You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 140. 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 my love. So happy to be back with you today. Oh, I’m excited about today’s episode. We are going to dive into waiting for the right time to lose weight. Oh my loves. So I have to tell you ladies about something that I’m doing right now, and if you’re not in it, you want to be in it. And the cool part is you don’t have to do anything. You just have to show up.

I’m going live every single week for the next eight weeks, now seven, on Facebook, on the BFLY Coaching business page. And what I’m doing is this eight-week series on how to get off the diet roller coaster for the last time. You don’t want to miss it. And I’m so excited. I’ve already planned out all eight of the episodes.

They are going to be good. So all you have to do is one, you can go and like the BFLY Coaching business page, and then get notified when I go live. Two, if you’re on my email list I’m going to send an email about this with the link so you can get right to the Facebook live. So the next one is June 2nd, which is this Thursday, right after this releases, at 8:30 PM Eastern time. You want to come, you want to be there. It’s going to be awesome. I love going live on Facebook. I love spending this time with ladies and just hearing the challenges and the struggles, and then also the successes and watching ladies learn this work.

I’ll never forget, when I started to learn this work, I felt like for the first time that I was really going to be able to lose weight for the last time. And I remember, you know, I didn’t totally believe it at the beginning, but as I started to see examples of ladies who are doing this process, and I started to really listen to my teacher and a couple other teachers that I was listening to at the time, I started to know that it wasn’t in a food plan. It wasn’t in an exercise plan. That I actually could lose weight for the very last time by learning how to change my mindset.

Your mindset is just a collection of thoughts, which become your beliefs. That’s all that it is. It’s just a bunch of sentences that run through your brain. And understanding how those sentences produce feelings in your body, and then you feel a certain way, and then you do or don’t do things depending on how you’re feeling because of what you are thinking. And when you can start to believe new things, when you can start to change the thoughts, practice new thoughts, it’s so powerful. So you don’t want to miss out. The best way is to get on my e-mail list.

Take my free course, go to freebosscourse.com. Get on my email list and we’ll make sure that we get that emailed to you so that you can come to all the Facebook lives. So fun. Right?

I want to make sure that you’ve heard too, we are opening on July 12th. We opened in February and then we’ve been closed to the public. And so we’re opening again on July 12^th. We were going to open in June. We wanted to make sure that we were really ready, and I was really excited about doing this eight-week Facebook live, and wanted to put my energy into that. And so we’re going to open on July 12^th. Mark that on your calendars. If you’re not a Transform Boss, Ooh, you want to get in.

I have to say like, there are days where I’m just like, oh my gosh, I just love my Transform Bosses. I love them. I think about them. I just did a Quick Hit. We do these once a week. We just do these 5 to 10 minute videos, the coaches and I, we do them. And it’s just like another way to just, you know, we have the weight loss course, we have coaching calls, we have these deep dive calls where we really do the work and we have workshops, I mean, there’s so much in Transform Boss Weight Loss. One of the other bonuses that we do are these things called Quick Hits. I had shared them on a previous podcast episode, oh, like maybe two or three ago. We’ll put it in the show notes for you so you can get a little taste of them.

But I did one today because I had been thinking about my Bosses. I just think about them. I think about where they’re struggling, where they’re having success. And then I think, okay, how can I help them? How can I make this better for them? And the Quick Hit today was all about how they can have more success in the process. So if you want to be a Transform Boss, mark it on your calendar, July 12th, 2022. Yes.

So today we’re going to dive into this whole idea and thought that we have around waiting, waiting for the right time to lose weight. Have you ever told yourself that you’ll start a diet and exercise plan after X? Now X could be summer, vacation, wedding, job change, basically any event in your life, and you just keep kind of pushing yourself off. You keep saying, oh, I’m so busy right now. You know, I’ll start in a month. I’ll start after I get through this. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I would tell myself when I get through this, I’ll start.

