#56: Your Body is Neutral

56. Your Body is Neutral

Do you ever think you will be able to look in a mirror and not feel upset about what you see looking back at you? Well, this episode is for you. I’m Dara Thomason, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters Episode 56, being happy and not having to lose a single pound.

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.

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This episode is going to help you reinforce the Love Yourself Thin philosophy. The more you love yourself, you will just lose weight. It’s inevitable, and I’m here to help you. Learn how to love yourself more. And so today’s episode is really talking about how do you create a feeling of happy without making the number on the scale change?

Be what you think it’s supposed to be. And I have some amazing thoughts that I got from one of my mentors, Jody Moore and ones that I got from my clients and my own work and my training. And then I’m going to help you to get to neutral. So if you are that person, that every time you look in the mirror, you think, oh, my body is disgusting.

I don’t want to look in the mirror. I’m so upset with myself. By the end of today’s episode, I promise you will have the skill, know how to get to at least neutral about your body. Now, if this is the work that you want to do for yourself, Join us this month of August. And if you’re listening to this afterwards, you can get the replays.

I promise they’re all in the portal, but if you’re listening to this at the time of the episode or in the month of August 2022, once you join Love Yourself Thin, then you can be a part of all these classes where we go deeper and deeper into these topics every Monday. Before I go into the meat of the podcast, I want to share a celebration. I’m so proud of my clients. They just blow my mind all the time.

This is one of my clients who lost 25 pounds in eight weeks. And in those eight weeks, her father suddenly passed. It was really challenging. They thought he was just going be in the hospital and he’d be out. And he ended up passing away and people were bringing them food.

She really didn’t have a lot of control over the food that was coming into the house, but she was able to keep going. Not only was she able to keep going, eating food that she didn’t feel like she had control over, but she didn’t, she wasn’t able to come to all the live classes.

She missed out on some of that support, but she was able to watch replay. She was able to be in the Facebook Group and get help and support. And I’m just so proud of her.

She is in her fifties. And I love sharing these examples with all of you because eight weeks ago, she didn’t think it was possible to change her experience with her body and with food.

She didn’t think that was possible. And then she came to one of my masterclasses and in fact, that masterclass is available in the portal so you can watch it. It was how to make weight loss sustainable. And she really worked on her thoughts and started learning the tools. And it’s just so much fun to watch that.

She did that for herself. And I want you to know that it’s totally possible for you too. That is one of the reasons I share these examples because, I know it’s hard to think of yourself as being successful when you’ve never had success. And I’m going tell you that she has really struggled with her weight and to have this, this total change.

And actually one of the things that when I asked her about what made the difference for her and having this weight loss, I want to share just some of the thoughts that she’s able to think now that have changed for her. So she believes in herself now, and she said food doesn’t matter to her as much.

She drinks her water. She spends time in her garden. She’s enjoying being with herself more. She can just sit outside with a glass of water or tea and just take in the beautiful gardening that she did. She’s not craving food so much, and she’s using her time to learn the classes and she’s able to just be with herself.

And it all started because she started to believe in herself more. And I want you to know that I believe in you. I truly believe that if you have enough intelligence to find a podcast, listen to a podcast, you have everything you need to lose the weight and keep it off. You really do.

So let’s get into the meat of the podcast. How do you be happy and not have to have the number on the scale change? And that’s what we’re talking about today. One of the greatest distractions I see women having. Is that they think that their self-worth is dependent on the size of their pants or the number on the scale, the way they look in a dress, how their hair looks, their pants size, their muscles.

I was just coaching, a client today, about her self-worth. She does everything for everyone else. In fact, she worked so hard on the farm that she wore out her knees, because she had to go and take care of all the animals and be consistently in the barn working and doing all the things.

She doesn’t think very highly of herself. And so she distracts herself by taking care of everyone else. And then she’s exhausted. And in order for her to feel any sort of dopamine hit, she’s had to rely on shopping or fabric, spending time on the internet, looking for her favorite candy and having it shipped to her.

