Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I'm Paula Parker, and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So quick little life update is we got back from Seattle a couple of days ago, and we often go to Seattle because it's kind of close to where we live in terms of, we can just jump on a quick ferry and go there and come back.

So I am feeling very. Rejuvenated. Sometimes it's just so nice to get away and have a different perspective on things. And that's what this episode is going to be about. So I entitled it creating a paradigm shift, unless I changed my mind, which sometimes happens. And this episode is going to be a bit more.

Lofty, a bit more conceptual, but I'm really hoping that it will help in some ways, maybe shift your perspective on things and give you a sense of clarity and hopefully some inspiration and even dare I say some determination. So first, I just want to share with you a little bit about my own personal tension with the title of weight loss coach.

So you'll notice in this, most of the episodes, I introduced myself as saying I'm a life and weight loss coach. And the reasons is because I do a lot of life coaching with my clients in terms of weight loss is not in a silo. It's part of, you know, your whole life, right. And it affects different areas. And we also coach on anything that you bring to the coaching call. 

But  I do want to focus on  Your relationship with yourself when it comes to  your body, your weight, helping women release weight off their body, if that's what they choose to do. And also their relationship with food, which oftentimes is the where we make the most progress, right? And feeling in charge around food.

And that actually relates to your relationship with yourself.  And so talking about it in terms of, Oh, I'm just a weight loss coach.  Is. Very narrow in terms of like what we are actually doing here And there's also just such a stigma around weight loss, right? At first glance It just seems like it's such a contradiction what I do with people which is the relationship with themselves self acceptance self love and weight loss wanting to be different in a different body can seem like a Contradiction and so I've spent personally that just a lot of You Thinking about this in my own, you know, coming to terms with it.

So I thought I would just share that with you in case it's helpful. So one of the business programs that I'm in is really cool. And you come up with your own culture for your business and, you know, let's define what culture means. We're all on the same page. There's two definitions. One is the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

And then of course, kind of what I think of when I think of culture is the customs, arts, social institutions of a particular, you know, nation or group of people. So when I am thinking about. You know, my company and MindfulShape and what is the culture at MindfulShape. I've done a lot of work here and I thought I would share with you so that you can just think about for yourself what this journey, what this weight loss journey means for you.

Okay. So let's just dive right in. And so the MindfulShape culture, we recognize.  Our social programming. Okay. And we reject it in terms of, we know that that is one source of our desire to fit this wider cultural beauty standard of thinness. Okay. We recognize that and we reject it. And also we want to release weight. 

We want to be at our, what I call natural weight and have a shape that we love, which may seem at times like a big contradiction.  We also stand for not having to hate our bodies to want them to be different. Okay. So that's really important. We don't have to hate our bodies to want them to be different.

And the last point here is that in this culture,  Weight loss is not vain or superficial. Okay? So it is really a path of self discovery and self evolution or growth Which can feel a little confusing to those of us who are not in this culture and have not studied this culture in depth Right, so it's not a rejection of self the weight loss journey But it's an acceptance of self and that has that's how I think about it And that's how I've come to terms with it I do think that weight loss can be inclusive in terms of body positivity.

They are not mutually exclusive. And I know I've touched on that before, but this is just an umbrella to this whole podcast episode today.  So my own personal tension is really just a microcosm of something that's larger. That's really happening in our culture in 2024, which was if you caught the Oprah and Weight Watchers making the shift.

I don't know, was it presentation workshop show that they had and you can find it on YouTube if you're interested in it. And I go into a little bit more detail on like what I thought of it and my own personal thoughts of like what I, what I thought went well and what I thought was missing. I sent that in my email.

So if you are not on my email list and you want to hear more from me, please go to mindful shape. com and sign up for my emails. But the conversation basically emphasized. A switch from, you know, weight determines your worth as a woman or as really anyone in this day and age to placing more importance on health and acceptance of sovereignty over your choices when it comes to food and your weight.

Meaning, let's just not judge any women for how they want to eat or not eat or whether they want to take weight loss medication. Or they want to say no to weight loss medication. Let's just not judge them for those decisions and not judge them for their body size, whether that's zero four, 16, 24, whatever that is.

So weight loss really has a stigma. Because it's tied. It has this history of being tied to our worthiness and this narrow unrealistic for many of us beauty ideal. That's where the stigma comes from, right? So again, I've given this a lot of thought. If you are brand new to this podcast and you're hearing this for the first time,  this episode is really going to let you know whether or not you're in the right place.

And if you've been in my world for a while, then this will likely put into words what you are doing, what you are up to here, which is very likely different than some other weight loss attempts that you've had, okay, or some other programs that you've done or just way of thinking about it that you've had In the past, so what I want to talk about today is creating a paradigm shift.

