#60: Weight Loss Maintenance

60. Weight Loss Maintenance

Do you feel like you’ll never be able to take the weight off, because it always comes back on? You feel like that cat that has nine lives that always comes back. I totally understand. We know how to lose weight, but keeping it off is a whole different story. Well guess what today’s episode is going to be perfect for you because we’re gonna be talking about weight loss maintenance.

I’m Dara Tomasson and this is episode 60, weight loss maintenance.

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.

Hello everyone. How do you love these podcasts? I sure do. I sure love making them for you. I love thinking about them and playing them for you. And today’s podcast. I have to say, has been in the works for four years. Now, I haven’t been a coach for four years, but when I first discovered weight loss using my brain, it all started to happen for me. So before I get into the bulk of this podcast, which I will be sharing with you, weight loss maintenance, some very, very special information. You do not want to miss. This is totally going to change the way you think. 

I wanna do a shout out for one of my clients because I am in love with them. I’m in love with you too, but I get to have this up close and personal relationship with them because they’re in my program and I get to serve them all the time. And it brings me so much joy. 

So this client of mine, I wanted to highlight. So she has lost 78 pounds and she is in her late sixties and struggled with her weight for most of her life. And the thing that I am amazed at, and this is something that I am just, it just is such a testimony for the importance of maintaining your brain and being on top of thinking about your thinking. So she’s lost all this weight, but not only that, but she has been able to change her relationships with her mother, with her sister, her brother, her children, her grandkids, her friends at the Guild. Because she’s been able to maintain this and the thing that’s so fun is I only have a few one-on-one spots open for coaching, which by the way, I do have an opening they will fill up. I just decided to fill up more spots. And so if you are interested in one-on-one coaching, you can come.

 So this client of mine, you think that she’s lost all this weight. Why would she wanna still have one-on-one coaching? But she does. She continually invests in her brain and she’s getting more and more, when I say results, what I mean is she’s more calm. She’s had an eye surgery, which has really drawn out and is a lot longer and more difficult than they ever imagined.

And she hasn’t turned to food at all. She is just living a life that is really what she had dreamed about and is actually beyond her dreams. So I just love that about her and I love that she’s investing and she’s at a certain age and some people will think, well by a certain age, you know, you’re kind of past due.

No, she’s enjoying her life. So I did wanna shout her out and it is so much fun being her one-on-one coach. And it’s been so much fun seeing her show up all the time in the group, she’s always there to support other people. She’s there to get coaching and she redoes the modules.

She’s like all in and helping her brain. It is so much fun. So I just wanted to shout her out. She’s such a great example of what I’m gonna be talking about in today’s podcast. So let’s dive into the bulk of the podcast.

Now, when we talk about weight loss maintenance, I have to go to my car. I just think about my car and I was talking to my mechanic the other day. I don’t know if I’ve told you on my podcast, but we tend to spend a lot of money on our cars when they break, because we love, I personally love having an older vehicle. I got three younger boys that are gonna be learning to drive on that van. And I go to girls camp. Like I do all the things and I just don’t wanna have a car that I’m gonna be really worried about keeping it super clean and pristine. But I was talking to my mechanic about this, cause he said, oh, my clients will come in. They’ll say, oh, sorry. You know, we’re buying a new car so we won’t see you. And he says, yep, I’ll see you. Don’t worry.

And sure enough, even a brand new car where everything is just spic and span. It’s beautiful. It’s going to wear down. And it’s the same thing with our bodies. It’s the same thing with our brains. And so with losing weight, It’s one thing to lose the weight, but keeping it off is a totally different story.

And of course, Where is that in your story? How many times have you lost weight and kept it off? So in fact, I’ll be talking about this at the end of my podcast, but I do have, if you’re listening to this in real time, I have a live event happening October 9th, through the 13th. It’s gonna be at the primitive gatherings retreat center, and it’s going to be unbelievable because we’re gonna have 25 women there. And I am going to be sharing with them this whole process of weight loss, maintenance, and so this podcast is just to start opening your brain. It’s kind of like, I imagine it, you’re just getting like the sample of something. And then when you come to the live retreat, it’s like, not only do you get to taste it, but you get to live it and you get to experience it and you get to like workshop it, and live it. Being like, you can see it and take a little, little tiny taste. You can actually like have it in you and it will be, it’ll become a part of you, right.

