Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I'm Paula Parker. If you want to release excess weight off your body by using your brain, then you are in the right place. Today, we are talking about believing in your weight loss goal. When you've been dealing with food and weight your whole life, and you can't even imagine it.

Being different. So you might notice I have a little raspiness in my voice. I'm getting over a cold. Well, I'm in the midst of a cold, but I like to think that I'm always getting over it. Right. And it's like super cozy and rainy and a little bit dark outside. And I just love the fall. I know that it's can be a bit blistering and cold, but it's very spooky and very charming.

And. cozy. So that's me right now, but let's get right into it. So today we are going to be focusing on this because it's very hard to say no to the food in the moment when you, you don't even know what's on the other side in terms of the upside for you. All your brain knows and cares about in that moment is that.

Neurochemical reward it's going to get from the cookie from the blueberry muffin from the chocolate cake not the joy of Waking up every day at your natural weight wearing all the clothes in your closet with ease Not you know going to a party and being very self conscious about how you look none of that right the freedom that that would That would give you How can we sell our brains on something that's so far removed, maybe something we've never even really spent much time thinking about, or we've Never even experienced before in our life, like feeling amazing in our bodies, being confident in a swimsuit, wearing all the clothes that we want, having zero food noise in our heads.

If right now you say I can't even imagine what that would be like. That's very telling, isn't it? It will be hard to use anything other than pain to motivate you. And pain as motivation works short term at best, and often feels pretty terrible while we're taking the actions that we need to take. Not all, but many of my clients have been dealing with overeating and like weight issues since they were a child or a teen for essentially decades, some of them.

And maybe that's your case. Meaning your internal guidance system, when it comes to, you know, what to eat, how much to eat and when to eat somewhere along the line, it got interrupted. And for many of us, it can be a long journey back to that internal guidance system. And who knows what knocked you off? A misguided comment from a parent, a TV show that you watched, that Model's Inc.

show really screwed me up for a while. Okay, the National Food Guide telling you to eat 6 11 servings of bread, pasta, and grains. Like, no wonder we had some issues. And virtually all of the media in the eighties, nineties, and you know, 2000s, I remember being on a bus once and watching a toddler eating cheesy crackers.

They would eat one, play a little, eat another, smash a few, eat a couple more. And I noticed the ease. at which they ate. No rushing, no drama, just relaxed, enjoying the eating. And I remember thinking to myself in that moment, this is not my experience with food, right? It just seemed very elusive and unattainable to be at peace with food at that time for me.

So if that's you, I totally get it. And I want to offer that even if you've been dealing with food noise for decades, it can end. It can really end. Here's what needs to happen, an unlearning process. We simply need to unlearn our current food habits. For example, stopping at enough requires you to unlearn eating everything on your plate, which you may have learned when you were growing up.

It might require you to unlearn how you think about wasting food instead of overeating because you don't want to be wasteful. You can either decide, you know what? I'm going to be a little wasteful and just own it without guilt or simply make less food to prevent waste. Right? The most interesting question is why are you making so much food that there's any waste at all?

Okay. So many of us have learned food rules that we've never really stopped to question before. Like you need to eat when you wake up. Instead of when your body naturally gets hungry, or that you need to be snacking all day for energy, or that you need something sweet after a meal, or other food rules that kind of go in the opposite direction, like you can't eat after 7 p.

m., or fruit is fattening because of all the sugar. It's not that there's no merit in any of these ideas, but I urge you to take a look at what you have simply, you know, taken for granted or you heard so many years ago and you're still kind of just believing it because you haven't really. re decided. So when it comes to how to eat, I want to offer that it can be really helpful to re decide given who you are now and what your current goals are.

But here's what will happen. If you go about re deciding, you will be making these decisions from your current self concept. Your current self concept when it comes to food and weight loss is based on for many of us previous failures, which is creating this self fulfilling prophecy. And that's normal because our brains are prediction machines.

It's how we make sense of the world, it's how we learn, it's the literal learning process. So we look to the past and then we make predictions about the future. And we essentially copy paste from the past onto the future. And here's how it used to show up for me. So I kept repeating the same strategies over and over and over again.

I would let myself indulge planning to start fresh on Monday, then heavily restrict with the eat less, move more model. And I would do a lot of running. I was really into running for a long time and maybe, you know, try another cleanse until I really wanted to indulge again, overindulge and the same cycle would go on repeat.

