You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christensen, episode number 181. 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 love. So happy to be back with you. First, follow me. Hit the plus sign or subscribe so I’m in your podcast ap or on YouTube every Wednesday. I don’t want you to miss anything. These are chocked full of amazing tips and examples and just tools so that you can lose weight, release it for the very last time. I know. So good.

So today’s TBOSS take is all about sabotage and how it’s showing up and what to do in your weight loss journey. And I wanna just kind of take out, I think sabotage is just, ah, when we hear it, it sounds kind of, I don’t know, I always, it feels a little scary and fearful to me. I just wanna take that out, that little zing for you today.

As you can see, I’m wearing butterflies. I know, I love butterflies. I love the transformation that they go through. It’s why I named my company BFLY Coaching, for BFLY for butterflies, and then also Transform Boss Weight Loss, because I do love transformation. I always have. I love watching transformations. I watch my clients just blow their own minds and do things they never thought they were going to. Lose weight for the last time, just do so many amazing things. You know, it is possible whenever we decide on purpose, this is what we want to do. And then we, you know, get help, we get support, and we have the tools that can help us, it’s amazing what you can do.

Okay, so let’s get into sabotage. I think for me, when I hear the word sabotage, I try to go back to when I was on the diet rollercoaster. It felt really big. It felt very painful. I think for every human, they sabotage their success in some way. In February in Transform Boss Weight Loss, I know this is March, but back in February, and every year in Transform Boss, we always do a book club on sabotage. And I always do a workshop around it too, because it is just one of those things that, it’s a really important part of weight loss is to understand where you’re sabotaging your results. And the Big Leap, it’s a book by Gay Hendricks, and I love this book. I do, I love this book.

Really understanding where you’re sabotaging your success, where your triggers. And too, I think just understanding what fears you have around when you lose weight, oh, it’s so important. So sabotage, what is it? It’s when you take actions to bring yourself down. Gay talks about it in the Big Leap as upper limits. I like to think of it as belief ceilings, which is very similar, right? We have this ceiling, right, that we hit that we can’t break through. And so we just bring ourselves back down. We’re feeling good, we’re feeling excited about losing weight, we’re trusting the process, and then suddenly we start bringing ourselves back down. We start overeating, we start silently quitting on ourselves. We start not showing up for ourselves and doing things that we’re like, wait, I’m here again.

Has that ever happened to you where you’re just like, oh my gosh, I was loving this process, I was doing so good, and then suddenly you start finding yourself, telling yourself, I’m gonna start again. Next week, I’m gonna be so good. Next week on Monday. You know, whatever the deal is, this is what sabotage is. We have these beliefs and these thoughts, and so you have a sentence in your brain, it’s words, and then it becomes a thought and then a thought on repeat. So you think it multiple times becomes a belief. And we have these beliefs about our ability to have success, our ability to lose weight. And when we hit a ceiling, it means that we’ve hit the capacity that our belief can handle.

We’re pushing up against, honestly, the fear. It’s almost like a fear ceiling, really. And we, because we have these fears about what will happen if we lose weight, they’re real, they’re real fears. And I think it’s just so important as you start to embark on this journey to losing weight for the last time, that you really understand what your belief or fear ceilings are. What are the things that you are thinking, or I always call it future puddling. I love thinking about my future.

But when you think that negative things will happen to you in the future, I like to call that future puddling. It’s where you’re, you know, worst case scenario or you’re thinking about loose skin, or you’re thinking about you might lose a relationship. And there’s some really deep beliefs that we have about what will happen when we lose the weight. I’m gonna take you through this process, but first you have to become aware that you are sabotaging, and you have these triggers, but most importantly, you have results in your life that you don’t want.

So for example, if you’re carrying extra weight, that is a result that you may not want in your life. Now you may want it, but if you don’t, that’s a result, right? Maybe your body doesn’t feel as free. That’s a result that you have in your life that you don’t want. And so understanding that you have this result is, again, just coming into awareness that, oh, I might be sabotaging my success. So for me, I, you know, was on the diet rollercoaster. I weighed all the weights, honestly, all the weights up to 315. And when I started to do this work and dive in, I realized that one of my sabotaging thoughts, or my limiting beliefs was that I wanted to be relatable. And I thought that carrying extra weight made me relatable. It made me likable.

I wasn’t shining too brightly. I felt like the weight kind of brought me down. Now, I just want you to really think about that for a second. This was a true thought that was in my subconscious. It’s not like I was just, you know, thinking this all the time. I just started to notice that my results was I couldn’t lose the weight. That was the big result in my life. I was on the diet rollercoaster for 38 years. I could not lose weight for the long term. I could not keep the weight off. And so I started to be curious without judgment of like, well, what are you thinking, Shan? What are you, what’s going on Love? What’s happening?

And I started to realize that with others. So this is just one, I’m just telling you a story about one, but I had many, many sabotaging thoughts. But this one was about this idea that if I lost weight, I would not be relatable. That people would look at me and think, Ugh, there she is, skinny girl, or whatever. And it was just, it was nonsense, to be honest. It wasn’t even the truth. But again, this was just a thought. Just so you know, just because you have a thought does not make it true, or even believable, but you have them. You have these beliefs, these thoughts in your brain. And so just understanding what’s in there. When I realized that I had this thought that I could no longer be relatable if I had lost my weight, I just had to tell myself the truth. That wasn’t the truth. That my soul, the human that I was, is what makes me relatable. My experiences, my stories, the things that I have lived through, that’s what makes me relatable.