It just becomes part of your everyday. And it’s, it really will be life changing. Like, I don’t say that lightly because once you know something, you can’t unknow it and if you don’t know it, you can’t apply it. But once, you know, it’s like in you, you can’t help, but be different. Okay. So. just like your car, you start driving it around.

So the engine starts getting used. We have dust on the road, it starts going into your engine. You’re gonna drive over bumps. It’s gonna affect your tire alignment. A rock will hit the windshield and it cracks. The cars require maintenance and we do too. So what kind of maintenance are you giving yourself?

So what kind of food are you eating? And if you’re eating that kind of food, what is that doing in your body? So are the ingredients in the food that you’re eating, do you know how to pronounce them? Because if you don’t even know how to pronounce them, your body doesn’t know what to do with them.

How you talk to yourself. So your inner dialogue, how is that affecting your body? What about the way that you dress and care about yourself? So if you wake up in the morning and you, you just slough on some. You know, yoga pants in a hoodie and you never really do your hair or put on some makeup.

How is that affecting the way that you talk to yourself and love yourself? How much sleep and rest are you giving yourself?

How much do you move your body? How much do you worry about what others think about you and what you, what you think of others? So all of those things, they impact that maintenance like that way of taking care of yourself. So whether you are at your goal weight, or you will benefit if you’re okay. So let’s say even if you’re at your goal, weight or not, what happens when you learn this process of weight loss, maintenance is that you are going to, like I said, once you have this framework in your brain, now you can’t unlearn it and you can.

Look at that in a different way. So I want to emphasize that your body and your higher brain want you to be at its natural thin state. So all of us have a natural thin point in our bodies and our higher brain knows that when you are at your, naturally thin point of your body or thin state, your whole body functions better.

You don’t have as many aches and pains. You’re at less risk of disease. You have brain clarity, you don’t have that brain fog, and you have increased confidence. So when you learn unconditional love, right. That, and I have this love. I have this little cute acronym, because you know, it’s just so fun to make those acronyms. But when you learn this unconditional love for yourself, then weight loss maintenance just becomes second nature, just like breathing or your heart pump. 

Okay. So the first one is learn. The first letter of love is L of course, and that’s learned, learn what food is best for you, what role you want food to play in your life and how to ensure that it’s gonna work.

So if you want to live in a body that’s working really well and feeling really good. You get to start exploring what food works best for you. So does it work best for you to eat a lot of meat or does your body not like meat? What about dairy? We already know that if you eat too much refined flour, sugar, what happens to you?

Okay. So just learn and I want to emphasize, and it’s interesting cuz even in my program, we call what we eat a protocol and I said, well, we’re always eating a protocol whether before love yourself then or not. So if your habit was to wake up and have a donut or have a muffin for breakfast, and then you have a bunch of coffee, you put a bunch of sugar in it and then you have a snack at, you know, at 10 o’clock of donuts or I don’t know, even like granola bar or something. And then you have lunch, you have a peanut butter sandwich, like whatever you eat every day, however much you drink or don’t drink or how much you sleep or don’t sleep. That’s actually what you’re doing. So that’s called your protocol. 

Sometimes women say, oh, well, I’m not doing my love yourself thin protocol. I’m like, well, your protocol is always whatever you’re eating is what’s your protocol. So you get to decide if it’s a good protocol for you or not. Okay. So, but you need to learn and learning requires investigation.

Investigation requires keeping data and learning from it. Now the next letter is O in love and that’s observe. So you observe your past, present and future, unless you are able to get peace from your past. You will not be able to move forward in the future. So one of the things that I see a lot in my program and coaching my one-on-one clients is they keep bringing their past back with them.

They’re like, oh, but I’ve never been successful before. Or I’ve always been the heavy one or I was never picked at school. So the problem is like all of those negative things that you’re saying, those are like really heavy weights on your back. And you’re just carrying it around with you all the way. So you’re not able to move forward very powerfully if you’re carrying around all this heavy weight.

And so I want you to observe it, see what’s happening. And when I say observe it’s, I kind of imagine you’re a scientist in a laboratory and you, like, let’s say you have, do they. Do rats, you know, like when they’re testing on animals, but when you are able to stand up above it, you can observe it.

You can kind of see. And when emotions are high intelligence is low. So if you can get to that place where you’re like, you kind of take yourself away from it, then you’re much better able to observe what’s happening and you can start seeing patterns and you can be, oh, I see that that’s happening.

