Ep. 271: Getting Un-Stuck

Hey Goalfriend, welcome to episode number 271 Getting Un-Stuck. Are you ready for this one today? This is going to be a deep dive into one of the most common things I see as a weight loss life coach. Where we feel like we're doing all the things and yet your weight isn't changing or it is, but it's like bouncing around. Like you've got two or three numbers that you just keep seeing on the scale all the time and you'd really like to get unstuck. Well, today we are diving deep. I've got the answers for you. I've got in fact more than, I've got three different answers for you today and we're just gonna get a little bit deeper into the onion with every one of 'em. So let's go. Let's first of all, start off by talking about whether or not you're actually stuck because this is, this is the thing that I think can really help you start to see where the mindset work meets the science and biology of weight loss. Like there's always this intrinsic. It is your mindset and it is your body and I wanna really be clear about what stuckness actually is. Like as a definable thing as opposed to as the thing that your brain is offering you about what's going on with your body. So let's first figure out whether or not you're actually in, what I would define as a plateau for your weight loss. These absolutely happen and , I'll tell you that even though… Even though lots of fitness trainers and lots of weight loss coaches will be like, oh yeah, you've gotta like mix it up and change things up and like shock your body and things like that. Generally speaking, what is going on is that you're not being consistent enough in order to continue to lose weight. So there is like a physical component as to what might be going on. And here's how I personally define an actual weight loss plateau. If your weight is literally the same for a minimum of six weeks, while you are hitting 100% consistency on the five things that we do every day with the 5-0 Method, which is to say managing your mindset by finding your thoughts and deciding if they're helpful, eating the right number of calories, which is not necessarily less than you were eating before, it is the right number for you right now. We are drinking the right amount of water, which is half your body weight in pounds in fluid ounces of water. You are sleeping adequately, which means that you have a sleep routine, you're going to bed at the same time every night, you're getting up at the same time every morning. And yes, we're looking for quality sleep, but also we're not worrying about whether or not it is good quality sleep every single night because frankly sometimes it's not and that's completely okay. Having a sleep routine is gonna do a lot for your body in terms of regulating your circadian rhythm and getting your cortisol regulated because of that, which god, that's a whole nother topic you guys. I’m actually in the process of writing my book learned so much about cortisol and how it affects us and estrogen and how it affects us and how they're intertwined and how there are 68 other hormones that have to do with like every single body process and it's so, so fascinating to me. But this is, this is the, the short version of it that if you have a sleep routine you can help regulate all of your body's processes. And also the fifth thing that we do with the 5-0 Method, which is what we're talking about here, in terms of a hundred percent consistency to make sure that you're losing weight, is to exercise moderately every single day. Which is to say also speaking of regulating your cortisol, which is to say that you are not over exercising. You guys, the more you exercise, the harder it is to lose weight. This is the most shocking thing to me as a weight loss coach and as a, I'm gonna go ahead and just say former over exerciser, as somebody who loves, loves intense exercise, this was the hardest thing for me hands down to wrap my brain around and to embrace and to really take on board that it's not the work that you do, it's the recovery from the work that actually drives weight loss and health and fitness at our age. Okay? So if you are hitting those five targets with 100% consistency, y'all we're not being sloppy here. It's not like, you know, 90% sounds so good like most of the time that's an A, that's a great grade. And yet for weight loss, the way I personally am defining a plateau is that you are hitting 100% consistency for six weeks. And I will tell you that the reason I define it as a hundred percent consistency is related to the story that I'm gonna tell you about how I was stuck or how I, let's just give you a spoiler alert, thought I was stuck. And honestly, okay, here's the thing that I really wanna be clear with. I didn't think I was stuck like that thought didn't occur to me. I knew it was taking me a long time, this is how I heard it. It's taking me a long time to lose weight. I never heard the phrase I'm stuck or I can't lose weight. I just kept hearing, wow, this is really taking a long time. And there was like a low grade level of frustration with that. And so this is the other thing that I really wanna define for you right at the top of the episode here is that you might not hear the phrase, I'm stuck. You