You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 148. 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. I am so happy to be here with you today. I hope you’re having a beautiful summer. It’s kind of monsoon season here. In Arizona, we have a lot of like overcast, lots of humidity. So it’s not my favorite month. I always say don’t come in August or late July because I can deal with hot, but when you add a little humanity into it, woo hoo, it’s horrible. So that’s kind of what, but it’s nice. I like the storms. That’s always fun to see the storms and get a little tiny bit of rain, even though it’s only been kinda, I dunno, spitting a little bit. It’s not full rain, but you know, I’ll take it. I’ll take it.

I’m excited, getting ready, next week, going to the east coast. I have not been there on the east coast for a good bit. So I’m excited. I’m a little nervous with all the travel delays. I know the airlines are really struggling right now. A little nervous, but it will all be good. And I think, you know, we’re going to have a fabulous time in NYC and excited to just kind of be for a couple of days and rest and relax with my husband. Right. So good.

So today, I want to really get into how to start. And I thought about this episode because for most women who are listening to me, you probably have been on the diet rollercoaster for a really long time, anywhere from 5, 10, 15, you know, 30, 40, 50 years. And we’ve started a lot, failed a lot. You know, I was on the diet rollercoaster for almost 38 years.

I think about that, 38 years of looking for the next quick fix and having some success along the way. I’d lose weight and then eventually gain it back. I always was hopeful. I do have to say that, you know, I know so many of you still, there’s some piece of you that is hopeful. And I know for some of you, you’re just so tired of it.

I remember when I was getting ready to go back to the last kind of quick fix that I did. I remember when I decided I wasn’t going to diet anymore and that I had had enough, it was a pretty monumental decision and it came from frustration. But it also came from hope. I just knew there had to be a different way. And I knew that it had to do something with my mind.

You know, I always loved self-help, I’ve loved self-help for as long as I can remember, I’ve watched all the great teachers and thought leaders. I’ve loved them all and learned something from them all. And I just knew that somehow that was tied to weight loss. And I knew too, that losing weight and getting off the diet roller coaster and really losing it for the last time, it was going to be a process that was one, going to be really slow.

And two, it was going to be filled with success and failure. You know my loves, I think wherever you’re at in this journey, whether you have lost some weight, whether you are upset because you’re the heaviest you’ve ever been, whether you are on a plateau, whether you have lost all your weight and you’re in maintenance, I just want to tell you that to really get off the diet rollercoaster and to start this journey of losing the mental and physical weight for the very last time, it starts with this process of believing new things. Starting to believe that the way to get off this diet roller coaster is really all within you.

It is two pieces. It is healing your relationship with food and healing your relationship with yourself. It has to do with mindset change and it has to do with reconnection to your body. You know, I tell my ladies all the time in Transform Boss, our bodies are miracles, every part of our bodies are miracles. And when you can start to, you know, reconnect with yourself and reconnect with your body and you can start to feel your natural hunger and fullness cues, when you can allow negative emotion and not have to buffer it away, that that becomes the magic my love. I know we’ve been searching for the magical pill, potion, diet, but it’s not in there. It’s within you.

And you know, if you’ve been thinking, okay, I really want to start, or I want to continue this journey of losing weight for the last time, I want to give you some reasons why it can feel hard to start this journey. I think number one, we, as women, have learned to put ourselves off and we do this because two things I think. One, we have this feeling that we need to be perfect, that we need to do it all, that we need to do 52 things. You know, then our brain starts to tell us it’s complicated.

And then two, we start feeling overwhelmed. And if you’re a woman, you probably already feel overwhelmed. You have all the things, all the responsibilities and all the different roles. And so this thought of learning how to heal the relationship with yourself and heal the relationship with food, it can start to feel overwhelming. And then add on that you like to be perfect, you want to do it perfectly, you just can continue to put yourself off. You can keep pushing “the start date.”

And number two, you start, but you do too much, so you try to do all the things. You know, I’m going to meal prep, I’m gonna eat this diet food. I’m going to exercise every single day. I’m going to journal. I’m going to meditate. I’m going to read and listen and learn. And I don’t know, all the things my love. I think about it, if you’ve ever read that like 75 Hard, it’s the new quick fix out there. I don’t know. There’s like all these different things. I’m like, holy moly. So that’s what I’m talking about. You start, but you do too much. So you burn out. And this is another thing. Your body is a very delicate thing.

And what I mean by that is there’s a lot of functions, a lot of things, and when you do too many changes to your body at once, it doesn’t know what’s going on. And so it kind of goes into survival mode. And so then you get frustrated because your body’s not responding like how you want it to respond. And so again, you start, but you do too much.

Now there’s a third way. And this is how I think you start your journey to losing weight for the last time. You start really slowly. I have a bunch of new ladies who are in Transform Boss Weight Loss, and I take them through this 21-day challenge. And I know at first they just want to jump in, so many of them, and they want to do all the things.

And I start them out really slowly. I, you know, they have these very, you know, 5 minute to 10 minute things that they have to do every day. And it’s very simplistic. And you know, I’ve even had some of them like, wait, this is it? Like, trust me, trust me. This is what I always ask them to do is just trust the process.

It is so important as you start to lose weight for the last time that you start slowly and that you understand that you’re not going to do any of it perfectly. And you pick one thing. One thing. So for all of my new bosses, they’re doing the challenge. They’ve chosen one thing to focus on, and they’re doing this 21-day challenge in Transform Boss Weight Loss. Now, if you’re not in Transform Boss Weight Loss, pick one of my basics. I have four of them: realistic plan, body basics, which is like sleep and water, I have reflection work, which is all of the thought cycle and thought work. And then your hunger and fullness. Pick one, not all four. Just pick one.

And we’ll put it in the show notes so you can go in and see some of the basics. But you just start with one. This is so important because you will want to do all of them. And again, when I was talking about starting and talking about the first and the second thing, whether you put yourself off or you do too much, again, this, the third way that I’m teaching you now, is so that you can start. Your brain is going to resist the slowness, because it’s different than what you’ve done before. You’re going to have all these thoughts around, it’s not enough. I need to do more. How am I going to lose weight? But I promise you this, from what I know, from what I’ve experienced, what I’ve seen with my clients, the ladies who go slowly, they pick a basic, they start slowly and then they start failing, they start learning. They get community support. They start to make small up levels of small changes. Those are the ladies that have the most success.

You know my love. We want the success and we want it so quickly. It’s how we’re wired. We just need to know that, you know, this process of starting with one thing, doing it, and then slowly upleveling, it is everything. Now, what is an uplevel? An uplevel is just where you make one minor change. So for example, you leave a bite on your plate. You, you know, you make your realistic plan, but you know, this week you’re only doing it two days out of the seven. And then next week, you’re going to add in another day, or, you know, you’re going to check in with your hunger and fullness one meal a day, and then maybe next week you’re gonna do one meal, and a snack.

Upleveling is just making a minor change. To start to lose weight for the last time you have to start slowly. You have to do it imperfectly. You have to have community support. And you have to slowly uplevel. And you know, if you really want to do this, I will say this over and over and over again, you have to do it slowly. You have to change your mindset, again, what you believe along the way. Because you are capable of learning new things, of creating new habits. Our brain is amazing. We just can’t do it all at once. So this old, you know, adage that the tortoise beats the hare, well my love, every single time.

If you want to take this work deeper, take my free course at freebosscourse.com. All right, my love. 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 bflycoaching.com. See you next week.