Ep #88: The 5 Phases of Permanent Weight Loss

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 88. 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 today. I’m going to share the five phases of weight loss, and I have seen myself go through these phases and my clients. Awareness of where you are can help you move forward in permanent weight loss.

But first I want to give a listener shout out. This is where I’ll read a review of the podcast every week. This week’s listener shout out is to Sharon Spohn. She is a Transform boss. I love her reviews and she has gone through the transformation and she is off the diet roller coaster. She has lost 121 pounds with Transform and she is a boss for sure. Sharon writes Shannan, this podcast really puts into perspective of how we as women feel. It is never the right time to put ourselves first to lose weight or even simple pleasures of life itself. When I joined Transform, I made a decision it was time to take control and put myself first.

I have to say it was hard to make the decision. I took a leap of faith. I was living my life on autopilot, taking care of others and having so much doubt and self-loathing of myself. Transform, Shannan and the sisterhood of beautiful ladies changed all of that for me. I love my life, my body, and helping other ladies on their journey with weight loss and changing their mindset. Choose now to be the right time, because you never know when your time is up. Live life for the present. Give yourself that gift of true freedom of self importance. Thank you. Oh, Sharon. I know, I love it. It was episode 87, if you’ve missed that one, you’ll want to go back and listen to it. It was a really great episode about, you know, honestly love, there just really is never the right time. We keep looking for it, but there really isn’t. So thank you, Sharon. If you love the show, I would so appreciate it if you left a review, I read every single one of them. And also make sure you subscribe so I am in your list every Wednesday morning.

So we just closed the doors for open enrollment to Transform, and we have so many new beautiful ladies. They’re a little scared, maybe a little overwhelmed, but excited and hopeful. And they’re starting to dig in and I cannot wait to have our welcome call and party with them this week. I love watching new ladies show up for themselves. It is the best.

I love all my ladies in Transform because they all each have their own story and their own journey. And I’m just so grateful that I get to be a part of it. We have a lot of exciting stuff happening in Transform over the summer. We love to make weight loss fun and exciting, because weight loss can feel heavy and hard. And I’m doing a virtual event, August 6th and 7^th for Transform members only. And it’s a virtual event, so ladies all over the country are going to be watching. But I just opened it up for in person, so ladies are gonna come here to Arizona and they’re going to meet me, and I’m going to meet them, which I cannot wait. I have to tell you my love, every time I think about meeting these ladies in person, I’m not kidding, I cry. Like tears roll down my face because I just cannot wait to hug them. I cannot wait to meet my ladies in person. It’s very small, we had only a limited number of tickets available because it’s a very intimate in-person event. But I just cannot wait to hug them. And I’m going to do all sorts of special things for them.

I have lots of surprises, like amazing surprises, which, oh my goodness ladies, if you know me, I love surprises. I love giving them. And like, like to this day, my son’s maybe a little like mom, I don’t like surprises anymore, and they’re always good ones, but you know, I just love them so much. I love surprising the humans and making their day. It’s like my favorite thing.

So today we’re going to talk about the five phases of permanent weight loss stages. And some ladies get stuck in phase two or three and they keep going back and forth. This is the diet roller coaster. I was on this dreaded diet rollercoaster for almost 38 years. And I know how difficult it can be, how frustrating it can be. And I want to just share with you these five phases so that you can decide where are you and where do you want to be.

So the first phase is the beginner phase, and the beginner phase, I think this phase is always exciting, right? If you ever think about starting something new, there is a lot of excitement. I think there’s a lot of hope. Hope that this is the time that this is gonna work. And you know, I think this phase is just, you know, it can also have a lot of fear with it too, right? Maybe a little bit of confusion. Like, Ooh, I’m not sure what to do, but this beginner phase is an important phase because this is when you decide that you want to do something different.

This is the phase that you start the work. Maybe you, you know, if you’re a Transform boss, right, you attend a call, you come to the welcome party, you watch one of the course videos. You’re just starting to kind of dip your toe in the water and you try some of the basics, right? Like a realistic plan. You join the community. But in this beginner phase, when you’ve decided that you want to lose weight for good, that you want to get off the diet roller coaster, the one like thought that keeps going through many of my ladies heads, and it went through my head too, it was just that you know that diets don’t work.

