I don’t know about you, but working so hard to lose weight only to turn around and gain it back might be the most painful and defeating feeling on the planet.
A sustainable weight loss journey on the other hand is one where the changes that are happening on the inside create an inner-environment where we’re healing the reasons we overeat in the first place.
When this happens, overeating just isn’t a thing anymore, thus living at your ideal size becomes the new norm.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- What a Sustainable weight loss journey IS NOT (you might be surprised!)
- The one law that you can never escape if you actually want to lose weight
- A weird question I asked my mom about the day I was born (you can ask your mom the same question!)
- The Good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to being on a sustainable weight loss journey to the final destination of your ideal size!
- And soooo much more!
Resources and Links:
- Take the FREE Path to Food & Body Freedom Challenge!
- I’d love to hear your thoughts…Drop me a DM on Facebook or Insta!
TIMESTAMPS:
[00:03:07] What is not a Sustainable weight loss journey.
[00:07:35] Disconnect from self and body.
[00:12:45] Sustainable weight loss journey.
[00:16:47] Underestimating calorie intake.
[00:21:15] The ugly is important.
[00:24:38] Eating as a coping mechanism.
[00:28:14] Total neutrality.
Full Episode Transcript:
Hello. Hello everybody. Welcome to the Hello Body Freedom podcast. I’m so excited to be here. My name is Audra. I’m your hostess with the mostess. And I’m just excited for today’s episode. I’m just feeling like excited about life in general. We just had a three-day weekend and I am feeling well rested. I feel like I got a lot of sleep.
Sometimes on weekends I will tend to stay up way too late and it messes up my circadian rhythm, but man, I still went to bed at a good hour. I got lots of good juicy sleep. I woke up feeling great. It’s got a little bit better every day. And now here we are outside of the three-day weekend and I’m slaying it, man.
I’m telling you just get more sleep. It fixes a lot of things. Okay. That’s the end of the episode. Have a great day. Just kidding. Today, we’re going to talk about sustainable weight loss, and we’re going to talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and what that even means. And I feel like this is an important conversation to have because quite frankly, what happens is we Talk about weight loss as if we want it.
Oh, I want weight loss. I want weight loss. That’s great But what most people do to lose weight? It’s not sustainable meaning that it’s not that you can’t go lose the weight It’s that once you lose the weight you will likely gain it back and this is the story for most people This is why a multi billion dollar weight loss And diet industry exists because if you were able to be on a sustainable weight loss journey and actually lose the weight and keep it off, why would they keep marketing to you?
Because you would have reached your goal and then move on with your life. But that’s not their point, right? Where there’s a multi billion, I feel like maybe a multi trillion dollar industry that feeds on our insecurities and that keeps us stuck on this hamster wheel over and over again.
And what we’re talking about today is actual sustainable weight loss. That means coming into an ideal size for your now body. And that’s very important that we talk about that. If you are not in a place of caring about weight loss, then this episode is not for you.
We talk, although I will be talking about things that are important that are connected to a weight loss journey that might also apply to you as well in terms of better relationship with food and better relationship with body. But we’re really going to be focused on weight loss as a part of your health and healing journey today. All right.
So this feels very important because again, we get stuck in diet culture and we’re just so desperate to lose weight that we do the most ridiculous things ever to lose it. And then we wonder why we gained the weight back. So we’re going to be diving into that and ultimately understanding what it really takes to be on this sustainable weight loss journey.
And Truly, it is me sharing with you the good, the bad, and the ugly because when you have the whole picture you’re just more informed. You can really step up to the plate and decide for yourself if this is something that you’re up for. All right. So I thought the best way to start this episode is to talk about what sustainable weight loss is and what it is not. Okay. And I think when we can get really clear with this, you can start to understand maybe some things that you’ve tried in the past as a part of this journey and and go maybe that’s why it hasn’t worked yet. All right. All right. So let’s dive in. So sustainable weight loss is not a diet plan.
