#61: Love Yourself Thin

61. Love Yourself Thin

Do you feel like weight loss is just not in the cards for you and you’re just such a failure at it that what’s the point. I felt the same way. And so did so many of my clients and this is why we have this podcast. So my name is Dara Tomasson. This is weight loss for quilters episode 61. 

Hello, everyone. That is the last time I’m gonna say this is the podcast weight loss for quilters. And I’m gonna tell you why in this podcast. And it has been 60 episodes, which I just think is just so amazing. And I’m so grateful to all of you who have been listening to this podcast and supporting it.

It’s wonderful, but you know, what’s been interesting, the last ladies that have joined my program are not quilters, but they have found my podcast. And so today’s podcast, I’m going to be, talking about the process of loving yourself thin and why it works. And of course, all quilters and all women are welcome to come. And I’m gonna talk a little bit more about that, but before I get into the bulk of the podcast, I want to do a shout out for one of my clients. 

And I shout this out to them because, and I’ve explained this in the past, but our wiring is to always look for danger and that’s our lower brain. And that, keeps us to survive. But if we want to be in our higher brain and we wanna have, this like amazing higher brain, that’s so incredible, we need to learn, to operate out of our higher brain more and more. And one of the ways of operating from our higher brain is to create more safety in our body.

And in order to create safety, we need to give our brain messages like we’re awesome. We’re really competent. We’re really capable. We’re really amazing. We’re really great. And so we always start off our classes, with positivity with women sharing wins about themselves. And it’s really interesting. We do it every single call and they still have hesitation and we are rewiring a lot of that old programming of it’s selfish, it’s boastful, you shouldn’t do that. But the idea is the more that you can normalize that you’re amazing and incredible. I mean, just even thinking about our bodies, our bodies are amazing and incredible. We blink and we, our heartbeats and we do all these incredible things. We don’t even have to think about it. So the more that we can do that and help our brain, the more success that we can have every day. And we don’t have to feel like our life is such an upward battle climb for it.

So that’s why I do the shout out. That is one of the reasons, and I want you to do that for yourself. It’s really gonna be transformational for you. 

Okay, and this is funny because even in those moments where we do the shout outs, they’ll say things like, I’m really glad there’s no forest fires or I’m going to be a new grandma. So those things are exciting and there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you don’t, like do this for your own shout out for like yourself, you personally, it’s not going to help you.

So today’s call, we had one client. She, has had a really busy summer, she’s had house guests. She lives in a really beautiful place, so people come to visit and she is only up three pounds from her lowest weight. And she has been in the program for like 12 weeks. That’s amazing. So things are becoming a lot more automatic when I asked her why she’s doing so well, she says I’m trying to be good to myself and being good to herself doesn’t mean eating a bunch of chips. Another client, she’s 72 and she comes to these calls all the time. She has lost over 25 pounds. She used to be the person that did all of the herbal magic and the shakes and all of that. And now she’s doing it all on her own with her brain. And with having the support, I love yourself thin.

And another client, she just turned 50. And she had quite a meltdown, and she did some binging, but she has, uh, lost 65 pounds. And she was actually my very first client. She was a quilting client for business and then we went into the weight loss and she realized that even with the binging, it’s okay. She recognized her feelings. She was able to work through it. She actually got coaching on the call. 

So that’s the kinda stuff that happens in love yourself thin. That’s what happens when you start getting help to apply these tools. 

Okay. So I wanna tell you a story and it’s a beautiful story. And my friend actually sent it to me and it’s, I’ve been meaning to share it with you on my podcast. And so I’m gonna go through it. Part of it is just reading the story and other parts I’m gonna skip ahead. And the fun thing about this story that she sent it to me was that we’ve had some conversations about, how do we live our life and, and what do we wanna have? Some of you might have, have heard this story already. And so let’s just have a story. One of my favorite things about being a school teacher was reading stories to my students. So it’s called the man on the train by Alex Haley.

Whenever my brothers and sisters and I get together, we inevitably talk about my dad. We all owe our success in life to him. And to a mysterious man he met one night on a train. Our father Simon Alexander Haley was born in 1892 and reared in the small farming town of Savannah, Tennessee. He was the eighth child of AEC Haley, a tough willed, former slave, and part-time sharecropper and of a woman named Queen. Although sensitive and emotional, my grandmother could be tough willed herself, especially when it came to her children.

