Weight Loss and Your Emotions

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Full Episode Transcript:

Weight Loss and Your Emotions

Welcome, welcome. So, today I want to talk to you about how your emotions have a massive effect on your weight loss results. And when I say results, that result can be anything. The weight loss result of NOT losing weight. Of losing 5 lbs. in 3 months. Of losing 20 lbs. and gaining 15 of it back. A result of losing more weight than you ever thought possible, all the results.

My point being that you will always have a result. It might not be the result that you wanted. It might be a result that reflects your biggest goal, one you originally thought might be impossible. You get to choose what result you want and in this podcast episode, I’m going to show you how your emotions can help you create that result.

So, your emotions play a direct effect on your weight loss result. The amazing thing about that is that you can control your emotions with your own thoughts. Your own brain. I know a lot of you think that your emotions are caused by things outside of you. Your circumstances. An event. A person. That’s not true though.

You have thoughts about your circumstances, thoughts about events or situations, thoughts about people, even thoughts about yourself. Those thoughts all cause any feeling that you have.

Do you know why this is true?

It’s because other people, other circumstances, etcetera, don’t have control over your brain. They are not literally inside of your brain, directing traffic along the neural pathways in your brain, and then causing all of the physiologic events that occur in your body in order for you to actually feel your feelings. Your feelings are just physical sensations inside of your body.

You’ve probably heard people refer to feelings or emotions as vibrations. That’s all they are. And they’re controlled by your brain and your brain only. No one else has any power over your brain.

Your brain likes to offer you thoughts about external things, like what other people do or say. Also, your brain likes to offer you thoughts about circumstances and situations, the world, your job, your house, and even your abilities. Your brain likes to offer you thoughts about everything. All of those thoughts elicit feelings. And when I say feelings, I also mean emotions. They’re one and the same.

So, when you’re feeling an emotion in your body, that will then cause you to act, react or not act at all. Your actions will always lead to results, right? So, if your feelings that you’re experiencing in your body cause you to act, react, or not act at all and those actions, reactions, or inactions lead to results, that means that your feelings greatly affect your results.

Also, because your thoughts about something or someone cause your feelings, that also means that your thoughts affect your results as well. Pretty incredible, right? So that means you have more control over your results than you ever imagined. And since you have control over your thoughts, you also have control of your own feelings. It’s that simple. I’m not saying that it’s easy, but that’s what coaches do, help with that to make it much easier.

So, what does this all have to do with weight loss? If you’re having trouble with losing weight or if you feel that you are gaining weight instead of losing weight, and don’t know why…or maybe you are doing all the things, however you are losing weight at a very slow rate, then I’m going to share how your feelings are playing a part. I could also get into the thoughts part of it, as there’s just so much to this and just how much you’re really in control of the amount of weight you gain or lose, however this podcast episode is specifically going to be on the emotions part of it.

Alright, so because your actions directly affect your results, you have to think about what kind of actions you would need to take, what kind of reactions you might need to avoid, and what inactions you also need to either do or avoid to get your results that you desire.

From there, you would need to see what emotion gives you the energy or fuel to do those actions or inactions.

In order to create that feeling in your body, you would need to have thoughts that would create that feeling. when it comes to the emotions, sorry I keep changing from emotions to feelings, but I mean the same thing. So, when it comes to emotions, positive emotions lead to positive results. Negative emotions lead to negative results. Neutral emotions tend to lead to a neutral result, or when it comes to weight loss can lead to some result, but just maybe not as much of a result as you wanted, as far as number on the scale.

So, in general, neutral emotions are definitely better than negative emotions, and there are at least moving in the direction of positive emotions, but the goal with a neutral emotion is to get it into the more positive emotion area. For example, I would consider acceptance, a more neutral emotion, that is leaning a little bit more towards the positive end of the spectrum.

