#97: Weight Loss and the Dara Way

Weight loss and the dara wayDon’t you love when you hear weight loss programs claim that they have tried and true guaranteed results, and then it feels like you need to just run and pay the money because there’s no way that you’re ever gonna be able to guarantee your own weight loss success? Well in today’s episode I am going to tell you all about how to truly create your own success, your own way.

The only way that you can create your own winning formula for weight loss is for you to create your own tried and tested method, not by using some generic plan. The only way you can truly create your own happiness, the only way that you can create your own transformation is from the inside out. Let’s go!

Weight Loss for Quilters | Weight Loss and Self-Sabotage 

If you are ready to lose weight and change the way you think about hunger, sign up for the lifetime access membership for Love Yourself Thin! Doors are open and you can find all the information by clicking here.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • How to guarantee your own weight loss

  • Why we prefer being told what to do

  • What assumptions do we make about our own happiness

  • Five key pillars of permanent weight loss

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

Full Episode Transcript:

Dara Tomasson Podcast

97. Weight Loss and the Dara Way

Don’t you love in advertising when they say tried and true guaranteed results, and it feels like you need to just run and pay the money because there’s no way that you’re ever gonna be able to guarantee your own weight loss success? Well, let me help you with that. I’m Dara Tomasson, and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 97, Weight Loss and the Dara Way.

Okay, everyone. Let’s talk about this. I was thinking about calling a podcast the Dara Way and thinking that seems like really self, what is that called? Like self absorbent or self-centered. I’m gonna share a little story you’ll see why it’s called The Dara Way. And this podcast episode is so amazing. I’m so excited about it. All of them are, but this one is really personal and I’m gonna get personal with you. And in fact, the only way that you can guarantee your own weight loss success is when you finally let yourself get personal. Don’t worry, I’ll explain more about that.

So one of my assistants, she was a friend and then she started working for me and it was interesting after a few months of working together, she made this comment and she said, well, pretty much, we always have to have it the Dara way. And I was taken back a little bit cause I thought, oh, I don’t wanna be this self-centered, like everything has to be my way or the highway. I don’t ever wanna be one of those bossy people. And so I, I just asked her to explain what she means by that, and it was really wonderful. She said, well, you always make it your own. But when you make it your own, it means that’s when it’s really the best. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that. And then I just got some coaching from Jodi Moore, which was really fun to be coached by her. And she started saying that, she’s like, well, you’ve gotta do it the Dara way and the Dara way. And she said it about three times, and I just thought, I have to do this podcast. I have to share with you what that means to embrace the Susan way or the Lori way, or the Kate way, whatever, whatever your name is, I want you to start embracing that the way to permanent weight loss is to create it for yourself, your way.

So this podcast is going to be really helpful and I do encourage you to print off the worksheets because I have some work for you to do and I am wanting you to really spend some time with yourself, because the only way to make it your own way is you have to be willing to go and do some work. Now, I know that you are not afraid of work. I know you’re not because you’re all some amazing women who have done tons of work, but working has actually been a detriment for you. And let me explain why. Because your thinking is I have to work harder, I have to be more obedient. I have to follow this plan more diligently. I have to up the ante. I need to speak harder to myself and harsher to myself so that I will obey that. I will do this tried and tested method.

So, one of the problems we have is that we do not step into our own authority, and it’s challenging to step into our own authority, especially when we feel like we’re such a loser at it. We feel like we’ve been so pathetically bad at something. So for me to say, Hey, come on, you gotta, you gotta get rid of this good student mentality and you, you’ve gotta just step into your own authority. That feels awful, and I agree with you. I get it. It’s really challenging, but just like anything you master, you have to be willing to be bad at it before you can be good at it. Think about your quilting projects. Think about your first quilt or your 10th quilt, or even your 20th quilt. How much better you get with every quilt that you make. Think about the first meal you ever made, or when you first did laundry or whatever that project was. You have just continuously gotten better at it the more you do it, it’s part of our life.

