You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women Podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 190. Woo. 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. And I just wanna say Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers. We just celebrated that. I know mothers come in various different forms, and so I hope that you celebrated you. I have to tell you ladies, we’re getting ready to come up to Unstoppable, which is our once a year event in Transform Boss, and I’m getting so excited. This event is huge. We have ladies come in person, we have ladies virtually, and I’m so excited about it. I’m like on pins and needles right now because I just cannot deal with my excitement because I just can’t wait. It’s so powerful to watch their transformation and watch what happens over these two to three days. We have VIPs who have three days, and then we have two days. So, ooh, so good.

I do wanna mention something about Mother’s Day too, before we go into the episode. Ladies, I know for many of you who are listening, including myself, Mother’s Day can have a double edged sword, and it can be a day of, you know, celebrating yourself and having your family celebrate you. And it also, for some of you can be a day that is difficult, whether, you know, maybe you don’t have relationships with your children, or you have lost your own mother, or you’ve lost a child and it’s this day that is very difficult. And maybe you’re still feeling a little zing from that, even as you listen today. And I just want you to know I’m sending you all the love and have some grace for yourself.

Allow yourself to feel the feelings. I allow when tears come about my mom to come. When I want to feel sad about her, I allow myself to feel sad. I also allow myself to feel joy, and I allow myself to feel blessed that she was my mom, for sure. Yeah, I mean all the way. And so wherever you’re at, I just want you to know that you can allow yourself to feel feelings. I think for so many of us, we just push them away and we use food to do that. And I just want to offer you allow yourself some space and time to process those feelings. And I’m sending you hugs and so much love.

Now, as we get into the show, we’re gonna talk about shame. And shame is this emotion that I think for many of you, you have felt. I think all the humans, we’ve felt shame at some point in our life. But if you carry extra weight because it’s on the outside, people can see it, then they know like, oh, you know, she’s got some, some deals, some problems, right? It’s how we, like, I learned how to cope with stress and trauma and things with my weight, but people could see that, right? When I gained weight people saw it. People knew, people were like, oh, yeah, that’s her, her problem, right? And so we can carry a lot of shame about it.

And shame is a very powerful emotion, and we will do anything not to feel shame. And what happens is that can keep us hiding and keep us very small. It can keep us from looking for a different way to, you know, to find a solution or doing the work because of shame. And I wanna give you the definition of shame. And the definition is a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior. You know, the definition even I was like, ugh, you know, the definition, I, I’m not even that crazy about it, right? This wrong or foolish behavior, because I think even the definition adds to the shame. Because when I think about me gaining weight, I don’t think it was wrong. I don’t think it was foolish. I think it was just a way that as a young child, or for some of you as an adult, that you learn how to cope.

And so I say this because we have put so much “shame” or wrongness or you know, all the things in gaining weight, and I wanna start to like take that away, and also give you my take on shame and how to start to release some of it. Now, I want to give you a, a story. So many, many times in my life, you know, when I was on the diet rollercoaster, I went through the whole, I gotta exercise, I gotta go to the gyms, I gotta hire a personal trainer. Every time I did it was, you know, some very thin and fit, you know, nothing, I mean, nice people, right? But what happened was when I would go to the gym or the thing, I’d be in the gym, and the gym environment for me produced a lot of shame, because I thought people were looking at me like, oh, she needs to be here, right?

Or, you know, oh my God, you know, I had a lot of shame about even using the equipment, being with a personal trainer, you know, when they were asking me to do things that I didn’t feel physically I could do. But, you know, trying to do it because again, I didn’t wanna feel shame, so I would push my body past limits where, you know, three days later I was still kind of like struggling because my body was so sore because I had taken it past its limits. And so I just wanna offer this story to you, because recently I had a similar story, and I tell you, I’ve done this work for a very long time. I allow myself to feel shame, but it was just, it was so interesting that it was still there.

So I went to physical therapy for, I’m having a hip and some bursitis, and I went there to kind of strengthen and stretch and do some things. And this was my second time at the physical therapist. The first time I went, it was just one session, and then I went back to my doctor and he’s like, Hey, I really want you to do physical therapy for like, you know, six to eight weeks. And I was like, okay, I’m in. You know, okay, great. So I go into the second time and she just kind of had this like, why are you here? You know, there’s not much we can do for the hip, right? So if you know anything about it, there’s not much they can do. And so I’m like, oh, I know. I said, my doctor just wants me to come back, build some strength, really get into the stretching, you know, dot, dot.

So right away I felt wrong. Right away, I felt like I had done something wrong. Then we go in, we start doing the stretches and the strength building, and it came to some of the exercises and, you know, some of them were more difficult. And, you know, I think I got taken right back to, you know, 1989, or I mean right back. I felt this emotion come over me. I finished the physical therapy with her that day, and I went out to my car, and I actually, right after physical therapy, was meeting my son and my dad, because we were surprising my daughter-in-law, we were redoing her office. So I was going into this like, really amazing thing, but as I got into my car, I just had all of this emotion.