Now I want to explain how you would use your emotions to help you with weight loss. So, start off with choosing a really specific result. For example, if you wanted to lose 5 pounds in one month and you normally eat takeout food five nights a week, what might you need to do to lose 5 pounds? You might need to decrease the amount of takeout food you’re eating, or at least choose healthier takeout food options that have less calories and maybe more nutrients. You’d also probably want to make sure your getting good sleep, drinking plenty of water, and moving your body in some way.

So, what would be a good feeling or emotion to have that would help to drive you to do all those things? What feeling or emotion that would provide motivation for you to do all those things? Maybe love for yourself. Love for yourself would make you want to take care of yourself. Or, even an emotion of excitement. It could be fun to lose 5 pounds right? It could also be fun to see how good you feel physically when you do all the things to lose the five pounds.

I remember when I had the awareness that I was gaining weight and I was only in my late 20s and had been thin my whole life. I set a goal of losing a few pounds, I don’t even recall that I put an exact number on it, even though I should have at the time. But I set a goal of losing some weight, and I started getting really excited about thinking about how I could feed my body better and how much better and more energized I would feel because of that.

At the time, I was working anywhere from 50 to 80 hours a week, and I was also a runner, so extra energy was a huge reward for me. That really excited me. So I took that energy, and started noticing that my excitement about my goal was inspiring me to eat vegetables and protein instead of pasta and bread all of the time.

Of course, I didn’t make the switch immediately and completely, however it made the process so much easier. I didn’t struggle at all. I also happened to use love for my life as an emotion to drive my actions as well. I had my whole life ahead of me and I loved so many aspects of it. I loved being able to be active and outdoors. I loved being around my friends and family. I loved being alive, so I wanted to do things to help preserve that. Not to sound too cheesy, but it’s true. That’s what helped drive me to do the actions, and to break my pasta and bread habit, that then led to easy weight loss.

And, even better weight loss that I was able to sustain. At this point, I am so positive that I will never gain unwanted weight. Never. I know exactly how to stay at this weight. Because I’m now the person that doesn’t have bad eating habits. I’m now the person who no longer is slowly gaining weight. I’m now the person that doesn’t even worry about calories or weight gain.  I’ve just become the person that thinks feels and acts like person I wanted to be, the person who had the result of losing weight and having more energy.

So, when you have a weight loss goal, like you said you think of the actions that you would need to take to get that result. If you’re not sure, then just write the actions you think you would possibly need to take. Whenever someone says or thinks that they don’t really know, they really do know. They just have to dig a little bit deeper.

So, if you’re in that place where you’re thinking, “well Kate, I only know a few things that I would need to do,” I guarantee you that if you start writing those few things down, and really push your brain, you’ll be able to think of lots more things you would need to do. And I don’t mean just choose some general things, I mean get really specific. It’s the specific things that will enable you to get results more quickly. When you’re too broad or general, that doesn’t give your brain good direction. It kind of leaves things up for interpretation.

Also, I want you to write down the inactions that would need to happen. Like with the example earlier, if you eat take out five nights a week, you would probably need to not eat take out five nights a week. Maybe just three nights a week to start out with. Or maybe you tend to come home from work and open a bag of chips. So, to lose weight, an inaction would be to not open the bag of chips.

Then, once you make a list, and I would say make it a massive action list, meaning write down as many things as possible, not just a few things, you’ll need to find at least one emotion that would help you to do the actions and help you to do the inactions as well. You might notice a couple of emotions, so you could just choose the most prominent one. From there, you could then think of a few thoughts you would have to have that would produce that emotion, or feeling, in your body.

Then you just say those aloud a few times and see which one produces that emotion the strongest. Then, make a habit of thinking or saying that thought as much as you can. I mean, like you until it becomes a thought habit. I’m all about helping you create new thought habits and breaking old thought habits, to get you more results, faster.

Now, I want to show you how negative feelings will tend to produce undesirable results.

So, let’s just say that you have been doing some things to try to lose weight and you haven’t lost a single pound. You might start to think that there’s something wrong with you. Or something wrong with the things that you’re doing. You might also think that it’s impossible for you to lose weight, no matter how bad you want to. You might even think that you have something wrong with your body that makes it impossible to lose weight.

