I’m not here to call you out to tell you you’re doing everything wrong. I do think this is a process. It’s sort of getting to know ourselves better. When we really think about what is in the way of our weight loss. Not about;
- I got to change everything,
- I have to make everything different.
- I’m doing it all wrong.
Not at all.
I want to call out five things for your attention today. Five things that I think are super common, and some different ways to think about it.
1) Data.
First and foremost, I think the biggest issue, and maybe it’s not even for weight loss. Maybe it’s just for anything that we want to achieve. If you want;
- a new relationship,
- a better relationship,
- a raise,
- a promotion,
- to be a better parent,
- to learn some new hobby,
- to learn how to build a house,
- to do something at that next level.
I think it all comes down to consistency.
We have human brains. I’m not gonna say they’re all the same, but I tend to find with women who want to lose weight, especially if you’ve ever been on a diet, there’s these three things that happen that really get in the way of our consistency
- All or nothing thinking.
- Being too extreme.
- Being impatient.
All or nothing thinking is sort of this idealistic perfectionist way. Like if I can’t walk for five miles today, then I’m not going to walk it all. If I can’t do an hour in the gym as my strength training workout, well then I’m going to do nothing at all. If I can’t eat organic chicken and vegetables like I planned, then I’m just going to eat cake instead. That is perfectionism.
Sometimes it feels like that should be a good thing but it is not. It definitely takes away from our ability just to be consistent. Getting any level of walk, any level of strength training, any kind of protein, sometimes is just the best that we can do.
I think with being consistent, it is about picking one or two things and not all the things being so extreme. I have to take 30 supplements. I have to make sure I go to bed by nine o’clock. I have to have three meals and one snack and they all have to be 32.5 grams of protein. I have to drink a green smoothie for breakfast every single morning. I have to do all of these things and if it does not fit into your lifestyle, if it is not easy, if it is not enjoyable, it’s not sustainable, it’s not going to work, it’s going to be too extreme and tracking all the things is going to be a full time job. If I wanted to be more consistent, I’d have to figure out what are one or two things that I want to work on.
First, you could pick the low hanging fruit. I’ve mentioned this before. You go for something like, I just want to count steps, or I just want to work on water, or I’m just going to add protein, or I’m just gonna focus on sleep. I don’t have to do all of the things.
The reality is, if you’re getting on the scale every week, and getting sad because you didn’t lose two pounds, or three pounds, or five pounds or any weight at all. Then you look back, and you didn’t follow anything consistently for the week. That’s where we need to be honest. That’s a mismatch. My actions are not going to get those results. That’s where we have to figure out why.
What is in the way of you being consistent with your workout? How you’re eating? What’s your sleep schedule? An analogy for this would be somebody who wants that promotion or raise that new position at work. It’s like, I want this yet I’m late every single day. I don’t return calls, I don’t return emails, I don’t answer, I don’t go the extra mile for the extra projects. Yet I expect that I should be getting that new promotion, I should get the fancy office, I should get all of these perks for being an employee. That’s the mismatch.
I think it’s fair to say, okay, where in your weight loss journey are you not being consistent and why not? What is in the way? What is actually happening here and why?
2) Physical Hunger.
This one is sort of interesting to me, because it’s taken me a full three and a half years working inside of Self Made to realize that most of my clients, and maybe even myself, are not really in tune with physical hunger. We often are following some sort of Diet Rules. We’re trying to eat every two hours, or we think we have to eat lunch at 12 noon because that’s when people eat lunch. I have to eat as soon as I wake up, because that is breakfast. But we’re never really giving ourselves a chance to figure out am I actually hungry? We’re actually afraid of hunger. As soon as I feel hungry, something bad is going to happen.
That’s probably an interesting thing our brains do. It’s very primitive. Like if you get hungry, this is a sign that there is no food. You have to go out and hunt your own food. But we know that it’s 2024 we have food everywhere. I mean, you could go to a gas station, you go to a vending machine, you could look in the back of your car if you have kids because they’ve probably left food back there.
Getting in tune with your physical hunger is going to require you to be honest. Here’s what I mean by that. When you go to eat, whether you are sitting down for lunch, you’re making breakfast, you’re going to go out to dinner, someone offers you food, you’re in the break room and everything looks so good. Whatever. Ask yourself what kind of hunger? Is this physical hunger? Or is this emotional hunger? That’s called just asking the question and being honest about it. It’s okay to be hungry.
I want to normalize that eating food and being hungry is part of being human. It doesn’t make you a weak person or a bad person. You will reach your weight loss goals being hungry and also satisfying that hunger but I think getting more in tune with your own body, listening to your body, pausing, taking time.
