Hello, my friend. Welcome back to the podcast this week, this week, I want to talk about the concept of being responsible for your results, whether that’s with your results, with food, your eating decisions, maybe it’s your weight, all of it. And what I know about most of you who listen to this podcast, or you are my client is generally, you are someone who has no problem taking full responsibility for your results in your life.
That feels very clear in your mind. You are very quick to take initiative and to acknowledge how you are responsible for what you create in the world and in your life. What I really want to touch on today is the concept of taking responsibility for your results, but more so how those of you who do this naturally, maybe using this against yourself when it comes to food and body.
And what I see a lot is the incredible women that join my coaching program. They’re just so ready for change. They’re so committed and they’re really in such a good place to create new results with food and their body. And they fully acknowledge that they are the one who creates their results and they are responsible. But sometimes what I see is this trait of being responsible for their results and being proactive with them.
They actually have a relationship to that where they’re using it against themselves, along their journey, towards healthy eating and weight loss. So that is something I want you to consider today. If you are someone who takes responsibility for your results, and you’re very comfortable doing that, not just with food and body, but with everything else in your life. I want you to consider when it comes to healthy eating and weight loss, how you may be using that trait against yourself.
So that’s really what I want to touch on today because I talk about this a ton in this podcast. And especially in my coaching practice with my clients, we are in the business of partnering with ourselves to create the changes we want, whether that’s to have control with food, whether that’s to improve our health, whether that’s to lose weight. We want to cultivate a relationship with ourselves, with food, with body, where everything feels like it’s on our side.
So we’re not having to work against ourselves and punish ourselves in the process of getting the results we want and really creating those results. We want for ourselves. How most of my women come to me. And as many of you know, this was definitely me in the past. I was always really conditioned to believe that to be responsible for the results I created, I had to push myself.
I had to strong are myself, punish myself, no matter how I was feeling to perform and to create the results I wanted. So for many of you, this may look like really pushing yourself with a lot of grit, willpower hustle, to eat healthy, follow a food plan, make certain eating decisions, lose weight in a certain amount of time. And if you are doing this or you have done this, of course, it’s perfectly normal.
This is where most of us start, because this is incredibly normalized in our society. There is this very masculine Huy approach to creating success. And basically what that approach is telling us is that the path to success should be hard. It should require a lot of effort and that if you want to create the results you want, your humanness and needs need to be pushed aside in order to create them.
And I want you to take a moment because how I’m describing it is going to resonate a bit differently for each one of you. You’re going to have your own experience of past eating habits of past weight loss endeavors, where you’ve really hustled. You’ve really attempted to work hard, give all of your energy and hustle towards those results. And I invite you to just take a moment to reflect and consider what that experience was really, really like for you.
And what I see is most of the women I work with when they were going about this journey, where they’ve been trying and failing, trying, and failing to eat healthy and lose weight permanently is they had the belief that they were responsible for the results. There wasn’t this issue of them not feeling like they had the resourcefulness and the ability to create what they wanted, but they were taking responsibility from a place of total disempowerment.So I wanna talk about that a little bit, how you may be taking responsibility for your results, with food, your results with your body, from a disempowering place, because here’s the thing taking responsibility for your results does feel empowering. And this is where you can observe results. You’ve created no matter what they are and think to yourself. I know exactly how I created this.
This is clear. I am not confused. This makes total sense. I know what to do next. I want you to consider this definition of taking responsibility. You acknowledge you have complete control. It feels empowering. And for most of my women, they can identify this type of responsibility in the workplace or in their careers, even as moms, like they just feel this sense of responsibility that feels more settled in their body.
And it doesn’t feel so punishing. It feels very, very clear, but I want you to notice if when observing the results you have created with food, or maybe your weight feels really disempowering to you.
So maybe you observe those things and think I did this. This happened because of me, it’s my fault. I’m the one to blame. I wanna offer that this is not you taking responsibility for the results you’ve created with food and body you’re punishing and blaming yourself for them. And I really wanna separate these two things in our minds, especially those of us, women who have some masculine energy within us.
We’re, go-getters, we’re high achievers. I really want you to separate in your mind what it means to take empowered responsibility and what it looks like for you to beat yourself up, punish yourself and blame yourself for your results from a disempowered place. And this ends up being so useful for the women I coach and myself, because it sets that boundary. Of course, we want to take responsibility and be proactive when it comes to our results in our lives.
But we cannot mistake doing that with beating ourselves up in the process. And if you want to create permanent change with food and body, this is a boundary you must set. You will want to step into empowered responsibility, where you are, the one creating your results. You acknowledge where you are in control of your results and how you are creating it from that empowered place. But we have to set that boundary where we’re not beating ourselves up and blaming ourselves for what we create.Because when we cross that line, we stop partnering with ourselves towards the results we want. So I want you to notice that subtle shift, or maybe not so subtle shift in energy for me, it’s quite obvious now, but at what point does taking responsibility become useful and empowering for you? And at what point does it become disempowering and punishing the main difference for those of you who might have some trouble doing this in the beginning is from empowerment, empowered responsibility.
