Ep #27: Being Worthy

Are you convinced your weight will never leave, like the unwelcome house guest? Well, this episode will open your eyes to why it keeps hanging around.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 27: Being Worthy.

Did you know you could lose weight and keep it off for good? After 25 years of hiding behind my quilts, I have finally cracked the code for permanent weight loss, and I’ve lost 50 pounds without exercise or counting calories. I’m Dara Tomasson, professional quilter turned weight and life coach, where I help quilters just like you create a life they love by losing weight and keeping it off for good. Let’s jump into today’s episode.

Okay, so let me share what you can expect on today’s episode. One of the biggest struggles I see my clients have with weight loss is feeling worthy of their success. Now, this is what I see. They feel they need to justify their reasons to lose weight. They feel they need to earn or qualify themselves to have these kinds of results. So we are going to explore the concept of self-worth or worthiness. I will be taking in various perspectives from well-known women in the area of self-development.

I will share my perspective as I have coached hundreds of women through this and then we’ll end off with a challenge for all of you to help you work through your own worthiness issues.

And before I do that I always want to shout out and tell you what’s going on in the Dara Tomasson Love Yourself Thin. So we are now four days into the official Love Yourself Thin group membership, lifetime membership. And I’m so happy to see these women who are using the tracking system. So how my website works, once you get into the membership you are able to have your own page. And you put in all of your details, your current weight. You put in all the modules you’ve watched. You talk about the worksheets that you’ve worked on.

And as they do this they are learning to really get their own results. So one of the things I see with my clients is they will lose 50, 60, 80 pounds. And I personally don’t even know what they’re eating because it doesn’t matter. Because I teach you the five simple steps of weight loss is you learn how simple weight loss science is. Then you create your own eating plan which we call a protocol. Then I teach you tools to troubleshoot that eating protocol. You then learn to feel all your feelings. So now you’re not buffering. You’re not turning to food because you’re uncomfortable.

And the fifth step is you learn to trust yourself. And today we’re really going to be focusing on trusting yourself. So what I love about the way we have Love Yourself Thin is that we understand that weight loss is not a one and done. It’s not like you just, once you figure it out you don’t ever have to think about it again. It’s very similar to laundry.

And actually one of my clients was talking about that today. She said she’s now lost 40 pounds and she’s been doing this for about eight months. And she had a bit of a problem when something had happened, one of her grandkids fell from a grocery cart so then she felt really bad. And then one of her other grandkids wanted an ice-cream treat and she ended up having an ice-cream treat which was very uncommon for her. And so she realized the reason that weight loss is like laundry is because we’re always having human experiences. And we always have to solve them.

So I love that analogy but anyways, it’s really fun for me to see all these ladies in the program getting so excited about they’re taking responsibility for their own results. And then they keep coming to the coaching calls and we have three live coaching calls. And they come to the Facebook group and ask for help. This is really exciting for me. I’ve been working on this lifetime membership for over a year and it’s finally here, so exciting.

Alright, so let’s get into this episode so you can finally understand what’s going on about our feelings of worthiness. So I got this idea for the podcast when I noticed that some of the members in the program have been having amazing results, 50 pounds, 80 pounds, which you would think going back to our sabotage episode, you would think, oh no, even if I lost 20 pounds I’d be so happy. But they’re finding themselves unhappy and in fact they’re stalling or even going backwards. And they’re getting very insecure about their ability to keep moving forward.

So I have done the podcast on inner bully. I did the podcast on sabotage. I’ve done a podcast on judgment. So when we talk about worthiness we have been told from a very young age that our worth is tied to results. So we have gold stars. We have praise. We have awards and certificates. We have trophies. We have rankings. One of the things I’m going to offer to you is that many of us have had this message since we were five years old.

So it’s difficult to start to see that there’s an option to change because it’s become so normal. It’s like it’s our operating manual. We don’t even realize that it’s an option to change. It’s kind of like if I taught you how to do half square triangles in a new and efficient way, it’s a little bit awkward at the beginning because you’re just used to doing your half square triangles a certain way. But once you see how much better it is to do them in this new method, you just need to redirect your brain and say, “Yeah, that’s right, we have this better way of doing it.”