And then she got excited about anticipating it coming and then anticipating opening it up and anticipating eating it. But then of course, what it does is just add more weight, which burdens her even more.

Your self-worth your worth as a human is non-negotiable. I heard it explained a little bit differently today. It was from a coach. She said your worth is like one hand. And your appearance is your other hand. Your appearance actually doesn’t determine your worth. Your worth is one hand. It’s your left hand and your appearance is your right hand.

So you can appear in different ways. You can have red hair, you can have yellow hair, you can have brown hair, you can have curly, you can straight, you have frizzy. You can have freckles, like all of those things. Those are just appearance. But your worth is totally separate. It doesn’t overlap. So some of us might value red hair more than others.

I love red hair. I don’t know what it is, but I just love red thick, curly hair. And so that’s something I value something I think is amazing, but that doesn’t impact someone’s worth. So if someone doesn’t have red hair, I’m not going to love them less. Okay. And I think that’s a really important way of looking at, in fact, there’s a quote here.

“If our eyes saw souls instead of bodies, how different would our ideal of beauty be?” And that was by Lauren Jauregui

So, our worth is always going to be constant so we can try new things. We can fail. Just like when we learned to tie shoes. If you didn’t get the first time, you didn’t get demoted, you weren’t at less important. Okay. Really important to think.

One of the greatest plagues for women in weight loss and in just general happiness, is they have this thinking and, and thanks to billions and trillions of dollars of advertising saying, you need to look a certain way, and that to be happy, you need to look a certain way, but appearance and worth are two separate things.

Okay. And your appearance: what one person thinks is beautiful is completely different than what someone else thinks is beautiful. And it’s interesting that we don’t go around as like for little kids and say, oh man, look at you, little kid, you’re not cute. We always say, oh, you’re so cute. You’re so adorable.

And then at like, what point did we not be cute and adorable anymore?

Elise Myers she’s on Instagram. And, she has like a million-something followers. And she said, when she grew up, she wanted to look good in a bathing suit because of all the messaging she got as a kid.

So sad. This is what I’m talking about is a distraction. The number on the scale is neutral, and we’re going really deep into this. And it’s part of the tools that is called The Model and this, which means our body is a “circumstance.” It’s just a fact. It’s what it is.

And it’s always our thoughts about it, that influence how we think. So if your thought is: I can’t stand how old my body is getting, or I can’t stand how big it is, or how fat it is, then you have frustration and then the actions are, you talk badly about your body.

You mistreat it with false pleasure. You take your body for granted. And then the result is you don’t like your body. But if you have a thought, my body is amazing, then the feeling is wonder. And if you’re, you are so amazed at it, you’re going to take care of that body. That’s the actions you’re going to take. And then of course the results will be you and your body get along really well.

I got this thought from Jody Moore and she said, “your body is not wrong.” And she was talking about, when you think about standardized clothing sizes. So somehow someone just decided that for this kind of body, you should have certain things.

Your body isn’t wrong, your clothes are wrong. When I heard her talking about this, I was like, of course, because I’m I have a 34 inseam. There’s not that many women that have a 34 inseam. And so a lot of my pants are too short. So luckily, capris and boots are popular. And I wear slouchy socks or whatever, and I just don’t get too stressed out because I really don’t have very many pants that go to my ankles.

I really don’t. And so, it’s not that my body’s wrong. It’s just, the clothes are wrong and, everybody is unique. So there’s a, a standardized template that doesn’t always work. Okay. And so when you go shopping and you keep telling your body that my body is wrong, that’s a lie. It’s just that the clothing manufacturers, they just had this standardized sizing.

And so that was a problem. And so just like my last episode about accepting what is you are, how you are supposed to. And so it’s interesting because even with my eyes, like I have hooded eyelids, I think I’ve actually talked about this in my podcast before and so people would make comments about my hooded eyelids and my sisters don’t have hooded eyelids.

