You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 100! Welcome to Weight Loss for Successful Women, a podcast for women who are ready to break the diet cycle and end their struggle with weight for good. Here’s your host, fortune 100 executive, and certified life coach, Shannan Christiansen.

Hello love. I am so happy to be back with you. Can you even believe it? 100? We’re at 100! I can’t even believe it. A hundred weeks. I’ve come every single week and shared my journey, my story, tools, tips. And today we have a very, very special episode. Today I’m going to bring on the Transform weight loss coaches. These two beautiful ladies are going to share a little bit about their story, and they’re also going to give some tips and some things that have really helped them along the journey that they have been on.

And if you love this show, please rate and review it. I read every single one of them. And also make sure you subscribe so I’m in your list every Wednesday morning.

So ladies, so I want to just do a really quick brief intro to both of the ladies. And I think each one of them are just really special women and they have different stories. But I think in this journey of being a woman, we always find this at the core of all of us, these struggles. So we’re going to really dive into it today. I am going to first introduce all of you ladies who are listening to Dawn Richards. I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself a little bit. Just tell the ladies who are listening how long you’ve been in Transform and a little bit about your story, a little bit about you.

Okay. My Name is Dawn Richardson. I am a Transform weight loss coach and I have been with Shannan just about 20 months now. And I am a mom. I teach high school math, which is just crazy in itself. I’m a wife, I’m a sister, I’m all of the things. I do all the stuff. And I have lost 61 pounds with Shannan’s program. I know it’s so exciting. And you know, my story it’s kind of a tough story. I met Shannan in one of the lowest parts of my life.

I was very depressed. I, there was very little light in my life. I had a lot of loss. I had lost a son and several other family members and I had some, some depression and I had totally given up on myself. I really had, and I didn’t want to diet anymore. I really didn’t want to work on myself at all. And when I found Shannan, I connected instantly to her because she had lost weight and she had had a lot of loss herself. And luckily, not luckily, but on purpose, she has truly helped me regain the light in my life.

Yeah, my love, I mean, I’m so happy. You know, sometimes they’re like Shannan, we saw your ad and I’m always like, yay. I’m so happy. I’m happy that you found me. You know, ladies stumble across the podcast. And when I think of all the women that I am blessed enough to work with, we’ve all had these losses. We’ve had pain, we’ve had trauma. We have these amazing, hard, wonderful, painful, you know, stories. And it’s what really ties us together.

And I remember when I first met you and I remember you telling me, like, I don’t want to diet anymore. Like I just, I can’t diet anymore. I can’t do this anymore. And when you first kind of started what was like, one of the things that you were like, okay, this is a little bit different. This is a little bit different than this diet rollercoaster restrict, count the points, things that you’ve done before? Well, one of the biggest things that struck me was you asked me to make a commitment to myself. You asked me, you told us that we never commit to ourselves. We commit to everybody else. And when was the last time you made a commitment and stuck to it?

And when you, when you said that it really struck me. I was like, I give everything to everybody else in my life. And I never take time for myself. And I really wanted to commit to myself for once. First time in my life, I wanted to make a commitment and keep it to myself. I had had all these things that were left undone in my life that I never finished. And I was like, I want to commit. I want to make a commitment to myself.

Mm. That is good. We’re going to talk about time. I want to talk about time. So, don’t let me forget, because I want to talk about time because I think as ladies, we’re always like, we’re so busy. I’m so busy, Shannan. Ladies tell me I’m too busy. I don’t have time. This is going on. That is going on. You know, all the things. But before we do that, we have another Transform weight loss coach, Jenn Taylor. Jenn, tell the ladies a little bit about you.

Hi, my name is Jenn Taylor and I also happen to live in Utah. I am a mom of two boys and married and I actually do work for BFLY on the back end also. So I get to coach and do some of the back end work. So it’s really awesome to surround myself with this work. I would say for my weight loss journey, I probably didn’t struggle with weight loss until my college years, you know, out on my own, figuring out life. Mom’s not cooking for you anymore. All of that stuff. And just dealing with the different emotions and the different more so thoughts. I mean, now I know at the time I didn’t know, but thoughts that you’re having in your head and, and the stories that you’re telling yourself.

And so I really started to lose some of my self-confidence, you know, trying to figure out who I really was, who I really wanted to become and dealt with throughout life, having my two boys. And then just some really hard things family-wise that kind of came up that sent me through a spiral and really just knocked me to the ground. You know, it was just one of those situations that I just didn’t know how to handle it at the time. And it just really took me down.