I want to talk about kind of an old weight loss paradigm, and I want to offer a new weight loss paradigm. And again, this is not right or wrong. This is simply what I've identified as kind of an old way, or my old approach to weight loss, and just offer a new paradigm shift. A new way of thinking about it or a new approach.

Now, as I talk about this, you can really choose for yourself parts of both and create your own paradigm. Okay. So I'm not saying this is the way to go. I'm just saying, this is what I have found being very useful in my own journey, and I want to offer it and share it with you. Number of factors here.

Number one is a general approach to weight loss. In the old paradigm, there's a right and a wrong way. And if you can just find them right way, you will be all set. And there's definitely a wrong way. There's definitely wrong foods and wrong ways of doing it. And in the new paradigm, it's more exploratory,  right?

It's relational, meaning it's really about a connection to yourself, your relationship with food, your relationship with your body, right? We are exploring those relationships.  Values in the old paradigm. What we value is certainty. I need to know that I'm going to release X amount of weight on this specific timeline.

I need to feel certain about that to move forward and control. So I need to be in a hundred percent control of everything all of the time, which of course, neither of those things are possible a hundred percent of the time. So no wonder we feel so defeated in this like old diet mentality and the new paradigm I really want to offer.

It's about power. You know, personal power, freedom, freedom around food, feeling in charge of food and adaptability. So what that can look like practically is when you are about to make a decision around food, you are asking a question of how do I incorporate this into my day or week rather than saying, no, I can't have that, which is more certainty and control.

It's more of an open question of if I were to have this. How would that influence my other decisions around food given my goals?  Old paradigm, the goal of eating is really just to lose weight, not body fat. So we're losing weight as quickly as possible. So it's seeing that number on the scale. It might not be fat off your body, but we just need that number to go down.

It's also never feeling hungry. So we eat so that we never feel hungry and we feel full. So that it's black and white. It's either we feel very full or very hungry and there's no in between.  It's also about temporary pleasure. So a big goal of eating is getting that temporary pleasure, that big dopamine spike.

So we are looking at food as how much pleasure can I get from it? We're making decisions around food in terms of how pleasurable is this experience going to be. In the new paradigm, there is pleasure for sure. And I think that when I talk about satiation, that includes a degree of pleasure. So, I don't think you should eat anything that you don't like the taste of.

Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. But you want to be, the goal of eating here is really to nourish your body and to feel satiated. Both emotionally and physically. And it is also to reach our natural weight. That is also a goal of eating. In terms of what to eat, the old paradigm is whatever you can get away with.

So this is thinking of things as like free calories, calorie free foods, calorie free jello, and things like that. Aspartame and sugar free anything or fat free anything. So we're looking at what can we eat and get away with. It's more of in the alignment of good foods or bad foods or clean foods or junk foods.

Even in a lot of the stuff for the literature that I Have in my world, there is a lot of this clean eating, right? And so you just want to take a look at what is the impact if you think of food in that way so if you think of food as clean and good and then there are foods that are bad and What what would that mean dirty right as if there's such thing then what does that mean about us?

When we eat those foods and then we tie our own worthiness and our morality into the foods that we're eating This I see this a lot with also healthy foods like healthy food is good And then you're a good person if you're very healthy. What does that mean if? You have an health issue, especially if that's beyond your control.

What does that mean? So again, you just want to take a look at how am I thinking about it? How am I relating to it? And what might the impact be that I'm not even aware of? So in the new paradigm, what to eat is based around foods that serve you.  It's based on your natural weight goal. So whatever your natural weight is and that goal for that number and also your insulin response, like how you, your body reacts to food that is going to determine what you eat for reasons you love.

So you choose foods based on reasons you love. So I always say like sometimes a cinnamon bun is going to serve you  because you're choosing it because you feel in control and you like your reasons. So I don't decide. what you eat, you decide. I only want to help you have some clarity around your reasons for doing that. 

When to eat in the old paradigm, that's going to be very specific in terms of eating window. And again, always a caveat here. There's certain parts of the old paradigm that might really serve you and you love. And you're like, this is totally working for me. And I feel great about it. I'm not saying you don't.

I have to like, you have to stop doing that. You can totally keep doing if it's serving you. But again, I think it leans more towards rules and more towards outsourcing decisions around food. So that's why I included that specific eating window in the old paradigm. It can also be when to eat in terms of the same time every day, no matter what.

