Ep #30: From Diet Jail to Diet Freedom

Weight Loss for Quilters with Dara Tomasson | From Diet Jail to Diet FreedomIf you’re sick and tired of going up and down on the scale and want to get to the bottom of why this is happening to you, this is the episode for you. By the end of today’s show, you’ll go from being locked up in diet jail, to escaping this trap and being able to enjoy true diet freedom.

Even though we’re accomplished in so many other areas of our lives, our lack of success with weight loss can seriously damage our self-esteem and self-worth. But when you understand why you keep gaining the weight back, you’ll have the key to permanent weight loss.

Tune in this week to discover the cycle that keeps us in diet jail and the eight stages for achieving real diet freedom. I’m sharing why your body is not the weight that it wants to be, and the vulnerability required to stop hiding behind shame and excuses, so you can lose the weight and keep it off for good.

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

I have a surprise for you! I have a 5-day training that tells you all the foods you should eat, why you should eat them, and the science behind weight loss. There are women who have lost 20 and 30 pounds just from this training, so click here to sign up to my email list and access the training now. I can’t wait to see how it’s going to help you as you continue to learn how to love yourself thin. 

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • Why a sustainable approach is the only way to guarantee permanent weight loss.
  • How negative self-talk and deprivation prevent us from losing weight sustainably.
  • 8 stages that we cycle through when we’re stuck in diet jail.
  • The importance of curiosity when creating a sustainable weight-loss plan.
  • The 8 stages for breaking out of diet jail and experiencing true freedom from yo-yo dieting.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • I have a surprise for you! I have a 5-day training that tells you all the foods you should eat, why you should eat them, and the science behind weight loss. There are women who have lost 20 and 30 pounds just from this training, so click here to sign up to my email list and access the training now. I can’t wait to see how it’s going to help you as you continue to learn how to love yourself thin. 
  • Ep #7: It’s Time to Talk About Your Feelings

  • Download the Weight Loss Worksheet PDF

Full Episode Transcript:

Download Transcript

If you are sick and tired of going up and down on the scale and want to know why this is happening, listen in on this episode where I walk you through the eight phases you have cycled through over and over that have created weight gain and not the other way around.

I am Dara Tomasson, and you are listening to Weight Loss for Quilters episode 30: Diet Jail to Diet Freedom.

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.

So, what can you expect in this episode? Well, I’m going to walk you through the phase stage cycle of why you keep coming back to weight gain. Even though you are so accomplished in so many other areas of your life this weight loss thing has really affected your self-esteem and self-worth. Not only will you understand why you keep gaining the weight back. I’m going to show you how permanent weight loss done sustainably is the only way. I will outline the eight stages women need to go through in order to guarantee they’re not going to keep gaining that weight back.

I recommend that while you listen to this episode allow yourself some vulnerability which is just a fancy way of saying be honest with yourself in the most compassionate loving way. When you open yourself up this way you are no longer hiding behind the shame of feeling like you are not good enough or hiding behind the excuses that come from blaming others or blaming circumstances. You can expect at the end of this episode a very clear understanding of why your body is not the weight that it wants to be.

Before I go into the meat of this episode I wanted to shout out one of my clients. She really wanted to join my program and she’s on a fixed income now that they’re retired. And there’s a lot of women and men out there, I suppose, that worry about spending money on themselves especially when it comes to weight loss because they’ve done that lots. So, she got very resourceful, and she owns season tickets to a football team. And so, she knew there was a big game coming up and she could sell it online to make that money and that’s what she did.

So, I love that not only did she become really resourceful in how she could pay for Love Yourself Thin, but at the beginning she had a bit of a rough start. And she decided, no, I have paid my money, I really want to make this work, so she persevered. She asked for coaching. She kept showing up even when she was embarrassed about not losing weight at the beginning. She really started to be honest with herself and so she was able to see, call herself on her excuses like blaming her age, or blaming her husband, and having to cook for people, and the holidays.

And so even at 72 it’s so much fun to see her have such a different level of trust with herself. So, I just really, I just love looking for the positive in my clients and helping them celebrate because let’s face it, celebrating about weight loss was not anything they were ever used to doing.

Okay, so let’s go right in. Now, these are the eight phases that yoyo dieters go through. So, the whole, and I’m going to talk you through it.

So, phase one is you look at the number on the scale and you are really upset. You’re like, “How did I get here? How did I let myself go?” And they see this number on the scale and it’s just devastating. So, you feel really bad about yourself. And when you feel really bad about yourself you now are thinking, okay.

