Hi, and welcome to the mindful shape podcast. I'm Paula Parker. This is episode 100 and it just makes me reflect, you know, I got into this work because I really felt like there was a place for wanting to change your body in a way that felt more aligned with just simply how you want to look and how you want to feel as you move through space, but also just doing it in a way that was effective, of course, and also kind and supportive of yourself and your body.

And then these last past few years, I've just learned just how integral your relationship with food and your relationship with yourself is to your effectiveness in losing weight and reaching and maintaining what I call your natural weight. Anyway, you want to be, I've been thinking a lot about this and you know, it's like, what am I trying to do here?

What is my business about? And what do my clients reflect back to me? And It really is about empowerment, and I know that empowerment is one of those terms that becomes so overly used that it really loses its meaning, but that is my goal. It's not to empower you, because that is kind of the opposite, like, empower you, right?

Empowerment comes from you, but it's really to cultivate a sense of. Empowerment, a sense of strength and power and feeling in charge when it comes to food, not overthinking it, not thinking about it all the time, not letting it run our lives. You know, a sense that you can get to rather than have to release the weight.

And today, given that we're on episode 100, I think of it as really a milestone for this podcast and like any milestone, it just gives you pause, you stop and, you know, take a look around where am I in relation to the past and what's ahead. So it lends itself toward reflection and forward thinking almost like a birthday, right?

And over the last few years, I've learned a lot. I've worked with many clients, I've had two babies. So my own weight has fluctuated quite a bit and now I'm 42 years old. I always forget my own age, but I'm early forties. So starting to think more about my hormones and perimenopause and all of that kind of stuff.

So I am also on my own journey and I've honed in on what works and what doesn't when it comes to both strategy and mindset with food and releasing excess fat off your body. And of course, I'm still learning, I'm still growing. And so my, also my process at, in my business and mindful shape, it will also be ever evolving.

And so I just wanted to walk you through what I've learned. where the process is right now, potentially why you can't release the weight that you want, why this is happening and what to do about it. Based on everything that I've learned so far in my years of coaching women who already know a ton about nutrition, but they just can't seem to get to that ideal weight, that natural weight that they want to be at.

So if you have at least, let's say 20 pounds of excess fat on your body, and you've tried all of the things over the years, Weight Watchers, Noom, maybe you even gave intermittent fasting a go for a little while, I want you to lean in because understanding what I'm about to say is going to save you years of pain.

of spinning your wheels. Okay, so we're just going to condense the timeline that it would take you to get to your natural way. So you know how you want to be eating. But the problem is that you can't stick with it. So you can you have maybe some success in the past, or you've been able to release some weight, but then something happened.

Maybe there was a tragic event like a death in the family or your pet died or COVID happened and there was something major and then you spiraled with food and put on weight or it might just have been smaller stresses that built up over time. Just dealing with Daily life and you felt like you needed to turn to food to cope and really get pleasure and then the weight slowly creeps on over the over the months or years so this happens because You're in a habit of listening to your brain when it makes justifications to overeat You're either chasing or escaping an emotion, or sometimes it's a physical sensation, like you're trying to escape being tired, you're trying to escape being stressed, or hungry, or you're chasing something, so you're seeking pleasure.

And you'll say, well, it's been a really long day, or it's the weekend, or I just want it. I just want it. And then you overeat. And you might think, well, it's not like I'm binging. Like maybe it's not like that or it's not that bad. But if you're not releasing the weight that you want and you're not loving your body and the way you look in clothes and the way that you show up and how you feel around food and how the way that you feel in your body and you have excess fat on your body.

That you could use as energy. You could use as fuel. You might be surprised how little your body actually needs when it comes to food, right? So you might be overeating more than you think. You really need to get clear that it's not the something that gets in your way, right? Even if it was a tragic event and somehow like mysteriously, the weight comes back on.

We really want to get clear. Instead, you need to understand that all that happened was your body was in storage mode. More often than it was in burning mode. So you stored fat rather than you were able to access the fat stores on your body and burn fat, right? So we can look at it like in really simplistic terms, also in non judgmental terms, right?

