110. Weight Loss and Honeymoons

As a former school teacher, I’m thinking about September with all my new students. And sometimes we would have those students where they would still be in a honeymoon phase and every day we were waiting to see when that would be over. So if you ever find yourself in diet the honeymoon phase, and you worry when you’re gonna crash on yourself, this episode is for you. I’m Dara Tomasson, and this is Love Yourself Thin, Weight Loss and Honeymoons.

Okay. There’s a lot of different ways that I wanna talk about this podcast, but the fun part about it is that we all have our own honeymoon phase. Some of us have actually been on honeymoons and this year I am celebrating my 22nd year of marriage, and I got married at the end of August and had a very short honeymoon, but it was very fun. And I think about honeymoons and the actual term of being married and having a honeymoon, but also we often talk about honeymoon phase with kids at school or honeymoon phase of any new project. And so let’s just talk about what that is to begin with. The purpose of this podcast is to look at how we can stop the honeymoon phase when it comes to different diets and start really learning to trust ourselves so that we can truly feel powerful in our own body and go to parties and have fun and not worry about the food, go grocery shopping and not get upset with ourselves when we buy the treats and eat them even before we got home.

All right, so a honeymoon is really fun for the most part because it’s supposed to be fun. It’s a celebration. You’ve just tied the knot, you know, you’ve gotten married. There’s not a lot of pressure. The whole purpose of a honeymoon is just to have enjoyment. It’s just to have this experience with the two of you. You also are really focused on having a good impression on each other, and it’s not really that hard yet. You know, married life is, you’re just starting out. It’s all new. And you don’t have a lot of history of them not doing the dishes or not paying the bills or picking up or taking the garbage or whatever it is. And so it was all fairly new and exciting. You don’t have to use a lot of willpower ’cause you’re just having fun. I remember when we, we got married and we bought a house, a townhouse together and we’d never lived together before or anything. And I remember being married for a week and we’d say, oh, it’s been seven days, it’s a week. And then it would be our first month or our third month. And, you know, I still get twitterpaited at times when I see him. My heart skips a beat. But we’re past the point of, it’s been, I don’t even know, 3,722 weeks or something. You know, we start getting in those routines and we start having those things that are just more common.

So this happens a lot with diets. This can even happen with Love Yourself Thin, we get really excited, we get pumped up. We’re like, yeah, this makes so much sense. This is awesome. I love it. And we do good. We do well. And this is the part that’s really difficult for a lot of us to understand. We never wake up in the morning saying, I have a good idea, I’m gonna be terrible to myself. I’m gonna sabotage myself, and I am going to make things a lot worse by eating the donut in the staff room or stopping by at Dairy Queen and getting treats for my grandkids, and then I’m gonna have one too. Or going to the tea party with the grandkids and then eating it, right? So we don’t ever do that on purpose. But we do have these innate self-sabotaging behaviors and, and when we can learn them, then we can do something about them. So we get excited. We buy all the things, we maybe throw away stuff in our pantry. But then there gets to a point where it starts getting hard. It’s hard to say no, and you really want the thing, and so what do you do? Do you go inside of you and have an inner dialogue and say, yeah, this is hard. I hear you. I totally wanna eat this, but I also don’t wanna keep worrying about diabetes and all these other problems. Or do you go turn to some expert of some diet and have that and try to answer it? Which as we know doesn’t actually solve the problem. So then what happens is if you turn to the diet, you’re not getting the, support or the help and you don’t understand the why, so then you just do what you’ve done before, is you just quit on yourself and promise yourself that on Monday you’re gonna do better. Or you can go inside of you and get your own answers, but this is the problem, you have to be willing to be vulnerable and honest with yourself. You have to be able to say to yourself, what’s really going on? Why do I wanna go and grab those chocolate chips? Why do I wanna stop work right now and take a little break and walk through the pantry and see what is calling my name? What is it about this that’s really hard?

