You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 159. 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. You know my love, when I was overweight, I kept thinking that a food plan and/or exercise plant was gonna help me lose weight, but it never did long term. I had to learn how to lose weight by healing my relationship with food and then myself. Today I’m gonna teach you my five-step healing process. Mm, So good.

My love, I am getting so excited. I know. One, it’s October and I love it. It is one of my favorite months of the year. I’m also getting excited because we are getting ready to open Transform Boss for the last time in 2022. You know ladies, this is what I do. If you’re new to me, I love to close the doors because my last couple months of the year I am working with my bosses.

I really double down, help them through the holidays. We are doing this amazing series called Healing You and we are doing some just powerful work. So this is our last opening until March 2023. The challenge Finish Strong, it starts on Monday the 17th. This challenge is super special. It is gonna be life and weight changing for so many women. So join us. We’ll put the link in the show notes, but it is bflycoaching.com/me. And mark your dates. October 18th, we open Transform Boss Weight Loss for the very last time in 2022. You can go to jointransformboss.com to learn more. I know my loves, I can’t wait.

So let’s get into it. Ooh, I love today’s episode. You know, I love them all, but today I really love. I love this work of healing. Healing is so powerful, cuz it helps you move into the next version of yourself. So diet culture, I know my loves, diet, culture, diet, trauma. I mean, we’ve all been through it. And this diet rollercoaster of thinking you have to restrict, thinking that you have to over exercise.

What it does long term is really keeps you in confusion. This is an important thing because if you look even at all the research papers and all the things, they’re every single one, if I find one that says I should eat this way, then I can find another one that completely contradicts it. And what that does is just keeps us in confusion. Like, what do I do? Low fat, high fat, plant based, keto, what do I do? And then when you’re confused, you do nothing. You just throw up your hands and you just are like, Oh, I don’t know what to do, so I’m just gonna just eat all the things and just disconnect.

Now I wanna show you exactly what to do. And this is what I do for my clients. We’re doing this special five-month series in Transform Boss, and it’s called Healing You. In Healing You, we go in depth every single month on the five-step process. I created this five-step process because it’s what I went through and what I’m watching my clients go through. And healing our relationships with food and with ourselves, it really is the only way to lose weight long term. If you wanna stay on the diet rollercoaster, my love, you know, just keep looking for the next diet. If you’re ready to start the healing process, to start doing this work, I know we love to tell ourselves how it’s difficult and hard, but being on the diet rollercoaster, I think it’s the hardest thing of all.

Living in a body that you don’t love, feeling your clothes being tight, fearing that if you lose the weight you’re just gonna gain it back. All the things, my love. These thoughts that just go on and on in our head. My love, that is hard. Healing, it is hard work, but it is the best work of your life. When I lost weight for the last time, when I started to have acceptance and love for my body, this was the healing process. And this is what I’m teaching my clients of Transform Boss.

So I wanna take you through my five steps of healing. Number one is awareness. Awareness is the first step in the healing process because you have to know where you’re at. You have to understand the thoughts and the beliefs of what you’re thinking, because what you think and what you believe produces a feeling. And then you do or don’t do something based on it. And another part of this process is some very powerful questions. For many of us, maybe you, I was on the diet rollercoaster for almost 38 years. I mean, it was deep beliefs, and I had a lot of thoughts around if I lose this weight, then I am going to lose relationships, myself, right? People aren’t gonna like me anymore. I’m gonna become this different person.

And so you have to be aware of what you think you will lose when you release the weight. You have to understand what you’re fearful of, what you currently sabotage, what your triggers are. So for example, for me, anytime I went under 200, that was a trigger for me. It’s a different weight for everyone, but as soon as I went under 200, I would sabotage my success. And so I had to understand and be aware of all of those thoughts and beliefs. When you come into awareness, you are being fully transparent with yourself. You are coming into this authenticity. You’re not lying to yourself, you’re not blaming, you’re not the victim. You are the hero. You are aware of exactly where you are today and the thoughts and beliefs that you’re thinking.

Number two, oh, it’s all about the feelings. Learning to feel emotion, learning how to process it instead of pushing it down with food. For so many years, I just pushed down my feelings with food or disconnection, or other ways I buffered, like shopping, Netflix. But emotions, they live in our body. So even though you’re pushing them down, they’re still there. And then they start to get trapped, and then we start sabotaging. We start feeling other emotions. We start beating ourselves up. We even can become physically ill and we don’t know why. We get headaches, our body aches, our neck aches, and all of this we think is something external.

So much of this are these emotions that are living in our body. The second part of the healing process is learning how to process and feel emotion. I tell you my love, when you, this is ugh everything. When you decide and learn how to process any emotion, you can feel anything, you become unstoppable. When you can feel shame, when you can feel uncomfortable, when you can feel deprivation, when you can feel anything and process it without taking negative action against yourself, it is the secret to the universe my love.

The third part of the healing process is deciding. This is a powerful step. It’s when you make a decision ahead of time. You find forgiveness and appreciation. You also will make big goals, but then chunk them into micro goals, smaller goals, so that you are taking baby steps. This part of deciding ahead of time. Why this is such a powerful step is because you’re using your thinking brain instead of your automatic, which holds all those old beliefs and old thoughts and old habits. And of course Lizzy. That part of your brain, right? When you’re deciding ahead of time, you’re using your thinking brain.

That’s the brain that knows your dreams and goals, my love. Anytime you can get into that part of your brain, so powerful. You wanna get into your optimal healing zone, This is where, again, you’re just using your thinking brain instead of your Lizzy or automatic brain.  So the third part of the process is deciding, again, making decisions ahead of time.

The fourth part of the process is remodeling. I think of remodeling, right? If you’ve ever gone through remodeling, it’s amazing and it’s painful and all the things right? It’s wonderful and exciting. You know, you’re rebuilding something. In weight loss and healing your relationship with food and yourself, you’re starting to rebuild your habits and your mindset. You’re starting to curate your new identity.

See my love, if you’ve been overweight for any period of time, you’ve created an overweight identity. You have deep beliefs about who you are, what you can do. And now in this remodeling process, you’re gonna create the next version of yourself. You are gonna decide on purpose who she is, what she is, and how she shows up for herself. Remodeling, oh, it’s such a beautiful part of the healing process.

And number five is recognition phase. In this phase of the healing process, you start to find acceptance of where you have been and where you are headed. You understand your fears and you’re no longer resisting them or staying in confusion. You start to celebrate who you are today because you know exactly how you show up, and you’re not anchored into some old version of yourself.

You celebrate your success. You’re more focused on celebration and where you are today than beating yourself up and living some old version of yourself. These five phases of the healing process are critical to healing your relationship with food. You must heal to release the weight for the last time. Now, if you wanna go through this work at a deeper level, you want the support and all the tools and the resources to do it, then join us in Transform Boss. Go to jointransformboss.com to learn more about when we’re open. Oh, this work is good, my love. All right my love. Bye for now.

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.