Ep #42: Weight Loss is Boring: The Antidote

Weight Loss for Quilters | Weight Loss is Boring: The AntidoteDo you currently believe that the price of being thin is a lifetime of boring food and constant dread over eating the wrong thing? Well, if this is a familiar story, you need to listen to this episode because I’m explaining the antidote to the belief that weight loss is full of boring food and nothing to look forward to.

If you want to lose weight, you need to feel confident and excited to explore what this experience has to offer you. So, over the next four episodes, I’m debunking the myth that weight loss is boring and requires a life of food drudgery.

Tune in this week to discover why food never needs to be in the equation when it comes to living a happy life. I’m sharing how to get clear on the unhelpful thoughts you have about weight loss, your ability to be disciplined, and the process being boring, and instead, I’m showing you how to decide intentionally what you want your relationship with food to look like.

If you are ready to lose weight and change the way you think about hunger, sign up for the lifetime access membership for Love Yourself Thin! Doors are open and you can find all the information by clicking here.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

  • How so many of us have come to believe that losing weight is a recipe for food boredom.
  • Why your enjoyment of life doesn’t need to be tied to the food you’re eating.
  • The reasons we associate special occasions like birthdays and holidays with food.
  • How to get clear on the thoughts you currently have about weight loss that aren’t necessarily true.
  • What you can do to decide on the kind of role you want food to play in your life.

Listen to the Full Episode:

Featured on the Show:

  • I have a surprise for you! I have a 5-day training that tells you all the foods you should eat, why you should eat them, and the science behind weight loss. There are women who have lost 20 and 30 pounds just from this training, so click here to sign up for my email list and access the training now. I can’t wait to see how it’s going to help you as you continue to learn how to love yourself thin. 
  • If you are ready to lose weight and change the way you think, sign up for the lifetime access membership for Love Yourself Thin! Doors are open and you can find all the information by clicking here.

Full Episode Transcript:

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Are you convinced that the price of being thin is a lifetime of boring food and dread? You for sure need to listen to this episode where I explain the antidote to the belief that weight loss is full of boring food with not much to look forward to.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 42: Weight Loss is Boring: The Antidote.

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.

Over the next four episodes I’m going to debunk the myth that weight loss is boring and requires a life of food drudgery. I have so much support coming up so that you can feel confident as you go and explore what the world has to offer. Before I dive in though I want to share how one of the lifetime members of Love Yourself Thin has been navigating the tools as she went out for dinner with her guild friends.

So, she went to dinner with her friends, and it was one of the ladies’ birthdays and she hadn’t planned to eat the cake. And she was actually surprised with how easy it was that she didn’t eat it. But the thing that pleased her the most other than the fact that she planned to not eat cake, she actually didn’t eat the cake, so she trusted herself. And she realized it wasn’t so hard after all. But she had ordered some chicken bites thinking they were healthy as they were indicated on the menu. But the coding on them was breaded and her stomach didn’t feel good afterwards.

So, she simply threw them away and she didn’t have any guilt and beat herself up for making the wrong choice. So, I love that for her. I always say in the program we are always winning or learning.

Alright, so today’s episode with planting season coming up, I know there’s a lot of quilting gardeners out there so you can relate to this episode. But be prepared to totally change the way you reap from the garden. So, food does not ever need to be in the equation of a happy life. But you’re like, “No, Dara, but what about birthdays or Christmas, or summer holidays, or any holiday of any sort?” Those are my most amazing memories. So, you will see how to have the most amazing life you never have to have that tied to food ever.

So, I highly recommend that you print off the worksheet after you listen to help you all the way. So, let’s dive in. When you think about your most amazing life, the most wonderful parts of your life I want you to think about that. So, I’m actually going to take Christmas, birthdays, and summer holidays. In my house we had three birthdays in 13 days. So, it was a lot of birthday stuff going on and there needed to be cakes and all sorts of things. So, let’s think about Christmas.

When you think about Christmas what are all the feelings you have? So, anticipation, excitement, thrill, feeling special, relaxed, family time, all of these things. And so of course we think about turkey, and the stuffing, and all the fixings, the yule log, the baking. It seems there’s no holds bars, chocolate everywhere and all sorts of treats.

