Ep #1: The #1 Tool for Losing Weight

Did you know you can lose weight and keep it off without counting calories or exercise? Keep listening, I’ll show you how I have done that and helped so many of my clients do the same. 

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. 

Welcome to episode one of Weight Loss for Quilters. I am so happy you’re here and I can’t wait to share with you one of my favorite tools. So I’m Dara Tomasson, I am a professional quilter and author, mom of 5, who has struggled with the same 50 pounds since my early 20s. Despite the 50 pounds, I think the thing that’s been the most difficult for me is the mental weight that came along with that weight loss and weight gain.

So what was actually worse than the extra 50 pounds was all the nasty thoughts I had about myself when the number on the scale was not what I wanted. I tried all the diets, punishments, disciplinary actions to get the weight under control, or even that I could call myself, I was at an acceptable range, so I could finally feel relaxed and calm in my body. That’s all I wanted, was to feel calm and peace in the body that I was given. And even though I had five beautiful children that my body did and I would run and I would do all sorts of things, make beautiful quilts with this body. I had a very difficult relationship with it, especially when it wasn’t showing me the number on the scale that I wanted.

So you can imagine the relief I felt when I encountered my first life coach back in 2018 and after a year of practicing these tools and using them, I knew I needed to help my fellow quilters create the same results in their life that I was seeing because of how amazing these tools were. So are you ready? This episode, I’m going to share with you one of my client’s favorite tools that I teach them to help them also enjoy weight loss success. So in this episode, and as you know as quilters, we love our tools. And in fact, if we don’t have tools like a rotary cutter or a quilting mat or all the rulers, we are not able to create the beautiful results that we want. Can you imagine making a quilt without a rotary cutter or a quilting ruler or a mat?

In fact, my giant long arm does not work unless I have a tiny little three-inch screw because I need to be able to adjust my tension. And if I don’t have that little screwdriver, I will not be able to quilt. So we know as quilters, how important the tools that we have. Now, we don’t know what we don’t know. So if we don’t have a tool, we won’t know how amazing it’s going to be to give us the results for our quilts. So this podcast is going to teach you tools and help you to build skills, to learn how to lose the weight and keep it off and create a life that you’ve always wanted. Are you ready to learn the first tool in our toolbox? Let’s go.

This tool is called math versus drama. And it is a tool that I learned from Brooke Castillo, who is the president of The Life Coach School, where I was certified. So I’m going to give you some quilting examples, so you can kind of understand what I’m talking about. And then we’re going to get into how we can apply this to weight loss, keeping the weight off, getting the weight down to where we want to be and being able to keep it off. So when’s the last time this happened to you. You went to a quilt store, or you were scrolling online and you found the most beautiful quilt, and you are so excited about it, you pull out your wallet, you put out your credit card or your debit card and you take it this beautiful bundle of fabric, you purchase the pattern and you get home and you start working on it. And of course, all the instructions are math.

And these instructions are amazing. They tell you how much fabric you need, they tell you how to select the yardage, they tell you even how to cut it out and assemble it. All math, details of exactly what to do. So when we follow those instructions, sometimes we don’t always interpret them properly. And when we don’t interpret them properly, what happens? You got it. There is an error. So for example, you put two pieces of fabric together in the wrong direction, or you might’ve cut them in different ways. There’s always the math about what you did. However, if you get caught up in the drama of it, what happens? You start to question your intelligence, you get angry with the pattern designer, you might go online and complain, you might even write a nasty letter to the pattern designer, you eat something, or you go onto Facebook and you scroll, you might even phone a friend and start gossiping or trying to get some sort of solace or feel better about how dare this person write this pattern? Who were they thinking? Okay.

So that is a very good illustration of math. There was instructions. You either read them incorrectly or there was an error, human error on the pattern, and that can just be corrected. Or you go to the other place of a lot of drama. I’m going to give you a personal example of how this showed up for me when I was nine months pregnant with my fourth child. I had hand-pieced a queen size granny’s flower garden. And I was determined to get this thing quilted before this baby was born. Talk about nesting. So I went to the local long armer. This is before I was a professional quilter. And I asked her if she could quilt my quilt. She looked at it for three minutes and said, “Nope, not going to do it. This is hand pieced. Quilts should be hand quilted.”

I asked her for a suggestion. She gave me a recommendation. I drove 45 minutes on a country road to bring my quilt to another long armer and asked her if she would quilt it for me. She looked at it for about three minutes and said, “No, I’m not going to quilt it for you.” And so she described that hand pieced quilt should be hand quilted. I asked her again, “Is there someone else you could recommend that I could take this quilt to?” So she gave me another phone number. I phoned that woman. She lived much further and just asked if she’d be interested in quilting a hand-pieced, queen-size granny’s flower garden quilt. She promptly responded. No. And so the math is I asked three people if they would quilt my quilt and the math of it was I got three nos and we could have stopped there.