And so I came across Shannan’s work and again, it was at the perfect timing in my life. I really feel like, you know, I had done other weight loss programs in the past, but this is weight loss, but also it is so much more because you’re focusing on getting back in touch with your body and focusing on your mind and loving yourself. And I really, I mean I think everybody needs this, but I really like deeply, deeply needed this work at the time that I came across Shannan. And so it really was just such a blessing in disguise, like looking back at how it fell into my life at the time, how it came in. And so it’s been amazing to be able to do this work and now get to coach for Transform.

I want to ask you Jenn, you know, coaching. So we’re coaches and life coaches. And I think sometimes people are like, what is that? Like, what does that even mean? Right. I think if I said, Hey, I was a baseball coach, everybody would kind of get what I did and would understand how we would help, you know, a baseball team. Or if I was a gymnastics coach, they’d be like, oh yeah, I get that, right. But a weight loss coach or life coach, what does that, what does that mean to you?

How I would describe it. And when people ask us, you know, what do you do for a living? I really, and like a simplified version as a coach, you really are just helping women to discover their own thoughts, to really dig deep into thoughts and beliefs that have been put into us since we were children and really just pull them out and work for them and see, it’s really crazy that we’re making some of these thoughts that, you know, something somebody said to us when we were nine years old and now we’re 30, 40, 50, and we’re still making it mean something about us. And so really just digging into those thoughts and pulling, helping women pull them out and really helping them like, see how amazing they are and helping them start to love themselves.

Yeah. You know, I saw this, so we have this in Transform, we have this private community and in this private community, I saw one of the ladies post today about, she posted this analogy and I really loved it. And it was about basically, she’d been kind of noticing like her car wasn’t running perfectly, but she wanted to ignore it. She didn’t want to like pay attention to what kind of was happening. Right. She was just like, no, no, I’m just going to keep ignoring it. Cause I don’t want to deal with that. Right. But it’s still there. Right. And I think our mind, we have all of these really old beliefs, these thoughts, these things that we were, you know, taught, things that we’ve learned over the years through socialization, and then we don’t want to look at it.

But what happens is it’s driving our behavior, it’s driving the actions, it’s driving the things that we do, how we feel. And coaching helps to uncover things you don’t see. Things that are in there that are just surfing around. They’re there, they’re like that, you know, sound and the, you kind of hear it. Sometimes it’s like that sound in that car. You kind of hear it, but you don’t want to see it. And so I thought that was just a really great analogy today about what coaching really is. It’s just uncovering these old belief systems that are keeping you stuck, keeping you self-sabotaging in so many different areas of your life.

You know, weight is just an outer symptom, right? We build this wall of weight around our bodies, this protection. Oh man, I had this big wall of weight for most of my life around me, but it was just because I didn’t know how to deal with feeling the feelings, and really the thoughts and beliefs that I had about myself, my worth my, you know, me being good enough, my capabilities. And so, you know, I loved your answer Jenn, because it just really is just uncovering what’s there and then tools so that you can like move forward so that you can take action to start to change some of that so your, you know, results can change too.

Dawn, anything you want to add about coaching as you’ve really experienced, you know, coaching over the last couple of years? Coaching has helped me realize that I have things in my brain that are, I don’t even, I’m not even aware of. And it has just uncovered these roadblocks that I didn’t even know were there. I just always lived in this automatic, like every day I do the same thing, and coaching has helped me realize that I’m in control of my life and I get to choose what I think and how I feel and truly how I act. And it’s uncovered everything that, as I said, I didn’t even know was there and just helped me move forward in my life.

Yeah. I think that’s it too. Right? Like this is the thing, ladies. I think all of us are just on this journey of exploration, and this journey, and for most of us, most women, we want to continually improve. We want to feel better. We want to feel energized about our life. We want to feel excited about what we’re doing, how we’re showing up. And sometimes we just don’t know how. Sometimes we’re just in this automatic pilot where we just feel like we’re drowning, kind of barely getting everything off of our to-do list.

And so I want to talk about time because you know, I’m a woman, I work, I have a family, and I hear a lot with women that I don’t have time. I don’t have time to show up for myself. And my instant reaction is you don’t have time not to. That’s my, like my gut response, but I get it. I get it. So Jenn, you’re a mom, your, your husband works out of town most weeks so you’re kind of a pseudo single mom during the week when he’s out of town. Right. And so you’re doing all the things. You have family obligations, you work for BFLY in addition to being a coach. And so what do you think when it comes to time and you working on you?

