Ep #31: 5 Steps to Permanent Weight Loss

Are you feeling totally annoyed with all the weight loss ads you see because every time you see one it reinforces a feeling of shame and failure from all your previous failed attempts of weight loss, kind of like pouring salt on an open wound? Well, this episode’s for you because weight loss is actually simple.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 31: Five Steps to Permanent Weight Loss.

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 this is what you can expect in today’s episode. There are only five steps required to lose weight. Get to your naturally thin weight and stay there without a lot of drama, stress or wasted money. As we walk through the five steps in this episode it will become clear why weight loss has been such a nightmare for so long. I have clients who are in their 80s and they are finally getting relief. Within the five steps you will also see how the old weight loss tactics have created your current result.

I’m going to share with you how to shift your thinking and see where real motivation comes from. In fact, I will show you the top three strategies all diets are founded on and then show you the three strategies to create sustainable, which means doable, figure out-able without a lot of pain weight loss habits are. So, before I go into the meat of this episode, which by the way I do have a worksheet that you can print off and you can walk through them as I go through the episode if that’s going to help you. So that will just be included in the show notes.

But before I get into the meat of this all I’m going to just shout out one of my clients. So, this client actually came from my podcast, she found me on another podcast from another quilter and really resonated with what she heard. And on the very first day of my lifetime membership, she joined. And she’s a mom, she has kids at home, she works, she has a very stressful job at the hospital. And she makes sure that she comes on her lunchbreaks and even though she has her pager, she could leave at any time, she’s showing up.

Not only is she showing up on the calls, but she is asking for coaching, and it is just really fun for me to see her finally taking matters in her own hands. And I know that she has so many tools already because she’s been listening to the podcast. In fact, it’s been really fun to watch her know so much already because she’s learned so much on the podcast. So, this is really fun to see her just really feeling empowered about weight loss.

And I’m just really excited for her and everyone else who comes on in to Love Yourself Thin. Because she really is taking responsibility for herself which now turns me to the five vital steps of weight loss. Here they are.

The first one is weight loss science is simple. So, when you learn the science of weight loss you now become empowered and you don’t have to turn to an expert, you actually just go to the science, and you can figure it out.

Number two. Create and troubleshoot your own eating plan. I call this creating your protocol. So just like if you were to get a will from a lawyer’s office and you went there and said, “Hey, I want to get a will.” They would say, “We have a protocol for that. We know what to do when people come in and ask for their will. We have a system in place.” You are going to learn how to create and troubleshoot your own system to guarantee your own results.

Number three. We are going to understand the brain body connection. This already happens. So, if I said, “I’m late”, or if I – I just have this image of bleeding on a quilt. Have you ever pricked your finger and you’ve bled on a quilt and it’s the worst feeling ever? And your body responds to it, it freezes, it’s because you have a thought and then that thought, our brain releases hormones to react to whatever thought we have.

So that’s already happening and so many of us have really struggled because we have tried to push that reaction away and we hide from ourselves. So that’s number three.

Number four is you learn to become a 100% responsible for your own results. So, I teach you how to be accountable without being a jerk to yourself. And it’s the most wonderful experience because you no longer feel like a victim to food. You no longer feel like it’s out of your control. You’re no longer being a control freak. Well, I like to say control enthusiast. It really, really changes your relationship when you’re like,  “No, I’m responsible for this.” Just like at your job when they hire you, you’re like, “Yeah, I can do this, and I can learn.” It’s the same thing.

And then the fifth step is we actually learn to build self-confidence. And when we learn to build self-confidence we just keep growing and growing in that confidence. And then we are able to really be in control of weight loss. So, this is my five step process, and this is what I have done myself and walked my clients through. And so, I would say the top three reasons why weight loss is such a huge stumbling block is because one, we don’t have a solid foundation.

Two, we think that we need to have a lot of motivation and we have to have all the right situation, the right circumstances, all of that to be successful. And then the third reason why weight loss has been such a problem is that we are result driven. We feel we have to have a certain level of results before we can feel confident, and it’s the opposite. So, I’m going to talk about those. And then after we talk about those I will share with you the top three ways that we can change our relationship with weight loss. And that’s how we’re going to keep going on this episode.

So, this is why we’ve had so many problems with weight loss. So, number one, by the way can I just say there’s only one reason why we’re overweight in the first place. Let’s just make it really, really clear. I know I talked about this in one of my earlier episodes. When I really think about it, if you did the math and you figured out why we’re overweight, it’s only because of one reason. It’s because we put more food in our mouth than our body can use. So, every piece of food that we put in our mouth has a certain amount of energy attached to it. That is what is called a calorie.

And so, our body does require energy, it requires calories to function. So, we need to be able to breathe, and digest our food, and walk, and do all, think, we need all of that energy to do that. But when we consume more energy than our body can use our body then stores energy as fat. So, if we relate that to a car it’s like me keep putting gas in my gas tank and my car says, “We don’t have any more room in this gas tank, you keep refilling us. We don’t know what to do with this.” So then what happens is we have to get jerry cans or gas cans as storage.

