Shifting Your Mindset To Lose Weight

Shifting Your Mindset to Lose Weight is key. Perfectionism, Shame, Guilt, People Pleasing, Self-Criticism often keep people stuck and prevent them from having consistent health habits and reaching their fat loss goals.

I’ve been coaching midlife women to lost weight sustainably for 11 years and consistently observe mindset being the number one thing that gets in the way of them feeling their best.

The majority of women over 35 who sign up for weight loss coaching already know what they should be doing. In fact, they tell me “I know what I should be doing to lose weight but I’m not doing it or I don’t know why I don’t do it.”

The problem isn’t that you need more nutrition or exercise information. You don’t need supplements, fancy workouts, detoxes, fat burners, or any other fat loss trick. The problem is your mindset.

I’ve spoken extensively about mindset on my podcast, the Dish On Ditching Diets, and many of my weight loss clients who have been on my podcast have said how mindset was the key for them.

Mindset isn’t quantifiable with the scale but makes a huge difference in reaching a goal like weight loss! When I speak about mindset I’m referring to the mental and emotional things that get in the way of us doing basic things to take care of our health – daily steps, strength training, protein and fiber intake, calorie or portion awareness.

I’ve seen women time and again get upset about a bad day only to down a bottle of wine and eat a bag of chips at the end of the day to self soothe. Or something happens in their day that creates more stress like their dog getting sick and having to take it to the vet or their car breaking down or their boss triggering them or their partner annoying them.

These are mindset issues. Many women use these situations as opportunities to self soothe with food and alcohol. That creates weight problems and health issues.

Learning to handle life stress and creating healthier coping mechanisms is key to creating a healthier life and losing weight. But few women recognize that these behavioral patterns are the issue. Not the nutrition or exercise.

On top of it, many women are self-critical which only reduces your motivation to do healthy behaviors. This is something I repeatedly have to coach my clients on – how they treat themselves.

Weight loss coaching is much more than just the nutrition and exercise plan – it’s all these mental and emotions issues that people often don’t recognize are the real issue. Subtle shifts in your perspective, in your thinking and in your approach are what drive the consistent, small wins that drives lasting change in your health.

In this Dish on Ditching Diets podcast episode, I share practical advice on shifting your mindset to lose weight sustainably along with the growth mindsets you need to be successful, and why celebrating small wins is key!

In this Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast Episode, You Will Hear:

• What Growth Mindset is vs Fixed Mindset
• How Self Criticism Causes Weight Problems
• The “I Can’t” Mindset
• Why Guilt and Shame Never Works
• The Mindset Shift You Need to Lose Weight for Good

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Related Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast Episodes

• Stopping Self Criticism To Lose Weight
• Nothing Works For Me To Lose Weight
• Do You Have A Dieter’s Mindset
• Little Known Secret To Losing Weight Forever
• Why Deprivation Diets Fail For Weight Loss

Shifting Your Mindset To Lose Weight Podcast Transcript

Hello friends! Let’s talk about shifting your mindset to lose weight. This concept of changing your mindset for weight loss seems vague to many women. But if you have been a long-time listener, you have heard my weight loss clients talk about how they changed their mindset during their weight loss coaching in various ways and how it helped them achieve peace with food, their bodies and made weight loss and taking care of their health a lot easier.

There are many layers to mindset I coached my clients on – guilt and shame around food, perfectionism, people pleasing, negative self-talk, your beliefs, your identity, self-criticism, how you perceive things, how you view failure, fixed mindset versus growth mindset which we are going to get into today.

Your mindset is the lens through which you see the world. It’s your environment, upbringing, people you surround yourself with. In regard to weight loss and nutrition, your past attempts at trying to live a healthy lifestyle, how you feel about that, what you tell yourself about that makes up your mindset and how you are viewing yourself.

One of the biggest things I see with clients is a lot of self-criticism and judgement. In fact, one of the first mindset lessons I work on with clients when they begin coaching with me is on self-criticism. Women are so highly critical of themselves. You are a bully to yourself and talk negatively to yourself which is exactly why you struggle with food and exercise.

I always ask my clients – would you talk to a friend like that? Of course, they say no and that right there is a major problem. Imagine walking around with a bully all day long telling you how terrible you are. Nitpicking at you for every choice you made with food. Telling you did this wrong, this not good enough, this thing not well enough.

You failed at this, why bother trying? Imagine speaking to a friend like that. This type of critical self-talk is exactly why women quit trying to lose weight and get healthier. No one wants to walk around with a bully all day.

To quiet the criticism, you quit working on your health habits, so you don’t have to hear that criticism and negativity anymore.

But what most women need to learn in their weight loss journey is how to treat themselves with kindness and compassion. This is a coaching lesson I work on with my clients right in the beginning because I know from having done this for 11 years that if this is not addressed right up front, any woman is a ticking time bomb.

