106. Weight Loss and Retirement

Are you retired or close to it? Well, today’s episode is going to help you whether you are retired, almost retired, or not quite ready for retirement. Because today we’re going to be talking about weight loss and retirement and how no matter what age you are, you can retire joyfully with weight loss. Are you ready? I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 1 0 6, Weight Loss and Retirement.

Hello everyone. I love getting so many different ideas for my podcast, from my coaching clients. I actually have a running tally of ideas for podcast episodes and I was coaching one of my clients and this came up for me and I am so excited to share it with you. Before I do, I wanted to just share a win from one of my clients because I love to help you see that it’s really possible for you. So, one of my clients, she was hosting a 4th of July celebration, and she had this realization that she tells herself all the time that she hates to plan her meals, but when she has a party, she loves to plan for it. And so as she was planning for the party, she realized that she can just plan the kinds of foods that she’s going to eat that’s gonna feel good for her, and she can provide lots of different food for all the different people that were coming and at the end she was able to stick with her plan for herself, and then she was able to send all the food home that she didn’t need, and that was a huge win for her and it’s all simple and able to do as you commit to doing this. So, so happy for her.

All right, so let’s talk about retirement. Now, there’s a couple of different definitions in the dictionary of retirement. So we have our traditional definition of the action or fact of leaving one’s job and ceasing to work. So typical definition, but I like this one that I came across when it said, no longer need to work to live comfortably and can rely on savings or passive forms of income to fund your lifestyle. So I really liked that one, and as I was reading it, I realized how much I feel this way. I retired with so much of the food drama, the weight loss drama, the eating drama, and it just feels so amazing to me that I’ve been able to do that. And it’s not just me, it’s so many of my clients. In fact, I got this idea from one of my clients who has lost about 80 pounds in five, no six months. And we were able to come across this concept because for her she’s always struggled with her weight ever since she was a little girl. In fact, her weight always made her feel like she was different from her family. Her Grandpa and uncles and different family members would make comments about her body, and so the way that she has thought about herself has been not very helpful, but it just has seemed normal and just what she normally does. And so we have to retire a lot of thoughts about herself. In fact, she has to retire a lot of the ways that she thinks about herself and frames the way that she does things.

And so when you think about retirement, and I, I just met with another client the other day who has only two years left before she can retire from her job. And so when you think about retirement, you have a lot of lasts. This is the last time I’m going to have to wake up at this time. This is the last time I have to drive down the highway. This is the fourth last time I’m gonna have to do report cards and so you start looking at your life by the last. But there’s a lot of good last, like as my last staff party or this is my last, this or that. And so as you look at retirement preparing for it, it’s a way for you to embrace a new life. And it’s saying goodbye to things that you loved. It’s saying goodbye to things that you didn’t love. Now, when you think about food, I want you to think on what have you been using food for and what would you like to use food for? What would you like your story to look like? So for example if you want to retire turning to food for comfort, how do you do that? Because we know that turning to food for comfort doesn’t actually create true comfort. So we have to be able to create your own comfort. So you say, all right, food. I have been using you for comfort, however, that’s not been working. And so you say hello to, I create my own comfort by going for a walk. I create my own comfort by doing a thought download. I create my own comfort by being honest with myself. I create comfort with processing an urge. I create comfort. And so you can just create all of these new ways that you create comfort that actually works for you. So the needing to turn to food for comfort would probably look like I don’t eat ice cream at night anymore, or I don’t go through the drive through when I’m doing errands or I don’t have the bag of chips after dinner or whatever those things are that you went to for comfort. So you actually say goodbye just like a retirement party. You’re saying, I’m not doing that anymore. And then you have to implement a new one.

