Ep #62: Self-Love and Why it is Necessary to Lose Weight

You are listening to the Weight Loss for Successful Women podcast with Shannan Christiansen, episode number 62.

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 excited to be back with you. I’m really loving today’s show. I’m excited because I am going to start a three-part series on love and how important it is in weight loss.

But first, I want to give a listener shoutout. This is where I will read a review of the podcast every week. And this week’s listener shoutout is to Sharon Spohn. She wrote, “Shannan, listening to these podcasts have given me more insight into changing into who I want to be. I’ve been with Transform for over a year and I’m still learning growing into my future self. I have found that mindset is so important, letting go of past beliefs has been so beneficial in my journey. Thank you so much for all you do.”

Thank you so much, Sharon. I really appreciate the review. And you know, Sharon, I have so much love for you. And ladies, we still have our giveaway going, so if you rate and review this show, you can be entered in to win a $150 gift card. And all you have to do is rate and review on iTunes or Apple. And then email me at support@bflycoaching.com with the title of your review, and you are in. So good, my love. We’re going to give away the gift card in a future episode, so stay tuned.

Okay, my love. I am recording this on the Sunday before Thanksgiving and I am getting super-excited. Even though for sure it’s going to be different, I will love every minute of it. And I’m also on vacation from both BFLY and my day gig for most of the week. So, I am going to get in some serious rest and relaxation.

I have to tell you ladies this quick story because it is so sweet. Speaking of love, last Thursday, something happened in the Christiansen household. My stepson brought his girlfriend over for dinner. And it is the very first time he’s ever brought a girl home. He’s 22. And we were like, “What’s wrong with us? Why don’t you want to bring your girlfriends home?”

But he did and it was like a dream come true for my husband and I. Honestly, it’s just because we love seeing him so happy. And she was just the cutest, sweetest young lady. And her name is Lilly. I mean, seriously, Lilly, yes.

And it’s been a while for us meeting a new partner of one of our kids. And I think we were a little nervous at first. But you know, love, we just settled right in. And it really was the highlight of our week. There is something about seeing your children happy and in love. And it is just so fun.

So, you know, loves, we have so many things happening right now in BFLY, as always. When this episode launches, we will have given the announcement for the new date of when Transform is going to open. And I’m excited.

We’ve been planning the launch and we have some really fun surprises and a free five-day challenge, because I know the ladies love the challenges. So, mark your calendars. On January 13^th, the doors to Transform will open back up. I cannot wait to welcome in a whole new group of ladies.

So, love, I am so excited about the next three episodes. I just did a relationship training for my members of Transform. I wanted to, during the holidays, really dig in deep with my ladies in Transform. I wanted to help them through the holidays. And it was so good.

So, I wanted to do just an abbreviated version here. So, for the next three episodes, we are going to talk about love. I mean, you ladies know I love love. And we’re going to talk about self-love, food love, and our love for others.

So, in this very first part of the three parts, we’re going to get into self-love. And I want to talk about – I remember actually when my mom, when I was growing up, she would tell me how important it was to love myself. And I remember thinking, like, “Okay, I’ll love myself.” I didn’t really understand what it meant.

And even I would say in my 20s and 30s and early 40s, I really never put that much thought into me, into the love that I had for myself. And I really, as I’ve done this work on myself and as I’ve helped other women lose weight and get off the diet rollercoaster, I really understand what self-love is. And it’s really two things. And the very first one is keeping commitments to yourself and showing up for yourself.

And you know, loves, we just have learned that everyone else comes before us. And we do so many things for so many other people. And what has happened over a long history of dieting is we’ve broken so many commitments to ourselves. And we just don’t even trust ourselves anymore.

I’ve spoken to so many ladies, especially new ladies who come into transform. And they don’t trust themselves. They don’t trust that they’re going to be able to follow the process, that they’re going to be able to learn, that they’re going to be able to keep commitments to themselves.

And I’m just here to say that one half of learning how to love yourself is beginning to keep small commitments to yourself. And this is why I teach – everything that I teach is very, you know, do one thing at a time and do that consistently before you start doing something else.

Because it’s starting to learn how to trust yourself again. And it’s almost like I think about bad relationships – we’ve all had them. I had, you know, my first marriage, I would say there was some serious broken trust there. And to repair trust, it takes time and consistency, right?

And so, if you’ve ever had someone who’s broken your trust, they need to show you that whatever area they broke the trust in, that they can rebuild that. And love, you have to do that with yourself. Because you’ve made plans and you’ve said you’re going to do things and you say, you know, I’m going to do this or I’m going to eat this.

And then, in the moment, the instant gratification, or Lizzie, gets in your brain and you break it. You’ve done that so often that you don’t even know when you’re doing it anymore. It’s so automatic.

