You are listening to the Weight Loss for a Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 158. 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 Christensen.

Hello love. So happy to be back with you. We are in October. Woohoo. I love the fall. And today’s episode is important because we as women have a habit of getting lost in the holidays and putting everyone else before ourselves. You won’t wanna miss this as I teach you what to do so you don’t lose yourself over the next few months.

Ooh, my love. I am getting excited. The final challenge of the year, I know the final one, the last one myself and my team are gonna do, Finish Strong is open for registration. So you can go to bflycoaching.com/me, M-E.  I know, I love the challenges. They’re so fun. I love introducing ladies to this work, and in the challenge, it’s an immersive experience. It’s a week free with me so that you can really go a little deeper in this work. Oh my love. It is a powerful week. You don’t wanna miss it. And in this challenge, I’m gonna do something a little extra special and I’m gonna teach some concepts that I haven’t taught in the challenges. So you won’t wanna miss it.

All right my love. So let’s get into this show today. So holidays, here we are. Right? The end of the year. And I love the holidays. It is my favorite time of the year. But many years I felt like I was drowning during the holidays. I wanna take you back to this time where I was on the diet roller coaster. I didn’t have this work, and I was living in Utah, commuting to Phoenix, and also I was graduating with my Master’s. I was newer in my position where I was at the time.

And so, you know, I was trying to do all the things, all the fun holiday things. I remember making, I think I made like, and Paul helped me, thank goodness, I think I made like 1200 cookies or something. I’m not kidding. And put them in these cute little jars with these name tags. I mean loves. I was doing all the things, you know, and again, we were celebrating the holidays and my graduation in Phoenix, but I was trying to do things in Utah and then drove down to Phoenix to get everything there. It was just this constant go, go, go, go, go. And even though the holidays come, you know, our normal everyday lives don’t stop.

So I was just feeling so overwhelmed, so just drowning. And I was eating myself all the way through it. And when you do that, when I did that, it just makes you feel worse because then you’re beating yourself up. You’re, you know, tugging on your shirt cuz your clothes are tight. You don’t feel good. You look at yourself in the mirror and you’re just like, who is that? I don’t even recognize myself anymore. But you just keep going. You just keep pushing through. And you know, on top of it, there’s all this added pressure with social media, right? We look at Facebook, we see everyone’s cute house and all the cute projects they’re doing. And so you think, Oh, I need to do more. I need to be more.

And you know, my love, I felt, I, I remember that time and even though I was around people, I was feeling lonely because I was struggling. I did not like all the weight that I had gained. I didn’t feel good in my body. And so, but I couldn’t tell anyone that, because I had dieted for so long. I didn’t feel safe, you know, telling folks. Oh my gosh, right? It just was, I didn’t. There was like a couple people in my life that I could even talk to about it, but I mostly felt lonely. Has that ever happened to you where you just are so frustrated and you’re trying, because the holidays for most of us, right, are amazing. We love them. We love our traditions. We love the weather. We love the first snow, or if you’re the fall and the fall leaves, right? We love that. And at the same time, if we’re in this cycle of overeating, dieting, I gotta lose some weight. I’m going to holiday parties. I don’t know what to wear.

That’s just all of this whirlwind that’s just circling in your mind. You know, holidays are amazing and wonderful and they are tough. You know, I love this time of year, but I miss my mom. I do. You know, October is a rough month for me. It’s her birthday and I miss her so much. And you know, I wish she was here. And so, you know, she loved the holidays. Shout out Jerry. She did. She would call me, I’m not even kidding, 10 times a day, because she was planning and she loved it. And so this time of year, you know, I wish she was here with me. And I know for many of you, you have that loss or you’re going through loss or maybe it’s other things.

Maybe you’re missing your family. Maybe you’re not living near them. And so the holidays are just a bunch of feelings. They are my love. They are all the good and all the bad, positive and negative. I think it is the ying and yang of life. But just understanding that that’s what it is. So what do we do? When I was on the diet rollercoaster, I just would disconnect. I just let my automatic Lizzy brain just go into overdrive. And I showed up for all the other folks except for myself. See, I used to have this belief that if I showed up for myself, that my family would be upset, that I wouldn’t show up for them.

And so me spending 10, 15 minutes, a half an hour a day on myself, I was so exhausted it didn’t even feel like I could do it. And what happened is that when I was in that, you know, diet, roller coaster, diet thinking, that just overwhelmed, showing up for everyone but myself, I felt lost. I remember looking in the mirror, like, who, I don’t even know who you are anymore. Like what has happened, right? And I know you may be feeling the same way. We start telling ourselves, Hey, I’m gonna start in January. That is one of the biggest sabotaging thoughts you can have. When you put yourself off, when you tell yourself that you’ll start later, my love, if you keep putting yourself off, you’ll just keep putting yourself off.