I think about this when I first started to find this work and I knew, you know, I had gone back to the national program many, many times. I had tried all the things, done, all the things, all of the things. And I just knew that it wasn’t about the food and that diets didn’t work. So I went on the search for a coach and I found one of two, like two coaches actually that I started to learn from and work with.

And, you know, in this beginning phase I was excited. I knew that coaching was the way. I wasn’t quite sure how it was going to go, but I just knew that it was going to be different and that I wasn’t going to diet anymore. And I had decided in that moment, not to diet any longer.

And then phase two, I like to call this the Lizzie phase. So if you’re new to me, Lizzie is what I call my own primitive brain. Our primitive brain is, you know, it’s responsible for flight or fight. It is impulsive, you know, and I like to call this phase, the Lizzie phase. Now phase two starts to happen, when things start to get complicated, they start to get uncomfortable, and we start to have a lot of fear in this phase. This is where all of what I like to call the puddle emotions come up. You know, worry, doubt, right? I can’t do this. You know, this is too hard. I remember going through this. I had a lot of things, you know, going on in my life and, you know, my mother and my mother-in-law were, you know, ill and, you know, I knew my mother actually was going to pass, and I started having all of this doubt. And, you know, I wasn’t sure that I could continue with my coach. And I had just kind of registered for her weight loss kind of course she had at the time, but I was still kind of in, I was still kind of feeling excited, but I still had a lot of overwhelm and you know, it just felt hard. And I had all of these excuses and reasons of why I couldn’t show up. I mean, I was commuting. I mean, I had all the reasons and all the excuses and it really felt uncomfortable.

And this phase, Lizzie phase in any, you know, when you’re learning this work and I think of my Transform ladies, phase two is one of those phases where you go in and out, you have these moments where you get into the puddle, and the puddle is just worry, doubt, and fear. Some overwhelm is in there too, and you’re just kind of playing around.

You’re playing around in all those old belief systems that you can’t lose weight, that it’s too hard, you can’t get off the diet roller coaster for good. And mostly, it just feels uncomfortable. And so that leads you right into the automatic phase, because remember our automatic brain, our habits, our old belief systems, they’re all in that automatic brain.

And so phase three is all about the automatic. And you know, we go into this because we want to disconnect. Love, this happens. And this phase to me is one of the most difficult phases to recognize and to get out of, because we disconnect. I think about this when my, you know, during this time when I had, I knew that I wasn’t going to diet anymore, I knew the way was through coaching and the tools that I was learning, but because of all the things that were happening in my life, I just couldn’t handle all my feelings, and so I just disconnected. And I went back to all of my old record players. I like to call them records, records spinning in the back of my brain, all of the old beliefs.

And I just wanted to escape the discomfort. And because I wanted to escape, because I wanted to disconnect, I didn’t want to feel the pain of loss of my mother or my mother-in-law, I just started to slowly quit. And this really happens. This is also part of this automatic phase, phase three, you start looking for your plan B, you start thinking, okay, this isn’t working, I need to go back to some old diet that worked one time or maybe a couple of times, but like, you’re right. Like I remember thinking, well, this coaching, maybe it’s too hard. Maybe I can’t do it. And I really, you know, I thought, oh, maybe I should go back to Weight Watchers.

You know, even though I had, you know, never really been successful, even though I had lost weight, I just never could keep it off. I never could count points for a lengthy period of time. And so this phase three is a phase that if you’re in it, if you’re disconnected, if you find yourself buffering, overeating, my love, it’s just, be aware of it. Okay. This is where I’m at. And then decide what is the next best action to move into phase four.

Now, phase four is all about commitment. I call it the commitment phase because this is where you really decide, like, I mean really commit, like I’m going to be committed. I’m going to fail. I’m going to have overeats. I’m going to have times where I go back to phase two or phase three, where I am in Lizzie brain, or I’m in the automatic brain, but I’m committed to show up for myself. I’m committed to live my best life. I think phase four is just this beautiful phase where you’ve just made this really like firm decision that you’re not going to quit on yourself.

That you’re going to keep showing up, even though you’re going to fail, even though you’re going to like, make all sorts of mistakes. I think about this when I really decided, and this was after my mom had passed and after my mother-in-law had passed. And I just remember just deciding like, you know the way Shannan, go get it.