You know, just as you were speaking, what came into my head old Jenn, when I was in that mindset of, I don’t have time to focus on me is I was so busy, thought looping and worrying about not having time, that the extra time I had I was spending on worrying about time. And it was so counterproductive. What I found to really help, especially as a mom, when I was starting this work was building it into my already schedule. If I’m doing laundry, listen to a podcast. If I’m showering, sometimes I listen. When the kids go down at night, I’ll commit to, I’m going to listen to one video and do one worksheet.

It’s just finding you don’t have to necessarily block out hours or even an hour of your time. It’s in these little increments of 10 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever that looks like for you. And then just fitting in what you can. And for me, the more that I do the work and I make the time for myself, I, like you said, I want to grow. I want to learn this work and have it be second nature. And so you just make more time over time.

Oh yeah. You know, I was thinking about as you were talking time, right? I think time is just an excuse for us. We’ve used it for so long. I mean, shoot, I’ve used it to get out of things I don’t want to do. Right. I mean, right. Oh, I’m so busy. I got two jobs, you know, the whole thing. Right. And so we’re just really used to just saying, I’m too busy. We use our kids, our families, our spouses. We just say, we’re too busy because really it’s not time. It’s this fear of like, what if, what if I find out something and I can’t deal with it? What if I explore this brain of mine.

Ladies, I just want to offer that you’ve already done hard things. You’ve already made it through so many hard things. And you starting to show up for yourself. You starting to do different, hard things that actually serve you, you will find more peace. You will find, you know, this sense of accomplishment, this sense of feeling pride for yourself. You will start to feel Unstoppable. Like, and that’s what happens. And fear is just part of it. Fear is just, you know, along for the ride, but fear, we don’t let it stop us. And I think every woman who is listening to this right now, like as you’re listening to this, I want you to, just for a moment to imagine all the things that you have been scared out of your mind and you did it anyways, and that is when you really grow, and when you really come into yourself. And, you know, fear, yeah, it’s going to be along for the ride, for sure. But right. But we don’t, we don’t stop us.

I was thinking about this too. You know, we just came off this member only event Unstoppable Live and it was this phenomenal, phenomenal event. And we saw so many ladies take two days, some ladies, two and a half because we had in-person ladies. And we also had, you know, virtual ladies, we had both and ladies flew here to Arizona, including you, both of you. And I think about, and then they spent two days, even the virtual ladies, two full days, they told their families, this is for me. And I’m watching just through the event. And then after, right, it’s been a couple of days now since the end and ladies are just like breakthrough after breakthrough, after breakthrough, they are just learning how to show up for themselves. And it’s showing up in so many different areas of their life.

And so, you know, ladies, time, we got to stop using it as an excuse. Now, Dawn, you’re a mom. You’re you, you got this gig as a weight loss coach and you’re a teacher and you know, you lost your weight during a pandemic during all the things. So when you were trying to figure out how to teach your kids online and do all the things, right? So when you hear, you know, someone who’s saying I’m really struggling to find time for me, what would you tell them? What advice would you give them?

For me, when I used to say that to myself, I used to say that all the time, it was really an excuse because I didn’t necessarily like myself. I didn’t like my body and I didn’t think that I should spend time on it. And so for me, I, when somebody says that to me, I’m like, oh no, you, you don’t realize like it doesn’t take as much time as you think to show up for yourself, you can show up for yourself just in your thoughts. You show up for yourself, just sitting and eating dinner and being present with yourself.

There’s so many ways you can show up for yourself that you do every day. And just in a little bit of changing, it doesn’t take as much time as you think. It takes three minutes to write your realistic plan. You know? And I think people, they think, oh my heck, a diet is so big. It’s more than me. I can’t do it. I’m not enough. But those are excuses too. We are enough and we’re worth our work. And you just need to realize it’s not going to take as much time as you think. And you just need to sit down and take the time for yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause it is it’s, it’s just a lie we tell ourselves because you know, you gave a few hints there. You know, some tips, the tips were, Hey, you’re sitting at dinner, Hey, let’s just come into awareness. Be present. Hey, let’s make our realistic plan. And you know, one of the concepts that I really taught at Unstoppable Live, and I really feel passionate about this is C work.

Ladies, we think that we have to do everything perfectly. And that is just, it is perfectionism. It is trauma. It is, you know, I said, this, this weekend, A work is trauma. And what I mean by that is it puts these expectations and then we just shut down and so C work, doing things in a, in a fashion that isn’t perfect. Making your realistic plan. We have a concept in Transform called minimum baselines where you put in a minimum, right. I’m going to make it three out of seven days or four out of seven days so that you can start to see success. Because perfectionism thinking that you have to do everything, you just don’t start.

