Hello, hello, GOALfriend. Welcome to episode number 303. Three tips to start losing weight today. Can I tell you a funny story? I'm going to anyway because that's what I do around here on the Get Your Goal podcast. I always start with a little almost non-sequitur. This one is related though, because it's related to the title and the number. I have no idea at all when I was designing today's I almost said workout. Sometimes muscle memory works in my mouth. Anyway, when I was putting together today's podcast, when I was writing the notes for it and stuff, I had a couple of different titles for this one, and then I was like, you know what? I like listicles I love the top 3 tips. I'm a huge, huge fan of a top 3 tips kind of podcast. So I'm like, okay, we'll do top 3 tips, and then I came up with the 3 and I'm very excited to share them with you, and then when I saw that it was episode number 303, I was like, oh my gosh! It's all threes! And I mean, Sometimes I'm still just a total preschool teacher. When in doubt, I like everything to be thematic.
I like to talk about apples in September. I like to have all the trees together. It's a thing for me. And I think that's… Okay. I don't know that it's a thing for everybody to like to need things in themes, but it is kind of the theme of the day about making weight loss easier on yourself. Here's what I want to tell you. These top three tips are not things like making sure you drink your water before 5 p.m., so you don't have to wake up and pee or things like that. They are practical, but they're not gonna sound as practical as you might be hoping for. Have you met me? Of course, we talk about mindset around here. Of course, I'm gonna talk about, like, how to lose weight in the big picture and specifically, how to lose weight in the big picture by working with your brain and your body so that it makes it easier on you. Cause here's the thing. Have you done this? Cause I know I sure have. I think about the last time I lost weight before I was in my 50s. When I was in my 30s, I went out to lunch with my girlfriends, and while we were out to lunch, my pants were so uncomfortably tight that I remember sitting there and talking, and we had just eaten remember I had to undo the button on my jeans, and I was just like, I'm going on a diet. This is it. I was done. I was done. I got home, you know, whatever time it would have been in the early afternoon. I made dinner for the kids and my husband. Why was my husband home? I don't know why my husband- my husband used to work nights. Well, I mean, like, afternoons, like, he would go to work at, I don't know, noon, 2 o'clock, and come home at 10 o'clock. Why was my husband home? I have no idea why he was home. Maybe it was his day off. Oh, maybe that's why I was able to go out to lunch with my girlfriends. In any event, it doesn't matter. I know you don't care but my brain was just like, I've gotta figure this out now. In any event, my husband was home, I put dinner on the table, and I announced to my husband that I was gonna lose weight, that I was on a diet, and I was going to Walmart, and I was gonna buy slim fast, and that was it. I was done. And so I did. And so I went on this extremely strict diet that didn't last very long. I ended up modifying it within a couple of weeks. Probably that's what I always did. I would go on these super extreme diets, and the only way that I could stick with them was by modifying them like a lot AKA, basically doing what I probably could have done anyways, but I had to start with the super extreme.
I think a lot of us do that. Like we do that thing where we'll clean out the pantry and then we'll set our alarm to get up an hour early because we're gonna go work out and like we think we have to make these big sweeping broad gestures to lose weight. And the truth of it is: Your brain hates that. Like your brain totally hates that. Your body is. Your body is more or less on board. Your body will put up with anything. Your body is like, do you remember Pinky and the Brain? Have you ever watched that show? That would have been like the 90s. I vividly remember my college roommate, Jessica, introduced me to that show. I had never watched it before. I have no idea how, but I remember watching it for the first time and just being like, this is what's on TV these days, I had come to college. I was older when I went to college, and I had had numerous jobs quite literally like 2 or 3 jobs at a time. And so I didn't really want a lot of TV, except that I know I did, but I didn't specifically watch Pinky and the Brain before, so I quit my job. I took out student loans. I just went to school, like my final 2 years of college and so I show up there, and there's all these really young kids who are like, you know, fresh out of high school and stuff, and here I am. I'm 24. I've already, like, made car payments and lived alone and like had jobs and things. And so I'm just looking around like, what? But anyway, my roommate was quite young, but she introduced me to pinky in the brain. Here's where we're going with the pinky in the brain thing. Your brain is a brain and your body is kind of pinky, like just kind of dopey, like, I'll just go along with whatever you wanna do. Your body can handle so much nonsense. It's your brain that really needs to be in control of things that really need things to be rigid, very routine, varied the same. Technically speaking, your body kind of does too, but your body has a lot more leeway with it. Both your brain and your body have what's called biological imperatives, which is to say that number 1, you need to stay alive, like at all costs as much as humanly possible. Your brain and your body do everything to stay alive.
