You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 176. 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. Have you been listening to this year’s podcast episodes? Mm, they are so good. They are bite-sized chunks of gold. It’s a collection of my learnings and I’m gonna continue them throughout this year. Today, I wanna introduce you to what I like to call goodbye eating. When I was losing my weight for the last time, I had to recognize what I could do and how this type of eating was showing up for me.

Goodbye eating is when we say goodbye to all our favorite foods because we’re starting the next diet. We tell ourselves that we will be good for a certain amount of time or when we’ve lost the weight, and then we can eat, you know, normally again. We cut the carbs out and tell ourselves we’ll reintroduce them when we’ve lost the weight.

Goodbye eating is us saying goodbye to our old self because we’re gonna be a brand new person on Monday. I did this so often. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and giving myself a good old talking to, right, that I was gonna buckle down, and I would make a plan and a vision board, and a week or two later I’d be back to eating all the things, feeling discouraged. I would tell myself I was eating all the things, that if I could just be good tomorrow, that I’d be back to my routine tomorrow, that it was okay to eat when I was not hungry. When you restrict, when you’re on the diet rollercoaster, then you want to overeat because you’re not allowing foods you enjoy or foods you’ve labeled as bad.

I do not label foods good or bad, healthy or not. Everything is food. Some of it fuels me and some of it not as much, but I eat all of it. I eat non-fuel food. It’s not off limits to me. Goodbye eating sets us up for binging. Binging in the context that I’m referring to today is overeating large amounts of food in a small time period. I would go on a restricted diet and then binge and eat all the things. I labeled myself that I was either all in or all out. I thought it’s just who I was. But it wasn’t who I was.

I was just restricting and dieting. And the opposite of that reaction is binging and overeating. I refer to it also as last suppering, where you eat like it’s your last supper, you’re never going to eat food again, but it’s just not what happens. You do eat it again, and then you feel bad and disappointed and frustrated.

Somewhere you may have this idea of what a thin person eats like. You’ve created a story about what that person eats, how much that they never eat dessert. You think that person, the person you think you should be is good. Because of dieting you have labeled food as good or bad. So when you eat foods that you label as good, you tie that to your own self, that you’re good, and that if you eat foods that you’ve labeled as bad that then you are bad. Goodbye eating, my love, just sets you up for failure, frustration, and feeling bad about what you’re doing.

So my take on it is, number one, you never have to say goodbye to any food or food groups. You get to decide if you want to eat it or not. You can eat whatever you like. You might say, I’m just not hungry for it today, but you never have to mark it off your list. Number two, to get off the diet rollercoaster for good, you must start by meeting yourself where you’re at. When I started to lose weight, I did it by slowly eating less. Over time, like years, I started up-leveling different parts of my four basics with small changes over time. I heard this once, we overestimate what we can do in a short period of time and underestimate what we can do in a longer period of time. Know this about yourself so you can give yourself grace and time.

Number three, you never have to start over again, my love. You never have to start on Monday or when you get back from vacation or when your life calms down. By the way, it will never be normal or calm down, so you know you can stop telling yourself that. It just keeps you in indecision and not taking any action. You just actually have to take the next best action for yourself. Ask yourself, what can I do for myself right now? And then do it. One simple thing. Losing weight for the last time takes a thousand tiny actions that build over time and learning to think differently so that you can have different results.

Next week, we’re gonna have Coach Jenn, she’s gonna come and join me as we talk about the power of the pause and how you can use it to lose weight. If you wanna take this work deeper, then check out Transform Boss. It is the best membership program where I teach ladies how to lose weight in a way where they meet themselves where they’re at, where no foods are off limit, and they learn how to get off the diet rollercoaster. It’s based on coaching, community, and coursework. You can learn more about my membership at jointransformboss.com. Bye for now.

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.