Ep. 251: Weight Loss Mindset Tips

You're listening to The Fitness Matters Podcast. And this is episode number 251, "Weight Loss Mindset Tips".

Welcome to The Fitness Matters Podcast where every week, we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. I'm Pahla B, YouTuber, certified life and weight loss coach, soon to be author, and your best middle-aged fitness friend. Are you ready to talk about the fitness mindset that matters to you? Me too, let's go.

Well, hello, hello my friends. It's so good to be here with you again. I am... Can you guess? I am very excited for this week's episode because A, I always am. I love to record these podcasts and help you with your mindset, but also, I'm really excited about this one really specifically. I was going over my own roster of old podcast episodes, which by the way, I mean, episode 251, come on, I've got 250 episodes behind me. And presumably, another 250 ahead of me. How amazing will that be when we get to number 500? Wow. Wow. That's weirdly a little bit of foreshadowing about something I'm going to talk about today, but that's super funny, that's not where I'm intended to go at all. But here's what I was thinking about, I have never given you a tips episode. We usually take one concept and really dig in with a deep dive.

And I'm not usually one for just a listicle kind of episode, but I love listening to listicle episodes myself. So I thought to myself today, "Self, hey, why don't you record one of those?" Well, here's why, I found out that this is actually kind of difficult for me because I am the kind of person who really likes doing a deep dive. So I'm just going to warn you, right here, at the top of the episode, I do have a list for you, I'm going to go over the list here in a very brief moment, and I'm also going to do a bit of a deep dive because that is just my personality type. And hopefully, it's a little bit of yours too. I assume it is, otherwise, you probably wouldn't have gotten this far in our episodes. I don't know. Maybe this is your very first one.

If it is, hi, welcome to The Fitness Matters Podcast where we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you, actually. You know what? I keep thinking about this... Wow, let's take another left turn. I keep thinking about how The Fitness Matters title almost doesn't fit anymore. We talk about your mindset, all the time, every time. Even when I'm about to give you just a little list of mindset tips, we're still talking about mindset. And I think, I think, it's almost time for a rebrand. I don't know when, I don't know how, I don't know what, but I think that it might be almost time to call the podcast something else, because I would really like it to reflect what we do talk about. And let's get back to what we were actually talking about. Because here's what we're talking about, I've got weight loss mindset tips for you.

In fact, I have six of them. Here they are. Number one, stop labeling foods as good or bad or healthy or fat name, which I don't really hear from you guys very often anymore, but fattening is the kind of word that I grew up with. And maybe, it's the one that's still rattling around in your head too. Number two, don't let the scale ruin your day. Number three, recognize restriction thinking. Number four, no pain, no gain is no bueno, which means no good. Number five, forgive yourself for failures. Number six, pay attention to your success. Okay. Let's dig in a little bit and then we're going to dig in a lot, because I love digging in. Number one, stop labeling foods as good or bad or healthy or fattening. Do you know that there is no such thing as a bad food? For reals, for reals.

I know that we all have these labels, we all have these kind of preconceived notions about foods that are healthy or foods that are fattening or foods that are good for you, foods that are bad for you, foods that you should have, foods that you shouldn't have, foods that go straight to your hips. A moment on the lips and a lifetime on the hips kind of foods. We all grew up hearing these things about foods. But let me tell you something about weight loss, really specifically. Weight loss, always, always, always, always, and one more time, always comes down to being in a slight caloric deficit. Let me dig into that really quickly, and then we're going to come back to the good foods, bad foods thing. Slight caloric deficit, I'm really emphasizing the word slight there, because the bigger of a deficit you are in, the harder it is on your body.

When we were younger, it was a lot easier to be in a big deficit, you could get some weight loss success, your body was a lot more efficient, a lot more effective, a lot more lots of things when we were younger. Now, at our age, we don't have the capacity to be in such a big caloric deficit and still see results from it. There are a couple of different reasons for it. Probably, the biggest one is that at our age, with a lack of estrogen, we are not, A, recovering from exercise very well, or B, recovering from too big of a caloric deficit very well. What happens is when you are in a big caloric deficit, it is a stress on your body. Generally speaking, stress is not actually bad for you, there's a process that your body goes through. It releases cortisol. This is weirdly a good thing for you to release cortisol because cortisol raises your blood pressure and raises your blood sugar.

