Are these 5 thoughts stopping you from losing weight? In this Dish On Ditching Diets podcast episode, I'm sharing 5 common thoughts keeping you stuck in your health and fitness journey.
Humans have approximately 80,000 thoughts daily. That's a lot! The majority of those thoughts are the same thoughts you had yesterday or previous days.
The things you think repeatedly, day after day, become your beliefs. Beliefs can empower you or make you feel demotivated.
Your beliefs directly impact your actions, motivation and consistency. All things important for permanent weight loss.
If your mindset is keeping your stuck, then no amount of weight loss information will help you in your weight loss journey.
This is the common problem I see with my clients in my weight loss coaching program.
They know a lot about food, nutrition, exercise, calories and weight loss. Yet, they are stuck and not seeing results.
Why?
Because they're inconsistent, not feeling motivated and do not have routine actions and habits.
Also, their beliefs are rooted in negativity: I can't do this, it's not possible for me to lose weight, I'll never figure this out, I'm just destined to be overweight.
Those are just a few examples of negative beliefs I have seen my weight loss clients struggle with over the years.
Listen to the full podcast episode for the 5 thoughts stopping you from losing weight and what to do about them!
In this Dish on Ditching Diets Podcast Episode, You Will Hear:
- 5 Thoughts Preventing You From Losing Weight
- How Your Mindset Impacts Your Results
- The Most Common Reason Why I See Clients Stuck
- Why Just Knowing The Calories, Food, Exercise Part Is Not Enough
- How Feelings Based In Fear Keep You Stuck
- Changing The Thoughts Stopping You From Losing Weight
Never Miss An Episode! Subscribe to the Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast on Apple, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify or Amazon Music
Related Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast Episodes
- The Diet Mentality
- Doing Everything Right & Not Losing Weight
- How To Lose Weight Fast
- All Or Nothing Mindset
- What Really Causes Weight Gain For Women
5 Thoughts Stopping You From Losing Weight
Hi Friends!
Today we’re talking about the 5 thoughts to stop thinking to lose weight. These are 5 things I see commonly with my clients: women over 35 that I coach in my nutrition practice.
I have experienced myself prior to losing 80 pounds myself in 2009.
These 5 thoughts are things you no longer should allow yourself to believe.
I always share with you how important self-talk and mindset is to getting healthier and losing weight.
You can know everything there is know about losing weight, calories, nutrition, exercise, but if you don’t have the right mindset and self-talk to go along with those things it will be hard.
This is the most common reason I see with clients why they’re stuck in their journey or haven’t yet succeeded.
They know so many things from all the diets they’ve done but they’re stuck.
They get stuck with their own stinky thinking and quite often they don’t even realize it.
They believe there’s something wrong with them. They just can’t do it. They just don’t have willpower or don’t want it enough.
When I’m working with my one-on-one clients, one of the things I focus on with them is how they think.
I have some clients who I never have to talk to them about how they think, but the majority of them I do have to spend a significant amount of time coaching them on their thinking.
Because how you think is going to be how you lose weight and how you keep it off.
For example, if you feel defeated, hopeless, afraid, scared – that will have you showing up in a way that sucks for you.
No one loses weight and keeps it off permanently by keeping their old thoughts based in fear.
Fear around food, fear around weight, fear around the scale.
Because if you just keep thinking like you always have with these fear-based thoughts, but the only thing you do is try to eat really good then you all this fear stressing you out. Guess what?
Most of us eat because we don’t like feeling stressing out and afraid.
If you’re stressing yourself out all the time with a bunch of stinky thinking that no one has ever told you to watch out for, then you are creating the perfect environment to have more urges to eat.
See more opportunities to eat.
Versus someone who’s going about losing weight but not allowing these scary thoughts to take their thinking all the time and stress them out.
Ok so here’s the 5 thoughts.
Number one. I can’t do this.
A lot of you think this and I’m sure several of you will be like, let me argue with you Megan about why I’m such a failure. Here’s all the diets I failed.
Here’s the number of times I’ve given up.
You know what my response to that is? What are you doing? Why are you ever going to spend time trying to prove that you can’t lose weight?
Think about how insane that is! But I hear it every day. From clients or women who reach out to me wanting to know about coaching.
They always want to tell me how they’re a big, fat failure. Here I am talking to you about how to lose weight, but then you go to bat for your failures.
It’s like you don’t even want to consider the possibility that you could do it.
You don’t want to figure out if there’s anything in your life that could be in the realm of possibility that could give you some evidence that it IS possible you could do it?
Like… listening to the podcast, watching my Instagram videos, your family wants the best for you, maybe you’re an exerciser and you exercise daily.
