#80: Weight Loss and Weather

80. Weight Loss and Weather

How often do you use the weather as an excuse for gaining weight? Like, well if the weather changes, I can go exercise. Or if the weather wasn’t so gloomy, I would just be in better spirits than I’d exercise. I could keep going, couldn’t I? And I’m sure you could keep adding to it. Well, today’s episode is totally for you because we’re gonna talk all about weather and weight loss. I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin episode 80, Weight Loss and Weather.

Hello everybody. So, you know, I’m from Canada and in Canada and many other places. I don’t know, I’ve lived in France, I’ve traveled quite a bit and it does seem like the international language is talking about the weather. It’s something that we can all talk about. And so today I really want to dive into how weather plays on weight loss. And I have two themes to today’s podcast. As I was thinking about this podcast, there’s two kind of angles that come from it. Now, when you download the handout, I am featuring a tool because I really appreciate you coming to my podcast and learning all of these things. And I want to help you learn tools to feel more powerful in your life and to have more control. And so today we’re talking about control and weight loss and how facts like weather actually don’t dictate our results.

So we think a snowstorm that cancels something dictates our results. We think that a canceled vacation because of weather effects, is like guaranteed five pounds gained. We think that the amount of sunshine that we get affects our results. And so today’s episode is going to go into how we can look at the things that we can control and the things we can’t control, but we can always come out being powerful in the end. So how does that feel? All right.

And just like usual, I love to celebrate the members of Love Yourself Thin or my one-on-one clients. And this is just a really sweet little celebration. But one thing that came up just recently in one of our calls, one of our members, she actually took time to shave her legs. It’s something that she doesn’t do very often, and when she was shaving her legs, she was saying to herself, I’m worth taking care of. And that is just such a huge win. And it just kind of goes through my brain of there’s these little things in life that we start doing because we start caring about ourselves more and this is the really fun thing you guys, she didn’t have to lose a bunch of weight for her to do that. She is just in the beginning of her journey and she’s realizing that she doesn’t have to weigh a certain amount before she can shave her legs. She’s shaving her legs as a way of taking care of herself, even though she hasn’t got the results that she wants yet, but because she knows it’s coming and that is how she’s going to have the progress because she is taking care of herself. By virtue of taking care of herself better, like shaving her legs, she’s not going to overeat as often. She’s not gonna turn to the ice cream for the comfort. She’s not gonna do those things because she knows that that is her way of taking care of herself and then taking care of herself will create a healthier, happier attitude towards herself. So just so much fun.

All right, so let’s go into today’s episode. Now, I agree a hundred percent, there are a lot of things that we don’t have control over. We do not have control over flight cancellations, and I live on Vancouver Island and so to get to Vancouver Island, you either have to take a plane or you have to take a ferry and, or I guess you could take a boat if you had a boat you could traverse that way. But I don’t have any private boats that could do that. And so those are my two options. I could take the plane or I can take the ferry and the fun thing about both of those is they get canceled quite often because we have weather, we also will have mechanical problems, we could have staff shortages, and when they have staff shortages, they could just say, Nope, we can’t run this vessel because we don’t have enough people who will run it. So every time you go to the ferry, even if you have a reservation or even in a plane, there is a chance for it to be canceled. And I’m telling you, there’s lots of times when it has been. And so it can create a lot of anxiety, it can create a lot of fear, and it can create a lot of insecurity because I have had many occasions where we haven’t been able to get that flight or be able to get on that ferry.

And so this is the beautiful thing, I do have control of how I react to the circumstance of flight being canceled or fairy being canceled. So I get to control what kind of human I wanna be. Do I wanna have a temper tantrum? Do I wanna freak out? Do I want to yell and scream? Do I want to build a list of all the things of how the world is against me, conspiring against me, or do I just decide that was probably the best thing that happened. Like I can spend seven hours in my car waiting with my daughter and we can have a lot of fun. We can do karaoke, we can rest, we can braid each other’s hair. Like there was the seven hours that we didn’t think we were gonna have, and now we can choose what we wanna do with it. We can sing the whole musical of Hamilton if we want. Like, we get to decide. Byron Katie says, “when you argue with reality, you’re gonna lose every time.” And so it was supposed to have been canceled. I was supposed to have had that experience.