I know neither one of those actually sound good, but here's why it's helpful for you in some situations. You actually start your day with a spike in cortisol. Because you have been fasting, your body is at a low blood sugar, low blood pressure because you've been resting state. Your body very naturally, in the morning, releases cortisol to get your blood pressure moving, to get your blood pumping and your blood sugar mobilized, so that you can have some energy to get on with your day. So that release of cortisol, actually very good for you. Here's the problem though, one of the hormones that helps attenuate or slow down the release of cortisol is estrogen. What? That means that without estrogen or with a lower amount of estrogen than we used to have when we were younger, it means that your cortisol can actually continue to rise.
Here's why we think of cortisol as being bad for us. Cortisol, because it raises your blood pressure, generally speaking, we think of high blood pressure as being a problem. It's not in small doses, but when it continues to remain at a high level, it's not good for your heart, it's not good for your body. Having a high blood sugar level, again, over time, can actually lead to things like insulin resistance, eventually can lead to things like metabolic syndrome, or even type 2 diabetes. This is more of a problem of cortisol being raised over time. That's why we think cortisol is bad. Cortisol is actually really good for you when it comes and goes the way it's supposed to come and go naturally. So here's why we don't want to be in too big of a caloric deficit. It's a stress on your body, which means that cortisol is in your bloodstream over time.
We want a little bit of stress and then we want the stress to decrease, that's how your body is supposed to work. So, when we are in too big of a caloric deficit, it's actually bad for your body. That is the only thing that I will allow you to say bad for. Because here's the thing about good foods or bad foods, which is where we started this particular mindset tip, you could eat your caloric target in nothing but "good foods or healthy foods," and then as soon as you eat more than that, you won't lose weight, or as soon as you eat too little, you won't lose weight. It is about your energy intake, it is not about the quality of foods. Here's where the quality of foods matters. I know you're going to argue with me, "But no, you have to eat healthy."
Here is where the quality of foods matters. The quality of the calories that you take in will help you feel good for a variety of reasons. For example, if you happen to eat, let's call it an adequate amount of protein. Protein helps you feel satiated, it helps your body... Well... And here's why, protein takes a long time to digest. When you take in protein, your body is working to break that down in a way that it doesn't have to work to break down something like carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are very simple for your body to break down, it's your body's natural food. And in fact, other things that you eat, for example, protein and fat, because those are the only three macro nutrients that we have, proteins and fat take longer to break down. But eventually, they still break down into carbohydrates, into glucose, which is your body's natural fuel.

It just takes longer to break down proteins and fats, which is why you feel fuller longer because your body is still working on digesting it. Your body is still like, "Come on, man, let's go." It's still trying to get the glucose out of it. So eating an adequate amount of all three macro nutrients is going to help you feel good. Also, eating an adequate amount of all three macro nutrients is good for your brain. For example, you need carbohydrates to operate your brain, you need carbohydrates to have energy, you need protein to help you build your muscles. Also, to have energy, you need fats because some vitamins and minerals actually only break down with the presence of fat. So you need all three macro nutrients. This is why you would like to eat, let's call them healthy foods is because you will feel like you have more energy, you will feel fuller longer, making it easier to not overeat.

And because they're "healthy and good for you," they will run your body processes better than so-called junk foods. Here's the problem though with thinking of certain foods as junk foods. I want you to just think really quickly. You have a food that you like that is not, let's call it healthy. I have foods that I like that are not healthy. If you've ever been around before, you've probably heard me talk about sugar. I eat sugar every day. I do not think sugar is the devil. I think that sugar, like anything in moderation, as part of an overall healthy diet is perfectly fine for you. There might be reasons why it's not great for you personally, there might be reasons why you count exactly how much sugar you personally have. I'm not trying to give you diet advice or medical advice or anything like that.

