Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast this week. I am so happy to have you here with me today. Today we’re going to talk about how to stop starting over when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss, because I know each one of you are here with me to lose weight permanently. You want to be done with the back and forth with healthy eating. You want to finally identify as a woman who eats healthy naturally, and you just wanna have your goal weight.
You want to stop working towards it. And so that is my expertise and that is what I’m here to help you do. So today I want to offer you an episode that is going to inform you of how you can really do this for the last time and stop starting over. I think this is one of the most painful elements of unsuccessful attempts with healthy eating and weight loss is when we feel like we have to keep constantly starting over and not seeing the results we want.
So I’m hoping this episode can give you some clarity, it can provide you some relief, and ultimately allow you to start taking steps forward in a way that produces lasting results. So really the biggest problem so many of you come to me with is that you’re setting goals to eat healthy and lose weight, and you plan for success in this area. So you on the surface, do all the right things to succeed. And then inevitably, as you’re going through this process of weight loss, something doesn’t go as planned.
So you end up overeating, maybe you don’t eat what you originally planned, maybe you gain some weight back, and then that’s that you decide that what you’re doing isn’t working. You feel really discouraged and then you quit. Eventually some time goes by and then you have another surge of motivation where again, you attempt to do it right this time and lose weight only to go through that same exact process of committing, taking action, inevitably experiencing a setback, and then quitting until again, you start over and start over and start over.
So just to start today, I want you to think about your cycle of doing this. So what does it look like for you to quit and start over, quit and start over. So maybe this involves you attempting diet protocols, weight loss programs, whatever it is. I want you to have the willingness to evaluate this and take a moment to sit with what your pattern looks like, what that cycle looks like for you. Now, for most of you, it will look similar in that you go into healthy eating and weight loss with the highest hopes and expectations for yourself, and then you follow through with those expectations for a short time and then something happens that doesn’t meet your expectations.
And then once that occurs, you feel discouraged. You don’t quite have that same motivation, and then you quit. And then eventually you desire weight loss again and you repeat that same cycle.
What I want you to know here today is that you don’t quit and start over because something outside of you isn’t working. Alright? So it’s nothing outside of you that is causing this cycle. The reason you quit and start over is because you decided that whatever setback you experienced on your journey meant something wasn’t working with you. So basically you believe that any setback implies that something has gone wrong, that setbacks are not acceptable or useful.
Now I want you to consider what thoughts do you have when a setback occurs in your weight loss journey when you do something that does not contribute towards the result or contributes negatively towards the result. So go to your worst case scenario, setbacks, , I think this is useful. So maybe a worst case scenario setback is you have a moment of strong emotional eating after feeling like you’ve really made progress and you fall off track.
Or maybe you gained some weight back after you really believed you were losing weight for the last time. Come up with that setback for yourself. What is the setback that you have experienced in a weight loss journey or healthy eating journey that feels the most discouraging for you? I want you to find what that is and then I want you to consider what are your thoughts about that setback when it occurs, what is it about it that feels so negative? So I’m going to tell you the most common thoughts I see after coaching hundreds of women through this.
Alright, so there’s two thoughts. So the first thought is I failed. The second thought is I’m back where I started. Alright? So these are the most discouraging thoughts you can possibly have in a healthy eating or weight loss journey. It’s going to create that feeling of discouragement in your body.
And without awareness of this happening, that discouragement will lead you on a very specific path that does not serve you. So from this discouragement, you’ll stop following through with healthy eating, you’ll stop prioritizing the weight loss. You’ll opt out because you feel discouraged, because you have convinced yourself in that moment that you just failed and nothing is working. This is going to be what leads you to having to start over. So notice this. This isn’t just happening to you, right?
You don’t just fail and have to start over. It’s something that only really occurs in your thoughts in your mind. Only you decided that a momentary setback means you failed, right? You decided that a momentary setback meant you’re back where you started. So from this discouraging thinking, you quit because it feels so emotionally unbearable. And then you have to quote, start over. So here’s the takeaway I want you to consider.
You can’t actually fail, quit, or start over with healthy eating and weight loss. These are only thoughts or perspectives of wherever you’re at. The only factual evidence you can ever go off of are where your eating behaviors are at and where your weight loss is at. And the only truth is the data you have to go off of. And then with that information, you need to decide objectively what you’ll do next. In order to stop quitting and starting over, you will need to create a tolerable experience of healthy eating and weight loss setbacks.
So indulging thoughts like I failed or I’m back where I started is not a tolerable emotional experience. If you keep feeding your journey with these thoughts, you will increase your levels of discouragement over time until you eventually quit. And it’s not the proper emotional fuel to maintain your progress all the way to your goal, which means to create a tolerable emotional experience of setbacks and progress, you’re going to need to change your perspective of healthy eating and weight loss.
Your current perspective and thoughts are related likely to short-term weight loss. So you probably have a lot of thinking left over from the diet industry or hustle culture that taught you that to achieve quality weight loss results, you need to perform and be perfect and avoid setbacks, which we know leads to short-term weight loss because you’re left not knowing what to do when the setbacks inevitably occur. You are here with me to create long-term weight loss results.
So you’re going to start thinking tolerable, sustainable, long-term weight loss thoughts, your thinking matters because your thinking is what ultimately informs your actions and how you approach weight loss. So let’s talk about how your perspective will need to change so you can have a tolerable relationship to healthy eating and weight loss, and so you stop quitting and starting over. First, you need to stop using healthy eating and weight loss to prove something to yourself.