This never worked, because I would almost always go into it feeling like I had already failed before I'd even started. I never had a vision that I could release the weight without it being a slog, without there being lots of restriction, without suffering. It was a quest not to find a way out of the suffering, but to endure the suffering, basically for as long as possible, in hopes I could just stick it out long enough to lose the weight.

But when you understand how to remove the suffering component from weight loss, you'll be able to not only release the weight that you want, but then you'll be able to keep it off because it doesn't feel like a slog. It doesn't feel like suffering. And one part of doing that is letting go of how we've been doing things and deciding who we need to become in order to do what we need to do.

Most of us say things like, this is just how I am when it comes to food. I am somebody who really loves food. I am someone who can't say no. I'm not a planner. I always finish my plate. I have a sweet tooth. I need food or alcohol to relax. Or food is my biggest source of pleasure and fun. So we are very afraid of restricting ourselves when it comes to food.

And yet, with all of these self concepts, with all of these ideas about ourselves, we heavily restrict ourselves in terms of what we are capable of. And who we are capable of becoming rather than actively stepping into that next version of you for whom your natural weight is inevitable. I truly believe that version of you is available.

Otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. You wouldn't even have the desire in your heart to release the weight because you don't need to release the way you want to. Okay. So you can do this. Because once you are aware of your self concept around food and weight, everything you think and feel about it, that's your self concept, then you can start to see exactly how this is all making sense in terms of how you are showing up with food, your behavior.

It's why it's so important to make small changes. and acknowledge them to yourself or have somebody like a coach who can acknowledge them for you. You start to see yourself differently. You start to shift your self concept. For example, if you want to be someone who exercises and you don't now, a great place to start is five minutes a day.

Now it doesn't sound like much, but that's not the point. The point is not about the results of five minutes a day. It's about you showing up. being someone who exercises every day, then you'll start seeing yourself that way. If you can take the time to acknowledge it, mind you, right? You don't minimize it.

You don't think, Oh, this is nothing. It's only five minutes. If you can acknowledge it, then you'll be much more likely to get yourself to do more. Why? Because you're inspired by your own self, right? Then you'll be doing 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and so on. You'll become somebody who just exercises somebody who moves their body.

And it will feel natural because it's how you think of yourself, it's who you are. It's like if you view yourself as someone who eats ice cream from the container the second your partner leaves, simply because maybe you've done that before, then what is likely to happen the next time they leave? There won't be much resistance to doing that.

You're making a food decision based on the self concept for whom that's reasonable, acceptable behavior. There is more friction, resistance to doing that. Just by deciding that's beneath you. That's not worthy of you anymore. That's not where you're going. That's not who you are becoming Because now it's in conflict with your self concept Even when you don't have any evidence for it just by claiming that just by deciding that intentionally You will create some resistance to doing that when your brain offers it up as a viable option eventually You will have evidence that that's not who you are anymore because you will be not doing that anymore And it won't even occur to you to do that.

Just ask me how I know And one more thing if this is you and you have a long history of overeating Be patient with yourself. You are literally relearning how to eat responsibly and enjoy food. This might be an entirely new concept for your brain. To eat for yourself, rather than using eating as something you're doing to yourself.

And the learning process can take time. My daughter, Rhea, is almost 15 months now. So there's lots of learning going on. And I've noticed with her that, She will make a big developmental leap, like, you know, when she was about a year, or maybe a little bit shy of a year, she took her first few steps, and then we noticed she didn't do it anymore.

She'd be crawling around. And same thing with talking. She, a little while ago, like maybe a couple weeks ago, a few weeks, She was starting to say a lot of new words. Like she would say all done and just more words. And then she hasn't said that for a while. So it's almost like we try on something. We make this developmental leap in our learning.

And then our brain just needs to recalibrate. It just needs to like soak up that new information. And then we're ready to continue on. That's what happens with her walking. She took a little pause. And then when she started again, she was like off to the races. And so I'm just waiting anytime when she starts.

Top speaking a lot more. I feel like she's going to be a nonstop chatterbox. All right. So that's what I have for you today. I have another free workshop coming up for you at the end of this month. So be sure to get on my email list. If you are not already on my list. And so that you can get invited to that.

So I'm going to be teaching you on really about that food noise component, like that incessant mental chatter about food that drives our behavior and basically torments us. So let's end that forget sign up at mindful shape. com. To get on my email list or you can email me directly paula at mindful shape.

com and I'll send you the details so that when Registration is open. You will be the first to know and you can sign up for that workshop All right, if you have any questions about any of this, please let me know and I will talk to you again soon Okay. Bye