So how has this got to do with weight loss? Well, one of the things that I see, and I hate the term control freak because there’s just a lot of negative connotations to that. So I will jokingly say, well, I’m a control enthusiast. And one of the reasons we become control enthusiasts is because we freak out, because we have anxiety and we have fear of when things don’t go our way and so what do we do when there’s seven hours where we have to stay in our car and waiting for the next ferry? Well, one of the ways that a lot of us try to take the edge off of anxiety or worry or concern is buy food. And I talk about food kind of like sandpaper, right? It just kind of takes the edge off of the stress.

This is a simple example, yesterday I had a webinar and during the webinar my husband came in and he said there was an emergency at work and he wasn’t able to take one of my sons to his basketball game. And so I had to rearrange my timing and we were able to figure it out that I could pick up my one son at the bus stop right at 2 45 and then go quickly to the school and I would have just enough time to get him to his game and the bus did not show up for nine minutes. It was nine minutes late, and my son’s game was at 3: 30 and it’s a 20 minute drive in good conditions. And then plus picking up my other sons where I needed to pick them up. And so my son is only 10, he doesn’t have a phone. I wasn’t sure exactly how to contact the bus. I was gonna start looking into that. But it was interesting because in the past, I would have food on hand as a consolation or as a way to kind of pacify myself when I was having that kind of, that level of stress of, I have this responsibility, I have to get my son to his game. And so that level of control would be diffused by that.

So, let’s go back to weather. So there’s lots of different scenarios and I was thinking about my daughter and my friend’s daughter, they go to the same university and fortunately, and I have another set of friends, all of our daughters live in Edmonton and Edmonton had a massive snowstorm and two of the three daughters didn’t get home for Christmas. And my daughter actually did get home for Christmas, and it was a big ordeal. During the day it was like my fight was canceled. No no, it’s not. It’s delayed. And the whole day, I’m thinking to myself, okay, it’s okay to prepare for the worst, the worst case scenario is she will not come home for Christmas, and I went there because you know, my podcast and I talk about anxiety and I’m like, Ok she wouldn’t go home for Christmas, but where would she go? And I started just organizing in my brain, where would she go? What would she do? How would we rearrange Christmas? Would we delay our Christmas and wait for her? Would we do two Christmases? So I just let my brain go to all of those worst case scenario of her not being home for Christmas. And then I started to plan, well, how would I create the best Christmas for her with that situation? So contacting friends and doing all of that. Having just a discussion with the family of, hey guys, what if she doesn’t get home for Christmas?

And so that scenario was so helpful because I didn’t turn to the food. I went into my brain and I was able to resolve it. And the fun part was one of my clients, she lives on the mainland in Vancouver, and she was able to host my daughter to sleep over because the fact was, by the time her plane did get into Vancouver, there was no ferry at all that she could take because the fairies had already shut down, it was quite late at night. And so I was able to get her with an Uber delivered to my client who was so generous, and then the next morning there was some uncertainty of if the ferries were gonna be running and what would she do? And, and we will work through all of that.

And so, no food was consumed to solve that because food actually doesn’t solve the problem. It takes a little bit of the edge off initially, but then we pay the price. And then of course when we have that extra sugar rush or the flour rush or whatever that is, we don’t have that same clarity of peace of mind. So that was an interesting experience because in the past a stressful situation like that, I just subconsciously turned to the food just like with sandpaper, which kind of just take that edge off. And I felt like it was something I needed to do. And it was interesting. I was reading a book to my son last night and the one of the characters was freaking out and I mean it’s Geronimo Stillton, so it’s like a silly book, but they said it took him like three cheeseburgers, a milkshake, and I think a piece of pie or something to calm him down. And I thought, oh my goodness, it’s like giving someone drugs, right? Like literally drugs, like a doctor would give to calm someone down. And we are using sugar as a way to do that, which we know has such a, negative side effect and it creates addiction and, and all of those kinds of things.

So I wanted to talk about that part of control. We don’t have control of flights being canceled or those kinds of things due to weather. But I also wanted to talk about weather itself. So we used to live in Alberta where there’s a lot of snow storms. Like, literally you’d be shut in, and actually living on the Vancouver Island, we’re actually a lot worse because we don’t have the same equipment to remove snow. So we can be housebound for two days, two or three days. And so when you are in your house, you know, how do you cope with that? Another one is the amount of gray. So there’s been lots of studies on not having enough sunlight, and you know, we have seasonal depression, so you can buy light therapy, vitamin D and here where I live, of course, there’s a lot of that. And so they’re already always on hand at the Costco and other places. And there’s a lot of different options out there of, you can get that vitamin D, that rejuvenation you can get LED. There’s lots of options there.

