You are listening to the weight loss for successful women podcast with Shannon and Christiansen episode number 136. 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 Shannon Christiansen. Hello, love so happy to Zack with you.

I am so excited as I record this episode. It’s the end of April. I’m getting ready for unstoppable live. I actually just tried on all my outfits. I did. I had to pick, I have quite a few and I had to pick kind of which ones I want to wear. I like to do a couple outfit changes during unstoppable live,

and I think I got them. I’m feeling good. Ooh, we have just been nailing down all the details and I just can’t wait to see all of the beautiful bosses that are going to attend unstoppable live and watch them show up for themselves and change their own lives. I mean, we have ladies right now who have flown into Phoenix are getting ready to fly into Phoenix.

We have all our virtual ladies. I have some of my virtual ladies who even got a hotel room like this is their time. And I’m just so proud of each and every one of them. And you know, ladies, if you are not a transformed boss, I want to tell you if you’re not in my membership program, we are going to open in June and we always kick it off with a challenge.

So, watch your email. If you’re not on my email list, take my free course and you’ll get on the email list, but you want to make sure the challenges are so fun. We’re only doing three this year. We did one in February. We’re going to do one in June and then more one towards the back end of the year, I think in October.

So, you, for sure want to get into that challenge. It’s super fun. And we open, we open the doors, we’re going to open them for five days. You want to be ready? You want to be ready. So, when we open you’re in, because transform boss weight loss is the most amazing membership. Ladies are changing their lives of their weight.

They’re losing weight. They’re having better relationships, changing careers. I mean, it is amazing to watch women show up for themselves and learn how to lose weight in a way that they can always do without all the pressure eating foods that they enjoy, not making separate meals for their families. I mean, I could go on and on and you don’t want to miss out.

So put it on your calendar June, watch your email for all the information. And you know, of course listen to the podcast because you know, I’ll, I’ll talk more about it as we get closer to it because ladies, this is the thing. When you listen to this show, we are going to be in May, May of 2022. Time just goes,

my love. It just goes so fast. And I want you to live your best life in a body that you love. That feels good. That feels like freedom. And I know that I’m a master at it and I coach and teach my women how to lose weight. And so you don’t want to miss out. You don’t want to keep putting yourself off thinking when you have time,

because this is the thing. Life is busy. If we keep pushing ourselves off, you keep waiting for the right time. My love before you know it, you’re going to wake up and it’s going to be 2042. And I mean that in all the way. So, mark it on your calendar and I can’t wait. And you know, if you haven’t taken my free course,

you for sure want to do that. That’ll get you on my email list too. It’s freebosscourse.com. So, today’s a special episode. I am going to do a Q and A, and these are questions that I get from my ladies. My bosses also too, from some ladies who are not in the membership who just email our support box. So, I can’t wait.

This is going to be again, a very special kind of Q and A episode. So the first question that I get a lot a ton is how do I stop snacking? And you know whether this is late night eating or weekend eating or snacking throughout the day, you know, it’s just kind of like eating little bits of food throughout the day.

There are a few reasons why we snack. And the first reason is its habits. It’s this habit that we had. So, it was before I started really losing my weight. And in the beginning, I still kind of struggled with this I every day at 2:00 PM, I would go to the pantry, and I would need a snack. My, I mean,

my brain was like, you need to eat a snack. And it was a habit that I had created and what it was, was a release. It was a little dopamine hit. I wanted, you know, the pressure from my day at work and all the emotions. And so it was like my quote unquote treat. And over time it just became a habit.

I also did this at night. I had a late night, you know, snack at the end of my day when I was unwinding from the day watching some TV, you know, it was things from ice cream to peanut m&ms, to sugar cookies, all sorts of things. And it was just a way to, again, disconnect, buffer. And I would tell myself,

but it was a tree that I deserved it that I worked so hard. And you just have to watch your thoughts about it and why, and ask yourself, why, why am I doing this? Is it from the emotions of the day? Is this just a habit that I’ve created? And I want to say this, because this is something I learned a long time ago.

Snacking is always emotional eating. It is rarely, rarely is it because you’re physically hungry. It is because you want that little bit of dopamine and it’s a way for you to disconnect. And so, to stop snacking, the first part is just becoming aware. Is it when you are triggered, meaning, you know, hey, you know, you come home and it’s during the transition of the day,

right? You’ve had this day, you’re getting the kids, you’re making dinner, you’re doing all this stuff. And then suddenly you find yourself snacking. Is it every night at the end of the night, when you’re watching TV, is it in the middle of the day? You just need to start to become aware of when then you’re going to ask yourself, why is it emotions, right? Are you trying to push away emotions? And then you’re just going to stop, take a deep breath and disrupt the thought by counting back from 30. Now every time I share this, especially if you’re a new to me, you’re like, what? But you want to disrupt the habit? You want to disrupt the thought.