I remember when I was writing my first book and it was incredibly, a huge amount of work and effort and they sent me the final draft and it was, you have to go through this whole book. You have to look at every single thing. And they had a whole new way of editing that was new to them, new to me. And I needed to have it done ASAP. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I did not wanna do that. And at that point I was exhausted. It was the summer. I didn’t want really anything to do with it. And I, I really couldn’t care less because I was just so tired of it. And I thought, oh, Dara you have to do this. And so I sat down. I thought, oh, I’ll go outside. It was summer, and I’ll just enjoy it and I’ll just remind myself, oh, this is so cool. You’re an author. And then the next thing I found myself, I was in the kitchen. And I was getting out the coconut and I was eating coconut and I was grabbing some chocolate chips. And I, it was so interesting to me of how ingrained that was for me to go for food. Now it was interesting, ’cause as I stopped doing the food, guess what I do now? I pick up my phone. What’s going on on Facebook? What’s going on on Instagram? Oh, did anyone email me? Did anyone join the program? Because I don’t really want to go inside myself. I don’t really want to see why I am doing that. I just want to get it over with, and I just don’t wanna feel uncomfortable.

And so I actually got this concept when I was coaching one of my clients and it came really clear. We have these weight loss cycles, and we’ll do really well and, and I see this with my clients who’ve lost like 60 pounds, 80 pounds, a hundred pounds. They’ll go through these different phases where they’ll, they have it really hard and they really struggle, but then they work through it and then they come triumphant, they feel really confident, and then they kind of glide for a while. And then they get to this, a new phase where they’re at like a 50 pound and then they struggle again, and then they start beating themselves up because they think, well, I should have nailed this already. I’ve already lost 50 pounds. What’s wrong with me? But it’s because they have to be willing to get more vulnerable with themselves. They need to figure out this new version of themselves. So this is gonna sound kind of weird. It’s almost, you know, people say meta. I’m like, that’s such a weird word, but meta to me means it’s like kind of in your head. It’s kind of, you have to imagine it in your brain. It’s not so visual. So I want you to think about this idea about the different versions of ourselves.

So we have, of course, our past self, and this is a really interesting concept. We always have our current thoughts about our past self. So this is really interesting. So if I was five and somebody asked me what was your first thought about seeing your baby brother? So, as a five-year-old, my answer would be very different than if someone asked me when I was 20, what was your first impression of your brother when you saw him or now as a almost 50 year old, if someone asked me, my recollection of it is so is different now than it was when I was five. So we always have our current thoughts about our past. And then we have our current self. So right now, in this moment, I’m having thoughts about myself and then I have my thoughts about my future. And as we grow and change, we are constantly rewriting the way that we operate.

So, in the past with my kids, like my three oldest, I had very different ways of parenting in bedtime, in routines, because everyone was home, I didn’t have to drive a bunch of kids to basketball. I didn’t have to drive everyone everywhere. And so they all went to bed at the same time pretty much. We had this great routine, but then life started to change. Some kids had to be at this thing for school, some kids had to be at this thing for basketball, and so I did things differently. And so my now 11 year old, he definitely has a very different nighttime routine than his oldest brother when he was 11 because we had different circumstances and so we’re always evolving and changing and even your body as a body that has lost 50 pounds is very different than a body that’s lost 80 pounds or 30 pounds. And so we have to learn to rewrite our manual. And then another piece of this cycle, this weight loss cycle is that when we look at ourselves, we now had to have a new identity. We have a new way of looking. Like I share when I lost 30 pounds, I was thrilled. And I just was so excited of what I had accomplished, so I just started living my life so much more. I remember going to Houston Quilt Market in 2019, and that was in September or October. And then by December that year, I had lost another 10 pounds, which I didn’t even think I needed to, or, or I could. And then a year later I was 50 pounds down. And so, the way that I thought about myself, the way that my body worked was very different.

