Your expectations are killing your results! When it comes to lasting weight loss, the majority of my clients have bad expectations that cause them to self-sabotage and eventually, start over in their journey.
Many individuals have a dieter's mindset. This mindset is a result of doing different diets that teach you that you should see fast weight loss results. If you don't see fast results, then what you're doing isn't working.
This dieter's mindset causes you to ultimately quit, give up and start over again.
By far, this mindset is the most detrimental things that gets in the way of individuals being consistent with their health habits and calorie deficit for weight loss.
The majority of women over 35 who I see in my nutrition practice don't have the basics down. I've spoken about the basics in several previous podcast episodes.
Again, the basics include eating adequate protein and fiber, daily movement (or walking), strength training, sleep and eating at maintenance calories.
In my nutrition practice, I've rarely seen a client who was doing these things. These basics are what I call the pre-work to losing weight. If your goal is to lose weight permanently, this pre-work is necessary to ensuring you do not gain weight back again.
Maintenance in particular is what most individuals mess up. This is the biggest challenge to individuals in my opinion. Everyone can lose weight, but most cannot keep it off.
I stress to my clients, the importance of practicing maintenance before working on weight loss. This will help them in the long run keep the weight off.
However, the impatience and bad expectations for how quickly someone can learn and change their habits often cause women self-sabotage and give up.
In this podcast episode, I share two client examples of how unrealistic expectations cause women to feel bad which can lead to failure.
I also talk to you about your mindset and whether or not you would quit your job after making a mistake.
When it comes to nutrition, for some reason the mindset is different. We would never be on or off with or jobs, but with weight loss and health goals the mindset is different.
You will learn in this episode why your mindset and expectations must change if you want permanent weight loss!
In this Dish on Ditching Diets Podcast Episode, You Will Hear:
- Typical Dieter's Mindset
- How Your Expectations Are Bad
- Why You Need To Build The Foundation of Your House First
- Why Your Mindset Is Sabotaging Your Progress
- Your Mindset With Your Job vs. Nutrition
- How Mistakes Are Part Of The Process
- Dieting Conditioning That Makes Expectations Unrealistic
- A Client Who Had The Why Bother Mindset
- Another Client Who Missed All Her Progress
- Little-Known Secret To Achieving Permanent Weight Loss
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
- Fix Your Hormones
- How Stress Makes Your Fat
- How Weight Loss Works
- 7 Rules To Achieving Your Best Body
- Optavia - The Most Dangerous Diet
- Scale Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss
Your Expectations Are Killing Your Results Podcast Transcript
Today we're talking about expectations and how your expectations are killing your results. Especially the times when you think nothing’s working. When you start to think isn't working, this diet, this program, this weight loss plan, this thing isn't working.
Which always leads to thinking I’m never going to get there, I screwed this thing up the other day, why isn’t anything happening yet, I’ll probably never be able to do this anyway. Why bother!
Often your own unrealistic expectations are killing your progress when it comes to getting healthier, getting leaner and I'm sure you've experienced this before.
You start taking better care of yourself, you're doing healthier things for yourself.
Maybe you're now going to the gym, maybe you're going on daily walks, maybe you're focusing on eating the right amount of protein, maybe you're trying to simply add fruits and vegetables to the meals you currently eat, maybe you're watching your portion sizes closer or tracking your calories or just writing down what you eat.
But then somewhere along the way your mind starts to scare you and you start to think to yourself it's not working, nothing's happening, or why aren’t results happening fast enough?
Why should I bother continue trying, nothing's happening it's not happening fast enough why should I bother?
Then you quit or you slowly stop doing the things you know you should be doing which leads to you feeling guilty about why you’re not doing them and then eventually you stop doing them altogether.
I have done this myself in the past and I've seen clients in this cycle many times.
You start taking better care of yourself and you logically know that the things you are doing are healthy. You're creating healthier habits for yourself.
You’re upgrading your choices and habits but instead of feeling proud of yourself you begin to think it's not working, and you start to throw yourself under the bus.
And THAT thinking makes you feel hopeless, anxious, and defeated. Then eventually you think to yourself why should I bother? Why should I continue?
Then you sabotage yourself and you give up so you stop doing the healthy things you were doing for yourself. Later, at some point later on in the future, you decide you need to get yourself together so you shop around for another diet.
And round and round on the merry go round of dieting you go never getting the permanent lasting change with your body that you really want.
For some women, they even start to believe that something mysterious is going on with their hormones. A lot of ladies will tell me this.
