Ep #15: How to Stop Yoyo Dieting Forever

Are you convinced that if you lose the weight, it will eventually come back on again and then some, so why bother? And you’ve taken the adage of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” I hear you.

So how many of you have had these thoughts about yourself when it came to dieting? When I am thin my life would be better. Being overweight meant I wasn’t taking care of myself properly. I wasn’t very smart. I wasn’t a good steward of my body. I didn’t appreciate what I had. I wasn’t grateful because I didn’t care of myself better. I didn’t have a lot of self-control. I was lazy or weak. I didn’t have honor or trust myself. I needed to hide my fat so that I didn’t look so embarrassing. People are judging me. People will think less of me. I can’t be proud of myself because I look so terrible.

So, if any of you had those thoughts, those are the thoughts that I had about myself for so many years. And so, this principle has been so effective to me because I was that yoyo dieter. I would use self-depravation and so many of my clients were there as well. So, if you also deprived yourself and stressed yourself out to get to that weight because it’s like, this will be worth it. Once I get to that number on the scales, then I can feel worthy, then I can feel good about myself. Then I can have my life start.

But how many of us have gotten to that ideal weight and life still was pretty crummy? Life still had problems. There was still broken fridges, and different problems. And you were so confused because you thought that once you lost the weight, then everything would be so much easier. Well, this episode is totally for you. I’m going to teach you the tool that will actually help you have a balanced life, and you’re going to be able to lose weight without any of the stress or strain that you once had.

I do recommend you have a pen because I’m going to share with you at the end of this episode four steps of how you can accomplish having a more balanced life no matter how much you weigh. Are you ready?

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 15. 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.

Alright, so let’s go to this tool which we call in The Life Coaching School, 50:50. Now let me explain this to you. Before I do, I want you to ask yourself how do you play out these scenarios? So, I’m going to read the scenario, and I want you to think in your mind, how do I react to this? What is my normal reaction? So, when you forget a password on your computer, and now you have to go get a new one. So, what is your reaction? How do you feel?

And I want you to pay attention when I’m saying these scenarios, what actual physical reaction are you having in your body? Because that will be an indication of what is your operating manual. What does your operating manual say. So, when someone says something negative or positive about us. So, they say, “That quilt is so beautiful.” Or when they say, “Why did you pick the colors for that quilt? Weird.” What is your reaction? And just kind pay attention to your body. It’s okay. You’re safe. You don’t have to tell anybody.

And the third one is you’re waiting on the phone for two hours to get a passport situation resolved that you actually didn’t create in the first place. Alright, so I want you to get really curious in your body. How do you react? Now this is going to teach us something about ourselves. So, the reason I’m sharing all of these tools with you in my podcast is because I know that life is pretty challenging.

And so many of us think that it’s our weight that is the challenge, but it’s not necessarily the weight. It’s the way that we look at the problems that we have, and it’s the food that we’ve turned to, to try to take the pressure off or try to take that off. And so these tools are going to help you so that you no longer need to go turn to the food to try to solve the problem, which of course, there’s only a few reasons why food solves problems. It’s to give us minerals and nutrients, it’s to repair our body, it’s to give us energy. And it’s also a form of self-care, which we talked about in previous episodes.

So let me tell you about the law of nature. So, in order to see light, we have to have the contrast, we have to have darkness. In order to know that we actually have joy, we have to have the contrast that we’ve had sorrow. Because imagine that, if your life was always happy, happy, happy all the time, you wouldn’t actually recognize that it was happy because that would just be normal. Do you hear what I’m saying? You wouldn’t have the contrast to say, “Actually, I don’t even really know how I feel because I’m just always happy.” No, we have to have those opposites.

And so, I want you to imagine a circle. And split that circle in half. And on one side of that circle is 50% positive emotions. So, joy, happiness, glee, calm, relaxed. Those are all positive emotions. So, on the opposite side of the circle, 50% are all negative emotions. And just like we play when kids are little and we say, “What are the opposites? Happy, sad, joy, disappointment.” Whatever, we’re going back and forth. So, for every one of those happy emotions that you wrote down in the circle of 50, there has to be, by law of nature, a negative of it. So, it’s like the opposites game.

So now I want you to think about, even let’s go back to the, I forgot my password. So, in life to have a balanced healthy human life it has to be 50% positive and 50% negative. I know, you’re like, “No, I don’t want that rule.” I get it.

Just like I want to believe that when I’m thin, everything’s going to be easier. Well, and truthfully, when you are thin, there are certain parts of your life that are easier. It is easier to, and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, it’s easier to do things when you are thin. It’s easier to fit in smaller spaces. It’s easier for you to get dressed in the morning because of all the thoughts you have about yourself.

Because when you get dressed in the morning and you’re constantly saying, “Oh my goodness, why are you so fat? What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you get this together? Why can’t you figure this out?” And then you have to spend five minutes in front of the mirror trying on different outfits to see if different rolls are going to appear because you have all these thoughts about people judging you.