So when you stop, you disrupt the thought by counting back from 30, and then you’re going to breathe again. You will be amazed at how it disrupts this pattern of, I want to, you know, reach for something somewhere. You created a habit, or it became this, you know, thing for you to disconnect from your emotions. And so, the quickest advice for all my bosses,

I go way deeper in this, in our course. Cause there’s several different techniques. But for all my ladies who are not in Transform Boss, the best quickest way that I can tell you how to stop snacking is one become aware of it. To understand that, ask yourself why what’s the triggers. And then three, use this technique SDB, stop, disrupt, and breathe. And by counting back from 30, what you’re doing, it’s, it’s really a brain hack. You are disrupting the thought, the urge, the need to run and eat again, stop, disrupt, and breathe. If you are one of my bosses, there’s a whole other part about feeling your feelings, but that’s in the weight loss course.

So, get in there and listen to that. And because it’s really, as you progress in this work, as you learn how to reconnect with yourself, you’re going to want to learn how to feel your feelings. Because remember snacking, it’s an emotional event, mostly it’s because we’re pushing down our feelings and we don’t want to feel them. We don’t want to feel frustrated, tired, sad, depressed anxiety. Maybe we don’t want to feel any of that. So, we just push it down and we do with positive emotion too. So good. Okay. Number two.

What advice do you find to be the most helpful for yourself? You know, my love, if I look back at my whole journey, my whole life,I want to give you three things that have been the most helpful for me. One, just because I have a thought a sentence in my brain does not make it true or mean that I have to believe it or take action from it. This work reflection, work, learning how to change your mindset. It is so powerful. The mind controls everything.

Your thoughts and beliefs are everything. The reason why you have the outcomes and the results in your life is because of your thoughts. And I tell you loves, we think it’s all the other things, right? We think it’s because of something or because of our family or you know, our life, or we were just dealt these cards or our metabolism. I mean all the things. And I’m here to tell you, I have done this work. I have done this research. I’ve done it on myself, hundreds of ladies. And this is it. Your mindset, your thoughts, your beliefs. It is everything. And when you decide that you can believe something different, and you start to do the work that I teach the thought cycle telling you loves everything will change.

And just because you have a thought, just because you have a belief that you’ve always held on to, like, I can’t lose weight. It’s hard. My body doesn’t work. All those things. I tell you my love. You can start to believe something different. And when you do everything changes to next best action. I love next best action.

I teach this in Transform Boss Weight Loss, and the next best action is all about if you eat off plan, if you overeat, if you, you know, don’t keep a commitment, you don’t drink your water. You don’t get enough sleep. You just take the next best action. You don’t beat yourself up. You don’t call yourself a failure.

You don’t tell yourself all the nonsense that you can’t do it. You just take the next best action. The next best decision. This is a really amazing solve for perfectionist. And I was a perfectionist. I still struggle with it. And I tell you, ladies, you know, I never wanted to fail. And I had failed so many times at weight loss that I, I just, you know, kind of had wrote it off that I was always going to be my struggle. But what I learned was, you know, what, if I could come into awareness and then just take the next best action. I didn’t need to start over. I didn’t need to be in or out. I didn’t need to go into a full binge.

I just needed to take the next best action. My love when you are losing weight, you are going to have failures. You’re going to have overeats. You’re going to have times where you don’t make your realistic plan or you don’t get enough water and, or, you know, you have transitions in your life. You’ll have things where you kind of start disconnecting.

As soon as you come into awareness, you don’t need to start over. You don’t need to go through the whole things and do 52 things. You just, in that moment, take the next best action for yourself. It could be making a realistic plan. It could be drinking water, getting more, sleep, writing down a thought. I’m getting all those thoughts out of your brain and thoughts cycle.

It could be just taking some deep breaths, your next best action. It’s everything. And if you’re a perfectionist or you’ve been all in or all out, it’s the best way to get you in the middle. And three loving myself is the key to it. All. You know, I’ve done a lot of, I would say punishing myself. I used to punish myself with food. I would eat until I had a belly ache. I have talked to myself in a way that I would never talk to anyone else. And I had a lot of self-loathing and self-hatred I, you know, that I had made a lot of mistakes and would beat myself up for it. And I thought I could be myself. Then I thought I could like those bootcamp folks.

