Ep #37: Judgement

Are you convinced that your life will not be what you want no matter how hard you try, exhausted for being judged and just want to quit caring? I’m going to show you how judgement can totally be one of your superpowers instead of your kryptonite.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 37: Judgement.

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.

In this episode I’m going to dive into all things judgement. I’m going to share how judgement can be used for good and not have you falling down the whole shame, blame vortex. You can expect by the end of this episode to be super clear on how to use judgement for good and how to stop judgement from sabotaging your weight loss goals.

Now, before we get in today’s episode I just got a message from one of my clients. In fact, she is one of my very first clients, even before I was a certified life coach I had this little group of 12 women. They just wanted me to share with them kind of what I had been doing as they watched me lose weight. This is back in 2019. So, she’s been with me off and on. And now she’s in the lifetime membership. And she just messaged me and told about what her experience was like going to QuiltCon. So, she’s been volunteering at QuiltCon for, I think, four years now.

She said how she’s basically running on sleep deprivation. So, she wasn’t getting all the sleep that she normally got. She wasn’t drinking all the water that she normally got. She’s being also careful about it. And she came back, and she had lost almost 5½ pounds, 5.3 pounds in a week on vacation. And she said she went to restaurants, and she ordered healthy choices. She bought some vegetables at the grocery store.

There’s a lot of nights where she was volunteering and they didn’t bring food or she didn’t have time to have food, but she didn’t want to eat it in her lunch, she actually wasn’t hungry. And so, she was able to fast, and she didn’t stress out about it. And she realized that so much of her weight loss was truly automatic and she said, “It’s finally what you’ve been teaching me, Dara, it’s to learn how to relax and have fun with weight loss.” So, I’m just so, so happy for her.

And she shared an experience where she was volunteering with one lady who was not really very open. She was kind of nitpicking on things and kind of trying to tell her what to do even though she’s been doing this for four years. And this other lady, this was her first year. And my client said that she went away, she used the tools about judgement, and she came back, and she was able. So, she actually did what I’m going to be teaching in the podcast. And then she was able to come back after doing this exercise and she was able to actually enjoy the rest of the time with her.

So that was so perfect, all of these examples that I’m using they’re just coming to me for the podcast. And they’re helping to inspire you in creating your own community outreach. I call it community outreach because I want to share with you how awesome the community is and how we can truly change our stripes, we literally can become somebody new. And I know that’s so hard to believe but one of the thoughts that I often ask my clients and myself is, you’re going to live a life anyway. So, what is the life that you want to have?

Do you want to have the life that’s full of anxiety, and worry, and stress about food? Or do you want to channel that energy into learning the tools, creating the tool, really making your life what you want it to be? Because you’re going to spend energy either way. Might as well use that energy towards what you really want. And so, it’s just such a great way to redirect yourself and to create the goals that you want.

Okay, so I think a lot about these podcasts before I do them. And I take notes in my classes with my clients when I notice things are coming up for them because I do really value your time. There’s thousands, hundreds of thousands of podcasts. There is YouTube tutorials. There’s so many things that you could be using your time for. And I really do value that you’re spending your time here on my podcast and that means a lot to me.

And so, as I prepare these podcasts, and I think about them and I ponder them, I truly think about where your life is at and how I can help you right now without even coming into my program. Of course, the doors are open for Love Yourself Thin. And I had a situation where I realized I hadn’t gotten my son vaccinated for his kindergarten shots. And he’s in Grade 4. And it was kind of embarrassing because I hadn’t had it done. He was my fifth child and I thought, oh my goodness, I’m just this stereotypical mom whose fifth child. So, I needed to go and get his shots done.

He’d actually got injured and so we weren’t sure if he had his tetanus. And so, I was really concerned. So, I went into the health clinic and lo and behold it was someone I knew and turned out her husband works with my husband. So, I’m sitting there in the clinic, and I realize, she could be judging me right now. It didn’t even occur to me until five minutes in. And I thought oh my goodness, she could be out there talking to those ladies saying, “That lady in there, she has her nine year old son and he hasn’t got vaccinated. She’s a really bad mom.”

And it was so interesting to me because the thought came, the only way that I ever feel judged by somebody is if I have that judgement first. And when that came to my mind it was like it really was an explosion in my brain. Because I think that judgement was just happening to me. When I would worry about my weight, and I’d be at the grocery store. And I would have bags of chips, or I would have ice-cream or whatever that is. I would think those people are judging me. They’re probably looking at me. They’re probably having all sorts of thoughts. And it’s just like over and over in my brain.

And when I realize that after five or ten, or I don’t even know how long, I thought she could be judging me. That’s interesting. And I realized that I’m the only one who allows any of that to happen. So, one of the things that, when we talk about judgement, and I like how Jody Moore explained it. Is that judgement is kind of like a fog. And I’m not sure exactly how she meant it for her but when I heard her say that I actually saw it as a way to hide.

And of course, as we know with weight loss, weight loss is a way to hide because we don’t want to feel negative emotions, so we turn to food so that we try to avoid those negative emotions. So, it’s a form of hiding. And I think judgement is the same way. Now, judgement, so I talked about judgement is actually, I think it’s a superpower. It really is. So, if you walk into a room and you kind of scope it out, you have some discernment. There’s discernment.

