Ep #36: But I Want It

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 36.

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 loves. Welcome back. I am so excited to be with you ladies today. Today, we are going to talk about another thought that we have that just keeps us stuck on the diet rollercoaster.

So before we get into the show, one of my favorite segments. We are going to give a listener shout-out to Sonia Kirkham. She wrote, “Amazing. I want to say thank you so much for what you do. You’ve taught me that it’s okay to mess up and not get down on myself, and to pick myself up and start again. That it’s okay to fall as long as I don’t give up. I don’t have to be on the diet rollercoaster to lose weight. I sometimes hear your voice in my head when I’m about to eat off-plan or eat more than I should. LOL. I can hear you saying that it’s on your plan. LOL. I’m still learning to love myself as I know that’s a process itself. I love the support and inspiration you give. Thank you for letting me find your group. Stay safe.”

Sonia, that was the sweetest review. Thank you so much. And thank you to all you ladies who are listening and all you ladies who have taken the time to leave a review. I really appreciate it.

So loves, another great weekend in the books. My littlest grandson turned two this past weekend. He is such a cutie. I can’t believe he is two. The time, it just goes so fast. I honestly wish all my g-babies would stop growing. No seriously. I want them to freeze.

We had a little party for him on Saturday and then went swimming with the older three. My son was not actually feeling well and so they took my littlest g-baby Wyatt home. He was so tired.

So it was my husband, myself, and my three oldest grandbabies. We were swimming, we had so much fun, but it was starting to get chilly. I know, I live in Arizona and when the pool is only about 85 or 86, it gets cold after a while. I know, some of you from the east coast and the north are like, Shannan.

But it was time to get out. So all my g-babies, they tried to negotiate a little more time in the pool. I always give them a timeframe like, five minutes and just tell them, “Okay, in five minutes we’re getting out.” So it was time and we needed to get out of the pool and our little Jaxie, our three-year old, she looked at me and told me no.

She said she did not want to get out. Now, we swim almost every weekend with them, so I knew if I gave in in that moment, every time she would throw a tantrum. So I just told her it was time and she would swim again, but today she was getting out right now and she did.

Now, if I would have given in, given her a reward by more time in the pool, it would be this constant battle to get her out of the pool. No thank you. I want more part of that. I love spending time with them and just want it to be the best. I do not want to enter into negotiations every time they come to swim.

I tell you this story because it is so similar to our own brains. We want the cupcake or something off our plan and we have this thought, “But I want it. I deserve it.” Some sort of this thought. Our primitive brain wants the reward and because we’ve given in to the reward so many times, the urge is pretty strong.

Sometimes it feels just like an automatic impulse, but it is not. You always have a thought that tells your hand to reach for the cupcake. It’s like we have a three-year-old, like my Jaxie, running around in our brains. And when the three-year-old is in charge, it’s trouble, ladies.

It looks like a tantrum in our own brain. We start negotiating with ourselves to eat off-plan or to keep eating even though we’re full. It becomes all this drama and it all takes place in our own head. It makes us feel frustrated and honestly, exhausted.

It’s like when your child does not want to do something, and you just cannot tell them one more time to pick their clothes off the floor. I know you ladies feel me on this. So loves, this is what it looks like. You go to a restaurant, you’ve looked at the menu, and you know exactly what you’re going to eat.

You’ve made your plan, you feel good about it. Then you go to the restaurant and they bring over the breadbasket. It smells so good. You know, like those Red Lobster rolls or the Texas Roadhouse rolls. You start thinking about what it would taste like.

You didn’t put it on your plan but what if you just had a piece of it? And then loves, the negotiations begin. Well, I’ll just do a swap. I placed a baked potato on my plan, so I’ll just eat the bread instead. So you start eating the bread and you give your brain the reward.

And then the meal comes and of course, the baked potato is there. And you go into negotiations again. This whole time you’re just going back and forth in your brain about what you should or should not do. Maybe just half of the baked potato, just a few bites.

But you’re really not hungry anymore because you ate a lot of bread. I’ve been there, ladies. But it’s there and it looks so good. This whole time, everyone is talking, and you are having full hostage negotiations going on in your head. You are the hostage and the negotiator, and it’s all going on inside of that beautiful brain.

Then when you’re tired, you’re feeling stressed, or you’re just over it, you say, “Just forget it. Forget my plan. Forget all of this. Forget me. This reward of the bread is more meaningful in the moment than my goal of losing weight.” You forget it, you forget you, you forget your dreams, your goals. You choose the bread in that moment because of a simple thought, “But I want it.”

I just want you to sit with that for a minute. We say forget it or some version of that in the moment and we let all of our long-term goals and plans, go for a reward in the moment. For a five-minute bread splurge, we give into our urges. It creates habit of overeating and indulging in the moment.

Our brains say, “But I want it,” and then we give it a reward. So we reinforce the behavior, just like my granddaughter who wanted more time in the pool. If I would have reinforced it, given her the reward, next week, it would have been 10 times harder to get her out of the pool.

But we do this with food over and over again. We reinforce the behavior by giving our brains a reward. And love, we do this over and over again. To change this, we have to notice the thoughts that are causing the urge. Then, disrupt the thought.

I teach my ladies in The Society to count back from 30. This will disrupt the negotiations. Then they choose a different thought like, “Not on my plan today, but if I want to put it on my plan next time, then I will.” Just like my granddaughter, this is not the last time she’s going swimming. She’s coming over again next weekend.

You will eat bread again. You will eat a cupcake again. You get to choose in the moment to be in integrity with yourself, to keep commitments to yourself. And then love, you build resilience. And loves, the urges, they do come less often because your brain knows that you’re not always going to give into the urge.

Practicing this over and over again is how you build a new habit, how you learn to be the one in control, instead of your primitive brain. Your three-year-old. If you want to learn more about handling urges, you can also listen to another episode. Go to bflycoaching.com/3 and I’ll teach you all about urges and over-desire.

This simple thought, “But I want it,” has kept so many of us on the diet rollercoaster. We choose the moment over the long-term goal. When I see ladies in my membership group, The Society, who have the most success, they learn how to notice the thoughts that are causing them to overeat.

They are disrupting their urge and then creating new thought habits. This is one of the secrets to weight loss. We think it’s the food or some exercise plan, but love, it has never been about the food. It all lies within us. To transform, we must do something different.

So, the transformational questions today are number one, what thought causes full hostage negotiations in your mind? Number two, are there certain situations where you find yourself giving into the urges more? Number three, how can you notice the thought and disrupt the urge? So good loves, bye for now.

If you love this work and want to go deeper, take my free course. You can learn more about it at bflycoaching.com/free-course. Bye for now, loves.

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 over to bflycoaching.com. That’s B – F – L – Y coaching dot com. See you next week!