So no matter what your body feels like, it can be breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Even when maybe you're not that hungry for breakfast and it includes snacks. So it's breakfast, lunch, and dinner with one to two snacks. This is how most of us were brought up. So you have breakfast, you have a snack, then you have lunch, then you have a snack after school and then dinner, and then maybe even another snack or dessert after dinner.

We just don't need to be eating that often, but we just take it for granted that like, this is how it goes.  Or, when do you eat? Whenever you feel the slightest bit hungry. So even a twinge of hunger will, it's like your brain offering the suggestion of food and we need to eat from that. Which of course we don't, right?

We can totally be healthy without responding that quickly to any kind of twinge of hunger. We also eat when we need to escape an emotion.  Or we are trying to chase an emotion.  There's usually something that we are feeling that we feel like we can't handle or that it's something has gone wrong when we feel boredom or we feel frustration or we feel overwhelmed.

And then we want to escape that by turning to food. Or we are trying to chase something. So we are looking for food to have fun or relax or just pleasure, mere pleasure. Cause we, oftentimes we don't have a lot of pleasure in our lives or whatever we're, we have a lot of stress. Then of course, we're going to be turning to food to as a source of pleasure.

Okay. So chasing and escaping emotion. That's when we tend to eat from that old paradigm  or. If you've done a lot of calorie counting or macros counting, you might eat when you have some calories remaining or some macros remaining. That's when you eat, right? Because you're like, Oh, well, I have to hit a certain number again, rather than focusing on  that.

It's okay for your body to go without food. And secondly, are you even hungry or not? Right? We don't even ask that question. And the new paradigm, super simple, it's you eat when you are really hungry, right? And I use the hunger scale as a tool to help you determine that, or you've reached your hunger level, which again is based on the, on the scale idea,  how much to eat  in the old paradigm.

It's what's in your budget. So how many calories do you have or how many macros do you have? It's more of a budget mentality in the new paradigm. It's when your body feels. Satiated that you stop and or what your common sense tells you is a reasonable amount so often We have outsourced these ideas  Now for some of you you may be at a point where you really do need a little bit more guidance and nutrition I would recommend a YouTuber YouTube channel.

I can't remember the name of her YouTube channel, but her name is Abby Sharp. So if you just go to YouTube and you look up Abby Sharp, if you need some more nutrition information, I would highly recommend her. She, I feel like she has a good approach. She's a nutritionist. But for many of us, and I think this speaks to a lot of the people in my world, we have all that nutrition information.

Like, we know what to do. We are simply not doing it. So how much to eat again, when your body feels satiated. And what common sense tells you, what if I plateau? So when this question comes up in the old paradigm, they tell you to try harder. You're just not trying hard enough.  And it really skews toward eat less and move more.

Okay. So eat less and move more is very simplistic and oftentimes. It doesn't work. There's just more, it's more complex than that. It just requires a little bit of more compassion and more depth of understanding to make changes. It's not very useful. And the new paradigm is try something different. And I think of it as like changing a lever.

And when I talk about levers, I mean, what you're eating, when you're eating and how much you're eating. So try changing something up in one of those categories. Another area to focus on in terms of trying something different is learning more about how to flatten your blood sugar spikes and doing that more often.

Learning a little bit more about insulin response.  In the old paradigm, the purpose of losing weight is again, back to that self worth. So I'm only acceptable to myself if I'm thin, or if I'm at this certain number,  that feels terrible and it's usually not going to  keep you motivated for the longterm.  So I really want to shift your thinking from being so tied to that end number of what's going to be on the scale and to  what you were going to make that mean about yourself when you get there.

And I want you to shift towards, why am I doing this?  That's more meaningful to me. What could make me excited about the process because if you are excited about the process Then that's something that you will be able to continue on and on and on and so I want you to think about being more excited and more motivated by Feeling really in charge around food  Feeling like you can go to a party and you're not going to stress eat.

Feeling like you can go to a restaurant and not feel like you're going to go into all or nothing. Like you're going to get all the most rich foods and you're going to drink all the drinks and you're going to get deep fried appetizers because your diet starts tomorrow. Okay, so the process is I can go to a restaurant and I can feel completely in charge and I can walk out of that restaurant feeling really good in my body.

Those are the kinds of results, the process oriented results that I want you to start thinking about getting tying your progress to or tying your success to. Because what will happen if we don't do that is that we will put all the emphasis on just that number at any cost. And then when we start making some like shortcuts or some sugar free foods or things like that, and then we might even reach that number, but then it's not sustainable because we get to that number and we're like, Oh, this actually wasn't giving me the happiness and fulfillment that I wanted. 

