#91: Weight Loss and Hustle

91. Weight Loss and Hustle

There’s a wedding coming up and you feel super stressed out because you wanna look good in the pictures or maybe a family photo shoot or a high school reunion. There’s so many different times in our lives where we wanna hustle to weight loss. Raise your hand if that’s you! Well, I got you. I’m Dara Tomasson, and this is Love Yourself Thin Weight Loss and Hustle.

So before we jump in, I am gonna share a quick win with one of my clients. She shared that just prior to working with me feeling just absolute despair that she could ever be happy or that she could ever be healthy or have the energy or be the kind of grandma that she wanted to be. And it’s so much fun to watch her now. In fact, she’s having all three granddaughters come and they’re gonna be doing all sorts of outdoor adventures because she has so much stamina. She can walk six k, no problem. And it is just such a testament to me of doing the tools and practicing the tools and applying them. And one of the things that she said that’s been really helping her is that we have a 90 day workbook, and every day there’s little questions. It’s very short, it’s very brief, but every single day she has shown up for herself. She’s traveled, she’s done all sorts of different things. But she said doing that work and doing those thought downloads and taking in that little bit of information I share every day in the 90 day workbook has made such an impact for her. 

So let’s dive into today’s episode about hustle. And so I asked the question of how many times have you had an event where you really wanted to lose weight fast? And what did you do to do that? So did you give yourself ultimatums? Did you double down on willpower? You put all sorts of restrictions on yourself? Did you, like, do a lot of finger wagging? Like what were the things that you did? Did you throw a bunch of food out in your kitchen? Did you put signs all over your house? Did you put reminders on your phone? And as I’m sharing these, like not all of them are bad. In fact a mother and daughter, they put why are you here? All over their house and I’ve actually been to their house and it’s hilarious. There’s all these signs everywhere. And they’re little, and they’re her favorite color, and they’re playful and they’re fun. And they even put one at the front door as a joke. So when people walked in the house, why are you here? And so there’s, there’s nothing wrong with some of those, but I just wonder about what is the attitude behind it?

So I’m gonna read the definition of hustle. It’s a noun and it’s a verb. So the verb, which is an action word, is to push roughly or to jostle, or to obtain illicitly or by forcible action. So if you’re hustling to lose that weight, you’re pushing around, you’re jostling, you’re obtaining it illicitly, or you’re forcing an action, how does that feel? Is that something you wanna be spending your time doing? Exactly. The noun of a hustle is a state of great activity, a fraud or swindle. Interesting. And then I kind of got a little bit more curious about hustle and there was the difference between hustle and persuade. So pressure or urge someone into an action. So think about like the reason why you wanna lose the weight for the family reunion or for the you know, family Christmas or the family pictures. Why is it? Is it because you wanna feel better about yourself? You don’t want people to judge you. You don’t wanna feel embarrassed. You don’t want to, like, what is that reason? You want people to think more of you, right? You don’t want people to think less of you. That judgment feels terrible. You don’t want people thinking badly about you. You don’t want people to think you’re less than. 

So when you look at the difference between hustle and persuade, so pressure or urge someone into an action. Persuade is to cause somebody to adopt a certain position, belief, or course of action, twist someone’s arm. You can’t persuade me to buy this ugly pitcher, for example. Now it’s interesting to me when I think about persuasion and hustle. What comes to your mind when I say that? The diet industry. So they are persuading you to believe that in order for you to think that you are of worth, to think that you are of value, to think that you are any good to anybody or anything, you have to look a certain way. And so billions of dollars are spent every year on us thinking that we have to look a certain way before we feel good about ourselves, and I take the exact opposite approach. My approach is I want you to accept yourself. I want you to love yourself, and I want you to understand why you have the extra weight. And when you can gain that awareness and gain that compassion and understanding and love, that’s when you get traction. That’s when you can start discovering, oh, look at me, I’m feeling bad about myself. And so instead of just feeling bad, I go and try to take the edge off by eating some apple crisp or whatever that is.

So I also looked at the definition of unconditional love because this is what I’m all about and unconditional love. I love this definition because it’s just very practical, love without strings attached. It’s love you offer freely. You don’t base it on what someone does for you in return. You simply love them and want nothing more than their happiness. And wouldn’t that be so fun for you just to approach your body that way? I just want my body to be happy. I don’t want my body to have pains and aches. I don’t want my body to be overburdened. I want my body to feel light and free. 

