The Art of Being Freaked Out, but Showing Up for Your Weight Loss Success Anyway

Pearl One

The diet-cartel has long insisted that “it will eventually get easy” to lose weight; that one day we’ll wake up and food won’t interest us in the least.

Sure, some of us can “get on a roll” and lose thirty pounds quickly but — having maintained for almost twenty years now — I can tell you that I still notice food especially if I’m hungry. I can deal with food better than before, but I still notice it. What the cartel wouldn’t talk about was addressing how we were supposed to maintain. In the old days, even the most enthusiastic losers ended up gaining the weight back.

Those who don’t get how difficult food and weight concerns can love (what I call) their “duh” platitudes like:

• Just move more and eat less!
• Focus on health and strength, not the scale.
• Burn more than you eat!
• Feed your soul, not your stomach.

“Gag,” right? So if you’ve reached your preferred weight and now aren’t sure what to do, I’ve got you.

You’re feeling scared of undoing all of your smart work work, and feeling scared is a normal response to – living in an immersed food-porn culture with temptation lurking around every single corner.

Of course I don’t want you to live in fear, but I do want you to acknowledge to yourself that it’s not “all you” and that there’s more at work here than we ever before realized. The overriding culture loves its food-porn. My hope is that someday we’ll see fast food go the way of the cigarette.

But given we can’t change the culture (for now), we’ll work instead to shift our thinking.

Here’s What I Did

I use positive self-talk and remind myself regularly that for whatever reason I’m a person who has a difficult time with food-porn. While it’s not the same as getting off heroin, it still feels pretty dang hard. I made peace with the idea that I would always get easily triggered into overeating or “inappropriate eating” (like downing eight sugar cookies for dinner) if I’m not manning the helm.

Steering my own ship was my forever part-time job.

I talk with my prefrontal brain throughout the day about how I’ll handle the next trigger, long before a trigger actually happens.

In other words, being triggered doesn’t surprise me anymore like it once did. As you know, I keep on-hand my favorite smart foods in the kitchen, I eat-before-I-eat, and I prep foods on Sunday afternoons. If I see myself ready to chow something inappropriate like brownies, I stop myself and either save them to go with my morning coffee or I throw them into the trash. (More on Brownies for Breakfast here.)

Can I take a moment to extol the art of throwing food-porn into the trash? Here’s the beauty of wasting food: our human brain is so powerful that you don’t have to spit food into the trash more than two or three times before the cavewoman part of your brain says, “um, apparently she means business.” Highly recommend this game-changer, it’s a wonderful habit to create for yourself.

But say a person is offering you a treat, you can’t exactly throw their food-gift into the trash so that’s when I whip out the strongest question in my tool box. I ask myself, “do I want to eat the butter cookie that The Scarfer brought home in the pretty pink box or do I want to wear a size eight pant?”

Snaps me back to reality. Essentially the question whisks our cavewoman from lunging at the pink box to our prefrontal back in charge reminding us of our greater plan of building a lifetime weight loss.

You know how newborns scream as they pull their own hair? Well, I like to wonder how I might be “pulling my own hair”? I’m pulling my own hair when I don’t regularly grocery shop to keep my kitchen stocked in my favorite smart food, when I hang out with people who aren’t on the same trajectory as me, and of course when I don’t track my the food I’m eating for that day.

Just like you’d soothe an infant by extracting his hand from his hair, that’s exactly how you talk to yourself. I tell myself often that this is the new me. The new me plans every bite. The new me isn’t overwhelmed by eating out because the new me never arrives anywhere hungry. The new me is fragile and needs a lot of reassurance as she goes through her day. In the old days losing weight meant “being good” or “being bad.” Today getting to our preferred weight isn’t about good or bad, it’s about embedding smart habits; engaging in smart planning; and being gentle and supportive when we use our internal talk. ♥

Pearl Two

Our journal-prompt pearl!

• Describe a moment when you chose yourself first — what happened, how did it feel, and what did you learn?
• Write about a situation where you ignored your own need — what would showing up for yourself have looked like?
• Make a list of three values or boundaries that matter most to you. How do you currently honor them?
• Imagine a perfect day where you fully show up for yourself from morning to night. What does it include?
• Write a letter to your future self, encouraging yourself to stand up for your own goals, health, and happiness.
• Identify one habit or routine that consistently drains you. How can you change it to better serve yourself?
• Describe a time you forgave yourself — what did it feel like, and how did it help you show up for yourself afterward?
• Reflect on a time you neglected self-care. What would it have looked like if you had treated yourself as kindly as a friend?
• If you promised yourself you would never back down from your dreams again, what would be your first three steps this week?
• Picture your life five years from now if you consistently showed up for yourself. What has changed? How do you feel?
• Create a “self-check-in ritual”—write out what it would look like to pause, ask, and act on what you need each day.

Pearl Three

Sequencing is taken directly from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The purpose of sequences is to help us move from reacting to circumstances to responding. I encourage you to do a sequence a day in your journal. Powerful stuff. Apply to your own life.

Knee-Jerk Sequence

• Situation (be concrete): On the road to visit family for Thanksgiving Tracy passes fast food at every stop along the highway.
• Thought: “I want to stop and buy something tasty. Just one shake or donut, but no. I promised myself that I’d get to Barbara’s house in time for family dinner. I can do this.”
• Feeling: victorious in the moment.
• Action: She drives with more urgency and arrives at her cousin’s house famished. Dinner will begin soon,  but she digs into the appetizer with gusto.
• Result: As she returns home it’s obvious to her that being hungry in the car was just the beginning of a downward spiral and that she was triggered into overeating leftovers every day and night of the long weekend. ♥

Chosen Sequence

• Situation (be concrete): On the road to visit family for Thanksgiving. Tracy passes fast food at every stop along the highway.
• Chosen thought: “I knew I’d get hungry on this drive to Barbara’s house and this is where my cold-tote takes center stage!”
• Feeling: Proud of herself for planning for the inevitable hunger and filling her cold-tote. (Tracy knew that pining for fast-food was a signal that she needed food-food).
• Action: As she drives to the dinner, she eats a hard-boiled egg that she’d sprinkled with salt earlier, a sliced apple and her favorite granola bar.
• Result: Tracy arrives at Barbara’s Thanksgiving dinner feeling great: not hungry, but not full. She eases up on the main course because she knows that her cousin displays a spectacular dessert buffet and Tracy wants to sample a bite or two of each. A couple days later she drives home – with her cold-tote full again — almost in disbelief that she pulled off the weekend without getting triggered into overeating even once. ♥

Pearl Four

Books love us and want us to be happy

Awesome book-dessert alert! This book-dessert suggestion is for the times when you want a lighter, sweeter read. This book isn’t overly sticky-sweet, just a gentle-sweet you might say. I highly recommend Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman. It’s about a smart,young girl who loses her mother, leaves her difficult childhood in Ohio and moves to Savannah, Georgia her great aunt’s home. The characters are fully developed and memorable. This is a great book-dessert. ♥

Pearl Five

Never underestimate the power of a moment to contribute to the success of your day. Carpe momentum!”  ♥

Leaura Alderson

I have come into so many great books that I have a stack waiting for me by the bed.

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Have a wonderful week!

♥, Wendy

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