#139: Weight Loss and Shame

139. Weight Loss and Shame

Are you embarrassed about the way you look or the way your life is? It’s not exactly how you wanted it to be? Well, I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 139, Weight Loss and Shame.

Okay, shame is one of those things that, I would definitely say I carry around with me a lot and ever since I was a little girl, I felt a lot of shame. I felt like I could never live up to expectations. I felt like I always fall short, no matter how hard I tried. I was always trying to help my mom. I was always trying to be the helper. I always wanted to have kids and a family. And I definitely am a nurturer and I just always felt like no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t quite get it right. And you know, as, as I’ve been a life coach and using these tools, it’s been such a game changer for me in how I’ve changed my attitude and how I’ve been able to look at myself in a different way. And I really wanted to share this episode with you as I continue to do this work and also study the work of experts like Brene Brown, who really gives us great insight into how we can turn shame into power.

And so today’s episode, we’re going to dive into what shame means and how we can overcome it, the difference between shame and guilt. And then we’re going to work on many strategies on how to overcome that. So today is a double whammy for the worksheets. There’s two worksheets there’s just so much that I I needed to put in so when you go print off the the worksheets you can see that there’s two pages. So make sure that you you really take a look at those.

But before we dive into the podcast, I wanted to share what’s happening to the people who are being influenced by Love Yourself Thin. So the members, they’re putting themselves out there and they’re really changing their relationships with others. And I have to just do a shout out to all husbands out there because I have to say that so many husbands, their lives are changing so much because of the work that the members do inside Love Yourself Thin. Now, the interesting thing is some of them, even well, quite a few of the husbands or partners or spouses, they lose weight. They lose physical weight as well as mental weight. One of the partners of my members, he felt like he was always walking on eggshells and now he doesn’t worry about that. He doesn’t have to worry that he doesn’t have to guard what he’s saying because he knows that what he’s saying he has good intentions and that he can’t actually control the way his wife feels she’s the only one to control her own feelings and this has brought them so much closer in their marriage Because he’s not having to edit himself. He’s not having to check himself. He’s able to really look at what’s going on. So It’s been really fun to watch their marriage progressing and that level of freedom and trust is, it’s just really fun to watch.

Okay. So Brene Brown, of course, is the go to expert on shame and shame research. She has amazing books and really have learned so much, but even if you wanted to just Google some of her TED talks and watch those, they are really profound. What I really loved about doing this work with women and losing that mental weight so that they lose the physical weight is a lot of us feel so much shame, but shame says I am bad. And it comes from having a conflicting expectation. So a lot of us think that we are supposed to be a certain way. And as soon as we start saying, I should be this way, I should do this. It’s saying that we need to be different in order to be who we are. And that’s really scary because we aren’t even being realistic on what that could look like. So how many of you have that feeling of I should be a different way. Right? And so just play around with that in your mind. What conflicting expectations do you have? Like I have kids, so I should take care of them all the time and nobody else should watch them and I’m fully responsible for them. There should be no room for error. They should be perfect. Like, what is that? Because if you have those expectations, then you’re definitely going to, you’re going to set yourself up for failure.

Now guilt is “I did something bad.” And I actually don’t think that guilt’s a bad thing because in fact, I have a personal experience with one of my kids who didn’t make the best choice, didn’t go to class when he should have. And he felt intense guilt. And It was actually a really good thing that he feels guilty and he wrote an apology letter to his teacher and I think that’s going to be a really powerful lesson for him moving forward because it will help him remember, Oh, that’s not the person I want to be. I don’t want to be a person that cuts class. So I think it’s good. I think it’s good to have feeling of guilt. I mean, if we didn’t have guilt, we’d all be serial killers or we’d be all robbing banks or taking things that aren’t ours. So there is definitely a place for guilt.

