Ep. 132 Being Honest With Yourself

  Hi, and welcome to The Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker, a life coach, and I specialize in food and body, so helping you release the excess weight. So today we are talking about being honest with yourself. So what is being honest within this context of reaching your, what I like to call desired weight, any kind of goal weight that you have.

I've often referred to it as your natural weight, the weight that feels natural for you. That just feels like this is how you wanna feel. What is honesty in this context? It's acknowledging first that this matters to you without judging what you want, that your desired weight matters, right? It's not vain or insignificant.

Sometimes you'll think, well, other people have real problems, like it's not that bad, and we kind of minimize it and it's not selfish. Sometimes we'll think, oh, well, you know, I need to, I shouldn't be prioritizing myself in this way because. It's selfish to do that and we put other people ahead of ourselves to our own detriment, right?

Because then we have less energy. We're have a limiting self-concept, and so we're not able to show up as the people that, as the women that we really wanna be and are in actual fact, usually of, you know, less fun to be around. Less in service of other people. So the more that we can fill our own cup, the more we have to give to others.

We know this intellectually easier said than done, okay? But you wanna acknowledge if this is something that has been a goal for you for a long time, or it may be you're less focused on the actual desired weight, but. You are acknowledging this is an area that's a little bit prickly. Like I don't love how much I'm thinking about food.

I don't love how I'm making decisions around food, and I want to feel in charge, and I want to be at peace. If that's important to you and kind of nagging at you, then that's important and it matters, and we wanna be honest about that without any judgment. The second note on this is when we remove our overeating or any kind of over-drinking.

We are present to what is there without it. Our experience of our own life when we remove those things, and that sometimes can be painful. So the food, the wine is hiding. The inner work you need to do to either, you know, experience that discomfort and learn the skill of being okay with that. And or the inner work required to create more comfort for yourself to rely on yourself to create that comfort.

For example, if I'm at a dinner party in which I don't really know anyone, I may want to assuage that insecurity with snacking on the appies or having a glass of wine or a cocktail, if those things are no longer an option. Because I've decided ahead of time I'm not gonna do that, and my priority is health and releasing weight.

The only option is to manage that insecurity within myself without something external. We either learn how to do that or we just eat or have a glass of wine or cocktail, everything stays the same. If we learn, then we're capable of providing our own security, our own comfort, and we don't need the external things, the food, the alcohol, the external validation, the distraction, and we're free of those external things.

They have no power over us. If you say it's like I'm out of control with food. I have no power when it comes to this or that. The food is just there and I'm eating it all throughout the day. It feels like that because you're dysregulated. Your nervous system is dysregulated. You don't need to remove all the food or alcohol from your house.

You need to learn how to take care of yourself when you are in this dysregulated state and feeling out of control, so the food or the alcohol is not making you feel out of control. The feeling of being out of control and not having the skills to handle that experience is what creates desire and permissiveness to overeat or drink.

So when we remove the food, we get to find out what we are currently hiding from ourselves. For some of us, that's some inner work around boundaries. We need to set more boundaries. For some of us, it's some self-compassion work. We really see how hard we are on ourselves, and there's an opportunity to cultivate more self-compassion for some of us as people pleasing, and we need to heal our people pleasing tendencies.

Or it could be. What becomes present is dissatisfaction in a job or relationship. Then we get the chance to work on those things, which requires us, of course, to learn, to grow, to change. I. Being honest with yourself means tracking your progress. This means you weigh yourself every day, or maybe it's that you take inventory of your level of being active or passive in your strategy.

How often are you following through? How often are you eating past satiety, eating more food than you need? How often are you maybe snacking after dinner or eating when you're not really that hungry? I wanna talk about what being honest is not. So there's that expression of brutal honesty as if it hurts to be honest, and it can hurt if A, you aren't actually being truthful and factual, but you're being hurtful, calling it honesty or transparency.

For example, you may say, well, the truth is I have no self-control. I have no self-discipline. The truth is I can't do this if I'm being honest. I just keep messing up. I have to get it together. Notice. There are no truths there, right? Those are all opinions, very unhelpful, judgy opinions. Your brain might offer up no facts.

It can also hurt if, B, you aren't being a compassionate listener to yourself. If you're being honest and you say, you know what? I ate because I didn't feel like I could say no to so and so person, it would hurt her feelings. So I just ate the thing even though I wasn't hungry, or even though I don't even like it, or even though.

I really wanna adhere to my weight loss plan. Don't then say, well, I guess that means I'm just a pushover, or I guess I just can't reach my goals because there will be countless times like this, so I'm just gonna give up. Instead, you wanna practice, you wanna train your brain to be compassionate. A compassionate listener, for example, you might say, well.

This makes sense that if I'm thinking I'm causing someone else pain, even this, maybe this person I care about, then of course I would avoid that even if it means causing me pain in the form of not reaching my goal or pushing my goal out, or feeling uncomfortable in my body with that food. Maybe it makes sense that I would do that because I've been taught that I'm responsible for other people's feelings, that I can hurt their feelings, that it's my job to make other people happy.