Why not focus on that stuff? The reasons it could be possible. Why aren’t you searching for that stuff?
From now on if you hear yourself saying I can’t do it. You need to stop yourself. I don’t care whether you believe if you can lose weight.
What I want you to understand is that every time the thought of I can’t do it comes into your head, you need to be aware that it is happening. Most of you are not aware of how often you say it or think it and it often becomes the truth for you.
This is why when I tell someone just to work on their protein, they’ll say well I can’t do that, that’s a lot more food than I’m used to eating. Rather than saying I can’t do this, say I can try this.
That one little thought of I can’t do this, is going to throw you under the bus. Always. I’ve seen it over and over my friends.
Your job isn’t to stop thinking that because you can’t control what thoughts pop up in your head.
What you do need is to stop believing it. You don’t need to believe every thought that pops into your head and react to it.
You’re in charge of what you think. You have a brain that you get to direct.
Number two - I’m worried I won’t stick to my diet.
This is another useless thought. Sitting around worrying about things does nothing. When was the last time worrying solved a problem for you? Never.
That’s the answer. A lot of you spend a lot of worrying and it feel productive, but it’s not.
Like someone will say to me, well a good mother worries. No, they don’t. You know what a good mother does? Solves problems.
Sitting around worrying is a waste of time and a drain on your emotions. All worry is – is a collection of thoughts that feel terrible. That’s it.
They don’t get you doing something. If you do something about it, it’s because you change your mind from I’m worried about it to I’m going to do something about it.
This is why when you say you’re worried you won’t stick to your diet a much better thought is I’m trying new things to see what happens. Be in the mindset of solving, not stewing.
Number three – I’m afraid I’ll be wrong.
If you’re always afraid you’ll be wrong, you’ll always be stuck with your weight and issues with food.
Nothing will change because you’ll be too afraid to try new things. I see this all the time.
People want the perfect food plan, the right exercise plan. They always want assurance what they’re doing is perfect and right.
If they can’t find the assurance, they do nothing, but this stuff requires you to do things then adjust as you go.
Trial and error is part of the process. But many will sit around endlessly searching for the right or perfect thing.
The reason why so many people are scared of being wrong or making a mistake is because you will beat yourself up after the fact if you are.
Your personal beat down does not have to happen.
Rather than just not doing anything out of fear that you will be wrong, what if you just decide you’re not going to beat yourself up if things don’t go the way you think you should and you’ll just keep going?
That’s a much better option.
What most people do is quit trying things because they’re so afraid of being wrong so then they sit around feeling afraid they’ll never lose weight.
Now you don’t have to worry about being wrong because you’re not doing anything.
The key here is you have to learn how to talk better to yourself. Just because things didn’t go right is not a reason to give yourself a beat down.
I want you to ask yourself if it were someone else in your life who made a mistake who you be so harsh and miserable towards them.
Oh wait, you wouldn’t treat them the way you treat yourself. Got it. Then that’s the thing that needs to change.
If you’re afraid you’re going to be wrong, the real thing you need to work on not allowing yourself to beat yourself up because you want to be certain you will keep going.
Anyone who’s lost weight and kept it off will tell you it did not go perfectly. It was not a linear process.
They just learned how to show up for themselves. They don’t sit around trying to figure out how to just stick to the plan.
The key is to figure out how to want to do the plan. Want to show up for yourself.
Build love and enjoyment of taking care of yourself and working the process where it’s not full of judgements and resentment, fear or worry.
Number four – I wish I didn’t eat that.
This one is straightforward. Wishing something didn’t happen in the past feels terrible and it’s a waste of time.
Is there anything good to come out of sitting around wishing you hadn’t eaten something? No.
It feels terrible! Anytime you catch yourself thinking this, all you need to think is and that’s a waste of my time.
We’re moving on. You don’t need to find a happy thought or think anything else. Just say – that thinking is a waste of my time and we’re moving on.
Here’s the other part of this. Many of you still think there are good and bad foods. Diet foods and non-diet foods. Weight loss foods and non-weight loss foods.
Once you start seeing all food as just food and not labeling it as good or bad, you no longer have these moments of feeling guilty when you eat something, and the beat ups stop.
The other thing is many people are not aware of what is going on internally with themselves all day long leading to the I wish I didn’t eat that.
Let’s say you’re at work and something got your feathers ruffled at work. Then all day long you’re ruminating over it, feeling bad, embarrassed and stressing yourself out over it then you might even play out wild scenarios in your mind about losing your job or how everyone’s talking about you until you get home and overeat.
