#84: Weight Loss: Forgiveness and Fad Diets

Love Yourself Thin

Do you worry about being able to permanently change your body and your relationship with food and your body? Do you feel like you tie your self worth to your weight? This is a problem I see all the time.

So in this episode I talk about being your own “mean boss” and noticing how you talk to yourself. This negative talk could be making it hard for you to find sustainable ways to lose weight and your ability to forgive yourself.

 

Weight Loss for Quilters | Weight Loss and Self-Sabotage 

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why fad diets can be hard on our self worth

  • Forgiveness is a relationship with yourself
  • 4 thoughts to help you keep moving forward

  • The benefits of learning to forgive yourself
  • Change can be easier than you think

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Dara Tomasson Podcast

84. Weight Loss: Forgiveness and Fad Diets

Do you worry about ever being able to permanently change your body and your relationship with food and your body? Well, today’s episode is just gonna really help you to find that forgiveness and change, because we are gonna be talking about forgiveness and fad diets. I am Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself In episode 84, Forgiveness and Fad Diets.

Okay, everybody, I just finished with a call with my group and I’m a little teary. I don’t always well, usually at the end there’s a little bit of emotion. But one of the coaching that I gave was a woman who’s just so incredible. They’re all incredible in there. I just love them so much, and she was having a lot of fear and listening to that fear, and it was really holding her back and it was so powerful to watch her finally being able to be vulnerable with that. She was worried that she was gonna be crying, but I’m telling you like the love and the comments and the concerns and the support that was received during the coaching was just so beautiful and it’s, it’s amazing for me to think it’s through the computer, but emotions and our hearts, they are able to transcend screens and all of that. So it was a really beautiful thing and the thing that really blows my mind is that we can convince ourselves that we are terrible, that we can’t ever progress, that things are awful, and we can convince ourselves that we should just quit and she was near a decision like that. And just with the coaching tools, it’s incredible to watch the transformation in just such a short time. It always blows my mind.

All right, so there’s lots of different ways that I can go with this podcast episode, but I wanted to pair up forgiveness with fad diets. And fad diets, and this is kind of an extension of the podcast, episode 83 about intermittent fasting. I kind of alluded to this idea, but one of the problems with fad diets is it takes somebody’s great experience, it takes somebody’s angle, it takes somebody’s theory. And then they’ve tried it out and they’ve had success. So just like with my banana and yogurt and oatmeal, chia seed, nut bowl that I made, I lost two pounds. I ate it twice a day. And I lost two pounds. And so I could go and yell everyone needs to do this, right? So a fad diet is somebody’s interpretation of their take on food and their body. And so what you can expect from this podcast episode is you can expect that you’re going to see how, when you believe in fad diets and when you don’t get the full picture, you are setting yourself up for failure. It is guaranteed failure, I promise you. And so I’m gonna help you understand how to forgive yourself with that.

All right, so this is the problem. This is a pattern I see over and over and over. So we tie our self worth with our weight. So now it feels dangerous. It feels incredibly dangerous to be overweight because how could we believe that we’re of worth if we are overweight? Okay? So when you tie your worth to your weight, then the stakes are really high. And so then you go into kind of a desperate kind of thinking about, well, how can I lose this weight? And it doesn’t matter how you get that outcome, it’s just really, really important on the outcome. So now the process is thrown out the window because you’re like, well, I don’t care how I lose the weight. I just gotta lose the weight because this is very dangerous. All right? So then you go and you do an internet search, or you talk to people and they will say, oh, you just track all your steps, or you play this game like on an app, like you put in how many calories and then you calculate all of that. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Like if that’s how you want to look at weight loss, if that seems sustainable to you then you know what there’s lots and lots of different ways of losing weight.

But the hard part is that because the process is so negative, it brings up what I call the mean boss. So we have a mean boss in all of us. And I gave an example many podcasts ago about my son who, he was having some struggles at school and I took him to the psychologist and she was talking about this and I explained the example of, I’m like, Hey, listen, if you got a job at the grocery store and you had this boss that would watch you pack your groceries and then come up to you and berate you and say, ah, you’re so, why do you do that? You’re so bad. Like, why aren’t you thinking better? And you’re so irresponsible. Versus a boss that would say, Hey, I’ve been noticing the way you pack your groceries and I noticed that when you do this, it doesn’t actually work very well. So I find it’s really helpful to do this. And so I give this example to my son and so then we kind of had this code of like, Hey, are you being the nice boss? Or are you being the mean boss to yourself right now? And it was really, really helpful for him to be like, oh yeah, I’m being the mean boss. I don’t want to do that. I’d rather be kinder to myself.