The criticism and negative self-talk will kick-in, and they will quit. Even if it is a reasonable way of eating. And of course, I want my clients to be successful. For most clients I work with, their issue is not the food. It’s how they are mistreating themselves. It’s the mental stuff that always gets in the way.

As a side note, I do believe this is why women do not sign up for coaching. They fear the person coaching them is going to criticize and demoralize them. That’s not how I work and you can listen to any of the dozens of clients of mine on this podcast who have stated that I never did that.

But I do think a lot of women fear being coached because this is what they believe coaching is. A drill sergeant guilting and shaming them into eating healthy and exercising. That is not real coaching and that is not how you achieve positive behavior change.

When people shame and guilt you, you shut down and quit. It’s very demotivating. That is not effective coaching and is not what I do. I do offer my clients tough love and alternative perspectives at times and help them work through circumstances specific to their lives to help them figure out how they can do some things versus doing nothing.

But self-criticism is probably the biggest mindset issue I see women having which is why I coach heavily on this in the beginning to get ahead of it. When I have coaching calls with clients, I also don’t allow clients to start off the call telling me everything they did wrong. I know if that is where their headspace is at that they will quit.

So, part of practicing compassion and kindness is forcing yourself to see where you are making non-scale progress and giving yourself credit for practicing new skills. I’ll often say to clients tell me what you have been practicing.

Some women will still want to go into the self-criticism, and I’ll have to pull them back but by me setting up the coaching calls this way it forces you to think differently.

Honestly, that is what weight loss and changing your lifestyle is about. Thinking differently, learning to treat yourself better and no longer tolerating you putting yourself down. Easier said than done, but this will sabotage you in weight loss if it goes unaddressed and you can change your mindset over time with the right coaching.

Let’s talk about growth mindset versus fixed mindset. If you think about an obstacle or road bump, do you view it – as I can’t possibly, this is going to mess me up, I don’t know how I’m going to deal with this, I can’t or do you see it as – oh this is interesting, how can I work around this, how can I work through this?

Two vastly different mindsets, but you can change it with intention and practice.

For me this is one of the amazing things about coaching clients and seeing them transform. I like saying to them – hey, do you remember when you started 6 months ago when you faced a similar situation and fell apart vs. now and what you’re doing? You’re navigating it a lot better!

Language matters a lot too – that is something I coach clients on language a lot.

For example, “I am, I always, I never, this is what always happens, I always do this, when I get stressed – this is what I do vs. this is what I tend to do when I’m stressed and this is what I’ll try to do, I’m a perfectionist vs. I’m a person with perfectionist tendencies that I’m working on, I’m a stress eater vs. I eat because I don’t know what to do with my stress.”

Sometimes it seems annoying to have to pay attention to how you say things, but those subtle things really make a difference. It’s the idea of either looking at something as opposition – something you just can’t possibly overcome and if you do face it, you believe you’re going to fail so why bothering trying vs. opportunity.

This is an opportunity for me to try something different. If you always do something a certain way, then this is an opportunity to try something new. A growth mindset when it comes to nutrition and fitness goals is going to help you move towards those goals easier because if you’re always criticizing yourself and a negative Nancy, no one wants to hang out with that negativity all day so you will bail eventually from your goal.

Now this is not to say you’re hopeless if you have more of a fixed mindset and it’s not going to work for you. Absolutely not. If you are open to looking at things differently and getting curious and asking, how did I get here, what’s not serving me?

You will be more objective and find more solutions to help yourself. A lot of it is being more objective. If you’ve been moving through the world and noticing you throw up a lot of roadblocks and tend to stop instead of saying, can I get over this hump, go around this hump, you’re just kind of stuck there.

The awareness of that is already a win for you. Just the awareness piece is huge because now you can say oh, I recognize this is what’s going on and now let’s try something different. Look at it as an opportunity vs. a dead stop, making that shift is going to be a huge win.

Years ago, I had a client get on an airplane flying west coast to east coast and she forgot to pack protein. She got on a 4-hour flight and messaged me saying Megan, I will never do that again. I learned I need to have protein with me because I was starving when I got off the flight.

My client learned from making that mistake whereas, most individuals take that road bump and say see this is why I can’t do this. That was a mindset win for my client. This is a good example of growth mindset vs. fixed mindset.

I think if you’ve struggled with your weight and fear that you will never get it together with weight loss, I encourage you to look at other areas of your life where you have demonstrated a growth mindset. Interesting thing is all my coaching clients are women who are high achievers.

Lawyers, accountants, teachers, doctors, therapists, FBI agents, business owners – you didn’t get there with a fixed mindset. You learned from your mistakes, you pushed yourself outside your comfort zone and you achieved amazing things.