One of her ambitions was that my father be educated. Back in Savannah a boy was considered wasted if he remained in school after he was big enough to do farm work. So when my father reached the sixth grade, Queen began massaging grandfather’s ego. Since we have eight children, she would argue, “wouldn’t it be prestigious, if we could deliberately waste one and get him educated?” After many arguments, grandfather let dad finish the eighth grade. Still he had to work in the fields after school, but queen was not satisfied. As eighth grade ended, she began planting seeds saying grandfather’s image would reach new Heights if their son went to high school. Her barrage worked, stern old Alec Hailey handed my father five hard earned $10 bills, told him never to ask for more and sent him off to high school traveling first by mule cart, and then by train the first train he had ever seen. Dad finally lighted in Jackson, Tennessee, where he enrolled in the preparatory department of lane college. The black Methodist school offered courses up through junior college. Dad’s $50 was soon used up and to continue in school, he worked as a waiter, handyman and a helper at a school for wayward boys.

And when winter came, he’d arrive at 4:00 AM, go into prosperous white family’s homes and make fires so the residents would awaken and comfort. Poor Simon became something of a campus joke with his one pair of pants and shoes and his droopy eyes. Often he was found asleep with a textbook, fallen into his lap.

The constant struggle to earn money took its toll. Dad’s grades began to founder. He pushed onward and completed senior high. Next he enrolled in a and T college in Greensboro, North Carolina, a land grant school where he struggled through freshman and sophomore years. 

One bleak afternoon at the close of his second year, dad was called into the teacher’s office and told that he’d failed a course. One that required a textbook, he’d been too poor to buy. A ponderous sense of defeat descended upon him. For years, he’d given his utmost and now he felt he had accomplished nothing. Maybe he could return home to his original destiny of share cropping. But days later, a letter came from the Pullman company saying he was one of 24 black college men selected from hundreds of applicants to be summertime sleep cart porters.

Dad was ecstatic, here was a chance. He eagerly reported for duty, was assigned a Buffalo to Pittsburgh train. The train was racketing along one morning about 2:00 AM when the Porter’s buzzer sounded. Dad sprang up jerked on his white jacket and made his way to the passenger’s birth. Where there a distinguished looking man said he and his wife were having trouble sleeping and they both wanted glasses of warm milk.

Dad brought milk and napkins on a silver tray. The man handed one glass through the lower birth curtain to his wife and sipping from his own glass, continued to engage dad in conversation. Pullman company rules strictly prohibited any conversations beyond yes, sir, or no ma’am but this passenger kept asking questions.

He even followed dad back into the Porter’s cubicle. “Where are you from?” Savannah Tennessee, sir. You speak quite well. Thank you, sir. I’m a student at a and T college in Greensborough.” Dad felt no need to add that he was considering returning home to share cropping. The man looked at him keenly finally wishing him well and returned to his bunk.

The next morning, the train reached Pittsburgh at a time when 50 cents was a good tip, the man gave $5 to Simon Haley who was profusely grateful. All summer he’d been saving every tip he received. And when his job ended, he had accumulated enough to buy his own mule and plow, but he realized his savings could also pay for one full semester at a T without having to work a single job. Dad decided he deserved at least one semester free of outside work. Only that way would he know what grades he could truly achieve. He returned to Greensboro, but no sooner did he arrive at campus then he summoned by the college president. Dad was full of apprehension as he seated himself before the great man, 

“I have a letter here, Simon. “The president said “yes, sir. You were a Porter for Pullman this summer. Yes, sir. Did you meet a certain man one night and bring him more milk? Yes, sir. Well his name is Mr. RSM Boyce and he’s a retired executive of the Curtis publishing company, which publishes the Saturday evening post. He has donated $500 for your board, tuition and books for the entire school year.

The surprise grant, not only enabled dad to finish A and T but to

graduate first in his class and that achievement earned him a full scholarship to Cornell university. In 1920 dad, then a newlywed moved to Ithaca, New York with his bride Bertha. He entered Cornell to pursue his master’s degree. And my mother enrolled in the Ithaca conservatory of music to play piano. I was born the following year. One day decades later, editors of the Saturday evening post invited me to their editorial offices in New York to discuss the condensation of my first book, the autobiography of Malcolm X. I was so proud, so happy to be sitting in these wood paneled offices on Lexington avenue. 