What I'm saying is that you probably have a food that you like, and when you think of that food as being bad, my friend, how do you feel? You feel bad. When you feel bad, generally speaking, we try to avoid feeling bad. And how do we avoid feeling bad? By trying to make ourselves feel good. And how do we try to make ourselves feel good? By eating something junky. It is a vicious cycle to think of foods as good or bad or healthy or fattening or any kind of label. All foods have a place in your daily fueling. How much of a place is going to be where you want to make choices for yourself that make sense, that's where you're going to want to use your all powerful brain to decide. Here's how much of this thing that I would like to have, because it satisfies me, because it feels pleasurable, because I'm, I'm going to say, using it as a crutch.

I don't know where that came from, but I was thinking about how when we are social with food, that sometimes, we will eat foods that we would consider more fattening or unhealthy. You have a place for all kinds of foods in your fueling plan, but you can also decide how much of them you'd like to eat. I do eat sugar every day. How much of it do I eat? Not a lot. I eat enough that it feels very pleasurable to me, it's something that I look forward to, it's something that I don't deny myself, I do consider it like a treat. And it's not really a treat because I eat it every day, it's part of my day. Therefore, I don't give it any extra mental weight than the other foods that I'm eating.
Number two, don't let the scale ruin your day. You guys, I hear this from you all the time. We, all of us, personify the scale in a way that I... When I'm able to step back from it, it's almost funny. The scale told me that my plan isn't working, the scale made me feel terrible about my whole life, the scale... Fill in the blank. Honestly, we all give our power to the scale all the time. And let me tell you something, the scale is an inanimate object who does not care about you, who does not lie to you, who does not have an opinion about you. The scale doesn't think. It doesn't... I was going to say it doesn't do, it does. The thing that the scale does is it measures your resistance to gravity. The scale is literally the most objective part of your day. The scale offers you factual information in a way that almost nothing else does. Truly, we go through our day hearing nothing but opinions from other people and ourselves constantly.

The scale is the only thing that is offering you objective data, but your mind thinks otherwise. When you let the scale ruin your day or tell you a lie or offer you information about what's working and what's not working, that is you not recognizing that you have all the power. All of it. Every single bit of it. Your brain is automatically, without your permission is what I mean by the word automatically, taking in a number and telling you a story. That story, my friend, is a fairytale in a bad way. It's not offering you the truth. It's telling you terrible things. Your brain, not the scale. Your brain is automatically interpreting a number and making it mean something without your permission. When you take a look at what you are making the scale mean, you can decide for yourself. This is not what this information necessarily is telling me, this is information that I can record and look at over time, which is the only way to actually look at data.

Number three, recognize restriction thinking. Honestly, this is very similar to the good foods, bad foods, but it's also a little bit bigger. We all tend to think about restriction in almost like a good way. Like, "Oh, I have a lot of willpower, I had a really good day because I ate under my calories. I had a really good day because I burned a lot of calories." We all have these, I just call them, I label them all as restrictive thoughts, meaning that we think we have to put a lid on ourselves, like we have to hold ourselves to this perfect standard in order to meet our goals and the only way to do that is to really hold ourselves in. We think of ourselves as being like the wild animals who would just eat everything and never exercise and never do the things that are good for us until we restrict ourselves.

When you are afraid of your natural behaviors and think that you have to restrict yourself in some way, in order to get what you want, I want you to recognize how lousy that actually feels. The crux of restrictive thinking is a lack of trust in yourself. And I want you to recognize how painful that actually is. Think about living with somebody that you don't trust. If you didn't trust your spouse, your animal... I'm really thinking about this. I actually am in this situation. I don't trust my dog at all. She's elderly and she's... I call her semi incontinent. It's not semi, she really struggles with her training. She struggles with a lot right now. She's not a young dog anymore and the elderly animal thing has been on my mind for years now. Rosie, thank goodness, was a cat who never had trouble finding the litter box. Thank goodness.

