Ep #7: Feelings

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

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. I am just so excited to be here again. I cannot believe it’s already episode number seven. Lucky number seven. So I’m so excited about today’s show. We are going to talk about feelings. Oh yes, loves. Feelings.

It is so good, and then of course I will leave you with a couple of transformational questions at the very end of the show so you can start taking action today. But before we get into today’s show, I want to do a listener shout-out. This is where I will read a review of the podcast every single week.

This week’s listener shout-out is to DawnInATot. Dawn wrote, “I really enjoy Shannan’s material. It is practical and a simple plan that works on your mind. She helps you love yourself. Within loving yourself, you learn that losing weight is not about food. It’s about dealing with your thoughts, changing them for good, and managing your mind. Definitely worth listening.”

Dawn, I love that review. Dawn, thank you so much. Okay loves, we are going to announce the winners in episode 10, so please subscribe, rate, and review the show. I would so appreciate it more than you know. Details on how to get entered in will be at the end of today’s show.

So loves, October honestly has been an amazing month. I told you about Dallas and the amazing stuff that happened there and the BFLY workshop in last week’s episode. But I haven’t told you about my launch of my jumpstart program. My Jumpstarters began two weeks ago and loves, it is so amazing.

I just love watching them and how these beautiful women show up. They want to change and they are honestly doing the work. We had our first group coaching call this week and it was so good. I just cannot wait to see their mind and body transformations. I feel so much love and admiration for them and I see their future selves and it just fills my heart.

So as I record this, last night was Halloween. I just remember a time where I would eat my way through bags of candy. I mean, bags of candy. I would buy it and then have to re-buy candy because I would eat so much of it.

And honestly, October would be the start of the holiday binge fest. Starting with pumpkin items. I mean, you know ladies, we wait for pumpkin season and the pumpkin muffin at Starbucks, and then it would just be three months of overeating and telling myself I would get it together in January.

Loves, October has been a very busy month for me. I travelled to Nashville, California, and Dallas, launched a podcast, my jumpstart program, I mean, honestly, I could go on and on. But guess what, loves? I lost three pounds. I got on the scale today, I wasn’t even trying to.

Because I just stayed with my process. I made my realistic plan, did my reflection work, and felt all the feelings. And this month was full of all the feelings. Good and bad, which leads me right into today’s episode.

Everything. I mean everything we have ever done or not done is because we want to create or avoid a feeling. We have a thought. So I’ll give you an example, the thought, “I always fail on my diet,” and it creates the feeling of maybe disappointment. And when we’re feeling disappointed, we usually then take an action.

And it’s not an action that serves us, right? So when we’re feeling disappointment, we can overeat. And when we overeat, then the result of that is gaining weight or being at a weight that we don’t want. And that’s the whole process.

We think something, it creates a feeling, we then take an action from that, and then it creates our results. So I want you to take a moment and just really think about this again. Everything we do is so we can either feel something or not feel it.

Just sit with that for a moment. We do so many destructive things to ourselves because in the moment, we don’t want to feel a feeling. I’ve done this so many times. I mean, bazillions. I don’t even know how many times. I would buffer, also known as avoid my feelings, by overeating. It became an automatic response for me.

So I’ll give you an example. I would get out of a meeting at work and maybe I was feeling irritated or even overwhelmed, and I would head straight to the pantry to get some form of sugar. You know, usually a Snickers bar or a bag of cookies.

And I did this over and over and over again. But feelings, love, they don’t go away. So if we try to avoid or push down, they just come out sideways or in some other form. Everything positive and negative comes from us wanting to avoid or feel a feeling.

Feelings, love, are just a vibration in our body. They last about 90 seconds if we feel them. Then we can have another thought that creates another feeling. I want to go into the different ways we handle feelings and emotions. So we either feel it, avoid it, resist it, or indulge in them.

So let’s talk about how we avoid. Also known as buffering. A buffer is something we place in between the thought and the feeling to avoid the feeling. Some common buffers include overeating, over-drinking, overspending, so on and so on. There’s so many ways.

We buffer with social media, we buffer with Netflix. And we do this to avoid a feeling. So here’s a couple examples I want to give you of buffering. So we go to, let’s say a holiday party and we don’t want to feel the feeling of being uncomfortable, so we drink or we overeat.

We don’t want to feel the grief for losing a parent, so we overeat. We keep trying to fill up this invisible hole but as you know, loves, never, no matter how much we try, we just can’t fill the hole with food. So let’s talk about resisting. Resisting a feeling.

This is where we try to push down the emotion. We resist it. We might have some past trauma that we’re still trying to push down and avoid the feeling. So we keep pushing it down, but it never works.

I love this example. Have you ever tried to push a beachball down in a pool? I’ve tried and it just keeps popping back up. The harder you try to push it down, the more powerful it comes back up. I think about this with the loss of my mom. In the first couple months after she passed, I mostly let myself feel the feelings of grief.