might, because I do, I do hear that very frequently as your coach, but also you might hear it as this is taking a long time, I'm feeling really impatient. I can't believe how long this is taking. Like there are other words or phrases that you might be hearing all the time that feel, I, I think the predominant feeling here is frustrated. I would say that stuckness is a level of frustration or possibly even anger or impatience that you might notice it as. So, so here's the thing about why you could be stuck and what I wanna offer you here is that the physical aspect of stuckness is that your weight is probably hovering, bouncing. I mean there's always gonna be a certain amount of fluctuation, like literally always gonna be a certain amount of fluctuation. For me personally, my, my level of fluctuation is a good three to five pounds in either direction that I consider maintenance. But the reason I define a plateau as being the exact same number with 100% consistency is because very frequently that's not what's going on with you. You probably are bouncing around a couple of pounds, maybe even several pounds, and your brain has decided that that is stuck. So what happens is that you have this thought, I'm stuck or it's taking me a long time or I can't get below a certain weight, whatever that number is, generally speaking, it's gonna end with a five or a zero. Our brains just love those like milestone weights. And sometimes it feels especially difficult, like you can hit the zero but you can't hit the nine right below it or you can hit the five but you can't hit the four. Like we have these kind of, I mean they, they are perceived barriers, they really are there, there's nothing about the nine or the four that actually makes a difference to your weight. But we as human beings that live in a society that have this social construct, that numbers mean things that, that we really see certain numbers as being meaningful. So you'll notice over time that your, your number is hovering, the noticing of that creates a thought in your brain. You have a thought like, I'm stuck. I can't get below such and such or I'm, it's taking so long to get where I wanna go. One of those three is probably what you're hearing. And then because this is exactly how your brain works, like this is literally brain science. Your brain wants to agree with itself all the time. Your brain is constantly taking in perceptions, forming thoughts and then finding evidence for why that thought is true and simultaneously creating more evidence so it can continue to be true so that it can continue thinking that thought efficiently. Continuing to think that thought takes less energy than thinking a new thought. So what your brain will do to create more evidence is what your brain is always doing. You have a thought that creates a feeling that drives actions. So in my case, here's what happened. I was losing weight and this was, oh my gosh, this was already several years ago at this point, which is super funny to me cuz it feels like it was just yesterday, but it was not, it was 2019, it was, it was 2019 when I just turned 50 or it was about to turn 50 actually is when I was losing weight. I was like 49 and I was really starting to notice a lot of changes in my body about how it was reacting to over exercise and what was going on with me. I was still really grieving my sister. She'd only been gone, you know, a year and a half, not quite two years at that point. My kids had grown up and moved away and then come home. Like there were, there were circumstances in my life that created what I call what I call a Swiss cheese effect. And I can't even take credit for this. This is something my sister told me about a long time ago. This is wildly unrelated, don't mind me, but I'm gonna tell you a little story. My sister was a flight attendant way, way, way back in the early nineties and I have a deep fear of flying. And so it was, it was very ironic to me that I come from a family where like both of my parents worked in the airline industry. My grandfather was like an air pioneer, my sister was a flight attendant. Like my whole family loves to fly and I used to have this really deep fear of flying. I'm, I'm really working on it. The more I travel, the more I'm enjoying it and finding it not so, so terrifying. But anyway, so I had a deep fear of flying. I was flying somewhere and my sister who told me a couple of things, first of all she told me something that's so obvious that I still think about it all the time. She's like, you know, the pilot doesn't wanna die either, right? like, duh, of course, of course the pilot is doing everything in their capacity to keep the plane in the air as long as it's supposed to be in the air and then get it back on the ground when it's supposed to be on the ground. Like obviously. But anyway, she was talking about all the different systems and checks and balances and all the different things that would have to go wrong for a flight to go horribly wrong. And so she called it the Swiss cheese effect, like this hole over here would have to line up with this hole over here on this completely different system that doesn't have anything to do with one another. And like the likelihood of all of the different things