She had trouble with all kinds of other things. She couldn't seem to feed herself, she couldn't seem to bathe herself. There was lots of other things going on with Rosie, but with Blossom really specifically, she doesn't always ask to go out. And I don't trust her, I don't trust her at all. Anytime she gets up and starts wandering around, I'm like, I follow her around like a watchdog for my dog, like, "Don't pee in the house." So I know exactly what it feels like to live with somebody that I don't trust. It is hard. It is mentally exhausting. It is a constant vigilance situation, like Mad-Eye Moody. The thing about not trusting yourself is that it is exhausting. And it's got that extra layer of pain because it's you. You have to live with yourself. You are the only thing that you do live with 24/7. You are always in your own head.

And when you don't trust yourself, that really hurts. It hurts from the other end. Again, imagine living with somebody who didn't trust you. You have possibly been in a situation like this before. I hope that you are not currently in this situation, I hope that what I'm referring to is a past relationship where somebody didn't trust you and somebody treated you like they didn't trust you and they were constantly questioning everything you did. If this is your current situation, this is well beyond the scope of this podcast, but I do hope that you do not put up with that. I do hope that you trust yourself and respect yourself to not be in a relationship with somebody who doesn't trust you. It's painful. It's exhausting. It's hurtful. Therefore, from both ends of that situation, when you don't trust yourself and live with somebody who doesn't trust you, which is you, it's really hard.

When you recognize that restrictive thinking comes from a lack of self trust, you will understand why it's so important to manage this, to deal with this. Because it doesn't feel good, you are constantly in that situation where you don't feel good. My friend, you can feel good. And when you do, when you trust yourself... First of all, you'll feel the freedom of trusting yourself and you'll feel the love of trusting yourself, you'll feel that trust, and you will recognize that you're not just going to go crazy. You're not going to go eat everything in the world. You're not going to fall off your exercise routine and never come back to it. When you tell yourself those things, do you know who's in charge of that? You. You can always stop yourself from eating. You can always make yourself exercise again. And you know how? By not being afraid that you won't start exercising, by not being afraid that you're going to eat everything in the world. When you aren't afraid of yourself, you won't do those things that you're afraid of.

My friends, number four, no pain, no gain is no good. No pain, no gain had a point in your life where it was meaningful. I don't know if it was ever helpful. I personally always found this sentence, this little helpful mantra thing, I always found it a little bit judgy. And technically speaking, you do not need to be in pain ever. Even when you were younger, you didn't need to be in pain. Pain is an indicator of something entirely different than effort. Sometimes, you feel the pain of effort, but sometimes, pain is actually injury. And therefore, this is not, in my opinion, a helpful mantra because very frequently, if we don't know our bodies very well, we can push into an injury situation as opposed to an effort situation. And at this point, with this whole lack of estrogen thing going on, the harder you work, the more cortisol is going to be released into your bloodstream to help you.

Cortisol, actually, one of the things that it does is it actually reduces inflammation. It's why cortisol is good for you in small doses and when it goes away, after a short amount of time. Pretty much everything in your life, this is kind of a left turn, but just bear with me, kind of everything in your life operates on a bell curve where it's good for you, it's good for you, it's good for you, right over the top of that bell curve, and then (explosion sound), it's bad for you. Cortisol is absolutely like that. It is good for you, it helps your body. Your body wouldn't have such a thing unless it was helpful in some way. But the problem comes from having, I'm going to say too much of it, but it's not even necessarily a quantity, it really is just having it in your bloodstream over a length of time that is longer than normal, than it would be good for you.

And the over the length of time is where it starts to become bad for you. So when you are exercising to a point of effort pain, and obviously, if you are exercising to a point of injury pain, that's definitely no good for you. I feel like that one's a little bit obvious, I'm going to leave that one alone. But when you are exercising to a point of effort pain, we don't recover from that like we used to, because cortisol, sends it out to help with the inflammation, but then nothing is attenuating the cortisol the way that the estrogen used to. There are still things that are attenuating the cortisol, but it's not the way that it used to with estrogen. So when we don't have the estrogen coming in and clearing out the cortisol and being like, "Hey, everything's fine here," nd then the muscles can repair themselves and your body does what it does and gets better, faster, stronger, we take longer to recover.