Now, the problem is we also want to be managed. We want people to manage us. We want people to tell us what to do because that saves energy, it reduces risk. It feels really safe. Like, it’s like you want me to tell you, no, just Dara, just tell me what to eat. Just tell me what to do. I’ll just do it. I know how to be obedient. I know how to follow a checklist. I know how to follow a recipe. I know how to do all that stuff. Right? So it feels like that’s what you want, and there is a lot of comfort in that. And I’m not telling you that you’re out on your own. And in fact I love training wheels. I love giving you support. I love giving you the structure. But the problem is we have free will. And we have this agency and we also have our own personality. We are unique, and I always joke with people, I say, there’s only one Dara Tomasson in the world. The world can only handle one of me. But that’s the truth for all of us. We are all super unique and different, but it feels scary to be different. Now I really love the work that Joe Dispenza does in the world, and he’s really helped me understand about how my brain works. He helps me make these crazy audacious goals and actually complete them because he’s taught me about the quantum field and how if we have, for example, if we watch a movie and we start crying in the movie, even though we know it’s not real, our brain at that moment does not realize that that movie is actually not real. That’s why we cry. And so he does a lot of work on personality, and there’s a book he wrote called the Habit of being yourself or the habit of breaking yourself. And we did that in a mastermind that I had with some, with some ladies, and we read that book. It was fascinating. But one of the quotes that he shared was, your personality is made up of how you think, act and feel. It is your state of being. Therefore, your same thoughts, actions, and feelings will keep you enslaved to the same past personal reality. However, when you as a personality embrace new thoughts, actions, and feelings, you will inevitably create a new personal reality in your future.

So one of the activities that I have you do on the first page of the handout, from the podcast is I want you to name all the diets you’ve been on, so Noom, weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, all the things keto, vegan. Then the next column is, what did you like about it? What parts of that diet worked well for you? So some of you, maybe keto was, it was very simple. You just had to, you restricted a whole bunch of food. You ate a certain amount of food. Some of you might have had those little sticks that you we’re able to tell every morning if you were in ketosis or not, and you just liked the simplicity of it, you liked the science of it. So that’s what I want you to do. I want you to say, well, I liked this part. So for example, with Weight Watchers, maybe you liked the idea of reward food. Maybe that really resonated with you. Or maybe saving up for something that you could eat later on. Cuz there’s always good from everything, right? There’s always a benefit. So I want you to think, okay, what were the diets? What did I like? And then I want you to write down what didn’t you like and why. So for me, I hate tracking things. I just think it’s ridiculous. I don’t want to spend my time tracking what I ate, the idea of measuring things and recording that. For a little bit I think it’s kind of a interesting game, but for the long haul, no, thank you. So that’s what I can learn about myself. I can also question myself thinking, is that real? Like, do I not like doing that because with quilting I actually like specific measurements. I like being accurate. So what is it about measuring my food or tracking things or putting it into an app that I don’t like? What part of that doesn’t resonate with me? Because there are parts of my life where I actually really like precision. Especially when I’m learning, when I’m making like a new design with feathers or when I’m doing a custom quilt, I really love that precision and it feels really clean and it actually feels a lot like freedom. So then I question myself of, well, what is it about the food? What is it about that, that doesn’t actually feel good for me. And the more that I can get curious, the more that I can see what’s going on.

So I want to ask you about creating the, so I’m talking about myself, of course, so the Dara way. Now, the problem with my story is that since my early twenties, I to my mid forties, so that 25 year period, the Dara way was; I don’t like my body. I overeat because I don’t wanna feel my emotions. I turn to food as rewards. I turn to food to buffer. And then I go and I be really mean to myself and I speak really harshly to myself. And then I try these traumatic diets full of restriction. And it is just been the story for 25 years. And so that has been my relationship with my body. And then I add in all the conversations I had with people of, I don’t like my body and I really struggle and this is really hard. And then I have all these walks that I go on with people and we’re like we’re talking about how much our bodies are so terrible. And I, and, and so then if I started losing weight and became easy, what would other people think? And what about my family members? What if I change? Will they like me? Will they reject me? Will they still invite me to family events? And then how will people judge me for what I say? Because if I used to say that Keto was the answer or Weight Watchers and I was a lifer for Weight Watchers. Maybe they’ll think I’m flaky. Maybe they’ll judge me and think, oh, here she goes again. I’m one of her weight loss rants. Yo, yo, yo, here we go. Right? It’s so interesting to think as a grown woman, you’re worried what other people will think you’re worried what if they won’t like me? What if they’ll reject me? What if they’re gonna judge me? What if they’re gonna say behind my back?