So for those of you who are lost in the trappings of I am keto or I am paleo or I am a macro counter, like whatever this kind of like dogmatic way of following somebody’s food plan, following somebody’s diet plan. A sure fire way to gain the weight back. And what do I mean by that? When you are following somebody else’s opinion outside of yourself, you are, and I’m not even saying that they’re necessarily bad.
I think that there’s, a lot of diets that are grounded in science, that are grounded in research, but, and there and there are golden nuggets. There’s information of golden nuggets that can be taken out of them for sure. But, Ultimately, the reason why the diet plan works is because it has drastically cut calories to ensure that you lose the weight.
And what research shows us over and over again is that 90 to 97% of all humans that go on a weight loss diet, Pop that diet plan and you are 90 to 97% positive you are going to gain the weight back. Full stop, period, gonna gain the weight back. All right. This is a surefire way to basically work your ass off, only to end up right back where you started or worse off.
It’s a really bad idea. What diet plans do is At a very psychoemotional level is they disconnect you from knowing your own ability to do what your body just innately wants to do, which is to be at its ideal size. It creates a lot of preoccupation with food. It creates obsession with food, which basically just keeps you locked in the trenches and stuck on that hamster wheel of going on the next diet when inevitably the diet that you’re on right now doesn’t work.
Okay. So if you are looking for a sustainable weight loss journey, which means just clear, I lose the weight and then like I don’t gain the weight back. It’s none of this yuck yo yoing up and down. If you want that experience, then you definitely don’t want to follow some crazy rigid diet plan.
All right. The other thing that sustainable weight loss is not, it is not counting points, counting calories, counting macros. Oh I don’t do a diet. I just count my calories. Okay. And this feels really important to me because all of us came out of our mama’s Vagina, every single one of us, okay?
Whether it was our actual mama, or whether it was just the mama that birthed us into this world, it doesn’t matter. That’s how we came onto this planet. That’s all we know, okay? Tell me, did you come out with a measuring cup? I’m just curious. Because I asked my mom, I said, when you gave birth to me, in addition to my body coming out, in addition to placenta and whatever, all the other things, did a measuring cup come out of you as well?
And her answer was obviously no. And then she looked at me funny and rolled her eyes because she thinks I’m crazy, but that’s cool. I don’t care. And I hope that I’m at least trying to make you laugh or you’re at least rolling your eyes at me because at the end of the day you didn’t come out with a measuring cup.
Okay. So then why is it the moment that your mama put you on a boob or a bottle that somehow you figured it out, that somehow something worked right. That you didn’t have to count your macros or your calories or measure it in any ways. Okay. Oprah didn’t hand out the point system to infants.
And I love Oprah, so we’re really clear. Freaking love her. mean nothing but like mad respect. But the truth of the matter is that’s not the situation. Okay. And so if you can imagine your life and the only way you figured out how to lose weight is to count your calories, count your macros, count your points.
And that’s the way you learned how to lose weight. I just want you to imagine yourself a decade from now. Two decades from now, four decades from now, you are in your fricking nineties or one hundreds and you are on your last breath. Do you really want to be thinking about how many points you ate that day?
Do you really want to be thinking about, do I need to calculate my calories? Okay. What is the measure of that macro and let me write all that down. It is not a normal relationship with food and is most certainly not a way to sustainable weight loss in a meaningful way. Okay. If you are looking for sustainable weight loss, what those two things do, counting points, counting all the things and going on diet plans, what those two things do is utterly and completely disconnect you from yourself, from your body.
And what we’re really looking for is reconnection to self and body, because somehow when we were infants, There were some sort of connection inside of us that told us when we were hungry, and so we ate, and when there was enough, and so we stopped. This connection does not just exist in infants, it exists in all of us right here, right now, today.
There might be some things skewing that in the way, but ultimately, if you keep reaching for those as the answer, this is the whole point I’m making in this podcast, you keep reaching for those as the answers, okay? You’re just going to end up gaining the weight back because you are perpetually increasing the disconnection that you have with self.