Then of course, this is the logical action, very compassionate. It's just more of an understanding. It's more neutral. So why do we even care about being honest when it comes to releasing weight? We can't change what is outside of our awareness or what we are ignoring if we don't know. What is happening?

If we don't have the data or if we don't know why we are doing the things that we are doing, then we can't change it. But what blocks us from being honest with ourselves is essentially self-rejection in which we don't have our own back. Self-love, self regard is conditional. Meaning if the scale doesn't go down today, I'm gonna feel like crap about myself.

I'm gonna tell myself I'm never gonna get there. So we avoid the scale. If I eat too many energy balls, I'm gonna berate myself for a couple of days. We don't trust ourselves to stand up for ourselves. We don't trust ourselves to be a safe place for ourselves, and we don't love ourselves enough to let ourselves fail.

A hundred times if we need to, and still keep fighting for it without apology. We're not honest with ourselves about what we want because we don't believe we can have it. And I know that might be painful, so take a second. Okay. We don't believe, we don't believe in ourselves. We don't wanna get our hopes up too high.

We can't even imagine what it would be like to feel and charge around food, to not want excess to, to not want to overeat. We can't even imagine that for ourselves, what that might feel like to not want dessert or to say no to the wine. So why try? We'll just be disappointed anyways, most likely. So then of course, we stay status quo in which we are already disappointed.

The only way. Listen, the only way you will not reach your desired weight is if you quit. If you think you might quit, or you're constantly doing these little quits and getting nowhere, that's a good indication that you need some more support. You need to change. You need to try different approach. You need to change something up than what you're currently doing.

You'd be a great candidate for coaching, most likely, or some sort of program, right? That's focused more on mindset because then all you need to do. If you're working with me, I show up for a call and tell me I'm feeling really defeated and I wanna quit. I don't even wanna do this anymore, whether it's a coaching or it's a weight loss.

And if you can do that. I will help you get through it. The reason you will want to quit is because it will feel too hard for you and it will feel too hard because of how you're thinking about it and also how you're thinking about yourself. It's my job to help you shift some of your thinking so that when it feels hard, you are up for it.

It being hard. Will feel empowering to you. I will remind you of how strong and how determined you are. I will help you tap into that for yourself. And when we're being honest, here's what's available. We get to know ourselves. We get to know ourselves deeper. We get to validate ourselves, validate what we want.

We get to actively care about ourselves and heal the relationships that we have with ourselves. We get to learn. We get to embrace our humanity. We get to have a deeper understanding of the human experience. We get to have more compassion and understanding for other people because we've experienced it.

We know what. Suffering or pain or whatever is like, we know what it's like to overcome that and what that actually requires, right? We can have a deeper understanding and appreciation for that, whether it's this particular challenge or some other challenge that maybe we, we find easy for us, right? We can still understand that.

For that person, the way that they were thinking, the way they were relating to it, that was really hard for them. We can understand where they're coming from. We get to see our previous blind spots and obstacles so that they're no longer in the way. Between where we are now and where we wanna go, we get to just, you know, drop our shoulders, relax a little, because at least we know what's up.

We have the information, we know what's going on, and then we can come up with. A accurate strategic plan that makes sense given the problem we're solving for the right problem. Okay? We're solving for the over desire for food, wanting more food than your body needs, rather than solving for just the result of that, which is get this weight off as fast as possible in any way, shape, or form, right?

Which is just gonna lead to gaining the weight back. We can also then listen to ourselves knowing what we really need. Oh, this actually matters to me. Why? How do I know? Because I'm experiencing pain, right? It's painful. Now I can go about resourcing myself to make things better for my life and for myself.

We see things like, oh wow, I'm really turning to food out of dread. We start to see patterns. I'm turning to food out of boredom or feeling overwhelmed or feeling like I'm trapped in my life. Okay. That gives us a really good starting point. What's causing all of those feelings? Do we need to shift some of your thinking?

Is there opportunity to have a different view of your life or that experience or that circumstance? Of that messy house, is it an opportunity to think differently and relate differently to the messy house so that you don't feel that? Or do we need to get a cleaner in there, right? Do we need to make some actual changes in your life that would just alleviate these feelings?

And it's only when we're truly honest that we can radically accept ourselves for the messy, flawed, glorious creatures that we are. So I hope this was helpful. If you are struggling in any way to be. Honest with what's going on for you. If this helps you access that declaration of, yes, this matters to me and I'm present to that, right?

And just own that a little bit deeper than you did previously, or maybe it gives you some insight into where am I not being honest and why? What is, where is there self-rejection? If I could move that judgment and self-rejection, what would be present? What would I really be honest about? Just for myself?

It's not even to say that you have to let anybody know, but just for yourself. So that you can hold that space for yourself and even lean into some self-compassion for your humanity, right? It might not be immediately accessible. If that's something that you're working on, that's okay, but just notice if just being honest with yourself, neutralizes, it just kind of helps you give yourself a little bit of a break.

Okay. We tend to be a little bit hard on ourselves. Just know that you're a human and you are doing the best that you can. Okay? So be honest. Take care of yourself because you really deserve it. Okay, I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.