I have a lot of clients who will just set a timer, especially if they’ve already ate lunch, they ate dinner, and they’re thinking I’m still hungry. I need to go get a snack or something sweet. I need something more. Set a timer and really see what is going on with you. Is this a habit? Is this you procrastinating? Is this you trying to avoid getting up and going back to work or dealing with something?
Getting in tune with your physical hunger is going to require a level of honesty because your brain wants what it wants. If somebody is serving cake or ice cream or another glass of wine and you’re like, I actually don’t want it, there’s going to be a conversation. You want to be able to sit through having these urges. You also want to be able to honor your body and feed it when it is hungry.
Weight loss, in many cases, you could argue, is about creating a deficit. We have to eat less to lose weight. In the diet world a lot of us are so used to cutting out way too much, coming in at a too large a deficit. We are used to being hungry all the time. We equate this level of hunger, the wanting to eat as weight loss is working. That’s where I should be. I should feel hungry all the time in order for me to lose weight. I want to call bullshit on that.
Getting in touch with your hunger, if you’ve never really thought about it, if you’ve never sat with hunger, or sat through just an urge to eat when you weren’t hungry. It just takes time talking about getting honest about your weight loss.
3) Negative self-talk.
How do you talk to yourself? Are you shit talking yourself? Constantly? I think it’s kind of like being a parent and realizing your kids are at each other’s throat. Their name calling, pushing, hair pulling, toy stealing, tattling, and they just are behaving badly. Except this is about you understanding that you’re doing that kind of thing to yourself. You are putting yourself down. You’re looking in the mirror and critiquing every piece of yourself.
Here’s the thing, it’s really hard to lose weight and keep it off from that negative headspace. Because as much as we would like to think that when the scale goes down, and when I fit in my jeans, and when I am a smaller version of myself, I will like myself more, it will be better, I’ll be happier. It’s just not true. My guess is that you’ve been on diets before. My guess is you’ve lost weight before, only to have found some of it again. Our self talk does not magically change as a number on the scale goes down. You actually have to realize some of this is just a practice, a habit of putting ourselves down. Whether we do it in that self deprecating way we tried to be funny or if it’s seriously just you suck, you’re old, you’re ugly. Look at all those wrinkles, stretch marks, cellulite.
I have lots of clients. I remember training clients in person and they literally would grab their inner thigh and be like, this is a problem. I’m like, that’s your leg. It’s just weird. We get into the habit of picking ourselves apart to the point where the honesty part is sort of saying, is some of this just a story?
We’re so used to just telling a story about not being;
- good enough,
- smart enough,
- pretty enough,
- thin enough,
- light enough,
- small enough.
We’re just not enough and it becomes this perpetuating negative self narrative. This is something that you can change. I think it’s going to help you actually lose weight and keep it off when you can stop shit talking yourself.
It’s actually come up several times and I’ve coached about it inside of Self Made because I think it’s important and I’m not I mean. I hope you know by now, well if you’re new you don’t know. If you’ve been here at all, I am definitely not Susie Sunshine and hearts and rainbows and unicorns and ponies and positive thinking. No, I’m not. You can be negative or you can have an edge, be sarcastic, be a little bit rough and gruff and tough. You know, not Susie sunshine, and still lose weight.
Just be aware of your own self-talk. Do you talk to others that way? Probably not. Most of us walk into a room and whether it’s a friend or it’s somebody to serve or at a restaurant and you’re like, Oh, I really like your nail color, I love your hair, or what have you. It’s so interesting how we as women freely complement other people, boost up, prop up our friends and our relatives and our kids. We’re so quick to pump everybody else up. But when it comes to ourselves, we’re pretty much just throwing ourselves under the bus and then just pulling the bus back and forth, reverse and drive reverse and drive. You have to stop it.
The first part is just being honest.
- What are you doing?
- What is it that you’re actually saying and doing?
- Why are you doing it?
- What can you do instead?
Recently we had this coaching topic inside of Self Made. Tracy, one of the coaches, was saying she was watching a Taylor Swift documentary with her daughter. In it Taylor Swift was talking about how at some point, because people had commented about her weight, that she just ate less, stopped eating, started to lose weight. Then she realized, hey, you’re taking this too far, or this isn’t the right way to do it. She started actually talking to herself, sort of saying, hey, yeah, Taylor, we don’t do that anymore.
So I offer that as a way to get in front of some of this negative self talk. “Bonnie, we don’t do this anymore.” Kind of like you what you would say to a kid. What would you would say to your spouse? Yeah, okay, we talked about this, we’re not doing this anymore. I gave an analogy about training a puppy. You redirect. Drop it, go lay down. I say that to my dogs all the time, go lay down. We’re not doing this right now. We’ve already covered this.