Now, think of birthdays. A typical birthday food is cake, pizza, chips. And so how do you feel for birthdays? You feel special, and it’s fun, and you celebrate. You feel acknowledged. You feel loved and surprised. And then summer holidays, typical food we think of is ice-cream. We have special road trip food. We’ve got to make a special stop at the store before we go. The sugar cereal boxes, all of those things that are very special. But what are the feelings that you have when you go on vacation? Relaxed, play, adventure, surprise, exploring, connection.

When I was 22 I was a missionary for my church in France. And Christmas, I’m a big Christmas fan, I love it. And now that I’m a mom it’s a little bit different. I can see behind the door, it’s a little more challenging as a mom to make sure the magic happens and that’s okay. So, this Christmas I ate live oysters, yeah, I did. And they slithered down my throat. And then for Christmas dinner, that was Christmas Eve and Christmas dinner I had blood sausage, yeah, blood sausage. It was pretty disgusting.

And I was away from my home, away from my family but I had an amazing Christmas. It was a wonderful experience. So how can we go from Christmas feeling anticipation, and excitement, and thrill, special, relaxed, all of those things, connected, but I can still feel that way having live oysters slither down my throat and eating blood sausage? So, this is where the gardening analogy comes in.

And before I go to there I want you to imagine if a doctor told you that you could no longer eat food, even just food, your doctor’s like, “Sorry, you cannot eat food.” Would you still be able to enjoy your life? And really think about that. Because this is the tool that I want to teach you. It’s actually the tool of our feelings. And our feelings come from our thoughts always. So, I want you to think of thoughts are a package of seeds. So, we have certain thoughts and then when you plant that thought, that seed then we have what produces is a feeling.

So, I’ve got a bunch here and I’m just going to share them, and I want you to put the feeling that you have when you have this thought. So, these are a lot of the thoughts that my clients, the Love Yourself Thin members come when they first come in. I am really fat. So, what’s the emotion that comes with that? I never get stuff done. Everyone needs something from me. I just can’t seem to get ahead. Being thin means, I have to eat plain things. I keep doing weight loss wrong. I just keep gaining the weight back.

So, with all of those thoughts, so we’ve just planted a bunch of thoughts and so the fruit of these are feelings such as gross, frustrated, annoyed, mad, bored, unintelligent, failure. So, if all of those thoughts you’re having about yourself and about your body, if that’s what you keep saying all the time, then you are going to be living a life where you feel gross, and frustrated, and annoyed, and mad, and bored, and unintelligent. You feel dumb. You feel stupid. You feel like a failure. So, this is how the human brain is connected.

So, you’re like, “No, no, no, Dara.” But hear me out here. So, if you have a thought like I’m late, immediately your brain releases that information, and your body is wired to respond. So, what does your body do when you feel like you’re late? Yes, your heart starts beating more, your armpits kind of sweat. We have a response. So, if we see a baby we are just, all of a sudden our body just, oh, that baby’s so cute, or we see puppies.

That’s why people love watching videos of puppies and hedgehogs and things because instantly our body’s like, aww, so cute. We relax. We have a trigger, it just washes through us. This is the emotion. And with weight loss so many women look at their bodies and instantly freeze. They don’t want to allow that thought of I’m disgusting, I feel fat, I hate my life because they’re very resistant to feeling that feeling.

So, when you think about what emotions do you want to have, well, the beautiful thing is all we need to do, so we write down all the thoughts you want. Like I want to feel joy, I want to feel happy, I want to feel successful, I want to feel competent, I want to feel accomplished. So, then you have to go, and you have to find the package of seeds that are going to assure that you’re going to have those feelings.

So, if you want to feel accomplished, what is a thought that’s going to make you feel accomplished? I’m very good at doing this. I have done this a million times. This is how it works. So, when you know that this is the way your brain is wired, food never has to go in the mix ever. So, we know that food is there. So, for example, I was just telling you about we had all these birthdays. And so, we had an Oreo ice-cream cake from Dairy Queen. So that’s the circumstance, it’s just neutral. And then we have a thought, it’s super yummy.

And then that was the package of seeds, so when we have the thought, it’s super yummy then you feel excited. So, let’s say your doctor did put you on a food fast, you couldn’t eat anything for two weeks. You can still have that Oreo ice-cream cake in front of you, you can still have the thought, it’s super yummy, and you can still feel excited and never eat any of it. It’s interesting. So, the problem is, and this is going back to weight loss is that when we eat more than what our body contains, so calories are stored energy.