And the more disconnected you are with yourself, the less you trust yourself, the more you put your trust outside of yourself and all these other things. And the more that you just don’t figure out that sustainable weight loss journey in a way that the weight stays off. Okay. So the last piece of what a sustainable weight loss journey is not.
Okay. It is not fast. I totally get that when you feel so uncomfortable in your body, that when you are struggling with behaviors around food and body and you don’t want to get dressed because you feel icky, you don’t want to go shopping because nothing fits. You don’t want to go to invitations to parties or go to family events because you don’t want anybody to see you.
The level of me knowing what that feels like is visceral. It is real. And I totally get it. And I also understand that those feelings inside of you are triggers to want to like, get that weight off. Like yesterday, get this off of me now. And you are looking for the fastest approach ever, but unfortunately, what research shows us is the faster you lose the weight, the faster you gain it back.
That, my friends, is also not a sustainable weight loss journey. And I know this is icky. You’re like, Audra, I thought you were talking about the good, the bad, the ugly. Y’all, I haven’t even got to the good, the bad, the ugly yet, okay?
So we’re just explaining what a sustainable weight loss journey is not. You’re probably thinking, this is ugly. This is ugly. I don’t want any of this, but just stay with me. Stay with me. Cause I’ve got the best news ever for you. Best news ever. Okay. So that’s what a sustainable weight loss journey is not.
Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about what the hell is a sustainable weight loss journey? Number one, It should feel doable. It should absolutely feel doable. If you eat fast food every single day, and you all of a sudden decide to go on the whole 30, and now you’re going to resect your whole body for 30 days, and it’s going to be amazing.
I’m not saying you can’t do that. I’m saying that way of eating and being on the planet is so far off from what your nervous system knows as normal, that the moment day 31 comes, guess what you’re going to do. You are likely just going to go right back. I had a new client. She just came in. I don’t know if you guys have heard about the hard 75.
I don’t even like to talk about these on my podcast because the last thing I’m, what you’re doing is Googling it than doing it, but she did it. She busted her ass for 75 days. She lost like 10 or 15 pounds. And on day 76, she opened the bottle of wine. She opened the giant thing of ice cream. It was insane for her nervous system.
And quite frankly, for most people’s nervous systems who are trying to lose weight sustainably. When we go too much too soon, it just basically creates fake weight loss. It makes it so you lose it and gain it right back again because it has to be doable. Your nervous system has to know that you’re not about to die because you’re changing all your comfort foods to like freaking broccoli and kale salads, right?
Unless those are your comfort foods. Which I’m guessing they’re not for a lot of you then you switching everything like black or white, all or nothing is part of the problem. So it has to be doable. It absolutely has to be doable. Okay. And the other thing is that what’s doable when you start this journey.
It’s gonna get easier and easier to do the next little bit, to do the next little bit, to do the next little bit, to do the next little bit, right? So who you end up being when you finally reach that point that feels I feel so comfortable in my body. This really feels like my ideal size.
This feels really good for me. When you are at that place, you’re not going to be in the same place you’re at today. You might like kale and broccoli more than you ever thought. Lord knows I can’t even believe that I am that girl that likes that stuff. Y’all, I had a major fast food diet. We’re talking two packs of cigarettes a day and fast food in my late teens and early 20s for a long time.
I quit the smoking pretty quickly. Thank goddess. But man, that fast food thing. It wasn’t until probably my late twenties or thirties, and there’s a whole story around how I get that. So if you want to know more about that story, stick around, I’ll show you how you can learn about it. But ultimately the sustainable weight loss journey is one that is doable and it’s literally one that when you get there, when you get to that ideal size, you could just keep living that way.
Like, I can’t tell you how many times I get on the phone with clients who they like white knuckle their way to lose the weight. And they did it. They had the willpower, they had the gumption, they did all the things, but now that they’re there, now they sit here in panic mode and they’re freaking out because we’re like, Oh my God.
