You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with coach Dawn Richards and coach Jenn Taylor. This is episode 138. 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.

Coach Dawn and I took over the podcast this week. Yeah. We just wanted to this week talk about some of the most common topics or misconceptions that we have seen kind of pop up on women’s weight loss journeys. My name is Jenn Taylor and I am one of the Transform Weight Loss coaches here. And I am just so excited to be spending tonight with Dawn recording this podcast. You ladies will see. She’s just so amazing and so insightful. Dawn, anything you want to add on, I’m just so excited to be here. I think this will just be so much fun. We just get to share a little bit of ourselves with you tonight. It’s just really fun to do. Yeah.

So the first topic that we wanted to talk about was, you know, oftentimes we think that everybody else has the answers. That we need to go and find the right diet, find the right trainer, because they have the answers to help us lose this weight for good, and get this body, the certain body type that we want. And when I think back on, you know, my weight loss journey over the years, the many years, every diet that I have been on, the person or the diet itself has told me what to eat, what not to eat. How much or how little to eat. Times of the day that I needed to eat. How many calories, how many points. The list goes on. Ladies, you know this, you’ve experienced this, I’m sure. I just always thought that if I could find this right diet, my thought that I had was I just haven’t found the right one yet.

But if I find the right diet then or the right trainer, then I can finally get to the certain weight that I had in mind. And through this work in Transform, I just have really come to learn that each of us have the answers within us. We all have all along. We keep searching for new diets because they’re not working. We’ve failed, we’ve given up, whatever. But the truth of it is, is that we don’t need anybody else to give us the answers. When we give up our power and we look to others for the answers and go away from ourselves, we get stuck in this victim mentality, right? And it creates almost this feeling of hopelessness within us. Dawn, do you agree? Like that’s kind of how you felt about looking for answers with others?

Yes, I’ve really felt that way a lot. But the thing is, is our society has almost done this to us because we’re always bombarded with all of these like diet things. Lose your weight this fast, 20 pounds in 20 days. Right. And they’re like, just follow this program, you know? And it sounds so good. But the thing is, is we know, we know before we even started, it’s not true. And we just give our power to this diet and we just think it’s going to be this answer for us. And it’s not. It never is. The answer is always within us.

We know intuitively how to eat. We know intuitively what is good for us. We just need to tell ourselves the truth and come back to ourselves and do what’s best for us. It’s almost like you’re giving somebody else total control of your life. It’s like, I’m going to give you all the control, and I don’t want anything. And no wonder we feel like a victim because we’ve just given all of our power to somebody else.

And if we’ll just come back to ourselves and realize that we have all the answers for ourselves, it’s very, almost freeing. It really is. When you realize that you can eat anything you want and that you can listen to your body and that you have your answers, then you have freedom. Yeah. And truly, I love that you said that because it is such like a freedom, and just, I think of it too, as empowering, right? And our body is already giving us the cues. We just haven’t been paying attention to it. We’ve been so disconnected because we thought that the answers were somewhere else. But we’ve had them all along.

When I think back to diets, I think if there is a way that I have to eat that doesn’t feel like I can maintain it for the rest of my life. Like you said, before we even start, we know it’s not going to last. Being able to just reconnect with our bodies and listen to the answers that are already within us, just gives us our power back. And it helps us lose the weight for the last time in a way that we can do forever. Love that.

The next topic that we wanted to talk about is failures. When I think back to me pre-Transform, I was just this all or nothing girl. I had to follow my diet plan, follow my workout plan, whatever it was, exactly. And the moment that I stopped doing it, I missed a day or I overate, I went into this beat down. I would sit and thought loop on, well, of course you did this, right? Like you aren’t going to have success. You’ve always failed in the past. And telling myself just these crazy thoughts that of course are just going to push me lower and lower and not have any belief in myself.

And truly when I think of failure now, I think it begins with making commitments to ourselves, following through with those commitments, right, that creates this feeling of success. When we create this commitment, we follow through. And then when I have a slip-up, because that’s the thing, ladies, we are, we’re going to have failures along the way or slip ups or overeats, whatever it is. But now I just don’t make it mean anything about me. Right? I just reflect on what happened.

Why did that incident happen? What can I do differently moving forward and move on. And of course I’m human. I still have the times, right, where I have a minute of beat down, but then I quickly pick myself up and I remind myself like, no, this is just part of the journey. Dawn, when you think about failures pre-Transform to now, what do you think? What comes up for you?

Well, the biggest thing is, is that pre-Transform, I did, I just beat myself up. But I also developed this fear of like failing. Now I have to say, though, if I failed at work, it wasn’t a big deal. I was like, oh yeah, I’ll just do it again tomorrow. Or I’ll redo this. And I wasn’t that way. It was truly only in this diet mentality that I would fail. Like I would start a diet and I knew I was going to fail at it. Like, it was the hardest thing. I can’t eat boiled eggs for like five days in a row. Come on. You know what I mean?