You know, if I just could white knuckle it and be on a diet and starve myself, I could lose weight. And this is what I’ve realized. The key to losing weight is through learning how to love the amazing you what that means, because I didn’t know what that meant. It means showing up for yourself. It means, you know, looking yourself in the mirror and seeing the beauty in yourself,

it is forgiveness for yourself. And it’s telling yourself the truth. It is holding yourself accountable in a way that is not with judgment, but with love. I tell myself the truth. If I eat off plan or I overeat, I tell myself it’s not because I deserve it. It’s not because my husband brought home donuts. I overate because I overate.

I overate because I didn’t want to feel any emotion I overate because it was there. And I gave into the urge. I tell myself the truth. I don’t look to others. I don’t blame others. I don’t name, you know, even the diet industry, all the things. No, I take accountability for all of it. And I tell you my loves when you can take full transparency with yourself, for all ownership, without judgment and beat down, that is loving yourself. And I care for myself. See ladies, we want to get out of our bodies. When I was losing my weight, before I started this journey, I’m on. Now, I want it out of my body. I didn’t like it. I, you know, I remember seeing those pictures where they like, you know, the pictures where they like the thin persons inside of you. Well, I just wanted out of the fat suit I wanted out of it, and I wanted to disconnect. I hated it. Well, my love when you disconnect and you are at war with yourself, you run from it. You for sure don’t take the next best action.

You for sure. Don’t show up for yourself. You just buffer and disconnect and learning how to love yourself is reconnection with yourself. It is caring for yourself because when you love something, you take care of it. When you love something, you don’t want to punish it. You don’t want to, you know, eat until you’re so full that you’re lethargic and you have a stomachache.

You don’t want to do that. You don’t want to know, go on some crazy diet and get rid of all the carbs. When your body needs all of it. Your body needs carbs and proteins and fats. Your body needs all the nutrients. You don’t want to do that because you love yourself. Falling in love with yourself, showing up for yourself,

full transparency with yourself. I mean, I used to lie to myself all the time. All the time I would blame. I would tell myself it was something else or that I deserved it all the nonsense. But when I could have full transparency with myself, oh my loss, it just opened up everything. Loving yourself. It’s the key to it.

The third question. How do I make my realistic plan without counting my carbs? Because I’m a diabetic. So I always like to say this, of course, my loves. You always want to check with your doctor again. This is part of loving yourself is, you know, going to the doctor and taking care of yourself. But to answer this question within my process is you’re also going to use your body as a guide.

You know, how you feel when you’re eating things that make you feel bad, you know, mostly what you eat. What I find is that Lizzie, our lizard brains want to be confused and want to make it complicated and want to make it like, oh, but my Love’s mostly, you know what? You eat mostly. You know how many carbs are in foods and you know how to be the scientist of your own body check in with yourself and your body when you’re eating, do you feel good? And then check in 15 minutes later, are you still feeling good? This is all about becoming the scientist of your own body and watching your thoughts around confusion. Because I tell you my loves, Lizzie likes to keep us confused. And, you know, especially if you have a health diagnosis, I find that we get into this just, oh, poor me, because you don’t want, and I understand that, but this is what it is. And when you can come into acceptance of, okay, I’m a diabetic or I have, Hashimoto’s all the different things, right? There’s a million diagnosis out there. And when you can just come into acceptance of it and then take your power back, take your control back of what you can control, what you can do. And you reconnect with your body. You become unstoppable. Number four, how do you feel less deprived about eating smaller portions sizes as you lose weight? Now, I find that ladies, I watched ladies struggle with this.

My bosses, you know, as they start to lose weight, they’re feeling so great. But then they start to notice that to keep the weight loss, you know, their body, as they check in, it doesn’t need as much. They used to eat, you know, three or four pieces of pizza. And now one or two, they’re feeling full they’re feeling satiated. And this is, again, this is an emotional connection that we have with food.

Deprivation comes from this emotional connection that we have with food. It’s this thought that food is our comfort. It’s our friend. It’s our things. It’s so good. We love it. And it’s also about your overweight identity. So I had an overweight identity and there, I have an episode in the podcast. We’ll put it in the show notes for you on that.

And I go deeper into this in Transformed Boss Weight Loss, but we have this overweight identity and we’ve connected to it. I had mine for 38 years, you know? And so having this identity of this is who you are. I eat this. I can enjoy whatever food I want. There are so many things around that identity, you know, and there’s many different facets.