They tell me they think they have a hormone problem but then I start to see that their habits are very inconsistent. There's a lot of extra calories coming from snacking and alcohol, lack of protein, lack of fiber, lack of strength training, lack of daily movement, lack of proper recovery and sleep.
I spoke about this in podcast episode 76 about the concept of fixing your hormones. Some women think that there's a hormone issue going on and sometimes hormones can be getting in the way, but most times they too have this mindset of why bother, nothing's working, my hormones are the problem, nothing works anyway.
This is what’s called a fixed mindset. This is a mindset problem. This is an expectation problem and it’s the number one thing that causes women to quit and fail.
I’m going to explain to you how your mindset is the problem and how your expectations are killing your progress towards reaching your goals and I have a few client examples to help illustrate this for you.
I'm also going to share with you a big little-known secret about losing weight permanently. I said permanently because you are done with losing weight and gaining weight and doing that merry-go-round of dieting, right?
I hope you're nodding your head in agreement because I need you to commit to the permanent part and I'll chat more about that in a bit too. But before we get to the meat and potatoes of today's podcast, I have a favor to ask of you.
Would you please pause the podcast and go into apple podcasts or wherever you're listening to this podcast today and leave the podcast a five-star review with a short comment if you’ve been enjoying it and finding it helpful. This helps other people find it who are struggling like you are!
So, first I want you to imagine this. What if your child or a child you knew was learning to play an instrument and after two months they said why should I bother I'm never going to be able to play this instrument? What are your thoughts about that?
Do you think that that child's expectations are realistic, or do you think that child's expectations are unrealistic? What would you say to that child? I want you to think about this and we're going to circle back to this a little later on.
OK so now for the meat and potatoes of the podcast! Here's the first client example I want to share with you. I had a client come to a coaching call a few months ago and she didn't have a food journal.
So, if you're not aware I have all my clients keep written food journals or have them track calories.
This way I can see how clients are fueling their bodies. See how consistent they are with their daily habits, and it also gives me a peek into their emotions and mindset because they not only track what they eat.
They track what they did well, what they need to work on, sleep, stress, bowel movements and they journal their emotions.
I believe women struggle with weight loss because of their mindset and not knowing how to deal with their emotions. Women have a lot of emotional and stress triggers which drive them to eat or not to eat and then we get into these cycles where we're either eating too much or we're eating very little and then we overeat.
I know a lot of women think that there's a mysterious hormone issue going on, but most cases I've seen in my nutrition practice throughout the nearly ten years that I've been doing this has not been the case for the clientele that I have seen.
Most of them have not consistent with their habits, have been confused about what to eat, they’re not eating sufficient protein and fiber balanced meals to keep their blood sugar stable, not daily walking, not strength training. They have not been doing what I call the basics.
And now perimenopause or menopause symptoms make it feel harder for them to do those things. The symptoms interfere with doing those things.
Emotions are heightened, making women more sensitive to stress so while you may have been able to willpower your way through a diet in the past, now your hormones are fluctuating.
It’s harder for you to say no to food. It’s harder for you to stay consistent because you’re more tired, your energy is lower, your sleep is poor.
Walking, strength training, eating balanced meals, getting your protein and fiber seems impossible because of the lack of energy and being tired all the time.
That was the case for this perimenopausal client. When she started working with me, she didn’t have any of these habits in place and I always communicate with clients upfront that before we can lose weight, we have to work on these habits first.
So, this client came to our call and didn't have a food journal. She told me she started tracking calories because she told me nothing is working, and I asked her what do you mean? What’s not working, and she said I'm not losing any weight and I said to her what makes you think you should be losing weight already?
Because one of the things I explained to client’s up front is like look we're going to work on building your habits and the foundation to your house first and then we're going to work on losing weight.
If you’re not eating balanced meals and sufficient protein and you don’t know what a balanced meal looks like, you’re going to be starving when you try to lose weight.
That foundational stuff has to happen first. We logically understand this in other areas of our lives.
Like we know if we want to learn how to play an instrument or learn how to play a sport that we must learn the basics, the foundational stuff first before we can play well.
But this logic that we use in every other area of our lives goes out the door when it comes to weight loss. We always think we should be able to skip the basics and foundational stuff and go right to losing weight.
I tell clients in the beginning of coaching what the plan is and if they should expect to be losing weight. I told this client this upfront she should not expect to be losing yet, but she still thought in her mind she should be losing weight.
So, when I asked her what makes you think you should be losing weight already her answer was well, I don't really know. She just really felt like it had been a few months and even though she was still working on her basics, and she knew that, she still felt she should be losing.
