Hello, welcome back to the podcast this week. Today I want to talk about something that tactically will help you create the long-term results you want with healthy eating and weight loss. And it’s something that you may not expect, especially if you identify as a woman who gets it done. You perform very highly and you love to achieve. This is something that I coach my clients on a fair amount. So I’m very excited to introduce you to this here today.
Really, the big thing I want to offer to you right from the get-go is that so many of you will think that you need to solve for your food, urges, your cravings, the desire you are having for food. Some of you will go so far to believe that you’re addicted to certain foods, which cannot be true, but really for a lot of you, you don’t need to solve for any of these things.
You just need to begin making decisions. And I want you to stay with me because sometimes as high achievers, we really can think that we’re excellent at making decisions, but actually it’s something we’re not so good at. And I’m going to explain exactly what I mean by that here, because a cause of emotional cravings with food for very high achieving women, it’s a very common cause of emotional cravings, is when we get stuck in indecision.
Now really what we’ll think is that we’re just taking time to make a decision that we’re being thorough, we’re being prepared, we’re thinking things through. But a lot of the time as very high achieving women, we will actually keep ourselves stuck in indecision because when we think about where our skills lie, many of us know how to figure things out.
We are the problem solvers of the world.
So we know how to plan, we know how to delegate. It is an art form that we have mastered. But this is actually the problem that’s so many of us do not see because for most of us, this is actually us not making a firm decision. It’s us sitting in indecision. And I want you to consider that you’ll know if this is you, is if you find you never stop planning and problem solving, you feel like you are always in that state.
So you feel like your brain space is always being taken up by a collection of unmade decisions, all of the to-dos and loose ends in your life, our accumulating over time. And you’ll also know this is you. If you feel like you are in a constant state of overwhelm and burnout. For a lot of you, you may also find you are in a state of resentment or frustration because from this indecision, you are thinking that you don’t have any time for yourself, you have too many demands, and we’ll just find ourselves in this self-pity state at times with it.
Now, this is a product of indecision, and I want you to really find how this is true for you because the differences, you are excellent at solving problems. No question. This is a skill that you have. What you are not as skilled at potentially is letting a problem be solved for. So I’m gonna say that again. These are two very distinct things. You are excellent at solving problems, but you are not as skilled at letting a problem be solved.
So here’s what happens. This is when you will ruminate and overthink every decision rather than making them firmly and quickly. This is when you will explore every possible option to make a decision and solve a problem, and you will explore this over a lengthy period of time. This is when making decisions and that process stays in your thoughts and your brain space rather than removing them.
You’re always having a dot, dot.in your brain that’s constantly going and making these decisions rather than putting a period at the end when your decisions are made. See what I’m saying here? It’s a very distinct concept. Why this is a problem when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss is because thinking in this manner where you’re sitting in problem solving mode and indecision actually stimulates an ongoing stress response.
So I want you to think about your primitive brain has a security system where it’s constantly scanning for danger. It’s what it does, it’s how it keeps us alive when we are in in decision. So we have our list of to-dos and loose ends that we haven’t completed and haven’t solved for in our brain. Your brain will never turn off that security system because it will perceive these things as still being necessary to solve for your safety.
It’s how the brain works. It constantly wants to solve from that stress security system for perceived problems because our brain primi sees problems as perceived danger that it needs to protect you from. So if you’re having unmade decisions and unsolved problems running in your head constantly, your brain’s security system is constantly going to initiate this ongoing stress response to protect you.
And you’ll feel like that you’re constantly helicoptering your life and you’re constantly solving for these perceived problems. This is what leads to ongoing cravings. You will constantly desire food, you will constantly wanna suppress the stress vibration that you’re having, and you’ll experience a lot of urges to overeat. And I want you to consider that being in this state doesn’t feel very dramatic or invasive or heightened.
This is an ongoing constant stress response. So again, if you picture a security system, it’s not thinking that there’s anything that’s abnormal or extreme about it, constantly scanning for this danger.
It just thinks that it always needs to stay on because there’s all of these unmade decisions in your mind. So it’s never turning off. Now, lower food cravings happen. This is the goal. This happens when you lower your stress levels. You cannot lower your food cravings from a place of high stress. If you try and eat healthy and lose weight from high stress, you’re going to be fighting your cravings and you’re constantly going to feel like you’re working against yourself.
Here is something that is very humbling for us to know. As the high achievers and high performers, your primitive mind, your stress response and your fear-based responses will always be stronger than you. They’ll always be stronger than your logical decision making because that is how they are designed, and you can fight them from a place of high stress where you’re having a high stress response and you’re forcing yourself to make healthy eating decisions, not overeat and lose weight, but this is going to be doing it from that path of high resistance where this is the hard way and it’s gonna require a lot of your effort to control your food decisions from a place of high cravings and high stress.
So what we want to do, and this is what we do in own your eating habits, is the first thing is we lower your stress levels in all areas of your life. So we uncover where your biggest stressors are, whether that’s in your personal life, your marriage, your work, your home life. We find that and we lower your stress levels with it. We bring down that stress response, lower the cravings, so then you’re able to make healthy eating decisions without fighting your body to do so.
This is always the goal, and for a lot of the women I coach specifically, they will come to the coaching having high stress because of all of the unmade decisions that they’re constantly having in their mind. So that means one of the skills that you must learn to lower the stress response, reduce your cravings and lose the weight permanently is making decisions.
You will need to master the skill of making decisions. And luckily for us, it is a simple skill to develop, and the key is understanding the difference between making a firm decision where it’s done and it’s out of your brain and indefinitely deciding. You need to understand the difference between firm decisions and indefinitely deciding one has an end point and one doesn’t.