And as we get older, this is more likely. Being in storage mode, because we often have less muscle. We may move less than we did before. We might have some problems sleeping or we, we just get less sleep, especially if you have little ones like I do, or you have more stress and our hormones are just all over the place.

And if you are approaching, or if you were in perimenopause, which they say on average, again, there's variation, but on average is about eight years. Then. Your hormones are really whacked, right? For some of us. And of course, then they change again in menopause. So it's always this moving target when it comes to strategy.

And it also can make releasing weight pretty confusing and very frustrating. So it's important and critical to weight loss that we start to see any kind of justification to overeat.

And with practice, you'll get to a place where even if you want the food, you'll feel in charge. You need to know how to follow through every time, even when you're tired, you're stressed, you're hungry, you want pleasure, fun and relaxation so that, you know, no matter what happens in your life, you just don't go off the rails with your eating.

And it becomes more of a lifestyle, more of simply who you are and not someone who's on a diet. Because of course that's going to be temporary, right? Anything that you're doing in terms of a diet that's temporary is not going to allow you to sustain your weight loss results. Another thing that can happen for you that might be getting in the way is when you don't see the results on the scale right away, you get discouraged.

We depend on the scale going down to feel motivated and weight loss is almost never fast enough to supply enough motivation to keep it up when, you know, life gets hard or we're tired or we're stressed. We can't rely on that motivation. What do you need to be thinking? When the scale doesn't go down fast enough, because it almost never will.

Okay. So you need to have your own back. How can you support yourself so that you don't get discouraged and then just give up on that day, decide that you're just going to overeat that day. Listen to those justifications on that day. Sorry, I know there's some beeping going on. I think there might be some construction going on in my street.

And this is the only time I have to record. So my apologies. If you hear some beeping going on in the background, of course, now that I acknowledge it, it stops. So hopefully it will stay that way. Okay. So I want you to start asking yourself when you get on the scale and it may be, it stayed the same and it's been like that for a week, right?

Or it's going down 0. 5 a week, something like that. That feels very slow to you. I want you to ask yourself this, is this a strategy problem or a mindset problem? Because how we're going to approach it is going to be very different. So to determine that, you can ask yourself these questions. Is there a protocol change required?

Meaning, do I have to change up how I'm eating? When I'm eating? What I'm eating? How much? That's going to be strategy, or do I need to follow through better more often on my current protocol? So do I need to manage those justifications and basically learn how to follow through? It's a mindset or skill set.

Issue there right or simply do I just need to be more patient is it working and it's just more of a mindset issue of Allowing the process to take as long as it needs to take then When you identify that when you ask those types of questions Then you'll know exactly what action to take to build momentum Rather than trying to rely on motivation Another thing that gets in your way is when you go off plan a little bit, even a little bit, you eat something you consider unhealthy and you don't feel good either physically and or emotionally.

Sometimes we feel emotionally even worse than we do physically because you're thinking you're never going to get there. You're never going to get there at this rate, which easily leads to that screw it, you know, just kind of eat whatever, whenever, or not even screw it, but just continually. Over eating a little bit or eating foods that are somewhat off your plan.

This is the all or nothing thinking trap where You're in what I call a sense of failure with your weight loss plan. Even again, if you've only overeaten a little bit, it can really creep in there and then things start to snowball. And as I say, sometimes it's not a lot of overeating that can prevent our bodies from releasing weight based on where we are, what, you know, season of life we're in.

So it can be really important to watch for any slight overeating depending on what your goals are. What happens is when things start to snowball, you give yourself permission to continue being so called off track in quotation marks with food. So what is the solution? The trick here is really to shorten that turnaround time window.

The sooner you can course correct, the better. You won't feel so terrible. You can stop making it all about how you failed yet again, and you can simply learn from it faster. And then you feel calm and you can really move on quickly. So it's not about never making a mistake. It's just about tightening up that time when you can get back on track.

And for many of you, you already know so much about nutrition and it's not a matter of strategy oftentimes, at least not for the first 10 20 pounds. You know what to do, but it's more of a case of you're not doing it. And if this is you, I'm sorry. It can be common to just be unaware of how you're currently thinking that's keeping you stuck.