She thought she needed to make things go faster because she felt like nothing was working and I could tell she was feeling anxious about this too.
So, I asked her well how she thought that tracking calories would help her lose weight faster. She didn't really know.
So, one thing I want to highlight here is that oftentimes we change things too quickly or we do new things like calorie counting that we are not ready for yet.
If your coach tells you you’re not ready to count calories that would be like your financial adviser telling you, your retirement account isn’t ready for you to start withdrawing money from yet. You’re going to run out of money if you start withdrawing now.
Then you start withdrawing money, run out of money and act confused. You didn’t listen to the expert.
This is what I see a lot of women doing. Not listening, being impatient and jumping into counting calories. You have years of dieting which have conditioned you to believe that you should see immediate results. You’ve been conditioned for instant gratification.
So, one month you’re doing WW, then you’re doing NOOM, then you’re trying calorie counting, then you’re jumping over to macros, then a shake program, then Optavia.
You’re jumping around from program to program, thing to thing and you’re never getting consistent with one thing.
That's what this client was doing, and she had done it most her life! It’s crazy how many women don’t even realize this is what they’re doing and that what they’re doing is blowing up their results. It’s making it HARDER and LONGER to reach their goals.
You need to be consistent in order to lose weight so if you don't really know how tracking calories or whatever new thing you’re jumping to is going to help you with your basics or make you more consistent then it doesn't make sense why you're jumping around like that.
This client was feeling desperate and frustrated that she wasn't losing weight yet and she had this timeline in her mind as to when she thought she should be losing weight.
In podcast episode 66, I spoke about how you should stop “shoulding” all over yourself. This is a good example of that where you think you should be losing weight.
Guess what? How quickly you can change and how quickly your body can change is not in your control. Not the way you think it is. Change is not a math formula.
Change is how well can you adopt, learn, and implement new habits. How well can you emotionally handle delaying gratification.
How quickly your mindset can get out of all or nothing thinking and perfectionism and accept that this is a lifestyle that requires adapting a middle ground thinking and not beating yourself up for everything little misstep.
All that stuff is what’s really required for change. Not just a math formula!
Your body, your mind has its own timeline and it’s not based on what you want. This is a good example of a client seeking instant gratification and having bad expectations for how quickly she could change her habits and her dieter’s mindset.
She really had it set in her mind that she should be losing weight by a certain date and because she hadn't seen weight loss yet her immediate thought was this isn't working. Even though she no longer has cravings. She's no longer battling hunger or snacking.
She's way more consistent with how she's fueling her body. She feels better, she has more energy, she's eating more food and hasn't gained any weight and is focused on consistently eating her protein.
This client has all that positive stuff that IS PROGRESS going for her, but none of that mattered. She didn’t even see these things as progress.
It’s really fascinating how our minds immediately go to this negative thought loop this isn't working, I gotta give up, I gotta change something, I gotta quit.
Like have you ever wondered why your mind doesn't immediately say if I just keep going and do what the expert I hired is telling me to do that I'm gonna get there? I think that's a much better thought to have.
But it is really fascinating how women’s brain never go there. It’s always the bad, bad, bad stuff. But you know, women are so dang hard on themselves.
They have such high standards for themselves and those standards and self-judgment makes it very easy for you to constantly think negatively about yourself and negative about everything you’re doing and have a negative outlook on where you're going and never allow you to see where you ARE making progress.
This negativity leads you to self-sabotage. For this client, she never thought for one second about all the ways she HAD made progress that had come from the work that she had done up to this point.
None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was that she wasn't losing weight. It wasn't good enough and she was really upset, anxious and frustrated about this and now this client like so many of my clients who have been dieting since she was a teenager.
She came to me and didn't know how to eat or what to eat and I find this to be true with a lot of my clients they are so turned upside down with all these gimmicky diets that they have done that now they have no idea how or what to eat.
Dieting has a psychological impact on you and when you've done this many diets you have to first unlearn all the things you learned from dieting and learn the basics, build your foundation before losing weight.
This frustrates a lot of women, but this is what has to happen first if you want permanent change.
For this client, she was very turned upside down with food and scared of eating certain foods and this is one of the worst consequences of doing so many diets throughout your life.
It really has this psychological impact on you and she also was trying not to eat very much food she was trying to eat around 1200 calories which I explained to her in the beginning that we had to get her calories consistently to a higher level in order to create a calorie deficit.