And so, when we have extra fat on our body it literally is just us storing energy. So, when you really bring it down to the nuts and bolts of it, our body cannot use the amount of energy that we’ve put into it. So, if we want to lose weight and keep it off all we simply have to do is just eat less food. So, the problem is we are not doing that. We are putting more food in our mouth than it needs. So, what we need to learn is that when we lose weight you become your own authority. You understand the fundamental principles, you apply them, you fail, you master them.

You take responsibility for your body, your life and yourself. And when you do that there’s only three outcomes that can happen. You can either lose weight, you can gain weight, or you can stay the same. So, for all you control enthusiasts out there, you actually are in control of your weight loss, you really are because you can either lose the weight with what you were just doing, you can gain weight so now you know how you gained that weight, or you can stay the same. So now you know, okay, when I eat this way and I do these things I will just stay the same.

Now, I’m skipping ahead a little bit but there are five emotions, that’s it, that are going to create this for you. And I got these from my business coach, Stacey Boehman. And she said, “There’s only five emotions that will help you get through these processes of the five vital steps.

The first one is you need to have courage because you need to be willing to fail. Then number two is you need to have resilience to get back up. Number three, you’ve got to be committed to the process. Number four, you have to have desire and desire to be great, desire to be successful, desire to be committed to your future self where you don’t have all the aches and pains, where you’re not carrying all that extra weight. That desire has to be stronger than the giving up.

And then number five, discipline to do it even when it’s difficult. I had a client the other day who struggled with her weight for over 40 years and she’s now down almost 70 pounds. And she said every day for 30 or 40 years she’d say, “Today’s the day I’m going to do this.” But there has to be a point where you have discipline to do something even when it’s difficult. And so, these are the tools. So, let’s go back to, you’re like, “Okay, Dara, tell me why is this happening to me.”

So, we have a crumbled foundation, this is all that’s happened. So, we think that it’s a diet that’s going to give us the result. And we get into this how greed of just tell me what to do, just tell me what to do and then I’ll do it. And then I’ll be a good student and I will memorize these steps and I’ll figure it out. And I’m going to rely on all these external experts. Can you imagine what it would be like to learn how to make a quilt by not knowing the rules, relying on others, don’t know the process, don’t have confidence, it feels really scary.

You’re not going to get very many quilts done if that’s how you feel. So why is that different with weight loss? And like I said, we think that weight loss, when we come to it, and this is in the most previous episode, go and review that one. It’ll be a really good foundation for listening to this episode, is that when we go to it we have a feeling like I’m not smart enough, I’m not good enough. So, we don’t ever have that encouragement.

And like I mentioned in the past episode, why it’s that we think that we have to have the weight loss success in order to feel confident, but we need to be willing to be all in on the process. So, then we think that we need to have motivation to lose weight. So, we need to put the right playlist, or the right workout clothes, or all the different reasons, the vision board, whatever it is. But motivation is a very short string. And also, we think that we need to be a certain weight to keep going which is hard to do, to have discipline even when it’s difficult.

And also, we’re relying on certain kinds of emotions or a certain vibe to get us through. So, the top three reasons why weight loss is a huge stumbling block. One is that we don’t have a solid foundation, two, we think we need to have a lot of motivation, and then three, we think that we have to have a result before we can feel good about ourselves. So, what happens is then we have a limited thinking of ourselves, I can only feel good about myself when I wear a size six. The problem is then we get into that hustle energy, we’re getting into that proving, or the earning, or the deserving energy.

And so, it’s like we don’t focus on the process so then the process becomes really, really painful. So, when you finally do get to that result you just are exhausted, you’re so tired and it’s not repeatable because you didn’t focus on is this going to last. So, when I decided I was going to lose the weight for the last time. I was so tired of all those, no, let me just get to the weight and then I can feel good about myself and then everything’s going to be fine. The problem is I still had a human brain. So, I’ve put the weight back on.

And so, it was just it was the worst ever because I thought how am I going to, I can’t keep doing this. It’s like you don’t learn how to do paper piecing so you keep doing the same mistake over and over. And you’re like, “Of course paper piecing is horrible, this is awful.” Because you didn’t take the time to learn the process of paper piecing. Or so many people say that about free motion quilting, “Oh, this is so painful, my doodles look like scribbles.”

Well, unless you give yourself some rules and give yourself a foundation and give yourself some understanding of how free motion quilting works, of course it’s going to feel terrible. So, with that we have felt a lot of limited thinking about ourselves, we’re not talking to ourselves nicely saying, “Yes, you can do this, you can figure this out.” And so, it feels terrible. And what’s really happening is that your brain and this is also from my business coach because it’s been interesting.

How we show up in one area of our life is how we show up in other areas. So, some of the thoughts that I gave in the last episode about I can figure things out, I can solve problems. I want you to think about what that would feel like in the context of weight loss. And I know that’s a real big stretch because weight loss has never felt safe, it’s never felt that it was doable.