So this is all that’s going to happen during this episode. I’m going to be sharing examples, quotes and different thoughts. So I want you to pay attention to your brain and seeing what reactions are happening so that you can gain awareness if this is you. So a lot of us, our generation and older, my generation and older, we have really been conditioned with the gold stars, and the awards, and certificates, and trophies and there’s a winner and a loser.

And then we went through this phase in the mid-80s to the 90s about everyone gets a trophy. And we don’t want to fail anyone at school. And everyone just gets pushed through. And so of course we have a lack of self-esteem on the other end because now these kids, they don’t have resilience. They don’t have the ability to learn to solve their problems. So this episode is going to really give you a way to find the middle ground. I’m going to teach you to find the balance because we’ve had this one extreme to another. And I’m going to help you build a very solid foundation.

So the first person I’m going to quote, and this is the concept I learned from The Life Coach School, is from Brooke Castillo and she said, “You didn’t create you. You can appreciate yourself without taking credit.” So one of the things that I see with women is they have a really hard time accepting praise, accepting accolades. And I love how Brooke said this is, “You didn’t create yourself.” You didn’t create your body so you can just appreciate yourself without taking any credit. I love that.

Now, she then said, “No matter what you have, or you haven’t done, your worth is already preestablished.” So I know I’ve mentioned this in the podcast, and this is a common theme and you’re going to hear me say this over and over again. That the day you were born your worth was already set, at no point in your life did you go from this perfect newborn baby to not being worthy or wonderful. And in fact I’m going to read from a part of episode 176 from Brooke Castillo’s episode, this is titled I’m not good enough.

And so we had the shame and blame. So whenever you have shame it’s some version of you saying, “I’m not good enough.” So she said, “Many of us believe we aren’t good enough. That other human beings are better. Do you believe other human beings are better than you? Do you believe that other human beings are worse than you? Let’s explore my theory,” this is Brooke talking, “That all humans are 100% worthy and 100% loveable.

Every human being is 100% worthy, and there’s nothing they can do in this world to change that.” And then she said, “Most of us don’t even know that we can choose our thoughts consciously.” So just like I was saying about the golden star, we don’t even realize there’s an option for us to think, well, the teacher might think this one thing about me, but I can just think whatever I want about me. And then I can just do that. So if we don’t realize that then we are living at the effect of a misguided thought.

And we talk about thought errors. And so when we’re operating from a place that is a shaky foundation, kind of like when I was talking about in the podcast about sabotage, the end of the episode I said, “Do not make a decision from a place of lack.” So, so many people are struggling with weight loss and feeling really terrible about themselves and really hating on themselves. And like, okay, I’m going to change my protocol, I’m going to change what I eat from a really bad place. And that’s not going to help them.

Sometimes humans make bad choices. Sometimes we are rude, or inappropriate, or we act violently. These are things, and this is Brooke again, “These are things we do to the effect of our thinking.” Because remember, everything we do, all of our actions are fueled by our feelings, those feelings come from our thoughts. This is not who we are.

So I’m a mom of five kids and my siblings kind of make fun of me and my parenting because I always say to my kids, “You just made a bad choice.” I have never said to my kids, “You’re a bad boy or you’re a bad girl.” I absolutely never ever said that. I always said, “You made a bad choice.” And I did actually tell them, “You made a good choice.” That is crucial for yourself. And I’m curious about how you speak to yourself. So we make good choices, and we make bad choices, but our worth is never at stake, we are always good.

So this also reminds me of how many times my clients will say to me, “But I was being so good, and the scale didn’t go down.” So when we are constantly saying I’m good or bad, we’re making food this moral dilemma which is really unhealthy. And then of course then we think, then we have to earn something or be worthy of something, if we’re saying, “I’m good. If I’m being good then I need to be rewarded. If I’m bad I’m going to be punished.” And so this is a really unhealthy way of looking at food or in any other area.