Suddenly I remembered Mr. Boyce and how his generosity enabled me to be there amid those editors as a writer. And then I began to cry. I just couldn’t help it. We children of Simon, Hailey often reflect on Mr. Boyce and his investment in a less fortunate human being by the ripple effect of his generosity, we are also benefited. Instead of being raised on a Shareco farm we grew up in a home with educated parents shelves, full of books, and with pride in ourselves.

My brother George is chairman of the us postal rate commission. Julius is an architect, Louie, a music teacher, and I’m a writer. Mr. RSM Boyce dropped like a blessing into my father’s life. What some may see as a chance encounter, I see as the working of a mysterious power up her good. And I believe that each person blessed with success has an obligation to return part of that blessing. We must all live and act like the man on the train.

So as you can hear, I’m a little bit emotional when I read this story. But as I’m, as I’m reading this, and as I have been thinking about it, it truly brings me back to this whole process of love yourself thin. Now let me connect the dots for you. When I struggled with so many women with my weight, I felt like I needed to look a certain way and be a certain way to be acceptable.

I struggled so much with my self-image, of how I thought about myself and I how I loved myself and I didn’t feel like I could keep going. I didn’t show up like the kind of person I wanted to, because I just felt so deficient. I felt so broken. I felt like I really wasn’t that smart. I let my weight and how I looked affect everything about myself. And the problem with that is that when I think that my weight has everything to do with who I am, I wasn’t able to be the kind of person that I wanted to be. 

And when I think about this story, And I think about this man who saw this value in this young man, he was able to go outside of himself and he was able to help him.

And when I think about our stories, so we’re all unique and special and our stories are all valuable and wonderful. And the handout that I’ve included in this podcast, I want you to write down, there’s a space there of all the things that you love about your story and this isn’t boastful.

Like, do you love that you were like, I’ll give just some examples for myself. Like I loved that I was, um, a peacemaker. I love that. I was creative. I love that the only thing my mom said about raising me that was so hard was that I just had papers and messes everywhere I went because I was always so creative.

And I love that I’m fun. I love that I’m engaging. I love that I love people. Like there’s a lot of things that I love about myself, but one of the things that happens with life coaching and weight loss coaching is that we have to go into our brains and we have to kind of organize and sort our brains cuz they feel kind of messy and unorganized. And so that means we get overwhelmed and we get confused. And so it feels like we can’t really sort things through. And so we go to food or shopping or over consuming or scrolling because we just don’t really know how to feel comfortable in ourselves. 

 I once heard this, this saying that says our childhood traumas become our superpowers. Another way of saying this is our messes become our message. And so if we were told all the time that if our body wasn’t perfect, then we couldn’t be perfect. Then that is traumatic. 

A lot of my clients, they were taken to weight Watchers at eight years old, or the doctors. I myself went to my first weight Watchers meeting at 23 because I had my parents divorced and so what I thought was a, an amazing marriage was apparently not. And so for me to get married and to start dating and, and to have that level of intimacy, It was really confusing to me and I felt very insecure about it. And one of the ways I coped is I used food, because I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to talk about what was going on.

And so I self sabotage by eating all the snacks and getting pudding and going to Wendy’s every once in a while or more than once in a while. Right? Like I got a frosty and a burger, it was like $3. But subconsciously it was like, because my body, as a teenager was always really pretty and people were always attracted to my body. And I was like, I can’t have that kind of attention because I don’t really know what’s going on. 

So I want you to think about what were your impressions from like when you wrote those things down. Now I see my story go beyond quilters. And so of course my program, my, I love my quilters. I love being a professional quilter, but when I look at this story of the man in the train and the influence that he had on being able to give that money and be able to have those ripple effects have generations and generations.

And so when I actually change, I don’t wanna, I don’t want anyone to feel excluded in my program. So if my podcast is called weight loss for quilters and you’re listening to my podcast, you might not think you’re welcome. And so the name of my actual program and my philosophy is love yourself thin. 

And love yourself thin is the way that I teach women how to lose the weight and keep it off for good. And it’s based on my five essential steps. So the first one is weight loss. Science is simple. I teach you the weight loss science. It’s very simple. 

The second one is you create your own eating plan. You’re already creating your own eating plan, but I’m gonna help you be empowered and troubleshoot how to do that. So that’s the second vital step.

