You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 110. 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, so happy to be back with you. Today’s show is a great topic. It’s one that I love and talk about a lot with my Transform bosses. See weight loss is easy, but it is hard. And today I want to talk about both sides and how you’re thinking is what really keeps you stuck.

But first I want to do a listener shout out, and today’s listeners shout out is from Nancy Nut. Love these ladies. I can relate to each one of them. The advice they have given is so true. Transform has changed my life. Ladies, if you’re looking to get off the diet roller coaster, join Transform Weight Loss Program. Shannan and the sisterhood is bar none to any other program I have ever been on. Thank you, Nancy Nut.

I tell you, I know I love Transform Boss Weight Loss. It really is, it’s such a blessing. I don’t know the right words. There’s no words for me about how much I love the women in Transform Boss Weight Loss. How I love watching them grow and challenge themselves. And it is just a gift, I think to everyone who’s in it too just, you know, watching other women, being a part of this amazing community, and learning how to really just live your absolute best life in a body that you love. So, I’m with you, Nancy.

So ladies, we are, as I’m recording this, coming off Halloween. I hope all of you ladies had a fantastic Halloween. I for sure did. It was really a great time. My grandbabies came over and you know, it was my grandson’s, well his birthday’s on November 3^rd, actually when this episode is being released, but we celebrated it on Halloween, and he’s turning 11. I can’t believe it. I cannot believe it. Devin, he is the sweetest boy, and he is just sunshine in a body. He has been that way since the day he has blessed us since he’s been on this earth.

And I love that boy. And he’s turning 11. I mean, I do want him to stop growing. I’m not so sure I’m okay. I mean all those babies, but ah, they’re just all growing up, and you know, we went trick-or-treating and I have to say there was a lot of folks out and it was just so fun to see all the kids in all their costumes and you know, all my babies were so cute and sweet and fun, and it was just a really, really good time. So, I hope you all had an amazing Halloween and I hope you saw my email and it said eat the Halloween candy. If you missed it, you’ll want to read it because it really is part of this process.

And you know, it’s all about allowance. I tell you, when I was on the diet roller coaster, I had this thought that losing weight was hard. And you know, I had all of these different thoughts about how it was my struggle. It was hard. I was never going to be able to do it. And really, as I’ve done this work, as I’ve watched, you know, my clients do this work, it is, what’s really the hardest part, really honestly, are my thoughts and the feelings that my thoughts produce. And you know, because hard and easy, if you just think about it, there’s no like easy scale. I know there’s an easy button I heard, I think in a Staples commercial, but there really is no like, you know, easy or hard scale. There really isn’t. My version of hard could be someone else’s version of easy and vice versa. So this is what I’m saying, my love. It’s just all an illusion. It really is. It’s just our own thoughts. We think things and it makes us feel a certain way.

And then when we feel that certain way we take action. We do something or we don’t do something. And so this whole concept about, you know, losing weight is hard, and you know, it’s so difficult. One of the reasons is because for sure, our thoughts, it’s the main reason. But there is a second piece to it. And it really is the diet trauma that we have as women suffered.

You know, because we’ve been in this culture of being on diets, of not loving our bodies, of thinking we “should” be skinnier. We “should” be healthier. I mean, there are so many. We should exercise more. There’s so many shoulds because we’ve had all of this trauma. It feels really hard because most of the main messages that we have been getting since, you know, I don’t know, since I was like eight years old, it does vary depending on your culture and your upbringing, but for most women, it happens at a young age when we’re told that we need to be a certain weight, whatever that is for your culture and what, you know, you’ve been socialized to believe.

And then if we’re not this weight, then something is wrong. And the way to get to that weight is through restriction. And so we do these restrictive diets and then when we can’t do it any longer, we overeat and binge. And so that is the hard part of losing weight. It is this restrictive white knuckling it, and I’m “eating clean,” or I’m just bingeing. And I’m just eating all the things.

And I feel out of control. And you know, it’s so interesting. This kind of like either side of the coin, right? The restrictive or the bingeing, both feel a little out of control, because it’s not coming from within you. You’re not paying attention to if you like the food. You’re not paying attention to how it feels in your body.

Someone’s giving you a plan. You look at the plan and you’re like, okay, I’m going to eat this or I’m not, right? You look at the plan and you’re like, okay, I can, I can do this for, you know, until I lose this weight. And then I’ll go back to eating normal. I mean, I said that to myself so many times.

And there’s just this kind of, I don’t know, middle part. There is a way, I remember always wanting it, and now that I have it, I really do understand. And it starts honestly with the way that we think. All of it does. So we’ve had this diet trauma, and then we have these thoughts that losing weight is really hard.

But I just want to flip that for a second. And I’ve talked about this before. Hard is, again, just what you think it is. And what I mean by that is, again, my hard and your hard could be two different things. Hard is when you carry extra weight on your body, and you’re carrying an extra 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 pounds. That is hard. That is hard on your body.