So again, this is Brooke, she said, “Your worthiness is already at capacity, and nothing you have done or will do makes you less worthy as a human.” This is a very difficult concept to get your head around, but I want to give some of these examples. So you lose all your money and you become homeless, you’re still worthy. You cheat on your husband, you’re still worthy. You yell at your children, you’re still worthy. So if you are already good enough humans and nothing we have ever done has made us less or more good enough, how does this affect our lives?

And I continue to quote her. “We have permission to live from abundance, confidence, and self-love. We are good enough simply because we were born on the planet. Your worthiness has already been decided. So no matter what your parents told you, no matter what the school kids told you, no matter what your teacher told you, no matter what your boss told you, no matter what your first, second or third wife told you, you are and always have been 100% worthy.

Being skinnier, richer, smarter, more giving, kinder and more generous, none of these things can increase your worthiness. Changing what you do will never make you more good enough than you already are. You are already good enough and there is nothing you can do about it. Any thought you have to the contrary is a lie.”

So I wanted to read it from her words because one of the reasons I became a life coach was when I understood this concept that she teaches, it resonated so strongly in me. And I wanted to tell all the people. In fact this is a little side story. So today I met with a lady who’s joining my program. And we actually met at a Riley Blake quilting retreat for shop owners six years ago. And she happens to own a quilt shop. And one of my clients who was able to lose 65 pounds is often at her quilt shop and they were just talking.

And my client mentioned, because of course you notice if someone has lost 65 pounds. And she was telling her, “I have this life coach. Her name is Dara.” She said, “Oh, Dara, oh, let me look.” Because my name is quite a unique name. And so she remembered me. And so today she said to me, she was, “You said something to me that I will never forget.” And so have you ever been in that situation where people say that. You’re like, “I hope it was something good.” And we were talking about religion.

And I had said to her, this is six years ago I said, “If you tried a really delicious cake and it was so yummy, you would want everyone else to experience how delicious that was.” So she had remembered that and now she’s in the program and she’s taking back power in her life. She’s no longer needing to have external things dictate her worthiness. But that was really profound. So this concept of our worth is already set and there’s nothing you can do about it is one of those concepts that is just the most delicious cake and I really want everyone to have it.

And I love the way that Brooke explains that. And I love how I have seen my clients transform their lives when they truly understand that their worth is already set. It’s like if you need to go pay your Visa bill and it’s already been paid. You’re like, “Oh, great.” It’s already done. So I’m going to give you an example of this.

So she said, “No matter what you have or haven’t done your worth is preestablished.” We can use different circumstances in our lives as proof that we’re not worthy. Or we can use those same circumstances as proof that we’re worthy, it’s all in what we choose to think. So I was thinking about an example of how to explain this and I thought about our faces. So some people could think that our faces are our circumstance. It’s just neutral, everyone would agree, this is my face. And we have wrinkles.

And so some people might think I am not as worthy as I used to be because I have all these wrinkles. Whereas someone else could think, I love these wrinkles. I’ve earned these wrinkles. These wrinkles mean that I have cried, and I have smiled, and that I have woken up with babies, and I have stayed up late, and I have truly lived serving people, and helping people. And so I love that example of we get to decide how we want to look at it. But the fact of the matter is we are already worthy and so why not tell the story?

Which version of the story do you like, I have wrinkles and I am older, and I’m not as beautiful as I once was? Or do you want to look at wrinkles of look how much I’ve lived, I’ve truly laughed? And anyone that knows me know that I am a crier, and I am a laugher. And I love that. So maybe I might have more wrinkles at 48 than other 48 year old’s but I have earned all of these and I’m super proud of them.

Okay, so this particular coaching session that spurred me into doing this podcast. My client who has lost 50 pounds, one of the things that happened when we talked about this worthiness concept was that even though she can buy into, she’s like, “Okay, I can buy into that I’m worthy.” But there is a disconnect in her brain.

And part of the disconnect was, so ever since she was a little girl she was told that she needed to be thin. But she also was told other things like, “You need to have dessert every day after dinner. And girls shouldn’t do exercise. And you should be a certain way.” And there was judgment on, “Are you going to eat all of that?” And there was these comments. And so it was really a conflict. And so for 55 years she has been struggling with this conflict. She hasn’t really been able to rectify it, really get some peace around it.