And so I structured this podcast in a way, I thought about the times where we need to hustle. When you need to have some roughly jostling, you need to have some forcible action. You need to kind of get going. And I thought about when it’s okay to hustle. And I had some, I have been doing some traveling since you know, COVID over and we have less restrictions and I’ve met some really awesome Uber drivers and one of the Uber drivers, her daughter is going to university and she’s a single mom. She is a CPA now, and she needs a little extra cash for her daughter’s schooling. So she wakes up two hours earlier every morning and she Ubers for two hours and then she goes to work. I thought, that’s amazing. That’s a great little hustle. Like we talk about side hustles. When I was quilting for people, that was a hustle that was like I really wanted a long arm, I really wanted to contribute to our family. But I needed to hustle to like pay off a long arm because it was a big investment and we didn’t have everything stored ahead of time. 

And so the other thing that I did was when I bought the long arm, it was from a lady who had passed away and her family said, you need to buy everything, you need to take, and she had a quilt shop, so I had my entire garage full, I had my living room and we had kind of a, a dining room and they were completely full of fabric. And so I hustled, I went to the guilds and I invited women to come to my house. I had a three day open house where people just came in and out and bought fabric. I went to quilting retreat, so I loaded up my van full and I unloaded everything. And this was during the winter, and so I unloaded everything, I went to two different retreats and I, I hustled, right? I jostled and I just went into action. I sold a bunch of fabric to the lady I worked for. I advertised and I had a lady come all, she drove eight hours or nine hours and she bought like $5,000 worth of fabric from me in three hours. And that was like a short term push to alleviate the money that I had spent on the machine. And then I worked hard at advertising myself. And so there was a time where I needed to kind of hustle my way and get myself out there. So that was okay. Just like the Uber driver. She’s like, I got this, this short term money I need to make for my daughter, for university so I’m willing to wake up a little early. And I admire that. 

Another thing that I find is a great time to hustle is when you’re gonna sell your house. And so you, you just kind of go in and you get rid of all the extra stuff, you stage it really pretty, you don’t really live in your house. Especially if you have kids the way you would normally, because you’ve gotta get your house ready to go at a moment’s notice. And so there’s a little bit of a hustle there. And so I think there’s times in our lives where it’s okay to hustle.

It’s a short-term strategy to get gained and you know, it’s not forever. Because you realize that that is not sustainable. It was not sustainable for that Uber driver to be working full-time and to waking up two hours early and then she’d work later. Like, that’s not sustainable for like good mental health and rest and your body. Same thing for staging your house or your house renovations. 

But I wanted to talk about a lot of women and men use this short term strategy to lose weight. And so they go into willpower and they go into deprivation, and they go into the struggle. They speak negatively to themselves. They think their worth is tied to the scale, and so they use that approach to lose the weight. And so they lose weight. They lose 50 pounds, 60 pounds, a hundred pounds, but the way that they lost the weight is not sustainable. It is not something that they’re wanting to do for the rest of their lives. And so they now need to reward themselves with food. And so now they’re putting the weight back on again. And so they go on this really terrible yo-yo diet attitude. 

So the tool that I want to share with you for this podcast and how we can overcome this weight loss and hustle is called intention. And I want you to look at what is the intention behind your activity. So for this mom, her intention to drive the Uber is so that her daughter can have the life, the opportunity, the educational opportunity that this single mom didn’t have, she didn’t have parents that were able to provide her with financial support to go to school. 

So intention. So what is your intention behind your actions? So, for example, when you make dinner for your family? Is your intention out of obligation? Is your intention because you wanna have a time together as a family? What is your intention? Is it out of making it out of obligation and so you feel a lot of resentment? And so I want to think about I have this fun way of looking at this that has really helped me to see the different traps that I fall in. So as I’m sharing this podcast, I want you to think about your experience with weight loss and why you think that you need to go to willpower. 

