Ep #26: Self-Judgment and Calming the Inner Bully

Are you convinced that your brain is broken, and you are past your prime to make long lasting change? Well, stay tuned in this episode where I will clarify the difference between self-judgment and being a bully. You’ll want to grab a pen so you can take lots of notes for this one. Let’s go.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 26. 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.

Happy 2022. Week two of 2022. How are you feeling? Well, let me tell you what you can expect in this episode today? We’re going to look at this concept of the inner bully. I was on an airplane in December, and I was talking to a girl, we were sitting beside each other, and she was talking about her inner bully. And I was like, “Yes, I remember her.” Because I too have an inner bully, but she is just way nicer now. So we’ve made friends with her. And a lot of my clients have done the same thing.

So we’re going to talk about if you have an inner bully and if you do are you the victim to her? And do you even know that that’s going on? So we’re going to explore that concept. And then we’re going to look at how to self-judge without being a jerk to yourself, being super critical, all of that. We’re going to see about how to change our relationship with ourselves that will serve us instead of staying stuck or even worse, going backwards. And then the last thing we’re going to do in today’s episode is we’re going to learn how to troubleshoot for when you aren’t progressing in three steps. Are you ready?

But before I do I want to just give a quick little shout out to what’s going on in Love Yourself Thin. So in three days’ time, January 15^th, we are starting our Love Yourself Thin lifetime membership. And I just wanted to quickly share what that looks like. It’s taking my five step process of loving yourself thin, so first, weight loss science is simple, second, you learn how to create your own eating protocol using those weight loss science tools. Third, I’m going to teach you how to troubleshoot all of that so you can guarantee all of your own results.

Fourth is being able to feel any of the feelings. And then five, the fifth step of losing weight and keeping it off permanently is learning to trust yourself. And all of that happens in 12 modules. And those modules are on the website inside the portal, inside the program which you get lifetime access of. And then there’s the bonus classes. And then there’s three coaching calls a week. You have your very own spot in the website or in the portal where you track all of your weight, all of the courses that you’ve watched, your goals that you have. It’s just so amazing.

And then you also get into a beautiful private Facebook group where we collaborate, we help, we support, we make comments, we help each other. And it is a place where you really truly can learn to lose weight and keep it off for good. So if you love these episodes, imagine what would happen in the Love Yourself Thin program which is $2,000 and it’s lifetime membership access. And you, just like a big investment in a sewing machine, it’s the same thing. And once you’re in, you’re in. And you just get to learn, and learn, and learn, and grow and change all the time.

So if you can’t tell, I’m pretty excited. It’s been in the works for over a year, and I just want to shout myself out. And all of those who will be able to take advantage of the Love Yourself Thin process, lose the weight and keep it off forever.

Okay, so let’s look at what am I talking about when I talk about the inner bully? So tell me if this is you, do you say these things to yourself? What’s wrong with you? Why haven’t you figured this out yet? Why are you continuing to do this? Why are you always causing trouble? Here we go again. Another diet. More money wasted. All of those phrases, that’s being a bully and not being kind to yourself. Let’s say for example, someone’s always talking to you that way. Would you want to be around that person? Would you want to be their friend? Of course not.

So if you are constantly talking to yourself in that way you want to hide, you want to run and hide from you. You want to do something else. And you know what that looks like? It looks like eating a lot of sugar. And it looks like eating a lot of flour? It looks like doing a lot of shopping, consuming of fabric and things. It also looks a lot like being on Facebook for hours, checking your emails, looking at Instagram, spending lots of time on YouTube or Pinterest.

Because if you are constantly being really unkind to yourself and you’re not speaking nicely to yourself you don’t want to be in your own brain. And sometimes people drink alcohol. And sometimes people do drugs. And some people go into pornography. There’s a lot of different ways that you can hide away from yourself. Another thing that people do a lot is they go into people pleasing.

I have a client who’s struggling right now. And she has lost a ton of weight and she has just been completely distracted with pleasing other people. She’s also using distractions as a way to sabotage herself. So during the day someone will call, or something will come up, or she’ll even have a thought like “Oh I better do that.” And then she just goes and does that, so she distracts herself from what she was doing. So these are all ways for you to hide to stay away from your brain. And one of the reasons you’re doing that is because the way that you’re talking to yourself isn’t very nice at all.

So it’s like the message is, I’m not a safe person to be around so I should go do something else or I should go somewhere else and busy myself with other things. So that’s the inner bully. The inner bully is, what’s wrong with you, smarten up, why haven’t you figured this out yet, just really, really unkind things. And so the problem is that if you are expecting that in order for you to change you need to speak to yourself like this then of course you’re not going to change.

