What a special episode today! Some of the amazing folks in my Winter Fat Loss Fast Track are sharing their progress, struggles, challenges & successes! Yup! Real life success stories!
My hope is that you can see yourself in them & have hope in your ability to transform, to get consistent & to achieve the results you want.
In this episode, I mention often (as do these amazing ladies) the spring Fat Loss Fast Track. To grab a space in the free training to learn more, click here!
Have you ever been frustrated by your lack of willpower? I know I have! I’ve had so many moments when I decided to create & follow a plan and then quit before I started!
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve told myself, “This is the time! I’m doing it! No excuses! Time to get serious!” and then found myself saying “yes” to cookies, ice cream and pizza the next day. Sometimes even the same day!
Maybe you’re familiar with the cycle? Commit in the morning, cave in the evening?
You use up so much energy planning & promising but it gets you no where if you don’t do the work.
You stop trusting yourself. You erode your self-confidence. Your word & your promises lose their meaning.
I broke so many millions of promises to myself that I wasn’t sure I’d ever keep one.
But I did.
In fact, I rebuilt the trust. I lost over 100 pounds without increasing my willpower by gradually building two things, one single choice at a time:
New habits
Trust in myself
I want you to make sure you read this entire explanation, but I’ve created a free tool to help you implement what I’m explaining below. (You gotta read the rest for the checklist to make sense & work it’s magic.)
Let me try to explain why I don’t think willpower works & why I think you don’t need willpower to lose weight.
The willpower approach is like trying to learn 6 new skills at once without bothering to figure out the basics.
I heard Chalene Johnson use the following analogy (not related to weight loss, but it works):
It’s kind of like walking on to a college campus all excited to learn. You follow a big crowd into Spanish 301. You’re excited! Yeah! Time to learn Spanish! You’re frantically scribbling notes & you’re determined to go home & study, but you quickly realize you’re in over your head.
Instead of thinking, “Hm. Well. I think maybe there was a 101 and 201 class I skipped” you think, “I suck at Spanish. I can’t do this. That class across the hall looks interesting. I’ll try that. Maybe that’s my thing.”
In you walk to Microbiology 407. You’re motivated. You’re there. You’re focused.
You’re lost. You’re in over your head.
Of course you are! It doesn’t matter how badly you want it, how motivated you are or how much willpower you have.
You’ve taken on too much and you jumped ahead without the basics.
When it comes to weight loss, that won’t work.
You must tackle the basics:
Learning to trust yourself & re-establish the credibility of your own word
Establishing foundational habits
I talk to my 1:1 coaching clients & the folks in my Fat Loss Fast Track about the difference between practice & play. I’m a big sports fan so I often use sports analogies.
If a young kid begins playing basketball for the first time, you probably won’t send him to a shooting clinic. He needs to understand & get comfortable with the basics. Repetition & familiarity are king here. Dribbling, passing, shooting, getting comfortable with the ball in his hands.
It’s about establishing a comfort level with the basics. Building confidence, repetition & familiarity. Before you’ve done that, it’s not even fun.
I bought a guitar about 10 days ago. I’ve never played the guitar. I’m not good. Practicing isn’t fun when you’re not good. It takes time and repetition to get familiar with the basics.
If I jumped into some advanced tutorial right out of the gate, I would fail, regardless of my willpower.
If I tried to learn to read music, master complex chords & memorize strumming patterns all at the same time, I would feel like a failure regardless of my willpower.
So how do we overcome this when our goal is fat loss?
We pick one behavior – yes, just one – that we want to master & we practice it every day.
We don’t want to tackle 7 behavior changes at once! Our focus, willpower & energy are finite. We don’t want to splinter them among 7 new things. That will only lead to frustration.
We want to pick one high-impact strategy and implement it every single day until we earn easy. That’s right. Easy is earned with repetition & consistency.
Some of the most high impact single strategies I suggest starting with are:
Tracking – writing down what you eat & how it makes you feel
Fat loss breakfast – focusing on healthy fat, protein and fiber from non-starchy veggies
Affirmations – replacing the negativity & self-doubt with strong, powerful statements about what you will do & why
When you simplify your approach and know there is only ONE goal to tackle for the day, your progress accelerates much more quickly than when you’re over-reaching & trying to do “all the things”.
Your trust in yourself begins to grow as you prove that you can repeatedly do that one thing until it feels easy or effortless. Then, and only then, add on more.
I have created a super simple checklist for you. I want you to carry this with you each day as you build this one, foundational habit.
Each day, I want you to make a check mark to denote that you executed your “one thing” and I want you to rate how easy it was on a scale of 1-5 (5 being effortless, 1 being brutally difficult). You will find that with time & consistency, it gets easier & easier.
That’s when we know when it’s time to transition to the next thing.
You don’t need willpower to lose weight. You need to focus your energy & attention on the mastery of ONE high-impact habit and invoke the power of repetition until it becomes effortless.
Last week I shared a personal episode about my experiences with binge eating. I talked about how & why I binged & how I stopped. The response to that episode was overwhelming. Whether you could relate to binge eating or just emotional eating and overeating, hundreds of you reached out for help and support.