I mean, right? The funny fat girl, the pretty fat girl, I mean, there’s so many different pieces. And so what happens is, as you start losing weight, you start hitting the ceilings, these beliefs, ceilings of becoming a thinner person of becoming a person who eat salad or veggies more or protein, more who doesn’t eat ice cream every night. And what happens is you have to just recognize that and almost grieve it where you just kind of go through the emotions because there’s some fear for many of you who are listening. Some fear about stepping into this new identity of a person who takes care of themselves, a person who isn’t the, Hey, let’s go out and eat pizza and donuts. And you know,  your friends are like, Hey, don’t you want to come and eat all the things with us. And you’re like, oh, I don’t know. And then you show up and then you don’t and then they ask you all these questions and you start to feel anxious. And my love it’s just about processing that emotion around it, because this is the thing.

When you live in a body that feels good. That feels like freedom at a weight at your natural weight, the weight that feels good for you. There is nothing better than that. When you can decide that you can feel any emotion, I tell you, my loves, you really do become so powerful. You become unstoppable because you realize that I can step into my next identity.

I can step into the next version of myself as you’re losing weight. That’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to keep stepping into these new versions of yourselves. So grieve the loss of your overweight identity, and then acknowledge the new you acknowledge who you are today. Acknowledge what you’re doing. Feel proud of your successes. Feel the deprivation to it’s just a feeling.

You know, sometimes we have this thought that it’s deprivation. And I did a podcast episode, a few episodes ago about this. I can’t have it. And how it’s such a horrible thought. It leads to bingeing. Instead of just saying, I don’t want it, right? Like, there are times where I’m at buffets with family and stuff, and I’m just like,  you know, I don’t want it because I love the feeling of feeling good. I love living in the body that I live in now. And so it’s okay to have that momentary, that deprivation, that feeling and just allowing yourself and then talking to yourself and just saying, oh, you know, I just don’t want that three. Talk to yourself differently.

This goes back to, I don’t want this versus I can’t have this. I don’t want this because I don’t want to bellyache. I don’t want 50 extra pounds on my joints and body. So start to talk to yourself more than you. Listen, start to decide the thoughts that you want to think. And you want to believe, remember a belief is just a thought on repeat. So you have all of these beliefs, these beliefs from dieting for so long, I can’t have this. You know, I have to cut out food groups. I have to do all of that. And now you can move into, I can have anything I want. And it’s always been that way. I eat what I want to eat. And if I choose not to eat something, it’s because I don’t want this because my why, the why that I want to live in a smaller body is because I want to feel amazing. I want to play with my grandkids or my kids. I want to wear a bathing suit, whatever your, why is I want to wear what I want to wear. I want to get off medications.

There’s so many. I want to just feel healthy. So, when you start to talk to yourself differently, oh my goodness. My love it’s amazing. And that’s how you start to feel less deprived because it remembered the deprivation is just a feeling and it’s caused by your thoughts. So, when you think something different, you’ll feel something different. Okay? So, number five, what do you do when you hit a plateau?

One don’t panic. Just keep doing what you’re doing. This is the thing about, wait, wait, ebbs and flows. I think wait, especially for women because we have hormones, we have different cycles. We have lots of things. We are meant to carry fat on our bodies. This is how we’re designed. I know laser is say, but men can lose weight faster. Yeah. Cause they’re built differently than us. And we are made to have more fat on our bodies. And so, weight ebbs and flows. It I’ve seen it anywhere from five to 10 pounds. Don’t panic. Just keep doing what you’re doing. I find that when ladies hit a plateau, then all these old thoughts and all these old beliefs start coming in and then they go and bench my loves.

If you’re following my process, right? You’re making your realistic plan. You’re checking in with your body. You’re becoming the scientist of it. You’re getting your water, your sleep. You’re doing a reflection work. Then you don’t need to do anything different. Follow the process. Now, if you’re new to me, take my free course because I’ll introduce you to my fundamentals so that you can learn this process because you never need to vary from it.

Because as you start to learn how to reconnect with your body, as you start to feel hunger and fullness and satiated, physical hunger versus emotional hunger, you don’t need to change anything. So, when you hit a plateau, you just tell yourself, oh, okay, I’m maintaining my weight right now. Great. Because ladies there’ve been many times in my life that I could not maintain weight.

I was gaining, I was gaining 10, 20, 30. I gained 55 pounds once in nine months. So when you hit a plateau, you just have to believe something different. This is my body adjusting. It’s maybe that time of the month, or, you know, maybe I have some stress or maybe I’m not getting enough sleep. Right. So just don’t panic.

Look at your data again, objectively not to beat yourself up. And have you been eaten a little more? Have you had some emotion or transition? And again, just get curious, right? That’s the next thing? Just get curious, ask yourself, why are you sabotaging? Right. Do you have these, you know, I talked about the overweight identity and you’re stepping into this new version.