going wrong would be like creating like laying Swiss cheese on top of each other so that all the holes line up so that you could see all the way through all of these different slices. And so I think about this somewhat frequently in wildly unrelated ways about how, how Swiss cheese can actually explain lots of things that don't actually have anything to do with one another. Anyways, anyways, here's what your brain does it looks for and creates evidence of this thing that you are thinking being true. So what your brain will do is it will drive actions by creating feelings, generally speaking, these feelings that are gonna be like low grade frustration, impatience, those, those things that don't feel amazing but also don't feel so terrible that they like really call themselves to your attention very much. Like have you ever noticed how you can be a little bit frustrated and still just totally get on with your day? Yes. So in any event; here I was in 2019 noticing that I had gained like, I don't know, somewhere between like seven and 10 pounds. Like it wasn't a lot, but it was also just a little bit like after years of maintaining my weight, it just felt really yucky. I didn't care for it. So I said about to lose weight and lost a good number of pounds like relatively quickly and then found myself stuck. I didn't think I was stuck. I just noticed that it was taking a long time. I noticed because I was creating evidence for and finding evidence for this. This is taking me a long time, but what was going on with me personally was that I was hitting all of my targets, kind of, this is where I'm telling you that 90% might not be as good as you think. I was mostly hitting my calories, I was mostly drinking my water, I was mostly going to bed, but sometimes I was staying up a little bit late once every three or four days I was going over my calories once every three or four days and not on the same day, but like different times I was over exercising. Like I really, I was hitting my targets but also in a very real sense I wasn't quite so my brain was offering me, I'm doing all the right things and this is me being very whiny and I apologize because I know you don't mean to whine at me. But that is how I hear it because it's how I heard it in my own head when I was whining about doing all the right things, but I couldn't lose weight that it was taking so long that I couldn't believe that I couldn't get past where I was. This is what's going on with you. Your brain is looking for evidence that you are right because it always wants to be right. It's looking for evidence that what it already believes to be true is true and it is creating more evidence. So that thought can continue to be true. It's taking me a long time, made my weight loss take longer because I thought it was true because this is what brains do, brains think that they are right. So this is why I offer you to really take a look in a really like curious, compassionate, committed way like we talked about last week at what is actually going on. When you can very gently look at your habits and look at the five things in the 5-0 Method, which by the way, I don't think I invited you to download it. If you don't already have it, it's on my website GetYourGOAL.com for free. It's in the show notes, it's everywhere. Like truly; if you, if you know me anywhere on social media, the link to get the the 5-0 Method, it's everywhere. But, so I really want you to very compassionately and curiously and committedly look at your consistency, a lot of Cs in that sentence when you can notice that you're hitting your targets but maybe not really hitting your targets, that's when you can see what's going on here. But also seeing what's going on here honestly might not get you where you wanna go because what frequently happens, I mean what happened to me, this is, this is exactly what I did. I saw what I was doing and so I just doubled down on, okay, I gotta do these things, I gotta hit my calories every day. I gotta make sure I'm not over exercising. I was just trying to white knuckle my way through and what I wasn't doing, even though technically speaking I was totally managing my mindset. I wasn't really always managing my mindset around weight loss. I was sitting down with my journal every day, but I was journaling. And to be fair, this was, this was in the big picture, this was very helpful. I was journaling about my thoughts, about grief, about my sister. I was journaling about my thoughts about my kids, about how they came back home. I was journaling my thoughts about my business and how I was trying to grow it. Like I was journaling, I was finding lots of unhelpful thoughts. I was moving through my mindset in a lot of different areas, but I wasn't very often looking at my thoughts about my weight. This is, this is coming back up to the big picture. This is why I tell you to have one goal at a time because doing the work, the mindset work is super helpful for your life. But if you wanna figure out what's going on with your weight loss, you have to examine your thoughts about your weight loss. Like this is, this is why I offer you the journal prompt in the 5-0 Method of what do I think about today's numbers. It's really important to actually look at