Ep. 62 When to Get Help or Keep Trying on Your Own

 Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker, and I'm a life and weight loss coach. So in this episode, I really wanna talk to anyone who is a little on the fence when it comes to reaching out for extra support when it comes to weight loss. So whether you're brand new to this podcast or you've been listening for a little while, but you've just been a little hesitant maybe to book a consultation or to download some of the self-coaching stuff I've provide.

Even inquire about coaching. Hopefully this episode will help you clarify your decision, whether that's deciding yes, you're ready to explore coaching with me, or any other program that you're interested in that calls to you or you decide for the time being that you are. Really confident about your next steps without any kind of help or paying for anything.

Although I do think everyone could benefit from some sort of life coaching or weight loss coaching, I don't actually think that everyone needs it to get where they wanna be. So after this, hopefully you will be closer to knowing, if not a hundred percent sure, which camp you fall into, right? So first let's talk about if you can likely just do it on your own and not invest any extra time, energy, money into a program.

So you might already have a way of eating that feels like you could do it for the rest of your life, and you've been pretty consistent with the amount of weight that you've been releasing by eating this way. You also are pretty confident that you can reach your goal. You just have a sense that you know you can do it, and it's only a matter of time.

You just really believe that it's possible for you, and you notice that you don't really get that sidetracked by either the latest weight loss fads or what. People are doing at work, or your girlfriends are doing anything like that, you're kind of steady with what you're doing and you feel good about it.

And then when it comes to food and your weight in general, you feel calm, mostly accepting, and you're at peace. And most of the time, maybe not a hundred percent, but most of the time you eat when you're hungry and you easily stop when you've had enough. If you have all of. Then you are amazing. Keep it up.

It sounds to me really like you've got this and you just need to continue on with these healthy habits. Your thinking is clean and in alignment with taking the action you need to take to get where you wanna go. So just keep going. , but if this is not you, see if you can relate to any of the following a little bit more closely.

If this sounds more like you, you can't help but constantly feel doubt about releasing the weight because you've tried so many things and you've failed so many times before. So when it comes to losing weight permanently for the rest of your life, you are just filled with. , you often feel really frustrated and just scared that it might never happen, that you might just have to accept where you are forever, right?

Or that you potentially could gain even more weight. And when you really think about that dream weight, like that number that maybe you have in the back of your mind or the way that you wanna look, you don't truly believe that it's possible to be there. Enjoy food. Like to be at that weight and to eat in a way that you're gonna feel nourished, that you're gonna have energy and that where you're still gonna be able to, you know, go out with friends and family and all of that.

The second thing is that you might be thinking you're really alone, or just feel alone. Feel like you don't have support. Maybe you can't talk to your friends or. about how challenging it is for you because either you're embarrassed to admit the degree to which you're struggling in this area, or maybe you can't talk to your spouse because they just don't understand Either they don't think you really need to change, or they seem to be able to eat whatever they want whenever they want.

So like how could they possibly understand what you're going through? Another thing is you still have the belief that you need to move. To lose weight, so likely by now, if you've been listening to the podcast for a little while, you know that it's not just about moving more and eating less. So if you're thinking, you know, if I just worked out five days a week or six days a week, if I was just more active and I didn't have this desk job, I'd definitely be thinner.

So if you were thinking. You fall into this, this camp, okay? This group of people. You might also be thinking that you have to give up sugar or flour forever to sustain your weight loss. . So sometimes we get into that all or nothing thinking. That's another sign. Another sign is you find yourself trying old ways of eating that worked before.

So this could include any kind of cleanses that you've done, or maybe you've done something like keto, or where you've just cut out carbs. But this time, whenever you try it, either you can't keep with it or you're doing it and you're for some reason not getting the same results. This. Another sign that you might need extra help is you think about your weight and food constantly.

A lot of my clients who come to me initially, that's one of their biggest complaints is they're just constantly overthinking food. So this can be doubting your choices, ruminating on what you ate or you didn't eat. Basically, food in your weight is taking up way more brain space than you'd like, and you'd much rather put that energy, that time, that focus on other aspects of your life, and it just feels like you.

or you might need support if you have a protocol or way of eating, but you just can't seem to stick with it long enough to see the results that you want. So maybe it's something like, this works for a lot of people, or you believe in the value of it, or you see how it's logical and makes sense, but for whatever reason, it's not working for you because you can't stick with it long.

Okay, I have a few more here for you. Another sign that you might need more support is if you've had some success. So you've lost weight. You've released weight. Maybe you've implemented some of the things that I've taught you or just from other people out there, but now you're stuck. So what has been working has stopped working for you because you've been at the same weight for maybe over a month or so now.