It’s hard on the way that you feel. Not fitting into clothes, not being able to walk a flight of stairs, not being able to eat the food that you enjoy without guilt and shame, feeling that your body is unacceptable. My love, that is hard. Not being able to look at yourself in a mirror because ah, it just upsets you. Not being able to wear the things that you want to wear, or go for that big job, or go for your dreams because you’ll wait until you weigh a certain way.

My love, that is hard. Losing weight, learning how to start to change and, you know, change your thoughts and believe new things, or the hard that I just described. And I tell you my love, I’ll change my thoughts all day long. And it just starts with this simple process that I teach.

I teach the fundamentals, and there are four fundamentals. We’re going to link them in the show notes so you can, if you’ve not listened to them, you can, because really it starts with just starting to notice what’s happening in that beautiful brain, having a few brain hacks, like the realistic plan, and then doing some foundational things for your body, like water and sleep. You know, the process that I teach is actually easy.

Make a plan, feel your hunger/fullness, feel some feelings once in a while. Yeah, all of them. And then decide what you want to believe and think. Get your water and sleep in. But I tell you, my love, what is hard is our thinking. It’s our thoughts about it. Again, I go back to, we have these thoughts like I can’t lose weight, I wish I were motivated, I hope I can lose weight, I hope I can make my realistic plan. I hope that, you know, you lose a little bit of weight and then you’re like, Ooh, I hope I can continue this. When we think these thoughts, we feel frustrated, panicked, even overwhelmed. And then we do nothing.

Or we sabotage our success and we repeat this cycle over and over again. These thoughts become beliefs. A belief is just a thought on repeat, or it is a grouping of thoughts that really are on repeat. And we just think it over and over again. I can’t tell you how long and how many times I would think that weight loss was always going to be my struggle and that I could never lose it and I could never maintain it.

And I had to start to just think differently. If you want to make weight loss easy, this is it my love. You have to start to believe something different. You have to start to practice new beliefs and new thoughts. And it starts just with one thought, one thought like I’m learning to lose weight by believing something different today. I just want to say that thought again, because it’s so powerful. I’m learning to lose weight by believing something different today. And I tell you ladies, this whole easy/hard, again, it’s just an illusion. There is no easy or hard button or scale. It’s just based on our interpretation of it. You get to decide if something is easy or hard.

And whether you love the easy or love the hard, because I just want to remind you that you do hard things. You can look back at your life and look at all of the hard things that you’ve done. You’ve done so many hard things, my love, you’ve gotten off your knees so many times where you have just had trauma, pain, loss, grief, hardship, and you keep getting up because you do hard things. So you get to decide if you want to love the easy or love the hard. And you can love both because you do hard things. Stop telling yourself it’s hard so you keep sabotaging your success. My love you have this one life. What are you going to do with it today?

This is how you make weight loss easy. One, start talking to yourself more than you listen. Anytime one of those old thoughts, old beliefs come in – I can’t lose weight, it’s hard, it’s difficult, Oh the food is calling my name – whenever those thoughts come in, just replace it with a new belief, a new thought that you’re practicing. I love the thought I’m learning to lose weight by believing something different. I tell you, just practicing that thought over and over again, it’s so powerful.

Number two, follow my fundamentals. We’re going to link all the fundamentals in the show notes. And we have the, you know, 1.0 version of the fundamentals. And then we also have the 2.0 so you can have eight episodes that are just full of, you know, simple information that you can start to lose weight right now through the holidays my love.

And then number three, love the hard. Start with just one thought and decide that you love the easy, you love the hard, it’s all together. And really at the end of the day, you’re just learning how to take one simple step forward so that you can lose weight for the very last time.

So the transformational questions and actions are number one, listen to the fundamental podcast. Episodes are gonna be posted in the show notes, and you can find the show notes on bflycoaching.com/110. And number two, ask yourself what is easy about losing weight? What is simple? What is like, I mean, it’s just piece of cake, right? I make my realistic plan. No problem. I drink water, no problem. And start to just list what is easy and continue as you’re losing weight. And this is for all my Transform bosses too. As things start to continue to get easier and easier, make sure you’re writing them down. Make sure that you’re looking at those successes. And then number three, what do you want to love that is hard about losing weight? Oh, loving the hard, learning to accept that this is just part of it, but you’re not scared of it. You’re not scared of it my love, because you are a Boss. You have done hard things. You have, my love, I know your story.

I tell you, I listen to stories over and over again from these beautiful women who are in Transform, and we all have this journey and these stories in our lives, and what we’ve been through, good and bad, and this losing weight and, you know, loving our bodies and, and really going after our dreams, my love, it’s all possible. It’s just starting with one thought. It’s believing something different today.

And if you love this work and you want to take it deeper then take my free course. Go to bflycoaching.com/ready. So good. 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 bfly.coaching.com. See you next week.