We eat food, the food gets broken down and then we have, all the food that we eat has a level of energy that’s attached to it. And so, if you have more energy in your body than you can use at the time, then it gets put in storage. So, all of us quilters can relate to this because we all go to the fabric store, or the quilt shop, or wherever, we order it online. We go and get it, but we don’t always use it. So, if we haven’t used that fabric it sits on a shelf, it sits in a bin, it sits displayed all pretty. But the same thing with our body.

So, if we have consumed more energy, more food, more calories than our body can actually use then it’s just like we are our own stash. So, if you don’t want to store the energy then you get your joy from your thoughts and then you skip the food because we cannot argue with science. It is what happens, we have calories, they have energy, our body uses that energy. If it can’t use everything that it has then it gets stored. And it gets stored in our bum, or in our thighs, or under our armpits, or wherever.

So, on the worksheet I have some suggestions of things that you can do that are going to create emotions. And I’m going to go over that with you in the podcast. But now that we know this is actually how our brain works now we can understand, I actually don’t have to eat the Oreo ice-cream cake to feel excited. I don’t have to consume anything to have the feelings that I want.

So, I have my mother-in-law visiting right now and she is a lovely lady. And one of the things that she absolutely loves to do, she’s completely obsessed with it is baking. She loves baking like we love quilting. And she bakes every single day and sometimes multiple times a day. And so, which makes it challenging for me because I actually do like the food that she makes, it’s very yummy. Remember, we have good, better, and best. There’s good food. Chocolate chip cookies are really good but they’re not the best thing for my body, they really aren’t.

And I’ve made decisions about how many chocolate chip cookies I want to put in my body. I am making decisions about how many cheese buns or lemon, she makes these new cinnamon buns that are like lemon buns. I haven’t tried one yet. But I make very purposeful decisions on what kind of fuel I put in my body. And I also know how it makes me feel when I eat certain types of fuel. So, this is a great suggestion for you, and this is a way to troubleshoot it. And truthfully, when my mother-in-law comes I always say to myself, “It’s like an amazing scratch and sniff sticker.”

My house is filled with all these amazing smells, and I can just enjoy it. So, I say things to myself like, “I enjoy the smell. I appreciate her kindness. I admire her abilities. I’m in awe of her devotion.” So that is the example that I wanted to share with you. So, I don’t have to eat a single thing my mother-in-law makes, I really don’t. But I can still feel grateful. I can feel awe. I can feel admiration. I can feel appreciation and enjoyment.

So here are some of the suggestions that I have because we have to reverse engineer our life. So going on a date, this was a really big one for my husband and I because going on a date was such a big deal. We have five kids, and to get a babysitter and to do all of that was just so much effort and work. And so, we would go on a date and then it would just be these guilty pleasures of, we should go to Dairy Queen. We can get whatever we want. And it was just this habit that we had, or we’d go to the grocery store and buy whatever, a fancy kind of ice-cream or something.

Just culturally we’re really programmed to turn to this food to give us all these different pleasures. And so, my husband and I now for approximately three years, we go on dates. We still will go for a nice meal, we are big fans of sushi. But we don’t go into the dollar store after and get chocolate, we don’t go to the grocery store after, we don’t go to Dairy Queen. We’ll go sit on a beach.

Or one of my favorites is we went, and we had to go check on our friends’ cat, and they have this really nice outside furniture and we laid on the furniture and just looked at the clouds. And we just sat and talked, and we just enjoyed just being out there and his friend had a beautiful garden. And we were just able to just be with each other. Sometimes we go on drives, and we just go to beautiful places and just sit in a car and just talk and enjoy the views.

That is something that my husband and I have been doing and it’s been really lovely. It’s been really nice just to develop our relationship with each other and to strengthen. Because what we really are wanting is we really want connection. And an ice-cream cone has nothing to do with connection. It just mostly makes me feel bloated. Being with your friends. So going for a walk, exploring somewhere new, quilting together. I love when one person’s piecing and the other one’s pressing. It goes so much faster. That’s a really fun way to spend time together.

One of the things I love about my hot tub is that my daughter and I will be out there for, I am not kidding, three hours. And then the boys come in and out. My husband might come in and out. But we just have that time, it’s uninterrupted. We talk. We just are together. We have that connection. And so, we also will do a new hobby as a family. So, we went through this phase where we did geocaching. And so really what you want is we all want those emotions. We want a life that’s wonderful. We want to feel amazing about the life that we have.