In nutrition and fitness, women tend to fall into that fixed mindset because of past failures, doing ridiculously unsustainable diets and all the BS diet advice that’s out there and what you must do to be successful with weight loss, be healthy, be happy, get toned etc.

But you can look at these other areas of your life to recognize you probably made mistakes while you were working towards those things, but you learned through the discomfort of making mistakes and grew.

You’ve been through hard things in your life. Changing your lifestyle habits can be hard and you can still do it. You can still setup the habits, boundaries and routines for yourself and make it work.

I use this to answer the question of motivation too because I always get this question of how do I get motivated, how do I stay motivated, what do I do when I’m not motivated? There are so many things you do in life that you do whether you feel motivated.

Go to work, wake up in the morning, brushing your teeth, cleaning the litter box, walking the dog, taking the garbage out, paying the bills, doing laundry. I highly doubt you are motivated and chomping at the bit to do those things all the time but how can that mindset apply to your nutrition and fitness behaviors?

I think women get so in their heads about nutrition and fitness stuff that you forget all the other amazing successes you’ve had in your life where you do have a growth mindset – where you learned from your setbacks, and you approached them in a completely different way.

Can you imagine looking at your life as a doctor – you go to medical school, pass your board exams, do your residency, spent a decade building a practice – can you imagine achieving all that and going yeah, I achieved all that, but I’m still fat.

This mindset that well all these great things have happened in my life, but I still need to lose weight. A lot of women have great lives and have achieved great things, but they don’t enjoy any of it because of this one piece of their life they’re unsatisfied with. They’re missing out on their life so much.

Since I mentioned motivation, let’s talk about busy. I frequently hear this – I should have done this when I was less busy, I’m going to do this when I’m less busy. I think there is some validity to that.

Where yes, some seasons of life are busy and that is where you need to lean into doing the bare minimums to keep you on the path of taking care your health versus the all or nothing mindset of stopping everything.

When you are crazy busy, it may not be the right time to be in fat loss, but you should still be able to lean into doing something. This was what podcast 145 is about where I talked about doing hard things and getting uncomfortable.

Most people just stop doing everything they are doing. That’s strange to me. Because how are you going to learn to take care of your health if you’re not willing to take some action steps when you are busy.

You may need to dial back certain things, but doing nothing is the same as yo-yo dieting. Women who tell me they can’t do coaching because they are too busy. You are waiting for a time that is never going to come.

You’re getting in your own way. I see people keeping themselves stuck with this mindset all the time. On one hand I get it, but also before doing nothing can you say no to some things, can you delegate some things, can you let go of certain things until a later time so you can give yourself something?

This the perfectionist thinking that some individuals get trapped in and I always like to challenge clients what is it that you actually think you have to be doing? If they say something like get 10,000 steps – I will say, can you dial it back to 4,000? It’s funny but a lot of people don’t naturally think that way.

The reality is you may not be able to fully do certain things, but even when you’re busy or don’t feel like it you still need to do certain things to be a healthy, functioning adult. A good coach is going to help you brainstorm how you can rearrange your plate or dial things back to benefit you when you are in a busy season of life.

That’s what I do with my clients so they can stay on the path. If a client tells me I can only get to the gym twice a week, I talk with them about how do we maximize that time?

Some coaches and trainers are more like you have to do these things or else. I think that is why some people also shy away from coaching because they have been burned by those approaches in the past.

All that does is reinforces an all or nothing mindset which makes people inconsistent with weight loss, so I never coach a client with a do these things or else approach because that’s not helpful and it doesn’t teach people how to do their health habits while their life is crazy.

Because that will never stop. So, learning to navigate real life with your habits and learning how to be flexible with those habits and fit something in is the goal. Not being perfect.

That said, for those of you who say I am a perfectionist – you saying you are a perfectionist is procrastination. You thinking it must be a certain way to do things. If I can’t do it all just right, then I don’t do it, or I can’t start until I know everything. That is procrastination.

Any level of hecticness, busy-ness, hectic, chaotic life that you have, you must step back and take smaller steps and be okay with one step at a time. This is how I coach my clients. Let’s just go for 10-minute walk three days a week.

Let’s just work on breakfast. We work on small, manageable steps. But people who are perfectionists don’t like that. They want to do it all just right or not at all. So, when life gets busy, they tend to fall back into this mindset of I can’t do anything because I can’t do it the way I always do it.

When you find yourself saying “I can’t, I can’t.”  Ask yourself is it really true that I can’t do anything? What could I do even if it isn’t how I normally do it? That’s a much different mindset then telling yourself you can’t do anything. The I can’t mindset feeds into your identity, your beliefs, your labels – I’m a perfectionist, I’m an all or nothing person, I’m too busy, I’m just too stressed.