Are you starting to sabotage your weight loss? And so just get curious without beating yourself up. And the next one is, decide on purpose that you want to lose weight in a way that you can always do it. You want to do it slowly. You want to take your time. You want to get off the diet roller coaster. You want to follow this transform process because this process is a way that you can eat in your life.

You don’t have to change your lifestyle. You just have to start to change your mind and your mindset. And again, reconnection to your body so that you can, your body is a miracle. Honestly, even now it’s such a miracle. And so you get to decide on purpose to reconnect. And it has all these signals that we’ve just been ignoring or that have been misfiring because we’ve filled it with all of this processed and just,

you know, food that doesn’t feel good in it. So, get off the diet roller coaster, decide I’m off. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to be in a hurry to lose all my weight. I’m not going to try some crazy diet. I’m just, I hit a plateau. I’m just going to take the next best action.

And then my last question that I wanted to add to this episode was ice cream and veggies. I feel the same in my body and what I want all of you to do as you’re testing. This is you go into your body, and you start to ask your body questions. So, when you’re starting out, this is for all the ladies. We have been so disconnected from our bodies that we don’t know when we’re hungry.

We don’t know when we’re full. We don’t know how food feels in our body. We just eat. We just eat, eat. Sometimes we’ll know when you know, when we’re not feeling well or have a belly ache that we’ve eaten too much or acid reflux, you know, all the things, right? And so, what you want to do if you’re starting out is to test one to two foods at a time.

So, for example, veggies is a huge category. There are some veggies that feel amazing in my body that are fuel. And then there are some that don’t for example, I love broccoli. I really do, but it does not love me. It does. I can eat just a tiny bit of it, but it’s really a non-fuel for me because of how it feels in my body.

And so again, this goes back to all of our bodies are different. Now in the show notes, we’ll put becoming the scientists of your own body. Kind of, I have two episodes that are really good on how to start to test and how to start to really reconnect with your body. But this is important to understand what food fuels you, where you feel energetic, you feel amazing what food is neutral, where you know, you eat it, you feel fine, you know nothing. And then you have non-fuel where, when you eat it, you don’t feel good. You feel tired. You might get a belly ache. You might get indigestion. Maybe you get leg aches. That’s another thing too. If I eat sugar, I’ll get leg aches. And so again, this is just checking in with your body and seeing how your body is feeling. And so you want to do this methodically like a scientist. You only want to do it with one or two foods at a time. And what you’re going to do before you start to eat, you’re going to check in with your body.

You’re going to ask questions. How am I feeling right now? Now again, this is before you eat, am I physically hungry? How does my stomach feel? You’re going to go into your body. How’s my energy right now. And you’re just going to ask yourself questions, then start eating. And then about five minutes after, start to check in with yourself. 10 minutes, 15 minutes you decide. And just again, ask yourself, how’s this food feeling? How’s it feeling? Am I feeling good? Neutral. And then about 30 minutes after you eat, you’re going to check in again. And you’re going to say to yourself, how am I feeling? Do I have a stomachache? Do I have low energy? Or do I feel neutral? Where I just feel good, or do I feel amazing? I feel energized. Like I didn’t notice, but I’m cleaning the house now. Right? And then you can start to see how that food feels. And another big piece of fuel food. When I eat fuel food, it keeps me, satiated keeps me feeling satisfied for hours, right? If you eat something and then 30 minutes later, you’re starving. That’s a non-fuel food. That is a non-fuel food for you. So again, you can eat all the foods you just, as you’re going through this process, want to learn how to Uplevel.

You want to learn how to up-level what you’re eating. And so, you’re going to move from more nonfuel to more fuel food because you want to feel amazing. It’s not because you want, I tell you loves, this is another trick of all my ladies who have lost weight. Yes, you want to lose weight, but the more important driver is you want to feel healthy in your body. You want to feel energy. You don’t want to belly. I don’t want a belly ache anymore. I don’t need foods that give me belly aches because I don’t want it.

And it’s, I still enjoy all the foods that I want, but I am in control. I get to decide. Whoo loves. I love this episode. I know. So fun, lots of different subjects. We’ll put some of the episodes in the show notes. So if you want to go back and listen, and if you have not subscribed, make sure that you hit the plus button and apple and then subscribe button on the other applications that you listened to, but you want to, because then every Wednesday I’ll be right in your library. So you can listen to all the new episodes.

And if you’re not a part of transform boss, then take my free course, go freebosscourse.com. This will give you an introduction and a workbook to get you started on losing weight for the very last time.

All right, my love. I’ll talk to you 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 be fly. coaching.com. That’s B F L Y. coaching.com. See you next week.