Part 1: Losing Weight and Gaining Money

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Related Episodes:

• Part 2: Losing Weight and Saving Time
• Part 3: Losing Weight and Increasing Connection
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Full Episode Transcript:

Part 1: Losing Weight and Gaining Money

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I have another three-part series for you. I did one a couple of months ago centered on the eating behavior sequence and this one is on weight loss. Today will be part one and I’m going to talk to you about losing weight and gaining money. So fun. And at the end of this episode, I will let you in on what Part 2 is going to be next week.

So, who doesn’t like to gain money? I was going to call it losing weight and saving money, however just making that word switch to gaining is way more fun. Because they really both mean the same thing, at least regarding what this episode is going to be about.

Before we dive in, just a little bit of news. Next Wednesday, I’m hosting a free live workshop on how to break an emotional eating habit. So, it’ll be on April 26th, which is a Wednesday, at 12:00 PM eastern time. So, for many of my listeners that is right at lunchtime. For my international listeners, that would be GMT minus 4.

You can grab your free spot here: https://katemjohnston.com/workshop

What I’ll be teaching at the free workshop is why it’s quite natural and almost expected that we emotionally eat as humans. Our brains were sort of constructed in a way that makes emotional eating a very easy thing to do. Why this is helpful for you to know is that you’ll understand that there is nothing “wrong” with you. You have a perfectly normal human brain if you emotionally eat. Even if you feel like you are the biggest or worst emotional eater in the universe.

I’ll also be explaining how you may be having some self-sabotaging thoughts that just make it worse for you. That way, you can be aware of some of these thoughts. Awareness enables you to not make the emotional eating habit worse than it already is.

I’ll also of course be teaching you how to break an emotional eating habit forever. At the end of the workshop, I’ll share the benefits and features of working together, meaning you having me as your personal eating habit and weight loss coach to get you your results and keep those results. To get you through all the challenges. To help you develop the skills you’ll have for life.

Alright, on to losing weight and gaining money. So, the best way to lose weight is by changing your eating habits. Lots of research shows this, unless of course you’re looking at research sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, and they’ll tell you the best way is to take their new weight loss medication. Or research from a University Hospital that tells you that weight loss surgery is the best, because their hospital will benefit financially from that in a very significant way.

But when you take the secondary gain out of it from these big companies and universities or hospitals, the research all points to changing your eating habits as being the best way.

So when changing your eating habits to lose weight, you’ll most likely be eating less food and better quality food as far as foods that have a higher amount of nutrients. This means food in their more natural states. Because you’ll most likely be eating less food and more natural foods, more money will be staying in your wallet. It’ll be staying in your bank account and accumulating week after week, month after month, year after year.

When you change your eating habits for life and lose weight and keep it off, which is what I help you with as your coach, you will gain so much money over the years that you would not have gained or saved if you didn’t lose weight.

Now, I’m not saying that if you want to make money, then you need to lose weight. I’m just saying that if you want to lose weight or need to lose weight for health reasons, this will most likely decrease your food costs for the rest of your life.

Now, you might be thinking, “well healthier food tends to cost more”. This is not that true. The healthiest foods are whole foods. Meaning foods that are in their natural state in nature. For example, a cucumber or banana or cashew nuts.

Healthier foods are also foods that aren’t necessarily in their whole food state, but maybe just a little bit processed. For example, a fruit and vegetable smoothie. It has whole foods in it, but they are mechanically processed in the blender. Peanut butter would be another example.

Very processed foods would be things like crackers, baked goods, sausage, even tofu. So, these are highly mechanically processed and chemically processed meaning there are chemicals added to these foods to give them consistency or keep them in certain shapes or to be used as preservatives. Also, when grains are processed into a flour, they’re oftentimes stripped of a lot of fiber and nutrients. The things your body needs to function and to feel full and satisfied.

The healthiest foods such as vegetables, fruits, meats like fish, chicken, steak, nuts, seeds, beans, are inexpensive. Maybe fish and steak are a little bit more expensive, however proteins are so filling that you tend to not eat a lot of them. Buying organic, grass fed beef or chicken might be more expensive than non-organic, non-grass-fed beef or chicken, but that’s just a personal choice. You don’t have to buy the best of the best to have better eating habits and lose weight.