And that is something that definitely does affect your mental health. It affects your ability to make good decisions. And so just knowing that and being proactive. When I lived in France they have the Mistral, and it’s this wild wind and it can make people crazy. And so having those kind of weather conditions of the wind and you know, people’s houses weren’t insulated the same way. And so hearing that wind going through and being limited. When we’re limited, like we can’t leave our house or the wind or the lack of sunlight, it affects our mental health and it affects our physical health. Like how much vitamin D are we getting?

I have some other examples that I thought would be really interesting. So in Iceland they had, they don’t do that anymore because we have the internet and all that, but for a very long time in Iceland, they did not show TV on Thursday nights, or I don’t even know what night it was, but one night a week, they would have no tv. And so the hope was, and the plan was to get people to leave their houses and to socialize and to interact with each other. And because weather… If you’re stuck inside, you’re not able to have that physical interaction. You’re not able to have that dopamine hit, serotonin, like all of those good hormones that come with interacting with people and having that, even like that physical touch.

In Norway where of course, the winters are long, they don’t have a lot of sunlight, there’s like many different names for snow and there’s different kinds of snow. And I remember listening to an episode on, it was on our CBC radio, this person interviewed about the psychology of all these different names of snow and it was really to create a love affair with snow. Canadians are similar. I know a lot of other countries as well, of getting out there and I know when I had little kids, and we lived in Red Deer. There was so many skating arenas and they were well lit and they were awesome. And so the sun would start to set at 3: 30, so it was just really encouraging parents and kids to go out and skate and have fun and it always warmed my heart when I would drive by these skating arenas at like 9, 9: 30 at night, and I’d see all these trucks in there and all these older guys just playing hockey and getting that good feeling from exercise, right? All those endorphins, all that, and then just even when I moved here, someone said to me, I said, oh, this rain, like, what the heck? And she said, well, you can just put on rain gear. And I was like, you’re right. And so even if it does rain because there’s days where it rains like 30 days in a row, just like in Edmonton, it snowed 30, I think it was 32 days was the longest it ever snowed continuously, you can just dress for it.

And so I love thinking about this podcast for all of you out there. I want you to find what is your story about weight loss and weather. And one of the tools that I teach is called the model and the facts, so circumstances, they don’t actually dictate our results. So for example, our circumstance is, snow for 32 days, or rain for 32 days. That is just a circumstance, we could prove that in a court of law. And then we get to decide what thought we wanna have about that. So if we have a thought like, this is terrible, then how do you feel? You feel discouraged. And then what are the actions you take? You stay inside. You think about all the reasons why life is terrible. You go to a lot of comfort food, right? And then the result is you don’t have the kind of life that you want. You don’t create this wonderful life. Versus if we had rain 32 days in a row, the thought is, I love the beauty of rain, or I have amazing rain gear and I see the world differently when it’s raining. The world is beautiful when it’s raining, like something like that. So then the feeling is peace. And then the actions would be, put on your rain gear, go outside, explore, ask friends to come with you, do different hikes, maybe take photography, like there’s so many different actions you’re gonna take. And so of course the result is gonna be you create an amazing life for yourself.

So that is what’s an option for you. And that is one of the tools that has completely transformed my own life. And the more that my members learn this and clients learn this, the more power that they get back in their own life. And that is what I’m inviting for you. So I have times during my week that you can book a 20 minute, 30 minute conversation with me where I can give you some coaching and I can show you how this particular tool, which I use as the foundation of my coaching would be able to solve your problem.

I’m not sure if you remember, but when I first got a life coach, I thought, this is the craziest thing ever. And she said to me, I have this tool that will solve any problem and I was in such a bad state of my brain that I said, I don’t believe you. And so for six weeks, I had her for six weeks, and every week I came up with… I was convinced, a problem that she couldn’t solve with the model, and every single time she solved it using this model. And so I’m offering that to you that you can take me up on that. And then we can have a conversation after we do some coaching, and I can help you solve that one problem. We can talk about if Love Yourself Thin or one-on-one coaching is a good fit for you. All right? So take me up on that offer. I love serving you. It is such a joy to be able to be a part of your life in this podcast. And I would of course, love to be your life coach and help you give your power back. Take care everyone. Bye.