With shame she talked about how we can we overcome that, how can we work through that. And she said there’s three steps for shame and she said actually is how to grow exponentially and so the first thing we need to do is talk to ourselves like someone you love. And I, I talk about this all the time in my program. Would you ever talk to your child or your grandchild the way you just spoke to yourself? Like, Oh, what’s wrong with you? Why are you so dumb? Would you say that to your kid? Number two, reach out to someone you trust. So as a life coach, women reach out to me and share with me what’s going on and I’m able to help them work through that. There’s therapists. There are good friends. There are maybe a clergy member or someone in your church maybe an older person that you respect, or maybe like there’s lots of different people that you can reach out to and, and share this with them. Because I always say that shame is like mushrooms, they grow in the dark and they’re fed poop, right? So we need to put some light on it and to, to really talk about it. And then the third is to tell your story. And as you tell your story, it’s very interesting as I listen to stories and the way the women share their experiences, because the way they tell the story is the way that they’re believing it. And the, the most beautiful thing is you actually change your story by the way you tell it and I remember learning this in life coach school training that you can actually change your past Because the way you change your past is the way you think about it differently.

So, for example, if I was to tell the story about , when I swam in a race and I broke a record like if I told that story when I was 10, how different would I tell the story when I’m now 50? You know, and even though you, cause you can’t change the past, like the past is, it’s something that happened, but the way you tell the story is different. And so you can change the past by the way you tell the story. It’s really, really amazing and crazy. And I think it’s one of the most empowering things that we, that we get to do in our, in our work in Love Yourself Thin.

All right. So moving forward. So there’s the three things we need to do. We need to talk to yourself like someone you love, reach out to someone you trust and tell your story. Now, she said, secrecy, silence, and judgment, those keep you in shame. Interesting. And then she said, the antidote is empathy. Now, I thought, Oh, that’s really interesting. Empathy. What exactly is empathy? So we’re going to talk about empathy, but she also mentioned the importance of vulnerability is not a weakness. And when we do this work, now, this is the problem, a lot of women, especially as you’re listening to this, you’re like, okay, weight loss. I want the magic pill. I want just to have the transformation. Or I want to be, just tell me what to do and I’ll just do it. Now, what is the problem with that? The problem is that the reason we started overeating, the reason we have all these troubles is because we are using food to distract ourselves. We are using food to not feel the feelings. We’re using food or gambling or overachieving or serving or people pleasing or perfectionism. We’re using all of these different strategies to try to keep us away from the actual problem and the actual problem is an emotion. So if we have an absolute fear of feeling fear or feeling sad or feeling discouraged, then we will try so hard to not feel that feeling, so we turn to food to try to get away from that or we turn to shopping or whatever that is. We all have different strategies and so we’re keeping ourselves away from our own transformation when we don’t let ourselves be vulnerable. When we don’t let ourselves look at what’s really going on.

Today I had such a powerful coaching call with one of my clients who was at first she said, well, I don’t want to lose weight because I’d have to buy new clothes and I hate shopping. And I thought, okay, this doesn’t make sense. And as we dug a little bit more, she then started to share that there’s fear around getting more attention. There’s fear about maybe putting the weight back on. And she realized that there are some fears that she has not let herself look at. And by doing this work, She can see how she can have the courage and strength to really look and really tell the truth to herself. And this is what I’m talking about vulnerability is not weakness. In fact, vulnerability is the most accurate measure of courage. That is why I say the more willing you are to feeling vulnerable, the more success you’re going to have with your mental and physical weight loss. So, and vulnerability is the path on how to get back to yourself and to others. Think about a marriage when you are, you know, in that very intimate setting where you aren’t wearing clothes or very little clothes and you’re exposing yourself, that is putting yourself in an incredible area of vulnerability, but it also is putting you in a very powerful way of connection and love and joy. And so it is worth it, but it definitely takes work.

