You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 95. 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. Ooh. I’m so happy to be back with you. Today, we are going to dive into this thought we have around losing weight without any evidence that you can. It is going to be a good one. And also, if you are loving the show, please rate and review the show. Also make sure you subscribe so I’m in your list every Wednesday morning.

And speaking of rating and reviewing, we are coming upon our hundredth episode. And so we are going to have an amazing fun hundredth episode. We’re planning it now. We are going to do some fun stuff. But I want to involve you in it too, and I want to make it super fun. So we are going to do a fun giveaway.

We have this goal that we want to hit a hundred ratings and reviews in iTunes. So whether you have an iPhone or an iTunes, you still can participate because even if you don’t have an iPhone, all you have to do is create an iTunes account on your computer. It’s pretty easy. And we’re going to give you all of the instructions and all of the details, if you go to bflycoaching.com/fun100. And it’s the actual, you know, numbers 1 0 0. So fun 1 0 0. You will have all the details, all of what you have to do and instructions.

And I’ll tell you, ladies, what we’re going to do. Even on there, you can go there to find out how you can rate and review the show. And then also how to submit once you have rated and reviewed the show so that you can get included in this amazing, fun drawing that we are going to have on August 26th. And I am going to give away, I’m going to put together a couple amazing baskets with all of my favorite things. It will be amazing actually, because I have some really fun, favorite things, and I’m going to make these just amazing baskets. And this is the thing. If we, when we hit over a hundred, I’m going to give away an extra basket. I’ll give away three instead of two. So definitely get over and rate and review the show, and then if you go to bflycoaching.com/fun100, you can get all the details for the fun things coming up so that you can be a part of our hundredth episode. A hundred episodes. I know I can’t even believe it.

And my love, if you’re listening to this before July 25th, we have an amazing fun July fun challenge. So if you have never been a part of the five day free challenges, you for sure want to register. We have a blast, and it’s a great way to learn the tools that I teach and just to get a kickstart into your journey. So you can go to bflycoaching.com/julyfun, and we’ll put all of these links in the show notes too, so it’ll be really easy. You can just click the link and all of these links will be there for you.

So ladies, I have to tell you what’s been going on. I want to talk about my granddaughter Annabelle and Annabelle just had her eighth birthday. She is just such a cutie. We had a birthday party over here for her and, you know, it was unicorns and all the fun things that, you know, she loves. And it was just really special to celebrate her. I think she, you know, I think many kids this year has, they’ve had tough years, you know, they were at home most of the year, and then they went back for just a little bit. And then now they’re home again for the summer. And she’s entering that zone of elementary school where, you know, some kids are not the nicest. And so she’s had a little bit of a tough year and it was just so fun to celebrate her.

And one of the gifts that my son and daughter-in-law gave her were horse riding lessons. So Belle loves animals. I mean, she loves them, like loves them. She loves the dogs. She loves animals. Everything that she wants is around animals. She wants to be a veterinarian. She loves animals. And so she had her very first riding lesson and it was just, I mean, oh my goodness, it was so fun to watch her in her own element where she was just having so much joy and, you know, the place that my daughter-in-law took her, you know, had, you know it wasn’t just riding, it was how to take care of the horse, how to scrub her hoof, you know, all of these different things and Belle just loved every bit of it.

And so, you know, I just want to celebrate Annabelle today. I love her to pieces and you know, I’m so proud of her. She can be a little bit shy and she’s lost a little bit of her confidence and it was just so fun to watch her, you know, get that back and to feel good and have joy and do some hard work and love every second of it. And so, I love you Annabelle. So I know, you know, ladies, our kids, our fur babies, our grand babies, we just have so much love for them. They just bring so much joy in our lives.

So let’s get into today’s show. I have been thinking about belief a lot and all of these beliefs that we have and how our brains are wired. Our brains they’re biased and our brains are always searching for evidence. So if we say I can’t lose weight, our brain, Lizzy also known as, will serve up all the evidence on why we can’t. All of the failed attempts. I mean, you know, it’s like this juke box where we have a selection, you know, we can F8, all the failed diets. I have to say, when that plays for me, right? This record in January 2001 – Atkins for the 10th time. Oh, F9 – let’s pull up March 2012 -Weight Watchers failed attempt number 11. This one is good. This record is all about how you did it at work and you failed in front of everyone. Ooh, good. Let’s not do that again.

I tell you ladies, I’m not kidding. This is the voice that comes in my head to tell me about all the things and all the failed attempts. And it’s funny. I talk about Weight Watchers attempt where I did do it at work, and then the next time I didn’t. So even though my work paid for it if I did it on campus, I didn’t, I did it by myself because I had so much shame around failing. So the next time I went off campus and paid for it myself. And it was the last time I ever went to weight Watchers. It just didn’t work for me.