your weight loss if you wanna know what's going on with your weight loss. And that sounds so obvious and yet at the time it totally wasn't to me. So let me say it plainly to you. In order to know what's going on with your weight loss, you have to look at your weight loss. Finding those thoughts is going to help you move forward. So, so here's how we find our thoughts and decide if they're helpful from moving forward. It's called the two-step tool. I offer it to you in the 5-0 Method and it actually has seven steps . The two steps of the two step tool is to find your thoughts and decide if they're helpful. And I'm starting to come to the conclusion that that particular phrasing of step two decide if they're helpful, isn't super clear about exactly what you're going to do. For me, a kind of a person who really likes to think it's very easy to look at my thought and then think more thoughts about that thought and think to myself, gee, this thought is very true or this thought sounds like it should be getting me where I want to go, my friends. The way you decide if a thought is helpful is to feel the feeling that it's creating for you. Now, the reason I slowed down there, and the reason I wanna be really clear about this is because this is the part that you are going to try to avoid. And I say this with so much love, it's the part I tried to avoid for months. I kept looking at my thoughts and being like, oh yeah, that's unhelpful . I could see that it was unhelpful. I could think that it was unhelpful, but the thing that I was avoiding doing was actually feeling the feeling that my thought was creating. Now here's the thing about using the two step tool and journaling every day. I offer you in the 5-0 Method to find five thoughts a day. You do not necessarily have to feel five feelings a day. For me personally, I can find generally speaking finding five thoughts isn't especially difficult for me. When you first get started, it might be difficult for you. So don't take that as anything other than this is where I am on my journaling journey that I, I have learned how to find my thoughts. I have really learned how to recognize them as thoughts to like come up and out of them and, and notice that this is a thought that I'm having. It is a spark of electricity in my brain. This thought doesn't mean anything about who I am as a human being. Like I can see my thoughts as thoughts relatively easily. Now when you first get started, that part won't be easy. After you start to recognize that your thoughts are thoughts, that's when you can start to feel the feelings that they are creating for you because your thoughts create your feelings, which drive actions. You don't necessarily have to feel every single feeling that your thoughts are creating. Some of your thoughts will bring about such a low grade feeling, but it might not, it might not be the best use of your time that you really can recognize, oh, okay, this is where it is in my body, this is how it feels. I can totally see that this isn't a pleasant feeling and how this would be driving actions that aren't getting me where I wanna go. You can relabel the the thought as unhelpful. You can recategorize it in your brain. You can get so much traction on your neuroplasticity of changing your mind without necessarily having to feel all the way through a lot of your feelings. But sometimes you will need to feel your feelings. How do you know which ones to feel? This is probably the biggest question that I have been really asking myself, and I have a couple of parameters for you. When you notice that a thought is really pervasive, like when you have found this thought in your journal every single day and you've noticed, okay, this is bringing about this feeling of frustration and you can recognize that it's unhelpful and you're really, you know, you're putting in the work. If you notice this pervasive thought for me, I mean I've talked about this on the podcast so often, it's the thought I'm stupid. That one, I, I did, I noticed it, I felt it through a couple of times. I kept noticing it, I kept recognizing that it came back up again and again and again and I had to feel it all the way through. I'm gonna say probably close to a half a dozen times because in different situations it had just that slightly different nuance that my body needed to feel through to get it up and out of me in order to create the space to even find other thoughts and other feelings that it was, it was, I kind of like to think about it like a, like a plug or a, a cork on a wine bottle. Like it's not a, it's not really stopping you necessarily, but it is stopping you from having the brain space and the body space to think and feel something more helpful. So for me personally, that I'm stupid thought it was so pervasive that I realized that I really did need to, to feel it, to get it up and out of the way. In fact, it rarely comes up anymore. Every once in a while it'll still pop up and I'll be like, oh my gosh, there you are again. How interesting. But it has, it has stopped showing its face every day the way that it used to when I was, when I was stuck , when it was taking me a long time to lose weight, I noticed that the thought it's taking me a long time came up so