Another one that we need to retire is needing those mints or chocolates within arm’s reach. And I, when I was a school teacher, I had one coworker, she was the guidance counselor. And she helped us with our kids with special needs and she always had a jar of mints in her at her desk, and quite often I’d find myself just going to see her, so I could just get that little hit of that mint. How many of us have chocolate within reach at all times? There’s the memes of the m and ms in the, our little drawer in the front case of our sewing machines. And so how often are we doing that? But again, those don’t actually create comfort. Those don’t actually bring us joy. So we need to retire that action and then we will embrace the new way of, I just look at myself in the mirror and I thank myself for all that I do, or I appreciate my body for stitching, or, I appreciate my body for having, you know it can do so many different things and acknowledging that. So we really do need to do away with one life and embrace another and we can take what you like from your past life and then re-implement it. So being able to say, I actually really liked that I laughed a lot. That made me feel really good. And so you can continue to laugh a lot. You don’t have to have a totally new life, just like a retired person. There’s still the same person. They just have a different routine.

One of the parts that is probably the biggest challenge that we need to retire is how we celebrate. Or maybe even there’s other ones of like people pleasing or perfectionism. There’s lots of these patterns that don’t serve us that we need to start recognizing, first of all, and deciding. This is not who I want to be. This is not how I want to live. But I wanted to, touch on this because, you know, when you think about retirement and I have a client also recently who just retired from work and one of the things that she said was, I’m excited to retire because I use my work as an excuse for taking care of myself. And now I’ve gotten rid of one big excuse. And I think that that’s accurate. But I also wonder how much of our life we spend thinking, I have to change to make a change. So that’s also very tricky.

But I wanted to talk about celebrations, and this one has been a huge one for me in my life and I’m watching this happen for the members in my program. So ever since we were little, even my very first memory, my very first memory as a child was sitting on my Grandma Hazel’s lap for my third birthday. My mom made me this wonderful chocolate cake. And she couldn’t find any small candles. So there’s one giant candle in the middle of the cake and I had this really cute yellow dress and I had these adorable pigtails with little yellow ribbons. And I just remember sitting on her lap and blowing that candle out and just feeling so happy. Another memory shortly after that one was my other Grandma Mary, who I have very few memories of her. She died when I was seven and almost every single memory of my Grandma Mary, has to do with sugar. She made homemade root beer and she put the root beer in the shower, which I thought was hilarious. I have memories of her making, she called them flapjacks, which I’d never heard anyone call pancakes flapjacks before or hotcakes. She also called them that. I remember her putting popcorn air popper in the middle of the living room and then take the lid off. And all of us kids had to go around and catch all the popcorn. I remember her making homemade ice cream. She only came to our house a few times ’cause we lived in the big city and they were out in the country. So it was hard for them to leave the farm because of all the animals. And my grandpa just really didn’t like being in the city. Another one I have actually is of peas because she loved growing peas. She loved eating peas. So I remember shucking peas. Another memory I have that has not to do with food. She had a bubbles in her bathtub and she would let us go in that. And then she had little lipsticks ’cause she had the Avon lipstick samples. And so I remember she let us play with that. But pretty much all the memories that I have are associated with food. So it’s really difficult to retire that relationship that I have with food and to say goodbye.

And so yesterday I had a, a really big day. It was a huge celebration for me. I had worked on this project for a long time and I I got it finished and I was so proud of myself. It was a big day. Woke up really early, had to get my makeup done and all sorts of things, and it was just a lot of prep and I remember feeling just so happy after it was done and I wanted to celebrate and I had to take the boys to basketball, and sure enough, I’m in the car and I’m thinking, this deserves going to Dairy Queen and getting peanut buster parfait or something really exciting. And it was just so interesting to me how even though I’ve done so much of this work, it’s still so ingrained in me into going and getting sugar. And so it was interesting ’cause I went to the grocery store to get some food for my son in between basketball ’cause there was three hours and I had some licorice all sorts in my hand even. And I thought, oh, these would taste so good. And I thought, no, this is not how I celebrate. And I got myself some yogurt and a banana. But it’s really difficult to retire that way of thinking.

And just like instead of turning to comfort for food, instead of needing to have the chocolate or the mint on the hand. We create our own happiness. We have our own plan, like one of my favorite things to do is when I’m brushing my teeth in the morning and night and just looking at myself and saying, Hey, you’re doing great. Like, you’ve really come a long way. I really connect with myself and that feels so good. Another thing I do almost every day I go in the hot tub, quite often, I’m by myself, I’m looking at the stars, and I’m just connecting with nature. That is a really fulfilling way to celebrate myself, my life and enjoy that.