So, one of the problems with the diet mentality, so when I, we were talking about the honeymoon phase you get excited and the motivation is really high, but then when it gets hard, what do you do? So you have to go internally, you have to, and I love how one of my clients, she said this, she said, diets tell us it’s a one and done, but it’s not a magic formula. The magic is us prioritizing ourselves and you know, this was so powerful to me because it showed me that she really learned what the whole Love Yourself Thin is all about. A diet tells you what to do, when to do it, and it’s a lie that says it’s one and done. It is just a formula that you just plug in and you’d get the same result over and over. But we are not a robot, we are not static, we are not the same all the time. We’re always, always changing. So in order for us to evolve, we need to embrace that part of us, and that’s what I’m talking about with our past self, our current self and our future self, because we always are changing. Just like I changed as a parent with the nighttime routine, just like we changed with C O V I D and we wore masks and we did social distancing. Just like we change with Zoom, we now have Zoom calls. We don’t have to travel for all these staff meetings.

And it was interesting because this client of mine, she had lost I think 70 pounds and then she went through a phase where she was stagnant and she wasn’t losing weight and she was plateauing and she was getting really frustrated. And the problem is that if you think that you just have to do exactly the same things. You’re not gonna get the same results because when you’re 70 pounds down or 80 pounds down, you have to change the way you’re eating and change the way you do things to keep losing the weight, you have to tweak some things. You might have to change some things. You might need to add a little bit more water or you might have to change the way you’re sleeping. Or maybe you have to eat less. I find myself having these bigger bowls of food, but I don’t need as much. And so learning how to eat half my plate and then deciding do I need to eat more or am I satisfied? All of those things happen, but unless we can embrace who we are now, we can’t change.

So this episode about honeymoons is just I think a wake up call for a lot of us, because a lot of us think that we, and I did this so many times, I went for the keto, I did this, you know, the Weight Watchers. I did all of these different things thinking that I can just figure it out and then it’ll be done. And I get into the honeymoon phase and then once it got really hard, I was depending on the diet to try to help me. But that’s not where the magic happens. It’s going inside of you. And when you can go inside of you and you can look at that, you can make such a change. And you know, I think about my, just the fact that like in my marriage, it’s amazing to me that we’ve been married 22 years and the love that we have for each other is so much greater than it was when we got married. And we got married, we were madly in love with each other, and it was amazing and wonderful, and I actually never realized, I didn’t know that I could love somebody the way that I do now. And it’s because we just keep working together and working through the challenges and working through the difficulties. We’re not always running to a self-help book or to having other people tell us what to do. We have just stayed committed to each other and really worked through so many of the ups and downs that happen in a marriage. And I’m so glad that we have, and it is the same thing with weight loss. I promise you, the more that you can be committed to yourself, the more that you can just love on yourself and learn from yourself, and really just stay committed to yourself and go to the magic of like, Hey, what’s going on for you? That connection, that dedication, that love is so powerful.

I’m just gonna share one of the things that happens for myself and I talk about losing 50 pounds and keeping it off. There are times where I’ve lost 40 pounds, like I sometimes go up. I’ve gone up about three or four times up to 40 pounds. So I’ve gained like a 10 pound, and it’s been really interesting to track because I think, oh, what am I doing wrong? Like, it kind of sneaks up on me. And every time I’ve gone up that 10 pounds, it’s been a big transition in my life. Like my son leaving on his mission, my son coming back from his mission COVID. It’s very sneaky and it’s very normal when we go back to some older habits and it wasn’t even that I was eating, like I didn’t turn to the chocolate or those things, but I would eat more than I needed or I would maybe grab a little bit more of a healthy snack in between meals, not really paying attention as much to my hunger. Very, very sneaky. But the more that we can just go to our own magic and really going into ourselves and answering those questions that’s where we get the power. I promise. It’s so worth it. You are your own magic and you really do have all your own answers. And until you can own that for yourself, until you can be willing to turn to you to find those answers, and of course, get support. All the women in my program, they have all the support. They can ask a coach, they can come to the Facebook group. Ask A Coach is a feature in the program where you can ask online as many questions as you want anonymously, and myself or my coaches will answer it. There’s no limit on how often you use that.

So that is my challenge to all of you, is to get yourself off of that honeymoon phase of a diet and really start committing to yourself because that is truly the only way that you are going to get that transformation is if you create your very own process that works best for you. I can’t wait to hear from you on what that means for you in your life as you go on to create the kind of life and body that you want. And I am here a hundred percent to teach you the tools and give you the support to making them. All right. Take care everyone. Bye-bye.