Ep #24: Weight Loss Sabotage and How to Stop Derailing Ourselves

Are you convinced that your life won’t ever be what you want it to be because you keep gaining back all the weight you lost on all those diets you’ve tried and then some? Well, keep listening because you will learn it’s never too late to stop this as you learn what sabotage is and how we can stop it.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 24: Weight Loss Sabotage and How to Stop Derailing Ourselves. 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.

Welcome, this is the last week of the year. How are you feeling about welcoming in 2022? Are you excited? So this episode is going to be so helpful because you know the definition of insanity, doing the same thing, expecting different results? Well, today you can expect that your brain is going to learn some new things and you’re going to be able to see why you keep sabotaging yourself.

And sabotage really is, I like the definition I have here, is that you’re changing something that’s working or fight against common problems like weight gain and then you just quit. So what you can expect in this episode is I’m going to teach you what this concept is. We’re going to learn about success intolerance which is a concept that I learned from my business coach, Stacey Boehman. And I’ve expanded on this for weight loss. And she coaches people on making money and building their businesses.

But as I listen to her podcasts and I’ve been applying these principles for the last two years, I see so clearly how these relate to weight loss. So, thank you, Stacey, for helping me change and helping my clients do the same. So you can expect in this episode that you’re going to see why we have weight gain after a weight loss, even when we have so much desire to lose the weight. And we’re going to learn about three different steps of how you can stop this success intolerance happening for your life.

And then I’m going to show you how do you make decisions powerfully that will create permanent change in a story that you feel like you can’t change. It’s like one of those stories that you feel the plot is the same and it will always have the same ending. Well, this episode is going to teach you how even though the plot is the same, we definitely can change the ending. And the ending will be a permanence rather than same old, same old. Are you ready? Let’s go.

But before I do I wanted to share an experience of what happened with – this is a shout out to one of my clients. And how she has used this concept to really help her. So this client is in her early 30s and she really wanted to get married and she wanted to live a life with children and a husband. And she was feeling really stuck. And so she hired me at the end of 2020, and she has been able to lose 35 pounds and she is now engaged.

And one of the most exciting things about not only that she’s getting married and starting her family but there was a dress, it’s a 69 year old dress that her grandmother made that many of the family members have worn. And she is now able to wear that dress. And as we were talking about this very concept she was feeling a lot of resistance to accepting that her body could fit this dress, that this dress was going to work for her. And that she was going to have all of the success.

And her brain was looking for all the evidence of why this was not going to work for her and have all sorts of problems. And when I talked about this concept she had this realization, I’m just experiencing a lot of success intolerance. Thank you so much. So let’s do this.

Okay, so the first thing we need to understand is what success intolerance, what does that mean? So when you think about – I want you to ask the question, am I tolerating my success? So when someone offers you a compliment, how often do you graciously accept their compliment? Or are you not accepting that compliment? That’s such a good question. So let’s just go to the definition of intolerance. It’s an unwillingness, or an inability to accept views, beliefs or behavior that differ from one’s own.

So when something is basically off from your subconscious view or yourself in the world. So I like to think about it as how you would describe yourself, so your identity, your self-perception. And what happens with success intolerance is that you have success in something. So you have lost 10 pounds or 12 pounds, even 50 or 60, I’ve seen this with clients who have lost 80 pounds. And then they start to discount something that is working after having the feeling of success because of an inability to subconsciously sit with and having that success.

So they are having a hard time identifying themself as being successful with weight loss or being successful with quilting. So if someone looked at your quilt and they saw the beautiful free motion quilting, and you’d say, “Well, it’s not that great. Did you see this, did you see that?” So they point out all the mistakes. So our brain doesn’t feel comfortable with it, so it finds a way to get rid of it as soon as possible. And the thing that’s really difficult about this is that you have such a desire to have that result.