If I eat that cookie, it’s all going to come back. Oh my God. If I eat that food, it’s dude, if you didn’t learn how to eat the cookie while you were on the sustainable weight loss journey, it ain’t sustainable, babe. I don’t know what to tell you. If you didn’t learn how to have birthday cake and wedding cake on your way down to your ideal size, shit’s going to hit the fan.
I don’t know what to tell you. This is the truth, all right? So now let’s talk about the good, the bad, the ugly of actually making this work happen. All right? So now you understand what it is and what it is not. Let’s start to understand some cool stuff here. Number one, a sustainable weight loss journey.
That means again, we were talking about weight loss. Number one, the law of thermodynamics is king. And queen. It’s both. We’re just going to put them right at the same level there. There’s a lot about this journey that matters, but the law of thermodynamics, we don’t get to escape this.
All right. This is super important. The reason why your diet quote unquote worked is because you were expending this much energy. Like I, if you’re listening to the podcast, I like put my hand like about at my eye level. But then the energy that you’re taking in, i. e. eating is less than that on the regular.
So on average, you are taking in less calories, less energy than you are expending. The reason why diets work is because that gap is so dramatic. which is part of the problem, which is one of the reasons why you gain it back. And the other I’m not going to get into all the things of why dieting is such a disaster.
If you are interested in why dieting is such a disaster, go to hellobodyfreedom.com and join my food and body freedom five-day challenge. It’s totally free. Just go do that. So I’m just going to plug that a lot because we have a live one coming around the corner. So I want to make sure everybody gets that.
But ultimately. If you can create this thermodynamic situation where you’re expending more energy than you are taking in, okay, that is the queendom and the kingdom of all of it. There’s more to it. There’s healthy habits. There’s all these pieces, but we don’t escape that. We don’t escape that particular thing, okay?
And I think that this is the good news, because you don’t have to follow a food plan to do this. You don’t have to follow a diet to do this. You literally have to learn, how do I create this? And that is very important, okay? Now, the other thing is in terms of sustainable weight loss, what you don’t want to do, remember we, we already talked about what sustainable weight loss is and what sustainable weight loss is not.
It is not counting every calorie because probably the first thing you’re thinking is then I guess I’ll just start counting calories and I’m going to know exactly how much I burn and exactly how much I don’t burn y’all. It doesn’t work that way because your body is not an exact science. It’s not a mathematical equation.
Your body is a chemistry set. Okay. You don’t get to measure exactly how much energy you expend, how many calories you expend. You don’t get to measure exactly how much energy you take in, how many calories you take in. The other thing is there’s a whole lot of research that shows even people who are trying to be meticulous about keeping track of every single calorie they burn and keeping meticulous track of every single calorie that they take in.
The research shows that almost everybody vastly underestimates the amount of calories they take in. I’m talking by like 20 to 50% underestimating it, even though they’re being obsessive and writing everything down. And they also overly exaggerate. And I don’t mean exaggerate because they’re trying to, or they’re meaning to, I don’t mean exaggerate.
It’s not the right word. I can’t think of it in this moment, but they are overly exaggerating how much they’re moving there, they are making it out that they’re way warm, more energy expended, more calories expended and way less calories taken in. So it ends up being a shit show and doesn’t work anyways.
That’s what the research shows. And so that’s not the point. And so you might be going, okay, then how the hell do we create this sustainable weight loss journey where I’m taking, I’m expending. A bit more calories energy than I’m taking in. How do I create that deficit in a way that’s an average on a way that creates a sustainable weight loss journey over time.
And now comes plug number two for joining. Go to hellobodyfreedom.com and join the path to food and bodyfreedomchallenge. com because this is what we’re going to do here. We’re going to talk about that on day one y’all on day one. All right. So that’s the good news. Now you can understand just how simple it is.
Now we’re getting into the bad and then we’re going to get into the ugly. Okay. So I’m just going to talk about the bad. If you keep going to diets, it keeps creating that disconnection that we talked about beforehand. The more disconnected you are with your body, the less you are going to be able to really come into this real mindful way of creating that deficit in a way that actually works so that when you get to your ideal size, it works with your life, it works with your lifestyle.
