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[00:00:00] I haven't been doing what I teach for a few weeks now, maybe even months. I would love to claim it was an experiment, but it wasn't. It is just how this goes sometimes. I may have mentioned before that I have my own weight loss journey and that I'm still on it. So I thought instead of hiding what my sometimes messy journey looks like, I want to make it a lesson to share with you.
I want to normalize this to decondition our brains, to look at it as a reason to judge ourselves and quit. I'm hoping you understand that this happens to everyone. And bye. how the process might look for you and how you can move through and forward. I've lost over 60 pounds in my journey, and I have since gained 15 pounds.
I have thought that I'm a failure, that I'm an imposter. And since I am teaching you all this, I have no business telling someone else how to do this. So let's [00:01:00] back up and start. I have known for a while I have been avoiding and justifying not planning, assessing, or tracking. It started when I was in certification school and developing this program.
I wasn't getting my seven plus hours of sleep most nights. Um, then I stopped planning on the weekends. Somewhere in there. I stopped using my habit tracker. Then I, I started having judgmental thoughts. That was the problem. I wasn't doing anything well enough without my habit tracker. I thought I was hiding from all the things I wasn't doing, but I also wasn't getting to see all the things that I was still doing.
So I continue to do things in coaching. And for this program telling myself that I was busy and that this was just for a period of time and then after I could focus on myself again. Sound familiar? These are more justifications. I teach you and truly do [00:02:00] believe that you putting your needs first creates so much more to give to others.
So I continued not doing things for myself and justifying them. This is where my thoughts started becoming louder. I was thinking, I am not doing anything right. I am not doing any of it well enough. I believed if I didn't do it perfect, or all of it perfect, then none of it mattered. Wow. Some limiting, useless thoughts there.
I saw in the beginning and through my journey before, that each step, each habit was powerful and built on the next, but was completely useful on its own too. Now, I was thinking that every little win was only important for you, but mine didn't matter. I wasn't even looking for the wins anymore. I had started only looking for and then trying to hide it.
From all the things I thought I wasn't doing. I wasn't doing any of the [00:03:00] things that had got me to where I was. I wasn't doing the things I teach you to do. But, Yet, this still felt different than any other time I had, quote, failed at weight loss before. This time, as I noticed these things, I also never felt the desire to quit.
I would have quit previously to feel the relief and escape my own shame and judgments. I had actually the opposite effect. I still had the feelings of shame and judgment, some disappointment. However, my brain never went to quit. Instead, it ramped up into binging, overeating, and eating all the things that I usually only put on occasionally onto my plan.
I planned sweets, high salts, processed foods only occasionally because they bloat me and they mess with my digestion. They create pain in my joints from that inflammation. I was [00:04:00] eating these on hyperdrive. All of them in quantities till they were gone. Somehow my mind knew that I was not going to quit.
Not going to give up this time. My thoughts were telling me to get it all in before I noticed and started taking care of myself again. But never once did I have that thought of quitting. It never even entered my mind. Wow. Like that is a major win in itself. Like I have told myself again and again, I will never quit on myself again.
So even when I wasn't doing the things, quitting was never even in my brain. So I took some time to journal, really dump all those thoughts out and look at it. I saw how this became, um, and progress to where it is. I look at how different it was from previous times. Yeah. Then I started looking at why, why was I thinking this?
I don't believe it was from restriction or deprivation. [00:05:00] Those are two areas that have come up in the past and resurfaced from time to time. I remind myself sometimes that I am in complete control of what goes on in the plan and what goes in my mouth. I remind myself that I may be choosing to constrain what I'm choosing, but I am in control.
So there is no deprivation. That is just a thought I think sometimes. Then I started looking at why I even would want to plan, assess, and track. I truly believe that it makes my life easier. I look forward to what I have planned. Now that my smaller body needs even less food, I sometimes think, I don't have as many opportunities to eat all the things I love.
So, to plan what I love, It lets me know it is all on the plan and gives me something to look forward to. I know these are all just thoughts too, but they are serving me and I am choosing to keep these ones. So now, I am looking at [00:06:00] the facts and the thoughts. So understanding here, I'm standing at this point.
I can acknowledge how I got here, understand it and love that it has created an opportunity for me to learn from and for me to show myself how I now love myself. I made a plan for the rest of the day. It has already, um, it was already past breakfast. So I, I just wrote what I had on the plan for that breakfast already.
And I made the plan for the rest of the day. Then I went ahead and made a plan for the next day too. Since this was still a new habit, I was reintroducing. I wanted to set myself up with as much opportunity to succeed as possible. The next thing I wanted to do was think about how easy I could make this.
When I was having this epiphany, when I was really analyzing these thoughts, I was on vacation when this whole process was going on. And I wanted to go home at the end of that week [00:07:00] with as much success as possible. I went ahead and wrote the dinner menu for the re entry week and ordered the groceries for pickup for when I got home.
All of this felt very loving to myself. I envision, I, I envision my future self thanking me and making it for making it so much easier for her. The next thing was my thoughts. I know that my thoughts are what create the feelings that drive me to my actions. I wanna think that I am taking the most loving care of myself, and that changes how it may look from time to time.
I also love the thought that no matter what I do. I do not quit on myself ever again. I feel so loved and empowered with these thoughts. I am looking at what other obstacles I may need to overcome going home. And I remembered this all started when I wasn't getting my seven plus hours of sleep a night. [00:08:00] I am looking for ways to get more sleep each night consistently.
This is a great example of an unmanaged mind. I am telling myself you did not come this far to only come this far. I am determined to always be kind, patient, and take excellent care of myself, however that looks and however it changes. I really want you to see how this process is real. It really works.
You do not need to be perfect, only willing. What thoughts are holding you back? What thoughts drive you forward?