And so the problem is then you don’t let yourself explore. You don’t let yourself enjoy these experiences. Like of learning how to eat and how to fail and how to learn from that. And so then you never change. So then it becomes that self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, the best news of all is that the only way you can truly create your own happiness, the only way that you can create your own transformation is from the inside out. So when you could to have true happiness is when you start being honest and authentic with yourself. So you have to go on the inside. You have to ask yourself. Now, since I’ve been doing this work, It’s been really interesting to watch my children and my husband’s reaction to how much I’ve changed because in some ways I’ve changed completely. Like I’m such a different person in so many ways. I’m still fun, I’m still playful, I’m still enthusiastic, I’m still adventurous. Like there’s still parts of my personality that I was before coaching Dara. But that part of me was a lot more restricted. It was a lot more difficult to let that part of me out because I didn’t have the tools to help me when I was stressed or worried.

And it’s interesting because I’m gonna tell a story and then I’m gonna come back to that. So this is just a story I made up. So there was a mom and she wanted so badly to help her to be the best mom ever. And one day she was with her kids and there was a commercial and there was a mom who was making french toast for her kids. And one of the kids piped up and said, Ugh, that’s a great mom. She’s the best. Like that’s awesome. So this mom decides I’m gonna make french toast for my kids. So every day the mom sets her alarm and she gets up and she wakes up early and she makes sure the night before that she has all the ingredients for french toast. And she even puts on a little bit of music and she makes french toast for her kids every day. So she starts doing this every day for like, A month and a half and the kids are starting to be more grumpy and more grumpy. And finally she said, well, what’s going on? I’m a good mom. I’m making you french toast. And the kids said, no, it wasn’t that I liked the french toast that she made. It was that she actually was having breakfast with her kids. And then the kids thought that the mom, what needed to make them french toast to feel good, but the kids really didn’t actually enjoy the french toast, they did for the first two days, but not every single day. So now the kids are upset. The mom’s upset, but really it was just because she made some assumptions of, to be a good mom, I need to make french toast. And so I’m curious about all of you of thinking, how many stories do we have, how many assumptions have we made about being truly happy? Do we think we have to wear a certain size of pants to be truly happy? Do we feel like we have to have less wrinkles on our forehead or have a six pack or whatever that is. And so now we are just limiting our ability to be happy because we think all of these external things create this happiness.

So when you start becoming honest and authentic and actually figuring out who you are, cuz a lot of us don’t even really know who we are. I know for sure there were so many things that I was doing just because I thought I was supposed to. And that’s why there’s a lot of coaching in Love Yourself Thin about our moms and our grandmas, because guess what? A lot of our moms and grandmas, that’s what they did too. They thought that they had to be a certain way. They never even questioned that it was possible to change. They thought that they had to have the house pristine. They thought they had to whip their kids into shape. They had to be harsh because that’s what they thought, that that’s what they saw. They didn’t even slow down enough to think, Hey, what’s working? What’s not working? And what can I do different next time?

So, my relationship with my kids has changed so much because my kids thought they had to be a certain way because I thought I had to be a certain way. And because I was trying to control them all the time, and when I just started to let myself be myself and let them be themselves, then nobody is pretending and no one’s playing anymore. And now we’re able to have these conversations of, hey, You know, when you don’t clean your room, I tend to take it personally and I think I’m not being a really good mom cause I’m not teaching you how to clean your room. And now I’m having an honest conversation because it’s actually them not cleaning the room is more about me being a good or bad mom than for them. So then I can have the actual conversation of, and I don’t want you to be a slob and when you get married, I don’t want your wife to think I didn’t do a good job. Like, so all this truth is coming out and then I’m now able to have this honest conversation with my kids about room cleaning. I can also say, and I don’t want, when grandma comes over, I don’t want her to judge me. So I want you to clean your room so I don’t get judged by my mom, as a 49 year old woman. Right? So now we’re starting to be more honest. Now we’re really looking at what’s going on now. So the problem, and the reason I’m calling this the Dara way, this episode, is that if we are going to be the good student, and we’re going to these diets because they’re tried and tested, then we’re not getting honest about why do I keep turning to the food? Why do I keep popping popcorn every night? Why do I crack out the caramel sauce in apples at 10 27 at night? Oh, it’s because I’m feeling really nervous about the next day, and I don’t know how to deal with my emotions. And so this usually calms me down. It kind of numbs me out and it gets me through the night. Okay, so let’s talk about our emotions. Let’s solve for what’s really going on and let’s stop self-medicating with food.