So you can keep on doing it. Okay. So that’s the bad. You keep reaching for the diet. It ain’t going to flow y’all. I don’t know what to tell you. The other bad part that makes this a little harder than just the thermodynamics piece. It’s like when we can understand that’s great. But what the law of thermodynamics doesn’t address are all the other reasons you are eating that end up increasing the amount of calories that you’re eating.
And I want you to think about mindless eating, bored eating. I want you to think about heading to Costco with all the samples and just not even mindlessly eating all the samples. I want you to think about walking by the break room at work and just grabbing that donut without even thinking about it.
I want you to think about the times when you’re just, when you think about a food and you go that sounds good. I just want it. And then you go get it and you eat it. None of this is innately bad, right? The only thing is if we aren’t addressing all the reasons that we’re overeating what we actually need in order to either create maintenance or to create that deficit, then that’s a problem, right?
And we haven’t even talked about the bigger ones, which are stress eating, bored eating, comfort eating anxious eating. I don’t know about you, but I never considered myself an emotional eater. But what I would do is I would get really like hyper and excited. Like we would have a celebratory dinner or a big party or something like that.
And my nervous system would just be like, Oh, I’m so excited. And then I would just eat. I would just eat and eat and eat right. If we aren’t willing to address And look at all the reasons why we would be overeating in the first place that got us to this place where we feel that we need to go on this weight loss journey.
This is an issue. Okay, plug number three. We are gonna be talking about this in depth on day two inside the Food and Body Freedom Challenge. It is a free five-day challenge. You go to hello body freedom.com and join. Get on it. Get in there now. You can move through this. Let’s do this. Okay.
All right. So now, the good, it’s a real simple equation. Now, the bad, the part that’s wait, what? Now let’s just talk about the ugly. Okay. Now the ugly is important to talk about. And this is what I think sets Hello Body Freedom apart from anybody else out there who any other weight loss coaches or whatever, nutritionists or even personal trainers, all the things, right?
Here’s the deal. If you have lost weight and gained weight over and over again, if you have struggled with your weight for a really long time, if you sense that food is like always in control and you are not in control and you keep trying to gain control and then it just keeps not working that might look like we call it self sabotaging behavior.
So you finally maybe get some things under control, but then you self-sabotage yourself specifically around your body, specifically around weight, specifically around your health. Okay. If you feel like you’ve literally tried everything and nothing’s worked. All right. Then we need to talk about nervous system dysregulation, aka unprocessed, unresolved trauma, right?
So what do I mean by that? I mean that what happens with a trauma body is something happens like a boundary violation, right? Is perceived, right? Either something actually happened or we believe something happened. My favorite example, I give this example all the time, is I am from Texas and I remember going to, it’s called the State Fair of Texas.
It’s like a really big deal here, in Texas. It’s a thing here. I don’t want to get into that, but my point is I was like six or seven years old, which would have meant my brother would have been like four or five years old. And we were at this giant thing. So like the State Fair of Texas is the amount of people are, it’s just insane how many people go to this thing.
And so my whole family was there and we were all standing around and I look over into, not right next to me, but I don’t know, like in the distance and I see my little brother. I’m like, Oh, there’s my little brother. But I look at his face and his face was like, he was looking around and like he seemed okay, but he was looking around and it was clear that he didn’t see me even though I was like waving my hand, trying to get his attention.
And inside of what, 10 seconds flat, 30 seconds flat, I don’t know, he went from being okay to curious looking around, where’s mommy and daddy, where’s my family, to sheer terror, screaming, holding himself, just shaking in place. Okay. And so what happened to his body now, I don’t know, I didn’t know it then, but the thing is he had the perceived sense of my family is gone.
I am lost. We were actually just right there, right? As soon as he started screaming my dad went over to him cause he saw her. Hello. I’m right here. And, gave him a hug and all the other things, right? But in that moment, what happened was an absolute intense overwhelm of a stress response inside of a child and children have a lot less resiliency than adults do.