Or you could go to drama where I did, of thinking I’m a terrible quilter, something must be wrong with me. I ate an entire box of one pound of chocolates, and I didn’t feel proud of what I did. And when I looked at that quilt for quite a while, I felt ashamed, I felt embarrassed and I felt very disappointed in all of it. So that is a good example of allowing drama to affect the way that I think.

So let’s go to the number on the scale since we are talking math and the number of the scale is a number and that’s math. So literally when you step on a scale, so a scale is just a measurement, a tool that measures weight. Now our weight is how much gravity that our body has. So our bodies are made of bone, of muscle, fat, there’s blood, there’s water in our body, there’s hair, there’s eyeballs, there’s teeth, we have organs, we have intestines, all of that. Literally each part of our body, the way we’re made out of molecules, they all have a certain level of weight. And so when you stand on the scale, it literally is just showing us how much gravity that number on the scale has.

And we have decided as a collective in the world that sometimes we use pounds as a measurement, sometimes it’s kilograms, in some places, it’s stone, whatever that is, we all decided that that is how we’re going to do it, how we’re going to represent the amount of gravity our body has. So now I’m going to break down. What would it be like if weight loss could be just done without any drama, if weight loss simply could not just math? So I’m going to show you how I describe weight loss to my clients. One of the ways, especially when we look at this tool of math versus drama.

So let’s say for example, you weigh 220 pounds. Now, all that’s saying is that when you step on a scale, your body has … Gravity is 220 pounds. And let’s say that your ideal weight is approximately 150 pounds. So all that means is your body is carrying 70 extra pounds of weight on it. Now we’re going to break it down a little bit further. So there are approximately 3,000 calories per pound on our body, pound of fat. And I wanted to let you know that calories, and I didn’t know this before became a certified weight loss coach was calories are literally just a unit of energy, of how long it takes for energy to burn. So I live on Vancouver Island, I am surrounded by trees, there are more trees here than I’ve ever seen, being a prairie girl previous.

So we have arbutus, we have pine, we have fir, we have cedar. And even in there, they have all the different types of cedar, and arbutus, and pine and fir. And we actually burn our house with wood, our whole house is heated that way. And so when my husband and my boys are going to collect wood, they like to find those woods that have those higher density so that they will burn longer, it will take longer for them to burn. So our body fat is 3,000 calories for 1 pound. That’s how much it stores. Now we’re going to go a little bit more into math where, so we have what’s called the basal metabolic rate. And what the basal metabolic rate is saying is in order for our bodies to function every day. So to blink, to breathe, to digest our food, to talk, to sleep, all of the things our body needs energy for, we need, and this is approximate. Like I’m six feet tall, you might be five, but on average, it’s 1,200 calories for a woman every day to basically be energized.

Like if we were to plug ourselves in, that’s how much energy, that’s how many calories because a calorie is a unit of measurement of burning. So you will need, fuel burned is 1,200. So if we went to the math, if you have 70 extra pounds than your body requires, you now have 210,000 calories that you are storing on your body. So the good news about that is if there was a food shortage, or a pandemic or something like that, then you could go for 170 days without eating. Now, please hear me. I am not telling any of you to not eat for 170 days. That is not what I’m saying, but when we look at the math, your body could actually go 170 days without having any more energy put into it. So when we look at the math of what’s happening with our bodies, when we can step on the scale, we can have a totally different perspective.

So as I asked earlier, what would it be like if we could focus on math when losing weight and ditch the drama? How different would your experience be? I want to share with you five different ways that if we ditch the drama and just have the math, what a difference your experience with losing weight would be, and being more comfortable and at ease in your body.

So the first thing that would happen if we ditch the drama and we approached weight loss with math is we would no longer look at our bodies as enemies. We are now just looking at our bodies. And in fact, I encourage all my clients to look at our bodies like a science experiment, when we can just see our bodies as a collection of bone, and tissue, and hair and all of that with this extra calories storage, then we can now just look at our bodies in such a different way.

The next reason why ditching the drama and just focusing on math with weight loss is that when emotions are high, intelligence is low. So if we have this constant state of emotional drama, like we’re living in a soap opera, for example, we’re just riding this like crazy rollercoaster and we’re up and down and we’re all around. And so when we take this emotional charge out of the number on the scale, for example, then we can just now be able to just be with the number. And we don’t have to have all this association. I know for myself, when I used to go on the scale and I would see I’d go up even half a pound, there it went, the tape just started rolling. Like, what’s wrong with you? Why haven’t you figured this out yet? When are you going to learn? Why can’t you be smarter? And all of that happens even with a 0.5 gain. So when emotions are high, intelligence is well, we want to ditch the drama so that we can just stay in that state.