Or, if you are aware of some of the thinking, like, you're part of the clean plate club, or you know exactly what your justifications are, I just want it, or it's not so bad, this won't make much of a difference, you're minimizing it. You don't have the skill. Of seeing those justifications as mere sentences in your brain that have zero power without your permission.

Also, it's likely that your capacity to manage feeling negative emotions without food is just a little bit lower than it needs to be. So if you notice the thought, I just want it, or it won't make much of a difference, and you catch it, and you still say no to yourself, then that feeling that you have Is right now so unbearable that you either kind of white knuckle it or you eat you say no and then you feel depressed you say no about the food and you feel self pity or you feel deprived if you can't think differently in that moment.

Then your only option is to feel that if your capacity to feel negative emotion is too low and your willingness to feel bad is low or non existent, you will go ahead and eat the food. So your opportunity here is to really create more awareness and then become aware of what's going on in your brain so that you can actually change it.

And to also increase that capacity to feel until those thoughts disappear. Don't have any effect on you at all. And I'm going to share now a client example, because it ties right into not wanting to feel deprived, which I know can be a big barrier obstacle when we're trying to release weight is we don't want to feel deprived.

So what do we do here? I want to share some coaching that I gave a client yesterday who is struggling with staying on point when she's out with friends or on dates, any type of social situation, especially if it's at a restaurant. And we talked about why that's an obstacle for her and she discovered some justification thought she was having.

Her brain is telling her it will be less fun if she doesn't drink or have the burger and fries. She's missing out. She doesn't know when she'll be able to be at that place again or be out again in general and everyone else is drinking. ordering whatever they want, and she doesn't want to deprive herself.

She doesn't want to feel deprived. And overall, it's just not as fun to stick to her plan of no drinks, no exceptions. And when I'm talking about no exceptions, I'm talking about like no deep fried food no flour in this.

I think we can all relate to these justification thoughts. We have all had them at some point in time. And you can imagine when you're in one situation, the barrage of thoughts that can happen. And so often we are unconscious. We're not even aware that we're having them. So that's why coaching can be so helpful is because then you really identify, well, what is my brain offering up?

Why does it feel so impossible? And so her coaching here was really, well, What if it is less fun? It doesn't mean you never get to have a drink or ever have burger and fries again. Of course not. There's time and place for that. But before you become that person who's living in the body of their dreams and is able to feel completely in charge that she can take it or leave it, that she's not being run by that justification program.

It might feel less fun. In fact, it almost always will feel less fun in the beginning. So the coaching here is to let it feel less fun temporarily. If that's what it feels like, if that's your experience and you can't change how you're thinking about it in that moment, if you can't get out of those thoughts, you're believing all the justifications.

that your brain is offering up and you're not complying, you're not eating the food or drinks, you're left with that negative emotion. So she said something that I think is so fascinating. She said, I want to want to be willing to let it be less fun. Okay. So listen to that. You got to love that honesty. I want to want to To be willing to let it be less fun.

It shows her obstacle, right? She doesn't even want right now where she's currently at. She doesn't even want to be willing to feel negative emotion right now, which is so relatable. Like we get that, right? If it feels bad, it's like, well, where's the willingness? I mean, I don't really, I'm not willing to feel that when I could just instead just enjoy myself and have fun.

fun. Of course, it just makes perfect sense for based on how our brains are wired. Okay. So nothing has gone wrong here, but because of that, it's no wonder that she's struggling in these types of situations. So we now have to sell her brain on not only being willing to feel negative emotion, but to want to want that right to cultivate that willingness because When you truly want to cultivate that willingness, you're on your way.

Some of you are there. You're not even at willingness. To feel the negativity, to feel the negative, negative emotions of saying no to yourself. You're more like this client. Your work needs to be selling your brain on why it's valuable. Why you would want to be willing to do that. So fortunately you are listening to this podcast and I am here to help you.

So here's the trick to selling your brain on this. You need to tap into. What is truly on the line here? Clients will often say, well, I just ate it or I just had the drinks because I had FOMO. I didn't, I didn't want to miss out. But what are you really missing out on when you do that? And this, this is maybe a little hard talk.