And I want to offer to you, again, when you look at the science, when you look at the way our bodies are wired, the only way we get an emotion is through our thoughts at first. For us to really, I really want you to apply this tool. And inside my program we go over it over and over. And so, when you learn this you can decide what role do you want food to play.

And so just in closing I did an experiment. It was kind of fun. I did three weeks where I pretty much just ate apples, stewed apples. And I would make a pot of vegetables with beans, yellow mung beans. And it was through this ayurvedic practitioner and at first it was just going to be three days. And I really enjoyed it. It’s called kitchari that you make. And you just put in a little bit of rice, and then these mung beans and then you just throw in whatever vegetables you want. And I used my instant pot.

And it was just so simple for me, I would eat it, and I didn’t have to think about food. I mean I make food for my children. I’ll make them pancakes. I make them a meal. And then so when I do this for myself, and then I just put whatever meat that I was making for my kids, I would just have that as part of it. And the thing that came up for me which was really surprising is that when I made my food really simple, and really I have my own food protocol. I have my approved food list.

But when I didn’t even have to think about, am I going to do a salad, am I going to do this, am I going to do that, when I just gave myself permission, I’m just eating this with a little bit of meat my brain just got freed up. I had this new space in my brain. And then the other thing that was really surprising to me, and this is why, I’m sharing this because it’s part of this concept of so many women are just, they think that food, it’s so boring to eat healthy. It’s so boring.

And what came to me when I have been doing this experiment is my other senses have been so much more triggered. So, when I wash my hands, and we have, I’m sure you do too, you buy the pretty soaps at Bath Bed & Beyond or all those different places. Now I’m actually taking a minute and smelling my hands and thinking, this smells so good. And then I’m actually listening to music more. I am moving my body more. I’m touching things. And we’re quilters, so we like touching.

I’m actually doing more quilting and my other senses, my smell, and my sight, I’m enjoying more beauty. I am taking things in. I’m smelling things. My other senses are allowing me to just be more of a human. And so that could be its own episode all on its own.

So, I just want to close this episode today and just remind you all that these bodies that we have, this is the only body that we are given. And just like a brand new baby, you want to take such precious care of this baby. And you wouldn’t imagine feeding this baby disgusting things, or things that it can’t handle. And I want you to truly treat your body in a very loving way. I want you to embrace that this body has done so much for you. And the more that you take care of this body, the more that you allow yourself the opportunity even to just tolerate your body.

We’re not even going to go to the other ones. But there is this idea of when you, and I talk about this a lot in the program, of the way that you think about your body and the way that you describe, the thoughts you have, describe it, if you are staying in anger, and discouragement, and blame, and worry, and doubt, and disappointment, you aren’t allowing yourself to live your best life. You really are, it’s like an anchor and it just keeps you down. And it never lets you catch your breath. It never lets you float to the surface.

You’re always feeling like it’s a battle. You’re always feeling like it’s this big struggle. And I want to offer to you that when you start doing this work and when you start seeing that it’s possible for you to change, you are going to have such a weight lifted off of your shoulders. Because when you think about taking care of a body from hatred and disgust compared to just even being neutral, what a difference, what a shift that’s going to be. And when you can get to neutral then you can start feeling hopeful and you can feel optimistic, and positive, and enthusiastic, and eager, and happy, and passion.

We call this the emotional ladder. And then we get to the very top of joy, knowledge, empowerment, freedom, love, and appreciation. And this is the work that I do in Love Yourself Thin. So, as you listen to these podcasts. And as you do the worksheets, I want you to imagine what a difference it would be if you had a guide to help walk you through all these tools and make sure that you got them right. And that is what I’m offering for you.

I would be so honored to be your coach and welcome you into Love Yourself Thin, lifetime membership where you learn these tools, you master them which will help you get to your naturally thin weight and stay there with ease. And then once you’re there and you have so much more energy in your brain you will be amazed at how much more joy, and happiness you can have in your life.

Alright, it has been so much fun to prepare this episode for you and I am really excited about the next three episodes that are going to help you, giving you the tools to travel, to eat out, to entertain because like I said today, this episode, weight loss is not boring, it really isn’t. And the antidote is when you feel your feelings, when you recognize where feelings come from you don’t need any food to have those feelings.

And we’re going to keep reinforcing this for the next three episodes for sure when we talk about having fun on vacation, losing weight on vacation, eating out and having fun, going to quilt retreats. I’m even talking about quilt retreats. So, you do not want to miss out and I would love it if you could share this with a friend. Alright, take care everyone. Bye.

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

 

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