But then I told myself, enough. I didn’t want to feel it anymore. Get over this, Shannan. Life goes on. So every time I would feel grief or want to cry, I would tell myself, no, you are strong, you are not doing this. So I’m a pretty healthy person. I rarely get sick. I have never had bronchitis, not in my entire life.

So this was 43 years of never having bronchitis, but boy did I get it the year my mom passed. I was so sick. I had bronchitis for six weeks. I even broke a rib from coughing so much. Loves, my body was going to feel the emotion even if I was trying to resist it.

The interesting part is that once I learned how to feel my feelings no matter how much I’ve traveled, been busy, had negative things happen, or how many places I’ve been on, I’ve not been sick. Not even a cold. So interesting that we try to resist these emotions, but they come out in different ways.

I want to talk a bit about indulgent emotions. These are emotions like worry, confusion, indecision. These emotions we like to “play in the puddle” with. It’s what I like to call it. We like to worry or be confused about what to do, even though we really know what to do.

I see this with my clients and the realistic plan, and these emotions are just dream-stealers. These emotions are just drama with our lizard brains. I mean, worry sounds good, like I’m worrying about something. But we just indulge in it. It keeps us in inaction.

It keeps us from focusing on what we want to do. It keeps our minds busy, usually with something we can do nothing about. So watch when you’re in confusion or indecision or worry. Catch yourselves.

Loves, I still catch myself doing this. I do this a lot now with my business. I’ll be confused about what to do, even though I know what to do. So I just notice it and I change my thoughts.

Loves, allowing a feeling is the only way to truly become your best self and lose weight for good. Now, allowing is just noticing the feeling identifying it, and sitting with it. It lasts about 90 seconds. I identify the thought that’s causing it, and then I either continue to sit with it, or if I want to continue to feel it, or change the thought.

So sometimes we want to feel bad. I want to feel the grief of losing my mother. So my mom’s birthday was just last week. October 29th. And I allowed myself to cry. I miss her. I wanted to feel the emotion of it. I didn’t want to push it down.

And then when I was ready, I changed my thoughts to how grateful that she was my mom and how I know she’s still with me. And I’ve learned to feel any feeling and be okay with it. If I get an urge to eat something that’s not on my realistic plan, I just ask myself, what am I feeling? What am I thinking? What am I trying to avoid through buffering with food?

Sometimes it’s stress, discomfort, sadness, but sometimes it’s just the feeling of being bored or tired, or even excited or joy. We do so much to avoid, resist, or indulge a feeling. A 90-second feeling, love.

For some of us, we are so disconnected from our bodies we do not even know what we’re feeling. One of the keys to losing weight for good is coming back into our bodies, feeling any feeling without resisting or avoiding. Learning how to identify the thought that is causing a feeling, and then seeing how the feeling feels in your body.

I like to do this when I just sit there and feel a feeling. And I try to notice things like is my heart beating faster? Do I have a tightness in my chest? Is my thread tight? Do I feel flush? I ask myself, what does sadness, anger, love, excitement, what does it feel like in my body? In your body?

Loves, I am so excited because my Jumpstarters are going into week three and this is where we just take a deep dive into feelings and emotions. And honestly, I just can’t wait to watch them go through this process. It really is life-changing.

Loves, life is 50/50. 50% amazing, good, joyful, and 50% painful, boring, all the other negative emotions. Every human, I mean every human on this planet has a 50/50 life. I remember when my teacher first taught me this concept. I wanted to argue with it.

I wanted to say, no, I want a 70/30 life. 70 good, 30 negative. But as I’ve done this work, I’ve learned that every human, 50/50, and that’s what I want. When we learn to feel our emotions with our buffering, resisting, or indulging, everything, I mean everything starts to change for us.

And love, you are so worth this. So you know I want to leave you with a few transformational questions in your reflection work. So what if you could feel any emotion, like uncomfortable, shame, pain, and still take an action that serves you? What would your life be like?

And the second one, what emotions are you trying to resist? What is your beachball emotion that you’re trying to push down in the pool? When I learned that I can feel any emotion, not buffer, and still take an action that serves me, it changed everything for me.

And this is what I want for you, loves. So join me too next week. I’m so excited. I’m going to tell you all about a retreat I went to in Nashville. It was a photo confidence retreat. I can’t wait to talk to you about it next week.

And to celebrate the launch of the show, I am going to be giving away a $50 Amazon gift card to 12 lucky listeners who subscribe, rate, and review this show on iTunes. It doesn’t have to be a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the show.

I want your honest feedback so I can create an awesome show that provides a ton of value for you. Visit bflycoaching.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter it. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode. So much love to all of you and I just can’t wait to spend more time with you on next week’s episode.

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!