People are always trying to eat 1200 calories, but really on average they’re eating 2000 calories. If you’re trying to eat 1200 calories but aren’t consistent with it what’s the point of trying to eat that low?
Not to mention most people can be at a higher calorie deficit and be more consistent. That was what I explained to this client in the beginning.
So, we had to spend a lot of time teaching her in the beginning how to eat because her lack of eating balanced meals, eating sufficient calories because her trying to eat so few calories was causing her to crave a lot of sugar, high caloric foods and her hunger and her energy were terrible because of all of this.
Before I go any further I want to remind you that weight loss works from having a calorie deficit. I spoke about this in podcast episode 85 – how weight loss works.
Like I said in that episode, if you follow paleo then you need to have a calorie deficit to lose weight. If you eat Whole30 you need to have a calorie deficit to lose weight. If you eat low carb or keto, you need to have a calorie deficit to lose weight.
If you fast, you need a calorie deficit to lose weight so let's take fasting as an example with fasting you're typically cutting out a meal that's usually how most people do it and if you're cutting out a meal that's how you get into a calorie deficit. You’re reducing calories by skipping a meal.
There's nothing magical about fasting from a weight-loss perspective - there are some benefits to fasting from a health perspective but from a pure weight loss perspective there's nothing magical about fasting.
I'm just using that as an example to show you that there's nothing magical about any of these ways of eating, what is magical – what does drive weight loss is the calorie deficit. So all of these diets are simply ways of eating and some of them might help you get into a deficit.
Some may not, but here is the trick. If you want to make this the last time you ever have to lose weight, then you have to find a way of eating that is satisfying to you and that you can keep doing until the day you die. Otherwise, you will keep gaining weight back.
Hopefully this is making sense to you so now that let's go back to the client example.
Remember I told you she didn't really know how to eat, and she was battling a lot of hunger and cravings and that her habits were inconsistent. She also wasn't walking daily she wasn't strength training to build muscle.
The thing is we had to work on all of that stuff first. We had to spend the first several months just working on her habits.
Unlearning diet culture nonsense that she had accumulated for years and working on strengthening her mindset. That stuff must be worked on BEFORE we can get to a calorie deficit.
It's no different than thinking about building a house. Would you ever build a house and say don't bother with the foundation I just want you to throw the structure of the house up? No! You have to have that foundation to your house if you want the house to stay up forever, right?
I think that's what a lot of women are trying to do. They're trying to skip the foundation part.
They're trying build the house which building the house is losing the weight but at the end of the day the house keeps falling because they’re not building the foundation, and this is what was really frustrating for this client is that she had to spend the time building her foundation.
Building her habits so she had this expectation that she should be losing weight which led her to this negative thinking cycle of it's not working, why bother doing all this work.
It never dawned on her to look at all the positive changes she had made. It never dawned on her to think well, headed in the right direction. I’m still making progress, even though I’m not quite where I want to be. No! Her brain never thought that.
Her brain automatically thought - it's not working, I need to change something.
I'm willing to bet that has happened to you. Many of you have this kind of thinking and it’s one of the biggest mindset mistakes women over 35 make is that they give up or they change things when they don't see that immediate progress that they expected within the timeline they had in their head.
If this is you, your expectations are killing your progress. When you change something too quickly, change the approach, go do a different diet or you give up, you are killing your progress you just killed your consistency and any progress you gained. You blow yourself up!
I had a client come to a coaching call the other day and I could tell when she joined the call that she was not in a good place. She told me she was disappointed in herself because she had been having some knee pain.
Doctor told her she couldn’t walk and she was under a lot of stress at work. She had a night of overeating pizza and felt disappointed with herself.
Here I am looking at her food journal saying sure you made a mistake one day. But what happened all the other days???
She had so many wins all over food journal. She was killing her protein breakfast, prepping her lunch, hitting her daily protein goal, she had multiple occasions of having better control around food.
I listed off to her in the call all the ways she had made progress in just the last two weeks. You know what her response was? I never even saw all those things. You’re right, I have made progress. I didn’t even realize it.
Right! Because she was so focused on the one mess up that she missed the 30 wins she had. That’s what most of you do. You have this bad expectation that you should just be perfect all the time and then you get mad that you couldn’t be perfect.
Then you blow yourself up for a mistake that you hyperfocus on and you miss where progress was made. Your expectations are KILLING your results. Someone who hyper-focus’s on the mistakes they make is going to constantly be at war with themselves.
When you are at war with yourself, does that feel good? No! It feels terrible. That’s why you quit. That’s why bail and go find a new program or diet. Because you’re focusing so much on the mistake and not at all on where you have made progress.