You can observe your results with food, your results with your body, your weight, and you can evaluate them. So it all feels in your deliberate control and you’re able to observe the math of it without making it personal. Now here’s the thing I wanna give the most massive disclaimer. We are all humans y’all. So we are not saying that it’s going to be 100% accessible all of the time to notice our weight or notice how we ate over the past week and not have emotions about it.
We are not robots, but I just want you to see the two extremes here. Empowerment is having the ability to look at the math of your results and objectively, see how it was created, what went wrong and what you’re going to do differently to improve that result. It just gets to feel very deliberate. Disempowerment is that other extreme, right?
So this is where most of us start. We observe the results we’ve created with food, how we ate, maybe we observe our weight. And in that moment we think taking responsibility for it is singling ourselves out as the problem. We single ourselves out as what went wrong. So this looks like punishing ourselves and blaming ourselves for what went wrong rather than the actual math of what created that results.
So really rather than taking responsibility, this is just giving that responsibility and power away. Hence disempowerment. When we make results personal, we actually can’t take responsibility for it. It just appears that way. Because self blame often on the surface can look like self responsibility. Now, as I mentioned, these are the two extremes empowerment where results can be neutral and disempowerment where results with food and body are personal.
As the humans, we will have both of these things available to us when we are changing the way we eat, losing weight, all of it.
And we want to make sure that we’re making decisions from empowered responsibility, where we’re observing our results and evaluating them in a useful, deliberate way. But because you are a human you’re going to have in the beginning, some chatter in your mind that wants to take you to that disempowerment, where you’re blaming yourself. And we don’t wanna demonize this part of us. This is completely normal.
The key is we don’t want to make our decisions from that place. The biggest way I see this disrupting someone’s success is when they don’t objectively evaluate progress, because they’re so stuck in believing it’s all personal. And this is the subtle tweak my clients make. When they enter my program, they usually come to my program, believing that they are the one who will create their results. They’re in such a good place to take that responsibility.
But in my process, we go through a lot of self-validation, right, where they partner with themselves to create the result.
Inevitably, what that looks like is they begin to acknowledge that the results with food and body that they’ve always had, whether it’s their past eating habits, their weight were never personal, right? They were always doing the best they could with what they had. And I’m betting. That is true for you. What I know about the women I work with, it’s likely you as well is we really do everything we can with what we’re given for most of us, what we were given was a food plan or a diet protocol, or we were just given a set of instructions to follow with food and weight.
We were just told what to do, but the missing piece for most of you, if you are struggling with food right now is who you’re being with food, the urges you are having to overeat, how often you are thinking about food, when you’re craving food, everything within you, that emotionally compels you to eat the way you do eat past your fullness and create a relationship with food that feels out of control.
A way you can bridge that gap between disempowerment and empowerment is acknowledging that you never had all of the pieces to take full responsibility of your results. And so I wanna offer that for those of you listening, because it is possible for you to get to full empowerment with the results you want with food and body. And that happens when you learn to take responsibility in a way where you have your own back, you validate yourself so clearly for why it didn’t work in the past, what will be necessary now.
And then you take full responsibility for creating that by evaluating progress, observing your own results and being proactive with that change, it is possible. But again, no, right? We’re all humans. So that disempowerment chatter, we may have, it could still be there, but we learn to process that and heal that, especially in my practice, this is a really, really big focus.So to remove your food struggles, you will need to take empowered responsibility for your results, where you have your own back. Rather than that disempowered self punishment, that isn’t really taking responsibility. It’s just beating yourself up in disguise. It’s like beating yourself up, covered in the glitter of taking responsibility. Notice that difference. Here’s how you’ll know if you are attempting to eat healthy or maybe lose weight from disempowered self punishment.
So this looks like constantly invalidating yourself. It looks like you punish yourself when you don’t create the results you want. And like I said, you single yourself out and blame yourself for any food setbacks you have. I think it’s so important to know this. I say it a lot, but I think every time it sticks a bit deeper for all of you food setbacks in creating the results you want with your body are inevitable because it’s one big process of experimentation.
You’re getting to know yourself as an eater, your food preferences, your emotions, your body. You’re going to have setbacks along the way because the setbacks are how you figure out what doesn’t work for you. So you really need to develop a relationship to your setbacks, where you aren’t invalidating yourself for them. You aren’t punishing yourself and you’re not blaming yourself. You will also know you are in disempowered, self punishment with food.