So the third reason we should ditch the drama and just focus on the math for weight loss is that we just get to accept the number that’s there. So I’m going to talk about this in future episodes about the importance of accepting, because the problem is if we don’t accept the number, that means we’re either avoiding, we’re reacting or we’re resisting. So if we avoid, resist, or react, we are using a lot of energy to not accept what is. And so we go to excuse land and we go to drama land. And that of course takes us away from really seeing what’s going on because you are the one who put those extra calories on your body. You are the one that over-ate.

There’s only two reasons we’re overweight. One is over-hunger. We just eat too often. And two, over-desire. We eat all the concentrated flour and sugar, refined flour and sugar. So you’re the one who put all those extra calories into your body. And so if you’re avoiding, resisting or reacting, you’re never really allowing yourself to be with what you actually did. And so you’re going to continue this cycle that’s giving you the results you don’t want, and you can never get a grasp on what’s really going on.

The number four reason why you should ditch the drama and focus on math for weight loss is you’re able to use your prefrontal cortex. I call this our CEO, executive higher management brain. And so I will be talking about this in future podcasts, but I like to think of it when I was 12 years old, we used to live about an hour away from a Hershey’s chocolate factory. They allowed you to go into the factory and walk around and you could observe the workers. I mean, you couldn’t walk around in the field, but they had these kind of high platforms that you kind of walked and you could observe what was happening in the factory. And of course, you could smell all these delicious smells and you would watch these factory workers just doing the same repetitive movements over and over. And they all had their jobs and they were super-efficient with it. So that is our lower brain, which don’t worry. I’ll talk about this in other podcasts.

But the CEO, they are able to get this bird’s eye view and able to see what’s actually going on. And then they can look at studies and they can see about efficiencies about how they can run their factory better. And so as the CEO of your own life, if you’re only in the math of things and you’re not letting the messy drama … When you think about drama as well, it’s almost like you’re walking through the mud and then you’re like putting mud all over the place everywhere you walk. And so if you can keep it nice and clean and just focus on the math, then you can see that a higher brain can help you find answers. And in fact, our higher brain always wants to help us.

So has this ever happened to you, where you are trying to think of something and you’re like, okay, I remember, but then you let it go? And then three in the morning, or maybe even an hour later, all of a sudden that name pops into your head or that concept. Or you can remember where you put something, it’s because your higher brain, it always wants to help you out. It always wants to give you support. And so when we can focus on that higher brain, we can be at such a higher level for ourself.

And the fifth reason why it’s a benefit to ditch the drama and focus only on the math when it comes to weight loss is we are no longer walking around feeling battered and bruised by the constant negative self-talk and always feeling exhausted because hearing all that negative talk all the time is no picnic. Imagine this. You’re wearing a backpack. And so your backpack, it’s the beginning of the day, there’s nothing in it. And then you have a negative thought and you get a negative thought, let’s say it weighs one pound. It’s a one-pound brick. Oh, you got to put that negative thought in your backpack. And then you’re brushing your teeth and you look in the mirror and you have this other negative thought about yourself. There is another pound. And so every time you have a negative thought, you get another pound, another brick, it’s one pound that has to go in your backpack.

So I’m curious, how long would it take to fill that backpack? What time of day would it be? So this is what’s happening. When you have a lot of negative self-talk you are literally mentally and physically weighing yourself down. It’s so exhausting to be constantly battered with all this negative talk, that’s having this drama.

So I’m going to just, once again, the top five reasons for you to ditch the drama and focus on the math. When it comes to weight loss.

The first reason is such a benefit is that you are no longer looking at your body as an enemy.

The second is you are no longer operating with these high emotions. And when you have so much space in your brain for these high emotions, you don’t have any space for this intelligence. And so if you can ditch the drama, now intelligence is on the lead.

And third is when you accept the number on the scale, then you can go to work to figuring out how did you get to that number on the scale? What were the patterns of behavior that got you there? And now you’re coming from a very clean place of looking at how you got there, different patterns of behavior, different thoughts, and now you can look at changing them instead of avoid, react or resist.

Number four. We are able to use our wonderful, amazing, smart brain. I always say to my clients as humans, we have a privilege to think about our thinking. And so when you can focus on being in this beautiful, higher brain of yours, you can now start to think about your thinking.

And number five, we can now take off this very heavy backpack of all these heavyweights of this negative self-talk, and we can let that go and we can have more energy. We don’t need to … When we’re not walking around bruise and battered, then we can have this energy to look at what’s really going on.

So it has been so much fun to spend this time with you. I cannot wait to continue to give you more tools to put in your weight loss basket, toolkit so that you can create the results that you want. So just like the importance of our quilting tools, and we all have our favorites, but if we do not have the right tools and we don’t know how to use them properly, we will not be able to get the results you want. And so I’d love to hear how these tools have helped you as you apply them.

To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away $100 gift cards to Lisa Bongean’s Primitive Gathering shop to four lucky listeners who follow, rate and review the podcast. It doesn’t have to be a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the podcast. My goal for this show is to provide you with tons of value. So please let me know in your review if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover. Visit daratomasson.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode. 

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