You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 130. 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. Have you taken my free course yet? If you’ve been listening to the podcast and you have not taken my free course, you want to take it. This is how you begin your journey to lose weight for the last time. You can go to freebosscourse.com and we’ll also put that link in the show notes for you.

So, oh, I’m excited about today’s episode. I’m going to talk about the love of food and this thought that we have that really keeps us stuck. You won’t want to miss it. But first I want to give a listener shout out, and this is to Fieldmoni. This podcast got me started in the program a couple months ago, and the knowledge that I’ve gained is amazing. My way of thinking in regards to weight is changing. And my self-esteem has grown. I’m starting to love myself more and more. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much Monica. She is one of our Transform Bosses and I just love her. I love the work she’s doing, how she’s showing up. She is a beautiful soul. So shout out my love..

Ladies, I am getting so excited. You know, me, I love, I love this work. I love what we do. I love my Transform Bosses, and we have Unstoppable Live coming. Now this is a Boss only event. So you have to be in Transform Boss to go to this event. It only happens one time per year. Yeah. After this April, it doesn’t happen again until we’re not going to do it again until October of 2023.

So it is very special, and we’re about five weeks out. Now this is an in-person and a virtual event. So I have ladies who are flying to Arizona to attend it in person. And then I have a bunch of ladies watching it virtually, and we make the experience so good that even the virtual ladies, they feel like they’re in the room with us. We take so much time and pride because I tell you, my team we’ve been working on this for months because we just always love to over-deliver. My clients, they mean so much to me.

You know, we have these lizard brains, I like to call mine Lizzie, and always tells us to not show up for ourselves to slowly quit on ourselves. It always tells us how we’re busy. I mean, you know, ladies, right? All the excuses. And so we’re always trying to make things simple and easy. And I just can’t wait for this event. We’ve been doing, it’s on the top of my mind because we have just been, you know, doing so much planning and work. We just put in the final orders for all of our swag, so every lady who attends they get this beautiful VIP swag box. It’s full of all kinds of goodies.

But most importantly, I know our bosses who attend this event, they’re going to change their lives. You know, I just got off a coaching call this morning with one of my bosses and she attended last year in person and is going to attend in person again this year. And she’s made so much progress. She’s like a different person from the very first time that I coached her. Just the way that she shows up, I mean, she is light. I just can’t even explain the difference. And she has done so much work on herself. I’m just so proud of her. So this is the work ladies. It is. Ooh, it’s so good.

Let’s get into the show. Last week, I talked about how we anchor ourselves to old versions of ourselves. If you’ve not listened to that, you definitely want to go back. It’s episode number 129. When we anchor ourselves, it keeps us stuck. And today I want to go deeper and talk about how our thinking about food and our love of food also keeps us stuck. We have these thoughts that we just love food. I mean, ladies tell me all the time, Shannan, I just love food.

I was thinking back to when I was 300 pounds and I thought I loved food too. It really was the center of my universe. It’s where I got a lot of my joy and pleasure from. I want to tell you about one of my favorite meals at the time. It was this meal and dessert from Chili’s. It was this chicken dish and like this blonde brownie concoction. Plus, you know ladies, I had to get their chips and salsa. I thought I loved this meal and I would crave it. I would think about it. And when I would get it when I would go to Chili’s or when we would order it to go, I would eat it up. There was no savoring, no checking in with my body. I just would eat the whole thing. There was not, you know, a bite left. And I had these thoughts that I just loved it, that this meal was just bringing me so much joy.

There’s other foods I can think of that I have these same thoughts. I think about this, I’m a sweet girl and I loved sugar cookies. And so, I had the same thought that I just loved them. I would go to the ends of the earth to try a new sugar cookie with deep thick cream cheese frosting. I would obsess about these foods, wanting them, creating this love story around them. But love, food it’s just food. It never loved me back. It never really brought me joy. Not for anything more than two minutes. When I would eat the whole buffet from Chili’s right? The whole meal, dessert appetizer, I would feel sick. I always felt like I needed a nap.

