You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 121. 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, I want to teach you how to give yourself permission to be successful. It is going to be a good one. But first, I want to do a listener shout out, and today’s listener shout out is from Dana Hageman Allen and it’s titled the 50 and fabulous in iTunes. Shannan, I listen to your podcast every Wednesday morning like clockwork. Your podcasts are always so inspiring. I loved your 10 lessons. I wish you a happy 50th birthday and look forward to all the fantastic things you’ll be teaching all the lovely ladies. So much love for you. Dana.

Ooh, I love Dana. Dana is in maintenance. She’s our main, one of our maintenance bosses. Thank you so much for leaving that beautiful review. I tell you, Transform Boss Weight Loss, we have so many amazing and beautiful women. I really do feel so blessed about the community of women that we have. And thank you Dana. If you find what you learn here valuable, you can help other women find this show by leaving a review and rating of the show. Also subscribe so that every Wednesday morning I’m in your podcast library.

Love, I am getting so excited. We are getting ready to open Transform Boss Weight Loss. We are less than a month away and we always kick it off with a free challenge. So if you go to bflycoaching.com/me, M E, you can register for our free challenge. It kicks off on February 7th. I love the challenges. I love working with ladies and watching them have aha after aha, and some hope again that they can lose weight and lose it for the last time.

When I was losing my weight, one of the reasons I would stay on the diet roller coaster was sabotage. I would sabotage my weight loss. Now I teach this in depth inside my weight loss course inside my membership area in Transform Boss Weight Loss. Sabotaging our success is one of the main reasons I see women struggle with their weight.

I would get to onederland and then my weight would start creeping back on. Sometimes it was just a number barrier, like onederland, or like 220 pounds. So I would bounce between 220 pounds and 260 pounds. And then anytime I would get under 220, I would bounce right back up. This happened with 220, and it also happened with onederland. I did this with different weights depending on where I was at.

It was not until I worked with a coach that I really understood the thoughts around sabotage. I had built a layer of weight around me for protection. I had trauma when I was younger, and my weight was my protection. It’s how I learned how to cope. I also have been to therapy and had a therapist help me identify some of the thoughts. Therapy and coaching are great compliment to one. Coaching is not a replacement for therapy. So after I identified the thoughts, I really understood the reason. I had to allow myself to be successful. I had to allow myself to be in a smaller body. I had to show myself love and kindness through the process. When I would start to sabotage, I did not beat myself up or make it mean that I was never going to do it, or that I was failing. I just gently reminded myself that it was okay to let the weight go. That it was okay when I had failures and challenges. It was all okay.

Because I was not going to give up on myself. I was going to lose the weight, through coaching, allowing thoughts and feelings, and then changing my beliefs and thoughts. I have a whole section in the weight loss course, plus a virtual event that is focused on sabotage and how it’s just a trigger. It’s how we’re alerted to what’s happening in our thoughts and our feelings. Another sabotaging thought I see my clients struggle with is that if they lose the weight, they will lose relationships or their relationships will change or get worse. This is what I like to call future puddling. Yes. This is worst case scenarioing the future. I know scenarioing is probably not a word, but we’re going to use it here – expecting the worst before anything happens.

Puddling is just having thoughts that create feelings like worry, doubt, confusion. They’re just not necessary. They don’t serve us. They just cloud your mind and stall your progress or put it off. Could a relationship change? Maybe. But I have found with the tools that I teach my bosses, they learn how to increase their capacity to give love to others, to drop the manuals, and have more love for the humans, and their relationships actually get better.

I have a whole relationship course in Transform Boss, and we do a whole lot of coaching on it. It’s so fun to watch our ladies improve relationships when they thought they would get worse. This goes back to allowing yourself to be successful, to have successful relationships, allowing success to be in your life and practicing thoughts of allowance by getting coached and becoming aware of the thoughts that are sabotaging your success.

Another sabotaging thought that I see many of my clients struggle with is loose skin. Oh yes. And that their bodies may be different after losing the weight. I struggled with this too. A lot. I would have these thoughts around, I’m going to look like a fat person in a thin body. Everybody will know I lost weight. My loose skin will be ugly. It will be bothersome. These thoughts kept me sabotaging, quitting on myself. I have loose skin now. I have a good bit of it. And I’ve had to do my own work on my thoughts. But I would take my loose skin all day, every day, over carrying the extra weight. It’s not even in the same ballpark. I had to practice thoughts over and over again around giving myself permission to be successful, to live in a body that had loose skin, that did not have a layer of weight around her.

I had to get really honest about what it felt like to carry 80 to 140 pounds of extra weight on my body and what it was doing to me. I had to practice and allow my thoughts over and over again. Some of the thoughts that I practiced, and still do to this day, is I’ll figure it out when I get there. I don’t need to worry about the loose skin now. I’m worthy of living in a body that feels like freedom. And one that I still practice is I’m safe. My weight is not protecting me now, nor has it ever. This is the core of what I teach and coach, helping my bosses become aware of the thoughts and beliefs that are keeping them stuck and sabotaging their success.

It just really is not about the food. The food is so secondary. I don’t know, it’s at the bottom of the list compared to our beliefs and our thoughts. Our beliefs and our thoughts are what keeps us sabotaging our success. And when we start to believe new things, when we start to practice new thoughts, that is when everything changes my love.

So the transformational questions and actions are one, how is sabotage showing up in your weight loss journey right now? And number two, how can you give yourself permission to be successful? One of the ways that I did it was just by, again, writing down the thoughts that were causing my sabotage and then writing down, I give you permission to carry loose skin. I give you permission to lose the weight, and really visualizing myself living in this body that felt like freedom, that was smaller, and really allowing myself to feel the emotions that came with it. It’s so powerful my love. And the third, pick a thought that you can practice when an old belief comes in. So here’s how you do it. An old habit that comes in, allow it to be there. You don’t need to resist it or judge it, and then feel the emotion from it, and then gently repeat the new thought that you are practicing.

And if you want help doing this and taking this work deeper, then start with my free course. You can go to bflycoaching.com/ready. So good my love. 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.