Flexible Weight Loss: Skills Not Rules

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Full Episode Transcript:

Flexible Weight Loss: Skills Not Rules

Hi there, career women. You’ll be happy to hear that the most effective way to lose weight is not by following rules. Instead, it’s when weight loss fits into your lifestyle and follows your rules. Especially for busy career women.

Basically, the way that you lose weight has to fit around you and your lifestyle. Otherwise, it will be completely disruptive, difficult to stick to, and not really enjoyable.

So, to have weight loss that fits into your lifestyle, the best way to do that is to learn weight loss skills, rather than rules or restrictions.

I mean think about it, if you’re going to lose weight and keep it off for years to come, you’re not going to want to be restricting yourself with only eating certain foods for all those years to come. You want to still be able to enjoy foods that you’ve always enjoyed. That’s how I lose weight and kept it off easily.

Here’s something that will shock you even more, but you could actually lose weight on a diet of Donuts and pizza. As long as you learn the weight loss skills.

Now your health will suffer if you just ate Donuts and pizza for the rest of your life, because of the lack of nutrients, so I don’t recommend it at all.

The lovely thing about weight loss skills, is that skills are with you for the rest of your life. You’re probably not going to want to completely restrict yourself for the rest of your life, or follow food rules.

The other thing I don’t like about food rules is that whole concept of you can’t eat this or that. Whenever you feel like you can’t eat something, it can actually create more of a desire for it.

And it just doesn’t feel good. You almost feel like a prisoner. Or a little kid who has all kinds of rules to follow. You’re an adult, there are enough rules in this world, I don’t think that you need to follow strict food rules if you don’t want to.

Now rules and restrictions are different than plans. When I work with my clients, I help them create plans for the week ahead that they choose. So something that they feel will work with their lifestyle and with the specific things going on that week for them.

So for example, if a client is going out to dinner three times in the coming week, she might tell me that she only wants to have dessert one of those times.

So, if that’s the case, we make a plan around that and make sure that she is set up for success to follow through on that. I also make sure that she feels really good about it and feels that it is very doable. So very different than rules and restrictions.

Alright so let’s get to some of these weight loss skills. These are in no particular order, but the first one i want to talk about is mindful and intuitive eating.

These are both very similar, but the concept is to learn to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’ve had enough. So to really focus in a body and learn what your body is actually feeling. What sensations do you feel when you are hungry. What sensations let you know you’ve had enough. What sensations do you get when you are overly full.

Getting this awareness and then noticing this each time you eat, is definitely a learned skill.

Several benefits of this are that it prevents overeating, which you’re definitely going to want to prevent if you’re trying to lose weight, it helps reteach your brain and body that you don’t need to worry, that you will give your body what it needs when it’s hungry.

Mindful and intuitive eating also includes paying more attention to the flavors, smells and textures and even how the food looks visually, to get more enjoyment from the food. When you’re getting more satisfaction or enjoyment from the food, you’re likely to be satisfied with a smaller amount.

Next up for weight loss skills is portion control. Now I don’t mean forcing yourself to eat a small amount every time. What I mean here is learning how much or how little your body actually needs. You don’t know how much is enough until you start learning and practicing this skill.

The next weight loss skill is planning. When you plan ahead, you are using the more future-focused part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. This part of your brain has your future and your goals front and center. Rather than the more primitive part of the brain, which is concerned with feeling good in the moment. So think instant gratification.

When you’re not planning ahead, you’re setting yourself up to make food choices that don’t really help you with your weight loss goals, and you’re setting yourself up overeat.

Think of this, have you ever been out running errands, and you start feeling those hunger signals. They keep building and building until you can’t take it anymore and you’re driving by the Chick fil-A (I’ve actually never been there…one of my clients jokingly said it’s kind of like crack) and feel like you have to stop and get something to eat otherwise you’re just absolutely gonna die.

This is the primitive part of your brain. The primitive part of the brain is focused solely on survival and thinks that if it doesn’t get food right now, you might die. That’s not the case though, because food is a-plenty, not like it was thousands and millions of years ago, when it was more difficult to get ahold of.

So learning the skill of, or essentially making the habit of planning for little things like this, by maybe packing a little Tupperware of nuts or a piece of fruit, is key to preventing that overhunger.

Next is a skill that my clients have found so incredibly useful and feel that it is absolutely life changing, along with the other skills of course. But this one was sort of a surprise to them. Learning how to manage your emotions.