Then you wonder why you overate. Because you spent your entire day in stress, worry and anxiety and then you wonder why it’s so hard to eat what you planned.
It’s not that your plan is wrong. It’s that you went home and had no emotional bandwidth leftover for yourself.
It’s not about the food or your plan. It’s about handling the drama in your brain and your emotions.
Wishing you hadn’t said or done something does nothing. We’re moving on. That’s what you tell yourself.
And if it truly was so bad, then go apologize instead of ruminating over it. Or ask yourself if you’re making it out to be as bad as it really is?
It’s so important to recognize when this is going on because a lot of eating happens this way.
Number five – if the diet is easy it won’t be good enough.
The diet industry has taught us that if it doesn’t feel terrible, it must not be working.
As women we are conditioned to believe weight loss should be hard and miserable. If you do my program, you’ll find we focus on the basics.
Clients comment to me all the time how surprised they were to find they were overcomplicating certain things or hyper focusing on things that didn’t even need attention. What do you mean?
There’s no weight loss meal plan, there’s no food list, we’re not cutting out everything we love? What’s happening? You freak out! You think it’s not going to be good enough!
There is this belief a lot of women have that it has to be really hard to do or it won’t work. It has to be miserable. And usually, there’s a belief that they have to do hours of cardio too.
Some clients I’ve seen over the years try to make their plans harder. They start doing all these extra things or things I never advised them to do.
Then suddenly they’re not following their plans at all. Why?
Because they’re try to put all their old diet rules into their plan. I thought I’d add in an hour of cardio a day. I’m like where did I tell you to do that?
They’re like nowhere. So even though I never told them to do that, they have that dieter’s mentality that more is better.
More equals faster progress. They sneak it in.
They have a belief that if it isn’t hard enough it’s not going to be good enough or it’s not going to work.
So, they make it hard on themselves, so they feel comforted that if they’re doing something really hard full of deprivation that it’s going to be better.
But the problem with that is you can’t sustain that long-term. Eventually someone who does that ends up crashing and burning and then they fall off the plan and then they wonder what’s wrong with themselves.
The reason why I keep things simple with my clients is because the simple stuff works.
It doesn’t need to be complicated to work, but we all have done diets that have made us believe that it must be super complicated in order for it to matter or work.
So, if you catch yourself thinking this is must be too easy to work, change that to thinking to easy is the path to success.
I just need to put in the repetitions and be patient. Because patience is required, and as a side note, lack of patience will also cause people to make things harder.
They think if they make it harder it will speed up the process. Speeding up the process is just a recipe for failure because you will end up doing things unsustainably. Always get rid of that mindset.
If that mindset helped you, I guarantee you wouldn’t be listening to me on this podcast today. Trying to shortcut the process is always going to result in unsustainable results. And remember sustainable does not mean rigid and strict.
I think a lot of individuals interpret sustainable that way when they hear experts like myself say that word.
That’s not what it means. We are all just so used to hard diets that we have an expectation that the well losing weight and changing how I eat and move by body is going to be hard too.
It’s going to be terrible and miserable so then we make the assumption that keeping weight off forever, executing your foundational habits (strength training, eating sufficient protein and fiber, daily movement, sleep, stress management) we expect that to be really hard too.
It makes sense to our brains that doing anything sustainable is going to be really hard. If this is how you think, change that thinking. Easy is the path to success.
If it feels easy, I must be doing it right. If I keep doing the easy, basic things I’m walking myself in the direction I need to go and I just have to believe I will get there.
Ok ladies, so those are the 5 thoughts to stop thinking to lose weight.
Now, I know everything I said today probably makes sense logically, but you may not be sure how to do these things on your own.
If you need support, get a coach. Sign up for a consultation with me to see if and how I can help you. If I cannot help you, I will refer you out to someone I believe can.
When you have got 10, 20, 30 years of dieting under your belt some of these beliefs you have about yourself are really ingrained in you.
It’s difficult to think better of yourself and to believe you can do something when you have so much evidence of yourself failing. This is where getting a quality coach to help you work through these things is invaluable.
Just listen to my clients who’ve been on this podcast. They all say over and over again in those podcast episodes how the mindset coaching was so helpful to them getting on the right path and unwinding their old diet beliefs.
It's easier to believe in yourself when someone is teaching you how to look differently at yourself and at the things going on in your journey.
So if you struggle with these things, schedule a consultation with me.
The link is in the show notes. Also, if you have been enjoying the podcast. I would appreciate it if you took a minute to leave the podcast a 5-star rating and written review in apple podcasts.
Thank you for listening to the show today and I will talk to you soon!
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