And so I guess the big takeaway that I want to share with you for this episode is I want you to ask yourself if you were to do a personal edit of your life, and let’s go back to the definition. You no longer need to work to live comfortably and can rely on saving or passive forms of income to fund your lifestyle. And I want you to do an inventory of how much of your life do you feel is comfortable, how much of your life feels calm and wonderful. Now you know, if you know the 50 50 life will always be 50% awesome and 50% maybe not so awesome, which is normal, but I want you to ask yourself what parts of that life are you holding onto that you’re sabotaging yourself, that you are making a lot more difficult than it needs to be? So, when you think of this definition, no longer need to work to live comfortably. Maybe no longer need to use willpower to try to change. So I gave the example of the celebrations because that is one thing in our life that we have been using sugar and flour for that doesn’t serve us. Now, I’m not saying you have to give up flour and sugar altogether. In fact, I still make cakes for my kids. I still eat sugar and flour usually at least once a week I’ll have like Apple crisp or I’ll, I’ll make something for myself or for my children. I don’t want to live a life of deprivation. I want to still be able to have some indulgences, just like our ancestors did, but I don’t wanna rely on it. That’s a lot of work and it’s also a lot of work for my body to have that much sugar all the time, and we can’t fight with the science.

The other piece that I wanted to just share, and this one that maybe we need to retire is so when I went on dates with my husband, and actually when our kids were really little, we didn’t go on as many dates because it was harder to find a babysitter. And with money and all of our obligations. And so quite often we would go to the grocery store and we would, you know, find some really fun ice cream or we would do that. And it got so exciting and we thought it was just so great. But the problem is you never really feel awesome afterwards. You feel kind of guilty and your stomach kind of maybe is bloated or doesn’t feel super great, and so it feels really exciting, but afterwards it’s not. And so one of the things that my husband and I have done over the last four years is when we go on dates we don’t always go for dinner. And if we do, we usually make good dinner choices, but it’s usually the trip to Dairy Queen you know, to get a special treat. We don’t do that anymore. And what we do instead is we will drive up the mountain and just sit and look at the beautiful sunset, or we’ll go to the beach and we’ll just sit and enjoy that. Or one time we were, we went to his coworkers, we had to check on his house and we just sat in his backyard with his really nice lawn furniture. And just enjoyed being together and just talked and connected. And that’s really what we want, is you really want to have connection with ourselves and with others.

So as I share this podcast, I really want to hear from you what takeaways you’re having and what do you need to retire, and I do want to just say in conclusion there are certain parts of our life that we loved. I loved having babies. I loved being pregnant. I loved nursing babies. I just loved babies and I loved having them as my own. I loved watching them grow, and of course it was tiring and all of that, but I really loved that and it was really hard for me to say goodbye to that. It was really hard to come to that conclusion that I’m no longer gonna have any more babies, and that was a hard one for me. But it’s okay to mourn the loss of that. It’s okay for me to say, you know what? I really loved it. That was a really fun part of being a human. And even for some of us who really loved eating ice cream and really loved going to the grocery store and even loved going to Dairy Queen and getting those treats on a frequent basis, you can love that you did that. You don’t have to love what it did for you, but you can love that you made efforts to celebrate other people in different ways and that’s okay.

So in conclusion, I want to encourage you that when you learn tools to manage your brain, you can actually start living in your body, living a life that feels so much more comfortable because you aren’t afraid of people judging you. You’re not afraid of you judging yourself. You get along so much better with yourself, and that is what happens when you learn these tools. So if you wanna learn them, they’re all there in Love Yourself Thin, and it’s just such a pleasure for me to watch the members in the membership embracing the tools, learning the tools, implementing them, and celebrating. So if you wanna be a part of that, you’re always welcome. Take care everyone. Bye-bye.