That’s the only reason why getting dressed in the morning is a problem is because you have thoughts about it. Because did you know that you can be thin, and you can still have lots of thoughts about getting dressed? You could say, “Why aren’t these clothes fitting me better? Why do I have this thing? Why do I have that thing?”

I mean, my kids for a while they’re like, “Mom, keep pulling your pants up. What’s wrong with you?” So even when you’re thin you’re still going to have different problems. But the way you think about yourself is so different because of the way that you talk to yourself. And one of the things I do say is once you learned, I have cracked the code for weight loss without counting calories or exercising.

So now I don’t have those same weight loss problems. I’ve taken that issue and I’ve discovered how to solve it. So now I don’t have to go solve that problem over and over again. That problem has been solved. And now I work on maintenance. And now I have this new treasure trove of information. And I have new habits that are so helpful. So now that part is easy. And I have other parts of my life that aren’t as easy because I haven’t developed the new protocol. I haven’t developed the new habits to resolve those issues yet.

So now let’s go to forgetting the password. So, you’re on your computer, let’s say you’re going to my, I have a free training, and you’re really looking forward to it. And you’ve got to sign in and the Zoom link isn’t working, and they say, “You have to get a new password.” And you’ve got five minutes before the free training. And what do you do? Do you allow yourself the feeling of frustration? Do you allow yourself to be like, “Oh, man, this annoying that I have to go figure this out?”

And then do you make it worse and, “Why is this so terrible? This always happens. Why do I even bother? This is a sign that I shouldn’t even bother doing this. See nothing happens. I try to do something good for myself and then it doesn’t pan out. I guess it’s meant that I’m just going to be overweight and unhappy for the rest of my life.” Okay, is that the whole bucket of thoughts that you have on that?

Or so you’re kind of reacting to, this is something I hadn’t planned? Or do you just say, “I guess I feel kind of disappointed.” And it feels kind of like maybe there’s a rock in your stomach. And then you say, “Well, I can get a new password.” And then you move on.

So, when I’m talking about this principle to have a balanced life, we have to allow 50% to be not so great, and 50% to be awesome. In that scenario, I didn’t beat myself up saying what’s wrong with me? I’m so insufficient. I shouldn’t have passport problems. On the other side, it’s like, oh, this is the 50% of my day that’s not so awesome, and I know how to solve problems.

So, let’s go to the scenario where you’re at the quilt guild meeting and someone says, “Why do you always pick the same colors? It’s like every quilt you make, it’s pretty much variations of the same.” So, person said words which of course is a circumstance because you can quote it, it’s literally neutral. And so now you have thoughts about it. So, if you had a thought like, wow, you’re really judgy. And then you had a feeling of disappointment, then what are you going to do? You get to decide, am I just going to allow myself to feel disappointed, or am I going to react?

So, imagine the circle again of 50% negative and 50% positive. So, if we are resisting, or reacting, or avoiding feeling that feeling, then what do we do? We’re not allowing it to happen. So we’re like, “I feel really judged, or I’m really disappointed.” But we’re like, I don’t want to feel that because that’s a negative emotion. So you decided to not allow that emotion to come into your body, which remember, an emotion literally is just a vibration in our body.

It’s just letting us know this is how you feel now, and you’re going to have a sensation in your body like your stomach might get clenched, your heart might beat a little bit faster. You might sweat a little bit because someone said something. But if you avoid it, resist, or react to it, then we might go into something like blame because it feels powerful or self-righteous. And so now what’s happening is we’re adding a layer to that circle, that half circle of 50% negative with emotions that kind of feel positive, that aren’t.

And so now because we haven’t processed those feelings, we’ve got this extra layer on the 50% negative. And then we have a layer on top of that layer because then we’re going to start feeling some shame, or regret, or disappointment, or overwhelm because we didn’t allow those emotions. So, we’ve got this lopsided circle that is not allowing us to truly live our lives. And so, buffering, which is turning to something external to try to feel better internally, is now happening.

So how many of us have a negative experience if someone says words to us and we go to Dairy Queen and get a Blizzard, or we go and buy some fabric? Because we’re avoiding, resisting, and reacting to that emotion. So that’s all that’s happening.

So, one of the things that is very normal for us especially since we were little children was we would go to food to feel better. So, in order for us to survive we needed to eat food. And back in the day, we might needed to have eaten crickets, or grasshoppers. Or we had to eat herbs or vegetation that didn’t really taste that great. But there is an instinct in our body, a dopamine is released when we eat food because it was a survival strategy that said when you eat this feels good, regardless of what it tasted like.

So, when you think about life when you were, especially as a little kid, maybe your mom yelled at you, maybe a teacher said something, maybe you got in a fight with your siblings. If you didn’t have the skills of learning to think about your thinking and say, “I need to make sure I feel this negative emotion so I can feel a positive emotion, I need to have the contrast.” We didn’t know that. But we did figure out that when we ate coconut, this is what I did, I went to the baking section in my kitchen. And if you ate shredded coconut that actually felt kind of good.