I would, you know, feel lethargic. And then I would start to beat myself up. I did not like weighing 300 pounds. It felt hard. I felt heavy. I didn’t like the way I looked. I didn’t like the way my clothes felt. I didn’t like that I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do with my son. I was a single mom at the time. But I would just tell myself I just loved food. I had created this whole life around food, because love, I had not created the life of my dreams. I had not put my focus on my dreams or my goals or the things that really brought me true joy, real pleasure. See, I was always rushing with food, scarfing it down, eating it in the car, eating it standing up. I’d go to the grocery store and eat things on the way home because I couldn’t wait to eat it.

This came from this thought that I loved food, I needed it. But I didn’t love it. I never sat with it and enjoyed it. I overate it until I was sick, lethargic, stomachaches. This is not love. See, I had this thought that I have to eat it now because somewhere in the back of my head, I was preparing for my next diet. My next time that I would be restricting. I would tell myself that I was going to be better, and that I would not eat foods like this ever again. Somewhere when I was eating the buffet from Chili’s and the back of my brain, I was telling myself that I was out of control, that I should not be eating it. That I will be better tomorrow. Now this is for all my ladies who are in Transform Boss Weight Loss, go to module three in the weight loss course, and then watch the video Using This Work Against Yourself. It’s video number 31. I go in depth about doing this work on transforming your beliefs.

Now love, your thinking is what keeps you overweight. It is believing thoughts like I love food, I can’t control myself with food, I will do better tomorrow or Monday or after the event or after the summer. These thoughts are what is keeping you overweight. And the Whopper of the thought, I mean, just this big thought that keeps you on the diet roller coaster is ready, wait for it – I can’t have it. We tell ourselves this story about how we restrict, how we can’t have certain foods. Then we feel punished, deprived. And then we rebel. The opposite of I can’t have it is I’m going to eat all of it. It brings out your inner rebel. This all comes from years of dieting, years of not focusing on what you are thinking and believing.

You think if I just eat the right foods, I will lose weight. It doesn’t work. You’ve done this. You’ve been on the diet roller coaster how long? How long? How many diets have you started? This is about really getting honest with yourself about the truth. Because until you start thinking better thoughts, you are going to stay on the diet roller coaster. And I know, I know this. I have seen it. I have done it. I experienced it for almost 38 years. And what changed was the way that I thought, what I believed, and then throw in tools and coaching and community. That’s how I lost weight for the last time. I eat all the foods. I decide what I want to eat, and I don’t tell myself that I can’t have it, because I can.

I’ve always been able to eat what I want. And now I love my body. I want to take care of it. I want to fuel it. I want to feel good. I don’t like the feeling of being lethargic. I don’t want a stomachache. I don’t want to carry extra weight on my body, my joints. I want to give the best shot at a healthy life.

See, you can always eat what you want. No one is taking food from you or forcing you to eat. So when you tell yourself, I can’t have it, you go into a pity party. You tell yourself, I can’t have it, poor me. Why is this my struggle? And then the opposite reaction is a full binge. I want you to practice a different thought. I want you to start to believe something different. You always eat what you want to eat. You always have. And simply say, I don’t want it. I don’t want to eat it because I don’t want a stomachache. I don’t want to eat off plan. I don’t want to have to take a nap. I want energy for what I’m doing today.

This simple change, this simple change from this thought of I can’t have it to I don’t want it, Love, just keep repeating that to yourself over and over again. I don’t want it because, and I tell you, it will keep that inner rebel from piping up and thinking that you can’t have it and going into a full, you know love, I know, I have been in that pity party so many times where I felt like, you know, I was out of control. I felt like, why is this my struggle? And what that did is it kept me in victim. And I want you to take your power back. I want you to just say, I don’t want it. I want a body that feels like freedom. That’s what I want.

So the transformational questions and actions today are one, get honest about your thinking and what you’re actually doing. Two, ask yourself why you want to fuel your body. Why is that important to you? And three, decide on purpose and practice boss thinking, I just don’t want it.

And if you’re just starting this work and you need community, you need the tools to lose weight for the last time, then start my free course at freebosscourse.com. Woo. So good my love. Now you want to tune in, you want to make sure that you’re subscribe to this podcast because, next week I am going to talk about how busy action shows up and how it’s sabotaging your weight loss journey. 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.