often that I finally realized, okay, I'm gonna have to feel this one through. It wasn't a big feeling, it wasn't something that felt tragic, it didn't feel like a big thing, which is why honestly for the longest time I really thought I could just recategorize it by putting the, the word unhelpful next to it. In your journal, the way that I tell you how to do in the 5-0 Method, I really truly thought that I was putting in the work and yet it was so pervasive that I finally decided to feel that feeling all the way through. So this is one of the parameters that I offer you. When you notice a pervasive thought, go ahead and feel the feeling all the way through, meaning allow it to exist in your body. Like identify what it is by either giving it a name or just recognizing that this is something that you are feeling. Allow it to be there. Describe it to yourself, like really stay in your body describing all of the sensations. Okay, my throat feels like it's kind of closing up or itchy. My fingers and toes feel very tingly. My stomach feels like it's clenching. I feel very cloudy inside. My ears feel very muffled, like really describing all of the physical sensations as opposed to, gee, I wonder why I'm having this thought. This reminds me of something from my childhood. You know, I've had this thought forever, like rather than letting yourself self go down a thought rabbit hole, really sit inside your body and describe the physical sensations only. This is harder work than you realize, but it gets easier with practice sitting inside your body and just allowing the feeling to be there. Generally speaking takes about a minute and a half. It's actually, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's very fast. While you're doing it, it's gonna feel unbearably slow, like it, it's really gonna take a lot of mental focus on your part to stay inside your body and only be describing the physical sensations instead of thinking more thoughts. But when you do that, there's this magical thing that happens that is kinda like I was talking about with the, the wine cork on a bottle. Feeling your feeling all the way through actually releases it from your body. I don't have the science behind this and it, it is something that I am currently doing a little more research and a little bit more just personal work on like paying attention to how it appears to be working in my life, like anecdotal evidence, how it appears to be working in my client's lives. Like I as a coach, one of the things that we do in the Get Your Goal group is I facilitate the feeling of your feelings. And I've noticed with everybody who does this that it's not necessarily immediate. But there is the effect of creating space in your brain and in your body to find a better thought to work on that neuroplasticity, that there really is something about feeling the feeling all the way through that releases the hold that that thought had in your life. So for me personally, once I recognized, okay, I really gotta, I gotta let go of this thought slash feeling of this is taking a long time. As soon as I did that, I found that it was easier to be doing the habits that I wanted to be doing. Ah, but then there was another layer. So to recap so far the first layer is to actually look at the physical situation of what's going on with your weight. Is it an actual physical plateau or is it a mental plateau? And just so you know, it's pretty much always a mental plateau. The second way to look at this is to really understand your thought of I'm stuck or this is taking so long, and work through that feeling. And here's what I'm gonna offer you is that there's another layer of the onion for, I'm gonna say most of us, I have found with most of my clients that the reason they even start thinking I'm stuck or this is taking too long or this is taking such a long time or I can't get below whatever. The reason that that even comes up at all is because there is some association with the number around which you are quote unquote stuck. Now here's how your brain works. Your brain makes associations all the time. Like your brain is taking in, I always say millions, but it's probably billions because truly if you start thinking about all of the, the light particles and the sound waves and the the smells in the air and the things that you are touching and all the memories and by the time you start really thinking about how many perceptions your brain is taking in at any given moment in time, and then there's 24 hours a day and then you're sleeping and dreaming and doing all the other things too, like plus all the, all of the internal processes that your body is paying attention to like your hunger signals and what's going on with your liver and what's going on with your blood sugar and your pancreas and all, all of the things your brain in order to move forward has to clump things together. It has to categorize things and sometimes your brain categorizes things together and by sometimes I mean frequently, but let's just, let's just say sometimes giving your brain a break here, it's really doing a lot of work, but sometimes it clumps things together that have absolutely nothing to do with one another, which is to say it creates an association between your weight