Processed and packaged foods like crackers, granola bars, pretzels, tend to not be as filling as your vegetables, fruits, beans, and check in, so it could be quite easy to eat an entire $4 box of crackers in one sitting. Especially when most of that box is just air.

Now of course the $6 box of gluten-free crackers is more expensive than the box of saltines, however gluten-free isn’t necessarily healthier and crackers in general are not the healthiest foods and will make weight loss a little slower for you.

So, let’s just say that you were not going to make any switches as far as what specific foods you’re eating. To lose weight, you would have to eat less volume. So, if you’re eating less, you’re of course going to be keeping that money in your wallet. Think about how that adds up over time.

And once you lose the weight that you want to lose, you won’t go right back to eating the same amount of food as before, because then you’ll just gain it all back. Plus, if you and I are working together, we will be addressing those underlying things that led to those past eating habits in the first place, so that they don’t occur again.

So, yes, you may reintroduce a little bit more calories into your day so that you just maintain your weight. However, the overall amount and quality of foods that you’re eating after you’ve lost weight and you are maintaining, is going to be less amount and better quality with more nutrients and foods that are more filling than they were before.

Another way that you will gain money by losing weight is this. I see a lot in my clients that they go out to eat less often. And they don’t feel deprived either. In fact, one or two have even recently said that when they do go out to eat, they enjoy it more. Because it’s not such a frequent thing, so feels a little bit more fun and exciting.

For example, one of them was going out to dinner three to four times a week and probably by week two of working together, she told me that she was only going out to dinner once, maybe twice a week, and now she’s only going out to dinner once a week tops.

She’s noticing that she really enjoys that meal too. She even takes home about half the meal. She feels full after just eating half of it. She also mentioned that her husband Is now doing the same thing. Which makes it even easier for her.

The best part is, she doesn’t feel as though she’s leaving hungry. She says that she takes home half the meal because she really is full after just eating half of it. And if she wants dessert, she’ll order dessert to go, eat a few bites while she’s there, and then she’s excited because she has dessert for the next few days at home. She’ll just eat a few bites each night.

And this is not something she used to do before. She used to have a full dessert every single night, whether they were out for dinner or just at home.

Now you might ask “why would you go out to eat less frequently if you’re trying to lose weight?”. The reason is this. Restaurants want you to love their food so that you keep coming back. Therefore, they put all the butter, all the oil, all the salt, all the sugar, all the things in their food to make it as tasty as possible and to make your brain want more of it.

They also tend to give you a very large volume, at least here in the United States they do. When it’s in front of you, it is much more likely that you’ll eat all of it. Whereas, if you’re at home, it tends to be a lot easier to control portion size. There are lots of ways to do this.

So, you can imagine that if you decrease going out to eat even just going out one less time a week, you’ll save money. Especially week after week after week. Also, even if you didn’t go out less frequently, if you are taking home half of your meal, you now have another meal, whereas you didn’t have that before.

Alright, so now for the fun part. Let’s do a little bit of math. So, let’s just say you save an average of $10 a week in groceries and you have 20 years left of your life. That would be a monetary gain of $10,400. Now, let’s just say you go out to eat one less day a week and you have 20 years left of your life.

Now I know the cost of going out to eat can vary depending on where you are, and where you go out to eat. It also depends on if it’s just you, if it’s you in a significant other, or if it’s you, your significant other and children. So of course, there are a lot of different scenarios here. But let’s just say that you end up saving $50 a week by going out to eat one less time.

That means, over 20 years, you’ll have a monetary gain of $52,000. What! So, if you combined that with the $10 a week in groceries, that would be a total of $62,400. And of course, this is a rough estimate and could be substantially more. I don’t think it would be substantially less to be honest, because I was a little bit conservative with the numbers.

Alright, now onto the potentially even bigger monetary gain from losing weight. Think about the savings in health care costs for you as an individual, out of your pocket.

This includes copays on medications that you may not even currently be on, but you may be on later in life due to health issues that can come about because of eating habits or body weight. It includes copays for doctor visits and deductibles and hospital stay costs. And especially with health insurances not really covering as much as they used to, health care costs are probably going to increase more and more for the individual. You’ve probably already seen your deductible go up. And you may not have a lot of health care costs now if you are on the younger side, but you will later in life.

So, when you lose weight in a healthy way, by changing eating habits, and even working on some other lifestyle changes and healthy habits, your overall health improves. Even your mental/emotional health because we work on that too.

