I know you’ve got ‘em, because everybody has “diet thoughts.” In your head, they make so much sense and they sound so true. But not only are these thoughts not true, they’re holding you back from losing all the weight you want. So today, we’re exploring four “diet thoughts” you can let go of right now.
Hello, hello, my lovely GOALfriend and welcome to the podcast. I’m so excited to dive into our topic today. Letting go of your unhelpful thinking is a piece of the weight loss mindset puzzle that often gets overlooked.
And I get it. I mean, it’s so much more pleasant to write affirmations to yourself on your mirror or to make gratitude lists or count your blessings or celebrate your wins. Everybody wants to feel good. Me, too.
But skipping over the yucky parts of your journey isn’t doing you any favors. In fact, not releasing your diet thoughts is the exact reason you’re either struggling to lose weight right now or the culprit behind why you’ve gained and lost weight so many times in your life.
As long as you continue thinking “diet thoughts” you’ll continue being on a diet.
Letting go of your “diet thoughts” is the key to having complete diet freedom, to being 100% finished with losing weight, and maintaining your goal weight easily for the rest of your life.
So, let’s dig into four very specific “diet thoughts” you almost certainly have rattling around in your head. How do I know you’re thinking them? Because I found them in my own noggin!
When I was losing weight in my 50s, and let’s be honest, even after I finished losing weight, I worked diligently on finding and releasing the unhelpful thoughts that had kept me gaining and losing the same 30 pounds half a dozen times in my life.
The four thoughts I’m sharing today came directly from the pages in my journal. And over the past several years of coaching other menopausal women inside my Get Your GOAL membership, I’ve noticed that almost everybody has the same or similar “diet thoughts.”
The process for letting go of unhelpful “diet thoughts” is shockingly simple: Observe that you’re thinking a thought. I know you’re waiting for there to be more to it, but seriously, this is it.
Observing a thing changes that thing.
Today’s podcast is actually a mini workshop, and we’re going to observe these four “diet thoughts” together. I highly recommend that you listen to this one someplace where you can pause the audio with each thought and really focus on slowing yourself down and doing the work.
Because, yes, observation takes quite a bit of concentration, especially if you haven’t practiced it before. What often happens instead of observing a thought, is that we judge the thought for being wrong, or we argue with it, or we try to push it aside, or we try to find the silver lining to it.
Sometimes we do all four of those things!
You might notice yourself getting really antsy and fidgety and impatient while you’re doing this work, and that’s completely normal, too.
In fact, noticing that you feel squirrely or argumentative or annoyed is fantastic news – because that means you’ll really feel the contrast when you observe.
Observing your thoughts feels completely different than just thinking them. Like, you know how satisfying it is when you finally get your fingernail in between a sticker and its backing? It’s like that.
Like pulling apart two LEGOs of the exact same size that you pushed together really firmly because you were afraid that that particular part of Hogwarts Castle was going to be too flimsy.
Or like finally loosening your fingers and putting the scissors down after you’ve been cutting out teeny tiny flower shapes for your preschool students to glue haphazardly onto their “Spring Has Sprung” art projects.
You know what that feels like.
When you observe your thoughts instead of thinking them, you will actually feel the physical sensation of release. Letting go. (Just like the title of this episode promised you.)
Inside the Get Your GOAL group, I often refer to this observation process as “getting a crowbar underneath the thought” because that’s what it feels like when you’re doing it properly – like you’ve pried a sticky, tricky thought, up and away from your brain.
Are you ready to dig in? I intentionally chose these four thoughts for this podcast because all four of them are scientifically untrue. So we’ve already got the claw side of the hammer on the head of the nail, and all we have to do is pull it free.
Here we go with four “diet thoughts” you can let go of (a/k/a, observe) today.
Diet Thought Number One: I’m too old to lose weight.
I actually have an entire podcast on this exact “diet thought,” and if you want to listen to it, I’ll have the link in the show notes. It’s literally titled, “Are You Too Old To Lose Weight?” https://getyourgoal.com/podcasts/295-too-old/
And the answer, of course, is no. I already mentioned that all of the “diet thoughts” we’re covering today are factually untrue. But let’s start this observation process by noticing how the thought feels.
It’s heavy, right? For me, the thought that I’m too old to lose weight feels really sad.
And also notice your brain gathering evidence for why it’s true, even though I’ve just told you it’s not. Watch your brain telling you how easy it was in your 20s – you could just not eat for three days and lose five pounds.
Or in your 30s. Yeah, it was a little harder, you had to add in some jogging now and again, but losing weight was still pretty much a no-brainer. And even in your 40s. Okay, you had to get a little more strict, but at least it wasn’t impossible like it is now.
Now, in your 50s or 60s, you can’t lose weight. It’s too hard, and you’re too old. Watch your brain connecting these fictional dots and drawing this completely fictional conclusion.
Hold on here for just a minute, because you’re about to just start arguing with yourself (or me), and that’s not observing. Tune into your body for a second. Notice the drooping shoulders, the heavy chest, the sad feeling. The deep desire to argue or fight back.
And then, gently. Come with me.
Imagine somebody else in your exact same situation at your exact same age, but who thinks something completely different than you. Feel free to use me as your example!
I’m 54 at the time of this recording and I am definitely not too old to lose weight. Do you hear the confidence in my voice? How different that sounds from believing you’re too old?
You don’t have to jump to the thought “I’m not too old,” that’s not the point of what we’re doing here. We’re observing that your thought is a thought.
We’re noticing that there’s more than one way to think about age and weight loss, which therefore means that your thought is a thought and not a fact.