and literally anything else in the world. , your weight has no meaning, none, nothing. It means nothing. Your weight means nothing. Your weight is meaningless and yet you and I and everybody else on the planet who weighs themselves makes our weight mean something about us and about what's going on in our lives. You have associations with your weight and unrelated things. Here's how this played out in my weight loss journey. I got back down to the number that I was when my sister died and my brain offered me that I couldn't possibly get below that number because my sister was dead. Now I hope that when you're listening to this, it's incredibly clear how wildly unrelated those two things could ever possibly be. But to my brain it made 100% perfectly logical sense that I enjoy being a certain weight. There's a weight that feels really good. I feel like myself, I feel strong, I feel fit, I feel powerful. It was the weight that I was for like 15 years. Like there was a weight that I easily maintained that I felt amazing at, that I quote unquote couldn't get to because it felt so good and my brain really didn't think I should feel that good if my sister was dead. Now there's a conversation to be had here about how your weight doesn't make you feel good like that. I really, I do not want you to think that I am equating feeling good about yourself with your weight because, because again, your weight is meaningless. Like the reason you feel good is because you think good thoughts. I had lots and lots of thoughts about I'm strong, I'm fit, I'm powerful, I'm fast, I can do anything I want to. I'm on top of the world like with, with all kinds of things going on in my life. So it wasn't anything to do with the number on the scale. You do not feel good about yourself because of your weight. You feel good about yourself because you have thoughts about not just your weight but like about your life, about your ability to be confident about things, about your ability to get things done, about your ability to fit in and belong and deserve nice things and all of that. So, so what I'm telling you that my brain associated with this weight with feeling good, it's not because of the weight, it's because I ha associated it with those thoughts. And my brain also felt like I didn't deserve to have access to those good feeling thoughts anymore because my sister was dead and therefore I couldn't weigh that number anymore because I couldn't feel good because my sister was dead. I know this got really convoluted and this is exactly what I'm telling you. This is a layer of the onion that's going to feel very tricky for you to unpeel. You have an association with whatever number you allegedly can't get under that it's going to benefit you to uncover and simultaneously recognize that that has nothing to do with your weight. Like this is the thing that I want you to peel apart, that the number of your weight has nothing to do with your ex-husband. It has nothing to do with that time you got sick. It has nothing to do with one of your parents dying. It has nothing to do with your life falling apart for some other reason. It has nothing to do with this bad thing that you associate with that number. And make no mistake, there is a bad thing that you associate with the number and I don't know what it is, which is why I'm, I'm trying to give you a lot of different examples and it might be something like really simple. I mean, it could literally be just that you got sick like in a way that mildly inconvenienced you like it wasn't even a big tragic thing. I don't mean to, I've given you kind of tragic circumstances that that make it seem like, oh, it really has to be something big. Now sometimes your brain has really associated something that, that it doesn't need to associate. And when you can uncover that and the best way to uncover it is, what do I think I mean in your journal, what do I think about weighing whatever it is, the number that ends with a nine or a four, what did I have to do to get there? What did it mean when I was there? What did somebody say to me about, I don't know, being too thin or looking sickly? How did I feel about that number? What do I associate with this number? There might be something, I'm gonna go ahead and keep using the word tragic cuz it, it sounds so big and tragic, but there also might just be something so innocuous that you've ignored it. Either way. That thing is what you are going to have to feel through next for me. Who doggies, let me tell you, I had to feel through grief again and weirdly, I had to feel through like the pride and the confidence and the amazingness of feeling that weight because my brain was offering me that I couldn't feel those feelings anymore, that I shouldn't feel those feelings anymore because my sister was dead. Y'all, like I said, this is, this is an onion. The thing that I want you to take away from this like big picture thing that I want you to take away from this is that getting unstuck means feeling your feelings. Like , I could have, I, gosh, I could have said that a long time ago, right? Like I could have said that at the top of the hour and been like, in order to get unstuck, just go feel your feelings . But hopefully by giving you these different