And then 10 years from now, you’ll be like, holy moly, I just lost 10 years. And I tell you, it happens so fast, so fast. It will never be the right time. I know. It just never will be. Life is a whirlwind. It’s never perfect. There is no perfect time. Right now is the time to start showing up for yourself. I know the holidays are coming and your brain is gonna want to power down.

I think it’s something with like our DNA, like we wanna hibernate, we wanna power down for the winter. And you just have to be aware that now is the time. How do you want to think and feel January 2nd, 2023? Do you want to be looking for the next diet? And you put on another 10, 15 pounds over the holidays? What happens is January happens and then the same thing my love. Then life happens. And then you’re like, okay, in February, and then Oh Easter, and then you can just keep putting yourself off. So I just wanna challenge you that when that thought comes up to just say, Hey, we’re not gonna think that right now. I love to tell Lizzie, not today my love. We show up for ourselves.

So what to do. To start to show up for yourself, I wanna give you some of the tips that I use that really helped me with overwhelm, especially around the holidays and how I learned to show up for myself. So number one, decide and make a commitment. When we decide ahead of time, when we use our thinking brain and make a commitment, we have a higher success rate. It is true. It’s not that we won’t have challenges, It’s not that we won’t fail, right? But if we decide and we make a decision ahead of time, make a commitment, and then we follow through, we build resilience and trust again in ourselves.

This is really important. It has to be small baby steps, not all the things. Just small, one step forward. And I’m gonna give you some of the ways that I show up for myself and for the other humans. See my love, when you start to show up for yourself, you actually, this is the crazy thing about it, you actually show up better for the other humans in your life. I know, I used to tell myself that I’d feel guilty, I’d feel even shame around doing things for myself. But what I found is that as I started to increase the love, the trust in myself, when I started showing up for myself and I started feeling better, people around me got the benefit of that.

And so when you show up for yourself, your family benefits from it. I know.  When you stop people pleasing and you stop telling people and doing things that you don’t wanna do, and you start doing things that are meaningful, then you show up with your best self. I know my love, it’s counterintuitive to what we’ve been taught, what we’ve witnessed, but I know that this is true. So how do I do that?

So number two, every week I have a top three. I love this technique. It’s so good. And every week I just have a top three. I have a top three for what I wanna accomplish just for my family, for you know, all my work, whatever it is. And then I have my top three for me. And what I do is I have it on a week and then I put it into my daily top three. What am I gonna do for me today? I have one for me and one for all the other things I have to do. This way, my top three for me, it’s, I’m on the list, I’m on the list. My love. I know I talk a lot about showing up for yourself, and it is an and statement. It’s not an or. I don’t show up for me or the other humans, I show up for me and I show up for the other humans. And when you show up for yourself, it’s so much easier to show up for the others.

Mm, I know. I know your brain’s like what? It’s a true fact. So number two again, every week I have a top three and then I put it into my daily top three. I do my top three for what I wanna accomplish for the others and my top three for me. And I tell you my love, it feels so good because it’s simple things. When you’re making your top three, you don’t want this to be huge projects, you just want it to be simple actions, one step actions. So for example, if one of your things that you’re doing, let’s just say decorate the house for Christmas, my love, that is a project.

So your first step in that might be, you know, I’m going to decide on the day that we’re gonna decorate, I’m going to pull the stuff out of the basement or out of the attic. That’s a second one. The third one is, I’m gonna ask for help, right? There’s all these steps and that’s what makes up your top three. You don’t put projects in your top three. You put simple actions. I tell you my love, it’s life changing. In my daily top three. I put make my realistic plan, do my reflection work. If I’m going for a walk, my walk, you know, maybe it’s sleep, it just, every day it changes depending on what I want to make sure that I do. My top three is a commitment to myself that these are the three things that I’m going to accomplish today.

And then number three, when you accomplish your top three, ooh, feel proud. Feel so proud. You know my loves, we don’t celebrate our success enough, and this is part of learning how to celebrate your success. So let me recap those steps again. Number one, decide and make a commitment. Number two, every week have your top three for the others, and a top three for you. And number three, when you accomplish your top three, take a minute and allow yourself to feel proud. The time is now my love. Putting yourself off until January, when you have that thought, just challenge it. And if you want support, you wanna learn how to start the healing process and get off the diet rollercoaster for good, then join us in the Finish Strong challenge. It starts on October 17th. Go to bflycoaching.com/me.  Ooh my love.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Weight Loss for Successful Women. If you love what you heard today and wanna learn more, come on over to bflycoaching.com. See you next week.