#94: Weight Loss and the Long Haul

94. Weight Loss and the Long Haul

Do you feel like you’re never gonna get to where you wanna go with weight loss? It just seems like such a rough deal. Well, today I’m gonna talk about how you can overcome these doubts that you have and start living a life where you feel comfortable and calm in your own body, regardless of the size. I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin podcast, episode 94, Weight Loss and the Long Haul. All right. How you doing? I used to be friends with long haul drivers. They drove Wonder Bread actually for quite a while, and they had all sorts of stories about being on these long haul trips, and I want to talk to you a little bit about what does that mean to be on the long haul when it comes to weight loss, and I want to dispel some really unhealthy patterns that we have just picked up just because of the way we’ve been marketed to and spoken to. So I’m excited to show you how you can see what is possible for you in order for you to have success. And so in this episode, you can expect to talk about patience. We’re gonna look at the difference between a quick fix and delayed gratification. We’re looking at the journey. I’m gonna give many examples, and then I’m going to give you some reflection questions for you to really look at your relationship with yourself and your body. And when you do that work, you will start seeing that permanent weight loss really is attainable and it’s totally available for you. Okay. But before we go in, I wanna share just a quick win from one of my clients because that’s one of my favorite things to do. And it’s also really fun when I’m sharing these wins and these people found me on the podcast, they join the program and then I get to shout them out. So that’s really fun. I have a client who has really struggled with her weight for a long time and has felt very discouraged about ever feeling like she can be comfortable in her own skin. And one of the things that she has brought up in the coaching is that, even though she hasn’t lost very much physical weight, she just feels like such a different person and she’s not beating herself up for not having the pounds on the scale changing, but she is really learning how to get her own back and start looking at why the number on the scale hasn’t changed, and she’s doing it from a place of love versus being really mean to herself. So that’s a really big win. All right, so let’s talk about the long haul. And one of the reasons I have the lifetime membership, is where you pay once or you do the payment plan, and then you don’t have to pay me every month is because I want you to not put pressure on yourself to get everything in, and you gotta, keep coming back. It’s like once you are in, everything that I offer is right there for you. You never have to pay again. It’s going to an all inclusive holiday where you pay and then you don’t have to pay for the drinks or for the food. You don’t have to try to decide. It’s just all there for you and I also believe that weight loss is so much deeper than just counting calories and tracking steps. It really is a mental struggle because there’s so many behaviors that we have that we don’t understand why we do things. There’s a lot of automatic pilot that we’ve gone on to, and so we are sabotaging ourselves and we’re not even realizing it. And in fact, I believe a lot of us have been programmed to eat when we feel bad. We’ve heard all sorts of messages of, you’re depressed, go get ice cream. You’re happy, let’s go celebrate with food. It really is deep in our culture. So I wanted to talk about the definition of patience. Now, I was a school teacher for almost 10 years. I taught quilting for quite a while and I have five of my own children. And a lot of times people will say, oh Dara you have so much patience. And it’s true. I actually do have a lot of patience in a lot of areas. And it’s funny when impatience comes around because it’s not always my go-to. And so definitely I’m a lot more impatient with myself though, which is also probably pretty normal for a lot of us. But the definition is the capacity to accept or tolerate delay problems or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious. Now, a lot of us struggle with anxiety, which means we go to the worst case scenario and we stay there. And part of our wiring as a human is to look for the negative and then plan for it. Especially as moms or women who have responsibilities, it does fall on us. And so if there are problems, then we do need to be able to switch gears and to, to take on that new level of responsibility. And so I wanted to talk today about how do we grow our capacity to accept that suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious? Because when you look at the definition, it’s the capacity to accept or tolerate delay problems or suffering. So how do we increase our capacity? Now the three things that came to my mind, especially when in regards to weight loss, is we have a lot of urges. And an urge is simply a desire for something. So if we see beautiful fabric, we have a urge to buy it. If we look at a beautiful patisserie or a chocolate bar or maybe that you can smell pizza or like you go into the grocery store and you walk