The third vital step of love yourself thin is to learn, to feel your emotions, to label them, to feel them, to process them. And when you do that and you accept them, then you don’t have to react, resist or avoid anymore. 

The fourth vital step of love yourself thin is to learn how to take responsibility for yourself. So we’re not living in shame anymore. We’re not living in blame. 

And then the fifth vital step of love yourself thin is to learn self confidence. So many people say, well, they’re just born with self confidence or they’re this this way. They don’t believe that they can change and they can evolve. And that’s a lie.

So we all have a unique story and each one of us, and remember the most important part of all of this is that your value has already been decided, whether you have a really thin body or a medium sized body or a extra large body. It does not determine your value. Just like your value is not determined by the number of money in your bank account. Your value is not contributed to how many people like things on Instagram. It doesn’t have anything to do with it. Our society might tell us it does, but it doesn’t. 

And so when you start embracing love yourself, then when you start to see that this actually is the case, then guess what happens? You become free. And you become able to take care of yourself.

So we all have our origin stories and the most beautiful thing is we get to decide how we want to think about them and we get to rewrite our story. We’re a hundred percent responsible for how we want to look at it.

And so this podcast has a name change. How fun is that? So for those of you who are binge listening years from now, this was our original title. And I love that. And those people who are listening right now, how fun is that? How fun that you found me?

This is an amazing world. Life is an incredible adventure. And if we are able to just embrace that and we’re able to look at our life as an amazing adventure, and we can say, Hey, like what, what would make my life more fun? And what would make my life incredible? If being thin is part of that plan for you, then welcome to love yourself thin. And you will learn to lose the weight and keep it off for good with getting your brain all organized and getting your brain systems like the weight loss science system so you can keep going.

All right, so that is why I changed the name. And thank you for listening to that story. That story has touched me so much. And I want the last question I’m gonna leave you with as before I say goodbye, is I want you to put yourself in the middle, like, imagine it’s a, like a circle, right. And you put yourself in the middle and that circle is water. Okay. And you put yourself in the middle and you drop into that water. And then there’s a bunch of ripples. Now you don’t have control of what else is in the circle. So there’s, there’s all sorts of people. There’s people on the internet. There’s people like your neighbors, there’s people in your family. There’s people that you drive by. There’s people that you sit beside in an airplane. Like we don’t have any control of the people around us, for the most part.

I mean, we can decide like who we wanna spend time with, et cetera, but we don’t know, like when I put this podcast out, I mean, I look on the, the, the stats, like there’s people in Singapore that listen to this podcast, shout out to them. There’s people in Africa, there’s people all over the world who listen to my podcast.

So I put my podcast out in the world and then there’s ripples. And so there’s a woman right now, possibly in Iceland who’s listening to my podcast, who’s really struggling with her weight who is using her weight as her way of deciding if she’s valuable or not. And when she learns this process of loving yourself thin now when she goes out, decide to do errands, she’s a little bit nicer to people. She smiles a little bit more. So now that next person she smiled to was having a hard day and someone smiled at them and now they go home and they’re taking care of their kids and they’re a little bit nicer. And then their kids go to school and they see someone being a little bullied and they’re a little nicer to them.

So I have no idea the effect of my podcast on other people. And that is a beautiful thing. And when you can be your best version of you, when you can love yourself as you are right now, the ripple effects we don’t know, but the ripple effects on your body, you do know. 

So right now, even if you weigh a hundred pounds more than what you want to weigh, if you start speaking kindly to yourself, if you start just, you know, putting on a little bit of makeup and doing your hair a little bit and just getting some pants that don’t fall down, all the time, they just feel a little bit more comfortable. You’re going to start losing weight. It is inevitable because you’re not having to turn to the food all the time. You’re not having to numb out all the time. You’re not scrolling as much. You might be like having a little bit more fun in life. You might be going you’re like, oh, I’m just gonna walk to the post office today. Or I’m just gonna, you know, I’m not gonna, well, I don’t really need that three o’clock chocolate bar keep me going til dinner. I don’t need to go and have five cookies. I can just grab an apple or I can just have some water. Do you see that?

So I want you to think about the ripple effects. It has on your very own body and then on others. And when you take care of yourself, you are not being selfish. You are being selfless. When you are kinder, and you are kinder to yourself. You’re gonna be kinder and more loving to everyone else around you. I promise.

All right. It was so much fun spending this time with you.