Ep. 28 Staying Committed for the Duration
Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. This podcast is dedicated to those of us who are ready to release the excess weight and finally be at peace with food. And I’d like to mention that I really am thinking of those of you who have connected with me either through email or on instagram. While I’m recording this alone, by myself, I truly am thinking of you and that’s why I do this.
So many of us have been trapped in diets and feeling miserable about our bodies for too long and it doesn’t have to be like that. Many of us were taught to simply eat less and exercise more and we’d lose weight, but as we know, there’s way more to it than that. There are deeper reasons why we started turning to food in the first place and that’s what we have to put our energy toward because when we solve for that - the REAL problem, the overeating goes away on it’s own.
So today I’m talking about staying committed for the duration of your weight loss journey. And this is a topic that was suggested by one of my Meetup members, who by the way lost 5lbs in the first month of our Meetup which is so awesome. So if you’re in the pacific time zone, be sure to check that out. We meet once a week on Monday or Tuesday at 7pm with a new topic each week. I’ll link to it in the show notes, but you can go to Meetup.com and search for Mindful Shape to find it. The group’s called Mindful Shape Weight Loss for Women.
Moving on. I have a few different strategies to help you commit to your weight loss journey but first I want to share with you this concept I learned about called The 4 C’s Formula, by Dan Sullivan for achieving goals because I think it will help you understand what’s going on when you’re having a hard time staying committed. And it really sets the stage for all of the tactics I’m going to share with you.
I like to think of it as a path. The first C is Commitment. So we start out - we commit to a plan or a protocol but what happens is that we experience resistance to it and feel all the unwanted feelings, self-pity, resentment, fear that it’s going to be terrible and then we start questioning the plan or doubting ourselves.
This is why I always warn my new clients that this is likely to happen for them after they sign up for coaching. Nothing is going wrong here. It’s totally normal. Our brain wants us to do things that are comfortable and familiar for our survival.
And we have lots of thoughts about how it’s going to be hard. Right? It’s going to mean deprivation because that’s been our experience in the past. So who wants to sign up for that? Now the first step of your program should be getting your hormones adjusted so that you’re not hungry all the time and having lots of cravings, because once your body is recalibrated, you’ll have solved for the physiology part and can then focus on the psychological part of weight loss. If you’re new and you’re like, what was that? Here’s a quick explanation.
When we overeat foods with flour and sugar, they spike our dopamine in our brains which feels great in the moment but over time, when we continue to eat this way, our dopamine receptors don’t function properly. They become down regulated meaning they need more and more glucose from sugar and flour to achieve the same great feeling. That’s why you feel like you need more and more to get the same enjoyment and pleasure. This creates what we can think of as over hunger - it’s a hunger for more and more glycogen. But when you get off sugar and flour, yes you’ll go through withdrawal at first, eventually you won’t even have the desire for these foods and you’ll get so much more pleasure from vegetables, grains and meat. I went from someone who loved candy and dried fruit like dried mango and dried papaya, thinking those were healthier options, to now, where I don’t even like fresh fruit because I find it too sweet. And you might be thinking I don’t want to give up fruit! And I get that totally, and you don’t have to ever - but what I’m saying is that I don’t even have the DESIRE for it anymore. That’s what this is all about - removing your desire for sugar and flour so that you’re not having to constantly hold down your cravings like a beach ball underwater.
And this takes me to my next C in the formula. Courage. I know that many of you will get turned off my the idea of cutting out sugar and flour on a daily basis. I know this because it would have turned me off when I was still trying to figure it out. I couldn’t imagine limiting myself to 1 or 2 servings of sugar and flour a week. So if you’re with me, and you’re willing to try - you are on the next step of the path: Courage. It takes courage to try something that you know will be a challenge. And it takes courage to be with all of the unwanted emotions that come up without turning to food.
However, if we can practice courage enough times, we start to believe ourselves to be capable of actually doing it. This is the 3rd C: Capability. So what does this look like in our example. I want you to imagine it’s Friday night and you’ve been sticking to your protocol all week. And it’s been a long week at work, stressful as usual and you’re tired and hungry and you don’t want the salad and cold chicken breast that you had planned on eating for dinner. Maybe your partner suggests ordering pizza and that sounds a million times better. This is your sacred moment. This is when you practice the courage of doing something different. You tell your partner, “that sounds great - you go ahead and do that if you’d like but I already planned to have my salad with chicken.” And you practice having the courage to feel the fomo, the depreciation, the self-pity all of that. And you do this the next day and the next and the next. And before long, you know you are capable of sticking to your plan. Weeks go by and you develop the last C in the formula: Confidence. You now have the skills to maintain your weight loss.