 I’d say this to myself in many different formats, but it was just a way to push myself off. I remember this one time I was finishing my master’s degree. I was in the last year of it, and I had just been promoted to a director and I had moved to Utah, and I had been on this really restrictive nutrition, like from a nutritionist, clean diet plan. And I had really, like, I was feeling amazing actually. But then I moved to Utah and I was transitioning into corporate housing. And then we bought a house and then we were moving into the house and still had a house in Arizona. I mean, we had kids, you know, it was just a lot going on.

I remember I started, because through the transition, I had a ton of emotion. And though I had done really well on this kind of plan, as soon as I started to have transition, I started to have change, I went back to what I had always gone back to, which was emotional eating. I had all of these emotions. I was very stressed. I was under a lot of pressure.

I had a lot of doubt. Like what had I done? Could I do this? Could I do my new job? Could I finish the last year in my master’s degree? And I’m telling you, I was just, I was a mess. And so what I did, like what I had always done, because see food plans, don’t solve emotional eating.

They just say restrict as long as you can. And then when you can’t, you haven’t learned how to fail. You haven’t learned how to feel any emotion. I just used food to get me through it. And then I would tell myself, I remember keep telling myself when I get through this time at my new job, when I finished my masters, when we decide what we’re going to do with our house in Arizona, I just kept telling myself, I’ll start then. I probably gained 25 to 30 pounds over this kind of year, this last year of getting my MBA. It just started with this thought, it’s not the right time to lose weight. I’ll start later. I just kept telling myself that I’d take care of me when it was done.

But what happens when you do that is that my last year of getting my masters, it was the first year of my new promotion and I didn’t feel good. I was eating all the things. I wasn’t feeling great about myself. I wasn’t moving my body. I was, I just kept telling myself that I’d make it through it. But at the same time, I wasn’t taking care of me. I wasn’t taking care of my health. I was feeling bad because I started to gain weight, and then I couldn’t fit in my clothes. And then I was having to go out and buy new clothes, you know, and feeling frustrated and disappointed in myself. And so this thought was really poisonous. And so this is what it looks like.

You first get into this habit of putting yourself off. You really get into the habit of breaking commitments to yourself. You create actual neural pathways in your brain, habits with this thought that it’s just not the right time. I’ll start after X happens. And it just becomes automatic. And so what happens is that every time you start to feel busy or you have a transition, you have this old automatic thought that it’s just not the right time. I thought I could devote the time to it, but it’s just not the right time. When you do this, for a moment, you get some relief, because you’re basically quitting on yourself. You’re basically not showing up for yourself.

So you get this momentary relief. You get some endorphins like, oh, I don’t have to worry about that right now. And you tell yourself, I’ll do this in a few months. And when I do it, I will be perfect at it. So this moves me into the second thing. So you decided I’m going to put myself off. I’m not going to start. It’s not the right time. And then you start having these, you know, fantasies about how, when you start, you’re going to do it perfectly. You’ll eat all the right things. I mean, you’re going to lose it fast. You’re going to lose all your weight in six months, nine months, whatever you tell yourself, right? You are going to be the person who doesn’t eat sugar and carbs. And then you start fantasizing about how you’re telling your family and your friends. And you’re the example. All of this is happening in your brain. And it’s just this fantasy about being perfect.

And then the third thing, the event, the time period that you said, it happens, it passes, and so then you start and then you find that you can’t be perfect. You may start. You may not. You may keep just pushing yourself off, and then you may fizzle out. You don’t know how to fail and not eat all the things. And then you start the cycle all over again. This, I will start again on Monday, next month, next week, after this happens and you do this over and over again.

And I want to tell you why this happens. And this is so important to understand. It really is because of this perfectionistic fantasy that you will suddenly become this super human, right? This perfectionistic fantasy that exists in your head, you’re going to only eat chicken and salad, or maybe you’re never going to eat carbs and sugar. I mean, maybe you’re even going to be a plant-based eater.