And actually the coaching call that we were on, we talked about what does the mean boss say to yourself? And a lot of the ladies in my program are still, were all at different levels and they realize that they’re still that mean boss that comes around. And so the mean boss looks like, what’s wrong with you? Why haven’t you figured this out yet? Who do you think you are to expect yourself to change? Like, those are all these terrible things that the mean boss says, oh, you’ve only lost four pounds. Look at all the work you’ve done. This is not worth it. Just quit. Just don’t even, you’re not smart enough. You can’t figure this out. Okay? Those are all the mean boss things to say. And so the problem is now you are tolerating that kind of behavior and you’re allowing that to happen. And I know for sure that you wouldn’t talk to your little sweet, let’s say you have this little neighbor or granddaughter or niece or nephew or someone, you wouldn’t talk to them like that. So why would you allow yourself to talk to yourself that way? Like why is that acceptable behavior? So one of the reasons is we grew up, maybe you had parents that were like that. Maybe you had a school teacher, maybe your school teachers were like that. I mean, we used to have the strap and you know, parents did the best they could with what they had. They probably were strapped and hit, and they thought that that’s what they were supposed to do. So my question is, you did it, you can’t take it back. But the beautiful thing is you can change.

So the tool for today is change is easier than you think when you think about what is happening. So it’s that metacognitive skill of thinking about your thinking, and the fancy word for that is mindset. So when you can think about your thinking, you can change and change is much easier than you think. So I wanna talk about forgiveness for a minute because it’s hard to forgive ourselves when we have put ourselves through a lot of uncomfortable experiences. So we go to this fad diet we literally don’t do it because we wanna be jerks to ourselves. We do it because we are desperate, because we don’t have confidence in ourselves. Because we think that what we want is to have an expert tell us what to do. But really what we want, what we need is to understand that weight loss science is simple. We need to understand how to create our own eating plan and how to troubleshoot it. Like that’s actually what we need to do. We haven’t been modeled that.

And I mean I’ve, there’s advertising, there’s all sorts of reasons why we keep doing the same thing. And you know, I love saying if we always do what we always did, we always get what we always got. And so we just think, well, I guess I am just not smart enough. Because that’s another one that just rings through our head over and over and over. So we need to start forgiving ourselves and I like to think about forgiveness as a relationship with ourselves. So how easy is it for you to forgive other people? Generally, I would say it’s probably easier to forgive other people than to forgive yourself, but forgiving other people is a skill, especially if you feel like they deserve it and that they wronged and one of the problems that I see is when people forgive, they think that they are condoning or they’re saying what they did was right. We can forgive people even when we don’t agree with what they did, and it doesn’t say that that is wrong. So I just want you to get curious for yourself of where do you fall in your ability to forgive others? And I want you to think about, so someone said something wrong, so there’s the person that you don’t agree with, and so that person, they’re allowed to think whatever they want. They really are. You don’t have to agree with them, but they’re in their own world, they’re doing their own thing. And they actually probably have no clue that you are upset. Let’s say someone cut you off in traffic and you are just so mad and upset and they have no clue. But we get to decide what we want to think about them.

And I thought of this great analogy about when you have all these thoughts about this other person, like they did this and that was wrong and they should know better, and all of that. You are like tangling yourself up and you’re putting yourself in your own trap. One of my sons loved to find my wool and he just loved the Spider-Man idea like he really loved making these huge webs and we had this beautiful staircase in two of our houses actually. And he would get the wool and he was so fast and he would put the wool through the different railings and he would make this like giant tangled mess that looked like this crazy spider web. And this is what I think about like, if we have thoughts that are not forgiving of people and it’s like we’re just tangling ourselves up, like my son with the wool. And I want you to ask yourself, why are you doing that to yourself? Because that other person, they’re allowed to say whatever they want and they allowed to do it.

Now, I’m gonna tie these two together because we’re talking about forgiveness and fad diets. So a person who’s doing a fad diet, they’re not a bad person. They have all sorts of reasons for what they are doing, but then we become really upset and we become mistrusting of ourselves and we become bitter and angry. And then, because remember the biggest falsehood is we’re tying our worth to our weight. So do you see how we just keep setting ourselves up for failure? It’s like we just can’t win for trying. It’s like this shaky foundation. So I want to leave you with just a few thoughts that will help you to move forward.