Okay. So I went to my, you know, the Googles, which are so helpful. And what I like about googling is that there’s a lot of really good information out there and you can take it or leave it. You can, some things you might really resonate with, other things not so much, and that’s okay. So I, I found this website cognition today, really helpful. And she talked about empathy. And so I’m just going to share with you some of the findings I found. And like I said, what is resonating with you? So she said empathy is a desirable human trait and is central to relationships, community wellbeing, professional growth. On some level, empathy is natural. Most people are aware that others have unique feelings and thoughts. Most people can resonate with some other people on those feelings and thoughts. It’s hardwired. Okay? So remember we are wired to belong. So if we’re too different or too weird or we’re too, you know, too far off, then people are going to reject us. And in our DNA, our instincts are to belong. So people also know that humans have similar emotions and deep down, they are not that dissimilar from each other. Similar insecurities, similar goals, and similar reactions drive a lot of our human bonding. Okay? And all of this is part of what psychologists call the theory of mind. But on another level, we could all actively use more empathy, not just in the feeling sense, but in more cognitive effective ways to guide decisions, to appeal to others, to cultivate relationships, to resolve conflict and to ever, you know, advertising, all of that.

Okay. So this is interesting. She has about 13 different ways for us to build empathy. before I go into those 13 suggestions, I thought it was interesting how she talks about how do we really learn to be more empathetic? And of course, as we talk about going back to our childhood we learn a lot what’s been modeled to us, okay? That’s why when we talk about you know, in our families, if we’re overweight, you know, we say, oh, it’s in our genes. No, a lot of it is what we’ve learned. So if we saw that our mom was always turning to food when she was sad or when we saw you know, all the celebrations, just like an incredible amount of food was such an emphasis that we just thought that’s just what you do. That’s just normal. Okay? So she said, empathy comes from the as if body loop. So what that means is the loop is set of neural structures that estimates other people’s mental states by copying others physical states and inducing the same state in oneself automatically. So we see this a lot with if a mother is really anxious and nervous, her kids often are anxious and nervous. If the mom is pretty chill and she’s more, she laughs more and she doesn’t take things so seriously, then the kids they tend to, to have similar characteristics because that is what they’ve learned. And so they mimic the facial gestures. They mimic the responses. And we see this with mammals so it’s documented with primates, rodents, and domesticated animals. They learn from their observations. So when you can realize the power of that, then you also realize, oh, if I learn to do this by watching other people, I can unlearn it and I can do things that are more my style.

So here are some of the suggestions. One of them is reading literary fiction. So when you read books that influences the way you think, it will then help you to think about things in a new perspective. I really like that. The second one is learn to recognize facial expressions. So learning to recognize how people react can help you learn how to make us a human. I think that’s why we really love watching Hallmark movies and those wonderful ones where they make you feel good and you’re like, I want to be someone that does that. Taking acting lessons. This is interesting. Acting involves taking up a set of characteristics and personality traits that don’t truly belong to you. So actors train for years to learn to put on a convincing face. Sometimes they draw from their own experience to resonate, and sometimes they regulate facial expressions, body language, voice to match a context in a near authentic way. So Keanu Reeves actually took lessons from the U. S. Marines to train for the, his role in John Wick. So, learning how to act teaches people a lot about subtle socio cognitive features that are embedded in society. So, words, expressions, gives and takes, picking up signals, they all come together and help boost empathy. That’s so interesting. Number four, use the perspective taking technique. So for example think of any person you are close to. There is a strong chance that you know a lot about that person than just factual knowledge. So you know their attitude towards like social causes, idiosyncrasies. So think about when you were growing up, did your mom say, did she have lots of comments about politics, about people who were overweight, about people who were like rednecks or different social classes? Because if you grew up with that, you just think that that’s normal. So from their perspective, that’s what they value. And then once you start realizing that, then you can now step into your own power of what you value and what’s important for you. Number five is to doubt your interpretation. So I like to take a pause and I like to say, like, I just interpret it that way, but is that the way I want to interpret it? Like, is that, is that who I want to be? We have a lot of homelessness around where we live, and not where I live, my house, but like where we go to church and in, in the city of Nanaimo. And I often ask myself, am I interpreting, like, how am I thinking about homelessness? Like, is this how I want to be? Manipulate words, number six. So spot assumptions, unknown metaphors, anecdotes, like, is this true? And so even like the word literally, I have to think about that. Like, is that actually true even true. Rephrase and acknowledge. So in a conversation, the speaker does not always know that the listener is understanding, so you can reframe it. Identify intentions. So very often the absolute truth of what others are saying is not the goal of communication. The goal is to be heard. So take in information from others for what it is. Something to be heard based on intention, not factual accuracy. So are you seeing the intention and you get to decide what intention you’re having, and you don’t have to take on other people’s intentions.