So now that she has lost 50 pounds and had so much success, she is really leery and worried that she’s going to be able to lose the next 50 pounds. This story, it’s so familiar. I don’t know if any of you have ever had repeated nightmares. I know when I was a child I had three nightmares that I just had all the time. And so even though they’re not awesome, they’re super scary and they caused me a lot of grief there’s kind of a familiarity, kind of this comfort with them that it’s like I know that they’re there. I know they’re not really that great but they’re mine.

And so this has been her story for so long. I used the example of it’s like her blanky, you know when kids have those blankies and they’re so disgusting, and dirty, and gross? But they just need to feel that feeling on their face. Or they just need to have that comfort. This is actually what happens to a lot of us with these kinds of thoughts because they’re just really familiar. When you understand that you actually become liberated. And it’s like you can break up with that bad boyfriend or you can break up with that relationship.

So there is going to be a bit of discomfort because now she just has new thoughts like, my worth is already set. I don’t even have to worry about this. And so that’s kind of where the struggle is.

Alright, so this is the part of the podcast that I’m going to help you understand how you can build on this concept. So the fifth step of permanent weight loss is learning to trust yourself. So the definition of self-confidence, so this is what we’re talking about with trusting ourself, because the definition of self-confidence, a feeling of trust in one’s abilities, qualities, and judgement. So when we have self-confidence we have trust in our ability to do something or figure something out but not necessarily in our ability to do it right now.

So we can trust that eventually we’ll be able to get it. So that’s why if you are trying to get self-confidence from your actions and results, i.e. the number on the scale, you will struggle to feel it. There’s only one place that you can get it and that is from your mind, which comes from your thought. So one of the things that generates the most self-confidence is just knowing that you are 100% worthy. You’re worthy because you were born, period.

So the caution is, if you live your life seeking your self-confidence from other people’s approval, you’re always going to be seeking. You’re never going to land in a place where you feel confident. This is true because of the number on the scale. So one of these concepts that goes with this. And so people call it a lot of times in weight loss they talk about you’re on a treadmill, or it’s a moving target. Some people call it the plateau effect. When I feel this then I can feel good. But there is this concept about how to increase our happiness, it’s called the hedonic treadmill.

So the hedonic treadmill, and this comes from Benjamin Franklin, when he was writing the American constitution and he talked about the pursuit of happiness. And so just in that concept, it gave this very difficult, unattainable goal because what it’s saying is that happiness is from outside of you. You need to go and find it. It’s a search. It’s this lifelong message.

So even there with food, the first bite is delicious. You have this happiness. You’re like, “I’ve found it.” And then there’s this influx of joy and it’s deemed to be pleasurable. Then the successive bites then come after, however, seeking the mood lift and ecstatic feeling, the food ceases to bring the influx of joy. So for people to quickly return to a relatively stationery level of happiness or set point despite experiencing major, positive, or negative events in life or changes. So I will be talking about that in a future podcast.

So let’s go back to this idea. And so if you live your life seeking your self-confidence from other people’s approval, you’re always going to be seeking. You’re never going to truly arrive because that is not how we have internal happiness. Internal happiness comes from inside. Internal happiness is not from what other people say.

Alright, so, Geneen Roth, she said, “Compulsive eating or eating more than what your body can handle is only the symptom. Believing that you are not worthy, your own love is the problem. Go for love, you will never be sorry.” And then Brené Brown, the queen of shame and emotions. She said, “When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness is a birthright and not something that you have to earn, anything is possible.”

So let’s go back to when you were five years old. You thought that you had to earn your worth. You also might have thought you needed to negotiate your worth by having righteous enough desires. None of this is true. One of the dangers about that kind of thinking, and I myself am a very religious person. But I’ve misunderstood the way I think if God deems me worthy enough then he will grant it to me. And so the same thing with the universes. It’s however you want to look at it.

But this is one thing that I want to emphasize at this moment is that you are always responsible for you. So I used to think that weight loss was outside of my control. I had to have the right kind of genes. I had to have the right DNA. I had to hire a professional cook. I had to get a science degree, so I understood. I had to take my blood type and send it to labs so they could know. I had to record the different food combinations. It just felt I had to work out for hours and hours. I had to have a certain kind of muscle. And I had to strengthen that muscle.