So there’s such a disconnect because you think well, no, of course, I should be happy that I’ve lost weight. But how many times have you said to someone, “You look really good, you’ve lost weight.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but I still have so much more to go.” And they don’t really own the success that they have. And one of the problems we have with this is because we are taught to always reach higher and higher and to not sit with success.

And in a book I’m reading right now, they talk about – the book is called The Gap and The Gain. And he was talking about how Benjamin Franklin in the constitution was writing the pursuit of happiness. And so one of the problems with this is that you think that happiness is outside of you, that you have to achieve a certain thing and then you will feel good. But what really has to happen is we have to start believing and loving ourselves in the process of change and then that just becomes a natural way of thinking. And it just becomes part of who we are.

So with weight loss for example, how this relates is you think that when you get to a certain number on the scale then you will be happy. And you think that everything’s going to be more wonderful and awesome. But you realize, we still have difficulty. We still have problems because it’s hard for us to believe that that is something that we have done, that we have had the success, that we have created that because it’s not anything that we’re familiar with. So that’s all that’s happened. Your brain just doesn’t believe it yet.

And it’s true, you’re not used to being this weight, it’s uncomfortable. And so that brings us to things that you aren’t comfortable with, make you uncomfortable. And sometimes it’s so uncomfortable in your brain that you have this intolerance to it, this inability to feel it. So you don’t understand that you can be intolerant of something because you have such a strong desire for it. And going back to the definition of intolerance, it’s an unwillingness or an inability to accept views, beliefs or behavior that differ from one’s own.

So just like before you were a mother you wouldn’t have identified as being a mother. And so it would be really awkward. And so you just feel this is just part of your identity. And for a lot of the ladies I work with they have struggled with their weight their whole life. So it just is part of their narrative, it’s just part of who they are. So to be able to have changed that feels really awkward and really uncomfortable.

So then when we don’t own our success, which is really our ability to change we feel like it was a fluke. We feel like it was someone else that did that to us. And it doesn’t actually become part of our narrative of who we are. And so then the brain has a hard time tolerating this new success and then it starts going into that self-sabotage mode by shrinking back and discounting all the successes that you’ve had. And then you can have your own opposing beliefs.

So our subconscious, it’s beliefs about ourselves, they are the most practiced beliefs, the things that you’ve thought about yourself the longest, that’s all. So we actually are always having to recommit to that decision. So I’ll give the example of my wedding ring. I’ve been married for over 20 years and every day I look at my ring and I think that’s the most beautiful ring, I love that ring. So I just recommit to it every day. So that’s what we need to do with our own successes.

So when you think about, when people compliment to you on your quilts you just get to decide if you’re going to just give yourself kindness and acceptance of, yeah, this quilt is wonderful, it’s a learning curve, not everything’s perfect but I can accept that. That’s a good example.

Okay, so I’m going to go into the three steps of how you can overcome success intolerance. And before I do that, so we have our own opposing beliefs. We all have these beliefs about ourselves and just like if we were, ever since a child heard stories like you’re just kind of big boned. You just are an overeater. That’s just part of what we start believing about ourselves and our own identity.

And I was coaching one of my clients on this who has lost 50 pounds and really is struggling to believe that she can continue to lose the next 50 pounds. She articulated this and I thought of this quote by Marianne Williamson, and she said, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we’re powerful beyond measure.”

And one of the things that my client brought up was she said, “Struggling with my weight,” she’s 61 years old. She said, “Struggling with my weight has just been a lifelong relationship, I don’t know what I would do with all that extra time and energy if I’m not worrying about my weight.” So that was such a great breakthrough for her. And I hope that as you’re listening to this, that you can have those breakthroughs as well. This is the work we do in Love Yourself Thin.

So the first step, what we need to do is we need to create a tolerance or an acceptance that you’re uncomfortable with success. So when people start commenting about your weight, when men start noticing you maybe a little bit more, when you get more attention that you’re used to, maybe you get invited to do more things and you’re included to do more. It’s just that uncomfortable feeling of going shopping and actually feeling good about what you’re wearing, that’s really challenging to be able to do more than you used to.