Another one in this one, I see a lot, especially when politics or religion is involved, it’s, it’s avoiding polarization. So sometimes when we speak in absolutes you know, this is, this is really challenging because they’re not actually looking at what they have in common. And so it like polarizes them. And so we don’t have a lot of empathy or compassion or, you know, kindness towards that other person. Practice rotating objects. So this one’s kind of interesting. It’s the ability to physically see and imagine shapes and locations from a different angle. That it helps in inducing empathy. So this happens because the ability to have a literal point of view is associated with the ability to have a metaphorical and imagined point of view. So if you’re playing like, Tetris is a great example. It’s a fun way to rotate objects and estimate how their position interacts with other shapes. And you can treat each shape as a person and some insight will follow. So, don’t take everything at face value and maybe take a look at, do things in different ways. I like the idea of judging the need to maintain factual accuracy. Now in Love Yourself Thin, one of my favorite tools is the model and the model really helps you learn the difference between facts and thoughts. And you’re able to like come back to what do you really want to believe.

So the other one we’d like to think about is mirroring and mimicking movements. So as you see what other people do, you can actually see where they’re coming from, and this really helps. Now, some of the obstacles that can keep us from having empathy is if we have low oxytocin. So if we’re always focusing on ourselves, then we’re not able to really have any other energy for other people. Painkillers, they can stop us from like really having the ability to see where other people are coming from. Emotional distance, so if you are keeping yourself from other people, then you’re hard to reach. You’re hard to, you know, you’re not able to relate to people. You feel unattached to people. You’re not really accessible. So that keeps you away. Also this idea of, this is happens a lot with children, high school kids is putting people in categories. So thinking like you’re this person, I’m that person, and you differentiate yourself from other people and like, so for example, a housekeeping person may offer more value as a kind gesture to a manager, like people judging other people from their social status or something like that.

So this episode, I really want you to think about what is your relationship with shame? And I know this is kind of a long one. I’ve kind of, there’s a lot that I wanted to share about this, but I really want you to think about the most important part of this episode is if you are constantly thinking, I am bad, how are you able to progress? How are you able to take care of your mental and physical body if you’re constantly saying, I am bad, I am wrong, I am no good. It’s not going to work. You have to be willing to really look at why do you think you’re bad? What are those conflicting expectations? And when you can get to that root of the problem, then you can start having traction.

And so I want to remind you the three ways that you can grow exponentially is one, monitor the way you talk to yourself and decide I’m not going to talk to myself like someone I don’t love. Like I’m going to talk to myself with kindness. Number two, reach out to someone you trust. And number three is tell your story and the secrecy, silence, and judgment that is going to keep you from transformation from changing. And the antidote is empathy. And the more you can be kind to yourself, the more you can love yourself, the more you can understand. Hey, I get it. I see why you’re treating yourself this way, but it’s okay. That makes sense, but we’re not going to do that anymore. This road always leads to sadness and despair and we’re not going to do that anymore.

Okay. All right. I’m so happy to have shared this podcast with you. And of course, I’d love to help you with any of these and you can find all the support and all the things you need in Love Yourself Thin. All right. Take care. Bye bye.