Alright? I really want you to hear me, especially if you’re like a lot of my clients and you identify as a high achiever or a type A woman, you need to stop using this area of your life to perform highly to get the A. If you want to stop quitting this work, you will need to be willing to accept that you won’t ever be perfect at it. You won’t always perform well, you won’t always meet your own expectations.
This is something you will need to accept when you accept this, that healthy eating and weight loss is not there to prove something to yourself. That’s not what it’s for. Then it gives you the freedom to just focus on the end result. When you remove your ego from it, you then get to just work towards the actual eating habits and the weight loss you want to achieve.
So what I want you to think about is you will need to make it about the end result, not about getting the gold stars on the way to the end result. These are two different areas of focus and in own your eating habits. We call it moving from student to scientist energy. This is what all of our women do. So it’s where a lot of the healing occurs, for lack of a better word. This is what will allow your pressure to come down in creating this result. Start showing up as that scientist where you decide to stop making the focus on your performance and instead make the focus your results that you want.
Your thoughts will begin to shift and you will change the way you view setbacks. How a scientist view setbacks is not as negative, right? They view it as a metric of data.
This is where your results will start to feel more available to you. Second, you will need to stop relying on hopeful energy when it comes to these results. So hopeful energy, I want you to think how that feels in your body. We all have access to it. I do too. Hopeful energy is very fluffy, and if you’re feeling a sense of hope or maybe excitement for the end result, it’s because you still believe your results are based on your performance, which they aren’t. Your long-term weight loss is not based on how well you perform each day.
It’s based on you committing to the long-term process. No matter what your performance looks like. The reason why you clinging to hope and excitement is because you really wanna believe that you’re capable of performing really highly every single day and not having setbacks. I know I can do it.
I’ve got this right? It’s very, very fluffy because what we’re aiming for doesn’t exist. You cannot be perfect and perfection is not what creates long-term weight loss. What you’re doing when you’re clinging to hope is you are trying to convince yourself that you can possibly perform highly indefinitely with healthy eating and weight loss. And you can’t. This is going to burn you out. You will need to stop setting impossible expectations with this area of your life because the truth is you’re going to have setbacks and you’re going to need to learn from them.
No one is exempt from this, so don’t be that person, which we tend to be as type payers, , that believes you won’t fail or have setbacks. So don’t go into this process thinking you are a special case. I promise you, none of us are unicorns and your journey is going to look imperfect just like anyone else’s.
And that’s okay. That’s expected. It’s not a problem. And if you realize that this isn’t a problem and you expect the setbacks, then you’ll stop clinging to hopeful, excited energy to get you to the end result. You will instead be able to evolve into more mature, stable energy and do what is necessary to create this result long term and build the skills you need to do so in own your eating habits. This is the biggest thing that makes this program so effective is we really focus on creating a culture where we are all in this high level mature energy where you are there to build permanent skills with healthy eating and weight loss.
So we don’t indulge any hopeful energy or any energy that feels fluffy or out of control. It is the highest standard of this result because of the energy that you will have in that program.
So know that any type of hopeful energy will just lead to you quitting and starting over ultimately, which is not what we want you to do. Third, you must understand the tactical value of setbacks, right? So you’re going to need to change your perspective of them. Setbacks aren’t only safe, they are non-negotiable, they’re necessary, and they are the most highly valuable part of any healthy eating or weight loss journey because it’s only through the setbacks that you learn what doesn’t work and knowing what doesn’t work will inform you of what does work.
So any setback you experience will ultimately be the breadcrumbs to your success. It’s how you lose weight for the last time and change your eating behaviors for life. And I’m not telling you that you have to love setbacks with healthy eating or weight loss, but firmly understand the tactical value of them.
So you stop pretending that they don’t need to exist in this area of your life. Alright? You need to establish why they are valuable. And then fourth, this is the big one. Anytime you experience a setback, always, always, always acknowledge it, study it, and then make a decision for what you’ll do next based on what you learn. Alright? And this comes to any setback you experience in healthy eating and weight loss. The biggest thing that keeps you quitting and starting over is when you let setbacks lead you to inaction.
When you let a setback mean, you stop prioritizing this work. The best thing you can put into practice here is to have a relationship to your setbacks, where as soon as it occurs, you notice it, firmly evaluate it, and then take action from it as quickly as possible. Keep that momentum there because remember, it’s not the fact that you are experiencing setbacks along your journey.
That’s the problem. Have an episode of overeating even after making progress normal, gain some weight even after you’ve been losing weight. Normal. It’s all normal. This is what long-term progress looks like. There’s no way around that With permanent weight loss. The only problem you’ve been experiencing is that you assume setbacks mean something has gone wrong, and that is what needs to change my friends. If you normalize setback and instead of hiding from them, use them as the tactical weight points to your weight loss success, you will never need to start over again.
You will lose weight for the last time. Something we discuss in my program quite a bit is that it’s never just about food or weight loss, it’s about how you’re showing up in your life. So our clients change the way they eat and lose weight for the last time, but they also transform many other aspects of their lives because of how they change their relationship to setbacks.
So allow this approach to serve you anywhere it applies, and I can’t wait to see what you do with it. If you’re ready to take this work to the deepest level, you’ll want to join on your eating habits. So this program is designed to be the final solution for healthy eating and weight loss. It doesn’t skim the surface and tell you what to eat. It teaches you to change your eating behaviors for life. You’ll join a community of like-minded women all losing weight for the last time. So to participate in the program, you’ll join the wait list at cat rents.com/waitlist.
Alright, I hope this episode was valuable to you. I hope you took many golden nuggets away from it. And thank you for being here with me today. I’ll talk to you next week.