we think. My future skinny self can sort it out then. She won’t ever have temptation or want to overeat. 

So what excites me is adopting the attitude of allowing challenges to change me in the biggest way possible. That’s what I’m working on. So for you, what if this food body thing could be something more important - it could be part of a curriculum for your human experience. A way to get stronger, better, more of who you truly are. 

I’ll share with you a challenge that I’m working on right now. So we bought our house a year ago and now there’s a proposal for a multi-rise building to go in right across the street. 

I would never choose this, this is definitely a forced challenge but I’ve decided I’m going to use it to get good at challenges, because I know that if I get good at challenges in general, my life actually gets easier because of that. Because when faced with any challenge it doesn’t destroy me. It doesn’t stress me out and keep me up at night in worry. 

This is the whole concept behind taking cold showers. You may have heard about this. But the idea is that you’re challenging yourself in a controlled way - you have control over the cold water but it’s still a challenge because it’s so uncomfortable and you build the skill of showing yourself you can endure and even take ownership over the discomfort - over the challenge. You get good at this low stakes challenge so that when a higher stakes challenge comes your way, you’re trained - you’re ready - you’re someone who can manage it. It works because of the principle that the more pain you feel, the less painful pain is. You get better at not resisting it. You get better at allowing for it. 

So it’s not about having less challenges in life, it’s about getting more skilled at handling them. 

Okay so let’s talk about what saying yes to it being hard really looks like in weight loss. We say yes when the scale goes up even when we’re sure the night before it’s going to drop. We have days when it’s pretty straight forward to manage urges and days when it feels impossible and we say yes to both. We’re going to feel hungry sometimes. We say yes to being in our particular body and not our friends’ body. We say yes to learning the skill of releasing weight and managing our thoughts, especially when that’s hard. 

When we think it should be a certain way, or it should be easier, we’re wanting it to be different than it is. And it’s not different. It’s just how it is. And the harder you think it is, the greater the challenge, the greater the achievement will be for you. So if it’s really feeling hard, I want you to know that on the other side is just as much intensity in emotion, but instead of frustration, self-pity and shame, it’s a sense of pride and accomplishment for overcoming the challenge and feeling amazing in your own skin. 

So here’s another question for you: How will this challenge help you become the next version of yourself?

Okay so that was A LOT on reframing the hardness - the challenge of weight loss. I want to offer another thing to focus on when it feels hard. It’s so simple, and I know you’ve heard it before but don’t dismiss it. Take it one day at a time. I’m going to share with you how to use this concept in a new way.

When it feels hard we tend to catastrophize the future and the enormity of our goal. We think “Today was a tough day, I can’t go through the whole week like this, let alone the rest of my life!” or “I have so much to lose, how will I ever get there?”, “It will always feel hard.” or “Sure today went well, but what about that upcoming dinner with friends or my vacation…”

These thoughts seem very important and necessary but you don’t actually need to entertain any of those concerns. So when your brain offers up these thoughts you can agree that it's hard and confusing - yeah so what if that’s what I believe right now...AND decide to keep going anyways. Don’t try to fight your brain every time. Instead give it something else, more constructive to do by focusing on  mastering one weight loss skill at a time. 

For example, instead of committing to being 100% forever from now on, decide that this next week you’ll really focus on building the habit of tracking what you’re eating or maybe you want to hone in on your own personal hunger and satiation scale. Maybe you don’t worry about anything other than sticking to the time you had planned to eat and overcoming all the obstacles that come up. You could also choose processing your urges - getting really good at that for the week or simply noticing the link between emotions and food urges. Whatever you choose and you practice, you’ll get really good at that. You don’t have to do it all at once, perfectly starting Monday and forevermore. 

I get it that you want this to be over like yesterday. That you are likely in a hurry to release the weight. If it takes you three weeks to lose a pound you think it’s all going wrong. But what if you lost a pound every three weeks until you reached your goal weight? What would be wrong with that right? You reach your goal. And what’s the alternative, you think it’s not working fast enough and end up quitting altogether and NEVER get there. Patience is your very best friend here. 

And one last point because I know future phobia is a very common theme so just know that you don’t need to decide everything today. If you have a vacation or a dinner planned, you can decide the day before what your plan is. We don’t need to figure out every detail today for this to work. Just remember to tell your brain, “ I don’t need to decide that right now. I will decide that when it’s necessary for me to decide that.”

I hope this was helpful. Some of you have been contacting me by email or instagram and telling me about your experience and that’s so, so fun for me, so if you feel called to reach out and just say hi - please do so. I would love to hear from you. My email is paula@mindfulshape.com and you can find me on instagram at mindful_shape. And the Meetup group is growing! We’re now at 126 members.

I’ll talk to you soon.