You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 132. 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. Always happy to back with you. Ladies, we’re going to talk about our body. Yep. Ooh, I can’t wait. But first, as always, I want to give a listener shout out, and this is Tammie, mtfiddler68, and she wrote Shannan, I just listened to this podcast again, like I have probably the majority of them, and I get something different out of them each time. Realizing that the word impossible is just that – a word, it means nothing until we make it mean something, just kind of opened my eyes that anything and everything is possible. And the statement you made of it’s impossible to live in a body that you do not love really hit home. I’m not totally there yet, but getting there and I’m getting closer each day, thanks to you and your teaching. Thank you for all you do for us Bosses. I’m so grateful for you and have so much love for you.

Oh, thank you so much Tammie. Tammie is one of our Transform Bosses. I appreciate you leaving this review on iTunes, and you know loves, Tammie is an amazing human, and she has just done this work. She’s lost weight. She continues to face her fears and all of the diet trauma, and she just keeps showing up. And she’s one of our mentors, senior mentor. And I just love her. I do. I know, my bosses are amazing.

So I am preparing for Unstoppable Live. I know I keep talking about it, but we are just in full like preparation mode, and it’s all about relationships. So today, I’ve just been thinking about the relationships that we have, and one part is about the relationship that we have with our body. I remember when I was 315 pounds, I hated my body. It felt heavy. You know, I didn’t feel beautiful. I didn’t even want to see myself in a mirror. I felt embarrassed. I mean, I think back to then, and just feeling so much shame all the time.

There wasn’t moments where I didn’t think about it. I mean maybe sometimes, but oh, I just remember even being at work and worrying about what people thought of me. How can you be a leader and you can’t even figure out this weight problem? You know, all of these things. And I felt tired, I felt exhausted. I mean, here I was in my late twenties and I was 315 pounds. It was like my late twenties, early thirties. And I just felt that I was at war with my body. And I blamed my body. I was disconnected from my body. I wanted out of it.

I remember having thoughts like, if I could just get on Biggest Loser, if I could just wire my mouth shut for six months and drink, you know, liquid diet, right. I just wanted to do anything to get out of the body. I remember those pictures where they taught, you know, you see where they like, unzipper the overweight person, and then in the, in the center of it was this thin person. I remember just thinking like somewhere in there is this person who is thin. But I just hated my body. And I was mad at it. I was blaming it for feeling tired and achy. I didn’t like parts of it. I didn’t like my stomach. I didn’t like my legs. I thought they were too big. And I didn’t like my arms.

Why I want to share this with you is because when you dislike something or you hate it, you want out of it. You want to run from it. You want to disconnect. Maybe you’ve had health issues. Maybe you’ve had infertility issues and you couldn’t have a baby, and you’re so mad at your body. So, you disconnect, you overeat. And then on top of all of it, you feel worse because of it. You beat yourself up.

You tell yourself, you’re never going to figure this out. This is too hard. You, you know, we have these pity parties for why is this happening to me? Why is this my problem? We blame our genetics and our mothers and how we grew up. And I just want to offer you, my love, I have felt all of those things. But that didn’t help me lose weight for the last time. You have one body. It has been with you since day one, and it’s the only thing that has been with you since day one, and will be with you until your last day.

The first step of starting to change the way that you think about your body is acceptance of it. Allowing yourself to accept what your body does and all its beauty and imperfections. See, to lose weight for the last time, you have to start thinking different, believing different things, and you have to start this journey of self-acceptance and self-love. Now I know for so many of you, you have been at war with your body for so long that the thought of loving it is so far. But what I want you to do is start with these first two steps I’m going to teach you.

And this first step of just accepting it, just looking at it, allowing it, allowing your body to be, and looking at its beauty and its imperfections. We have this thought that if we accept it, right, if we accept our bodies, we won’t want to change it. But I want to challenge that. If you keep resisting it, you keep disconnecting from your body, you will never change it. See, the reason why you don’t know when you’re hungry or you don’t know when you’re physically hungry or you don’t know when you’re approaching full is because you’ve disconnected from your body. You don’t pay attention to it anymore.

We have hormones, actual hormones in our bodies that tell us when we’re physically hungry, when we’re approaching full, and we don’t pay attention to them anymore because we’re so disconnected from our bodies. And I just want to offer you this first step of accepting it, of just accepting it for what it is today, that is how you will change it. If you keep disconnecting, you keep running from it. You keep telling yourself how horrible it is, how you hate it, how you just have, you know, so much fat, how you know, it’s let you down. My love, you won’t be able to move forward in losing weight for the last time. You might lose some weight, but you’ll always gain it back.

Now, the second step is appreciation for it. Now this is a little different than loving it. This second step is the first step in how you start to find love for your body. Appreciation is just this deep appreciation for all that your body does. Love, your body, your body, I just need you to hear this, it is a miracle. Think of it. Think of it, of how your body heals, how it breathes, how it processes all that food that we overeat. For all my ladies who have produced babies, you have had a human. That’s what your body has produced. It does all of these things that we don’t even have to think about.

It takes care of us, even when we don’t give it enough sleep, we don’t give it enough water, we don’t take deep breaths, we don’t eat food that fuels us, it still gets up. And I say this love, because your body, your body is beautiful and amazing and a miracle. And when you can slowly start to appreciate it and you can start, you know, I appreciate that it got me out of bed today. I appreciate that I’m breathing. I appreciate that I’m thinking, that I’m listening to this podcast. This is what your body does for you. It is amazing.

Now the third step is starting to reconnect, going into it, paying attention to it. See your body is the miracle. I know all the things out in the world will tell you, take this miracle pill or drug or whatever it is, or miracle shake or miracle food combination. No. To lose weight for the last time, you have to find the miracle that you already have, and it’s your body. And when you start paying attention to it, you will realize that it has been here for you all along. And starting to pay attention, starting to reconnect, finding your hunger cues, your fullness cues, and then what happens over time as you, you know, work with me as you, you know, if you’re a Transform Boss, you can go into module one where I really go into hunger and fullness. But as you start to do this work, you’ll start wanting to take care of it. You’re going to start to find that you want fuel, that you want to feel differently. You’ll find yourself wanting to move it more, not crazy exercise, you’ll just want to, you know, take a couple extra steps. You’ll want to maybe, you know, do something that’s fun that moves your body. When you reconnect to your body, you will want to take care of it.

If you keep resisting it, you keep telling, you know, looking at it and just despising it, love, you will stay on the diet roller coaster. And I know this because I did it. When I started to accept it right where it was right at the beginning, right when it was, you know, 250 pounds or 260 probably at the time, when I started to accept it, when I started to have appreciation for it, when I started reconnect with it, everything, started to change.

And so my love, the transformational questions and actions are one, how can you have appreciation for your body? Two, what are you resisting with your body that’s keeping you from accepting it? Three, what are you mad about your body about and how is that keeping you stuck? Four, what does reconnecting mean in your body? Ooh, it’s so good my love.

And love, if you want to take this work deeper and you want to start the journey of losing weight for the last time, take my free course. If you’ve not taken it yet, you got to take it. Go to freebosscourse.com. We’ll put it in the show notes so that you have it. But this is really the first step in learning the basics of what I teach. Look, I teach women how to lose weight for the very last time by learning how to enjoy foods that they have, learning how to think and believe different things, and we have community that is there to support and help. So you for sure want to take that. All right my love, I will see you same time, same place next week.

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.