in in the baking section, you know, they waft it through. There’s a lot of desire there. And so that’s an urge. And so learning how to grow your capacity, grow your ability to accept or tolerate that discomfort is really important. So for example, if you go to a potluck and we have all these urges, you know, you see people, they just pile a bunch of desserts on a plate and that just seems like that would be an expectation that that’s what you do. And so we have this urge to want to not miss out. We want to try all the different foods. And so think about the Christmas season. Think about all the food that gets brought out and everything is displayed. Those are all desires. And so if we can grow our capacity to be uncomfortable with that, we can then look at what would happen if we ate that food? So we can take that pause and then make a decision on purpose of, if I eat that, then I will have this consequence. So having that patience and being able to build that capacity is gonna really serve us. Another issue or an area to grow your capacity is your identity. Now, one of the things that I see a lot in my coaching with my group and my one-on-one clients, is that a lot of them believe that that’s just who they are. And especially if you look around in your family members. You know, we all have different cousins and aunts and uncles, grandmas, and it’s interesting because if you look around, are certain families they tend to be either they’re all kind of on the large side or they’re not. And so it’s difficult to step outside of those expectations that your family has. That’s just who we are. We’re just a bigger family, or that’s just who are, we’re all really thin but really it’s all just an individual choice in how they decide to think about themselves, how they decide to use food. But if your family and your identity is tied to being the chubby kid or always struggling, then it’s going to be really difficult to grow the capacity to accept or tolerate that difficulty. Another area that I see in growing your capacity to change is the realm of possibility. And this one, I I like to dive into a little bit in a different way. So my dad was six foot four. He is shrinking a little bit. It’s kind of fun to watch him try to straighten up was he compares himself to my boys who are all growing so fast but as a six foot four youth, he played a lot of basketball, he played a lot of football, and when he played back in his day, it was never in the realm of possibility for them to dunk the ball. Never. They didn’t even consider that they could. And it’s interesting because I’ve been watching my sons playing basketball and even my son who’s now 20, when he was in grade eight, he got a three point shot in the game and the coach came up to us afterwards and he said, you know what? We haven’t had a three point shot in a game in years, like 10 years. And people didn’t think that kids of that age could shoot a three pointer and make it in a game. So then when he got the three pointer, It now started to be acceptable that, oh, wait a minute, maybe kids at this age could. And then my other son in grade seven, they had the shorter rims and he could dunk. And people were just amazed that they could dunk. And now my son, who’s in grade five, who’s as I’m recording this, it’s his birthday today. He just turned 11. He can dunk on those rims and he’s in grade five. So it’s really been fascinating for me to watch the expectations that my kids have of what they can do at certain ages keeps evolving. And so now it’s just it’s no big deal. So my youngest son seeing his brother in grade seven dunking thought, well, maybe I should try. And now he can dunk at that younger age. So they’re growing the capacity to be able to do things that people didn’t think they could do. Now, we have a worksheet in Love Yourself Thin it’s called the powerful tedious worksheet. And it is super tedious and what they do is you get something that you love, like ice cream or a piece of cake or dessert or something, and you take one bite and you just eat that one bite and you focus on it, and you then, write down what you thought of that bite and how that felt in your taste, and you describe it and you do that until you don’t wanna do that anymore. So eight bites, four bites, 20 bites, and you start to see the food from a different perspective. So you’re growing that capacity to see things in a different way. So it breaks it down and it actually starts becoming honest with how do you like that food? What actually is happening for you when you eat it? So just like my sons have raised the bar for what is possible at a certain age. I wanna raise the bar for you and how you can think about yourself and your body. So one of the things that I did especially when it came to urges, was I decided one summer I was gonna get really good at being able to feel uncomfortable and not eat the thing. So every time my kids wanted a frosty from Wendy’s or an ice cream from McDonald’s, because they were both 99 cents each, and I have five kids and so I thought for $5 and 35 cents or whatever the tax was. I can practice feeling an urge, processing an urge, and that whole summer I took them over and over and not once did I take a lick or a bite, and that helped me grow my