You don’t do anything. You just kind of like, okay, like, right. And you just, and you just keep putting you off. You keep putting you off. And I tell you, if you are listening today, stop putting you off because there is no better time. There is no right time to do this work. You can start right now today you can start right now. You can go to episode six and learn all about the realistic plan. You can come to, you know, our five-day coaching experience, bflycoaching.com/BC. That’s happening in a few days. The deadline, if you’re listening to this, the deadline is August, I think 27th to register. But ladies just stop putting yourself off because I I’m telling you, I did it for so many years and it just kept me feeling like I was drowning.

Now ladies love to say, I don’t have enough money to lose weight. Oh my ladies, I know I was like that because I had spent so much money on so much just ridiculous stuff. Right. I bought all the supplements. I mean, hydroxy. I don’t know what I think about all the things. Jenny Craig, I can name a million things all the times I went to the store and I’m like, I’m eating healthy this week. And I would go and I’d fill my cart with like vegetables and like organic and this, you know, lean meats. I’m like, I’m doing it. And then the time would come and I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it. And so that food would go to waste.

I have wasted so much money on “diets.” And I just want everyone who’s listening, I don’t do diets. I don’t do diets. You don’t have to make special meals for you versus your family. So I want to ask Dawn, because Dawn, this was right when you first started, like I don’t have to make different plans. So yeah. So tell me, ore different food for my family. So when you hear someone say, I can’t afford, right. I can’t afford to lose weight. Let’s talk about that. What do you think about that?

Well, I love what you said you can’t afford not to, but at the same time, like I don’t cook separate meals for my family. I cook one meal and we eat all have the same meal or I may add a salad or something to mine or something like that. But I, and I don’t buy special foods either. I have not had a shake in a million years. You know what I mean? I, I shop at my local grocery store. I don’t buy anything that’s that’s diety anymore.

There are not diet foods in my house. There are normal foods and normal bread. Normal, I know that’s weird, normal bread is there. Yeah. There’s real bread. What do you mean, you eat white bread? What is happening? You know what I mean? But You know, and I have milk and I have cream and I have butter and I, and you know what, they feel great in my body. I just listen to my body and I feed it what it needs. And really, I don’t eat as much as I used to, but I still eat exactly what my family eats.

Yeah. I think about that too. You know, ladies, when I think about when I was on the diet roller coaster, how much money I spent. Oh my goodness. I mean, how much money I would spend, like going to get my sugar cookie fix and my chocolate fix. I’m a sugar girl. So I know if you’re savory, it’s something different. Maybe it’s your pizza fix, but whatever it is, I spent so much money on that. And now food is literally the least important thing in my life.

And I just, you know, like I just don’t spend as much money because I don’t need to overindulge and overeat. I get to choose and eat whatever it is that I want to eat. I eat all kinds of different foods, foods that fuel me, foods that don’t, but I spend a whole lot less time and a whole lot less money on this whole food thing.

So Jenn, what, when I said that, what popped in your brain? I think of when, I mean, I just think, honestly, Shannan undercharges us for her program. Every time she says the price on, you know, on a call to someone I’m like what? Because as a family of four, we will go out to dinner and spend that in one shot pretty much or go to Target or, you know, there’s all these other things that, I mean, I am a coffee lover and so coffee is not cheap. I have, I don’t even want to add up what I’ve spent on coffee. So I will go and spend, in the past I would have gone and spent money on coffee, but not on myself for something like this. Right.

And so I think for me, it was just about finding my worth that I was okay. It was okay to, I was worth spending that money on myself to focus on myself and improve myself. Before I would have been like, we have to spend it on something for the family or save it. I would have, you know, justified not spending it. And I just think like, I hope whoever is listening, that you just know that you are worth the time and the money to focus on yourself because it’s the best work that you’re going to do of your life. Like when you can show up for yourself in a way that serves you and you feel like you are living your authentic life, the way that you show up for those around you is the way that you want to.

Yeah. And you know, Jenn, I did the quick math. Oh no. If you spent $5 a day, five days a week. And let’s just say, you know, I don’t know. Let’s just say, you know, you, you didn’t do it a couple weeks of the year. It’s over $1,200 a year and ladies that’s coffee or that, you know, stopping at, you know, well Circle K here, or I don’t know where it is all over the country, but stopping at your gas station and filling up on the Cinnabons or whatever it is for you or the pizzas or the corn dogs or whatever it is, you know, stopping through Sonic and grabbing, you know, chili cheese dog, and tots $5 a day in a whole year. It’s, it’s over 1200. It’s probably closer to like 1400 bucks if you did it just five days a week or $5 a day, five days a week.