It’s interesting because in every aspect of our lives, we know as humans’ that mistakes are part of the human experience. Part of learning.
But for some reason when it comes to nutrition, women don’t have this expectation. They want to be perfect all of the time. And if they can’t be perfect, they’re on or off. Think about when you started your career or job. I guarantee you messed things up when you began your career.
Did you make a mistake and say I’m so off track with work, I’m just going to stop working for a while. Maybe I’ll get back to working someday.
Why is nutrition and fitness the only aspect of our lives that we view as on or off? Instead of everything else we do where we’re just adjusting as we go through it.
We accept that is the process of changing and learning. But for some reason we treat our nutrition differently.
Weight loss is about long-term consistency and habit change. You gotta have the foundation you need to be consistent with habits for a long time like 12 months as an example, but most of you have done extreme diets in the past like Optavia.
Diets like that have conditioned you to think that you need to follow the rules. You’re on or off. They also teach you that you should be seeing weight loss in 6 weeks, 8 weeks, or 12 weeks and if you don't see weight loss within that time frame you get mad, you quit and you move on to the next.
That would be like quitting your job and saying maybe I’ll get back to working again someday.
This dieter’s mindset has conditioned you to automatically think this isn't working and that makes you feel terrible and hopeless. But the problem is when you quit and move on to the next diet or thing you just blew up your progress.
Now down the road, you’re going to be starting over. How is that helping you? Whereas, if you had just kept going you would have continued to refine and adjust and would eventually get to where you needed to be.
What this client was doing was saying well I did all these other unsustainable diets in the past and I always lost weight within X amount of time and based on those unsustainable diets I should be losing weight. That’s the typical dieter’s mindset.
You can't compare what you did in the past to what you're doing now. In the past you never took the time to build the foundational habits with those other diets up front. That's why she's working with me to build the sustainable habits, so she never has to do this again and that is the mistake most of you keep making.
You have a dieter’s mindset. You've done all of these unsustainable diets and then when you attempt to do something normal by changing your habits slowly over time, you get frustrated and mad that it's not happening fast enough, or you beat yourself to a pulp for one mistake and blow yourself up by quitting or changing the plan.
You sabotage yourself because your expectations are killing your progress.
Do you know how many clients I've had just in this past year who didn't think anything was working and then we took measurements, and they lost inches.
Podcast episode 78 I talked about the difference between scale weight loss and fat loss. Most of you are so focused on the scale going down. If you only want to see the scale number go down, don’t eat anything the rest of the day and weigh yourself tomorrow.
That’s not fat loss, that’s scale loss. Scale loss is not going to lead to your pant size going down. I guarantee most of you that's what you want – you want your pants size to go down.
But you don’t understand what that means because you have the typical dieter’s mindset that says if the scale isn’t going down that must mean this isn’t working.
There is a reason that none of these conventional diet programs are teaching you fat loss because it’s not great marketing. They know the human desire for instant gratification. They know that to make sustainable change it takes time and that there is no money for them to make selling that.
People would rather have the promise of a quick fix and they prey on your emotions to get you to sign up for these things that just lead you right back to square one.
You have to stop investing so much in the scale. Your measurements, how your clothes are fitting, your health markers is what matters most. One of my clients lost 2 inches around her waist, another lost 3 inches around the bust.
Neither of them realized it was happening and they were about to give up. Can you imagine if they gave up? They would be starting all over from day one and probably doing something extreme and unsustainable like Optavia.
That’s how most women are because their expectations kill their progress. They're not measuring the right data, they're not having that long-term game in their mind and they're not seeing the progress where all the progress is happening.
The diets you have done in the past have taught you a quick fix nothing more. Nothing sustainable - you never worked on your habits first so you lost weight quickly and then you went back to your old ways of eating and you gained the weight back.
A lot of women over 35 come to me and they have done low carb, keto, a shake program, a really extremely low-calorie diet like 800 calories, HCG, Optavia, diet pills or they've even had weight loss surgery.
These women come to me and are legitimately confused about why they keep gaining weight back and they feel like they're trying so hard but they're trying hard at the wrong things.
They're trying hard at being consistent with something they can't do until they're 70 or 80 years old. They're trying hard with a shake program and then they gained the weight back because they never built the sustainable habits up front.
They jumped right to the losing weight part by doing something unsustainable but never took the time to work on their habits first.
Again, that's like building a house with no foundation and an acting confused like why did my house fall down during the storm? It fell down because you didn't take the time to build the foundation.