That recovery process, because it takes longer, keeps your body in that stressed state longer than it used to. When your body is in that stressed state with the cortisol, it eventually starts storing fat. The no pain, no gain mantra might have been helpful when you were younger, but now, is one of the least helpful things you can say to yourself. When you exercise to a point of maximum effort, you can, don't get me wrong, you can. First of all, you're capable, you're still capable of doing all the things that you were ever capable of doing before. And you can exercise that way as part of a program, but only, only if you really focus on recovering afterwards. No pain, no gain all the time is the problem, rather than the solution.

No pain, no gain once in a while, pay attention to your body's signals, figure out when you are fully recovered, and then do some moderate exercise while you're continuing to recover and make adaptations, and then you can push again, that works, that's fine. But be really careful about truly paying attention to all of your body's signals. Simply going for no pain, no gain every day, without regard to the consequences is not in your best interest. And in fact, it's in your least best interests, because it will very likely cause you to gain weight rather than losing weight. And remember, these are weight loss mindset tips. Number five, forgive yourself for failures. Oh, my goodness. My friend, there is nothing guaranteed about your weight loss journey, except for the fact that you're going to fail at something. And boy, do I say that with love. There is, in my opinion, no way to know what's going to work for you until you find ways that don't work for you.
I wholeheartedly believe that there is no way to just follow a plan and go directly from A to B where B is total success. You are going to have failures and it's not even necessarily a failure of what you've done. Even if you are following your calorie plan, even if you are following your hydration plan, your exercise plan, your mindset plan, your sleep plan, even if you are following all five points of the 5-0 method, which by the way, is my free weight loss program specifically designed for women over 50, there will be a link in the show notes or the description box depending on why you're watching and listening. Yes, I do say that a lot, which is why it sounds like something I've memorized. Even if you are doing every single thing exactly right, your body is a biological specimen, that quite frankly, operates on its own schedule of things.
Your body is doing billions of processes every single minute of every single day, you are controlling the input for five of those things. Five out of a billion. So sometimes, the scale's going to go up. Even if you're doing all the right things, the scale is going to go up on its way down. Nobody, in the history of weight loss, ever, has had the scale go continuously down from day one until the day they got their weight loss goal. And just so we're clear, you will not continue to weigh one exact weight even when you get to your weight loss goal, your weight will fluctuate, it's supposed to. Your body's doing a billion things that you don't even know about and it causes weight fluctuations. So if you would like to consider that a failure, I mean, you can, but also, recognize that it is just part of the process.

Thinking about something as a failure is probably not helpful for you, unless you recognize that failures are just part of it. When you know that you're going to make mistakes, that you're going to have failures... And some of them will be, for lack of a better way of saying it, your fault. Sometimes, you're going to eat off plan. Sometimes, you're going to eat something that you think probably is okay and then it does not fuel you well. Sometimes, you're going to eat too much, sometimes, you're going to eat too little. Sometimes, you're going to exercise too much, sometimes, you're going to... You can't really exercise too little so I don't like to say that, because truly, you can lose weight without exercising at all. Sometimes, you're going to not go to bed on time, sometimes, you're going to have such fitful sleep that even though you went to bed on time and you got up at the same time, your body just is not operating at peak efficiency. Sometimes, you're not going to get in all your water. Sometimes, things are going to happen.
Life is not ever going to be without its failures. Recognizing that you are going to fail and really being on board with that, and what I mean is forgiving yourself, being on board with the fact that failure is actually information. I feel, personally, that when you can look at failure as the way forward because it has information, it won't feel like a failure. It will feel like one more tool in your toolkit. Oh, my goodness. When I exercise this much, I don't feel good, it takes me way too long to recover. I can see it on the scale, I can feel it in my body. You didn't fail because you exercised too much. You found information about how to not lose weight. When you can think about failure as part of the process, as part of the thing that will give you the information to help you, eventually, lose weight faster…

Because honestly, as you gather this information and don't think about it as a failure but think about it as information, you will start to recognize, "Okay, here's exactly how much I can exercise. Here's exactly what I can do to make sure that I'm always in my calories. Here's exactly what I can do to make sure that I get to bed on time." All of those little ways that you fail at not getting to bed on time or not eating to your calorie target or not exercising the way you meant to, when you gather up all that information, over time, you'll get more and more and more efficient at doing the things that will help you lose weight. You'll get better at going to bed on time, you'll get better at exercising moderately, you'll get better at eating at your calorie target. Failing will actually help you lose weight faster. Eventually. The trick is to get to the eventually part, rather than sitting in the failure and quitting.