It can feel fairly easy to choose those healthier foods in most situations, but certainly not when certain emotions come up. So learning the skill of managing emotions is so helpful with eating habit change and of course weight loss. But, the beautiful thing is that it’s also super applicable to everything else in your life.

When you learn that skill of managing your emotions and knowing exactly where your emotions come from, your thoughts, helps prevent emotional eating, helps control cravings, and helps with weight loss.

And then learning the skill of being able to reframe your thoughts or at least question your thoughts, helps you with everything in life. You just learn to start feeling better, because you realize how much control you have of how you feel.

For me, this was completely life changing. I actually treated my anxiety by learning this skill. Actually, I’d say it’s two skills, managing the emotions, and then also really learning the skill of how to question and even reframe my thoughts.

Actually, the best thing that I have ever done for myself, was learn how to do this. Which is why I incorporate this into my coaching philosophy with clients. It is just so valuable not just with eating habits and weight loss, but with everything. Confidence, happiness, stress, anxiety, depression, feeling worthy, motivation, commitment.

And to go along with this, another skill is learning to improve your inner dialogue, so that’s also a large part of my coaching. When you improve how you talk to yourself, you’re essentially improving your thoughts, which will always make you feel better.

When you feel better, you are much more likely and much more easily able to do the actions or the inactions that will help you to create the results you want to create in your life.

OK, Next up is a super important skill and that is learning to take small steps. We like to make big changes, especially as career women, because we’re go getters. And that’s great, but you need to break it down into small changes.

This is so important with sustainable weight loss, which is why it is one of the things that I’m teaching at the weight loss you can do workshop on February 1st.

If you haven’t reserved your free virtual seat yet, you can do so with the link in the episode description. I’m teaching you how I lost weight and kept it off in a very doable way, that fit my super busy lifestyle of being a surgical PA.

The reason why you don’t want to make big changes, and this actually kind of means changes that don’t fit into your lifestyle or your personality, is because they’re going to be much harder for your brain to want to follow through on.

You may start out being able to follow through, because of some really positive emotions like excitement, commitment, motivation, but as these emotions start to decrease naturally overtime, the resistance that your brain has against big changes is going to overpower you.

This is when you’ll notice that you start really falling off the wagon. And if you don’t have a coach helping you with all of this, it’s very easy to keep getting on the wagon and then falling back off and feeling like you’re not making any progress.

I hear this happening so frequently out there in the world, but I have not had this happen with a single client. That’s because that’s the power of coaching. I help clients in a way that helps prevent them from falling off the wagon, but also if they do, how to get right back on again and not let negative thoughts and feelings get in the way.

Also, this actually leads me to another skill of adaptability. Adaptability really helps with this. Being able to adjust what you’re doing going forward regardless of what happened yesterday or on the weekend or even today during lunch.

Also learning the skill of being able to adjust your plan based on changing circumstances. We have things come up in life and that’s why you can’t have such rigidity. You need to be able to have some flexibility and adaptability. So these are just skills that are learned through coaching as well.

Now of honorable mentions as far as skills, because this is not an all-inclusive list, are learning how to cook some quick and easy meals, doing some time saving food prep, things like that. Developing the habit of doing these things over time, can make your life easier.

Also, learning to communicate better with significant others or people that you live with. Communication is a very useful skill when it comes to food, because the people you live with are often the people that you eat with. So effectively communicating your desires, working together to compromise on things, is super helpful also.

All right, so these are just some of the very effective weight loss skills that help you to lose weight in an enjoyable way that fits your lifestyle, and that helps you actually build habits that will last you a lifetime.

Rather than feeling like you need to follow food rules and restrictions, make these big changes that are uncomfortable and that are difficult to maintain. No one really wants to do that. And you don’t need to.

So, these skills along with others, are things that I teach and help you master, if you and I work together 1:1, so that you can have sustainable changes. Whether that is changes in eating habits without a goal of losing weight, or whether that is losing weight by changing your eating habits and incorporating other weight loss habits in there.

 If that sounds intriguing to you, I invite you to schedule a free consultation with me, so I can learn more about you, where you’re struggling, your goals, and I can tell you exactly how I would help you as if you were my client. So that way you can see how doable it is and what’s possible for you. And then if you’re interested in learning more about working together, we could talk about that as well.

So you can book the free consult right on my website, https://katemjohnston.com/consult, or there’s also a link in the episode description.

And if you’re listening to this podcast episode on the episode page on my website, you’ll see a button to book a free consult there.

Thanks so much for tuning in, take care, and remember, skills, not restrictive rules is the way to go.