And so, the first part of learning how to love yourself is learning how to trust that you can make a commitment to yourself and you can begin to keep them. And the second part of self-love is the conversation that you have with yourself.

I don’t know where it happened. I don’t know when it was. I look at my granddaughters and I think they are the most beautiful, precious, you know, my grandsons too. And when I think of them, I think of love and beauty and I can’t imagine – my three-year-old granddaughter, Jackson, she thinks she’s the bee’s knees. And she is. And I just don’t know where it changes.

I don’t know where it changes where it’s okay to think and speak to ourselves in a way that is not with love, in a way that is harsh, in a way that is – we speak to ourselves in ways that we would not speak to anyone else.

And I have to say, I was coaching someone recently and she’s one of my Transform ladies. And she was telling me, “Shannan, I don’t think I beat myself up.” And as we were going through the coaching session, she had this a-ha moment of it’s just these little whispers.

It’s these little whispers of, “You can’t do it.” It’s these little whispers of walking by a mirror going, “Eurgh…” not looking in a mirror because you don’t want to have the thoughts about what you look like or what you think you look like.

It’s these little whispers of doubting your capabilities, not forgiving yourself, living in the past, telling yourself what could have been, what should have been, and just beating yourself up about it. It’s not these huge, like – I mean sometimes it can be.

Sometimes, if you mess something up or you think you’ve failed, you might give yourself a good beatdown. But usually, it’s just these small sentences that live in the backs of our mind. And this is when it come sot us becoming more conscious and aware of what we’re really thinking.

Because we do speak to ourselves in a way that we wouldn’t speak to anyone else. If someone else makes a mistake, we might think, “Okay, well you’ll learn from it.” But if we make a mistake, we’re all over ourselves about it and we just loop over and over and over again.

The conversation that you have with yourself is the most important conversation because, when you learn to love yourself and speak to yourself with grace and with kindness, you will increase your capacity to love, your capacity to love yourself and your capacity to love others.

I really, truly believe that when we don’t love ourselves, we don’t have the capacity to full love others. It’s not that we don’t love them, but we can’t fully reach our potential, our highest capacity to show and receive love from others.

And I really want you to hear this. If you don’t learn to love yourself, if you don’t learn to have a conversation with yourself that is with grace and with love and with kindness while you are losing weight, you won’t automatically love yourself when you hit your goal weight. It just doesn’t happen.

And what will happen is you’ll hit a goal weight or you’ll come close to hitting your goal weight and then you will sabotage and you will slowly start to gain it back. This is how you stay on the diet rollercoaster. Learning to keep commitments to yourself, learning to speak to yourself in a way that is with love and kindness and grace and honesty, that is how you learn to lose weight and keep it off and in a way that feels like love.

You know, learning to change the conversation that I have with myself and learning to keep commitments to myself was some of the best work that I’ve ever done. And it doesn’t stop. I still will have a thought that Lizzie serves up that I’m failing, that I can’t do it, or doubts, or, you know, “Hey, you’re looking a little older today.” You know, all of those things.

The difference is when those thoughts come into my mind, I stop and I just say, “Not today. This is not how I speak to myself anymore. This is not the truth for me anymore.” And just by stopping and not allowing it and not thought-looping on it and not taking negative action from it, it’s just changed everything for me.

And when I watch ladies and I watch them start to transform their mindset, they start to learn how to have different conversations. It’s so amazing to me. The way they show up for others is – it’s unbelievable.

We think that keeping commitments, putting ourselves in the picture, doing things for ourselves, speaking to ourselves in a way that is with kindness and with love, we think that it’s selfish, or that we have these thoughts that we don’t have the time or whatever, you know, life is so busy, and that we have to take care of and do for others.

But what I have found, when you put yourself first, when you show up for yourself, when you learn how to love yourself, the way that you treat and show up for others is like you’ve never seen before. Your capacity to love others, to show them love, to be kind to them, to just honestly love them increases.

And so, my love, I just challenge you to really think about how are you keeping commitments to yourself? And what are the conversations that you have with yourself like?

And the transformational questions for today are, number one, what are two commitments you want to make for yourself? And number two, what is the conversation that you’re having with yourself? So good, my love.

Next week, we are going to get into all things food love. I know, love, we love food, yeah? I know. We’re going to talk about it next week. Alright, my love, bye for now.

Love, you can text me. Yes, my personal number. I am so excited about this. I have just rolled this out and I am loving texting my ladies. You can send me a quick hello text at 480-605-3506, and then add me to your contact list and I will add you to my address book. Then I will send you at least a weekly inspirational text. So fun.

So, get out your phone right now and text me at 480-605-3506. I can’t wait to hear from you.

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!