And you guys, number six, pay attention to success. How hard is this one? Am I right? We are... And I, actually, we are designed to look for our failures and see them as failures, because, I mean, evolutionarily speaking, if you could see how something went wrong, it could help you survive so that you could not do that again. So from a biological standpoint, we are not actually programmed to see our successes. We really have to work for it. We really have to look at something and think about it as a success. And because we don't practice this very often, it can feel very uncomfortable to be successful, which means, because it feels uncomfortable, that we'll actually avoid it even more. We are naturally programmed to look for failures, therefore, that feels very comfortable, it feels very familiar to think of yourself as not doing something correctly because we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. If recognizing your success feels uncomfortable, AKA painful, you will naturally avoid it.

This is something you're going to have to do on purpose often enough, to practice it so that it doesn't feel painful anymore. And isn't that weird that you have to practice finding your successes and celebrating your wins? It's so funny to me, sometimes, how it almost feels like we're just programmed not to be successful at the things that we want. And obviously, that's not a very helpful thought to think that we're not capable because of our biology of getting where we want to go with things. But sometimes, you have to recognize that you are going to have to put in an effort that feels like an effort, that feels a little sticky, a little bit gritty, a little bit uncomfortable, in order to get better at something. When you get better at it, as you practice this skill... Because frankly, recognizing your wins is a skill. When you get better at this skill, it'll get easier. It will start to feel pleasurable, which means that you will then seek it out and stop trying to avoid the pain of it.

You guys, these mindset tips, as you found out, are hopefully helpful for one thing, but also, that's all kind of hinging on recognizing what you are currently thinking and changing your thoughts. You guys, this is where the other layer of the onion is. I can give you these mindset tips like, "Recognize your wins. Yay. That's awesome." But then in the day to day, how? How do you do this? How do you stop thinking about foods as being bad or good? How do you not let the scale ruin your day? How do you recognize restrictive thinking? How do you hear no pain, no gain in your head and then not follow through on that? How do you forgive yourself for failures? How do you pay attention to success? This, in my opinion, is the thing that is missing from other weight loss programs and other listicle type podcast or blog posts or wherever you hear these kind of tips.

The fact is the how of it is the thing that you're going to do every day. The how to implement these mindset tips, my friend, it's the two step tool. It's to find what you're currently thinking and decide if your thoughts are helpful. 99.9% of them are not. And boy, do I say that with love. I want you to know that there's nothing wrong with you having unhelpful thoughts and I really want to normalize for you that we all have a lot of unhelpful thoughts. I think when we first come to this mindset stuff, we're like, "Okay. Yeah, I probably have a couple of thoughts that aren't good, but I also probably have lots of really good thoughts in there too." And then we start doing the mindset work of journaling, of finding your thoughts. And we're like, "Oh, my God, I'm thinking nothing but terrible things."And then we judge ourselves for thinking nothing but terrible things. And then that feels terrible. And then that slows us down. That is a vicious cycle of having more negative thoughts.

And that's why I want to normalize for you. You have a lot of negative thoughts and it's completely okay. And there's nothing about having a lot of negative thoughts that you can't overcome. You are capable of doing anything and of getting any goal you have for yourself. If you have a goal, you can achieve it. The end. And here's how to find your thoughts and decide if they're helpful. And really, really peel away that layer of judgment about the unhelpful thoughts you have. You have them. If any of these mindset tips resonated with you like, "Oh, my gosh, I totally called foods good and bad. Oh, my gosh, I totally let the scale ruin my day. Oh, my gosh. I totally restrict myself and think that if I let myself go, that I'll be out of control. Oh, my gosh. I totally think that I have to exercise harder. I totally have a hard time moving on from failures because it feels so fail-y. I totally have a hard time recognizing my wins." Yeah, me too.