Overall, you decrease your risk of many diseases. And even if you have already been affected by preventable diseases, which are the ones that typically will occur with poor eating habits, poor lifestyle habits and being overweight, losing the weight and developing healthier habits can absolutely decrease these diseases and even treat them entirely.

As a physician assistant for 15 years, I have seen this happen repeatedly. Even in orthopedics and spine, I have had patients change their eating habits and no longer have substantial back pain that they were going to have surgery for because the pain was so bad.

I will never forget a patient that I had, who weighed somewhere around 350 pounds and she needed to lose 100 pounds for us to operate on her back. Her quality of life was terrible because of the pain. I gave her a few recommendations for some dietary changes. She came back about six months later saying that she implemented those, lost weight, and all the pain resolved. I mean completely resolved. I was in a little bit of disbelief at the drastic change, and she had done nothing else besides what I had recommended.

She had decreased some of the foods that typically can be linked to inflammation, and she added in the foods that I had recommended, which were anti-inflammatory foods. She felt an incredible difference. Decreasing her body weight also probably helped substantially as well. Amazing right? And I’m sure her back was not the only thing that was affected in a really great way by the changes that she made and the weight that she lost. I imagine her cardiologist was very pleased as well.

OK, so I don’t even know where to start with calculating the money saved over the years due to less health-related costs. That can be such a huge variation and I think a lot of calculations would be involved with this. I imagine though that this can easily be $10,000 ranging all the way up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on how substantial the weight loss and lifestyle changes are and how many decades you live.

Imagine all the things you can do with all that money saved. You can spend it, or you can invest it and make even more money. So much fun to think about, right? And of course, don’t forget about the money from the food itself.

One last one that I want to mention, and there are certainly lots of other little money savings here and there. But with weight loss and healthy lifestyle changes that go with that and all the healthy eating habits that go with that as well, you’ll typically find that you have increased energy and increased confidence.

These things can really help you in your career. Potentially helping you to be promoted, maybe being energized and confident to apply for positions that you may not have felt as comfortable or confident about applying to in the past, leading to higher income. I just wanted to mention that one because that’s one that you may not have thought of before. And there are some other less obvious ones like this as well.

Alright, so if you want to start losing weight and gaining money now, so that you can really optimize all the benefits from losing weight, not just saving or gaining money, I can help. I can help you to do this much more effectively if you have been unhappy with your progress thus far. Or, if you feel like you have gotten to a certain point where you feel like you need help, I’ve got you.

I can help you do this in a way that you lose weight, and you keep it off. I can help you do this in a way that you are changing your eating habits for life. You’re changing other lifestyle habits as well.

You’re gaining so many different things that branch off not only from the weight loss results but branch off from the process to get there. The skills that you learn.

Even just feeling better from the way that you are talking to yourself, thinking about yourself and your body. Feeling better from the new healthy lifestyle habits and the more nutritious foods that you’re eating. Feeling better from not eating as much sugar and salt and even just not eating as much and feeling overly full or getting heartburn from the foods you’re eating.

We will work closely together so that you have support the whole way through and even with the maintenance part of it. And when things come up, we problem solve for them. When you hit plateaus, which always happens, we get you through that plateau.

Normally, when people hit plateaus, it’s very easy to give up. And then they just lose all their progress. I can help get you through those plateaus emotionally so that you push through and continue getting results after you’ve made it through that little plateau. We keep going.

We celebrate the wins, because there are so many wins, not just the number on the scale even. And most likely, you’re probably not celebrating all the wins on your own, which can help motivate you to keep going. I’m willing to bet though that you get down on yourself when you feel like you’re not doing well. Which is not helpful. And you will learn how to minimize that and really maximize positive self-talk. So that you can keep getting results.

So, my career ladies, invest in your future and start losing weight and gaining money for the long term. If you want to talk about it, let’s do that. The easiest way to do that right now is right on the episode page or if you’re listening through your podcast app like Apple or Spotify, just go into the episode description and you’ll see the link to book a free consult.

Don’t worry I didn’t forget, as promised, for next week, Part 2 is going to be losing weight and saving time. I know you’d love more time, so I’m going to explain how losing weight will save you time. Lots of it. More than you even realize. Alright, thanks for listening, take care and I’ll talk with you next week for Part 2.