You go to phase two where you research like crazy. So, this is you going on a hunt for the solution. You need a diet. You need someone who’s smarter than you, obviously you aren’t smart enough because you haven’t figured it out. And you look at the other parts of your life where you’re super successful and so it just feels very frustrating.

So then phase three, you spend money. You invest in a program, you put your whole heart into it but most of what you’re doing comes from depravation, discipline, and fear.

So, phase four is you exhaust yourself. You use a lot of negative self-talk, you are very punitive to yourself. There’s a lot of depravation. There’s a lot of discipline and fear. And so, this is exhausting, but you keep thinking, I spent a lot of money, I’m not smart enough. I need to do what they do. So, there’s a lot of shame that comes up.

And then stage five is you actually get the number on the scale most likely to where you want to be, or close. And then you start wondering, I thought I was going to be happier when I got here. And so, we do a couple of things. We wonder why we’re not happier. We celebrate and we reward ourselves with food. We kind of also reward ourselves with not having to be so strict with ourselves. So, we ease off the depravation and essentially we just go back to our old ways. We have never turned a relationship around with food.

So then phase six is that you sabotage yourself. So, you convince yourself that you weren’t actually meant to be a thin person, that you were just a unicorn, that you were not able to be one of those people that could figure it out because now you’re looking for evidence like my DNA, I look at my aunt, I look at my mom, I look at my age. I’m in perimenopause or menopause, I guess just, I missed the boat on that. If I was overweight going into menopause, I guess I’m just going to keep going. So, there’s a lot of old stories.

COVID, people convince themselves they can’t quite do what they would normally do if gyms were more open or whatever that was. You basically are creating the situation where you’re the defense lawyer and now you’re building a case for all the reasons why you never could have been successful in the first place. So then of course now you’re beating yourself up because you think, why did I waste all that money, and time, and energy.

And now we go to phase seven which is resignation. You just lose all hope and apathy kicks in, and you think, yeah, I guess I was never meant to be one of those people. And it’s really a discouraging place.

And then we go to phase eight where you wait to do this again when the number on the scale comes up that’s unacceptable, when you’re at the doctors, or a certain pair of pants just don’t fit you. And so once again you find yourself back up to phase one where you feel really bad about yourself.

So, I do have a sheet that is a PDF that’s included in this podcast that walks you through the typical weight loss journey, the diet journey to where I’m going to show you how you get to the weight loss freedom. So don’t worry, I’ve got you. And you will have that PDF that you can print off and you can look through that and just kind of see where you are with that.

So, the biggest difference, the phases of change are one, you look at the number on the scale as data. So, you start seeing yourself and think, I wonder why this is happening. Phase two, you get curious about why it is. Phase three, you experiment with food, and you learn how to make your own eating plan. Phase four, you look at the number on the scale with objectivity because you feel like you can tweak it, or troubleshoot, you have a lot of tools that you can work through to figure out, why is this number happening?

And then number five, you have an acceptance of you and your body as is. And then number six, you focus on the process, not the end result. Number seven, you predict the number on the scale 80% of the time. And then number eight, you have food freedom because you are no longer tying your self-worth to the number on the scale.

So, what these phases represent is number one, when you look at the number on the scale as data you understand that your worth is not, you don’t have to earn your worth, that’s what it is. Your worth is already set. Number two, you make an informed decision. You are now when you look at getting curious about why it is, now you’re able to make informed decisions and you’re not reacting. Number three, you become an active participant. You trust that you are someone who has knowledge, who has information and can use that information to help themselves.

And then when you are able to be objective about the number on the scale and you can troubleshoot you are learning that you have infinite commitment to yourself. You’re really, really focused on the process of losing weight, not hurried or hustle energy to get to that number. So, when you have an acceptance of your body, what that’s doing is it’s allowing you to have a balanced life. And we talked about, in the yoyo dieting episode I’ve done previously about the 50/50 balance.

And then number six, when you can process on the process, not the end result what’s happening is you’re actually allowing yourself to have the human experience which has always been that we learn through failure. Then we predict the number on the scale 80% of the time. We learn that we’re a 100% responsible for ourselves. And then number eight, we have food freedom because our self-worth isn’t tied to the scale.

