Weight Loss By Degrees
I have been a coach for 6 years now and I’ve helped 100’s of women and a few men, and the number one thing my clients want help working on is weight loss.
So many have tried diet after diet and they’re left frustrated. They started out hopeful, but eventually they grew to hate it because it’s hard and miserable.
When it comes to losing weight so many people focus only know to focus on the food piece, trying to change what and how much they eat.
But what I’ve come to realize is that changing what you eat is actually the last piece of the puzzle. There is so much more that needs to be addressed first. Once you address these things, then the food part becomes so much easier! And there’s not the constant battle going on.
So instead of just jumping all in and trying to do a complete 180 degree overhaul of your life trying to do and eat all the things perfectly all at once to lose weight, I promote working on weight loss by degrees. And more specifically, just one degree, one tiny percent, at a time.
On this episode I’m sharing my framework for weight loss.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER:
- How and why weight loss by degrees works.
- Rachael’s framework for weight loss
- What it means to be a “normal” eater
- What things effect and influence our weight
- Why past diets didn’t work and what will
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TRANSCRIPT:
This is The Joyful You Podcast, episode 89, Weight Loss by Degrees.
Welcome to The Joyful You Podcast.
On this show, I talk all about the tools you need to build faith in yourself, cultivate a healthy relationship with food, your mind, and your life.
I’m your host, Rachael Collins.
As a certified life coach, it is my mission to show you how to work with your body, manage your mind, process your emotions, improve your relationships, and create supportive habits so you can live well, feel well, and become your strongest, healthiest, happiest, most amazing self, a joyful you.
What’s up, everyone?
Happy Thursday or whatever day it is when you’re listening to this.
Today, I want to talk about weight loss.
I have been a coach for six years now, and I have helped hundreds of women and a few men.
And the number one thing my clients come to work on is weight loss.
I love weight loss.
I know, though, that sometimes weight loss can get a bad rep, especially right now.
I have noticed, with probably all of you, the world’s shifting from a place of everyone should lose weight to this idea that if you do want to lose weight, it means that you don’t love your body enough and that you need to just work on your self-love or your body image, right?
But I personally think that weight loss is a great goal to have and to go for.
I have seen it be a huge catalyst for change in so many areas other than just weight.
And the reason why is because it is so much more than just the physical weight and food.
Weight is just a symptom of other things.
So when you work on those other things, not only do you release the weight, but to also improve every other area of your life.
And it’s this really awesome thing that happens.
And that is what I want to talk about today.
So you might want to grab a pen and a paper and take notes because I am going to share with you my framework for weight loss.
I have talked to so many people who have tried diet after diet, and they are just frankly frustrated.
They start out hopeful that this is the thing that is finally going to work, but eventually they grow to hate it because it is hard and it is miserable to be on a diet.
I recently read a statistic that said, women try to lose weight 130 times before the age of 40.
And I completely get it.
That was me.
I believed just like so many that I just needed to find and stick perfectly to the right diet.
So I find one, I’d hop on it, it wouldn’t work.
I’d hop on another.
Nope, that one wasn’t the perfect one for me.
And maybe I didn’t do 130 different diets, but I bet I tried 130 different times to lose weight.
I seriously probably tried five different versions of Weight Watchers alone, because you know they’re always changing their program.
I tried Atkins.
I tried no flour, no sugar.
I tried low fat, high carb.
I tried high carb, low fat, so many more.
I was desperate.
I was desperate.
In fact, my Google search was always weight loss related, so much so that my entire social media feed was filled with some kind of diet or miracle weight loss supplement.
That was all that I could see as I would scroll.
And so as I’m scrolling, I’d see someone’s before and after picture, and I’d immediately leave the diet that I was on, and I’d switch over to whatever diet they were doing.
Paleo, Whole30, Vegan, Atkins, Beachbody, Weight Watchers, this special protein powder, this meal replacement bar or shake, you name it, I was there.
I was also constantly reading those clickbait magazines in the checkout aisle.
We all know the ones, right?
The ones that are promoting quick and easy weight loss.
But none of it worked.
When it comes to losing weight, so many people focus just on the food piece, trying to change what they eat, trying to change how they eat.
That is what a diet’s main focus is too.
But what I have come to realize is that changing what you eat is actually the last step.