You can kind of discern if someone is a good person, someone who’s a little bit sketchy. You can kind of look at them. They’re drinking during the day, they’re doing those kinds of things. We’re like, “I probably don’t want to bring my three year old around. I don’t really want to be around that person or that situation. That doesn’t seem safe.” That is when judgement is very, very helpful. So, if we’re walking down a road and it’s dark, and we need to get to our car, maybe we get our cellphone out.

I used to go running on the country roads and I used to bring a phone because I heard once where a guy would kind of prey on these people that would do that. So, I was using judgement, what would be a good idea? I’m not going to go running in the woods by myself at night. That’s using good judgement. So, judgement, and it actually is part of our wiring. We’re wired to know if something is good or bad. So, if something is burning on the stove, or something’s burning in our oven, we have good judgement to get an oven mitt and put it and use it, so we don’t burn our hand.

So that’s what I’m talking about. And so even with judgement of even for different weight loss programs. You can have judgement because there’s lots of ways we can lose weight. There’s lots of different methods. But if they’re saying you have to write every single thing down. You have to count the calories. You have to measure it out.

And you’re someone that you know that this is not going to be something you’re going to want to do for the rest of your life, you use that judgement to say, “Yeah, that’s not going to work for me. That doesn’t really go well with the way that I operate, I’m more of this kind of person.” I would not be a good accountant. That would be very poor judgement on my part to choose to be an accountant because that’s not something I enjoy doing for the rest of my life.

So, we have discernment, we have judgement in us and that is very helpful. And so, I have a few stories I wanted to share in just how judgement can be used for our bad and for our good. And I want you to just get curious with yourself of if you’re doing this for yourself. So, the most important element to this podcast and I’m going to kind of come back to this is the only way that you can feel judged is if you’re judging yourself. So that alone is super critical. I’m going to now give some stories to illustrate.

So, this one’s kind of a funny one. And I was debating if I should tell it or not, but this is kind of funny. And it’s an interesting one because it kind of illustrates the point that I want to share. So, when I was in high school I took my driver’s ed with two or three other girls in the car. So, we would be driving around three hours, because I think there was three of us because we all got an hour each and it was quite the evening, I think it was six weeks or something, I can’t remember. It seemed like a really long time.

There was a strip club, that we would pass by the strip club. And so, we would drive by it, and everyone had different opinions about this strip club and how it was sultry people and all these things. And it was interesting because our driving instructor, normally she was very opinionated. And she would say certain things but any time anyone brought up the strip club she didn’t really say very much. And so, I was kind of curious of what was going on and why she would not really say much.

And so, I was thinking, is she feeling judged? Was there some part of her life that she had some involved in strip club, in this culture, whatever that is. And so, I was trying to be sensitive. This is a 16 year old by the way, a 16 year old girl in a van. And this is back in the 80s, late 80s. I said, “Well, if someone grew up near a strip club, or if their mom was a stripper, or that was their lifestyle then I guess it’s”, because the one girl in my car was very opinionated. And she would say all sorts of derogatory things.

So, I was trying to be more kind. And it turned out that my driving instructor’s daughter was a world class stripper. And so, there was some of her feelings towards that. And it was just so interesting to me because who are we to judge? Who are we to know anyone else’s story? And so, this leads into my next story about, I think teenagers tend to be very judgemental. And I know for me I was very judgemental as a teenager. And I would be constantly putting other people down. “Can you believe her sunglasses?”

“What’s up with her hair?” This is back in the day when bangs were really, really high. And so, I’d say, “She has a wave. She has a whole bottle of hairspray.” Her bangs were five inches tall. And I would just be constantly saying these negative things to other people. And one day I just kind of sat myself down and I thought I don’t feel good when I’m judging other people. This doesn’t help me. And I got kind of curious with myself on why am I being so judgemental?

And I remembered my parents had talked to us, I have three brothers and two sisters, so there’s lots always going on in our house. And my parents would say, “When you put somebody else down it’s because you’re wanting to feel up.” So, it’s like a teeter-totter effect. And I realized as a teenager that that’s what I was doing. I was putting other people down because I wasn’t feeling so good about myself. So going back to my point of the only way you can feel judged is if you’re the one who’s judging.

So, what I ended up doing was I decided that I would just say, “Well, they’re just a different lifestyle.” So, this is one of the other assumptions of judgement, it’s like that there is a right way and a wrong way to live. So, if we’re thinking there’s a right or wrong way to live then we’re just constantly judging on some sort of level of if they’re doing it right or wrong. And it’s so interesting to me as I look back as a 48 year old thinking about my 15, 16, 17 year old self.

And thinking how I was able to decipher that, that it didn’t feel good to judge other people because I knew that deep down I was judging myself and that didn’t feel good. And so, by giving them permission to being just a different lifestyle it gave me permission to be a different lifestyle. I was different than all my friends. We were a certain religion in a place where there was one dominant religion, and I was not part of it. And that was challenging. And people judged me. Even I had a schoolteacher judge me for my religious faith.