Maybe it's, you know, you're going past six weeks or so. That is an indication that something needs to change. Another one is you find yourself eating when you're stressed, when you're sad. Bored, overwhelmed, happy, even really any emotion that's not feeling neutral in your body. So emotional eating is a huge one, and I really recommend getting support in some area wh when you're dealing with emotional eating because it just is something that goes a bit deeper and often requires you to not only learn some tools of how to process your emotions instead of eating.

Also requires you to change your thinking about how you relate to your emotions. So definitely if, if emotional eating is something that you feel like this is really getting in my way, that's definitely, I would say, an indication that you need to reach out for some, get some sort of support on that. Okay.

And the last one is you just keep, and this is such a big one, you just keep telling yourself that you should be able to do it without any help. Because why? Because you know what to do and you just need to get yourself to do it. It's like, I know what to do, I just need to do it. Here's what I wanna offer here.

If you knew how to release the weight you wanted and you already had the tools to do that to follow through, you would have done it by now. You are not sitting around knowing exactly what to do and how to do it on a regular basis and choosing to be uncomfortable in your body and in mind. Drama around.

Your brain might be telling you this because then you don't have to do anything different and feel a different negative emotional state. Instead, you'll continue feeling the same emotional, negative emotional state when it comes to your weight, which is preferable to your brain because it's designed to like the familiar over the new, right?

It requires less metabolic energy to think all those same old thoughts, and it has that emotional state memorized in your body. So it makes perfect sense when you face the fact that you don't know how, or you would've already done it. That requires a lot of action on your part, right? It in. It requires you to feel a little uncomfortable.

It's much easier for your brain to avoid taking any kind of action. I would say that the degree to which you are experiencing, all that I just described, will give you an indication of the level of support you need. We're all at different points in the journey. and at different times too, you will need different levels of support.

And I'll tell you that when I first signed up for Life Coaching, this was I think almost 20 years ago now, I didn't tell my life coach that I wanted to lose weight, which was the very reason why I signed up with her , but I did not tell her that. It took me working with her over a. Before I told her that was a goal of mine because I was so embarrassed and had so much shame wrapped up in it.

It's really hard to admit where we struggle and it's even harder to reach out for help. Most people won't. Most people will keep telling themselves lies like they just need to find the right diet. They just need to exercise more. They just need to have more discipline or more willpower, or even more basic.

I just need to eat. I know what to do, I just need to do it. If that worked, you would've already done by now. Our tendency is to look for what action we need to take. It's like, okay, this is what I need to do. But we still feel all the same feelings that we felt before. We're just trying to slap on a new action, so we still feel hopeless, frustrated, confused, overwhelmed, and we still have so much over desire for food.

That's why we're overweight, because we have an over desire for food, not a natural desire, which would lead to a natural body weight. So that doesn't change all of that, all those negative emotions, they don't change simply because. We take a new action and we don't create the result that we want because the mindset we have about food, about our body, even about our capacity to release the weight and keep it all forever, that hasn't changed at all.

Only the action, which most times will only be temporary when we haven't changed the mindset. So it's like trying to get someone to do something different when they're just thinking all the same thoughts that cause them to overeat. And so much of our thinking is either outside of our awareness, so we don't even know it's causing overeating or we think those thoughts are facts.

So I'll give you some examples to illustrate what I'm talking about here. A thought you might have without even knowing it's sabotaging your weight loss, is that if you get thin, other women will be jealous. and you'll be rejected. So maybe that's a sister who would really envy you at your natural weight.

You know, all gorgeous and the fullest expression of yourself. Or maybe it's a friend who says you're not eating enough. They're really watching what you eat and making comments. Or maybe it's like a family member or your mom who says, don't get too skinny. . Right? If we associate thin. Being at our natural weight with being threatened, our brain will get very sneaky at preventing us from having to go through that.

This can also show up in that you don't wanna draw unwanted attention to yourself or your body. Especially from men, this can feel very threatening. And if you've ever lost weight in the past and then you've noticed more attention either from your girlfriends or from men or anything like that, and it felt very uncomfortable and you weren't able to process your emotions and work with your thoughts about when that was happening, then it makes sense that that would still be going on for you and it's not resolved.

And so it makes sense. Your brain would get really sneaky and say, listen, if you just overeat, if we create an over desire for food and we overeat, we won't have to go through that again. Yes, it'll be different pain, but it won't be that pain. So if that's coming up for you, it might be really sabotaging your weight loss without you even really knowing it.

Right? So we can have a lot of unconscious. Thinking when it comes to relating to our choices about food and our weight loss and our self-concept. Okay. When I talk about thoughts that you might be confusing as facts, here's an example. One is that when you're tired, you need food for energy. Or it's just a fact that your body likes in quotation marks to be at a certain weight.