You know what to do. Like, I just remember having this conversation like it’s gonna, right. You’re gonna not do it perfectly, but you are going to commit yourself to this because what is at the other end of this process is everything. It is living your best life in a body that you love. And I tell you my love, when I decided it was everything, it was everything, it changed, it really has changed my life. And it just came down to this commitment and really deciding, and looking and researching and finding the tools and finding, you know, all the different things and really honestly creating my best life. And I knew and made the decision that I just wasn’t going to quit on myself. And I started immersing myself in the work.

I just remember, literally I’m not even kidding watching my teachers masterclass, I don’t even know how many times, over and over again. I just, I would listen to all of these different podcasts, read all of these different books because I didn’t have Transform back then. There was no program that I could find that had everything I needed, the community, the course work, the tools, the coaching, all the different things. So I was sort of piecing it all together myself. Now my Transform ladies, like you have all of this. You have all the pieces. And so, but I was, I was committed. And so the feelings in this phase honestly, is just commitment and resiliency.

I just kept getting back up. Like I would like fail and have an overeat. And then I was just like, okay, okay, you did move on. And then what happens over time is that even now if I have an overeat or I don’t make my realistic plan, it’s so like, it’s so minor. Like before I would have like a full overeat and like eat all the things for days like a whole weekend.

Now it’s just a meal or it’s just a dessert or it’s just something that wasn’t on my plan. It’s not to the degree. And I think that this is what happens through these phases is that even if you have, you know, challenges or failures, they’re small in comparison to before. I mean, before I would go and I would like binge for months, you know, my loves for months. Now because I moved to phase four, I’m just committed. And so the way that I view failure and challenges is that it’s just part of the process. It doesn’t mean, I don’t make them mean anything about me. I just know it’s just part of it. And I started embracing the discomfort and loving the hard.

Ladies, we do hard work. We are women. We do all the things. We show up. We do the hard work. The difference is we’ve been doing it for everyone else. And now we just need to do it for ourselves. Because when you start loving the hard work and you start embracing the discomfort of losing weight for good, my love, everything will change for you because there is no plan B.

You have to change your mindset and learn how to believe different things if you want to get off this diet rollercoaster. I promise you this, it is not in a food plan or an exercise plan. It is in learning how to use these tools so that you can lose weight for good in a way that you can always do love. No one wants to be on a diet when they’re 75. I know I didn’t. I wanted to be at my best weight in a body that felt good and felt healthy. That’s what I want for my future self.

Okay. So phase five my loves, phase five is the unstoppable boss phase. And this really is where I am now, where some of my ladies are. I have a lot, I have a good amount of ladies in phase five actually. This is where you’re just feeling all the feelings, good, bad. You know, that life is 50 50. And you know, like, Hey, if I enter a challenge, if I have a painful event, if something happens in my life, I got it because you start to have your own back. You trust yourself and you’re showing up for yourself.

You’re committed to learning and failing and growing. You’re connected with your body and you show love to yourself. I tell you this unstoppable boss phase, it is so amazing to be in. And I’ll tell you why, because weight and your body becomes the least important thing in your life. See my love, these phases could work for anything, not just weight loss. Because now I went through all the phases of weight loss, now I’m an unstoppable boss. I’m in maintenance. I feel good. I love my body. Weight and food are the least important thing in my life.

And now I’m moving through the phases in entrepreneurialship in this business. And this is what I’m watching ladies do as they move through these phases and weight becomes a thing in there like rear view mirror, they start just expanding their life. They start dreaming. They start doing things that they never thought they could do. They, their relationships are better than they ever have been. They’re loving themselves and their capacity to love others is just growing at like crazy speeds. That is what the unstoppable boss phase is.

And finding mastery in this work, doing thought work, changing old beliefs that you’ve had, you know, for as long as you can remember and rewriting your story. My love, this is possible for you. This is what I know. I am no different than any other woman. Nope, no different. I’m just a woman. I have done all the things. I have amazing things about myself.

I have lots of flaws and, but this is the thing I just decided to show up, learn this work and start to believe new things. So my love, I know that wherever you’re at. So whether you’re in phase one or you’re in phase five, it is all possible for you.

So the transformational questions are one, What phase are you mostly in right now? And number two, if you’re in phase two or three, what is your next best action to move to phase four?

And if you want to learn more about my tools, take my free course. You can go to bflycoaching.com/ready to take it and learn the fundamentals of what I teach, tools that can help you start to lose weight for good and get off. So good.

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.