Okay. But I want you to know it comes straight from the heart here because I believe in you and I believe that you can have Whatever you want. So when it comes to food when it comes to body, right? So please take what I'm saying in that spirit what you are truly missing out on is being in Love with the body that you have right feeling so confident in your own skin having a body that you What you miss out on is being the person who gets so much pleasure and joy out of how she's feeling, and the conversation she's having, and who she gets to be in that restaurant, in that amazing outfit.

The food and the drinks, they don't even compare. They can't compare to that. They just aren't that interesting. You don't even get joy from that anymore, right? The, the joy you get from that is minimal. The joy you get from being the person you want to be in that restaurant just outweighs it. And I think what gets in our way is that we focus on what we are giving up in the moment or what we're telling ourselves that we're giving up, like the burger or the drink, but we're not really giving anything up.

We're gaining the person with the body that we want, the confidence that we want. That's what we are gaining when we say no to ourself in that moment. And when you can focus on what you are getting out of it and step into the energy of having everything you want for yourself and knowing that that is coming true, okay, that's when you can tap into that willingness to experience some temporary Minor FOMO sadness deprivation when that drink, that burger feels like, you know, such a big obstacle.

Like it's impossible to say no. It's only because you are seeing that obstacle as bigger than you are, but you are so much bigger than that obstacle. Especially the version of you who has everything that she wants, who's living in the body that she wants and has a relationship with food that she wants.

So, so, so much bigger, right? So we want to step into the energy of her and what I have found overall to be most effective when it comes to a real permanent solution to creating a relationship with food that you love and releasing the weight Permanently so that you're not just releasing the weight and then it all comes back on when something bad happens in your life or just life happens are the following things.

The first is you reduce over desire for food to a natural desire for food. We wanna enjoy our food. We want to want food. It's not a problem to desire food. The problem happens when we have an over desire for food. Then we overeat and we're in an overweight body. The next is we want to change your body from being a sugar burner into a fat burner so that you are not as hungry all the time and you can use the energy source off your body and use that as fuel.

Next is you only want to eat when you're physically hungry. Often times we're eating, we're not even physically hungry, right? That means we're overeating. We want to be choosing foods that serve you. And I could kind of go on and on about that, but essentially foods that are going to serve you, your body, your lifestyle, your weight loss goals.

We want to be stopping at enough. Again, if you're going to be overeating, you're going to be an overweight body. So we need to get clear on what that enough is and stop at enough. And lastly, what works is creating a sense of success for yourself. This is momentum. I touched on this earlier when I talked about how we typically don't do this.

We typically try to rely on motivation and it's not sustainable. So instead, What we need to do is, as I say, create a sense of success, create momentum. How do we do all of that? That's a lot of things. Or maybe you're like, that's all, that's all we need to do. Right? No. Okay. How we, how we do all of that is we start by one, we decide on an eating plan for the day.

You need a protocol that is going to optimize fat burning, reduce hunger and cravings, and increase metabolism. Satiation, so that you don't snack or overeat at your meals. You need to plan daily so that you have flexibility and it works with your lifestyle. When you want to celebrate, you know, celebratory meals, it works with your schedule and it works with what your body needs that day, depending on your, your cycle.

If you still have a cycle, you also need to stabilize blood sugar. You also need to prioritize movement. Sleep, stress management, and hydration. Again, that's going to play into optimizing fat loss because again, it's going to be tied into our hormones. Okay. So one is decide on an eating plan for the day.

Number two is follow through on that plan. Easier said than done, right? But you need to learn how to say no to yourself and to others oftentimes so that you can stay on that protocol. Long enough to see if your protocol is working right to see if your strategy is working You also need to to be able to follow through you need to see those justifications as merely suggestions from your brain.

Just sentences, just sentences floating by in your brain. And number three is you need to know how to handle your emotions. Whether that's FOMO, sadness, stressed, being exhausted, or just kind of a uneasiness without food. All of the human emotions. You are not a robot, you are a human. You are going to feel negative emotions.

We need to know how to handle that without turning to food. Step three. We need to reflect. So you need to reflect with honesty and be transparent about really what's going on and tenderness. I have heard so many times that people don't, would never want to do a food journal and show it to somebody else.

