141. Weight Loss and the Fear of Being Selfish

Do you think it’s super selfish of you to think about spending time on your body, on your brain to lose weight and that there’s so many other things that you need to do and that by taking care of yourself, other people will think that you’re selfish or narcissistic or conceited? Well, I’ve got just the episode for you. My name is Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin Podcast episode 141, weight loss and the fear of being selfish.

All right. You ready? All right. So before we go into the meat of the episode, I am committed to sharing with you the ripple effects of the members of Love Yourself Thin’s lives so I would like to share with you about one of my clients who, she has a grandson. And her daughter and husband, they had an au pair and things are not going well with her. And so they asked the grandma to come in and help. And it’s been really interesting because she reported on what a difference her visit has been because she has all of these tools now of Love Yourself Thin. So people can make comments, people can say whatever they wanna say. And she’s not being triggered as much. She doesn’t react so much because she realizes that they’re allowed to say whatever they want. And she’s also allowed to react however she wants. And she just feels so empowered. And then the other thing that’s happening is that she has boundaries with them on this is when I am available and this is when I’m not. And so she’s not feeling resentful, she’s not feeling frustrated, and she’s able to enjoy her time. and not feel so afraid. So everyone’s benefiting, the grandson, the daughter, the son in law, and the au pair. So I love that for them all.

Okay, so let me go into this episode, and I’ve been thinking a lot about this fear that, and this is not just for people thinking about joining my program. This is me thinking about the way that I spend my time and how I’m helping other ladies in the program. So a lot of us got the message of what a good human is by the messages we picked up as kids. So when I was a kid, my mom was very concerned about a clean house. And in fact, she talked about clean houses so much that I remember going to this person’s home who was a very good person but she had a messy house. And I remember being so confused. I was about 10 and I thought, how can she be a good person? She has such a messy house. I honestly thought that. Because that was just something that was emphasized to me. So we get, we pick up these messages as kids and then we kind of put them all together and think this is the rule book and so then we kind of just live by those rules and we don’t realize that they are optional and that we are allowed to think what we want about them. So we kind of cobbled together these rules that come from sometimes when we’re five, sometimes when we’re 10, sometimes when we’re 15, sometimes when we’re 25, we overhear some ladies talking and we think, Oh, this is, I guess we need to live this way.

So the problem is we are operating out of all sorts of mismatched ideas, thoughts, and beliefs. And until we actually sit down and write the manual that we want, we are kind of operating willy nilly. I think I might have shared already when I was first learning life coaching, this was a really interesting experience for me. My coach was coaching me about my relationship with a certain individual in my life who tended to trigger me quite a bit. And so my coach said, well, just write the operational manual that you expect from this person, the role of this person. Let’s say it was a friend. And so I wrote what I wanted a friend to be like. And then my coach said, now I want you to write what it really is like. And it was so powerful to me. And I literally took out a red pen because, you know, my 10 years of being a school teacher, I took out a red pen and I wrote what the relationship really is. And it was so empowering because truly it was me learning how to just accept who she is. And I understood how detrimental it was for me. Because I was expecting someone to be something different. And my coach said to me, what would it feel like if there was somebody who wrote a rule book for you and they expected you always to follow it? How would that feel to be in that relationship? And I realized, yeah, I wouldn’t like that. So really good exercise. Loved it. Very life changing.

So let’s look at this fear of being selfish. Let’s look at this idea of it’s selfish of me to spend time on myself. So, I have three definitions and if you go to the worksheet it’s episode 141, weight loss and fear of being selfish, the definition of narcissism. Okay. So narcissism seems like it’s all over the place, but this simple definition is excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance. Excessive interest in or admiration of. So you actually get to decide what does excessive interest or admiration of one’s self and one’s physical appearance? You can decide. So does that mean like three hours a day, two hours a day, 10 minutes a day? Like you get to decide that. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot myself, the definition of conceited, because I would never want anyone to say I’m narcissistic or conceited or selfish, because that doesn’t really resonate with me. I’m a very loving, giving and serving person. And even even as a mom, it’s been tricky for me to navigate the level of care that I spend with my kids. So of course when they’re brand new, you are 24 7 pretty much. And then just navigating like how much time do I spend, as soon as they get home, do I go with them? Do I give them some down time on their own? Like it’s kind of a tricky balance. And I also think about this for a lot of ladies who get really attracted to Love Yourself Thin and they love the idea of going to coaching calls and they love the idea of being part of a community, but then they think, Oh, is that being really selfish? Am I going to become a narcissist? Am I going to become conceited or selfish? So that’s why I’m doing this episode. It’s kind of a check in to see what do you want to think about taking care of yourself? How much time do you want to spend on yourself? How much time do you think would be a good idea? And just start making, just kind of open up the conversation. So I’m, I’m presenting these ideas to you.

So the definition of selfish is a person so a person action or motive lacking consideration for other people, concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. All right. So again, narcissistic is excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one physical appearance. Definition of conceited is excessively proud of oneself or vain. And then the definition of selfish is of a person, action, or motive lacking consideration for other people concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure. So when you have those as your understanding, I want you to ask yourself, are you these things? And if you are, do you like that about yourself or is that something you want to change? Because I actually can help you with that with coaching tools. So on the worksheet, I ask you what were the messages you were told as a kid about living your life, reaching your dreams, spending your time, how you get your worth. So, did you hear messages like, it’s selfish to want more? You should be happy with what you have. Your worth as a woman is tied to your level of caretaking. Okay. I want you to just ask yourself, what were some of those messages?