What we typically do is commit, then when we have to have courage, feel the deprivation, the self-pity, we say this isn’t for me - I’m out and turn back, only to start again a little while later and commit again. Do this on repeat and you get the opposite of confidence - you have no trust in yourself or your ability to lose weight and keep it off.
So that’s the 4 C’s: Commitment, Courage, Capability and Confidence. So I touched on the main issue which is to develop the capacity to feel unwanted emotions. I don’t want to breeze over that. It’s massive. It’s key and leads me to my first strategy for commitment.
Reminding yourself that you don’t have to FEEL good all the time. Why do we expect this? I think throughout my twenties I was oscillating between extreme hopefulness and extreme disappointment. I wanted all the good things, but really didn’t want to feel any of the negative emotions that went along with getting them. Watch if you have some entitlement about feeling good all the time. Or even most of the time. What if from day to day is more like a bell curve. There are always outliers, but throughout the day we have a few lows, a few highs but for the most part we’re doing okay. I mean, I’m totally making this all up, but how would it serve you to think that was the case. We can look at people who we think have everything we could want - ideal bodies, millions of dollars, fame and and power, and I’ll bet if you asked them, they would say they have a bell curve experience most days. I don’t know anyone like that personally, but when I meet one I’ll be sure to ask them and let you know if my hypothesis is correct.
What I’m saying is that you don’t need to feel a certain way to keep your commitment. You don’t need to feel inspired or motivated. You simply need to DECIDE and then keep deciding, on purpose and by default.
Let me use Marriage as is proof of this. When you get married, you make a commitment.
During my consultations I always ask out of a scale of 1-10, how committed are you to reaching your weight loss goal? What do you think people say? What would you say in this moment?
I’ll tell you - I VERY RARELY get a 10. Now I want you to imagine asking someone on their wedding day, on a scale of 1-10, how committed are you to staying married? IMAGINE if someone said, “hmmm, well to be honest about a 7 or 8.” How do you think that marriage is going to go?
And yet, when it comes to weight loss, we think we can be less than a 10 and still get there. No. You need to do the work on your brain to get you to a 10, otherwise why keep trying and failing? You could simply say, “yeah know, I’m okay with this shape for myself.” That’s totally an option for you. It’s a very valid option. But if you consider that and think, no I really want to release this extra weight, then go ALL in on it. Everything you’ve got.
If you’re thinking, well I’m only an 8 on my commitment, it’s because you’re using your past as a reference for the future. We all do that. For those of you who were a Dr. Phil fan back in the day, you might remember him saying, “The best predictor of your future is your past.” That’s what we’ve all been taught. And this line of thinking is using probability - what’s likely to happen based on the past, as a basis for all your decisions.
What I mean is you don’t want to decide to be a 10 on the commitment scale because of your past results. But this is the VERY reason you don’t have your result yet. It’s because you’re not a 10 - you haven’t decided to recommit in the moment of an urge to overeat that you don’t have your result. And it can feel uncomfortable to make the decision to be a 10 because of what we think it’s going to mean. We might feel deprivation, anxiety, all of the emotions we’ve currently been eating over.
But I want to offer that instead of using your past as evidence of what you can do, it’s much more fun to live in possibility and use your FUTURE as a reference for your decisions. There’s nothing we can do about the past. It’s done. But your future is your property. You get to have a say here. What if you knew you could build the capacity to feel all of those unwanted emotions? What if you knew you could learn how to manage an urge without overeating? Would you be a 10? Of course you would, right? Nothing could stop you.
And I want to reiterate the point that you DO NOT have to feel inspired and motivated the entire time you are losing weight to reach your goal weight. It’s impossible anyway. So ask yourself, is that your underlying belief? You’ll know it is, if in the moments you don’t feel inspired or motivated, you give up. You think it’s not working. You think you simply lack willpower or can’t do it. But that’s not it at all - your brain has a false belief. It’s connecting staying on your plan with inspiration and motivation. But what if all you needed was determination in those moments. What if when you had an urge, it was really an opportunity to re-commit.
And MAYBE you could feel self-pity, despair, deprivation and STILL stay on your plan. What if that was true? The Olympics are happening, or maybe they are finished now, I don’t know but think about how hard those athletes train. You KNOW they don’t want to train that hard every single day, but they’ve mastered their brain to get to where they are. It’s totally possible for you too.
HOWEVER, I know you have many other goals and commitments competing for your time and energy. Work, relationships, projects, all of it. Sometimes you simply want to get a little emotional lift about achieving your weight loss goal right? And feeling motivated and inspired at least once a day feels really really good doesn’t it? So!