And what they also do in order to stay alive is they reproduce so that they can, you know, pass things on. They also have to stay the same as much as possible, and then way down there at number 4 is to adapt when necessary. So your brain and your body are 100 percent capable of changing. Like, make no mistake about this. Your body can change and your brain can change but they don't really want to. Like they're the higher imperative on the importance scale there is to stay the same as much as possible. And here's the thing, that makes sense. I mean, you actually don't want to react. I mean, you know, okay, when you wanna lose weight, I know you do want to react to what you just ate yesterday and like, okay, if I was in a caloric deficit for one day, let's lose 15 pounds. Come on, come on, body. But also, when you have one of those days where you do go over a rather significant party or you're doing something, you really don't want those changes to show up as quickly.
So here I'll make another pop culture reference. You take the good, you take the bad, take them both, and there you have. The facts of life. I don't know why I'm being so weird today, but I am. Thank you for coming along with me in any event. Your body and your brain, Pinky and the Brain don't like to make a lot of changes, but can. So in order to make weight loss as easy as possible, this is where I'm truly going with this entire conversation. In order to make weight loss as easy as possible, it's actually really important to understand how your body and your brain work, like what they're naturally going to do. The way they would normally do things and then work with that as much as possible. So here are my top 3 tips for how to work with your menopausal body and your very, very human brain. Who don't really wanna make a lot of changes, but are completely capable of doing so. Tip number 1 is to focus on belief. This is what we do around here at the Get Your Goal podcast. We talk about belief. We talk about your mindset, which is belief. Do you know that? I don't know that I've ever actually connected those two dots in this exact way before, so let me do that for you right now. When we talk about your mindset, I am never, ever, ever telling you to think positive thoughts. Ever. What I am offering you is that you can pay attention to everything in your brain. Again, coming back to that whole facts-of-life thing. You take the good and the bad. You simply observe that you have thoughts in your brain and understanding in your brain is producing results in your life. Your body, again, along for the ride, like pinky, is not gonna just go off on its own. Your body will only go where your brain goes first. And I know I know because a, I used to think this myself, and b, I actually still hear this really frequently. I know we all seem to think that weight loss is just a body thing. Like if you do the mechanics, the calories in, the calories out, it's math. It's simple blah blah blah that your weight will change except that that's not really how it works. Your weight changes when you believe your weight can change. And I wracked my brain on this one when I was putting together my notes. I was like, is there anything else in the world that is something that we would consider just a body thing that I can prove to you that your brain always has to go first? And so I dug deep into the archive. So I was thinking about when I was a kid.
When I was a kid, I was not especially athletic and that's a really nice way of saying that I was very uncoordinated. I was absolutely the last one picked for dodgeball. I was kind of afraid of everything. And yet, simultaneously capable of doing quite a few things. I didn't have a lot of coordination if you've ever watched any of my full-length workout videos, I have told the story about how the one bad grade I got when I was a kid was because when I was in kindergarten, I couldn't skip. I could gallop but I couldn't skip. So I have all kinds of thoughts about my coordination, and I'm still not fantastic at it, probably because of my thoughts from when I was 5. In any of it, I was strong, I mean, I was a child in the 70s, so of course we were outside all the time. I rode bikes. I mean, I was a strong, sturdy kid who was capable of doing lots of things and had fears, thoughts, and beliefs about some things that stopped me from doing them, and here's what I came up with. I could do a cartwheel. I was actually not great at cartwheels. I was gonna say I was good at cartwheels. I was good at cartwheels. I'm gonna leave it at It was good at doing cartwheels. I could do handstands. I could do headstands. I had a little bit of fear about headstands, so I would usually, like, be up against, like, a wall or something like that.