We do, in many cases, have to retrain our brain and have to literally snap or clap or just have some type of you need to snap out of it. You need to stop that. We’re not doing that. We don’t do that anymore, because it is poison. It’s also not true. I don’t care who you are, if I’ve never met you, I’m sure you’re not horrible and terrible and a loser. You’re not.
4) Stop making it so complex.
If you really want to get honest about weight loss, you have to stop making weight loss so complex. It can be our pet project, it could be a whole other job. For weight loss I need;
- to know more,
- to research more,
- to know all the ingredients,
- to get different supplements,
- to get different recipes,
- to change my intermittent fasting window,
- new macros,
- a new macro tracker I like,
- to have all of this data and science and research,
- new notebooks,
- tracking mechanisms,
- all of these things.
Those can all be helpful. Except we just get lost in the sauce. We can’t take action when we overwhelm ourselves with all of these things.
If you are new here, you might not know this about me, but one of the things is I always have a knee jerk reaction when someone asks for recipes. I literally want to poke my own eyes out. I do. I don’t know why. I think it’s because my thought is, it’s just not that hard. Like cook a chicken breast, cook a burger. How do you do it? This gets into my famous meatball recipe. It is pretty much open the ground meat and make it into a ball and cook it. There are a lot of people who find this hysterical that I’m dispassionate about recipes, or passionate about my hate for recipes. I think a lot of people are like what is wrong with you?
In my experience, nobody has lost weight and kept it off and the reason is they just had so many more recipes. Recipes are a commodity. You can go on Google and Pinterest. You can find them everywhere. It’s not the recipe. It’s the thought that I need to make food interesting or it has to be exciting. It has to be a certain flavor profile. I get bored easily. I want to say, you know what? Being bored is probably the best thing that could ever happen for your weight loss and being honest about it is asking yourself why food has to be a certain way? Why does it have to be interesting or exciting? Or New? Or not boring? Why?
There are studies, you can find them on Google. They are about how boring food, monotonous or repetitive or just when we kind of eat the same things over and over, then we are going to be more in tune with our physical hunger. We’re not going to always have this oh my gosh, this tastes so good. I have to have one more bite. I need to clean my plate. I don’t know when I’m going to have this again, when we have a lot of the same foods over and over.
It’s just like when I brush my teeth. Am I looking to go, oh, is this Crest toothpaste? Is this Colgate toothpaste? Is this Tom’s? Like? What is this? I need a different toothpaste. I need a different flavor. Not really. I’m just brushing my teeth. Is it fun to get different toothpaste? Sure. I think a lot of us fall into that rabbit hole of different shampoos and different makeup and all of this stuff. It’s partly a dopamine hit. The new thing, a new recipe, a new way, a new answer, we’re going to make weight loss so much easier. Actually we’re making weight loss so much more complicated.
We could get our dopamine hits in other places. I’m not saying your food has to taste terrible. It should be burnt. It should be spoiled. It should be awful. No, but it doesn’t have to be that complicated.
5) Not dealing with the root cause.
I’ve seen other coaches or programs be like, we’re gonna find your root cause. The root cause is not because you don’t have enough exercise. The root cause is not because you don’t know the difference between a protein and a carbohydrate. I’m a coach, I’m not a therapist, I’m not looking to go into deep childhood traumas.
Obviously, if you are somebody who’s had trauma, and I will say that as a human, you’re not going to get to be over 10 years old without having some level of trauma. I’ll call those little T’s. But for big T’s, big T trauma, get a counselor or a therapist. Work through some of that, because the answer isn’t in food or alcohol. It’s not either overeating or under-eating. That’s where a lot of my clients go, they don’t really want to deal with what is really on their mind. Other thoughts and feelings that they’re having about themselves about other people about their situation, what is driving you to eat or to not eat. That’s why I think a lot of times when it comes down to being really honest with your weight loss, we don’t want to. We either decide we’re going to go into strict dieting mode, so that I can just focus on that, or I go into f*cking eating mode, and I just eat what I want, whenever I want. Both solutions allow me to avoid dealing with whatever I’m actually thinking and feeling because our brains make it like, Oh, this is a big problem.
If you actually think about this, or you are connected, and you feel the feelings, this is dangerous. It is much better to do something else. The things that we do as adults, we overeat, we over drink, we overspend. We do all different kinds of things to distract from the main thing. Getting honest about your weight loss is not because you’re a flawed person and you should be flogged for doing it wrong. It’s just identifying where’s the gap from where you are now and where you want to go? That’s it, just figuring out, am I just being inconsistent?