We need to derive the happiness and fulfillment from the process, from feeling in charge around food and learning to accept and love our bodies as we go. And that just requires more work, right? It just requires more in depth inner work on your part. Okay. So the purpose of losing weight and the new paradigm is more geared towards self discovery and personal growth and the process and the relationship you want to have with yourself, with your body and food. 

Okay, this leads me to what drives me  what drives me in the old paradigm is self loathing, right? Just hating your body hate being like in such pain that you were just like in the fire and you need to get out I neediness or like grasping energy So again, it's kind of like weight loss at any cost it geared towards that in the new paradigm.

It's really much more about curiosity  Commitment and determination. That's those, that's like the emotional fuel that's going to drive  your willingness to do the process, to do the hard stuff, curiosity, commitment, determination. In the old paradigm, your enemy is. any kind of deprivation, restriction, and hunger.

So those three are to be avoided at all cost. So we do, we do all this like mental gymnastics and we do, we try to eat all of these foods and try to just avoid that at all costs. And the enemy in the new paradigm, is truly underfeeling your emotions. So again, this goes back to escaping and chasing. So it's not an overeating problem.

Most of the time, it's an underfeeling problem. When you are willing to feel all those negative emotions, at least 50 percent of the time, then it's You won't need food to soothe  a reoccurring thought in the old paradigm is I want that but I can't So I want that food, but I can't have it. I'm not allowed to have it I'm not gonna reach my goal weight if I have it in the new paradigm.

It's really I can have whatever I want in as much quantity as I want, but I choose not to for reasons that I love that I got really clear on in my coaching session with my coach or in your self coaching, you got really clear on why you want these things. And it could be those reasons that I mentioned, it's not just limited to the weight loss goal, right?

Or fitting into your clothes. That's amazing. We love that. And I want to urge you to tie it to bigger purpose.  Because it's true. You can have whatever you want in as much quantity as you want. You're an adult, but there's reasons that you don't want to do that.  And then lastly, who's in charge in the old paradigm?

It's the expert. It's whoever is telling you what to do, when to do it, how to do it. There's somebody outside of you who knows more than you. And all you need to do is listen to every single thing that they say and do it. and you'll get your result.  Now, again, that might seem like a little counter intuitive because you're like, well, you listen, you're telling me what to do, right?

But I, I hope that's not the case. I hope you're not thinking I'm telling you what to do. I hope you're thinking that this is an approach. This is one way. And just as like, as my learning evolves and I share more with you, your learning is evolving too. And you were on your own journey. So who's in charge ultimately in the new paradigm?

It's always you. So you are your own expert and you are resourceful and you will take what works for you from this podcast or any other so called expert out there and you will leave what doesn't serve you, what doesn't work for you.  Okay. So I want you to notice. It suggests that a lot of times your weight loss questions or confusion or overwhelm is likely coming from trying to figure out how to do the old paradigm. 

What should I be eating? How do I know if I'm eating too much? Or how if I, what if I'm eating not enough? Or, how many indulgences should I have? How much ice cream can I have? How often can I have it? How much weight can I expect to lose if I try this or that, if I do intermittent fasting? What are the hours that I need to be eating?

When, when can I have my last meal? All of that. What if I'm not hungry and somebody offers me food?  All of those questions are coming, again, from trying to do that old paradigm. When we, as we, I should say, move into a new paradigm, you will notice that those questions usually fall away and or you have the answers inside of you to answer them pretty clearly.

When the old paradigm creeps up, which it will, and it's no problem.  I want to offer this thought that you are no longer available for that.  Okay, so it's okay. If that old paradigm comes up, you're just like, okay, I'm no longer available for that. I am moving into this new direction for me. And if you notice you're in that old paradigm a lot and it's not feeling good and it's not getting you closer to the shape and the weight that you want either, your natural weight, then I can help you On your path toward this new paradigm, this new approach.

Okay. So I'm currently taking on private clients. We work together for six months. We start by choosing a way of eating that is optimal for fat loss, for your hormones, for your energy levels. And that feels doable, doable longterm. I like to think of you come up with a plan that you can do at least three years.

Okay. So if you can't do it for three years, conceivably, then that's not a good plan for you. Okay. Then of course we work together to overcome anything, any obstacle that gets in the way of you following through on that plan. That's what we do together. I support you. I encourage you. We work with what's going on in your mind, the thoughts that you're thinking, the emotions that's coming up for you so that you can really do any plan that you want to do.

Okay.  So if you are up for that, please reach out to me. You can go to mindful shape. com and join my wait list and I will contact you right away because I do have openings and or you can feel free to email me directly to my email is Paula at mindful shape. com and we can just set up an informal chat and just see where you're at and talk about next steps for where you want to go.

All right. Okay. I will talk to you soon. Bye.