But so my loves, we have all of these old records and they’re just playing in the back of our brains. And for many of us, maybe you, you don’t have the evidence yet that you can maintain weight or lose weight for the last time. And so all that you see is the failures, the diets, maybe all of the negative self-talk that has been just playing in the back of your brain.

So I want to tell you a story. I worked for a company for almost 25 years, and you know, I started there when I was 22 and I loved that company. And then I got this offer to go to another company and another firm, and I did. I have to tell you, ladies, I had no evidence that I could be successful.

I had spent my entire adulthood. I had only had, you know, that job, my first firm. And then before that, I worked at like K-Mart, right, when I was a kid, when I was like, you know, 16 through like 21. And so I wasn’t one who like transitioned through a lot of jobs, you know, I just, I stayed with companies. And so, you know, I didn’t have a lot of evidence that I could be successful. Plus on top of it, I was going as an executive, a senior vice president. I had no evidence that I could be successful, that I could even figure out this really big firm.

And, you know, I remember, you know, when I got the offer and I was deciding on whether or not to go, I had all of these thoughts of like, well what if you fail? What if you don’t know how to do it? You don’t have any evidence that you can go in and be successful. And I tell you ladies this story because, you know, I had to acknowledge all of those thoughts that I didn’t have the evidence. But I had this belief. I had some faith in myself that I could figure it out and that I had enough resilience, enough, you know, knowledge and enough, you know, enough skills to figure it out. And you know, I think about this too when I started this journey to lose weight for the last time, my love, I had zero evidence, zero, that I could maintain my weight for a long period of time. Because I was on the diet rollercoaster. I always went up. I always went down. I always gained weight. I always lost weight. I was always all or nothing. But somewhere in me, I knew that I could figure it out. And I was going to try different things.

I was not going to keep going back to the same old diet system, expecting different results. See my love. It just starts with simple steps and some trust, some faith in yourself. It starts with some belief, even though you might not have the evidence. And I want to challenge you on evidence. So our brains, I mean, our brain is constantly scanning for evidence.

So maybe maintaining weight for a long period of time is something that you’ve not done. And so you are like, Shannan, I don’t have the evidence. But I want to challenge that because you do have evidence that you can have success and maybe it’s not weight loss. Maybe it’s your career. Maybe you have evidence that you show up and you do great work and you give your best.

Maybe it’s in the vein of relationships. Maybe you’re an amazing parent or friend or daughter. You show up for others in your life. So you do have evidence some parts of your life where you’ve had success, where you’ve shown up, where you’ve done really hard things. And we need to rely on that evidence and pull that evidence forward. Because remember my love, our brains are wired to show us danger, and change is danger. And so because of this, our brains are always trying to pull us back into the cave, trying to pull us into safety, trying to keep us in bed, watching Netflix, eating cupcakes. I mean, Lizzie is like, please, Shannan, stay in bed, eat some cupcakes let’s watch Netflix.

But my love, we want to live our best life in a body that we love. And so to do that, we have to start finding new evidence so we can start to change some of these old beliefs. And I can’t say this enough, sometimes love, you just need to have a little belief and faith in yourself. Even when Lizzie is telling you all the reasons you can’t.

So to recap, you don’t need evidence that you can lose weight for the last time. You just need to have a little faith and believe that you’re figuring it out. It all starts with one simple step forward. In Transform, we actually just created this success path and it has four different seasons because I believe that in a weight loss journey, or even in your life journey, you go through these different seasons. And season one is all about just the beginnings. And there are some milestones and some direction, and also some very simple steps. And again my love, that’s all that you need, one simple step at a time. So if you’re in Transform, go to season one, start there. And you know, again, we’re always talking about just what’s the next best thing that you can do, the next best action.

Now, if you’re not in Transform a really good place to start, one simple step, is making your realistic plan. Now, if you’re new to me and you don’t know what that is, go to bflycoaching.com/6. And of course, we’re going to cover it in the challenge too. So if you’re listening to this before July 25th, get into the challenge, cause I’m going to teach a lot on this. So one simple step forward, and my love, have a little belief and faith because you do hard things. You have lots of evidence of that, my love, and sometimes we just need to pull it forward.

So the transformational questions today, one, what evidence do you already have that you can lose weight for the last time? And number two, if you don’t have any direct evidence of maintaining your weight, what are other areas of your life that you can pull evidence from where you have been successful and you’ve done really hard things?

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 the very last time. Okay my loves, have a beautiful, beautiful day.

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.