Yes, it's gonna take longer to build your house if you have to build a foundation first.
But here's what's really going on in your mindset. You are probably equating all of this – all these changes and healthy habits to punishment.
Because if you dread the thought of creating healthy habits for yourself like going on a walk, eating more protein, strength training, adding fruits and veggies to your meals, paying attention to how you balance your meals and that feels awful and dreadful to you, then you're equating healthy habits to punishment.
You are equating taking care of yourself to punishment! It's no wonder you don't want to do any of it.
If you spend most of the time feeling afraid of food, saying no to invitations to going out, terrified of the holidays, scared of going on vacation, scared of looking at your body in the mirror or in a swimsuit, scared that you're not going to be able to sustain any of the things that you're doing, fearing failure… that is all suffering.
You are equating healthy habits to punishment and suffering.
And I think you just get so desperate to lose weight that you think - I'll love myself so much better when I'm thinner. If I just get this weight off and get thinner then I'll work on taking care of myself.
I'll magically eat better after I lose weight. I'll magically watch my portions when I'm thinner. I'll never have a craving for sugar or overindulge in food ever again because I'll just like myself so much better when I'm thinner.
People with dieter’s mindsets think like that and all that is BS. I'm not going to say the whole word but really, it's BS.
You have proven to yourself repeatedly by doing unsustainable diets that always led you to regaining weight. You need to change this storyline in your head that you'll magically eat better and be healthier and take care of yourself if you just do something drastic temporarily to get the weight off.
You have gained weight back many times to prove that.
But women over 35 get so desperate to lose weight that they only think about losing weight as quickly as possible so they can get relief from the emotional pain and physical discomfort of being overweight.
Then they are overlooking the most important ingredient to losing weight permanently and that is creating sustainable habit changes.
Creating your foundation that is the little-known secret to losing weight permanently.
Because without building your foundation first you are guaranteed to gain any weight you lose back. What do I mean by sustainable habit changes?
Things you can repeat until you're 70-80 years old like daily walking, strength training, drinking water, eating protein and fiber with your meals, eating some vegetables and fruits at all your meals, paying attention to balancing your meals for your blood sugar.
I think many of you believe sustainable habits means restricting yourself and eating as little food as possible and never enjoying yourself.
Never having a cookie, never having a piece of bread, never having a piece of pizza, never enjoying yourself at all. You equate healthy habits to misery. It’s no wonder you don’t want to do anything healthy for yourself!
But that is not what healthy habits REALLY mean. There is middle ground so I encourage you to really do some self-reflection on what you are making habits mean in your head when you think about building healthy sustainable habits for yourself.
What is your mindset around what it means to create sustainable habits and lose weight. It’s likely you equate it to punishment and misery.
It's no wonder you don't want to do all that stuff if you immediately go to punishing thoughts like all the food you're going to have to cut out and all the time and effort it's going to take and how hard it's going to be and how long it's going to take and how much time you must take away from your family to work on yourself.
That’s all punishment. It's all punishing thoughts. It's no wonder you don't want to do any of that!
This is why I say your mindset is the most important thing to pay attention to because weight loss is not a punishment and if that is how you are thinking about weight loss and creating sustainable habits for yourself you're thinking needs to change because that thinking is poisonous and is sabotaging you.
Let's say you do a shake program. You lose weight in 12 weeks but now you have no idea how to eat.
Do you know how many brilliant successful women come work with me in my practice who've done a shake program or another one of these diets or even who have had weight loss surgery and are totally confused about why they gained the weight back because they never changed their habits? A lot!
They got consistent with drinking shakes but went back to how they were eating before the shake program. It's not a mystery why you gained the weight back if you don't work on creating your foundation and building those habits first.
The dieter’s mindset is always I failed. I just need to go back to that diet because it worked quote-on-quote. I just need to go back do it again and be better. Be more disciplined.
This is always the mentality. Did it ever dawn on you that the diet, the approach failed you? Why would you automatically assume you were the failure when it’s likely the approach was setting you up to fail from the start.
So what would you rather do? Delay weight loss a little bit so you can work on building sustainable habits first little by little so you can keep weight off the rest of your life?
Or would you rather lose weight as quickly as possible than gain it back in a few months or a few years and then have to find another diet to try to lose weight again?
You know what the right answer is, but you must reconcile this with your brain. I know your brain thinks it's a brilliant idea to lose weight as quickly as possible because it's instant gratification.