None of that is the case however. Let me repeat, none of that is the case. I promise you.

What is true though, is that your emotions are massively affecting your results. Which means, that your thoughts which are creating the emotions, are then creating the results. But again, we’re just gonna focus on the emotion part of it for this podcast episode just to keep it simple.

What happens when you have a negative emotion driving your actions, is that you think you’re doing the things you need to do to lose weight, however you’re not really doing all the things you need to do to lose weight.

Losing weight can be easy, if you have positive emotions to help you. Losing weight can also be hard, if you have negative emotions that are actually sabotaging you, sometimes in a very subtle way.

For example, let’s say that you have a goal of losing 20 lbs. and keep it off. You really want to lose this weight, but you don’t really think that you will realistically, because every time you try to lose weight, you get close but then you gain it back period. The feeling or emotion that is generated from that thought, is what will continue to create the result of losing some weight and then gaining it back period.

Because when you don’t believe something is possible for you, what kind of feeling do you think that that creates within your body? Definitely not confidence. Definitely not excitement or love for your body. Definitely not motivation or at least not the amount of motivation that it takes.

Why I say this, is that you might start out feeling motivated, but you lose that motivation, so it stops being fuel for actions that will get you the result you desire.

So back to that question, what kind of feeling do you think a thought like “I probably won’t reach this goal, because I haven’t before.” Or whatever thought it is. This thought can be subtle or you’re not really sure of the thought, and that’s where having a coach is really helpful. A coach can help you to find those thoughts and see how they are creating your results, and then help you find the thoughts that DO create the results you want, every step of the way.

So, the feeling that this thought or a thought like that might create could be defeat. You’re essentially feeling defeated ahead of time.

How likely do you think a feeling of defeat will help you to create the result of losing 20 pounds and keeping it off? Extremely unlikely. You may not even be realizing it either. You’ll be sabotaging your efforts with the feeling that you’ve created with your thoughts. and then, when you are trying to work towards your goal and don’t realize that your thoughts and feelings are sabotaging your efforts, you’ll be putting all this effort in and not getting the results you want and that’s going to be very frustrating.

That just then leads you into this dark hole of no place good. Let’s just say that. Then, your brain takes all of that as evidence going forward, and then any further attempts at weight loss, your brain is just going to tell you things like, “don’t even waste your time”, “this never works for you”, “you’ll always be this weight no matter what you do”, “you don’t deserve to lose the weight that you want to”, “you’re not capable of losing weight and keeping it off”, “you’ll never be the weight that you want to be”, all the negative thoughts, right?

None of these thoughts feel good. None of these thoughts are going to serve you. None of them are even true. It’s a natural human tendency for your brain to want to try to conserve energy going forward and protect you from any discomfort going forward, so it tries to keep you in this “safe place” to avoid anything negative. It interprets that past experience as negative, so it’s going to want to avoid any further attempts at weight loss so your brain will offer you lots of different thoughts that are aimed to prevent you from making further attempts.

I want you to catch on to your brain though. I want you to realize that this doesn’t have to occur. I want you to realize that by changing a few things, you can change your results.

You can have all of the results that you ever wanted with weight loss. You just need to learn how to catch on to your brain and understand how your thoughts create your feelings which then drive your actions or reactions or inactions, which then create your results.

It’s a really simple thing, but like I said it’s not necessarily easy the first time around. Just like it wasn’t easy for you to start walking when you were a baby. But after some practice you got it and now it’s super easy. And also, just like it wasn’t easy for you to be good at your job the very first day you started working, but you got practice, and mastered lots of the tasks in your job.

Sometimes something small like this podcast episode is all the help you need, sometimes you need more. But just know, anything you desire is possible. No matter your history, no matter how many failed attempts, no matter the story your brain has been telling you over and over again.

If you’d like further help in bridging the gap from where you are now, to where you want to be, I can get you there. Just send me an email with what you’re struggling with, and we can set up a time to chat that works for you. So email me at [email protected] or click here to message me.

Alright, thanks for joining me today, take care and I’ll talk with you soon.