Pause and think if that is really true. I would wager it’s not – you might have to pivot, adjust or dial some things back or rearrange some things or say no to somebody. There is so much power when you start doing that for yourself. There’s going to be wrenches thrown your way. Many people are too quick to go the “I can’t” path. Why can’t you? Says who?

You can say no to your family. You can say no to friends. A think a lot of people think societal pressure prevents them from saying no to things which leads me into people pleasing. Think about if you and a friend always went to coffee every weekend and your friend said to you that they couldn’t meet for coffee with you this week even though they met you for coffee 3 of the last 4 weeks.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say I’m sorry I can’t be your friend anymore. If that is the attitude your friend or family have with you, examine that. I hear all the time I don’t want to be rude; I don’t want to let them down.

Well what story are you telling yourself about that? The bottom line is you need to do things that are in alignment with what you want if your priority is to change and build healthier habits. Is it really true that everyone in my family is going to come down on you like a ton of bricks if they’re watching a show and you say I want to go for a walk? Is that what’s going to happen? Or should you maybe just do what’s in alignment with what you want and is right for you?

People pleasing is part of perfectionism because you fear what someone else might think of you. You don’t want anyone to be mad at you. You don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. You just want everything to be nice, perfect, calm and peaceful.

Because we never want to disappoint anyone, we never learn to say no, and we end up doing things we feel resentful about.

If I was going to give all of you one thing to work on regarding people pleasing, it would be to make a list of everything you’re currently saying yes to, and what on that list could you say no to if you weren’t afraid of disappointing someone or upsetting someone, because that is now the list of things you really don’t have to do. 

That is the list of things that you are doing out of fear, not because you must, but people pleasers convince themselves they must.

Along these lines I think sometimes you need to rethink taking on other people’s feelings. One thing that was powerful to me was realize that I had a habit of taking on other people’s feelings. I would think it must be my fault if someone’s upset or I need to fix how they feel.

But once I was like, they’re responsible for their feelings, I’m responsible for my feelings, it took the pressure off. If I’ve screwed up, I apologize. But they’re still responsible for their feelings. I was like, wow, I don’t have to take care of someone else’s feelings. That’s their job to own their feelings.

Going back to telling going on a walk when your family is watching tv. Is true that it’s rude to say you’re going for a walk? I mean, it’s only rude if you say it to them rudely. What’s wrong with you lazy people, go for a walk!

Why aren’t you the pinnacle of health like me? It’s only rude if you are being rude about it. It’s not rude to turn down seconds. It’s not rude to leave food leftover on a plate. It’s not rude to turn down a glass of wine. It’s not rude to bring protein or a fruit platter to a gathering. It’s not rude to turn down things you know aren’t what you truly want.  

Unless you’re really hanging out with the wrong crowd, it’s not going to be a big deal unless you make it a big deal. People pleasers tend to make habits a big deal because they don’t want to disappoint other people, and they don’t want other people to feel a certain way.

Now some family dynamics are interesting and there may be some teasing. I have seen that with a few clients. When that happens, I want you to remember that is a reflection of them.

They are expressing their difficulty with you making your health a priority by making comments to you about you making it a priority for yourself. You may have to ignore that and just go for the walk.  

Realize it’s about them and maybe health has never been a priority for them or the family. I know easier said than done. But understand it’s about their insecurities. Somewhere in there they may wish they were doing that.

The only thing you can control in those situations are your reactions. You cannot prevent people from saying bad things to you. But you can control how you react to it. If you constantly let those things spiral into mental chaos, that’s where the mindset growth needs to happen.

The more you let other people dictate your actions, the more resentment you have. Do you want to put all your energy into your sister rolling her eyes or what your uncle said at a holiday dinner?

Or do you want to put your energy into what you do have control over? It’s about handling it in a more peaceful way for you and that is a mindset win. Do what you need to do to be your best self.

To wrap this up. Listen to the tape playing in your head. Is it opportunity or opposition? Until you get your mindset fixed around these issues, you will struggle with exercise and nutrition because everything is mental first.

Long-term change doesn’t happen until your mindset changes and how you look at things changes. This is hard for everybody. It’s just a different hard for everybody. But make hard your friend – you can’t avoid hard when you’re trying to change so make hard your friend. Hard is not a bad thing.

Dwelling and complaining, looking for reasons you can’t do something or focusing on how far you have to go or how far gone you are, why you will fail, criticizing yourself – that is a fixed mindset and will keep you stuck.

Instead, look for opportunities, accept taking things slow, look for how you can do things differently, give yourself grace and compassion and practice dialing habits up and down as life happens.

That is a growth mindset and once you adopt that mindset along with dropping self-criticism everything begins to shift. I always find working with women these are the real issues preventing you from losing weight and taking care of your health. It’s not really about food and exercise. It’s your mindset and how you treat yourself that gets in the way of weight loss!