So you just have more energy and you’re just not used to being someone who just gets more done. And so that’s just kind of a shift for you. The other thing when you tolerate or accept that you’re uncomfortable with success is actually you start saving more money and you get more productive. And so there’s a transition of shifting the way you think about yourself and how you actually describe yourself. Now, with that, the definition of tolerance is to allow the existence of the occurrence without interference.

So how do you interfere with your own weight loss success? You are allowing yourself to believe in your success, are you? And are you allowing the subconscious beliefs, that internal thermometer to believe ourselves to be more? So this is what we have to ask ourselves.

Alright, step two, we need to allow the results without interfering or sabotage. So the definition of sabotage is to change something that’s working or fight against a common problem like weight gain you have for over three or four days and then you quit. Because you’re like, “Yeah, I guess it’s not working.” So you’re making decisions when you’re in a very unhealthy place, you’re in a very self-critical place. You’re on a beating yourself up mode and you’re making these decisions and that’s not going to help you.

So you can see this by starting to spin out, stop working on your eating protocol, you’re not allowing yourself to get curious about what the weight loss science says. You start blaming others. You start believing that old story of you’re not smart enough, or good enough, or worthy enough. And then the other thing that starts happening with this interfering or sabotage is you go to all the past failures and use it as evidence that you cannot be successful.

The third step is to embrace 50/50. You thought that losing weight meant that life would be so much better. You thought that you had arrived, and you never had to worry about weight loss again. The other thing that happens when you embrace the 50/50, and we’ve talked about this in past episodes is you think that everything just feels so overwhelming and confusing that you give up or just stay the same. Because you are constantly spinning and not learning solving problems and growing.

So if you just stay in overwhelm and confusion, those of course are indulgent emotions, and you never give yourself the opportunity to work through how to solve the problem. So those are the three steps of having to overcome success intolerance or having that belief that you are actually able to be successful in this. That’s all it’s really meaning.

And so when I talk about making decisions from that shaky ground it’s just that you are making decisions when you are uncomfortable. And so this is what I want to offer to you. I want you to only allow yourself to make decisions when you are calm. And so this is what I recommend to my clients. You say, “I only will make a decision, I will only change my protocol, I’ll give myself 24 hours before I make that decision.” Just like impulse buying with your fabric. So you can only make decisions for yourself from a place of calm.

The second thing that’s going to help you is that you need to acknowledge that you yourself was the one who got those results for yourself, that you are powerful. It wasn’t because of Weight Watchers telling you to do this counting points because even if it was, you’re the one who counted the points and you’re the one who created that. So you have to be in a place where you acknowledge that you are powerful and that you were instrumental, you were the one who created the results for yourself.

And then the third part, the third way that you will be able to make permanent change and overcome this unconscious identity crisis. And then the last thing you need to do in order to make decisions from a powerful place that’s going to create permanent change is to be well rested. So you have to be calm, those go together but just really feeling in your own power.

So let me recap. The reason we sabotage ourselves is because our brain doesn’t believe that we are actually the one that created the results for ourselves. And that our brain believes that we couldn’t actually be that person and create permanent change. And so because of that, and we had two main problems, the one was we thought that everything would be better when we lost weight. And we also don’t accept that we’ve had success if we’re still feeling uncomfortable.

I would love to hear your thoughts about it, and I want you to know that sabotage, the reason you go on yoyo diets is only because you just haven’t learned to see what’s going on inside your brain and that’s all. And when you can learn that skill and when you realize where those cracks were in your foundation, thinking that once you lost weight then everything would be better. So that is a thought error. And then understanding that weight loss is a continuous process and that being uncomfortable is all part of that.

Alright, thank you for joining me, have a wonderful rest of 2021 and I cannot wait to keep serving you. Take care, bye bye.

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