And where we get ourselves into trouble as performers and high achievers is indefinitely deciding. We’ll equate that to problem solving and we’ll equate that to being more responsible in getting it done and being the leader. And it is none of these things. It is not more productive. You do not make better decisions. You are just stimulating an unnecessary stress response in your body and you’re working harder, not smarter.
So the key is to always set a firm boundary with yourself where you commit to deciding quickly, as in you give yourself a short period of time to make a decision and you set a boundary that you will not do more research, consider more options and ruminate more on that decision.
Because what you will also decide is you will decide to have your back no matter the result from that decision, and you’ll be willing to evaluate objectively and neutrally the results of that decision. Because here’s why we have resistance to making decisions. This is the truth is because as the performers and high achievers, we do not want to make mistakes. We want to feel accomplished. We want to feel deserving of success.
We want to feel enoughness. And so a lot of the time, that’s why we become high achievers. That’s why we develop this demeanor is we do not want to make mistakes and we have a very low tolerance for our humanness. And so we have a lot of gifts when it comes to our type A qualities and they serve us in a lot of ways, but we need to be careful because a lot of the times we will convince ourselves that we have the ability to not make mistakes, and this is a lie we tell ourselves we will always make mistakes, but what can happen is to avoid the reality of that where we’re a human who does make mistakes, we’ll just not make decisions, and we’ll spend more time problem solving and figuring it out and researching, and we’ll convince ourselves that we’re being productive when we’re not being productive and getting closer to a result.
We’re just avoiding doing it wrong. I want you to think about this. We will need to stop avoiding making mistakes, especially when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss, because the truth is, mistakes are the breadcrumbs to your progress. They are the only way you create permanent results where you leave no stone left unturned. You cannot skip the mistakes we need you to make in your journey to healthy eating and weight loss because what you are defining as mistakes is actually just you learning how you tick.
It’s you learning what works for you and what doesn’t work for you. You are personalizing the experience of making decisions, and you’re equating them as mistakes because of what you’re making them mean about you. And what most of you, because I have a high achieving brain too, and I coach all of the clients with this mindset, is when you make a decision where you don’t create the desired outcome, you believe I am a failure or I failed.
This is not reality. This is not true. This is you attaching your self worth to the process of making decisions. And so what we will do to protect ourselves is we will become the planners, the over analyzers, the ruminators, and we will work a lot harder in our positions at work or with healthy eating or with anything else in our lives to avoid making a firm decision because we do not want to go through the emotional experience of shame.
We feel when we don’t get a a desired outcome. This is what leads us to indecision, but indecision will strongly increase your cravings with food because indecision stimulates that stress response in own your eating habits. This is what we help you solve for because our clients evaluate their progress every week. So they make firm decisions, they take action on those decisions, and then they evaluate what went well and what didn’t go so well.
It is a part of the process, and this program is really focused on bringing each client into total leadership energy with their eating habits and weight loss, total responsibility because healthy eating and weight loss is a lifelong relationship that you will have. It’s never just gonna be done and checked off on your list, although it can feel that way when you learn this process, but you will always have to be meeting those needs.
And so in order to do that, what our clients do to put it the most simply is they build the skill of doing it wrong. They build the skill of making mistakes, but what they’re really doing is they’re making quick decisions, making mistakes quickly, and then making new decisions as quickly as possible after that. So they go through the process of decisions, failure evaluation more quickly, so they create their results.
What’s happening for those of you in indecision is you’re making decisions, doing it wrong, not evaluating, and then continuing to not make decisions, , so you’re not progressing forward. This is what I want you to see. It is the most important part of all of this, and I want you to hear me. It’s not you ever doing it wrong that stops you from creating the results you want. Mistakes are not a problem. You doing it wrong is never a problem.
What creates a problem is when you’re unwilling to keep making decisions after you do it wrong. So what happens is the fact that you make a decision and don’t create a desired outcome is not a problem. It’s part of the process and it’s expected. When it becomes a problem is when you take that moment, you personalize it, and then you stop making decisions and taking action.
Know that distinction, it will completely change the way you approach the results in your life because what happens when you’re unwilling to do it wrong is you keep yourself stuck in indecision. You will not take high quality action and create your results from indecision. What will happen is you’ll do a lot of problem solving. You’ll do researching, learning, consuming information.
You’ll read books, listen to podcasts, do all the things, but there’s never implementation where you’re making firm decisions and moving forward. I highly recommend if this resonates with you, I do this for me too. I do not want you to word all of these things as problem solving anymore because that’s not what you’re doing. You’re not making decisions or taking action, you are not implementing, and I really encourage you to set this boundary with yourself because it makes it so much more clear.
We don’t want you to not make mistakes because those are inevitable and it’s time. As high achieving women, we really understand that we need to stop lying to ourselves to think we can possibly do it better than every other human. Even though it feels true a lot of the time, it’s not the case here. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to do it wrong. You are going to make the wrong decisions, but that is not a problem. What we want is for you to take action.
We want you to evaluate your progress, and we want you to move forward because when you’re willing to do it wrong and make those wrong decisions, you become a decision maker. You become a leader, and you take total responsibility for your results with food and body because you’re not tying your personal worth to your progress. It’s total emotional maturity where you’re able to step back, notice the decisions you made, evaluate them from a clean place and move forward.
This is the state you need to be in to eat healthy long-term and lose the weight permanently. So I’m so glad you were able to be here with me today. Thank you for listening, and I will talk to you next week.