So now you’re more open. So that’s gonna be so much more powerful for you. Okay. And then the V is verify your story. My husband often says there are three sides to every story. So there’s there, his side, her side and the truth. And so when I say that we all have filters, we all have different ways of looking at things.

So I don’t know if you’ve ever tried that thing where you take a picture of your quilt and then you put different filters on your phone. Where I, when I worked at the quilt shop, we used to sell the tone of the quilt for you, and then same thing with your phone, right?

If you could put it on black and white or grayscale you’re able to see the color for its value rather than. Like you get distracted by the red or the green or whatever, the whatever colors. And so you can see if it’s like darker or lighter or medium, and then you can see if there’s that balance. And so the problem is if we have, we all have biases, which are filters, right?

And if we are constantly looking at our life in a certain way, we’re not able to see the full side of the story. So one of the things I teach in love yourself thin is that we can rewrite our past without having to do anything different. And just like with relationships. If you go to my podcast with Jody Moore about having difficult conversations, we would spend so much time trying to convince the other person to change where really, it’s ultimately our decision to change, because if we don’t change the way that we look at things then even if the other person has changed, it doesn’t matter because we haven’t changed. 

And then the last letter of love is excellence. So everything you do in your life, you want to feel like you’ve done it at your very best. You’ve put your best foot forward. And the thing that has kept so many of my clients from reaching. That helped them, prevented them from reaching out to me, to work with me is because they were really embarrassed and being overweight was a very, was a sore spot for them. It was very sensitive and it was very difficult.

And so even you listening to this podcast, like I’m giving you, I just give you so much love for listening to this podcast, cuz you’re finally having the courage to do something different and I’m telling you. This is really hard. It’s really hard to try to tackle something that you feel really bad at, you know?

And so for you to listen to this podcast, I want you just to put your hand on your heart right now and say, wait a go like a good job. Right? You’re finally giving yourself some tools because you resonate with what I’m saying, right? Like you get it. You’re like, okay, I’ve followed all these diet and it’s not like you’re not good at following directions.

I mean, Google maps tells you what to do. And you’re like, yeah, I do it. And she Google, whatever, you know, if it’s a girl voice or boy voice says, get in the right lane, I do it. I know how to follow instructions. I mean, we all got on a podcast, you know how to follow instructions.

You go open your phone and then you turn on the podcast, right? It’s not that you aren’t excellent. It’s not that. So it’s hard for you. You tend to be really good at everything you do. And weight loss has not been that. And so of course the perfectionist comes in and, and all of that, I hear you and I get it.

It’s hard. But when we learn to take your ability to have excellence, okay. Excellence is a skill set you have learned to be excellent at everything. Now the problem is it’s, it’s not all or nothing. Right. We have learned to become excellent at something.

I was talking to my own coach about this the other day about trusting other people. And she said, It’s not like you either trust them or you don’t, there’s like a sliding scale of trust. So sometimes you trust them with something like other, and sometimes you just trust them with certain things. And other times you wouldn’t, you don’t trust them on things. It’s like an ebb and flow, right?

It’s not, she said it was fluid. And I was like, absolutely. And that’s the same thing with us. We trust ourselves. With pouring water. We trust ourselves with paying bills. We trust ourselves with brushing our teeth. We trust ourselves with, if we said we’re gonna go on a coffee date with a friend. We trust ourselves to get there.

At that time, there are things that we feel very confident in doing and other things we don’t. And so learning how to build confidence is part of this process. So you will. So in weight loss maintenance, and what I’m gonna be teaching at this live event is you will use that event as a gauge in the progress of your life, because you don’t know what you don’t know.

And if you don’t know it, then you can’t apply that tool. I remember the first month or two, I was in the classroom as a school teacher. We did this art project where we did art rock, we were doing mapping and oh, I just thought it was this greatest idea ever. And then I hadn’t really thought this might not be a good idea to have a bunch of rocks in a classroom with a bunch of boys that might wanna throw rocks.

Like it didn’t even occur to me. Anyways, it was controlled chaos. And I’m glad that it, I mean, it could have gotten a lot worse than it did and, you know, I had to give myself compassion, but I just didn’t know some of those classroom techniques or just to be able to think of things all the way through.

And so when you learn these tools, And you’re in person and you’re with other women who experience those same struggles. You also forge a stronger relationship and support system for yourself. You connect and you build a community with them. 