It’s the last piece of the puzzle.
It’s the last thing that we need to be working on.
There is so much more that needs to be addressed first.
And then once you address these things, then the food part becomes so much easier, and there’s not this constant battle going on.
So instead of jumping all in on a diet and trying to do a complete 180 degree overhaul of your life, trying to do it all and eat all the things perfectly, all at once to lose weight, I promote working on weight loss by degrees.
And more specifically, just one degree, one tiny percent at a time.
There is a saying that goes, there’s only one way to eat an elephant, one bite at a time.
And when it comes to weight loss, we try to eat the entire elephant in one sitting, instead of taking it one bite, one degree, one thing at a time.
Part of that, I think, is that we are in a hurry to lose weight, and we think that by doing it all, it’s going to get us there quicker.
But I also think that we don’t know another way.
We haven’t been taught or shown another way.
And a lot of my clients, when they first come to me, they’re skeptical, and they wonder how a one degree change is going to make any difference.
And so I always share these examples with them.
So hear me out.
Listen, one degree is the difference between hot water and steam, and steam will power a locomotive.
It will power a train.
Or if you want to look at one degree as in distance, like we’re using a compass, and we’re one degree off, the effect of being one degree off is not noticeable at first, right?
Seems like you’re just going just normal.
But the longer you travel, the more you stay in the one degree direction, the more it becomes obvious.
So people far smarter than me have explained it like this.
If we go off course just one degree after one foot, so 12 inches, you’ll miss your target by two tenths of an inch.
Okay, not a big deal, right?
After 100 yards, so a football field, you’re off by 5.2 feet.
Still, not huge, but definitely noticeable.
After a mile, you will be off by 92.2 feet.
That’s a lot.
That’s a lot.
One degree makes a huge difference.
So my framework for weight loss is different than probably anything else.
But I also think it works better than anything else.
And as I get into this, I think you will see why.
But the biggest reason is that my strategy for weight loss doesn’t force you to do a complete 180 degrees.
But instead, we change things just one degree at a time, which is so much simpler to do.
So let’s jump into my framework.
The first part of the framework is learning how to be a normal eater.
Now, one of the things that I hear all the time is, I just want to be a normal eater.
And I think what people mean when they say this is, one, they want to stop dieting.
They want to stop starving themselves.
They want to stop eating foods that they hate to eat.
And they want to be able to eat foods that they actually enjoy and that they actually want to eat.
And then two, I think that they want to be like their friends that they see eating normally, quote unquote, whatever that means to you.
And they’re always at their natural weight.
They’re not dieting all the time.
So the first thing that I work with my clients on is learning how to be a normal eater.
There is a way.
Did you know that?
There is a way to be a normal eater because let’s face it, no one wants to be on a diet.
No one does.
So this framework is the what, when, how, where, why, and who of eating.
This involves tools like the H2E eating, 24-hour plans, awareness, deciding what you want out of food, and lots and lots more.
So that is the first part of the framework.
The next part of the framework is mindset, knowing how your brain works, which part of your brain is speaking to you, discovering all the beliefs that are weighing you down, and also how to still the brain and your nervous system, because your body will not release weight when it is stressed out.
So we work on all of that.
We also work on your emotional world, so knowing the true cause of why you feel the way you do.
We work on learning coping skills, and what to do with all of those uncomfortable emotions that are going to come up in life, and also how to deal with urges and wanting to eat all the things.
The fourth part of the framework is working on our social health.
Not many people know that our relationships play a huge role in our overall health, including our weight.
Now, this gets really specific to individual needs, but it could be working on your relationship with yourself, could be working on your relationships with a spouse or a child or your sister-in-law or a parent.
It could also be working on your relationship with food, money, time.
It also includes environments.
This could be the environment of your home, it could be the media that you view, the music that you listen to, so many different things, because whether we’re conscious of it or not, our environment and our relationships are contributing and influencing our weight.
Before we dive into the rest of the framework, I want to take a minute to let you know that if this is resonating with you, if this is calling you, I would love to be your coach.
July is right around the corner, which means we only have six months left in a year.
We’re halfway through.
I am inviting you to spend the last six months of this year together with me.
Imagine where you will be by the time Christmas rolls around.
