#114: Weight Loss and Excuses

114. Weight Loss and Excuses

How many reasons, aka excuses, do you have that you haven’t lost weight yet? Well, I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 114, Weight Loss and Excuses.

Okay, before I start, I do want to say that this might strike a nerve with some people. Some people might think that I’m accusing you. Some people might think that I’m in your brain and I’m picking your brain. But let me tell you, we all have excuses. And that’s okay. But the excuses, in my mind, are like a way to figure out what’s really going on. So my job for you in this episode is to show you that excuses actually are like a flashlight that helps you know why you aren’t where you want to be.

So I want to just share a quick win with one of my students. So this student she was on a plateau for a while and was really struggling and she wasn’t quite sure what was happening. And so she’s been using the Love Yourself Thin tools. And then she decided she was gonna go see a naturopath and see about what was going on with she was having some bloating and some discomfort and realized that she is allergic to potatoes and she was eating a lot of gluten free foods, which has the potato flour, which by the way, I definitely don’t really encourage if you’re going to use any sort of flour, I would recommend almond flour because it’s just ground up almond. It doesn’t have any refinement in it. Anyhow, so when she was able to take that extra step, collect more data for herself, she was able to break that plateau and she’s feeling so much better and I’m just so proud of her.

And one of the reasons I share that example is that a lot of us have a lot of excuses. So just take a minute and you can even put me on pause and what do you think are some of your favorite excuses? Now, it might sound like weird, but it’s true. What are your favorite excuses and why? And if you get the handout, it’s there in the handout. So some of the excuses that I hear a lot are It’s just the way I am. Another one is menopause. Another one is my DNA. If you look at my grandma, and my mom, and my aunties. It’s just how we are. My husband he likes meat and potatoes. My kids are picky eaters. My mom told me when I was a teenager or when I was growing up that I had to finish everything off my plate. What are some more excuses? Just, let them come, right? How many do we have? So many. So what else? I hear them all the time. The weather, the government, the food chart, at school they taught me this thing, I can’t change, or money, I, I don’t have enough money, or I don’t have this, or I don’t have that. So write down all the excuses.

Now one of the things that I like to joke about in my program is what’s the excuse de jour? Right? Just like we had soup du jour. It’s like, what is that, that day that I’m going to use as an excuse? What about an injury? How many of us use injuries as an excuse? Well, I can’t exercise. So one of the things that I have done in my weight loss journey. So I got my first life coach in 2018. I started losing weight and then by the Christmas of 2019, I had lost 50 pounds. And the problem for me was I actually didn’t think that they were excuses. I thought they were legit reasons. I thought legitimately perimenopause was the reason to gain weight. I thought legitimately my brucitis in my hip was the reason I couldn’t lose weight. My DNA was legitimately a reason. I had all sorts of reasons. I had five kids and my fifth kid, I had a lot more trouble losing the weight after him than my other ones. Time. Time is another one. That’s a huge one. Money. I don’t have enough money to pay for a personal trainer.

So I want you to write down all the excuses. And then I want you to ask yourself, is this true? Like, is this legit reason? And then, if it is, I want you to research it. So, I started doing that. I started researching menopause and perimenopause, and I actually found that there are some legitimate reasons why women gain weight during menopause. One of them is that we lose muscle mass. And so when we lose muscle mass, our body is no longer using 200 calories a day. So if you don’t build that muscle mass, and if you continue eating what you normally would eat, you are actually gaining weight because your body is now storing 200 extra pounds a day just by doing the same thing you used to do. So 200 calories over seven days, that’s 1400 over two weeks. That’s 3000, approximately 3000. I’m just rounding. So that’s a pound every two weeks. So that’s two pounds a month. 24 pounds a year. So you have a legit reason why you gain weight in menopause if you don’t change the way you do things. Right, so that’s what I’m saying with this episode is we do have excuses and sometimes there’s legit reasons to it.

So let’s take another one, our DNA. Now there are conflicting research about that. I have read all sorts of different things about it but one of the things that really resonates with me is that the way that you grew up, the family traditions, the family focus, the family culture impacts us greatly. And one of the things that’s interesting for me when I look at this is my daughter is five foot six, I’m six feet tall. My mom is five four. All my uncles and my cousins are under six feet. I’m taller than all of them. So, like, with weight loss, when you talk about DNA, some things are transferred over and some things aren’t, like height. But if my family is always focusing on food and cooking for people and celebrating with food, then yes, of course, it’s just inevitable that I’m just going to gain weight. So, in this episode, I want you to go through this exercise. What is the excuse that I have that I haven’t lost weight? And then if it’s menopause, then you could say, okay, well, is there any truth to that? And if there is, well, let’s figure it out. Oh, okay. So it means I need to lift weights or if I’m not interested in lifting weights because I my body is just losing muscle mass, then I guess I need to eat less. So when you can see the truth of it, then you can now be proactive in your own life.

So in Love Yourself Thin, I have five pillars and the five pillars are first, weight loss science is simple, so you gain knowledge. The second pillar is you create your own eating plan and you troubleshoot it. So these women in my program who have lost all this weight. I don’t know what they eat. I don’t need to know because they’re the ones that are using the tools, they’re creating their own success plan. And so now you’re getting experience by application right? Applying these things and then the third pillar is how to feel your feelings instead of eating them So now you’re actually allowing the feelings you’re letting them be in your body and you’re allowing yourself the opportunity to have this full experience of being a human.

And so you’re no longer avoiding yourself and avoiding what is. And then the fourth pillar is you take responsibility for yourself. So now you’re no longer blaming other people. Like blaming excuses, blaming this, blaming the government, blaming your mom, and you’re not shaming yourself. So you’re not constantly saying, well, I’m not smart enough. I’m not good enough. I can’t do this. I’m not capable enough. And so you’re degrading yourself and you’re not able to fully trust that you can solve these problems for you. And then the fifth pillar is learning how to build self confidence. Having self confidence means you’re willing to feel any feeling and you’re learning to trust yourself and what you say about yourself is the most important.

So as I talk about these five pillars, I want you to ask yourself again, what are the excuses you’re using to not lose weight? And whatever’s coming to your mind, I want you to dive into that and say, is that even true? And what parts of that could possibly be true? And how could I learn from that? Because unless you’re willing to learn, unless you’re willing to really take a look, you won’t change. You will stay the same and you won’t be able to have that transformation on the other side. If you want help and support to learn these tools and to do that, that’s where I come in. That’s where these tools come in. That’s where the support of a group of like minded women come in. You are not supposed to be on your own. You’re not left to your own devices. There is support and love and help out there. But unless you reach out for it, it will stay within arm’s reach and you will also the success that’s available to you will also stay within one arm’s reach.

But I am excited for you to be listening to this podcast and if you’re listening to it on the day it came out of September 27th, make sure that you join us for October where we learn how to overcome falling back into old habits. And if you’re listening to this afterwards, it’s all in the portal, it’s all in the replays and you can take advantage of all the goodness that you’re gonna learn there. All right I can’t wait to hear back from you on what you got from this episode and I will talk to you later. Bye