In fact, I always still do headstands against a wall or down against them all. I would much rather have a little bit of support, but incapable of it. So I wasn't afraid of being upside down. I was perfectly fine being upside down. I was strong enough to do cartwheels and handstands and headstands, and things like that. So I had upper body strength. I had lower body strength. I had just enough coordination to do stuff like that. But the thing that I could not do, like really, truly, could not do. I couldn't flip over the bar. Do you remember that I only came up with uneven bars, but they weren't uneven. It was just a single bar, where it was just a single bar, and you would like to climb up and have like one leg over and then flip around like my friend Jaymi Dressel. My friend Jaymi Dressel could flip around that bar like nobody's business and she'd be like Pahla, it's really easy and I'd be like, no, it's really not. I could get up there. What could I do? I could, in fact, I think I could hang upside down if I still had my hands. I don't think I ever let my hands go. Yeah, I know I could. If I had both knees over the bar and kept my hands on it, I could go upside down and hang upside down, but I couldn't get back up. So I never got the thing more I could flip around on the bar. That is 100% a brain thing. I was clearly physically capable of doing it, but my brain didn't believe I could, believed that I was afraid of it, didn't like the idea of falling, and had all kinds of thoughts that stopped me, stopped my body from being able to do a thing that I wanted to do. I did not have a mindset to work when I was nine. If only. So even though it might not seem exactly the same, I swear it is you who have thoughts and beliefs right now about your ability to lose weight, about what it takes to lose weight, about your personal body, and whether or not it can lose weight.
You have all kinds of thoughts, and all kinds of beliefs, that have gotten you where you are, which is to say that the results that you have currently are a result of your beliefs. Your body is showing you what you currently believe about what you can weigh, about what you can eat, about what you have to do, about your age, and all kinds of things. And I don't say that I don't say that in any manner like shame or blame. I say that because you have a human brain. This is what our brains do. They create results in our lives, sometimes in our bodies, sometimes in our garages, sometimes in our pen cups, and sometimes with the things that we own. Like, everything that you have in your life is a result of something you currently believe. And in order to change that, you change your beliefs. And let me be very, very clear again, I'm never, ever, ever, ever, advocating that you simply chant happy affirmations to yourself about, oh, I believe I can lose weight! Because right now you don't! And that's totally okay! Of course, you don't. I mean, to be fair, we are surrounded by all kinds of messages about how hard it is to lose weight, especially how hard it is to lose weight over 50.
You personally have, like, history and family stories, and all kinds of thoughts in your head that are just thoughts in your head. I mean, I don't wanna I don't wanna belabor that point, but you have thoughts that show that you don't believe that you personally can lose weight right now. It's completely okay because all you have to do is observe them. I know that doesn't sound like much. I know. You're like, no, that's definitely not enough. I have to squash them down, I have to throw them out, I have to think positively, and I promise you, you actually don't. Truly, all you need to do to focus on belief is to use the 2 Step Tool. I mean, I literally wrote an entire book about it, Mind Over Menopause. I've talked about quite a few podcast episodes before, it's where you find your thoughts and decide if they're helpful. And the way that you decide if they're helpful is whether or not they feel good in your body. When you discover the thoughts you have in your brain.
And let me be clear that that's the other half of why this isn't shame or blame. They're all subconscious. I mean, you don't hear them. You hear some of the negative chatter in your head, and so do I. But like the thoughts that are actually driving your actions and getting you results day after day, they're subconscious. You don't hear them until you go looking for them, which is why I created a journaling method that helps you find them. It's all there. And there's, oh gosh. I didn't look it up beforehand. I have an entire podcast episode that talks about the 2 Step Tool about finding your thoughts and deciding if they're helpful. It's free for you to go listen to that podcast episode if you wanna dive deeper, like I said, I wrote the whole book. But the essence of it is that you uncover your subconscious thoughts and simply observe them. Observing a thing changes a thing. That's a scientific principle. They talk about the time in, sorry, I just had hair falling off of me. They talk about it all the time in, like, physics and even psychology. Do you know how anytime you fill out, like, those personality quizzes and things like that? Maybe you don't. But I know I do, and so, therefore, I assume you do, aren't you trying to manipulate the answer? Like, I truly believe that I'm an introvert. So anytime there's any kind of a question on those personality tests, about I love to be with people. I'm like, no I don't.
Even though I totally love to be with people, I want the test to prove to me that I'm an introvert. I know I'm being, you know, observed by this quiz, and so I maneuver my answer to reflect back on me what I think I already know. Anyway, observing a thing changes a thing. All you have to do is observe your thoughts to change them. You don't have to squash them down, and they definitely don't all have to be positive. Okay. Tip number 2 is to prioritize pleasure, and this one's super important because your brain and your body are already doing this, so if you can work with it instead of against it, everything well, everything in life, but also really specifically everything in weight loss will definitely be easier. pleasure principle. It basically states that you are always seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. You can override this we frequently do. It's called willpower, and it's usable. You can use willpower. You can use willpower long enough to actually change habits, but it's the hard way. It really is. I've done it before. I'm capable. So are you? But why? I mean, really when you can work with your brain and your body and it's easier, why wouldn't you just do that? It's what I advocate. I strongly recommend that you work with the pleasure principle instead of against it, because you'll notice that when you are trying to really restrict yourself when you are trying to clamp down and put the lid on.
