I’ve worked with thousands of menopausal women over the years, helping them lose weight for the last time, and every single one of them has gotten stuck at some point on their journey. Thankfully, getting stuck isn’t random, nor is it permanent. Today, I’m going to share with you the universal places everybody struggles, so you can figure out which of these three things is keeping YOU stuck.
Hello, hello GOALfriend, and welcome to the podcast! If you take nothing else away from today’s episode, please take this: struggling and getting stuck on your weight loss journey is an inevitable (and completely fixable) part of the process.
You’re supposed to struggle. You’re supposed to get stuck. It means absolutely nothing about you that losing weight isn’t smooth sailing from start to finish.
I truly believe that the reason we human beings set goals for ourselves is to learn something deeper about our human experience. And the way we learn whatever it is we need to learn is by being challenged.
Struggling. Getting stuck.
And it’s my mission in life to help you, not just struggle less, but to see the struggle and the stuckness as opportunities to learn something about yourself, and to love, trust, and respect yourself even more because of it.
Viewing your stuckness through that lens can mean the difference between working through it or giving up. And I don’t want you to give up.
So, rather than throwing in the towel on your weight loss journey, let’s explore which one of these three things is keeping you stuck.
Thing #1 that might be keeping you stuck is being inconsistent with your tasks.
Biologically, your body is actually designed to tolerate a LOT of inconsistency. We humans are a surprisingly hardy species that can withstand all kinds of weather conditions, lack of food, and sparse shelter. But what your body does with that inconsistency is maintain your weight. It holds steady while conditions are variable.
So, if you’re looking to change your weight, you actually want to be really consistent with your inputs – eating in a slight caloric deficit over time and supporting your metabolism with hydration, sleep, and movement.
But maybe you’ve noticed… consistency is hard. And the way this plays out for 99% of us is that we just force ourselves to be as consistent as we can for as long as we can (also known as “dieting” or “using willpower”).
But you literally can’t force yourself to do something forever. It’s not sustainable, and it’s really not enjoyable.
Here’s what is sustainable for permanent weight loss, and not coincidentally, this is the exact two-part process I teach inside the Get Your GOAL membership.
Part one is to set achievable, doable parameters for your weight loss tasks, while simultaneously doing part two, which is uncovering your mindset blocks about the tasks.
Both parts can seem really counterintuitive, especially because we’re all inundated every day with messages about how to work really hard and lose weight fast. And let me be really clear that I’m not advocating for you to lose weight slowly because slow is somehow better than fast.
No, the best way to lose weight is permanently, and you can do that fast or slow by setting parameters for your tasks that build your trust in yourself and uncovering your mindset blocks about those tasks inside your journal.
Some members actually breeze through this part without really getting stuck at all.
Thing #2 that might be keeping you stuck is having an association between your weight and unrelated events.
You know how you’ll lose a few pounds and suddenly you find yourself saying something like, “Oh, wow, I haven’t been this weight since I worked at my last job!”
We all say things like this, so it sounds like a perfectly normal association, but have you ever considered that your weight and your job are actually completely unrelated?
Your brain is biologically designed to categorize data and events together as a mere matter of efficiency – I mean, it’s taking in billions of perceptions every minute of every day, so it’s got to be able to store memories quickly. And for the most part, this works out fine.
But when you’re trying to lose weight and your brain has associated a particular number on the scale with the wildly unrelated circumstance of losing your job, or your cat dying, or your best friend moving across the country, you’ll get stuck.
This is just the Pleasure Principle at work. Your brain is avoiding the emotional “pain” it associates with certain weight milestones.
So, inside the Get Your GOAL membership, I’ve laid out a simple but oh-so-powerful journaling process that helps you find these hidden associations you have between your weight and other events in your life and shows you exactly how to pull them apart emotionally so you can get unstuck.
In all my years of weight loss coaching, I’ve never met anybody who didn’t have some associations to unstick. But sometimes they don’t show up until you’re almost done or even completely finished losing weight. Which leads me to…
Thing #3 that might be keeping you stuck is not letting go of your overweight self concept.
I know when you first hear this, you’re probably thinking something like, “But I can’t wait to think of myself as a thin person (or a person at a healthy weight, or whatever descriptive words you’re looking forward to – I know the word “thin” doesn’t resonate for everyone).
And you’re absolutely right – thinking of yourself in a new way is fantastic! It’s exhilarating! And also, biologically, it’s a place where you’re very likely to get stuck.
Your brain and your body have a couple of biological imperatives. Number one is to stay alive, number two is to stay the same as much as possible, and number three is to change when necessary.
What this means for you, is that A.) you can change your mind about who you are and how you look and what you do, which is fantastic news. But also, B.) changing your mind doesn’t happen passively and will require some effort on your part. Specifically, some emotional effort. And yes, what I’m saying here is that in order to feel good at your goal weight, you actually need to practice feeling good.
The truth of it is, if you’re not actively working on letting go of your overweight self concept and stepping into your healthy weight self concept…
Well, we’ve all heard the stories of people who lost a bunch of weight only to turn around and gain it all back again. And for me, this wasn’t just a story, it was my life.
In so many ways, losing weight really wasn’t hard for me. Consistency comes pretty easily to me, and I didn’t really have a lot of associations with my weight, but oh, boy, when I would get down to my goal, I would start describing myself as a “fat girl inside a thin girl’s body.” Or when people would compliment me on my loss, I’d say, “Don’t worry, I’m going to gain it back again!”
Inside, I wanted to believe that my weight loss was permanent, but my automatic and efficient thoughts and feelings – the ones that are biologically designed to keep me to stay the same as I’d always been – had me stuck.
I gained and lost thirty pounds again and again, half a dozen times. Until I figured out the trick to letting my old self concept go – a journaling and somatic technique I teach inside the Get Your GOAL membership.
You absolutely can change your mind and get unstuck from your overweight self concept.
In fact, you can get unstuck from anything that’s stopping you on your weight loss journey. There is always a way to use your brain and your body together to get your goal.
My friend, I hope this one was helpful for you today. Thank you so much for listening. I’ll talk to you again soon!