I really truly felt weight was completely out of my control. And I want to tell you that it is totally in your control, 100%. Even clients who have diagnoses of different things, I have one client who’s on a diuretic. She’s had cancer. She’s had all sorts of problems. She has lost 40 pounds. And she’s continuing to lose weight even though she has some different challenges with her diuretic, she’s playing around with it, she is consistently losing weight. And before she started working with me she was convinced that this was going to be her story.

So if you believe that you are not in charge of your weight loss then you are now at the mercy and whim of the universe, or of God, or whatever that is. And that is just false. We have thought errors that don’t serve us. So you don’t have to earn your worth. You don’t have to negotiate your worth by having righteous enough desires. So, so many women, this is always interesting when I meet with women, and they say, “Well, I just want to be healthy.” It’s almost like this virtuous reason, if it’s virtuous enough then it will be granted to them.

But we don’t have to do any of that anymore because you just get to decide why you want to lose weight and then you just do it. And you just follow the formula, and it just happens. You learn the weight loss science, you learn how to create a protocol, you learn how to troubleshoot that protocol, you’ll be willing to feel all the negative emotions and all the positive emotions. And then you start building confidence in yourself by learning to trust yourself. Those are the five simple steps. It has nothing to do with your worthiness, or your reasons if it’s been granted to you.

So I’m going to read this quote by Arnold Patten, and he said, “We don’t create abundance, that is our natural state. What we create are our limitations.” So going back to my very first podcast, math versus drama, so from this quote, when we eliminate the drama the math does itself. Drama is a set of thoughts that create an emotional response. When we lose the drama, excuses, rationalizing, all of that, we are free to create the math with our beliefs. So when we clean up the drama we begin to make better choices for ourselves. Isn’t that exciting?

So we truly are blessed with everything we need, we just get in our own way with all of these problems that we created for ourselves. So we have just accumulated a bunch of misconceptions or misinterpretations. Now we know they aren’t necessary so we can decide from today on they are to be put in the garbage. So I want you to imagine drawing a line in the sand and saying, “I’m no longer going to think these things. I’m just not going to.” And so when those thoughts try to come back you’re like, “No, sorry, garbage, you go in the garbage, no, not going to happen.”

Just like my analogy of if your grandson or granddaughter started putting chocolate bars on the grocery conveyor belt, you’re like, “No, not buying it. No, not buying that. No, we’re not buying that.” And you just take it off, you don’t buy it. These are the same things with our thoughts. You don’t have to wait to love or appreciate yourself when you get to that number on the scale. It’s not like only until I weigh 150 pounds then I can love myself. It’s the opposite. You start loving yourself now at 225 pounds.

And the more you appreciate yourself and you have so much compassion. Compassion, remember it means active love, the more that you really truly embrace who you are because you’re the one who put the extra weight on. And so how about it’d be nice just to be kind to yourself and be like, “Yeah, sorry, body, I’ve been not really treating you very nicely.” You’re going to change your relationship with your body. You’re going to be kind, and thoughtful, and caring, and compassionate. Then the more weight you’re going to lose, I promise.

If you are truly being kind to yourself you’re not going to shove a bunch of Oreos in your face at night. If you’re really being so appreciative of yourself you’re not going to be grabbing tubs of ice-cream and eating until you feel sick, I promise you, that’s not going to happen. So you don’t have to wait to love or appreciate yourself when you get to that number on the scale. You don’t have to earn any accolades or awards, you just get to decide what sounds fun and then get to work in accomplishing it. We do this by deciding what we want to think about ourselves.

So this is the part of the podcast where I told you that I’m going to give you some direction. I’m going to give you a challenge. So this is your challenge. I want you to spend some time just thinking who do I want to be? When you join my program you get all of my bonus classes. And in the 12 days of Christmas we did an exercise where we talked about who is someone you would love to be. And then you wrote down their characteristic traits. And so you learned so much about yourself. So get that in your head and you can just decide ahead of time who you want to be, and then just like a job.