So for example, when you have a baby, you do a lot of preparation. You put a lot of effort into preparing for the baby, studying about the baby, and putting a lot of time into the learning of how to take care of a baby. And then when the baby’s crying, yeah, sometimes you might get a little annoyed or frustrated, but overall you realize like, I’m dedicated and I love this baby, and I want the best for this baby. And so I’m curious about why you wanna take care of this body that you have? It’s like this amazing body that does all sorts of things. Why would you think that in order to take better care of it, you should be really mean to it and use a lot of deprivation and unkindness? Like, just like when I compare those two things, does it not surprise you that you are taking this approach, this really negative way? 

So when you think about the definition of unconditional love, which is simply put is love without strings attached, it’s love you offer freely, you don’t base it on what someone does for you in return, think about what conditional love is. It’s saying the only way that you can be acceptable is if you look a certain way, do a certain thing. And we know, you know, with Brene Brown, she’s done so much research about shame and about all of that. 

So going back to my difference between hustle and persuade is to pressure or urge someone into an action persuade cause someone to adopt a certain position, belief, or course of action. And when we think about the way the educational system was, and still in some places can be, when we think about some parenting strategies, we think about some cultural strategies. When we think of dictatorships or like different government philosophies, they buy into if we use fear to rule people, then that will be a better motivation. And I think even religion there can be a lot of religions that will use fear as a motivation versus love of Jesus or love of yourself to treat yourself with kindness. 

And I’m gonna use just one example and then conclude. But when I was growing up, and I, I think I’ve I definitely know I’ve talked about this in other podcasts, but you know, my mom and I’ve done it myself, I would say don’t play with fire because, and then I would show my kids pictures of people who, yeah like burn scars. It’s terrible. Or brush your teeth. And I would show pictures of people with gingivitis. So I used fear as a motivation, which, and sometimes it can be very effective, but I think it can be overused, and I feel like if you’re constantly saying, I need to brush my teeth so that I don’t have gingivitis, versus I want to brush my teeth so that I can have beautiful, healthy teeth and I can have beautiful gum health, that’s a completely different story.

And so I want to encourage you to change the way you think of taking care of yourself. I want to encourage you to, and imagine you’re a little girl and your mom is saying to you, Hey, you’ve got these sugar bugs on your teeth, and we gotta make sure that we take care of these sugar bugs so that we can have these nice clean teeth that are gonna be so healthy and they’re gonna be so strong that you can have them for the rest of your life. And we wanna take such good care of them. Kinda like cleaning our room. It’s like, oh, we have this beautiful house. We have this beautiful room. When we put everything away, it just looks so nice and we just can feel so pleased and we can feel so much calm and at rest when our house is in order. Versus people who have messy houses are losers or whatever, right? Or they’re irresponsible or they’re lazy, or they’re this or that. And I think that’s one of the problems with people who are overweight. They feel like people are judging them. They feel like they’re not smart enough or they’re lazy, but that’s not true. They just are overweight because they haven’t learned how to feel their feelings. They haven’t learned how to take care of themselves. They haven’t learned how to stop buffering. There’s lots of things that haven’t happened. 

So I want to invite you. I do want to invite you to come and take advantage of my free coaching offers. I have those spots in my calendar because there are far too many women who are suffering, who do not need to suffer. There are tools available, there is support available. There is so many different ways for you to change and in a way that feels so loving and kind and thoughtful and it’s going to create a permanent change for you and your life. So book a call with me. I can do some free coaching for you. And then after I teach you that tool, you come with me with any problem, any struggle you have, I will give you some coaching, and then we’ll have a discussion about is Love Yourself Thin the right fit for you. There are lots of different ways of losing weight and what I hear a lot of women say on these calls is that it’s not a high pressure sales call. It is a way of service and a way for me to help you to see what is the best route. I have helped so many women learn to love themselves and appreciate themselves and to change their relationship with themselves and their bodies, and I can use those expertise as I help you make that decision of joining my lifetime membership. Or working with me one-on-one or with one of my coaches.

All right. I can’t wait to give you that free coaching, that free help and support. I’m not sure how much longer I can do that for, so please take advantage of that offer because it truly is, I know for myself the very first hour of me or getting coached and learning these tools made the biggest difference for me when I’ve been struggling for over 25 years with my weight and one hour of coaching made all the difference. And it’s what’s caused me now to have lost over 50 pounds and kept it off without any real drama, difficulty, no more finger wagging, no more self-control or willpower, and it’s really of a place of love. So I want that for you, so please take advantage of my offer. Take care everyone. Bye.