But your brain is not rational when it gets emotional and desperate. It's like a drug addict. It's not rational. It's not thinking right. You just want that instant gratification and will do whatever it takes even though it's not rational.
Your way of thinking is no different when you say I need to get this weight off as quickly as possible I'm going to eat these gross Nutrisystem meals and bars, drink these yucky Isagenix shakes, only eat 800 to 1000 calories, count Weight Watchers points obsessively, take diet pills because I need to get this weight off or else!
Could you imagine speaking to your best friend or children that way? You need to do this or else! That's all punishment! Ladies, losing weight is not a punishment.
Taking care of yourself is not a punishment. It's something to feel proud of and when you stop restricting and thinking it's all about restricting and punishing yourself and being perfect all the time, the journey of losing weight changes.
The pressure is lifted off your shoulders and it's so incredibly freeing.
Building your foundation, building your habits first. This is a little-known secret to achieving permanent weight loss.
I know what a concept! Instead of obsessing overweight loss ask yourself how can I do something good for myself today? Something healthy for myself? How can I hit my protein goal?
Maybe that’s the only goal you focus on first. Then once you master your habits that's when you focus on a calorie deficit if you haven’t lost some weight.
There's a lot of nuance and factors that influence how long it's going to take to lose weight, but I want you to hear me very clearly and you may not you may not like what I'm going to tell you but I'm going to tell you it anyways because I'm always going to tell you the truth.
You must expand your time horizon.
Weight loss is going to take as long as it's going to take. I talked about this in episode 72 with the 7 rules to achieving your best body. Expand your time horizon. Six months to 12 months of consistently executing the basics and when I say consistently, I mean 75-80% of the time.
The majority of my clients do not have the basics in place before coming to work with me so that's why I'm pointing this out.
What so many of you do is something for 3 months and then you quit or change everything because you think it's not working quote-un-quote and what I'm saying to you is that THAT dieter’s mindset is exactly what's killing your progress.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
Your mindset is killing your progress. You are comparing a quick fix diet you’ve done in the past to something sustainable you’re trying to do now. You can't compare the two. They are not comparable.
If you haven't mastered your foundation yet because you still equate healthy habits to punishment and misery and are doing restrictive things with food your expectation that you should be losing weight is an unrealistic expectation.
You're beating yourself up and telling yourself how you failed another diet and not allowing yourself to see where progress has been made when it was your own faulty expectation that was wrong in this first place. That was what I told this client.
Do you know what started this with this client? A friend of hers did Optavia and lost weight rapidly and my client immediately compared herself to her friend. She got upset that she wasn’t where her friend was. That’s what sparked all of this.
If you haven’t listened to episode 83 that I did on Optavia, I really encourage you to listen to it. Optavia is one of the most extreme diets out there and from my perspective I believe it's a dangerous diet.
It puts your metabolism in a position where it’s very easy gain weight later on. It puts you in a very easy position to gain a lot of weight back.
Yet this client was comparing herself to her friend. She wanted to be where her friend was even though logically, she knew Optavia was a bad idea.
Ladies you have to stop comparing yourself to other people. If you are comparing yourself to others stop doing that. Your body is your body. You are a unique individual. You can't compare yourself to another person.
Comparison is always a thief. If you want to make this the last time you ever lose weight stop comparing yourself and keep your head focused on the long game. Keep your head focused on where progress IS happening.
It's you versus you. It's not you versus your friends or you versus your family or you versus your coworker. Your body is on its own timeline. You are on your own timeline of change. Remember what I said at the beginning about your child learning to play an instrument?
Would you tell that child after two or three months – yeah, kid you're a failure you're never going to be able to learn how to play a song. You keep hitting the wrong notes.
You should just give up. No!!!
You logically know that that child has to learn how to read the music, then they have to learn where the notes are on the instrument, then they have to learn where to place their hands on the instrument, then they have to learn all the coordination to playing the instrument and reading at the same time, playing smoothly and in-tune.
You know that there is all that foundational stuff that has to come before they can get good at playing.
You know this yet when it comes to losing weight and creating healthy habits for yourself you don't apply the same logic.
We see what our friends, our family and our coworkers are doing, and we convince ourselves that this isn't working.
I told you about the clients earlier who thought it wasn't working and then when we took their measurements, we saw that they were actually losing fat right because measurements show fat loss which the scale doesn't always show.
Those clients guess what they went on to eventually lose 25 pounds one of them and the other one lost 15 pounds.
Imagine if they had given in to the dieter’s mindset of it's not working they never would have lost 25 and 15 pounds.