So A. our worth has nothing to do with our weight. And what I say to my clients or to anybody, what I say is because our weight has nothing to do with our worth, we just get to decide what kind of life do we want to have? Do we want to have a life where we carry extra weight and that we have extra storage? Or do we wanna have a life where we don’t have as much storage don’t have as much freedom with like bending over, our knees don’t have the same impact. Like what sounds more fun to you? So this is taking the stigma or the judgment out of weight loss.

The second one is fad diets are somebody’s interpretation. Somebody’s solution to help you lose weight. And I don’t believe that they’re bad or that they, they’re, I mean, sometimes I feel like the weight loss industry is trying to trick us. I think they’re just wanting us to keep spending money, which is fine. I mean, you can be an entrepreneur, right? I don’t need to judge them on that.

The third one is, do you want someone to tell you what to do or do you want to become empowered? So just asking yourself that question. And the other question is, do you believe it’s possible that you could learn the science and that you could become empowered and in your own way. And what I’m telling you is that it’s totally possible because I myself have used these tools to lose over 50 pounds and keep it off for years, and I help women do the same thing. Because I give them back their power. I give them the ability to tap into their brain. I give them the ability to look at what the science says, and then I teach them how to create their own eating plan and how to troubleshoot it. And then I help them feel their feelings, and then I help them take responsibility for themselves, and then I help them build confidence. That’s the whole process. That is the Love Yourself Thin process. So if you want help with that, of course you can come and talk.

So the next one is I want you to stop beating yourself up. I want you to stop being the mean boss to yourself, and I want you to forgive yourself. I want you to forgive yourself for the mean boss talk. I want you to forgive yourself for all your judgment that you gave yourself on following these fad diets and all the money, and all the time, and all the effort. I want you to forgive yourself because when you keep those non forgiving thoughts, you just get all yourself all tangled up and then you feel rebellion, you can feel vengeful, you can feel mistrusting, you can feel hard done by. And you could probably be justified in some of those, but what is the benefit of that? There isn’t.

Okay, so this podcast is very thought provoking for me. Hopefully it is for you too, because when you can forgive yourself, when you can stop wagging your finger, like what’s wrong with you? When you can just be kind and compassionate and curious and when you can step into that power. So with this client that I coached today, right before I recorded this, she was sharing some of the things that she has done that has, that she’s used these tools for and that she would never have done before the program. And it was so fascinating to me because it wasn’t until I said, well, you have the skill of processing your emotions, allowing them and not turning to food, or not turning to this or that. You actually know what to do, you just need to get that skill. Like you need to use it for other things like in other situations. And she was so surprised. She’s like, oh yeah, I did process my emotion. I didn’t yell at that person. I didn’t freak out. I was able to be calm. And I was like, yeah. And you can do that here too. Like you’ve learned the skill, you know what to do. And so she was able to forgive herself so much and she was able to change.

That’s the tool I’m talking about today, is that change is much faster than you think when you think about what’s going on. Just because you’ve done a bunch of fad diets, just because you’ve broken some trust with yourself in the past, you did the best you could when you did it. You didn’t wake up and say, I’m gonna be a jerk to myself. I’m gonna spend a whole bunch of money and I’m gonna lose a whole bunch of weight and I’m gonna use a lot of willpower and then I’m gonna gain it all back and then more. No, you never did that. You always had your best interest at heart. You did the best you could. And what I’m offering is that when you can slow down and you can think about your thinking, and you can use those tools change is much quicker than you think. But you need to learn how to forgive yourself, and you need to learn to forgive other people. Otherwise, you just get all tangled up and you never get unstuck.

That is my message for you today. I’m so glad you joined me. I love having you listen to my podcast. So I have an invitation for you. On the worksheet it says, if you could ask Dara anything right now, what would it be? I want you to come to one of my free calls where I can give you coaching on that one question and then we can look at if Love Yourself Thin is the right fit for you, because I no longer want you to be feeling all the stress and pressure and all the discomfort that you have. I am very interested in helping you specifically in what’s causing you the most pain. To be able to have my client come on that call today and able to give her that coaching that in 30 minutes and to see what a giant change for her, I want that for you too, and it’s possible if you take one of my spots. Let’s do it. All right. Take care everyone. Have a wonderful week. Bye-bye.

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