I’d set myself up for failure and then I would fear it, you know? And I’d be afraid of failure. I failed so many times, I stopped believing in myself. That’s the one thing is that I just stopped. I was like, Nope, no more dieting. I’m not even going to do that anymore because I don’t want to fail one more time.

And it becomes this huge, like breaking point in my life. But the thing is, is coming into Transform, we take teeny tiny steps and you learn to commit to yourself and come back to yourself. So it’s not this like all or nothing mentality. It’s one little step, one little step. We’re gonna up level one little thing. And those little, teeny tiny actions lead to success. And so then you don’t fear failure so much because you’re just taking one little move forward. I used to beat myself up terribly, and I did a lot of coaching around fear of failure because I was afraid of failing. The thing is, is now I don’t look at it that way. It’s just one way I found that it doesn’t work for me, and I’m going back and I’m just going to start again until I figure it out.

I truly have just changed my mindset completely around failure and realize like, okay, not going to do that. Let’s go back again. Because if I failed once I fail a thousand times, and that’s just what life is. Because every time I fail, I just get a little bit better. And I’ve had to find that love and grace for myself though, and it’s taken a lot.

Yeah. I love that so much. I think too, the most successful people, they will tell you, they have had failure after failure after failure, and that is what leads them to the success. When you were talking, it popped in my head that oftentimes right, we, the stories that we create, you talked about this fear of failure, the stories that we create, like we can actually visualize what is going to happen when this failure happens and how embarrassing, we can even feel it, right? When I think of like those certain types of situations, and ladies, we’re just creating these situations for ourselves that are false. 90% of them are not even going to happen. And we were creating these emotions that are just keeping us from becoming our best self is really all it’s doing, it’s just keeping us stuck.

Our next topic that we wanted to talk about was self-worth. This is a huge topic for me. Before I came to Transform, I truly believed that I wasn’t worthy of living my best life. I wasn’t worthy of living in a body that I loved. That my body was broken. That I wasn’t enough. You know, the thing is, is that I really did believe those things about myself, and I created this life around those things and I truly thought I was second best. I compared myself to everybody and that I always found that I wasn’t good enough. And I truly believed even in my work, you know, I wasn’t even as good as my sister and my mom. And I just created all of these things.

But what I’ve found about self-worth and what we teach in Transform is that really these are just lies. These are just lies that we tell ourselves to keep ourselves stuck, to keep ourselves living in fear. And so that we don’t move forward. Really Lizzie, we call our lizard brain Lizzie, you’ve heard us talk about it. She’s just trying to keep us safe.

We’re making changes in our life. We’re moving forward and she’ll just pop up and say, oh, by the way, you’re not enough to do this, you might as well quit. And the thing is, is self-worth, Jenn’s going to talk about this in a minute, but we are born worthy. We are born a hundred percent worthy. We don’t have to prove it. We don’t have to do anything to get it. Okay. It is a lie we tell ourselves, and it’s taken me a long time to realize that.

It didn’t take one day. It took a lot of mindset work to make me realize I am worthy of my love. And I’m worthy of love from anywhere I want it to come from, but I’m worthy of my love. And that took a long time for me to say and mean. But that’s the thing is I wanted everyone else to love me so that I could prove that I love myself. But that’s the thing is that I needed to love myself first, and through this work I’ve learned self-love and it has changed everything.

So Jenn, tell us a little bit about your self-worth journey. Dawn, that’s so good. Yeah. I thought a hundred percent for me, I sorta saw a lot of perfectionism showing up that I had to be everything for everyone. And to be honest, when I think back, it’s just exhausting to think about, right. I needed to show up for my kids, for my husband to be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect sister, friend, daughter, all the things right. As women, we play a lot of different roles. And I thought that I had to be everything for everyone.

Like you said, Dawn, so that they would love me so that I could love myself and truly, and I thought, you know, if I could show up that way, then I would be worthy. Right? If I was the perfect mom. What is perfect? Perfect doesn’t, mean, I just, we giggle because now everybody has, first of all, their own definition of perfect. And there is just no such thing. Now I know that like Dawn said, I was born worthy just like each of you. We don’t earn our worth. We are just born worthy and nothing that we do can remove our worth or lessen our worth. That’s not how it works.

I think there’s just such freedom in knowing that. And along with Dawn, it took me a long time to be okay saying out loud that I loved myself or that I was beginning to love myself because for so long, I thought that that meant that I was being selfish. And that’s actually the opposite. Because when I wasn’t loving myself and I was trying to do all the things for everybody else, I was showing up with resentment and bitterness, and felt like I was missing a piece of me.

And I think, you know, along with this, just knowing that you’re not alone, like I think Dawn probably can agree to this, when we are coaching, a lot of the coaching, including our own, comes down to worth, like bottom line. And so, when you can begin to just show yourself this love and begin to believe that you were born worthy, it changes everything.