They would have sabotaged their consistency because of bad expectations, felt like a failure and round and round on the weight loss merry-go-round they would have gone for the rest of their life. Usually, the moment when you think it's not working is the moment you must keep going.
And the other part of why your expectations are killing your results that you must understand ladies is your metabolism if you have lost weight and gained weight back most of your life you've been a yo-yo dieter then you must reset your expectations that it's just going to take longer to see weight loss.
I'm not saying that to be a downer. I'm saying that because I want your expectations to be realistic. It's not impossible to lose weight. It's going to be a little harder and it's also harder to change when we’re older because we are more set in our ways.
If you're a woman over 35 it is really important for you to understand that since the age of 30 have been losing muscle mass each year as a result of declining reproductive hormones.
That is part of the aging process. It's a normal part of the aging process that reduction in muscle mass means your metabolic rate is slightly decreasing year over year which is why protein and strength training become very critical to combat weight gain as we age.
Year over year the muscle loss is a small amount but over the course of 10, 15, 20 years it becomes a lot and it's the reason why I see so many menopausal women in my practice who suddenly feel like they gained so much weight overnight.
It’s because they’ve lost a lot of muscle mass and if you're not working to build and retain muscle, it's going to sneak up on you.
Couple that with if you've done diet after diet after diet after diet after diet after diet then your thyroid and metabolic rate have slightly down regulated from all of that too.
It's like all of these things coming at you yet you and your brilliant mind still think well I lost weight within X amount of time doing this quick fix diet or restrictive thing that was unsustainable it should work the same way this time.
No! Your expectation is wildly unrealistic. Slow down take a big breath, work on building your foundation, building and retaining and truly what's the hurry?
I want you to really think about this. Why are you in such a hurry to lose weight as fast as possible and why do you think you need to see physical results to assure you're doing something healthy for yourself?
You have all this evidence that you're doing healthy things why do you need to see your pant size go down within a timeframe to have confidence that what you're doing is the right thing. Why do you need your pants size to go down rapidly to feel proud of yourself?
I think that is a bigger problem for a lot of women. If you can't feel proud of yourself for going for a walk or moving your body, if you can’t feel proud of yourself for eating more fruits and vegetables, hitting your protein, etc. then that's a bigger problem and that tells me you're really hard on yourself.
You have a lot of judgment about yourself and expect yourself to be perfect.
That needs to be worked on more than anything because no matter how much weight you lose if you have a problem with judging yourself, if you have a habit of putting yourself down, that's not going to go away when your pant size goes down. Oh no…
So what if what if you just slowed down? What if you just worked on building your foundation? What if you just allowed yourself to believe without any doubt with all the certainty in the world that weight loss will come if you keep going?
What if you just did that? What would happen? I know what would happen! You would be way more consistent, and you would probably start seeing change. It’s just a question of time, persistency and patience. You can't Amazon prime your body it just doesn't work that way.
I know we live in this world of you know instant everything. Instant gratification of everything. We've got Google, we've got phones, we've got all these instant things.
So the question is are you willing to give up instant gratification and the dieter’s mindset that you need to restrict and punish yourself? Are you willing to give up your habit of beating yourself up and being so hard on yourself?
Because I think the greatest gratification you can gift yourself is building strong sustainable habits you can execute for the rest of your life, and I know if you do that you will lose weight.
It may take some work getting into a calorie deficit, but the calorie deficit will be easier with having a foundation first and you will never have to lose it again.
But if you have the dieter’s mindset of how hard it is to practice new habits and how miserable it is, I want you to think about this.
Isn't the reward of losing weight, making peace with food, feeling confident in your own skin and no longer carrying around this mental burden worth it? Isn't that worth it?
Would you tell your child that the work they're doing to get into college so they can get a good job someday isn't worth it? Would you tell your best friend don't bother going on a walk today or eating anything healthy it isn't worth it?
I'm guessing you would never say those things to your child or your best friend so you my friend need to reconcile with yourself why you have higher standards for your children and friends then you do for yourself.
I can tell you from personal experience from losing my own 80 pounds and from all the clients I've worked with who've lost weight the sustainable way, it is so worth it and you're so worth it.
But your expectations are killing your progress and your dieter’s mindset is a huge part of that problem. Take a hard look at where you are in your journey and ask yourself whether or not your expectation is truly realistic or are you just falling victim to your own negative thinking and habit of beating yourself up and giving into your need for instant gratification?
I think that is worthy of you investigating and looking into because if you want to figure out your weight then that's the thing you need to start changing your perspective on.
Talk to you soon!
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