And what happens is in that moment when we have so much intensity happening in the body, I love that example because it can be real or perceived. In my brother’s example, it was perceived, but his body does not know the difference. And so what happens is we have these situations where our nervous systems get really freaking overloaded with stress response, fear, adrenaline, norepinephrine, stress, all the things happening, fear response.
At its highest. And what happens, especially as children is if we learn that food fixes it, right? Food makes us feel better. If I eat the food, it soothes this icky thing that I’m feeling because maybe we didn’t have grownups help us process or soothe that intensity, right? If we learn that habit, then that can be.
Again, to be really clear, eating of the food in those moments of intensity doesn’t fix the intensity in the body. It only just shoves food on top of it. It does not fix it. This is why it’s called a coping mechanism, right? And this is the ugly part of this is that for a lot of us, this is a big piece of the puzzle.
This is why we’re mindlessly eating. This is why we can’t seem to stop these habits because what we’re talking about is an intensity in the body. That’s at the body level for most of us, because we’re so disconnected from our body. We don’t even have capacity to consciously realize what’s happening. Our unconscious and subconscious part of ourselves, the part that’s connected to this intensity learned a habit a long time ago, which is grab the food without even thinking about it.
Put it in the mouth and it fixes and changes our state. This is the ugly of it, and this is what we specialize in Hello, body Freedom. We specialize in all of it. Everything we talked about, we walk all of our clients through this, but just about everybody who’s struggling with their weight and being on a true sustainable weight loss journey, this is a piece of the puzzle that nobody’s really working on and talking about.
So my exciting call to action for you is to go to hello body freedom.com. Get your ass into the challenge. I got to see you there because we’re going to go over the good, the bad, the ugly. We’re going to knock this out of the park. It’s going to be the best thing you’ve ever done inside of the Path to Food and Body Freedom challenge.
Again, it’s hellobodyfreedom.com. You can go there, you can click on the challenge, you can join right away. We will be there. Literally what we’re doing is we are helping you get out of your own way. So you stop self-sabotaging so you really can go on one more sustainable weight loss journey and let it be the last journey you ever go on.
We do this by using the latest research in trauma and trauma resolution in neuroscience as well, in order to reprogram all of these deeply ingrained overeating pathways that you have. We literally start to untangle this at a conscious level, at a subconscious level, and at an unconscious level. It’s very powerful.
And when you do all of this, my friends, you end the food sabotage. You end the overeating, the stress eating, the mindless eating, the emotional eating, you end it. And if we are able to do this work and we understand how the law of thermodynamics works, then poof. It seems like magic, but it’s really not.
That is what we do inside. So I’m encouraging you to join the Path to Food and Body Freedom Challenge, go to hellobodyfreedom.com. Hello body freedom.com, and you can there, there should be a link right at the top. Get in there and let’s do this. Because if you are ready for feeling control around food and you want that to just be your new norm where it’s not like food has control around you, then go to hello body freedom.com and join this challenge.
If you want to know what it’s like to completely and totally and utterly forget that there’s a chocolate bar in the pantry or that there’s ice cream in the freezer and literally forget about it for months and then when you remember, you’re like, Oh shit, I forgot about that total neutrality. You need to join this challenge.
Okay. If you are interested in learning how to have a cookie because you want a cookie without eating the whole damn box. And you want that behavior to not feel like you’re white-knuckling it. It just want, it just feels like as natural as breathing. You need to join this challenge. All right, my friends, that is my plug for the food and body freedom challenge.
This is a five-day path to food and body freedom challenge. I am so excited for you to go on this with me. Thank you guys so much for being here. This was such a fun episode and go join. It’s happening right now. We’re doing it. We’re so excited. We’re just laying it over here and we’re just waiting for you to realize that there’s more to it than just going on a quickie diet.
In fact, you might want to quit doing that. All right, my friends till next time. See you later. Bye.
Important Links