Tune into your body again. Do you notice that it feels a little looser? A little more open? Sort of curious or interested, instead of just sad and heavy?
THAT! That’s what observation feels like.
You’re not eliminating the thought or eradicating it or pushing yourself to believe something new. You’re simply observing. You’re loosening your grip on the old “diet thought.” You’re letting it go.
Diet Thought Number Two: I must be eating too much or doing something wrong.
How familiar does this one sound? Like, literally every day you step on the scale and it has fluctuated up a bit, right? I know!
I have definitely covered the science of this one before, though I honestly couldn’t tell you which episodes of the podcast have mentioned it. Briefly, your body is performing billions of processes every minute of every day, so your weight is constantly fluctuating. True weight loss can only be proven over a stretch of time, not from day to day.
And even though of course you understand this logically, when your brain offers you this thought it feels really true. And not just true, but anxiously true. Urgently true. “I have to do something RIGHT NOW to fix this” true.
Tune into your body and notice that uncomfortable fluttering, flapping, squirmy, squeezing sensation.
And then… come with me and observe.
This thought is a sentence. Picture it written in a book. Notice the words. Notice the letters forming the words.
A quick note to the side: this is why written journaling can be really helpful, because you can literally see the words forming a sentence on a page.
Your brain, like the author of any really good novel, has chosen these words to form this sentence to evoke this particular feeling inside your body.
And, like any skilled author, your brain could alternatively choose different words to form a different sentence to create a different feeling, depending on what story it wants to tell. Right now, your brain is telling the story of you doing something wrong.
But it could tell a different story.
Again, don’t try to force yourself to choose a different story right this minute. Simply observe that you’re telling a story at all.
Come back to your body. It’s less jittery now, right? Don’t be looking for complete calm. You’re not evicting this “diet thought” from your brain, you’re just prying it up a little with the crowbar. You’re letting it go.
Diet Thought Number Three: I can’t eat _____ (food or type of food) because it’s _______ (not healthy, bad, etc.)
I will freely offer my specific thought that I’ve observed in my own brain, and it’s “I can’t eat pizza because it’s fattening.”
I know you have some version of this, and in fact, you probably have a lot of thoughts like this because we all grew up hearing that some foods are good for weight loss – cottage cheese, salad, rice cakes, or fat-free ice cream – and some foods are bad, like pizza or hamburgers or full fat desserts.
Scientifically speaking, there’s absolutely no truth to this sort of thinking. All foods have calories, and when you are too far over or too far under the amount of food that your body needs, it will choose to store fat in order to keep you alive.
Okay, but the science isn’t really the point here. You’ve heard the science, but your brain still hands you this “diet thought” on the regular, so let’s observe that.
When I think this thought, I feel very sadly indignant. I want to pout my lip and stomp my feet and cross my arms and shout, “It’s not fair!” Inside my body, the feeling is simultaneously heavy and tight.
Tune into your body. What sensations do you notice right now when you’re thinking that you can’t have something you love to eat, because it’s bad?
And now… come with me, and let’s observe the thought as a thought.
Picture your brain as a little cartoon character, with a little pink brain for a body and little legs walking around and little arms, carrying a little cartoon thought bubble that says, “I can’t eat pizza because it’s fattening!”
Can you let yourself see this thought in a silly and funny way?
Come back to your body real quick – is it lighter, looser? Even a tiny bit? That’s observation.
You’re not changing your entire world view, and you’re not suddenly going to be able to eat anything you want completely guilt-free, but you’ve gotten yourself out of the stranglehold this “diet thought” has had on you. You’re letting it go.
Diet Thought Number Four: I’ll never lose weight with that many calories
I know for a fact you’re thinking this one, because I get emails and comments and DMs about this topic on the daily. And, just like our other “diet thoughts,” this one is scientifically false. Your menopausal body needs to be in a slight caloric deficit, which is different from the huge caloric deficit it used to be able to work with when you were younger.
Science aside, though, let’s observe this thought in your body. For me, this one presents as certain and inevitable doom. Sour stomach, twisted, sneering lips, and a caved in chest dragging me down down down.
There’s a very good chance you just picked up your phone and decided to check your email or play a quick little game of Candy Crush, and I want you to know that that’s completely normal. This feeling is really uncomfortable, and I want to get away from it, too!
But come with me, because we can observe. And here’s how.
Picture all of the places you’ve heard people talk about calories before. All of those “expert” opinions, telling you that 1200 calories is the only acceptable weight loss number.
You’ve seen that in magazines you’ve read, or in conversations with your friends, in your calorie counting app, or in online articles, or all those in-game ads for weight loss gummies.
Now imagine every one of them as soap bubbles floating around you. There are dozens of them. Hundreds even. But they’re not solid, they’re not true. And you can pop them, one by one.
Not true – pop.
Not true – pop.
Not true – pop.
Take your time popping them. Feel yourself loosening and letting go of this “diet thought.”
You’ve done really brilliant work here today, my friend. Did you enjoy this mini workshop and all of the embodiment work? This is the secret sauce of mindset work – it’s not just your brain think think thinking your way to your goal weight. It’s your brain and your body working together.
And if you liked this observation practice, you’ll love the Get Your GOAL membership group. This podcast today is exactly what we do in the weekly coaching calls and with the video learning library, and in the community conversations, and I would love to see you inside.
Consider this your personal invitation to join us. There’s a link to learn more about the group and sign up in the show notes. https://getyourgoal.com/work-with-me/
Thank you so much for listening. I’ll talk to you again soon.