So, the biggest difference with these phases is that we are looking at the relationship you have with yourself. So, think about what happens when you see yourself in the first eight stages of I’m not smart enough. I can’t do this on my own. This is complicated. I’m totally overwhelmed by weight loss. I just can’t stand how much I fail when I’m trying to do weight loss. Why does weight loss cause me so much pain? So, these are all the thoughts that you’re bringing to the table when you look at the number on the scale, or look at your body, or whatever you’re doing.

And so, what emotions are fueling inside your body as you entertain these thoughts? Well, incompetence, shame, disappointment, confusion, frustration, defeated. So, it’s like when someone asks you if you want a bite of their food and they’re like, “This is disgusting, do you want a bite?” Of course, you don’t want to have that bite. But all of these thoughts that you’re having are terrible thoughts that are creating emotions inside you that really are awful. So, you can actually stop this, I promise.

So, when you look at the eight phases that create permanent sustainable, which is just fancy words of doable, achievable, figure out-able. Sustainable to me is it’s something I’m going to do for the rest of my life. So, when I decided I want to lose the weight and keep it off, I knew that counting calories was not sustainable for me. I knew I wouldn’t do it for a long period of time. I knew writing down food wasn’t going to be sustainable for me. I also knew that doing any sort of math that I had to do on a consistent basis was also not sustainable for me.

Sustainable means that it’s lifelong, it’s how you are going to do it forever. So, the same thing we do with our quilting practices, if it’s going to be painful and tedious, and it’s not a thing we want to do forever then that’s sustainable, that’s not going to be long lasting. So that’s what I’m talking about when I say sustainable. So, we’ve been getting it all wrong. We think we need to have all the results before feeling confident about weight loss. We think that when we get to the number on the scale then we can feel better. This is the problem my friends.

So, think about making a quilt. We all have our favorite parts. So, is it the buying of the fabric? Is it selecting the pattern? Is it cutting out? Is it the trimming? Is it the binding? So, making a quilt, there are certain parts of the process I don’t really like. And in fact, I really don’t like piecing. I know, I don’t. And so, I got really creative. I thought, well, I don’t really like the piecing because I would much rather be doing the free motion quilting, which by the way, at one point, free motion quilting was super stressful for me and now it’s my favorite, favorite part.

So, I have quilt fairies, and I have a fairy that will piece things for me and then I will just trade her to do quilting for me. It’s perfect. Some of you already do this. Some of you hire long arm quilters and some of you pay people to do the binding for you. Some of you get a friend to quilt with during the parts where you don’t really like it, so it makes it less painful. So, we already know that there is a process to making a quilt. We already see the parts of that process that aren’t so appealing to us. And we have been creative in figuring out how to overcome those.

I mean some of us struggle because I mean we have a lot of unfinished projects waiting to be done. So, I get it, we have struggled along the way. But that’s all that’s happened for weight loss, and I want to tell you that weight loss is a process that I’m going to actually be talking to you about next episode, there’s five vital steps and that’s it. So, you can wait for that episode.

But for this episode stay with me. So, we went through those eight phases of the yoyo dieting. And then I walked you through what needs to happen to have a sustainable. And when you think about learning a new skill, so I’m just using the example of the process of making a quilt. So how did you get through that quilt? How did you keep going? You had thoughts like, I can be trusted to learn this. I am competent and even amazing at other parts of my life. I know how to solve problems. I’m responsible and capable. I know how to problem solve. I want to learn the skill. I know I can do new things.

So, when we have those thoughts, what are the emotions that come? Hope, competency, excitement, trust, faith, calm, reassurance. So again, our feelings will always fuel our actions. Our actions create our desired results. So, if you want to have a different result you will need to know what you are feeling, just like I shared in episode seven when I talked about the different – there’s 50 fuel tanks at Bucky’s, a gas station in Texas, when I was down there for quilt market. So, whatever our tank is fueled by, our bodies are fueled by, that’s what’s going to propel us into action.

So, when you start to understand this you actually become unstoppable. I heard a quote the other day that said, “Old keys don’t open new doors.” Your thoughts are what create your current life. Change your thoughts, you literally change your life. That is what I do and that is what happens inside Love Yourself Thin, when you learn that skill. And it comes from the model which is one of my life coaching tools that I teach all of my clients.

It was so fun to share this episode with you. I would love to hear your feedback. If you love what you heard today I invite you to consider joining my Love Yourself Thin lifetime membership where I show you how to change your relationship with your food and body.

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

 

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