Hello there, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I’m very excited about today’s episode because we’re going to talk all about the concept of healthy eating momentum. And when we think about the concept of momentum, what I’m referring to is increasing the forward motion of your progress with healthy eating and weight loss. So really feeling like you are on the most efficient path towards your goals.
And the thing about momentum that we want to imply here is that the further you are along the path, the more efficiently you are moving on that path. So this is that concept of momentum. You can think about visually like a bolder rolling down a hill where the further it goes, the more momentum it gains until it’s making progress in the most efficient way. Now when it relates to momentum in your weight loss journey, the visual I actually love the most was shared by a friend of mine, her name Sarah, and we were talking about this concept of momentum and she brought up the analogy of a moving train.
So if you think about one of those older steam trains and how the wheels move, I’m going to say this completely wrong, but there is this horizontal bar that goes across the wheels and this bar rotates fully in a circular motion as the train moves. And when the train first starts moving, it is very slow and it takes a while for that horizontal bar to have one full rotation and the wheels are moving slowly.
And then as the train starts to pick up speed, that speed horizontal bar starts moving faster and faster and faster until that train is at its peak speed and it has reached momentum. Now, once again, this is not the most technical definition or visual here, but I hope you are still with me. What I want you to gather from this visual is that the initial movement of that train is slow.
The initial rotation of the wheels are slow because it hasn’t picked up that momentum yet, and the train has not found its rhythm. But then once the train starts moving, the rotation of the wheels becomes quicker, they become more efficient until it reaches its peak optimal speed. Now I really want to relate that to your healthy eating and weight loss progress today because the reality is to eat healthy naturally, you will need to learn new life skills.
So this is what is missing for us. When we partake in food regimens or diet protocols or just plans, we are not learning new life skills in that process. So in own your eating habits, which is my program, women who join learn how to regulate their emotions as a life skill. They learn how to tap into and listen to their body as a life skill. They learn how to make really decisive healthy food decisions as a life skill.
So these are skills and skill building must happened for you to make permanent changes. So you need to give yourself and your body the time to adopt these skills before that peak momentum can be reached. So you can think about when it comes to momentum. In my program, for example, the first turning of the wheel, which is slower could be a client learning these new skills for the first time. And then once they become masters at those skills, once they become comfortable, then that momentum starts increasing and the results become quicker in that process.
So I want to give an example of my current client. Her name’s Sandra. So she’s a client in the own Your Eating habits program and she’s been in that program for about five and a half months now. And when we started working together, she would attest to this. She was putting so much pressure on herself to perform in this program, and this is really common for very high achieving women who come into this program.
They’re really used to having to work really hard and exert a lot of effort for the goals they have, especially with healthy eating and weight loss. So she came to me with all of that energy and adrenaline and I told her like I tell all of my clients that in order for her to make lasting changes with this process, she needs to first begin lowering this anticipation pressure and stress that she was having. Because if she tries to rush her results from this place and rush her implementation of the skills that she needs to learn, her results are going to be messy.
And if we think about the train, perhaps her train would break down because she would be putting in an incredible amount of hustle and she would never reach peak momentum where her progress felt sustainable and easeful for her. If she rushed the process, she wouldn’t have the awareness that she needs to have to make lasting changes.
She wouldn’t take the time to get to know herself as an eater because you can’t hustle or rush your way to naturally healthy eating. It just doesn’t happen this way. My friends, and this is how a lot of us have tried to create results in the past. We’ll feel all this pressure and this hustle and this stress and then we’ll attempt to lose weight that way. And then we’re not giving ourselves time to create lasting changes where we learn new skills. So you need to be willing to lean back and give yourself and your body the time.
You both need to have a long-term relationship to your progress. Where you exhale, you surrender, and you have that leaning back experience. Only when you decide to do this, you will create results more efficiently and have more momentum with your progress. And this is often the biggest area of growth my clients experience in that program.
It’s them releasing that hustle mentality with healthy eating and weight loss. So if you do join, own your eating habits, you will learn to do this too. This is where you will start. But it’s important to acknowledge when we’re talking about momentum, kind of like that train analogy. The initial growth is the hardest and the initial growth for Sandra and for a lot of my clients is learning to release that pressure with healthy eating. So it’s adopting the skill where you learn to manage your stress levels, lower your cravings, lower that emotional urgency so you can have the capacity to take action long-term.
So that first turning of the wheel right, it’s a bit slower. It requires a little more effort from the train. Once that time has passed, the wheels begin turning quicker and with more ease. This is how you can think about when you solve this problem long-term and you focus on becoming a naturally healthy eater.
With Sandra’s, she’s such a beautiful example because the amount of pressure she came in with, it took her a bit to get that momentum going because this was a massive area of growth for her and it was non-negotiable for her to have these changes in her life. She needed to be willing to work to release that stress and do that first turn of the wheel, give herself that time. But once she did, everything felt more downhill to her because she was willing to give herself that first turn of the wheel to begin building momentum.