I’d like to share with you a formula I learned by Tom Bilyeu from Impact Theory - which is a really motivational podcast for health and personal development if you haven’t yet heard about it. He gets really interesting guests and asks them great questions. He says motivation comes from Ascribed meaning + embodied enthusiasm + increased stakes. So if you want to increase your motivation in the moment, all you need to do is increase one of these variables.
Let’s dig a little deeper into this one so that you feel clear about it and understand how sometimes you’re motivated and sometimes you’re not.
I know for me I rarely feel motivated when I don’t have embodied enthusiasm. I interpret embodied enthusiasm and FEELING the physical sensations of enthusiasm or excitement. Like if you’ve just received a great promotion or new job and you can feel how energized you are in your body. You are super motivated to start that job aren’t you? But on a daily basis, that’s almost impossible to generate when you’re tired. And even if you aren’t getting up in the night with a newborn like me, you’re an adult. I know you’re tired a lot of the time.
So then, if we can’t generate embodied enthusiasm, how about ascribed meaning. To me, that means the meaning you assign to your goal. What it would mean for you and your life to fit into any sized clothes that you want, to feel agile and light on your feet and to feel completely in charge around food. That can be easier to generate because you can write a list of all the positive aspects of reaching your goal. Now I’ll be honest and tell you that I’ve done this exercise and sometimes I felt so great and sometimes I felt terrible. Why would I feel like that? Because my brain was focusing on the, “yeah but you don’t have that now,” or “how will that happen?” And if you are having a good day and can master your mind to turn that around, then great, you’ll increase your ascribed meaning and feel more motivated. However, as a human, you probably won’t be able to do it every time. I just had a voice come into my head like, Just think positive! Ugh. So annoying right?
So if you’re in this place, it’s a perfect space for that last piece of the equation. The stakes. What’s at stake for you if you DON’T release the weight this year? Imagine this day one year from now and you’re at the exact same size, and are experiencing the same relationship to food you are now. How would you be feeling? What if you continued on like this for more than a year, think about yourself in five years, and maybe you’ve even put on more weight.
I don’t encourage you to spend a lot of time stewing in the muck of this line of thinking, but I think for those of us who have difficulty experiencing all of our emotions, and buffer them, even the happy ones, with food, it’s helpful to connect with the consequences of what will be our reality if we don’t do something different. We are in the habit of not wanting to think about future negative consequences such as overeating tonight and how bloated and tired we’ll feel in the morning.
#2 Make a list of all the obstacles that could get in your way and come up with solutions beforehand. And you may say, well I’ve tried that and it didn’t work. And I’ll bet that your solutions were all actions. They were all things you would do when a craving struck or something. And that’s great. But what’s missing is the THOUGHT that you will also plan to anchor to ahead of time.
Here are some examples of anchor thoughts when you run into obstacles to stay on your plan.
I can figure this out.
This feeling will pass.
I was expecting this, it’s no problem.
Nothing is going wrong.
I can wait 10 minutes and then decide what I want to do.
I am responsible, I’m in charge.
#3. Have a Fail Plan.
Dan Savage says 50% of men and 50% of women cheat. Maybe I’m naïve but I’m skeptical of this stat. This seems super high to me. But even if we reduced it by half - the odds are still high that you will deal with infidelity at some point in life but we don’t ever plan for how we’ll deal with it if it happens right? And you know that you’re not going to be perfect 100% on your protocol, so why pretend that’s the case? Instead have a fail plan for what you will do when you go off.
What will you say to yourself, what will you think about it, what will you do the next time you’re in similar circumstances that led you to overeat.
Okay so a brief summary here for you: The 4 C’s you need for your goal are Commitment, Courage, Capability and Confidence. If you’re able to stay committed, have courage to stick it out, you’ll build capability and confidence. It’s really that simple.
The reason you’re able to commit to your relationship or your partner is because you DECIDED and are a 10 on the commitment scale. You made that commitment knowing you would have obstacles but that you would overcome them no matter what. You can do that very same thing with your weight loss. There will be discomfort. There will be some deprivation before you are fat adapted. You can handle that.
We need to remind our brains that we don’t have to feel good ALL the time. Your mood and energy will fluctuate throughout the day and that’s normal. You don’t need food to fix that.
When you DO want to generate motivation and inspire yourself, try increasing either your embodied energy, the purpose why you’re even bothering with working on this at all, and or think about the stakes if you don’t figure this out. What does THAT future look like?
Don’t try and be perfect and pretend you won’t have obstacles to overcome. You know you’re going to have urges, how will you deal with them? Build a plan for that. And also, how will you treat yourself when you DO go off your plan? Break the cycle of beating yourself up and treat yourself with kindness.