examples and like walking you through the process, hopefully I've given you a little bit more of a clear path for which feelings to feel through. But I'm also gonna offer you that there's no way to do this wrong, but if there's a feeling that you'd rather not feel, if there's a feeling that is uncomfortable, that feeling is the stuckness. That feeling is what's sticking you to the place where you are with your weight. The path through your stuckness is feeling your uncomfortable feelings, and I don't know which ones it's gonna be like, it could very well just be the feeling of stuck. It could be that frustration, it could be that impatience, it could be that that kind of low grade yuck, that feeling once you feel that one all the way through might set you on the path to from here to goal weight in zero to 60. But you might have another layer. You might have to dig through and find the association that you have and feel through that feeling. You might also have to feel through what sounds like it should be a good feeling of what's waiting for you on the other side of stuckness. If you get to your goal weight and you anticipate that amazing sounding feeling, but you have some reason why you think you shouldn't feel that feeling like you've been taught your whole life, that you can't feel proud of yourself. You've been taught your whole life, that you can't brag about yourself, you've been taught your whole life, that you can't feel confident and sure of yourself feeling that allegedly good feeling, even though it feels uncomfortable to you is the path to getting there. You guys feeling your feelings is an integral part of the two step tool that isn't something that you actually have to do every time. And I really kind of wanna parse this out for you a little tiny bit more about how and why feeling your feelings is the way to go and why you don't always have to feel every single feeling. For me personally, the way that I decide which feeling I'm going to feel is I really lean into whichever one is the most uncomfortable. Like when I notice that I'm feeling a lot of resistance about feeling a feeling, I'm like, oh, well clearly that's the one that needs to get felt because that's the one that's getting me stuck here. When I feel resistance, that is my cue that that's the thing to feel. Now sometimes I don't even necessarily notice the feeling in my body, but I'll hear the thought and I'll be like, oh, that one, that one just has an energy to it. I call it the full body zing. And what it is, is my body actually recognizing that there's a feeling there before my brain can have the thought that there's a feeling to be felt. I, I like to describe it as instinct. If you don't think that you have an instinct or an intuition for this work, I, I didn't used to think that I did either, but the more I've leaned into feeling my feelings, the more I've noticed that my body understands my feelings before I have a thought about it. This, that's why they call it your, you know, your gut instinct or listening to your gut. It's because your body is having a physical sensation that you haven't even noticed yet and it's giving you information. Leaning into the physical aspects of mindset work is an integral part of getting your goal, of moving forward, really creating and honing and practicing that brain body connection. I mean, I've talked about it for years. If you've ever watched one of my workout videos, like ever watched one of my workout videos, I have talked about the brain body connection and I've talked about how beneficial it is in terms of like finding your physical balance and finding your physical strength and building your muscles, building your bones, building you know, your cardiovascular endurance, like all of the physical benefits that it has for you, for your health, my friends, it has all of those benefits for your mental health. Also, thinking your thoughts and feeling your feelings is the key to mental health. Recognizing your thoughts as thoughts, feeling your phys feelings as physical sensations that are just, just that they're physical sensations. They don't mean anything about you or about your life or about your abilities or about your deservingness or worthiness or your desire to belong or what you, what you can get in the world. Your physical sensation feelings don't actually mean anything about you. They just exist and you're capable of feeling them. And when you do, you will create the space in your body to get unstuck and move towards the thing you want. I feel like this was kind of a lot to take in today, and I strongly suggest that this might be the kind of episode that you kind of take in in pieces. Like honestly even even the first part about just like, wait, what's a plateau? What, what are we even doing here? And then understanding your thoughts about being stuck and then diving deeper into the thoughts about the associations you have with certain numbers that are creating the stuckness that you then notice and have thoughts about the stuckness that then create the plateau that you thought you were on. Like the deeper you dig, the less stuck you'll be, and I really, really hope that this was helpful for you. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.