#112: Weight Loss and the Thrift Store Purse

Weight loss and thrift store purseDo you ever find yourself attaching your self-worth to the number on the scale, even though you know deep down it shouldn’t define you? I want to share an interesting story about a thrift store purse I stumbled upon, not knowing its true value when I bought it and how this story relates to weight loss and how we value ourselves. 

Here’s the real question: How do you measure your own value? What standards do you use to determine your worth? Often, we underestimate our own worth, and demeaning ourselves can rob us of the happiness and fulfillment life offers. In this episode, I’ll share some tips to help shift your perspective and recognize your true value.

 

Weight Loss for Quilters | Weight Loss and Self-Sabotage 

If you are ready to lose weight and change the way you think about hunger, sign up for the lifetime access membership for Love Yourself Thin! Doors are open and you can find all the information by clicking here.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Overwhelm leads to inaction
  • How to let your brain see your value
  • The more you can love yourself, the healthier your relationship food will become

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • If you are ready to lose weight and change the way you think, sign up for the lifetime access membership for Love Yourself Thin! Doors are open and you can find all the information by clicking here.
  • Leave me a review in Apple

Full Episode Transcript:

Dara Tomasson Podcast

112. Weight Loss and the Thrift Store Purse

Do you feel like your worth is tied to the number on the scale and no matter how many times intellectually you know it’s not, it still feels like it? Well, don’t worry. I got you. My name is Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 112, Weight Loss and the Thrift Store Purse.

All right. I am so excited about this episode because I love stories and today I’m telling you a story. I love reading stories. I love putting myself in stories. I remember when we first moved here, in fact, my youngest, so my third son, he was really struggling and he was missing his friends. He was eight years old and I said, you know what, honey, this is hard, but let’s go read a great story. And we started reading Harry Potter and we didn’t stop. I read the entire, more than a million words to him over the course uh, we got here in May and we finished up, I think by Christmas, we read all of it. And so sometimes we just need to go into a really good story to help us. And so this episode is all about this story and I’m excited to hear your takeaways from it.

But before we go into that, I do want to share a story about one of my newest clients and she was really nervous about signing up. And she would write me emails and say, Oh, I really want to join. And she’d tell me a little bit about what was going on in her family and her life. And we just were able to talk back and forth. And then finally she’s joined and she has some really challenging situations at home and has a lot of different responsibility of taking care of older siblings and just managing all of those dynamics. And she realized that she needed to really dive into the tools. Cause one of the problems when people first join Love Yourself Thin is they get overwhelmed by so much of the information. And all I say to them is you just start with one, module one and you just keep working your way up. So she got home from work and just was able to say, I’ve got more work to do and was able to put herself in her room. She didn’t have to explain to anybody and just let herself enjoy the module and let herself just dive in to the workbook. And it just made the world of difference for her. And the fun part was when she was weighing herself she was so surprised by the scale, number on the scale that she weighed herself three times on her scale and a few times on her husband’s. And this is what happens when you learn how to take out that mental and physical weight. So I’m so happy for her and this can be your story too.

All right so I’m telling you the story about the thrift store purse now, I really enjoy thrift store shopping. I think it has throwbacks to my heritage, my grandmas, my great grandmas, they were very, very thrifty. They used all the scraps and they made quilts out of them and dolls and everything they get a hand on. They were very, very resourceful. And I love the idea of reducing, reusing and recycling. And also I love that I was able to, I made choices, as a stay at home mom, when my kids were little, to not go back to work, I worked when I was pregnant with my first, second, and third. And after my third pregnancy, and going back to teaching, I said, okay, enough is enough. I want to stay home and be with my kids. But it meant you had to make sacrifices. And one of those sacrifices was shopping at the thrift store. And I actually got really good at shopping at thrift stores and finding really good deals and clothing my kids. I have four sons and they tend to go really hard on their clothes and so handing clothes down wasn’t as much of an option. And it actually makes me really happy because my third son is really good at thrift store shopping. And he’s 14 and he’s so patient. He goes through all the different items and he can find such treasures.

So just recently I went to a thrift store and I found a purse and I found this purse and I thought, Oh, this is really interesting. I will have it in the show notes and I thought. I didn’t even really actually know what the material was. It had leather straps and leather on the corners and but it just looked really cool, and I bought it for 11. 99 And I got it home and I checked it out. There’s a attached to the purse, you know, just on the label. And I looked it up and I was so surprised. First of all, the purse itself is no longer, it’s all sold out and the purse that mostly resembles it but doesn’t have the leather was 199. And I thought, wow, for 11. 99 and I even had a 20 percent off coupon. That’s quite the deal. And I was, I was thrilled about it. And now it’s super fun for me when I go and I see people I say, oh, what do you think this purse is made out of? Oh, I didn’t even tell you it’s made out of paper. It looks like it’s made out of leather, but it’s paper and they have, I will also link the website. It’s very interesting. There’s some very cool purses and it’s very unique and it’s worth a lot of money and I didn’t even know it when I bought it.