So, it was very empowering for me just to give myself permission to be me. And so that has been a really great superpower for me. Now, I will mention this, I don’t know, I’ll just keep mentioning it because it was such a transformation for me. When I got my first life coach which I didn’t even know what a life coach was. And I remember, we had moved to the island, and I left a life that I had really loved. We were mortgage free. We finally had our house all so, it was just so cute, and it was just so perfect for us.

And I had such nice friends, and I had a great quilting business. And I had a great partnership at a quilt shop. And I moved here because I wanted to be that wife. And so, I was really down, and I had gained all this weight. And I saw someone I knew from quilting. She had become a life coach and she needed volunteers to be coached. And I was in such a bad state. Of course, I was judging myself. I was really mean to myself. I didn’t want to be with myself. And so, I was judging my husband for moving us and judging our house because it was so ugly.

And I was just all in this really down judge, judge, judge because I was feeling so down. Anything I could do to try to feel better, I tried. And obviously it wasn’t helpful. It was very detrimental. And when she said that I could solve any problem I jumped on the opportunity. And so, when she started teaching me the difference between a thought and a fact, and teaching these tools I realized that the only reason I was having the problems in my life that I was having, it was all because of I was having thoughts and I was judging those thoughts.

And I wasn’t allowing them. I was reacting to them. And I was resisting them. And I was avoiding them. I was trying to hide away from my own life. And judgement is a way to do that. And so, when she started talking to me about my body, and about weight, and my relationship with food, I remember the peace that I felt because I no longer had to judge myself. I got to just start discerning what was going on.

And I had enough vocabulary. And I’m an intelligent person. I’ve got a university degree and I taught school for 10 years. And I built an online quilting business. But she finally gave me a way of thinking that helped me understand why I was in the state that I was in. And this created a level of safety inside me that I was no longer spending my energy judging myself, but I was able to start understanding myself.

And just like the example that I gave of my client, she was able to go on vacation. She was able to just truly focus on the life that she wanted. Her body was just able to lose five and a half pounds essentially whereas most people go on vacation, they gain five and a half pounds. It’s because she’s no longer judging herself, she’s not worrying about other people judging her. She feels a level of confidence that she can solve any problem. And so, she’s using judgement for good. And she’s no longer using judgement for bad.

So those are some stories that I wanted to share with you. And I wanted to just leave this episode. So, I have a handout that I prepared for you. And it just is a very simple handout, but I do want you to spend some time with it.

So, the first question is, how do you judge yourself on a daily basis? So, I really want you to do kind of what I did in this podcast of some different examples of taking my nine year old son to the medical clinic and worrying, realizing that I should worry or that probably might be a good idea to worry about what other people think about me. And realizing, wait a minute, no, that’s optional. I am my own person. I have my own reasons. And in fact, it was that time where I would have taken him was during that time that we moved here and that was a really hard time for me.

And it was an opportunity for me to give myself a lot of compassion. You kept them fed. You actually did things with your kids. You took them to the beach. You engaged with them, all of that. So that was a great opportunity for me. So, I want you to ask yourself that question in the worksheet.

And then the second question is how much time do you spend a day judging yourself and others? That’s really key. So, as we’ve found in this episode, the reason you’re judging others is because you’re judging yourself but you’re judging yourself and you’re judging others. They go together. So, it’s like a tandem bicycle. So, I want you to do kind of almost like a time capture of how much time you’re doing that.

And then the third question is what would be more fun to spend this time doing? Now, the last part of this podcast is as we talk about weight loss one of the things that I find has really held my clients back is this idea of self-judgement. And when you are constantly judging yourself about your weight, and being so hard on yourself and it really has a very negative impact on you as a person. And it takes you out of truly being in the ability to make change for yourself.

And so, as we stop judging one of the best ways, one of the best antidotes for not judging yourself anymore, are you going to guess it? The first one is curiosity because when you are curious it actually takes judgement out. And if there’s too much of that with curious you can just get fascinated. You can just be fascinated, that’s fascinating, it’s fascinating when my brain does that. Kind of like my driving instructor. That’s fascinating, your daughter’s a world class stripper, fascinating. I’ve never met anyone in the stripping world. And it’s like a whole different place. It’s fascinating.

So, I’m not judging her, I’m having a fascination. And then I could get curious. So, you see how that allows me to step outside of that judgement, and of that harshness, and of all of those kinds of ways, just like we talked about in the episode prior to this one was that we can now be objective about it. So do the worksheet. It’s so helpful for you. And remember, the only way you can feel judgement and the only what that judgement can be detrimental is if you’re judging yourself. The only way you can feel judged is if you’re judging yourself, I promise you.

I would love to hear your feedback on this episode. It is so much fun for me to share with you these things. If what I’m saying in this episode really resonates with you I invite you to join my lifetime membership of Love Yourself Thin. I also want to let you know that the third week of April I am doing a popup group where I’m going to give you the key to weight loss jail so that you can have freedom around food forever. Alright take care everyone. Bye bye.

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