All of this, I made this list for me. These are all things that you are currently thinking, and there's nothing inherently wrong with any of the thoughts that you currently have. The thing that you might consider as wrong, and that's a heavy air quote situation, it's just that these are slowing you down. These thoughts that you have that there are good foods and bad foods, this thought that you have that you have to exercise more, this thought that you have that you have a hard time recognizing your wins, it's just slowing you down. It's not stopping you. The way to speed yourself up, the way to lose weight faster with these mindset tips is by recognizing that you're thinking these things, and recognizing that these thoughts don't feel good.

This is the two step tool, by the way. You find your thoughts by journaling and then you take a look at each thought individually, and you ask yourself, how does this thought make me feel? If the thought feels good, it's moving you forward towards your goal. If the thought feels bad, it is slowing you down, and possibly, stopping you from getting to your goal. That's it. Find your thoughts, decide if they're helpful. When you know that you're going to have unhelpful thoughts and then you find them, you can decide for yourself. Not by demanding that your brain think a new thought, not by telling yourself affirmations every day like, "No foods or bad foods," that doesn't even sound realistic right now, does it?

I mean, it sounds like, "Okay, intellectually, I totally get that," but also, "No, obviously, pizza's fattening. Obviously, apples are healthy. Obviously, I have to eat a certain way." That thought, I have to eat a certain way, how does that make you feel? Me? It made me feel totally pressured. Instantly, I had that perfectionism churning of my stomach. That tells me, I found the thought I have to eat a certain way, and then I asked myself how I feel. I feel pressured. That feeling of pressure is bad, it does not feel good, which means I have to eat a certain way is an unhelpful thought. Ta-da. That, my friend, is the biggest weight loss mindset tip I can give you. Find your thoughts, decide if they're helpful.

And then, you can tell me, was this podcast helpful for you? Because of course, I hope it was. Of course, I hope that it helped you recognize some thoughts that you're having and gave you the practical knowledge of how to find those thoughts and how to allow them to be there while simultaneously deciding that they are unhelpful, so that you don't have to think them as often, so that you can recognize, "Hey, this is an unhelpful thought, this one isn't going to get me to where I'm going." And I don't think I mentioned it. In fact, I know I didn't mention it. Here's the thing about the two step tool, there is no step three. We talked about this in mindset management, but I don't know how deeply I went into this particular concept. When you label a thought as helpful or unhelpful, your brain will naturally do its magical brain thing and it will offer you that thought less often.

Your brain does not need to be forced into stop thinking a certain kind of thought or start thinking a better thought. When you label your thoughts as either helpful or unhelpful, your brain will naturally go to work, do its own thing behind the scenes in ways that I do not fully understand and I'm not even sure if brain science understands it yet, it will vary naturally over time, like all good things, change how you think. Your mindset will not be changed by you, demanding that you think something new, it will be changed by you, recognizing your unhelpful thoughts and allowing your brain to work its brain magic. Your brain will automatically offer you unhelpful thoughts less often and will start serving up things that you can then decide. Well, maybe this is a little bit more helpful. Okay, well maybe this one is helpful. Oh, hey, here's a great thought. This one's definitely going to get me on my way. Your brain will continue to offer you thoughts and you can continue to decide is this unhelpful, is this helpful?

Eventually, you will find nothing but helpful thoughts that get you on your way. Okay, that was definitely helpful, right? You guys, thank you so much for listening, like always. I hope you have a great week and I'll talk to you again soon. If you're getting a lot out of The Fitness Matters Podcast and you're ready to take it to the next level, you are going to love The Get Your GOAL Coaching and Accountability Group. We take all the theory and knowledge here on the podcast and actually apply it in real life, on your real weight loss and fitness goals. It's hands on, it's fun, and it works. Find out more at pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal, and let's get your goal.