So I cried the whole way to my dad. And you know, my son and my son, you know, was like what’s wrong? And I said, oh, it’s just this, you know, this experience, this emotion. I wasn’t ready to like go into the whole thing with him, you know, of course he’s like, mom, you know, he just loves me so much. And I’m like, you know, but I wanna offer this to you because I didn’t shut myself down and think I shouldn’t feel this shame. I didn’t tell myself, okay, stop doing what you’re doing. I didn’t make myself wrong. I didn’t make her wrong. She didn’t do anything, she was just trying to do her gig. I just allowed myself to feel this trauma that was still inside of me for many years of feeling shame and feeling like I was wrong.

When I think about this definition, again, this word consciousness, right? It’s our thinking that we did wrong or that we did something foolishness, right? It’s not that we did something wrong or something foolish, it’s that we think we did. And so when we think we did, it causes the shame. So I felt like I was wrong. When I would go to those gyms, I felt like I had done something wrong by being overweight. Here I am, you know, in a body that I love that feels good, lost my weight, feeling amazing, and it still was living within my body. Because shame will come at different parts of your journey at different pieces. And sometimes like that, it will surprise you and you’ll start to maybe think, oh my gosh, you know, I’m not as far as long as I thought.

You’ll start to make yourself feel wrong. I don’t want you to. I just want you to allow yourself to feel shame. I didn’t need to go overeat. I didn’t need to go run from it. I didn’t need to clean myself up, you know, to put on the appearance in front of my son and my dad. I just allowed myself to feel it, to cry, to release it. I’ve gone back, I don’t know how many times now, I’m like in my, I don’t know, fifth or sixth week maybe now, I love her. She’s great. You know, she pushes me as she should, you know, not too hard that I break, but she pushes me and I’m building strength.

And my hip does feel better because the bursitis is chilling a little bit. And so again, I could have shut down, blamed her, and never went back. I could have shut down, overate and disconnected and not felt that feeling. Instead, I chose the third option of allowing myself to just feel it. It wasn’t anyone’s problem. Nothing had gone wrong. It was just old trapped emotion that lived in my body. And it was from my thinking.

Shame also, it just keeps us from feeling good about ourselves. It keeps us hiding, right? I can’t tell you how often I felt so much shame about my body, about, you know, all the things. And so it just kept me being small. It kept me doing, you know, just the bare minimum. And I wanna offer you that all your dreams, all your goals are on the other side of feeling really powerful, negative emotions like shame. When you can just feel it, when you can, like feel, it doesn’t feel good, right? Crying. I mean, it doesn’t feel good, but you allow yourself to feel it, ah, amazing things can happen.

I think in this business I’ve made, you know, I have made a bazillion mistakes. I’ve had some shame about like, oh, you should be smarter, you should be this, you should be that. You know all the things. And I just allow myself to feel it. While you’re losing weight, you might carry some shame about how you look. And I just wanna tell you, you’re gorgeous, you’re beautiful. I just need you to hear that. I know you might not believe it. I know you might be in a space where you’re like, Shannan, I don’t. That’s all right my love. I’m just here to tell you and remind you that it is possible for you to think that one day. Through this work, you can start to love the body that you’re in right now. Not when you lose the weight.

Because if you don’t start loving it now, you don’t start paying attention to it now, you won’t do it after you lose weight. It just never will be good enough. Shame also happens when we compare ourselves. I talked a little bit about this last week, but comparison, when we compare ourselves to others, it causes shame. So if you’re around a thin person and you are overweight, you think again that you’ve done something wrong, that it is wrong for you to be overweight. I’m just here to tell you, it’s not wrong. It’s not wrong, it’s not wrong. You carrying extra weight does not make you wrong.

It does not make you a bad person. It does not make you unworthy. That is just nonsense. Extra weight is just extra weight. That’s all that it is. A little more juice on the body. And when you start to tell yourself like, nothing is wrong with me. And you might say, your immediate thought might be but Shannan, other people, it doesn’t matter what other people think. And you’re like, Shannan, I know that’s hard for us, but at the end of the day, if you don’t start to believe that, you have to do that work on yourself so that you can start to have some love and acceptance of your body.

And I know that it is a journey. It has been a journey for me, and it just comes with one baby step at a time, and starting to allow myself to feel feelings. Now, my take to overcome shame, this is it. Allow yourself to feel it. Allow yourself to feel the sensation, the vibration in your body. Then just have some love and grace for yourself, your body, and the journey that you’re on. Give some appreciation, give some love to yourself, and redirect your brain and tell yourself, I’m enough, I’m enough. I’m worthy. I’m enough. And if you need to come back and re-listen and hear my voice telling you that, just do it. Just put my voice in your head. I’m enough, I’m worthy, and I am showing up for myself.

And I tell you, Ooh, it’s the best. Look, shame’s gonna show up. It is. It is. It’s gonna show up. And you don’t have to hold onto it, believe it, or let it derail you. And you don’t have to compare yourself to others. You are unique. You are unique and beautiful, and you know, you just keep moving forward by one, allowing yourself to feel the emotion. And then two, allowing love and grace for yourself. You got this, my love.

Now next week, ooh, we’re gonna talk about the feeling of belonging and how it can show up, and how it can also derail you. I know, it can actually, I know, I’m gonna talk about it. So if you wanna take this work deeper, come check out Transform. Boss. It’s my monthly membership. It’s so good, ladies. It’s the best program out there, and I get to be your coach. I know it’s pretty fantastic. So go to jointransformboss.com and check it out. All right, 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.