Yeah, you can, but you spend so much time just spinning around and around in self-doubt, which is not belief, that it makes it a million times harder. And I have found with the I mean at this point thousands of women that I have worked with, have truly found that until you can actually believe and embrace pleasure, your likelihood of gaining the weight back, even if you can get all the way to your goal weight, the likelihood of gaining it back is just it's so much higher. It really is. When you can incorporate working with your brain, with your body, it'll feel really easy. It'll feel incredibly sustainable, you actually won't notice anymore. It will just slip into the subconscious of, oh, this is just my routine. This is just how I live my life. It won't feel so constantly on edge like slipping out of your fingers. You won't worry every minute of every day, whether or not you're gonna gain the weight back because you know you won't. This is easy. This is pleasurable. This is fun. I'm working with myself. I totally believe that I can lose the weight and keep it off. It makes it so much easier. So here's my specific recommendation.
Here's what you do to prioritize pleasure. My food recommendation is to eat the foods that you already know and love in portion sizes and I go small or I go big because for lots We're eating more food than we're used to. You don't have to add extra food. You simply change your portion size of the foods you were already eating, foods you already know and love so that they fit your calorie target. I find this to be probably the most controversial advice that I give. People wanna argue with me all the time on this one, and I'm just gonna stand firm here because the science is very clear. The science is very clear on both points. Number 1 is that it really is just the slight caloric deficit that drives weight loss. It has nothing to do with the health factor of your foods. You could, I don't recommend it, you could eat nothing but junk food. As long as you're in your calorie target, you will lose weight. And having said that, you don't believe you will, so maybe you won't, but if you believed you could, and it would work, and you did, it would because it really truly is just the caloric deficit. And also, I mean, science has proven like again and again, psychological science, we know about the pleasure principle. We know that the human brain is always seeking pleasure in avoiding pain. So when you can keep as many of your routines as possible, and change the portion sizes. You are making some changes, but not the kind of changes that your brain and your body.
You're going to be like, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, we can't sustain that. That's way too much. That's way too ridiculous. The way it would if you were changing, like, portion sizes and times that you're and foods that you're eating, and making all new recipes, and making all new choices. That's just a lot for your brain to take in. So stick with what you already know for as long as possible and make tiny changes over time. I had already overhauled a lot of my eating habits. When I lost weight that time when I just told you the story about how I had to undo my pants at lunch, I went out, I bought slim fast, I was like, this is it. I'm completely on a diet, and I'm, you know, restricting myself extremely, and so I lasted on that slimfast thing for, like, maybe a couple of weeks. I started seeing some weight loss results. I was also starving. Like, I would go to sleep, like, so hungry I wanted to eat my own arm. So I was like, okay, I gotta modify this somehow. Like, this is not gonna work as is, so here's what I'm gonna do. What I ended up doing, don't judge me. I mean, go ahead and judge me. I can't control what you think. But what I did was I did the Slimfast thing, that super, super, super strict thing, Monday through like, Friday at noon. And then Friday at noon, I ate basically anything in the world until bedtime. And then it was my cheat day, but it wasn't a whole cheat day. It was just a cheat like 5 hours or whatever it was, and then back to the grind on Saturday and Sunday.
Now here's the thing, I probably consumed an entire week's worth of calories on that Friday afternoon. So over the course of the week, it, like, probably averaged out to what I should have been eating the whole time, except that most of the time I was eating such, oh my gosh, in such a calorie deficit. I was in my thirties. I was in my late thirties, but I was in my thirties. Your body could handle it when you were in your thirties. In any event, it only took me 9 months. Took me 9 months to lose the weight eating like that, but I was so unhappy with all of that. I mean, that was 100% willpower. And here's why I know that when you lose weight by willpower, you spend so much time worrying that you're going to gain it back. The way that I finally got to the point where I didn't worry about gaining back was I rehabbed what I was eating, how I was eating, I made it work for me, I made, I prioritized pleasure, and I ate in a way that I could definitely sustain so that I could believe. So here's what I'll offer you. eat the foods you love in portion sizes that make sense for your calorie target and know that you can make changes over time. I'm not telling you that you should eat junk food. I'm telling you that you can And while you're doing this, you can slowly rehab your food also. I don't think I finished that part of my story. So it took me 9 months to lose weight, but it took me 3 years, in fact, probably longer than 3 years, but it took me at least 3 years to really rehab what I was eating and a lot of my thoughts about foods because I had a lot of judgments about food and I have come to almost the complete opposite at this point. Now, I really truly don't believe in good foods and bad foods. I absolutely believe that you eat what you eat and you make decisions about what you're going to eat in a way that you can have your own back, which means that there's nothing that's off limits. Everything is food, and you get to make choices about how much of any of them you wanna eat. Okay. Tip number 3 is plan for recovery. This one's gonna sound like it's all body all the time, and it's still kind of a mindset thing because we have spent our whole lives thinking that we have to eat less and move more. And now in menopause land, your body is like, no, thank you. No, thank you.