But I want you to know that if you can make a quilt, if you can learn all the skills involved of starting and finishing a quilt you’ve literally had this ability to lose weight, I promise you. Because losing weight permanently is just a skill. Now, one of the things that we have a lot of obstacles in the way because our brains haven’t believed that it’s possible. And this is one of the things I want to share with you. In order to break this cycle of our brain going to passive action.

So, our brain feels like knowledge equals safety. So, when I say weight loss science is simple and literally weight loss is literally just three hormones. And there’s not that much more to it. It doesn’t feel safe when I say that because when we go and do an internet search there are millions of different solutions and people saying, “Do this, do that. You’ve got to do macros, and micros, and you’ve got to calculate this, and you’ve got to factor in this. And you’ve got to have this kind of blood.” They’re making it way more complicated.

And I knew for myself and so many women, if it was complicated it wasn’t going to happen. We have more things in life than to be researching about macros and micros. That is why I made my process, the five vital steps, that’s it, that’s all you need to do. But our brain thinks that knowledge is safety. And when you follow diets and especially you don’t even question them, you just blindly follow along, that feels like we’re doing. It feels like we’re actually taking action. But the problem is we’re never interacting with our body. We’re never interacting with food.

We’re not becoming an interactive participant in any of it. We’re not allowing any of the emotions. And so, it doesn’t make a sustainable process that way. It doesn’t put you as an authority. So, to go into productive action, we are interacting with food, we’re interacting with the scale, we’re interacting with our bodies. We’re taking the emotion out of the number on the scale. And we’re becoming curious about how did this number happen in the first place? And we’re allowing ourselves to fail so that we can learn from experience.

So, diet knowledge and obedience do not equal sustainable weight loss. Experience equals sustainable weight loss. Application equals weight loss. Understanding what thoughts are happening, that’s it. So, when we look at creating permanent weight loss, number one, weight loss science is simple. You understand what it’s all about, you create a foundation based on facts. You’re no longer being super emotional about what’s wrong with me, I’m such a failure, I can’t figure things out.

No, you now can go back to the facts, okay, what’s happening? What hormones are off balance? What am I doing? And then step two is that you make your own protocol. You make your own food plan. And you learn to troubleshoot it, just like in this podcast I teach you tools. My clients and in this process you learn how to troubleshoot. So, if the number goes up five pounds, eight pounds, what’s happening?

Instead of beating yourself up thinking I’m the worst, I’m so terrible, you’re like, “Obviously there’s something in the science that I did that’s not serving me. Let me check this tool. Let’s see what happens? Okay, let me check this tool. And now step three, you learn that you do actually have a brain and body connection and that that’s actually really helpful.

So too many of us have been hiding from ourselves and we’ve been suppressing our feelings and trying to numb ourselves out with food. And so, we are negating that brain body connection which actually really serves us and allows us to have results. So, as I was saying, there’s five emotions that are required for results. So, courage, resilience, commitment, desire, and discipline. And when we deny that brain body connection we’re denying those results to happen for us.

And then number four, when we understand about our feelings we truly are able to take responsibility for all of our results. We no longer need to be blaming anybody else and we certainly are not going to be shaming ourselves. And if we do go down that road, which it’s very normal, we know now how to get off of that road and back to the road of I’m responsible for me, I can figure this out, this is totally in my control. Because remember, you can only have three results.

You can either gain weight, lose weight or stay the same. Those are all in your control, you all learn how it happens. I was joking with my clients the other day, I said, “If we don’t become scientists in this and we don’t become, you know, being able to have these facts it’s like we threw a bunch of things together to say, “I want to make the antidote for COVID”, but if we didn’t write anything down. And then all of a sudden someone took one of our pills and they were cured, we wouldn’t be able to reproduce that. So, we’ve lost the opportunity to cure COVID.”

It’s the same thing with weight loss, but because we’re avoiding ourselves and hiding from ourselves then we don’t know what’s working and what’s not. And so, number five is you learn to create and grow your own confidence because now you’re totally working through all of these steps.

So just like at the beginning of the episode I talked about how when we make a quilt we need to learn some rules and we have some tools. And then we stay committed through the whole process. And if we have any problems we just get help because we want to make the quilt process sustainable, and fun, and enjoyable. And I want to tell you, when you take these five vital steps for weight loss you can do the same thing.

You can make weight loss totally doable without all the drama and you don’t no longer have to be turning to the food for relief because you create your own relief through your brain. So, thank you so much for joining me. In this episode you saw that I have five vital steps for weight loss and in my program we actually have 12 modules that walk you through how to navigate all of these to really strengthen your understanding. But I shared in this episode the top three strategies of why weight loss is such a nightmare, because we’ve relied on motivation.

We rely on results so that we can feel better about ourselves. And what we need to do is we need to understand the difference between passive action and massive action. We understand the root of weight loss, of why we turn to food to feel better because we have done it ourselves, because I’ve said the only reason we’re overweight is because we put more food in our mouth, so why are you putting more food in your mouth? When you can answer that question you can actually start solving for why do I keep turning to the food? Why do I keep doing this?

You now take responsibility for your results, and you can turn to massive action to creating those results for yourself. Alright, it was so fun to spend time with you today in our episode 31, Five Steps to Permanent Weight Loss.

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