You have all these beliefs that you must be perfect. That to live in a healthy body, that you have to do X. Now X, it’s different for all of us. It could be cutting out the carbs, becoming a plant-based eater. It could be, I’m going to run two hours a day. As you are living in this kind of perfectionistic fantasy, what it does is it feels overwhelming. When you think you have to do all the things, you have to cut out the foods, you have to meal prep, you have to eat differently than your family, all the things. Meditate, journal, write a book every morning, not go to certain events because you can’t handle it because you’re scared. You’ll overeat.

I mean, all those thoughts just go over and over. And again, it comes from perfectionism. Perfectionism, it’s just a lie. It is. It’s just this thing that, this fantasy, again, these thoughts that we have in our brain that keep us running on the diet roller coaster and it’s this in or out, off or on, and wanting to be perfect. We believe that it takes this crazy amount of lifestyle change. You know, again, that something is wrong and that we need to be fixed. You don’t need to be fixed. If you want to lose weight for the very last time, you look at what you’re believing. You decide on purpose what you want to think, and you plan on purpose what you want to do, and then you do it. And when you fail, there’s no beat downs or judgment. You just ask why?

So I want to break this down into three simple steps that you can do. Number one, become aware of this thought, I will start on X, whether it’s in the morning, whether it’s next week, whether it’s two months from now, notice when you have this thought, it is a poisonous thought, and it is there. So you take no action. So you actually do nothing. When that thought comes up, I like to practice, this is the thought, you can borrow it from me, I have already started. Ooh, it’s so powerful. It just takes the poison right out of it.

When you tell yourself we’ve already started, we got this, right? When you say that your brain is like, oh yeah, we’ve already started. You leave all of that, I have got to start tomorrow, I’ve got to start next week, I’ve got to start, all of that, you just know, nonsense.

Number two, take a small step forward. You can write a realistic plan, drink more water, check in with your hunger, ask yourself, am I hungry? Does this food fuel me? Is this really what I want to eat right now? Losing weight for the last time is thousands of small decisions and actions. And it’s just the small, mundane, boring decisions that you do throughout the day.

And three, when you overeat, because when you lose weight for the last time, you will have overeats. You will have days that you don’t make a plan. Days that you don’t drink enough water, get enough sleep. You just want to ask yourself why? Why? Am I afraid of something? Am I, was I stressed? Did I have a trigger? Like, you know, I got in a fight with my spouse, whatever it is. Just ask yourself why? Then this is it my love. Take the next best action. Again, one small step.

So I want to give you an example of what this looks like. You overeat because you end up going out to eat rather than cooking at home, which gave you just enough of an excuse to throw it all to the wind. So you go out, you eat off plan, and then on your way home, you realize it. You start telling yourself, okay, we’ll start over again tomorrow. And then you decide as you’re negotiating with yourself, okay, let’s eat the bowl of ice cream. Let’s eat the cookies, let’s eat the chips. You know, we already blew it tonight, so let’s just keep blowing it. And you start to notice this negotiation. As soon as you start to notice, this thought, we’re going to start again tomorrow, we’re going to start again next week, we’re going to eat all the things, then you just simply say, I’ve already started.

And my next best action is to just eat the snack I already had on my plan and then feel proud. Tell yourself that you did it. You took the next best action. This comes back to this concept of talking to yourself more than you listen. It’s this process of just taking the next best action and then feeling proud, allowing yourself to feel the success of it. This is what losing weight for the last time looks like. It’s never starting over because you’ve already started. You know, that you’ll make mistakes, but you just practice your new thought, take the next best action, and move on. No judgment, beat downs, or bingeing needed.

And if you have not taken my free course yet, you for sure want to. Go to freebosscourse.com. I’ll teach you some basics, some really simple things so that you can start your journey to losing weight for the very last time. And make sure that you join the Facebook lives. We’ll also put the replays right here on the podcast. So subscribe so every time I have a new episode, it’s right in your library. All right my love. See 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 bflycoaching.com. See you next week.