When you are forcing yourself to make the right food decisions. So eating healthy feels like a moral dilemma. Like if you eat the right things, you make it mean more positive things about yourself. And when you don’t eat the right things, you make it mean negative things about yourself. So this is, is just representative of black and white thinking with food in your mind, you just believe that eating more nutritionally, valuable foods makes you a better person, which means the opposite extreme is always available when you don’t make those food decisions.
You’ll also know you are in disempowerment. When you are focused on harnessing more willpower, more discipline, more grit to make eating decisions so you can lose weight faster. So this is where you are really focused on harnessing emotional fuel. That is extremely harsh. And it’s all because you are really attached to weight loss, because you think at the end of weight loss, all of your problems will go away. And so you force yourself to that result.But the thing about harsh, emotional fuel like willpower and grit is it burns out really, really quickly. And it feels terrible. So of course you can see how, if this is your experience, you are likely in that disempowered self punishment version of taking responsibility. And then next, you know, you are in disempowered self punishment when you are creating an experience of both healthy eating and weight loss, that just isn’t sustainable long term.
And I think this is such an important exercise for all of us who are struggling with food and with body. I want you to picture, if you can see yourself engaging with healthy eating and weight loss for the rest of your life in the way that you are now, if you cannot see your current method of healthy eating and weight loss as sustainable for life, then of course it won’t be. But that means the results you create with those methods, won’t be sustainable either how you create healthy eating and weight loss is what it will take for you to keep it.
So just observe that, I think this is really important for all of us to be curious about this. Just picture the approach you are taking, and if you truly believe it will be sustainable for you long term. So, so important. All right.
So here’s how you’ll know if you are eating healthy or losing weight from that empowered responsibility. That’s really useful. The first most important thing is that you are practicing having your own back no matter what setbacks occur. And I want to be clear with all of my women. Sometimes this makes them uncomfortable and they’re like, I don’t wanna pity myself when I have a setback or coddle myself.
No, no, that is never useful either. there is no self pity or coddling in my practice. We don’t do that. What we’re referring to when we say having your own back is self-validation and I want you to picture how self-validation feels in your body. To me, it’s the simple thought. This makes sense why I did this. This makes sense why this occurs, all of the math adds up, right?
It’s not super positive or negative.
It’s actually extremely balanced and neutral in the body. This is having your own back. It does not need to be this charged experience and it doesn’t need to mean self pity or coddling yourself either. I think that’s so useful to know empowered responsibility also looks like taking responsibility of all of your results with food and body. You are acknowledging you are the one who will create them. You’re not delegating responsibility to a food plan, to a program, to a coach.
You are acknowledging that you are the one without self punishment. That is the key. That is the difference between the disempowered and empowered. If you are doing all of those things, but without that self punishment next, you know, you are an empowered responsibility with these results. When you are being resourceful and committed to becoming your own best expert with food and creating the weight loss results you want yourself.
I always say to women who apply to my program, a really big piece, I’m always looking for just so I know someone will have the best experience and results in the program is if they’re interested in being their own best expert, right? They want to step into that version of themselves who has everything they need. They always trust themselves to create the results they want and they know the results they want are inevitable. This is empowered responsibility at the highest level.
And then the last way you’ll know if it’s empowered responsibility is if you are partnering with yourself to eat healthy and lose weight permanently on your terms in the way that actually works for you. And when I say partnering with yourself, it means you are taking yourself and your needs into account first, before ever considering any right ways of eating healthy, that are recommended to you.
So this means the first expert you check in with is your mind, your values, your opinions, your body cues, your wisdom, your lifestyle, your limitations, these are all things that you are fully aware of. And you use to partner with yourself continuously towards eating healthy and permanent weight loss. That is how you build that result based on what works for you.
All right. So I hope this is helpful to see it through this lens. Like I said, most of you listening, who are a part of my community are very comfortable taking responsibility for your results, but we don’t want you to do that at the expense of partnering with yourself, partnering with yourself. Isn’t just a cutey Doy. lovely thing to do. It’s actually necessary for us to make the results inevitable with food and with our bodies.
So just know that being someone who takes full responsibility for your results will highly highly serve you in removing your food struggles.In fact, it’s necessary, but make sure if you’re doing so that you’re not using it as a reason to punish yourself to the changes you want to make. All right. So I recommend with this episode, just take a moment and sit with yourself and reflect on how you will know your in disempowered self punishment, or when you are an empowered responsibility. When it comes to creating the results you want with food and body. And if this resonates with you in my program, own your eating habits, you learn how to take full responsibility for food and weight loss within yourself in a way that is not forceful.
So you learn how to stop harnessing willpower to eat healthy. So you can create permanent weight loss or permanent health without burnout. And when you make changes from this approach, you create an experience of weight loss that feels maintainable for life. This is how we focus on doing it all differently in that process. So if you are ready to make these permanent changes, you can learn more at kareo.com/coaching.
Everything you need is right there. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful. Have a fantastic rest of your week. And I’ll talk to you next week.