So now I want you to ask the question, what are your intentions of your life right now? So one of the things that’s tricky about this is that we grew up thinking this is what I want. I want to get married, I want to get an education, I want to have children, I want to raise my children. Maybe you did have a aspiration for a profession or like a teaching or like you were a teacher, you wanted to be a secretary, you wanted to be a doctor or something, but then it kind of, we kind of stopped dreaming. We kind of stopped doing that. Am I the only one? I don’t think so, because I coach women on this all the time. So in your life right now, what is the intention of your life right now? What makes you feel, and a good way to think about this is before you go to bed, how, when you talk to yourself, how often can you say, I had a good day? So then that’s how you know if you had a good day or not is the things you approve of for yourself. Okay. So was it that your house was clean? Was it that you had meaningful connections with your people? Was it that you scrolled a lot? Was it that you got some things accomplished? Was it that like, what, what was that? Did you move your body? Did you eat well? Like what? You paid some bills? Like what? You didn’t break any laws. You didn’t end up in jail. Like, seriously, like, what, what is it? So then I want you to get clear on that.

So now my next question is how will people benefit from you being an independently happy woman? So this is kind of an interesting question because there are a lot of women that I’ve met that their, self worth, their joy comes from other people. It comes from other people’s accomplishments like your children or your your grandchildren or, you know, we, they live basically through other people’s joys and they don’t, they don’t really know how to create their own joy. They don’t know how to create their own like way of being happy and they find themselves distracting themselves with making themselves important to other people. Now, this is called codependency which means that you depend on other substances or other people to create your own happiness. And I just taught a class on how to break up with food and create your own happiness. And I talked about the principles of Melody Beattie’s book .

So I just wanted to ask you like this is just such a good opportunity for you to, to think about, because the problem is if you don’t shine a light on these ideas then you live a life of a lot of fear. And so you live a life, a lot of fear and you don’t really know why. So I was helping my friend. She is nine, eight. She’s eight and I was helping her with her math homework. And the question was eight plus eight equals 16. 16 minus eight equals blank. Five plus five is 10, 10 minus five is blank. And she had this little portable abacus and I was helping her with her homework. And it was really interesting because you know, she was really struggling with it. And this little girl was not quite getting it. So I was using lots of different techniques and different ways to help her try to understand what was happening. Now you could say, Oh, that’s so simple. That’s such simple math. But for her in her life, that’s hard math. but there are a lot of things right now in our lives that are hard. When my youngest son went to school and I had no kids with me during the day, that was really hard, like exceptionally hard for me. Even though I had a thousand things I could be doing during the day, I had to reinvent who I was and that felt really uncomfortable for me. And so just like with my friend, Ever’s math, that was hard for her at this stage of her life. And this podcast, I’m here to help you meet you wherever you’re at and help you.

So the problem is if you are not able to create your own happiness and you are always relying on other people, people needing you, people wanting you, people giving you praise for what you’re doing. Then that’s a scary way to live and actually this was another concept from a Melody Beattie’s book. She talked about this triangle. And it’s called, so she was talking about a caretaker and she defined the caretaker as when you are caring for others and aren’t taking care of yourself in the same way. And there’s this triangle that we fall into that is, when I, when I first read it, I realized, Ooh, and I come from a long line of martyrs. I really do. They could, if there was a competition for martyrs, my people would do really well. So the triangle, Carpman Drama Triangle. So we’ve got the rescuer, we have the persecutor, and we have the victim. So the problem is that the victim is, so people who we believe are not capable of being responsible for themselves. Then we have the rescuer. So we rescue anytime we take responsibility for another human being, their thoughts, feelings, decisions, behaviors, growth, wellbeing, problems, or destiny. And then there’s the persecutor. So resentful and angry at the person we have so generously helped. We did something we didn’t want to do. We did something that wasn’t our responsibility to do. We ignored our own needs and wants. And we get angry about it. So the victim is not grateful. And she said we rip off halos and grab our pitchforks. Okay. So how often do we fall into that bad habit? Because we don’t know how to create our own happiness. We are relying on others.

So my objective, and one of the things that happens inside Love Yourself Thin, is you learn how to create happiness within you. I just re recorded all of the 12 modules, and I broke them in, some of the modules I broke into 3 classes. Because I wanted to take them into bite size, and that is definitely one of the themes in Love Yourself Thin, is to learn how to create your own happiness. Because happiness cannot be bought, happiness cannot be eaten, happiness cannot be given to you. True happiness is an inside job.

So I’m gonna leave you with this challenge. And I really hope you take advantage of it. What would your 90 year old self tell you about taking care of your physical and mental health? And I had a particular challenging thing happen to me today and I did a lot of, I did some crying and I did some self coaching and I reached out to my coach, my very first coach. I love her so much. And one of the things that she said to me is that she often writes herself letters from her 90 year old self and I thought that was so beautiful. And so I wanted to provide that option for you as you think about how do you work through this fear of being selfish? Versus the actual act of self care, of tenderness, of taking care of yourself, nurturing yourself.

And I’m just going to finish off by the words of Melody Beattie, who has been in this field of codependency and taking care of yourself. And she said, the best way to love yourself is gently lovingly, like you would nurture a new baby or puppy instead of turning on yourself. And this is how we get sober from our food. We get sober from unhealthy relationships. It’s gently, nurturing, loving. And taking care of ourselves. So I encourage you as you move forward in your life. And as you really think about what do I want, that is one of the nicest, kindest things you can do for yourself. It is not selfish because if you don’t take care of you, you will not be the kind of version you want. You’ll be haggard. You’ll be exhausted. You’ll be overstimulated. You’ll be all the things that you don’t want to be because you’re not truly taking care of yourself, All right. It was so fun spending this time with you And of course, I’m always loving hearing from you and your insights, so you can share them over on my Instagram Dara underscore Tomasson. And see you there. Bye