My sisters have these like really pretty eyes. And so I’m judging my eyelids. That’s the way I was born. And that’s the way I’m supposed to be because I am this way. Another example that I wanted to share about our bodies is that to be happy with our bodies, this concept Jody was talking about, (can you tell, I was just listening to one of her podcasts that I just admire so much!) I really like the way that she brought this up and it, I wanted to share this with you.

She talked about how our body is the most amazing invention ever. And she did a Google search, the greatest inventions in the last a thousand, last thousand years. There were things like the printing press because it increased literacy, and the electric light bulbs. We had social change.

We could be more; we could have longer periods of time where we could work, and we could see things. She talked about the automobile so we could travel more. If you had an emergency and you had to get a horse and wagon, thin of how much longer it would take to get to a specialized doctor.

Then we had the airplane, and it made the world smaller. We could travel more. We could interact with each other more. That helped mass production of food, computers, like all these things, but none of these inventions in the last thousand years are as amazing as our body, our bodies are incredible.

Our body, we have this nervous system that can regulate. If we’re super-stressed, we will have the fight, flight, or freeze that will kick in. We don’t even have to do that. We don’t do anything. Our body just does that. Our heart pumps blood. If we increase our speed, our heart will just say … no worries, I’ll just beat faster.

If we’re calm, it will just slow down and it will just give us that extra. We have a digestive system, and it takes vitamins and minerals and nutrients, and puts it in all the places that our body needs. We have our senses that tell us, like, if something’s burning or, it can give us joy and, happiness with the visual stimulation of a sunset, beautiful fabric, or a design.

It gives us fingers that we can use to touch and create and use scissors. So, our bodies are truly amazing. And just like that quote, that if our eyes saw souls instead of our bodies, how different would our idea of beauty be?

Especially when you think about, if you went to a different country, the space in between your two front teeth means, the more beautiful you are; in other countries, the taller you are, the more beautiful you are. The wider you are, the more beautiful

I really wanted to just emphasize that you don’t have to lose a single pound to be happy with this gorgeous body that you have.

And sometimes with my clients, I say, okay, tell me five things that you love about your body. And they have a really hard time. And I say, okay, you have teeth that can bite into food and they, and you have back teeth that can grind. You have the canines that can rip food. Like even that it was like: I have teeth.

What about your hands? They can work together, and you can use a rotary cutter. Like that is amazing. What about, you know, your sense of smell? Like what about your eyes that can take in beautiful flowers or whatever? So that is just some ideas that I really want to give you because one of the ways that I teach in my program is a tool called a Thought Download.

I want you to imagine you have a junk drawer, or you’ve got these boxes that you’ve been storing for a long time in your closet or in your basement or wherever. And you’re like, okay, enough is enough. We’ve been storing this stuff in the junk drawer. It’s a disaster.

I think the best way is just to dump it all out. Just see what’s there, because otherwise you’ve got this hiding and this corner and that over here. So you just dump it all and then you can sort it out and you can say: this is what I’m going to keep, or I’m not going to keep this.

And you go through all of it. And then you get to decide what you want now. This is what I do in my program, what we call a Thought Download. So we have all these thoughts in our head and they kind of jam us all up. They’re just, you know, judgment here or thinking here or your aunt said this about you and your teacher said that about you and you.

I want you to just get it all down on paper. And to give yourself a break, I say, we need to do what’s called Equal Airtime. And the acronym of that is – if you dump your brain and you have like 10 things that are negative and you only have two things that are positive, just like in the episode with Jody Moore.

If you don’t have a balance of like five to one, like the Gottman Institute, then that’s an unhealthy balance. It’s the same thing for the thoughts in your brain. And again, remember our brain has like 40,000- 60,000 thoughts a day. And so many of them are 95% subconscious and 80% of those are negative.

We have to intentionally create positive thoughts so that we can be more balanced. So the reason we talk about this becoming neutral is that we have skewed ourselves so much in the negative, and we are wired to be more negative in our subconscious, because if you are, if you walk outside of your house and there’s a polar bear or grizzly bear vs a rainbow, what are you going to pay attention to?