Now, here’s how weight loss fits into this because it’s really important for those of you who want to make permanent changes that your expectations are set. And what can be tough about this is when you’re committing to the long-term changes, your body often will not surrender to the weight loss you want until you commit to releasing this pressure and this stress.
So for example, for Sandra, her body was resisting weight loss because of how much pressure and stress she was putting on herself. She found herself trying to lose weight and being unsuccessful with that four years. And what I was able to show her is that so much of her problem was the stress that was being created with this area of her life. So the tough part about that that we can acknowledge is you are ready to lose weight, but that weight may not be willing to come off your body naturally until you pay your dues and until you’re willing to de-stress your body first.
And until you’re willing to learn the skill of emotional regulation, this is why this is the very first thing my clients learn and prioritize and own your eating habits because it is setting the conditions for your body to lose weight in the most healthy and long-term way.
You cannot stress your body into the weight loss you want. It will not be sustainable and your body will resist those changes. This means you will have to release any weight loss entitlement that you have. I think entitlement is a very normal thing to have. I don’t think we have to make ourselves wrong for it, but when we have weight loss entitlement, it’s this thought process where we think we deserve those changes from our body because of how much we’ve struggled. And that’s actually not true. Your body does not owe you the weight loss you want.
You owe your body the care it needs to lose that weight long term. If you have not lost weight long-term, you have not been putting your body in the conditions it needs to do so. And what I’m saying here is that first turn of the wheel right to create that momentum might be a bit slower at first than you’re used to because you’re not focused on a quick fix because you’re focused on solving this problem permanently.
But you need to be willing to meet your body’s needs and lower stress and set the right weight loss conditions with your body. So once you’ve gone through that first wheel rotation, the momentum picks up and your body releases the weight efficiently. So I hope that makes sense because momentum, in order for it to keep going and for the train not to break down, it has to be a consensual process between you and your body. So this is where long-term momentum happens and the train keeps moving.
You keep maintaining the weight loss you want. It happens when you create the momentum by partnering with your body and meeting its needs. If you are attempting to create momentum with your weight loss and it’s feeling pressuring or husty, it’s not going to work because you cannot force your body into the long-term changes you want to make with your weight. Because if you’re doing so, you’re not setting the proper conditions for your body to lose weight long-term. It must be a consensual process, which means you have to be willing to solve for your food struggles at the most foundational level.
And this is really the game changer when you’re willing to make these long-term changes and go through that full first rotation of the wheel. I.
Like to to think of it like paying our dues and establishing trust with our body that we’re going to treat it differently because that’s the thing about solving this problem for the last time. It is making a promise to your body that you’re going to stop forcing it into the changes you want to make with it. It’s setting that higher standard because once you’ve established this with yourself and your body that you’re going to give it the time it needs, your body’s gonna start opting into the changes you want to make with it.
So for example, with Sandra, she’s such a great example of this. She really made a promise to herself to focus on the long-term changes and she spent a period between two or three months in the program just focusing on building the skill of emotional regulation so she could lower her stress and relieve this pressure.
What this did is it lowered her cravings and it lowered her urgency, not just with food, but in other areas of her life. She felt a lot less reactive in her life. So then when she was willing to go through this full first rotation of the wheel, then everything got easier for her because she removed so much of the stress from this process, her body felt more equipped to lose the weight and she paid her dues. Now, Sandra would want me to be very honest with y’all because she earned that right for me.
To be honest here with you, this was not easy for her. She really had moments where she felt discouraged and she felt frustrated because she wanted the train to move quicker. She wanted the weight loss to happen faster, and she did have some entitlement come up where she thought that she deserved the results in a faster timeline.
And this is where the coaching really came in. And she was very open to the coaching. She trusted the coaching and she allowed herself to exhale this discouragement throughout those three months. And where that left her is in a place where her body was willing to release that weight in such a consensual way that after that point it became easier for her. She got through that first turn of the wheel as the train she got through that initial rotation and then her momentum just started building because she was willing to give herself the time she needed to build it.
From that point, what her focus was and what all of the clients and own your eating habits focus is, is listening to your body and making really deliberate food decisions, which you learn how to do. Now with her, that means it became really accessible for her to just stop eating when she was full and notice her hunger because now she wasn’t having all of that stress and then she began being able to make food decisions really logically because she wasn’t having high cravings.
This is what occurred when she was really willing to focus on setting those foundations with emotional regulation. Now, what keeps momentum going? What keeps the train moving in the most efficient way is high quality action. So high quality action are actions that create your results. So it keeps the train moving to the destination. Low quality actions aren’t negative, they’re just not actions that create the result. So for example, here are actions that do not create the result, as in they do not keep the train moving.