We’re gonna have outings and workshopping, and we’ll be stitching at night. We’ll be connecting, but what I really wanna focus on, and of course, you’re welcome to come. It will be amazing to have you. There are only 25 spots. So first come first serve. They’ll fill up quickly. So make sure you come, but let me just review this for the podcast, because some of you obviously are listening to this after, after the event.

And I, this podcast is very important for you to listen to. Weight loss maintenance is the way that you take care of yourself. It’s the way that it’s a way of how you value yourself and your body is always getting used. It’s like how we talk to ourselves, how we dress ourselves, how we take care of ourselves, just like my laptop.

I value my laptop. My business is dependent on me having a well functioned laptop. So I’m not gonna go around and throw the laptop around. I’m not just gonna check it in my purse or throw it in the backseat of the car or throw it on my bed at night. I’m not gonna just, you know, leave it open beside my dining table with food there. 

No, I’m gonna take care of my laptop. I’m gonna make sure that I have a protective cover and that I always keep the charger with a laptop and I keep it clean. And I don’t have crumbs and eating around it cause I need it to be like good and taking care. That’s what we’re gonna teach you how to take care of your body and how to take care of yourself.

And of course, this is just the very surface level. Right. And like I say, in this podcast, this podcast is giving you awareness, love yourself thin in my one-on-one coaching. That is where we go to work. That’s where we apply it. That’s where we troubleshoot. That’s where we implement. That’s where we, we really get our hands dirty and we get to work at like making that transformation real.

Yes. It’s important to listen to these podcasts and I love that you’re here. Ugh. It does my heart. So good to know that you’re here. And I think of you all you ladies and, and men, if there’s men here too, that are listening to this podcasts, it warms my heart. I’m just so thrilled for you. But again, to have a balanced life, we need to have consumption and we need to have application.

And if you aren’t applying these things, in fact, yesterday was very interesting. I had a lady reach out to me on Instagram and she said, oh, I need help with my procrastinating. Dare. I said, sure, no problem. So we went back and forth and I said, well, so after a few back and forths on Instagram, I said, well, you have a couple of choices.

You can sign up for my procrastination class. You can buy my prerecorded procrastination class. You can talk to me about love yourself thin and how you can learn to manage your brain. Or you can stay the same. Be this to say it is not easy to ask for help and it’s not easy to make a decision.

You think it’s easy just to say, I’ll do it later, but the problem is, and this is, and we’ve done. I have a podcast about this. I can’t remember which episode, but it’s when you don’t make the decision, you’re actually making a decision to not progress. You say I’ll do it later. You’re just making a decision to not prioritize yourself.

You’re making a decision to overwhelm yourself. You’re making a decision to stay the same. In fact, I know a lady, and for three years, she’s been saying the same story about her business. I want it to be this way. I want you this way, but she’s not into action. She doesn’t take the action. And one of the things I teach is Massive action. It’s like, you just go in, you just do it and then you just work it out. You evaluate. So I love you ladies and men and people we’re listening. I should just say, I love you people we’re listening, but I also want to encourage you to love yourself. And I want to encourage you to get the bigger picture.

So weight loss, maintenance, I just gave you the basics of learn, observe, verify, and excellence. You losing weight and keeping it off is just a skill. And how you maintain yourself, maintain, maintain how you take care of your body, how you maintain, how you think about yourself, how you talk to yourself that is going to translate, into weight gain or weight loss a hundred percent. 

All right. You’re amazing. So great. So thank you for joining me today. I want to just let you know if you’re interested in the weight loss maintenance live event. You do need to be a member of love yourself thin.

So go ahead and sign up for that. I do have a bonus. If you want to sign up for both and you can come and talk to me, make a 20 minute call. Also, I have a special 90 day workbook that guarantees 20 pounds down by new year’s Eve. So we are going to get, a book every day, You have a system and I’m in there in the group every day. So you do not want to miss that. And so if you signed up for the live program live event, we will be already started October 1st. And so I just wanna let you know about that because I don’t want you to miss out. It’s gonna be like, you’ve never experienced before weight loss, walking through, hold your hand amazing.

And some of you may be nervous to invest in coaching because you’ve tried so many diets in the past and failed. You may be nervous that you don’t have enough time to invest or be successful, and you’re worried you’d waste your money. So I do have the capacity to volunteer, to help four ladies a week for free, and in that session, I will teach you how to make, how to create a habit. Of weight loss that you’re not gonna give up after a week or so. And I’d like to help you. So jump on a call because those spots fill up quick, have an amazing week, and don’t forget 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.