Of course, you’re going to pay attention to the grizzly bear! (I mean, you could see a polar bear if you live where polar bears are are), but obviously, your brain is going to look for the danger. It’s going to look for the negative. So I’m intentionally teaching you to give yourself some positive to help balance that.

So, I want you to imagine when you were a kid and you went to school and you had the number line on your desk and you had zero in the middle and you had the negative numbers on the left side, and you had the positive numbers on the right side. I want you to imagine that same visual, but I want you to have a neutral feeling in the middle and that’s our circumstance.

Your body is a fact. It’s like we could take the measurements. We could take the weight, all of that. That is all neutral. And the negative side to the left, that’s disappointment, frustration and all of those negative emotions. Then we have all these positive emotions, like wonder amazement, joy, elation, excitement.

this body of ours has a nervous system and it has a heart that pumps and we have a digestive system, and we have senses. Even if we we’re blind, we have our other senses. They get even more attuned. And so, then we have that superpower on that side. For example, I have finger with a nerve that died, so I don’t have the proper feeling in that finger, but I can do other things with it.

Your worth is non-negotiable. There was never a point when you were not worth it anymore. That’s not how things work. Our, our advertising, they want us to be dependent on them. They want us to buy stuff. They want us to spend money so that we can feel worthy. That’s one of their strategies, but we don’t have to listen to them.

Our body isn’t wrong. Our bodies are just perfect. Exactly how they are. Even if at 250 pounds, your body isn’t wrong, because guess what your body did when you ate all the food, your body just stretched.

Your body just allowed the extra storage. So your body isn’t wrong. It’s doing exactly what it needs to do. And your body is incredible. It’s so amazing. And so the last thing I want you to do is get to neutral. Bring it to neutral by starting to be amazed and in awe of the body that you.

Okay. So that is what I have for you today. My friends, I am so grateful that you’re here with me. And one thing I want to share before I go, is that I’m a mom of five kids. I’m a woman who struggled with her weight. I remember shopping when I was in grade six and I was a sweet little kid.

And I remember trying on a pair of Levi’s and I thought, oh, my thighs must be big because my waist is loose, but my thighs are kind of tight here. So I actually carried around this thought with me for a long time that I have big thighs. And if you saw a picture of me when I was nine, that’d be the last thing you would think.

I didn’t even actually have hips until I was in university, but I had this story and I just kept feeding that story about my thighs. And so we all have these stories and the more that we can unveil them and, and put a flashlight on these deep, dark secret stories that we are so ashamed of.

The more we can bring it to light, the more we can bring it to neutral. You can have success. We’re all wonderful and amazing. But I just decided that I was going to change my story. And so I just invested in my brain and I just went for it.

And now I have a body that I feel a lot more comfortable in and I have been able to dispel so many of those myths that I kept holding onto thinking they’re real like menopause and family history and jeans. And I was, you know, I was a goner. I like, my grandma was overweight. My mom’s a little bit overweight. Like, I guess that’s just my, my lot in life.

There’s nothing special about what I do. I don’t have a personal trainer. I don’t spend a ton of time cooking. I don’t even like to track steps. I don’t really understand calories. It’s not a big deal, and I want you to know if you’re thinking, she’s got something that I don’t. I’ve just dedicated myself to learning some tools and I’ve learned those tools over and over, and I’ve never quit on myself.

And that is totally available for you too. And that’s why I invite you at the end of every podcast to join Love Yourself Thin, and you too can have that transformation and you too can be one of my celebration stories at the beginning of my podcast. I am challenging you to meet with me.

Let’s have a 20-minute conversation. If you’re here listening, and this is resonating with you, this is your invitation. This is that sign to know, yeah, this is for me now.

All right. You have an amazing week, and I can’t wait to talk to you the next episode. Bye-bye.

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

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