Even the non, like the dark chocolate that my mom kept, even if I just had a little bit of that, that actually released some dopamine. So every time we turned to food it literally was a way for us to take care of ourselves. And so, we’ve got to work through that. And we have to create a new strategy. We need to learn to think about the thought that got us to that problem.

So, I don’t want you to be beating yourself up on this. I want you to just have a lot of grace and a lot of understanding. Knowledge brings relief. Knowledge gives us permission to start now solving what the problem was. Because if we didn’t, we only know what we know, but now that you know this tool and now you have this awareness it’s going to help you so much.

And one of the ways that I like to ask my clients to think about this is remember those old fashioned scales? And so, in order to have that balance we need to be able to balance the scales. And so, some of the thoughts that I have that really, really helped me is when I go through the bad, I can feel the good. This is the part of the day that’s the 50% negative, check, done, moving on.

So, I don’t make a big deal of it. I’m like, “Oh, there’s the 50 that’s not so great. Perfect.” So now I have, I can embrace, and I can allow just like the scale, literally visualize that old fashioned scale. So, okay there’s a little bit of negative. That means I can now have my positive. But just like I gave the example earlier, if you could have all these thoughts, why haven’t I figured it out yet? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this?” Then you’re now making that scale even heavier, and it’s not balanced.

So, one of the thoughts that has helped me so much in understanding from this concept is that when I have negative things happen in my life, it doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong. It’s not a punishment, it’s not a consequence for my behavior. It literally is just part of being a balanced human.

So, are you ready for the tips that I’m going to share with you, the steps? So, the event in our life, so someone said words to us, or the number on the scale went up, or whatever it was. That is a circumstance, that is neutral. So, the first thing I want you to do is I want you to slow down and isolate the circumstance from the thought.

So, imagine you’re in your car, you’re driving along and there’s a road bump. So that’s just like life, someone says words to you. So are you going to slow down and see what’s going on for the event and go over the road bump? Or are you going to go for a big detour around and get distracted, go to Dairy Queen, and get a Blizzard, or go do some fabric shopping, or go call a friend and do some gossiping? That’s a detour. Or are you going to get on a lawn chair and quit? And be like, “People are so terrible, this is awful.” So, who are you going to be?

So, let’s go back to the steps. So, the first thing is the circumstance happens. So, you have something that happens in your life. We’re going to now create that as a circumstance. So, somebody said words to me, let’s just take that example. Woman at the guild said, “Why do you always pick the same colors?” And so now you get to decide what do I want to think about that person? Because remember the thought always creates an emotion. And the feeling always creates our actions.

So put your hand on your chest, now say, “What is the feeling I have when I have that thought?” And what I like to do is I actually put my hand on my chest, and I don’t take it off until I’ve found that feeling in my body. Because my thoughts are now being connected to my body. And so, I press kind of with some nice pressure on my chest, it feels kind of like a hug. And I say, “Where in my body am I feeling this feeling?” So, it’s like I’m playing a game of hide and seek. Where is that feeling?

And so now I am saying, “Am I going to be a speed bump? Am I going to be a detour, go and get distracted and go onto Facebook land, fabric shopping land or make cinnamon buns, or something, or am I going to quit?” No, I’m going to be the speed bump. I’m just going to slow down. I’m going to see what thoughts are creating an emotion. And then I’m going to discover that emotion.

I’m going to allow that emotion. I’m just going to allow it to be here just like a vibration in my body. Here it is. I feel it. I’m feeling a little bit – my skin is a little bit hot. I’m feeling a little bit of like my heart is beating a little bit faster. There it is. I’m there. And then I let that pass and then I can move on.

So that is my tool for you today. In order to have a well-balanced life, we need to have a 50% experience every day of happiness and of joy. And so, we’re not going to react to the negative emotion. And so, the problem was we thought that when there was a certain number on the scale would appear, then everything could be happy. But the way that I approach weight loss is that when we can learn to accept all of us, then we can truly make permanent change because now we’re not avoiding, resisting, reacting and being so unkind to ourselves.

We’re literally becoming an active participant and having a well-balanced life for our weight loss. Alright, so here we go. Are you ready? For this next week allow yourself the opportunity to learn how am I feeling, where is this feeling coming from? As you notice all those moments in your life. Alright, you got this. Take care everyone. Bye bye.

If you’ve been enjoying these tools that I’ve been sharing in my podcast, I have a surprise for you. I have a five day training that tells you all the foods you should eat, why you should eat them. I tell you about the weight loss science and there are women who have lost 20, 30 pounds just from my free training. And so, if you go over to my website daratomasson.com and sign up for my email list, you will get that training every day for the next five days.

And not only do you get the free training but being on my email list helps you get all the first dibs on all the exciting things happening in the Love Yourself Thin community. There will be special bonuses that aren’t available otherwise. So, if you want to learn how to continue getting success, I invite you to hop over to daratomasson.com and register for my email list where you will get that free training and I can’t wait to see how it’s going to help you as you continue to learn how to love yourself thin.

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