I can still do everything I used to do, but I don't feel good afterward. Your menopausal body needs more recovery. It just does, and more recovery isn't really a great number to put on that. Your personal needs and your personal body have information for you about what's too much when and how, and what it does afterward. For me personally, figuring out what I could do sustainably meant that I went way overboard as I did because, I mean, for so many years, for so many years, I prioritized doing more instead of prioritizing recovery. Now I still like to do, like, bigger exercise, bigger workouts, bigger things, but now I know, oh, okay, I'm gonna have at least a day, sometimes 2, and frequently 3 days off afterward in order to prioritize my recovery. And for me personally, this is actually why I suggest to you that you exercise moderately every day. I like to exercise so that made it so much more pleasurable and sustainable for me to bring everything down to moderate so that I could work out every day, versus doing what I really wanted to do and then having to take 3 days off. The other reason I think of this as the significantly easier way to go in terms of moderate exercise every single day is because then you really know what your caloric needs are. You calculate your caloric needs once. You put a 0 on the end of your current weight. That is your calorie target. That already includes your deficit.
You're done. It's literally the simplest calculation in the world. You don't even have to do math. You put a 0 on the end of your weight boom, your calorie target. Because you're doing more or less the same exercise every day, you don't have any fluctuating “calorie in” needs. For me, that seemed the simplest. For me, these are the 2 for you to prioritize pleasure and your plan for recovery. I mean, keep it simple, sweetheart. When in doubt, make it as easy on yourself as possible because the easier something is. The easier it is to believe that you can do it, that you can sustain it, that you can stick with it, and that this will all work out in the long run. My friend, it all works together. My top 3 tips, and I'm going to tell you all of them again. My top 3 tips really do work together to make weight loss as simple as possible. You can start losing weight today with tip number 1, focusing on belief tip number 2, prioritizing pleasure. Tip number 3: Planning for recovery. And I'm going to go ahead and throw in a bonus tip here too. A bonus tip is to download The 5-0 Method, which is free. It's my weight loss program.
The entire program is free. You can get it from getyourgoal.com, and it really talks about all of the changes that we've gone through in menopause, and it talks about working with your brain and with your body, and a bonus tip 2a or whatever it would be or 4a, I guess it would be, is to come and join us in the Get Your Goal group.
The Get Your Goal group focuses very exclusively on this belief part because when you believe when your brain goes someplace first, your body will follow. It truly makes it inevitable when you work on the brain stuff first, everything else feels easier. And when you watch this? I don't think they'll be live yet. I think I've been talking to you about the four stages of weight loss and how I've been working on the four courses and I keep I don't think I've told you the joke about the 4 courses. Internally, inside the Get Your Goal group, I've been making a joke about the 4 courses of the apocalypse. Now I have made that joke externally because it's almost impossible to say four courses without hearing the back half of that in my head. I just say it out loud. That's how I roll. I have 4 courses about the 4 stages of weight loss, which are Losing the First Five Pounds, Losing All the Fives in the middle, Losing the Last Five Pounds, which is a whole other can of worms, and then maintenance and other exciting goals. All four courses are going to be live in the Get Your Goal group. I'm going to say in September, I don't have a date. We're working on putting all the pieces together behind the scenes. All of the I mean, everything's been written. Everything's been filmed. Everything is ready to go. The books are ready. It really is just getting all the pieces together and actually having it go live. So by the time you are watching this podcast, if you're watching it or listening to it the day it comes out, it probably won't be live just yet, but it's gonna be coming really, really soon. So now is a great time to join so you can get the four courses of the apocalypse, and work on your belief, your ability to believe that you can lose weight is the driver of weight loss. My friends, this was a silly one. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this was really, really helpful for you. Thank you so, so much for being here. I'll see you again