So the tool that I want to share with you is I want you to start taking an honest look at what your relationship with food is, and I want you to start looking at all of the past experiences you’ve had. We call them failures, but really it’s excellent data to see, okay, this is what I liked about this. This is what I liked about that. And one of the things that I’m gonna offer to you is they all offer some version of a formula. So, for example, keto says if you restrict this many carbs and you do these things and you know, you do the little test every morning and you can see if you’re in ketosis. That formula says, then it will guarantee that you will lose weight. Same thing with Weight Watchers and noom all of those things, they say, if you do this, you will get this result. Remember how I said we all like to be managed? We all like to have that comfort. We all like to have those clear cut boundaries. The problem is that if that does not resonate with you, if that is not something that you want to do for a long time and that you don’t always wanna be using willpower and being hard on yourself, then it’s gonna feel terrible. And that’s not authentically you. We’ve gotta get it so that it’s for you. And so what worked for me is I actually finally understood the science. I understand what happens when I eat food. I understand what happens in my body, how my body reacts to food, certain kinds of food, because now I understand the science and it’s very simple. It’s simple enough for a a fifth grader. So now when I understand that, then I can start figuring out what really would be a good choice, and then I learned to make my own eating plan and I troubleshoot it.

Then the next layer is my emotions. So if I’m buffering all the time with food, I’m finally able to feel the emotions so I don’t have to buffer anymore. And I’m not overeating because I don’t want, I’m numbing myself, right? That’s one of my self-medicating ways. So now I’m so much more aware of how much I’m eating and the emotions, and then I learn how to take responsibility for myself. I stop shaming myself all the time and blaming myself. And then the last thing that happens in this permanent weight loss process is that I build my own self confidence, which is trusting myself, which is allowing myself to feel all the emotions. I just laid out the five key pillars of permanent weight loss, and the only way that it’s going to be successful for you is if you create it for you. There are women in my program who lose all this weight. I don’t know what they’re eating. But I trust them that they’re smart enough to understand weight loss science. I trust them that they know how to create the, I have my guidelines of the protocol, like, how much are you drinking? How much are you sleeping? How much are you managing your stress? How much are you, you know, we have this whole list of the protocol and then they can come to the group and say, Hey, I am on a plateau. I’m doing this. Okay, let’s troubleshoot. Let me show you. This is how it happens. And then you learn to feel your feelings. That’s pillar number three. And then you learn how to take responsibility for yourself. That’s number four. And then you learn self-confidence, which means you learn to trust yourself. And the only way that you can create your own winning formula is for you to create your own tried and tested method with these five pillars. And to have a coach, just like my boys playing basketball, the coach sees the play that they’re not doing right, and he calls the timeout and says, Hey, stop. You’re not doing it right.

It’s not gonna work. So I’m the coach that helps you and say, Hey, stop. It’s not working, you’re not using your will properly. That’s not the way that it’s gonna help you. But then I ask you, I go into your brain and then we can find what’s going on for you and create your own unique results. So that’s why I can guarantee results in my program because I say, if you show up, if you keep going and you let me help you, you’re gonna lose the weight and keep it off forever because you become your own authority. It’s the most beautiful way, and I’m doing the same thing with my business. I’m doing it the Dara way. Yeah, there’s lots of business techniques and strategies, but until I make it my own way, business is gonna feel like a grind and I’m gonna have to use willpower. I don’t want my business to be like that. I learned to Love Myself Thin. I’m gonna learn to love myself in building my business. So tell me what’s going on for you when I share these things.

I’m just gonna share, and with these three quotes from Joe Dispenza. He says, “If you can’t control your mind, everything and everyone else will”. So you gotta learn to control your mind, ladies and I help you with that. The next quote is, “knowledge is power, but knowledge about yourself is self-empowerment.” That is what we do and love yourself thin. And the last quote is, “we can’t create a new future while we’re living in our past. It’s simply impossible.” So if you keep going to your past saying well, I failed here and I did this there, you’re always gonna fail. You’re never gonna progress. That is why love yourself then is the way to create your own way. I help you find your way. It is incredible, and I have so many testimonials of women in my program that say, Dara, thank you so much. You finally gave me my voice back, my power back. So if you’re ready for that, let’s go. Let’s do it. No more waiting. All right. You have an amazing week.

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