And so I dunno, ladies, this is what I know. We have these things, time, money, and they’re these two, like really big things that prevent us from doing the work of our lives. And it’s all because for the most of us, because we have some fear, we don’t want to fail again. We failed so many times and we have been traumatized by the diet industry by diet culture, by these false promises, by restriction. And because of that, we have so much fear of like, well, what if I don’t, what if this doesn’t work? What if I, you know, come into Transform or I start to do this work and I don’t do it. And so as we kind of, you know, in today, cause this time is going so fast. I mean, I could spend all day with you ladies.

So as we kind of end, you know, what would you say to, you know, if you were coaching someone and they just said, you know, what, if I fail again? Dawn. I would tell a lady that she is so worth her time and her energy. She’s so worth her work. We are worth our time. And we have thought so long that we’re not enough that we’re broken. And we are none of these things. We deserve all the love and grace, the forgiveness, all of those things for ourselves. And we have put ourselves off for so long and we deserve to spend just a little bit of time on ourselves.

Yes, that’s so good. Jenn. I would say that one of the most important things that I have learned and continue to learn in Transform is that failing is necessary. We need to fail to progress. Us failing means that we are up leveling. We are growing and you will be surrounded by the most amazing community. Shannan just talked about our live event and I like have butterflies talking about it because it really was. We got to meet some of the other women in person. And it was an amazing two days virtually also like those ladies are incredible.

Just the community that you have in Transform is just unlike any that I’ve been in. You’ll be welcomed with open arms. And when you fail, they’re right there to pick you up, to cheer you on, and to, you know, offer different solutions or talk with you through, you know, here’s advice, here’s what’s worked for me. And so I just think, yes, it is scary to try something new and to fail, but we have to get to a point where we are okay failing.

I loved both of what you said, because failure is the only way and we have this fear of it. So we don’t even start. We don’t even begin, but honestly love I get that we failed because we’ve been traumatized by restriction and then overeating, right? So we’ve either been in these really overeating cycles or really restrictive cycles. And so this failure that I’m talking about is a failure of learning how to fail with love and kindness and some grace for yourself and learning that, you know, what can I learn from it instead of beating yourself up, instead of telling yourself that you’re not good enough, and you know, you can’t do anything and you’re not capable and you were always meant to be overweight. And you were always meant to, you know, all of that, because all of that is just nonsense. Honestly, it’s just nonsense. You were made to honestly live your best life, your very best life in a body that you love, in a body that you love.

So Jenn and Dawn, we have one more minute. And so if you could, you know, tell a lady, coach a lady and you were to give them one piece of advice of this journey that they’re starting no matter where they’re starting, if they’re starting the podcast, or I know we have ladies who are listening, who are newly in Transform, what would you tell them? Dawn. I would tell them that to make a commitment to themselves and honor the commitment that they make. Tell, tell yourself the truth, speak to yourself in a loving way. You haven’t done it for so long. Learn to listen to your body and listen to your thoughts.

Hm. I love it. Jenn. That is so good Dawn. I would tell them to stop comparing their journey to somebody else’s because I think that one of the most important lessons, I think I say this about everything, ladies, you’ll see, there’s so much to learn, but really, you know, I’ve been on these fad diets where it’s a race, how fast can we lose this weight? And we compare to those around us. And it, all it does is set us up for failure and disappointment. So stop comparing your journey to those around you. Just show up for yourself like Dawn said, keep the commitment and know, that the way that you’re showing up is the perfect way for you.

I love it ladies. Dawn and Jenn. I mean, I love you ladies. Dawn and Jenn are our weight-loss coaches in Transform. They help ladies, they coach them and they run calls for us. They’re just amazing. And if you’re listening to this right now, and you’re listening to this on the day that it’s published, get into our bootcamp, the Transform BootCamp is happening. You do not want to miss it. It is a way for you to experience Transform and kind of dip your toe and see what coaching is all about.

And so you don’t want to miss out. I think the deadline to register might be the 27th. I’m pretty sure, but you know, check the link. The link will, the link will tell you. It’s bflycoaching.com/BC. All right, bye for now.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and want to learn more, come on over to bflycoaching.com. See you next week.