Today I want to help you take that next step. I want to cover how to stop overeating & repeatedly giving in to temptation.
So many people feel like it’s beyond their control – like they just can’t stop. You can. I will help you.
I was a champion overeater and binger. I used food to cope with emotions and I would often eat until I felt (or became) sick. I felt that in many ways food owned me and had more control than I had. I was wrong.
There were a few strategies I began to gradually implement to help me radically change my relationship with food, my mindset & my body.
I strongly encourage you to listen to the episode because I think it will be helpful to hear exactly how & when I’d implement these strategies.
The first step I encourage you to take, before implementing any of the strategies described in this episode is to identify the lies you tell yourself. For me, the lies were often, “I’ll start tomorrow. Just this once. It won’t hurt. I deserve a break.”
I want you to challenge those lies and ask yourself, “Is that true?”
When you tell yourself, “I’ll start tomorrow”, is that true? Do you? Or is this how you make yourself feel good about being indulgent? Are you telling yourself what you want to hear?
It’s hard to accept the truth when the lie is what you want to hear.
Then, you can try one of the following 4 strategies:
Just for today
The 3 questions
How do I want to feel in 1 hour?
How will this choice make me feel?
Is it worth it?
1 more (rep, choice, minute, hour)
Do not go back to what broke you
In today’s episode I explain how these work & how I apply them in moments of indecision.
I want to challenge you to pay more attention to your body & less attention to everyone else’s. I want to show you how to interpret the signals your body sends every single day & use them to your advantage.
The reality is that your body is constantly communicating with you. It’s letting you know what’s going right, what’s not, which hormones are struggling and which ones are cruising right along.
Many of us, however, are so busy living life & paying attention to other people and things that we don’t pay attention to the signaling & signs of our own bodies.
Today we’ll take a dive into keeping a journal of what you eat & the signals your body sends without the cumbersome tasks of counting calories or macros. We’ll uncover the common sense approach to fat loss & hormone balance.
The primary signals we get from our bodies related to fat loss & hormones are quality of sleep, hunger, energy, mood & cravings. Those are the signals we’ll evaluate today.
In today’s episodes I talk about the different things we can learn from our hormonal biofeedback and go through detailed instruction on how to interpret signals your body sends. What I want to provide for you here is a series of questions you can ask yourself when reviewing your tracking document or journal. To understand how I recommend tracking (in a very quick & easy way), read this blog post about tracking.
How is my energy level upon waking?
Do I feel rested?
How would I rate the quality of my sleep?
For how many hours did I sleep?
Am I hungry upon waking? How hungry?
When in the morning do I begin to feel hungry?
How satisfied does my breakfast leave me feeling?
For how long after breakfast is my hunger satisfied?
How is my energy mid-morning?
Are there breakfast choices that leave me with less energy mid-morning?
Are there breakfast choices that leave me with more hunger mid-morning?
What’s my average energy level throughout the day?
Do I rely on caffeine for energy?
When do cravings strike?
What are my cravings for?
Are there food choices or meal timings that reduce my cravings?
When do I get hungry for lunch or a snack?
Am I eating out of habit or pure hunger?
What foods improve my mood?
What foods hurt my mood?
How is my focus throughout the day?
When does my focus wane?
How would I rate my exercise intensity?
How do I feel after a workout?
Am I more hungry or less hungry on days I work out?
Do I tend to make better food choices or worse food choices on days I workout?
When does my energy begin to fade?
What time do I naturally feel ready for bed?
How long does lunch satisfy my hunger?
How long does dinner satisfy my hunger?
What snacks satisfy my hunger?
What snacks leave me looking for more?
What food choices am I making when I see the best fat loss progress?
What patterns do I see when my fat loss isn’t where I want it to be?
Am I consistently having protein with my meals & snacks?
Am I consistently having healthy fats with my meals & snacks?
Am I following the Golden Rules of Carbs & Fat Loss?
Have you ever heard the Cherokee story about two wolves? I share it on this episode & adapt it to the internal debates I have over food & health.
A fight is going on inside me. It is a constant battle between two lions.
One is stubborn & lazy. She is greedy. She stands for pity, guilt, resentment, lies, abuse, avoidance, excuses, exceptions and delays.
The other is beautiful. She is hopeful. She is strong. She is optimistic. She is determined. She cares for me, believes in me and knows that everything is possible. She is my guardian and wants to guide me to my potential.
The same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person, too.
Which lion will win?
The one you feed.
If we’re standing at a figurative fork in the road during these debates (and we are), what we do today we are more likely to do tomorrow.
This is powerful.
This isn’t woo-woo emotional stuff. This is the science of change, how change happens & how it can be sustained.
What you’ve done most often – if you’re giving into that voice of the present instead of the voice of potential – that’s your groove, your pattern, your rhythm. Your path of least resistance.
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So, we have these two lions.
The voice of your potential and the voice of your present.
The voice of the best life possible and the voice of resistance to that life.