Imagine looking good for your family Christmas card and not feeling so out of control around all the holiday food.
By the time 2025 rolls around, you’ll be feeling so good knowing that you ended the year having reached your goals instead of having to set them.
This is the perfect opportunity to spend six months with me teaching you this framework, holding your hand through it, helping you every single step of the way so that you start the new year a new you.
How amazing would that be?
Right now, I am running a summer special.
I don’t usually do this, but I am.
I am discounting my coaching packages, so if you’re interested, you can go to my website, ajoyfulyou.com forward slash work with me.
Do we even say forward slash anymore?
Or is it just understood?
I don’t know, but I just said it.
Anyway, ajoyfulyou.com/work with me.
You can get more info there.
All right, let’s get back into it and talk about the fifth part of the framework, which is our spiritual help.
The biggest tool in this area, I believe, is identity work.
Who we think we are, how we see ourselves, all of that is creating every experience of life, including our eating habits and our weight.
So we work a ton on this.
The last part of the framework is physical help.
So we save the food piece for last.
Now, like I said, our weight is just a symptom of something or something else.
It is a messenger.
It’s just a way to get our attention.
It’s saying, hey, something is out of alignment and needs our attention.
This is the reason that just going on another diet and trying to quote, unquote, fix what you eat and cut out sugar and eat less calories and just work on the food piece feels so freaking hard and why it doesn’t work.
The problem is internal, and diets only attempt to apply external solutions.
Just changing what we eat isn’t enough to fix what’s really going on, which is all the other things that we just talked about.
I like to explain it like an iceberg.
When an iceberg is hanging out in the ocean, you only see a really small part of the whole thing.
Perhaps even just 10% of the iceberg is visible above the water line, and the rest of it is just hidden below the surface of the water.
So 90% of that iceberg is invisible.
If we want to remove our iceberg of excess weight, what we’ve been taught to do is to go on a diet.
Just change your eating.
Just change how much and what you’re eating.
Just cut out sugar.
This is surface level stuff.
It’s the part of the iceberg that’s visible above the water.
So we try to get rid of the iceberg by chipping away at the surface.
Sometimes it might look like we’re doing a good job.
We’ve stayed off sugar for a while.
We’re eating clean.
Then suddenly, all that’s underneath the surface, all the stuff that that diet doesn’t even touch, it starts bobbing up, starts coming up.
And this is why it gets harder and harder to stay on a diet, because just chipping away at the top of the iceberg, just chipping at the food piece, is not getting rid of the iceberg.
It’s not.
And it’s not that there’s something wrong with you.
It’s not that you’re lacking in willpower or that you’re weak.
You are fighting a giant iceberg.
Can you now see why it feels so hard?
It’s everything under the surface of the water that is driving all of our cravings, and it’s driving all of our overeating, and it’s driving what’s making our body hold on to excess weight.
So what I as a coach do is I use this framework, and together we dive under the surface, and we address all these root causes, and we start chipping away at what’s under the surface.
I don’t just give you a food plan or a list of foods.
In fact, I don’t do that at all.
You’ve already tried that.
You know it doesn’t work.
This is why coaching with me is so different from anything you’ve probably ever tried before.
But it’s also the reason that it works.
We look at the imbalances that underlie cravings and overeating, and then I show you how to balance each one so that you can conquer cravings and you can lose weight and you can finally put an end to dieting forever.
So again, I’m going to invite you to spend the next six months working with me.
Together, with my help, we will dive under the surface and we will start getting rid of all of these things so that you can lose the weight for the last time without dieting.
Alright, thanks for joining me on this episode today.
If you would like to discuss anything on this episode or anything on any past episode or future episode for that matter, please just send me a DM on Instagram or if you’re an email kind of person, just send me an email.
My email is Rachael, that’s R-A-C-H-A-E-L at ajoyfulyou.com.
Remember, I want you to succeed and I am here cheering you on.
Alrighty, I’ll talk to you next time.
Thank you for listening to The Joyful You Podcast.
If you’d like additional support, click the link in the show notes and let’s chat about how we can work together to get you to your goal.
If this episode was helpful to you, make sure to subscribe and please share it.
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If you want to hang out on social media, you can find me on Instagram at A Joyful You or on my website, ajoyfulyou.com.
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