Again, just understanding what are some of those thoughts? And again, they’re just these barriers and obstacles that you create so that you don’t break through that ceiling. You create these barriers and these obstacles so that you can keep yourself down. We do this in every area of our lives. It can be weight loss, it can be relationships, it can be career, it can be finances, right? And it all comes from these limiting beliefs. And this can show up. Have you just ever been feeling really good and you’re going about your, you know, week and you’re feeling so good and you’re just like, oh my gosh, I’m having the best week, this amazing thing happened to me this week. Ah, I’m just on top of the world.

And then something happens, like, I don’t know, let me give you an example. So I won this award at work once, and it was so amazing. It was this amazing award. And actually I had won three, like it was, one was hard, but at this award ceremony, I actually got three of them. And I walked off the stage. I was feeling so good, like I’m so successful. And then that night when I got back to my room, I ordered all of this dessert and I was just overeating all of this food. And I share this story with you because I felt so successful in one area of my life.

And so sabotaging thoughts like, don’t be too happy. Don’t think something so good. You’re not worthy of this, right? And again, this is subconscious thoughts. And so then I actually did something to prove to myself, look, we’re going to eat all the things to “celebrate.” But I, I stuffed myself and I had so much shame because I did it alone, and in secret. At the time, I was struggling with my weight. I was on the diet rollercoaster. And so I say this because, oh my gosh, we just do this. Or have you ever had this thought, something good happens, and you’re like, oh, no, something good happens so something bad is right around the corner.

My love, that is just sabotage. That is just a way that you keep yourself down. In life we have amazing things, and we do have challenges. We do have things that, you know, we don’t want to happen or things that are out of our control. But I want you to just be aware of this thought of how you tied something good to maybe something bad’s gonna happen. And just understanding that, oh, this is what I’m thinking. Because you might be surprised you might cause the thing. I know,  I know, right? I had success at work, so of course I needed to sabotage my weight. So then I went back to my room that night and ate all the things. And so again, it comes from this thought that I didn’t deserve to be happy. I didn’t deserve success. I’m not worthy.

So what do you do? One, you shine a light on it. You just notice when you have results in your life that you don’t want, notice your triggers. Notice the thoughts around it. Notice the things that you’re thinking. If you keep gaining and losing weight, ask yourself why? Really, like, why? And then when things come up like, oh, I don’t want loose skin, I, you know, I might lose a relationship. Just know, because let me just tell you, I used to have the loose skin thing too. And ladies, I’ll take all my loose skin. I’m playing with some of it right now. Like seriously, if you’re watching me, watching me on YouTube, you just saw me like, ladies, I will. I’ll do it all day. Okay? So what. I would live in this body that I have now, I wouldn’t go back to weighing, you know, over 200 for all the money in the world.

So I just, I say this to you because it’s just a false thought. It’s, it’s not the truth. Because once you lose the weight, you’ll feel amazing. You’ll have to do some work. This is why I invite you to come join us in Transform Boss, so you can do the work to start to love the body, whatever it looks like. So you can start to have acceptance for how beautiful and amazing it is. So one, shine a light on it. Notice all of those limiting beliefs and thoughts.

And then two, just decide what do I want to think? What do I want to think instead? So this thought, I wanted to be relatable. I wanted, I didn’t wanna shine too bright. I didn’t wanna believe that anymore. That wasn’t the truth. I had to decide and practice the new thought of when I lose my weight, I will be relatable because I’ll have had this experience and I will still be me. I’ll still be the same person, just in a lighter body. And so practicing and thinking that different thought.

And then three, this is just so important. It is starting to love the process and the journey of losing weight for the last time. We focus so much on the number. If you didn’t listen to last week’s episode on the scale, you’ll want to go back, episode number 180. We focus so much on the bull instead of focusing on the process and the successes that we’re having along the way.

So one, shine a light on it. Two, decide what you want to think and practice. And three, love the process instead of focusing on the goal. Mmm, it’s so good. And next week, I am going to really talk about how being alone in your weight loss journey and not being a part of a community is keeping you stuck. Why it’s keeping you stuck and what to do. I want to tell you, if you have not joined Transform Boss, and you’ve kind of been on the fence and you’ve been thinking about it, Transform Boss Live, which is our biannual event, it’s happening next weekend, March 25th, 2023. So if you’re listening to this before then for sure, you want to come in.

This half day event we are just deep diving in how to overcome the scale. Ugh, it is gonna be incredible. It is a four-hour event. You know, we just have so much fun in it too. We do. Not only will you feel better, you’ll know how to overcome the scale. I’m gonna teach something that I actually have never taught in Transform Boss before to all my clients, and you’ll be a part of it. So all you have to do is go to jointransformboss.com. Join today. Right away you’ll get your membership login. You’ll get this amazing community, so many different benefits so that you can lose weight and learn how to release it for the very last time. So again, go to jointransformboss.com. It’s just a way that you can take this work deeper.

I think the podcast is amazing. There’s lots of details, but what you get in the membership is this times a thousand. And not only do you get my full entire course and the amazing community, you also get coaching so that you can start to uncover some of these sabotaging beliefs and limiting beliefs that you didn’t even know that you had. I know. Check it out, jointransformboss.com. And I’ll see you next week. So much love for you. 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. That’s B F L Y coaching.com. See you next week.