But why? Right? What's going on there? It's so interesting just to ask that question, right? But we need to be honest with ourselves. We need to weigh ourselves. We need to track what we eat. We need to identify what's really going well and identify where we still have growth, where there is progress. But what we want to continue.

working on. And then lastly, we just need to strategize. So when we've reflected and we kind of can see where we are, what's getting in the way and where we want to go, we can strategize along the entire way. When that strategy is clean, meaning it's not coming from a shameful place or any kind of judgments coming from kindness, Then we can really start to shorten that timeline for whenever we make mistakes and we can make a solid strategy to move forward.

That really helps us get out of that all or nothing thinking, and we get back on track really quickly. When we, when step four is strategize, it also allows us to really personalize our weight loss approach, our approach to eating, our approach to our relationship with our body, all of it, your strategy is going to be yours alone.

When it comes to fat loss, there are, you know, some, lots of research out there now. There are some really great tactics that are effective and that you need to know about for sure. And ultimately you need to work with your body for the best. What your goals are and what season of life you're in. There's no one size fits all when it comes to how we want to eat.

Some of us want to eat vegan, some of us want to eat more often in the day. We need to have an eating plan and a protocol that is, yes, going to help us reach the body that we want, but also is going to really work for us in our individuality. If this is all sounding like something, a process that you are into and you would like to hear even more detail about my process, because this was really an overview, then I would love to chat with you.

I offer a free one hour. Session in which we will go over is not a coaching session, but it's a session in which we spend time looking at where you are, where you want to be, and explore really what's getting in the way of that so that we can strategize together in terms of what is the next step moving forward, that may be coaching, it may be trying something on your own, but we do it with a place of more clarity and understanding so that you can feel confident in whatever move you're going to take next.

My process is really effective because it lends itself to any way of eating that suits you, your body, your preferences, and your lifestyle. But more importantly, it gets to the root at why you overate in the first place, why the weight even came on in the first place, and why you continually get off track with your food, why you can have some short term success but it always comes back.

Because when you can sort that piece out, it won't matter which way you want to eat, what strategy you implement. You will just be the person who can follow through on that way of eating. So book a call with me. You can go to mindfulshape. com and you can sign up on my wait list. I do private one on one coaching for six months so that we can have enough time to set up the right protocol.

We have enough time for you to get off track. Right, because that's going to happen and it's not a problem. That's why you, why you have a coach. It allows for some time to, to happen. You get sick. It's no problem. We can get right back on track. And then it allows for you to release the weight at a pace and which is going to one, be very optimal for your body.

And very optimal for your mindset so that you can make it a sustainable way of living. You can also email me if you want to set up a call like this at Paula at mindful shape. com and we will get it on the calendar. Okay. I look forward to meeting you. I always love to meet. Who all of you who listen to the podcast it's always a fun call.

Whether we move forward with coaching or not, it's always so fun to meet you. And so I hope you will go ahead and take this opportunity just to really, if nothing else, just decide for yourself that this is something that you want and give yourself permission just to take the next step. That's all you're asking of yourself, right?

You're not asking yourself to believe in having everything that you want, reaching your natural weight. We're not even asking that of your brain right now. We're just asking your brain to open up to the possibility that you could move even an inch forward because we do it just one inch at a time and obviously no pun intended.

That was terrible pun, but we're just taking it one step at a time and your next step could literally booking a call with me so that we can focus on this. I take it very seriously. This is your dream. I stand for your dream because I know how much, you know, turmoil we can be in when it comes to body image, when it comes to thinking about food all the time, when it comes to that struggle.

I know what that's like. And I also know that it's not. It's totally possible to make significant progress in this area and just how much it impacts your life in such a positive way, not only how you show up in your work and your ability to contribute, but also your relationships, just how you feel about yourself, right?

And your mood overall. All right. I will hopefully talk to you soon. Congratulations on a hundred episodes, whether you were just starting with me now, or if you've listened from day one, I know that many of you listen over and over, and I just can't tell you how much I love doing the podcast, how much I, it helps my own growth.

It helps my own learning, my own reflection, and how much I truly, truly appreciate you and your time and your attention on. listening and absorbing the information and learning and making change for yourself. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.