185. Strategies to Break the Sugar Cycle

Hello, everybody. Do you feel like no matter how hard you try, you can never break this sugar cycle? Well, I got you. My name is Dara Thomason, and I am the accidental weight loss coach. I help women learn how to get to the root of their weight loss struggles by going deep into our emotions. And when you can do that, you can actually free yourself from counting calories and tracking steps and all those traditional methods don’t work because you’re finally allowing yourself to really get to what’s happening.

And so it is my. intention for this podcast to help you see that it’s not that you’re not smart enough. It’s not that you aren’t clever enough. It’s not that you aren’t good enough at tracking calories or tracking steps. It’s that you haven’t learned to regulate your body. All right, so this is episode 185 strategies to break the sugar cycle, the quilters podcast, and I’m Dara Thomason.

I’m a professional quilter who helps quilters or any other woman who resonates with what I’m saying, create the kind of life that they want. Now, this episode is piggybacking off of 184 where we talked about So Addiction is the opposite of connection. And this morning I went on a walk and I was really thinking about those experiments and those studies that showed how addiction really happens.

And we can have a mouse, like they talked about in the last episode, and if you haven’t watched it or, or listened to it, go and do that. It’s really good. It’s amazing, but they took a mouse that had two water sources, one that had heroin and one that didn’t. And nine out of the 10 mice got addicted or rats to the heroin water.

But then we had a Canadian scientist who thought, well, what about their environment? They were the only rats in the cage by themselves. Um, what if we gave them a really nice environment? So he called it rat city and, um, he put all sorts of activities and other rats. And even though there were only two water sources, um, not, uh, they had hardly any addiction because these rats wanted, they had different things to do and the excitement.

And it was interesting for me to read that podcast, or sorry, to read that, um, research because something that I’ve been saying for the last three years. Well, since 2020, since I became a life coach, I say over and over, make your life more interesting. So food doesn’t have such a center stage. And um, and then in the last podcast they talked about in Portugal, focusing on how they help these people have deeper connections.

And when they have that, then they are, so they have way less addictions. So, having thought about that and looking at that, um, this concept and having worked with hundreds of thousands of women in the last five, I guess, four and a half years or so, um, we are all very smart, we are all very capable, but if we don’t address the real issues, then nothing changes.

And, I just did a training in February or January that was excellent. And it talked about how I can give you recipes. I could give you. workouts. I could, we could even take your blood. We could do, um, an analysis on your blood type and what kinds of foods you should be eating. Um, we could actually do an analysis on what kind of body you have.

Um, and your body likes more protein, meat protein, or vegetable protein. Like we have all the science. We could do all those kinds of things, but none of those things will matter unless you learn how to go into here first. And how to go into here. And in here we’re talking about the vagus nerve, which is our regulation nervous system.

So we have the sympathetic nervous system, which is all about looking for danger. And that’s our lower brain that’s constantly scanning, or we can be in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is always thinking about our thinking. And that’s in our higher brain. So we are, as humans, we’re evolving our understanding and knowledge of how our brains and bodies work.

We also understand that we’re more neuroplastic, that we can actually change so much more than we thought we ever could. And so this is really good news. However, we are still approaching weight loss the way we did in the 80s. Right? And so we are not updating the way we think about weight loss and we’re not keeping up.

And that’s my job. My job is to create this podcast, to go on Instagram, to write emails, to find women to say, Hey, listen, it’s not that you’re not smart enough. It’s not that you aren’t clever enough. It’s not that you aren’t disciplined enough. It’s that you don’t have all the rules. And that is my job is to help you with that.

So I’m so glad you’re here listening or watching. And, um, so today I’m actually going to talk about some strategies because, you know, it’s one thing to know about it. And it’s also good to know that counting calories and tracking steps aren’t necessarily everything you need to do. In fact, you don’t really need to do it that much.

Um, but you do need to have some things to do. Okay. So when, when people would see me losing weight back in like 19, uh, 2019 and 2020 and they say, well, how are you losing all this weight? And I said, Oh, I’m just using my brain, losing weight with my brain. And they were so confused. And I was, I would have been confused too.

I’m like, no, just give me the checklists. And, um, so we do need to have some form of checklists. but we also really need to have a solid foundation and understanding. And before I go into the rest of the podcast, I do want to share a win with one of my clients. And, um, this client, it’s been really interesting working with her because, um,

one of the things that she grew up with wasn’t, she had a mom that would, would be doing errands and her mom was, would be pretty resentful about doing errands or, um, And so she would always go and get herself a treat. And so this client of mine, she just figured that’s what you do. You just go and get yourself a treat when you’re doing errands.

And now she never, she doesn’t film anymore. She doesn’t need to. And if she does get herself a treat, it’s something healthy. So if she goes and gets, um, like a, a cool drink, it says it’s a, just bubbly. Like there’s not, no sugar, it’s bubbly water. And so she’s able to modify. Um, these unhealthy habits. And also she’s able to say, my treat is that I have a car.

My treat is that I have a body. My treat is that I live in a free country. Like she’s able to, to realize how many treats she has, what truly is a treat and what’s happening and how she’s caring for her body. So I really like, this is a simple win, but it’s made such a difference for her. Not only has it helped her lose weight and keep it off.

But it also helps her to be like the boss of her own life. She doesn’t have to always be doing everything on autopilot. She can make a decision. What do I want? Okay, so and then I’m just going to add just because we’re going to talk about strategies here. We’re going to talk about it because the truth is if you want to lose weight, you do have to be in a calorie deficit.

Your body needs to access stored fat. and use that stored fat. Okay. So that is the truth. So if we’re eating 2000 calories a day, then our body never gets the opportunity to, to have to go and dip into the storage. Okay. And so we do need to be mindful of our calories and my work talking about strategy. So I made myself a promise.

I said, I am never going to count calories and track steps. for me to lose weight. I’m just not going to do it. And, um, I can do it for like a week or two to gather information, but that is not going to be how I’m going to lose it up because I, how you’re going to lose the weight is how you’re going to keep it off.

Right. It’s just like, um, with parenting or marriage or your job, um, if it’s always constantly stressful and difficult, that’s not very sustainable, right? You’re not going to want to do that for very long. So people who get themselves in a marriage and don’t use their words and don’t communicate and don’t, um, you know, share things and say, wow, I’m just going to get through this week.

Instead of saying, this is really hard and I don’t really like the way this is going, can we make some changes? And taking more merit, more charge in charge of that. So, um,

all right, so that was, so when I say that you have to be in a calorie deficit. It actually means you don’t have to be counting calories all the time. And so here are some of my strategies. So when I decided to lose the weight, I thought, Okay, there are a lot of foods that I’m allowed, that I’m allowed, that I can eat.