The other problem that happens, and this is part of the discussion I had with this woman in the airport was that it’s a negative feedback loop. So she thinks that when she’s really mean to herself and when she’s really strict with herself, that’s the only way that she’s going to be able to get things done. So now when she thinks that she should be nice to herself, and she should be kinder to herself, if she does that then she’s never going to get anything done. And that is what we’re going to talk about today in today’s episode.

So one of the biggest objections that I hear about weight loss is when women say, “If I accept myself as I am I won’t change.” How many of you have thought that? If I just accept myself as 100 pounds overweight, or 50 pounds overweight, or 30 pounds overweight then I’m never going to change. And in fact I’ll probably just keep gaining weight. Do you think that’s false or true? So I’m going to say this in a different way and I’m going to see if you can relate to this.

So do we ever say to our kids or our grandkids, “You know what? You’re just great the way you are so don’t bother going to school. You don’t need to stress yourself out. You don’t need to learn all those things. Let’s just, no, just stay home.” Or when your kid is learning, or your grandkid is learning how to walk, and they keep falling. You’re like, “No, just don’t bother, it’s like walking, you just keep hurting yourself, don’t worry about it.”

Or what about someone’s wanting to learn to play basketball, it’s like, “No, you shouldn’t even try to learn to play basketball. I mean you’re going to get hurt. People could maybe say something mean to you.” Do we ever say to ourselves, “Don’t worry about cleaning or having an organized house. No, just it’s fine, don’t bother changing.” Or what about if your car, the muffler was broken on your car would you say the same thing? Would you say, “Let’s not bother fixing it, it’s fine.”

So these are kind of some silly examples, but I want you to think about what are you saying to yourself when you say, “If I accept myself as I am now I will never change.” Because the problem with that is the reason you are overweight in the first place is because of choices that you’ve made. So if you are 30 pounds overweight you have consumed 102,000 extra calories that your body is just not capable of using.

It’s like you keep charging your phone and your phone doesn’t need to be charged. So it has all this extra charge, and it doesn’t know what to do with all the extra charge, so your phone just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And now you’re just carrying around this really, really heavy phone because you’ve just charged it so much. And that’s what we’ve done with our body.

So our bodies only have a capacity, it’s like a fuel tank. It only can hold so much fuel. And then if we keep filling up our car with more fuel, we have to get those jerrycans or gas cans and we just have to keep filling them up. And then we carry them around everywhere we go. We are just putting more fuel in our body than our body can manage. And so now we have stored energy and we are literally walking around as storage units. So that is what’s happening.

And if we say, “Well, I don’t want to accept myself. I don’t want to do that.” Then you’re not able to see why you’re having a problem. So with our kids, if we say, “Just be who you are and let’s not try to be better”, then we’re not serving them. We would never say, “Oh, no.” Kids need to learn how to read, they need to learn how to be, you know, they don’t have to all play sports, but they need to have opportunities to learn and to grow.

And when you say that, if you accept yourself as being overweight you’re just denying yourself growth. Because you’re the one who put all the weight on. And if you don’t accept it then you’re in trouble. So we need to accept why we’re overweight. And I’m going to give you the three tips in just a moment. But this is a concept that I talk about inside my program and today even on one of the calls one of the ladies mentioned how powerful this is. And so I do want to share this with you because my whole goal of this podcast is to help you to start living the life that you want to live.

And we do this work more of course in the Love Yourself Thin program. But the idea that I could help you now is very exciting to me. So I’m going to share this concept. So even though you don’t think that your weight right now is acceptable, what I want you to do is I want you to accept the unacceptable.

It’s the same thing as when children are starving in this world, that is unacceptable. It does not seem acceptable that in a society, in a world that we live in with so much that we have children that do not have enough food every day. But we have to accept the fact that there is unacceptable practices. Racism, that is an unacceptable practice, but we accept that racism happens. Sexism, there’s all sorts of problems in this world.

And so even though we don’t want it to be acceptable that children are starving and that there’s racism. We do need to accept that that is a reality in our life. And so that’s a big differentiation. So right now when you look at yourself in the mirror or you stand on the scale and you see that you are 50 pounds over what the ideal body weight is for you, even though you say, “This weight is not acceptable for me.”

What I’m asking you to do right now is to accept that you weigh 50 pounds more than the recommended body weight for yourself. And so when you can accept it, you can now be your own authority of what’s happening. So is the reason that you’re overweight because when you feel sad you don’t just allow yourself to feel sad, you go to Dairy Queen? Is the reason for you being overweight because you celebrate with food all the time? Is the reason you’re overweight because every time you walk through the kitchen you just pick something up because you don’t know how to do transitions?