Journaling doesn’t do it. Listening to this podcast doesn’t do it. Showing up to a coaching session doesn’t do it. Watching a course video doesn’t do it. Reading a book doesn’t do it. These things are all informational, right? They do not move you towards your weight loss actively. They do not create weight loss with your body. What creates weight loss and momentum in this work is making different eating decisions.
That’s what keeps momentum going and how you keep yourself making different eating decisions is you make clear decisions first off. So this is what my clients do and own your eating habits. They make decisions on what they’re going to do for the week with their eating habits. They implement those decisions, they observe their results with their weight, and then they evaluate what they found based on that data. They evaluate what did work, what didn’t work so well, and then they make a new decision for the following week based on what they found.
So this is a very simple process of evaluation. There’s nothing fancy here, but this is how they keep their momentum in the peak state because they are in their progress. They are not waiting on the sidelines waiting to be told what to do. They’re not consuming information and then doing nothing with it.
They are the scientist of their results and they keep that train moving by making decisions with their eating, implementing those decisions, measuring their results, and then evaluating them to make different decisions. I wanna offer you to think about this for yourself and think about that difference between the train not moving and momentum not happening, and you building that momentum with yourself. It’s all about high quality actions that keep you moving forward.
And when you’re in this momentum where you’re creating your results through trial and error, you will create your weight loss in the most efficient way. This is creating long-term results in the most efficient manner. And it’s interesting because sometimes long-term results, there’s a connotation that because they are long-term, it takes longer and it’s on a case by case basis. But I would say the majority of the time, this is not true.
Watching hundreds of women go through this process. When you are willing to give yourself the time to build momentum with weight loss in a useful and foundational way, it’s interesting how quickly the changes can be made once you’re willing to do it that way because the time will pass anyway. So all it takes is you making a decision to give this the time it needs, taking action on those foundational steps and then moving forward and creating momentum with those changes.
If you’re willing to do that, you will create long-term weight loss in that most efficient way. Now let’s talk about what gets you out of momentum. So let’s say the train is moving and you feel like you’re making progress. Here’s what can get you out of that flow and what gets you out of that flow is very simple, but it’s based on one thought and this thought is this isn’t working.
Alright? So what gets you out of momentum and creating long-term results is this isn’t working. When you have that thought, what this is related to is the initial pressure you may feel to get a result quicker. Maybe you’re having doubts, you’re having some discomfort about the long-term changes you’re making and what your brain will start to scan for is what’s going wrong. And oftentimes it’ll just sneakily present you the thought, this must not be working, something is going wrong.
You might feel that pressure and then here’s how it gets you out of momentum. It’s actually not the thought. The thought is safe to have it’s human. But what gets you out of momentum is when you react to this thought and you stop doing what is working. Okay, so I’ll say that again. What gets you out of momentum is only when you stop doing what’s working.
A setback does not get you out of momentum. Having a moment where you overeat and then you evaluate, that does not get you out of momentum. The only thing that gets you out of momentum and your efficient progress is when you stop doing what’s already working. You want to be more aware of what is working than anything else in your weight loss journey in order to keep up momentum. Because what actually keeps you in momentum is the opposite. It’s the belief this is working where you’re in that momentum and you feel that determination when you really are in the place where you believe this is working and you look for that evidence, it’s going to allow you to stay in that momentum cycle where you’re making decisions, implementing and evaluating.
Because momentum does not imply hustle or effort. I think the word can sound a little bit huy, but it is not.
We wanna set that standard here. Momentum is high quality action that brings you the most efficient results over time. What keeps that action light and feeling ease useful is the relationship you’re having to taking those actions. If you’re attempting to take those actions from the thought, this isn’t working, then it’s going to feel like it’s taking a lot of effort. If you’re acknowledging in your momentum what is working, then it’s going to feel lighter.
It’s not going to require hustle. I really invite you if you have never attempted to evaluate your results from this place to do so, establish what is working right now, allow that to fuel your weight loss momentum. And then once you’re in the energy of that momentum, you can evaluate your progress in terms of what you can change and what you can work on and what you can improve upon.
But you must do so from that place. The only thing that gets you out of your progress is the belief that it’s not working for you, and that is something that you can keep an eye on. So with Sandra, this was really foundational for her because in the first part of her being in the program, weight loss was not able to happen in the most efficient way until she built this foundational skill and started building her momentum. Once she committed to that and it all started feeling downhill and she began losing weight efficiently in a non hussy way.
And so this is what I want to offer to all of you today. Let your weight loss take the time it needs. Consider if you really believed that this was the last time you were losing this weight in your life, would you be willing to give it the time it needs? Of course you would, right? And there is no other way. You have to be willing to build the momentum and to adopt these skills in your life. Let that train get to the destination and enjoy the ride along the way. It is the only path to long-term weight loss.
Alright, my friends, I hope this was helpful today. Have a fantastic rest of your week and I’ll talk to you next week.