Look at the data. Do you have any data? Are we just kind of going on feelings? Do we have any facts? Inconsistency is going to be the biggest lever when it comes to weight loss. Meaning if there was one thing I could focus on, being more consistent, not perfect, not trying to do everything perfectly. I don’t have to walk five miles a day every single day for the rest of my natural life. I could just work on having a certain amount of steps. I could work on getting enough sleep. I could work on having some water. Do those small things. Over time they add up. It’s not going to be a week, it’s not going to be a month, it’s not even going to be three months, it’s just going to take time. If you can be honest with where you’re falling off with your consistency, it’s going to be a game changer for you.
When you look at physical hunger, when you think about it, are you actually physically hungry? Or are you emotionally hungry? There is no right or wrong. It is being able to name it, be honest about it, and figure it out. There’s nothing wrong with being hungry, that’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with actually craving or having urges for food when you’re not really hungry. It’s just figuring out what that is.
If you’re sh*t talking yourself, it’s time to stop. Even if you reduce it. The more you can be aware of it, and get ahead of it, and call it out and redirect, the easier it gets. I’m gonna give an example. I can look in the mirror at any given time, and I can see things that are not perfect. If I could find a Genie in a lamp, and I could get my three wishes I would have perfect skin, no cellulite, no loose skin, no bumps and lumps. If I could change stuff, I would for sure. I could spend hours in the mirror picking every single thing apart. Or I could look in the mirror and be pretty happy with where I’m at. It’s a choice. That’s what I want to tell you about shi* talking yourself. A lot of what we’re doing is storytelling and thinking that it is factual when it is not.
Are you just making weight loss too complicated? Where can you simplify? What is it that you’re trying to avoid? Why are you eating or drinking or not taking care of yourself? What is it that you’re afraid of? It may not be as big and scary as you think it is. Sometimes it’s just this pervasive “not good enough” theme. This pervasive “people pleasing.” It could just be pervasive “worrying about what everybody else is doing or worrying about how everybody else is doing besides yourself.” Getting to know yourself is not about calling yourself out and beating yourself up. It really is a gift you give yourself when you get completely honest about what’s going on with your weight loss.
All right, my friends, that is what I have for you. I hope you have a great week. Please reach out to me. I am very accessible. You can find me on Facebook, Bonnie Lefrak. You can send me a message if you have any questions at all about that Real Weight Loss Challenge. I would love to work with you.
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The next round of the Real Weight Loss Challenge starts on Monday, February 26. You will want to sign up. You can find the link in the show notes. It will take you to my website. There you will find information about this two week program and things that you need to know no matter where you are in the world. This is an online virtual program, I don’t expect that you’re going to be available for every single coaching call we put on, it’s totally fine. There’s eight calls over the two week period. Then our private Facebook group will be open till the end of March. That is so that you can get replays. You can hang out and you can ask questions. We’re not rushing to get through a program.
It is called a challenge, not because we’re trying to lose as much weight as possible in two weeks. If you’ve been here at all, you kind of know that’s not my jam. It is about teaching you everything we do inside of Self Made and how to have sustainable weight loss without the craziness. If you want to lose weight and keep it off, we’re going to pull back the curtain on everything. We talk about food, fitness, everybody’s favorite feelings, fucking hormones, and your future self.
I have a hormone expert joining for one of our calls. My co coaches will be leading some of these calls as well. You do not want to miss it. It is a great deal and a great way to get started. We hold nothing back. I can’t wait to work with you. So check out the show notes.
ABOUT THE HOST
Bonnie Lefrak is a Life & Body Transformation Expert and Founder of Self Made, a program designed to help you tackle the physical aspects of health and weight loss as well as the beliefs and thoughts that drive our habits and behaviors. It is her goal to help women create certainty in their own lives, their own results, and their own abilities.
Weight loss is not about the one “right” diet – it is about MUCH more than that. Weight loss is not about the one “right” workout. Weight loss is not about being positive and putting a big smile on.
Weight loss is about FEELINGS. All of them. Not trying to bury them or hide from them but knowing and allowing the full human experience. Weight loss is not about grinding hustling and will powering your way to some end line. Transformation (when done well) is done from the inside out.
By addressing both the physical and mental aspects of dieting and weight loss, she has coached thousands of women ages 30-55+ from all over and helped them ditch the mindsets that are holding them back, achieve permanent weight loss, and get the bangin’ body of their dreams.
Bonnie is an expert at Demystifying weight loss. She helps you u****k your diet brain. She is on a mission to help women love themselves, to find PEACE in the process of losing weight, taking care of themselves, and leveraging the power they do have to become who and want they want right now.
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