Is the reason you’re overweight because whenever you feel you miss your kids, that they don’t live at home anymore, you think of a memory, and you just get so sad that you just decide to make those chocolate chip cookies to bring you back? You’re using the sense of taste to relive memories. So whatever that is I want you to get really onto yourself of why you have all that extra weight on you, why are you a walking storage unit?

So step number one for today’s episode is to accept your weight. And to really start seeing why you are the weight that you are.

Now, the second step and there’s a few parts to this is that we need to learn how to be a human. So one of the things that I see so often, especially as I wrote the 12 step perfection recovery program and as I coach these amazing women in my program. Is that we have very unrealistic expectations.

And it was interesting when I worked at a quilt shop, and I started creating quilt tops. And I had to start charging per hour of how long it took me to piece something. It was astounding to me how long things actually took because I was on the clock. So I had to calculate every minute that I was working so that I would be able to invoice my work. And so it was so helpful for me to see, to make a half square triangle, or to make flying geese, or to make the star block or whatever it was, it actually takes me 45 minutes, or it takes me one hour and 20 minutes.

And so when you can learn how to have realistic expectations it takes so much pressure off. So that’s huge. That’s the first part about learning to be a human.

The second part of learning to be a human is to articulate the problem. So, so many of us turn to food to try to solve a problem. So if we’re annoyed you might grab a chocolate bar. If we’re disappointed we might get a milkshake. If we’re feeling really stressed we might grab a burger or something. So instead of skipping that part of just going to try to find some solace or some comfort, the dopamine hit that comes from food, we actually slow down, and we are able to articulate the problem, see what’s happening.

And then the third part about learning to be a human is to actually solve for the real problem. So if you’re turning to a hamburger because you’re stressed. So let me look at, well, why am I stressed. Well, the stress is I gave myself three hours to finish something and I didn’t finish it. So now I’m stressed. So now we see the problem is you didn’t have realistic expectations of how long something would take.

Or say you gave yourself three hours to do something and then you spent every 10 minutes looking on Facebook because you felt so insecure and so worried that you needed to get a dopamine hit from checking your Facebook. So now you can solve the problem where you’re feeling disconnected and so you are searching to feel connection at Facebook but all you’re willing to do is get connection with yourself.

And when you can connect with yourself then you’re not wasting all that time on Facebook and you’re able to stay committed to the three hours that you gave yourself, whatever that is. So we can actually start solving for the real problem. So first we’re going to learn to accept why we are the way we are. The second one is to learn how to be a human which, we’re going to have realistic expectations. We’re going to be able to articulate what the real problem is. And then we’re going to be able to solve for the real problem.

And then step number three is we do all of this with compassion. And compassion means act of love which also means we are not judging ourself. Which brings us back to the inner bully. So when you are in self-judgment and you’re being a bully, that means you’re being very critical, demeaning, unkind and just really, it’s not serving you. Whereas if you are neutral or as I would like it to be, self-love which is compassion you are then able to be objective and you’re able to see what’s really going on.

So we do a lot of this work in Love Yourself Thin, and I wanted to just share with you those three strategies because there is far too much time, energy wasted on being a jerk to yourself, to being mean to yourself, to thinking that the only way that you can change is through being critical and unkind.

And I’m just going to end by asking a quick question. If my program, the way to lose weight and keep it off permanently is called Love Yourself Thin, how are you loving yourself? Are you loving yourself only on condition of, I could only love myself if I am thin. I could only love myself if I produce so much projects. I can only love myself if my kids are good people. Or are you able to embrace you loving yourself no matter what? Which means unconditionally.

And what I want to close this episode with is if you are not loving yourself unconditionally that is why you’re being a bully to yourself. That is why you’re being a jerk, because if the only way that you can believe that you can be acceptable is by having a certain standard then you are now being a bully to yourself, you’re being a jerk to yourself, you’re being, I call it punching yourself in the face, because you think you need to be harder on yourself to pull up your bootstraps, to smarten up, to snap out of it. But the absolute opposite is true.

The only way that you can truly change is by loving yourself unconditionally, by accepting yourself exactly how you are, understanding why you are that way and then you’re able to be in a position to create permanent change.

Well, that was really fun spending this time with you. I love that you’re here. And it really does help that you spread this joy to other people, my podcast, I really appreciate it. If you haven’t left a comment or a mark on iTunes, I would greatly appreciate it. Every time you leave a comment, or anything on my podcast it helps so many other people to see it as it is. My podcast is in the top 5% of all podcasts and I want to help all quilters know that they can lose the weight and keep it off for good.

So, thank you for listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more information, please visit daratomasson.com. See you next week.

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