So sure you can get down to one 50, but that's it. Your body doesn't wanna get lower than that. I definitely have had clients who said that my body doesn't like to get lower than that. You think it's a fact or? Maybe it's a fact that you'll always desire a certain food or drink. Maybe that's pizza or ice cream or even bread.

Maybe it's hard for you to imagine that you could finish a long day at work and not have a glass of wine. I had a client recently say shout out if you're listening to this , that that's what everyone does. That's what everyone does. They have a glass of wine after work as if it was a. Of course not.

Right? There's many of us that don't drink. There's many of us that that's just not something that we do after a hard day. So of course that's not right, but that's what her brain was offering her. How could it be any other way? That's just the reality. So, so much of our thinking, we just think it's fact.

When you get coached your reality. , everything you think is true about yourself, about your body, about your ability to release weight and get to your goal weight, and that might be, you know, even up to 10, 15 pounds lower than what you might think it is right now. All of that gets turned upside down. It gets questioned.

All those limiting beliefs that you have. We shine a light on them and then we change. It's like if you were to organize your closet, you know, I think maybe, I don't know if I've used this analogy before, but you know that Marie Condo show, if you first, you have to turn on the lights to see everything that's inside, right?

So imagine like a closet that's just like full of stuff. First you turn on the lights, you take a look at what's inside. Then we take everything out. So that's her model, right? She takes everything out so that we could put back what we truly want. So just like the items in your closet, you might have thoughts back there that have been there for so long you didn't even realize that you had them, and here's why.

You might be reluctant to reach out for help and even like book a consultation with me or any other kind of coach or any kind of other program. , and I'll let you in on a little industry secret here. After doing so many calls with women who are generally thriving in their lives overall, but specifically struggle with weight loss, the number one reason that you won't get help is that you don't believe you can really do it.

So these women, if this is you, they are so afraid of failing. And the reason is they've tried so many times and had so much disappointment in the past around this area of food and their weight that they are afraid of even more disappointment. The reason this happens is because that's what our brains do.

We look to the past to inform us of what we're capable of in the future, and it's the biggest mistake we could make. I want you to consider that if you only used your. And failed attempts to determine whether you could do something in the future, then you would try nothing new at all. So when it comes to weight loss, we give up before we've even started in order to prevent the shame and disappointment of failing.

Again, we don't give ourselves the chance to win at this. We feel the disappointment and the shame ahead of time with our current weight and our current struggle. So no matter what your next step is, how you go about solving this problem, whether that's a course, a program, or working with a. PS, I'm open for business and would love to coach you,

Here's what I want you to know. I want you to decide ahead of time that if the offer seems reasonable to you and it's something that fits with your values, then you will go all in and you will get the result that you want, so you can decide that you can decide that ahead of time before you even start, that you will get the result that you.

That you are someone who gets what they pay for every single time, and it's okay that there's some doubt because yeah, you've tried a lot of things, right? You've failed in the past, but you could decide that all of that. Was leading to where you are now, to a place where you are just so done. You are so over it.

You are so ready that you will do whatever it takes to figure this out. No matter whether it's this, it's just gonna maybe gonna be one more step closer, but no matter how long it takes, you will create your result. And of course you won't believe that a hundred percent right. You won't be in that belief that it's gonna happen for you a hundred percent of the time.

You might not even fully believe that you can reach your weight loss goal once and for all, and also stop thinking about food all the time, that this could be your reality. . If you've never experienced that before, you have zero evidence and it makes sense that your brain would be skeptical. So healthy skepticism is good, but if it starts to get in the way of you betting on your own success and having your own back, then you know it's not serving you.

If you only take one thing away from this entire episode, just let it be. This, your efforts, the energy, time, and even money that you put into solving your. Will help you improve. You must believe that. You must believe that what you're doing is going to make an impact. Otherwise, you'll have zero activation energy and not make the changes needed.

Know that even if it seems incremental at times, you're growing, you're learning, and you're better off for your efforts. And if you do that, you will eventually definitely get what you want. So where can you start? I want you to check out my free resources. You can go to mindful shape.com/resources and you have access to, I have a webinar up there.

I just have a lot of self-coaching resources. For you to start, if you're new or if you just want to restart or check out what self-coaching can look like, that will be a great place for you to start and it's totally free. . And if you're doing those for a little bit and you find that they're very helpful and that it resonates with you and you wanna accelerate your results and you wanna take this kind of work even deeper, then you would definitely be a great candidate for a client who gets results in my program.

So please go to my website and you can sign up for my wait list and see when we can work together soon. So I hope this was really helpful for you if you were contemplating maybe about reaching out for a consultation. Or if you're just thinking, you know what, I have most of what I need and I'm just gonna keep trying it on my own, then by all means, keep doing that and I will talk to you again soon.

Okay. Bye.