capacity and understand that I’m a person that doesn’t need to have those things to feel good. So I wanna challenge you to do something like that. Now, I’m not telling you to go and stop all your habits that were really difficult. So I just shared in last podcast about the consolation prize when things don’t go so well and you go and get a frosty or you go and get licorice all sorts, or a chocolate bar or something. That’s, a very common, an old behavior that I’ve done for years. So one of the things that I’ve done to help myself bridge my own gap in that way is. So I will go to Dollarama, I will get a fizzy drink. They have quite often they’ll have bubbly water that’s lime or grapefruit or a lemon flavored water. So it’s like fizzy. It’s like playful in my mouth and then I’ll get macadamian nuts and it’s like a little package and it’s so delicious. And so I will still go and get myself something because I need to meet myself where I’m at, and I will allow myself to buy that treat. And every once in a while I might buy smart food, the popcorn that I really enjoy, and I’ll just have a handful. The other thing I’ll do is there’s a dark chocolate that has really high fiber and low carbs, so I will sometimes get that from myself as a consolation prize. So you see what I’m doing is I’m growing my capacity to accept or tolerate delay problems or suffering without becoming super annoyed or anxious with myself. So just in conclusion of this episode, I want to offer to you that when you give yourself permission to being awkward and unsuccessful because you haven’t learned it yet, that yet at the end of that sentence has really, really helped me. I remember as I was promoting this quilting class like four years, five years ago, and it was right when I, in 2018, when I got my life coach and I was offering this, this monthly membership and I was so excited about it and I really wanted to sign a certain amount of people and I didn’t. I didn’t meet my goal and my coach said to me, you just haven’t figured it out yet. And when she said that, that really helped me and I think that’s been a really key tool for me when it comes to patience, is for me to say, you know, I just haven’t figured it out yet. Because the second definition of patience is a person’s ability to wait something out or endure something tedious without getting riled up. So we have an expectation to do something or that something was gonna happen. And it just hasn’t come yet. And the best way to do this is to just let yourself being a human. So building those support beams of, I’m a human doing different things. I’m learning. Just like you would talk to a child, Hey, it’s okay, you haven’t figured out how to clean your room totally yet, because you just haven’t had enough experience, you just haven’t had enough practice at it. Like we talked to our children this way, so why wouldn’t we talk to ourselves that way? And I feel like when I think about, I shared two podcasts ago about how to solve any problem. We really can solve any problem in our life. We really can create whatever we want. And the way that we do that is we need to build those support systems in place for us to be able to have that strong foundation of being able to use our brain in the best way possible. Our brains are our best investment. And as you learn to trust yourself, as you learn to process urges, as you learn to look at your identity and as you learn to look at your realm of possibility, then you’re able to transform, you’re able to become the person you wanna be. I’m gonna share a quick little story. So when I was 17, I went to university. I’m a November baby. And through my church I had been given this responsibility to help with a Christmas dinner. And I think there was about 300, maybe not quite 300, but there was a lot like yeah, maybe 300. There’s a lot of people for this dinner. And there’s a few adults that kind of helped, we were young adults, so we were, you know, between 18 to 30 and there was a few like married ladies that were kind of helping us, and the one said to me, okay, well you’re in charge of potatoes. And I thought, I’m an 18 year old girl, do I know how to do potatoes for this many people? And I remember her saying just to me like, yeah, you, you can do this. And I thought, oh, okay. I guess I can. And it was really interesting. I peeled all the potatoes. I cooked all the potatoes, and I mashed all the potatoes and had no one believed in me to say, you can do that. I wouldn’t have even thought to even try. So I want to just encourage you all that you are a lot more capable than you think you are, but it requires you to grow your capacity to accept or tolerate delay problems or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious. And if you are becoming annoyed and anxious, let me help you because I can help you process those emotions and help you to have the life that you want. This is what I do inside Love Yourself Thin. I cannot wait to help you transform your relationship with food, your relationship with your body, which then of course will change your relationship with everyone around you. All right. For more information, come and book a call with me and let’s talk about what would be like for you to truly learn how to love yourself th