So of course, as I tell this story, how does this relate to weight loss? How does this relate to us, the way that we look at ourselves and the way that we see ourselves? Well, one of the things that creates a lot of sadness for us is, and this is a very common story to so many of my clients, when they’re little girls they just love life. They love creating, they love jumping and they, they play and they just have a lot of fun. And then they start hearing moms and grandmas and aunts and mom’s friends and people start complaining about their body. And I, and I know for this for myself and for my clients, starts getting a little bit confusing. I’m not supposed to like my body. I was supposed to criticize my body and what is my relationship with food? What’s, what’s going on there? And so it starts feeling really kind of weird because like a lot of us. We thought oh, we’re supposed to love our bodies. I thought we were supposed to enjoy having a body. I thought we should be proud of our bodies. So then of course what happens when we’re in high school, quite often we start hearing other girls talk about their bodies and talk about them in not a really happy way. And so we start getting insecure about our bodies. And then that relationship starts changing. So we start thinking we’re less than. We devalue ourselves. We don’t see our value. And in fact, our brain, with this whole concept of confirmation bias, looks for all the reasons why we aren’t as good. It looks for all the reasons why we are less than and so we don’t see our value.

Now you can imagine when I went on the website and I saw that this purse that I bought for 11.99 with 20% off was valued more than 200. So how do you think I’m taking care of this purse now? Versus, Oh, this old thing, it was only 12. So my question for you is how are you valuing yourself? And what is the criteria that you use to decide what your value is? Now every month in love yourself Thin we have a different focus and we talk about different aspects of why we tend to turn to food and in the month of September we’re talking about overwhelm and overwhelm leads to inaction. When we feel overwhelmed, we kind of put our head under the sand or under the covers and we maybe scroll a lot more, we do a lot of different things that that really aren’t getting us to where we want to be. And then of course, the more that we hide away, the less we get done and the less that we feel connected to ourselves and we feel really happy. We walk away from our value. We walk away from how wonderful and amazing we are.

And so if this is you, if you are resonating with what I say, I want to invite you to look at yourself again in the mirror, I want you to really just look at yourself. I want you to look in your own eyes. And ask yourself, what do you absolutely love about you? What are the things about you that are of worth? What are the things about you that you enjoy? What are the things about you that you can feel really proud of? And let your brain see your value. So just like and you know really I’m sure some people would look at that purse and say well, it’s only 200, what’s the big deal? Because there are purses that are thousands and thousands of dollars. I get it, I totally get it. But for me in my situation and the way that I look at things the idea of having a purse that I didn’t spend very much on and then learning that it is of more value, it increased the way that I was able to see that purse.

And, you know, we hear stories. In fact, I was sharing one of the stories and so when I was telling the story and one of my friends said that his wife, she was listening to the news or the radio and somebody found a first edition Harry Potter at a Thrift store. And it was worth like 20,000 or something. So my example of the purse is it’s just, it’s just a fun story, but it got me thinking about how are we valuing ourselves and the sadness that comes when women only can value themselves when they weigh a certain amount. And the problem with this is you demean yourself, you, you take away from the joy that is available to you and you don’t really enjoy the life that’s there. So now when you’re at dinner with your friends, are you valuing yourself and your conversation and the way that you can contribute? When you’re at your daughter’s and helping with things, do you feel as helpful and as loving and as kind and as patient? Or are you more in your own head wishing that you were better, wishing that you had made better choices so you could have more energy? So then you’re not even really enjoying yourself. This is what’s happening when you devalue yourself, you’re not allowing yourself all the joy that could be possible in the life that you are having.

I just want to finish this story with just an invitation. I want to invite you to imagine yourself. When you are five years old, or 10 years old, or 15 years old, and I want you to ask yourself would your five year old self be excited to hang out with you right now? Would she have so much fun? Would she have a great time hanging out with you? Or would you be a bummer to hang out with? Would you always be kind of down like an Eeyore? Or would you have that wonder and curiosity and excitement that you once had when you were five, before people started telling you that you were shy or messy or disorganized? And then you started living kind of in fear of judgment of others.

I really want to hear from you. I love hearing from you. And I love when women join my program and they say, they already know me because I’ve shared so much and we are friends and we are we already are. Because I already love you. I love those people who listen and you are building a relationship with me. It’s all your thoughts about me and I love that I’m able to help you and help you see things in a different way. So as you contemplate joining Love Yourself Thin I want you to know that you are welcome and you are loved and that is a wonderful feeling and the more that you can do that for yourself, the more you can love and accept yourself, the easier your relationship with food will be because it’s not so conditional. I love this analogy and I want to encourage you to share with me what thoughts are coming to you and what experiences do you have that you can relate to this. All right, I can’t wait to share with you all the new and upcoming episodes. Goodbye!

Apple PodcastsSpotifyStitcher

Share this post

Radical Self-Love Masterclass

February 26th-28th, 2025 at 12pm Pacific

4-Day Live Masterclass via Zoom