Our next topic is actually the thought work and the mindset change. This part of Transform is different than any other weight loss program that I’ve seen. We truly believe that losing weight is an inside job. We believe that changing your mindset is the way to lose weight and really learning to love yourself. We just talked about self-love a little bit and feeling worthy. The thing is, is when you love something, you pay attention to it. You want what is best for it. And you do whatever it takes to get that for the things that we love.

I mean, think about your children. Think about your spouse. Think about dear friends. We love them. We pay attention to them. And that’s what we do when we learn to love ourselves. And what we’ve done in Transform as we work on your mindset, like what thoughts are going through your head every day? And the biggest thing seriously, and I remember this moment, I think it was during a Facebook live and Shannan just came out and she says, the thoughts that roll through your head are not always true. They’re false, that your Lizzie lies to you. You know? So when you say I’m not enough, I’m not worthy, I’m broken, and that’s Lizzie lying to you. She’s trying to keep you stuck.

She’s trying to keep you safe. Right? And what I do is when she comes in, she says that, I just say, Hey, I hear you Lizzie, but you know what? It’s not true. And we don’t have to believe that anymore. And I choose to believe something different about me. And that is how we start transforming our mind is we start noticing what thoughts are in our head, then we start challenging them and questioning them in a loving kind and caring way, and then we change them.

We reframe them so that they serve us. Because being broken doesn’t serve me, and it’s not true. And I want to live in a life where I tell myself the truth every day. And I act in a way that serves me. So the thought work piece is just the most amazing piece because you get to create from your thoughts, you have feelings and then you have actions and you get to create a life that you love.

Jenn, what has been the biggest piece of thought work and mindset work that has helped you? Well, that’s a loaded question. It’s a big question. It’s a big question. I think thought work in general, like I remember hearing that too, that just because you have a thought doesn’t make it true, and your brain wants to explode, because I think a lot of us think you’re dealt with your thoughts and deal with it, right? This is who you’re going to be. And this is what you’re going to think.

Recently, we just came back from Unstoppable Live and we really focused on relationships, all sorts of relationships. And for me, this thought work around relationships with my husband, just to point out one, of course I have like multiple examples, but with my husband, I think throughout our marriage, I’ve had different times where I thought, you know, why isn’t he showing up this way?

Why would he respond that way? Why isn’t he reacting a different way? Right. I had all these different manuals for him of how he was supposed to show up. It created the multiple feelings, right? Depending on the thought, of sadness of resentment of frustration. And I’m sure he’s felt the same for me. But through this work, when we really focused on relationships at Unstoppable, what we focus on is going to grow. So if I want to focus on, you know, how my husband didn’t take out the trash or he didn’t put the clothes in the laundry basket, whatever it might be, then that’s going to create a feeling for me of frustration and annoyance. And then my actions are going to be one way from that.

Or I get to focus on this amazing father that my boys have, this incredible loving husband that I get to have, and my feeling from that is just love. Like I love this man. And the way that I’m going to show up when I feel love is completely different than resentment and anger and frustration. And so I just think, of course, you know, Dawn and I have been doing this for a little bit, it takes time. This isn’t something that you just do once and it’s fixed. We still do the work every day. Every day. This is a lifelong journey. But knowing that I think the more that you do it, you really begin to come into awareness of when it’s happening.

Thoughts that you don’t, that aren’t serving you. And then you just like Dawn had said, you just say, okay, that’s not the truth. This is what we want to believe instead. And you shine a light on those thoughts instead of pushing away from them and trying to hide them. You just remind Lizzie these aren’t what we’re going to focus on today and believe.

We’re going to think this instead and you move forward and you just get to show up in life. I have like chills right now, thinking of the difference, because this work is life-changing. Thought work is life-changing And it hasn’t just been in my weight loss journey either. Like Jenn says, we do relationship works. Our whole month this month is relationships. And we’ve talked too, Jenn talked earlier about the manual. Like we all carry what we call these manuals or these books or these stories that we tell about how our partners, friends, neighbors, everyone should act, our children, right? You know, the thing is, is that one of our biggest things that we learned about relationships is the only person we can control is ourselves.

No matter how much we want someone to act a certain way, we can’t do it. And we talk about this a lot in Transform. And we talk about that, how that we can come back to ourselves and the only person we can truly control is ourselves, and the relationship with ourselves. And this has seriously been the greatest work of my life is learning about truly how I think about myself and learning how to change that. And it’s just been amazing.

So this month coming up, we have a couple of different things in June. Actually, we are opening. So if anyone is interested in joining Transform, this is where we make weight loss fun and get to know lots of women. And ladies, if you’re not part of Transform Boss, then take the free course now, along with listening to these podcasts, because both of those are great. You’re going to learn amazing tools that you can start using today. You don’t have to wait, right, until you join. You can start doing the work now. Go to the free course. You just go to freebosscourse.com. And yes, this work really, truly is life-changing and learning how to get your voice back and how to just choose what you want out of life.

All right, ladies, Thank you for letting us spend a little bit of time with you today. Shannan will be back 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.