You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen episode number 98. 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. I have to tell you love, one thing that I have learned in my life journey, so far, is that I don’t know what I don’t know. Today we’re going to dive into this and why it can keep us on the diet rollercoaster. And if you are loving this show, please rate and review the show. Also make sure you subscribe so I’m in your list every Wednesday morning. And I don’t want you to forget we’re doing a biag giveaway. We’re almost there, almost a hundred episodes. When you leave a written review for this podcast on Apple or iTunes, you can put yourself into a drawing for a basket of my favorite things. So go to bflycoaching.com/fun100 to get all the details.

Oh love, our weather has been so nice. A little crazy for August actually. We’ve had some rain and now our temps are in the low one hundreds, high nineties. It’s amazing.  I will take it. We have some humidity, but it has been nice walking in the morning with the cooler temperatures. I will take this all day. Now, I hope it doesn’t mean we’re going to have a super cold winter, but ah, I can’t beat it for August.

I’ve been thinking about this concept, you don’t know what you don’t know. What it means is that if you don’t have the knowledge or experience, you don’t know something and you don’t know that you don’t know. Let me give you an example and how this relates to weight loss. When I was on the diet roller coaster, I did not know how it felt to not be obsessed about food. I was always thinking about it, about my next meal, about what sweet thing I was going to go buy and eat. It was on my mind a lot. I would hear people say, “I forgot to eat,” And I was like, I don’t understand that. It made no sense to me at the time because I did not know what I did not know.

See, we believe that we know how to lose weight because we think we should know. We’ve tried all the things.  Yes, you might know some, but love, you don’t know what you don’t know. See, I now know what it’s like to forget about food. Forget about eating, for it to not be the most important thing. But I didn’t have the experience or understanding of it before.  We have a pool, and we’ve lived in this house for a little over two years and a couple of months ago, the grandbabies were over and they wanted to go swimming and it was night, and I thought it was pretty dark out there. Love, I had no idea that we had lights in our pool. I didn’t. The switch was hidden.

And I had no idea until Paul went over and he just switched them on. I was like, whoa, these are pretty cool. And I was thinking like, why have we not used them before? But again, I didn’t even know we had them. Another example I have of this is when I was a young leader. Oh boy. I thought I knew the things. I thought I knew how to lead people, connect with them. But I didn’t know what I didn’t know. There was so much learning and growth I needed to do, so much experience that I did not have. But again, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I remember applying for this job and not getting it. I thought I was ready, but I wasn’t. I didn’t know that I wasn’t ready, but my mentor, those who had more experience, they knew. This is so important and losing weight for the last time. See your brain has been filled with years of diet mentality. You’ve been told that a quick fix is the way. Your brain wants it to be easy. You think that if you don’t lose weight fast, then you’re failing. You believe if you don’t restrict and follow some “healthy plan” then you’re not doing it right. Because that maybe is the experience that you’ve had. Maybe you’ve lost some weight and you lost it by restricting, cutting out food groups, you know, restricting your calories, over exercising. So your experience is I have to cut out food groups. I have to restrict to lose weight.

That is what you know. But love, you don’t know what you don’t know. I can tell you that you can lose weight by eating foods you enjoy, that you can learn to feel feelings and not push them down, that you can handle urges to overeat, that food can be the least interesting thing about your life. But if you don’t have that experience yet, then you don’t know what you don’t know.

It can feel like it can’t happen for you. Somewhere in your brain, you don’t believe me. I see this with clients when I’m coaching them, I can almost see or hear their brain freeze up. When they start to have these epiphanies when they start to know what they don’t know. If you want to lose weight for the last time, you must do something different than you ever have.

You have to go into unchartered territory, you have to gain knowledge and experience that you don’t have today. When I started this journey of coaching and changing my mindset, I had no idea what was in front of me, the work, the failures, but love, it is the work of my life. Because of the results. The experience of my life is richer. I feel better. Have more energy, have amazing experiences. I am living my best life in a body that I love. And love, I want that for you.

The transformational questions are one, what resistance is coming up for you when you think about changing your mindset or doing something different? And number two, what if you went all in on learning something different and exploring what you don’t know? What is the one thing you would start with?

And if you’re ready to learn what you don’t know and experience something different sign up for Transform BootCamp. This is a five-day coaching experience that can change everything for you. Sign up at bflycoaching.com/BC, B as in boy, C as in camp. And if you’re in Transform Weight Loss program, no worries love, I got you. You don’t need to sign up. All right my loves. Bye for now.

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.