I remember my first week of being a teacher. We had the staff meetings, and we were talking. And then they said, “Okay, now you go to your classroom and the kids are going to come in two days.” And I thought, I don’t know how to be a teacher. I mean I went to university. I did some student teaching, but I’d never done this on my own. I just thought, okay, well, I guess I am just going to figure this out, just like a quilt, just going to figure this out. I mean you have a pattern, and you have YouTube videos to watch but you’ve never done it before.

So it’s the same thing with weight loss, it’s the same thing with your identity. You just get to decide what kind of person you want to be. And the beautiful thing is your worth is already set. So it’s not like you’re going to ever fail. So once you’ve decided and get some details of what you want.

I don’t know if you’ve ever potty trained a child, or a dog, or a cat. But they sometimes mess up. All we need to do is just patiently calmly redirect them and say, “No, this is where we go to the bathroom, this is what we do.” So if you catch them, bring them back and you’re redirecting, you’re refocusing, you’re recommitting your brain to this new identity. That is why my program is called Love Yourself Thin. Be kind to yourself, be compassionate to yourself, be gentle with yourself, be patient with yourself.

And then when you keep redirecting yourself and recommitting your brain to this new identity then you can rebuild all of those new beliefs. And so every time you have a gain now you’re actually collecting evidence for the new you. You’re like, “I guess I can be this person.” Because now you are able to collect evidence that you can change, and you can be redirected.

So just to cap back this podcast. Many of us feel we will never be able to lose the weight. It’s like this really negative friend. And this might be a good way to think about it. So I have a client who is having some difficulty and she gained two pounds this week and she just felt really discouraged about it all, even though she’s lost 27 pounds. And I said, “So imagine you have two cheerleaders, one is saying, “Oh, man, look at you failing, this is terrible, what were you thinking? Why did you even bother? I knew this was a bad idea and look how much money and effort you’ve invested in this, you’re never going to learn.”

Or are you going to have a cheerleader that says, “We always learn from every experience and let’s just keep going. You’ve gained weight in the past before and you’ve taken it off. Let’s investigate and see what’s really going on.”” And so we kind of laughed and she said, “Yeah, I think I’m going to fire that other one. She’s not very nice.” And you can go to the bully episode, and you can relisten to that one about judgment.

But what I want to emphasize today is that if you feel you need to justify your reasons to lose weight, you don’t. If you feel you need to earn or quality your results, you don’t. If you feel you aren’t worthy to be a person that can be thin and keep the weight off, I want you to be the nicest, kindest cheerleader ever. And actually the way that I like to think about it is the nicest mom.

So if you imagine the most kind mom with so much patience at the end of your bed every night, putting you to bed, she just has all the time in the world for you. She will listen to you. She’s so kind. She’s so thoughtful. I want you to be that nice kind mom to yourself. And I promise you that when you can approach yourself in that way you are going to have so much success.

I have loved preparing this podcast for you. This is one of my pillars of my program is to truly understand how to embrace self-confidence. And I want you to know that self-confidence is literally, we learn to trust ourselves, we’re willing to feel any negative emotion and then our opinion of ourself is elevated. And all of that happens before we get to that number on the scale. If you’re needing that number on the scale to validate you, you’re going to get there but you’re not going to be able to stay there because you have gotten there out of so much unkind words and all of that.

So I love hearing back from you. I love hearing all of your feedback from the podcast. I ask you to leave comments if you haven’t. The more that you evaluate and leave comments on the podcast, it goes up higher and higher in the system. And then more people can see the podcast and we can just help so many more people. So I really appreciate if you would do that for me, that would just mean so much to me.

You guys are amazing. Thank you so much for – I’m thanking your future self, and your current self, I’m encouraging you to keep listening, maybe listen back, this was a little bit longer podcast than I normally do. But as you can see, there is so much here, and it is so much of building such a strong foundation that’s going to help you to lose the weight and keep it off.

Alright, you have an amazing day, happy 2022. Embrace all of it, and remember, everything is conspiring for your good. Alright, take care everyone. And if you want any more information you can go to www.daratomasson.com. Take care.

Thanks for listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more info, please visit daratomasson.com. See you next week.