How busy mamas can lose weight without having to rely on willpower or discipline
I’m not sure where this myth was started but, if you believe that you’re not losing weight because you don’t have enough willpower or that you’re not disciplined enough, I have good news! That’s not true! Willpower and discipline aren’t the real reasons women, and especially busy mamas, can’t lose weight!
Willpower and discipline aren’t the end-all, be-all for healthy living. They’re just disguises we use to avoid the real problems we’re facing.
Let me tell you about one of my clients, let’s call her BK for privacy, who thought her lack of willpower was getting in the way of her weight loss goals.
When BK first started the Macros Made Easy Program she was really excited about making progress. She was a mom of little girls and she really wanted to lose baby weight.
A few weeks into the program, I got a text from her that said, “I’m intentionally not taking accountability for my choices. I’m not being honest with myself and I’m self-sabotaging. Why am I doing this?`”
First of all, let’s celebrate the fact that BK had the self-awareness to realize when she wasn’t sticking to her plan. Her weakness was sneaking bites of food off of her kids' plates, or throwing in the towel for the day if she ate one thing that didn’t fit into her nutritional boundaries.
So I asked BK, “Why are you doing this?”
And she responded, “Well I’m feeling shame and fear, so I eat.”
As a health and life coach, I’ve learned so much about emotions, nutrition, and how they intertwine. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is how we all will do almost anything to avoid feeling our emotions - especially the “bad” ones.
Instead of avoiding her emotions, I asked BK to dive headfirst into them. I asked her what do shame and fear look and feel like. What colors are they? How do they feel in your body?
As she sat in her feelings, she realized that fear and shame felt cold and black. They moved quickly and felt shaky. They sat in the pit of her stomach.
BK’s doing all of these things like taking bites off of her kids' plates, snacking on accident; not showing up for herself, and not keeping her promises just because she wants to avoid feeling fear and shame. It sounds super logical, right?
But then I asked her this.
“What if an alien came down to earth, and the alien that didn’t understand our emotion or follow our line of thinking and asked you, ‘Why are you not holding yourself accountable? Why are you throwing your health, and your progress, and your goals, and your momentum in the trash when you know this is something you really want?
And you replied with, ‘Well it's because there's this thing that looks black that runs through my body and feels cold that I don't want to feel it.’
The alien would be like, ‘Wait, time out. You're doing all of that for something that looks black and it's cold and runs through your body a little bit for a few minutes and then goes away?’
Does that really sound like it’s worth it?
Of course, not!”
BK’s problem wasn’t that she didn’t have the willpower or the discipline to stick to her goals! The problem was she was avoiding her feelings and trying to bury them so she didn’t have to feel them! And she used snacking and food to do that.
This is why I don’t just focus on food and exercise in the Macros Made Easy Program. Yes, weight loss is about the food, but it’s not really about the food.
It’s about our thoughts and feelings about the food.
Today, I want to give you two quick tips to help you process your emotions so that you don’t try to hide them in unhealthy habits!
Learn to recognize your toddler brain
Two parts of our brains control decision-making. One is called the primitive brain and the second is the pre-frontal cortex. The primitive brain operates from emotion whereas the pre-frontal cortex uses logic.
I like to call the primitive brain the toddler brain. The toddler brain’s main goal is reward and pleasure. It wants everything now, now, now and it wants everything to feel good. The toddler brain doesn’t stop to examine the consequences of its actions, it just takes what it wants, when it wants it.
I call the pre-frontal cortex, the adult brain. It evaluates actions and consequences. It determines the best route. When you’re thinking from your adult brain you can make decisions that are aligned with the outcomes you want.
Resistance to something that you know will benefit you comes from your toddler brain.
When you are stressed out and you see those dino nuggets on your kid’s plate your toddler brain, who is already overwhelmed, says, “Hey! Let’s eat those dino nuggets. They taste good, they’re already made and you won’t have to do anything extra!”
Your toddler brain is really good at making bad choices seem good because they don’t require any extra effort, especially when you already have lots of emotions bubbling under the surface.
But what happens when you give in to your toddler brain? Your adult brain comes in to lecture you.
“You shouldn’t have eaten those! They weren’t healthy. You know better!”
Unfortunately, your adult brain is right. You did know better. You didn’t feel better after eating the dino nuggets like the toddler brain said you would. So you feel guilty. Guilty that you did something you knew wasn’t good for you. Guilty that you messed up your diet. And most of all guilty that you didn’t show up like you wanted to.
But Mama, guilt doesn’t serve you! If feeling guilty made you lose weight, I would talk down to you and make you feel bad all day long. Instead, I want you to learn to recognize your toddler brain and learn how to speak to her from your adult brain so that you avoid the guilt vortex.
When your toddler brain speaks up, I want you to see her. Give her a little, “Hey girl, I see you! I hear you, but…” Then you can tell her why those dino nuggets won’t serve you.
Talk to her just like you do your kids. “Hey, I hear that idea and I know it sounds super good, but it won’t give us what we want in the long run.”
As you learn to talk to your toddler brain and calm her down, you’ll start operating from your adult brain more often, and you’ll make choices that are in alignment with the goals you have.
Sit with your emotions instead of ignoring them
Just like BK learned, running from your feelings doesn’t get you to where you want to be. The only way to not have our emotions take us away from our goals is to sit with them.
When I was doing this exercise with BK, she asked me an excellent question. It was so good! She asked, “Do you have any tips for how to do this when you can’t sit down for 10 minutes and work through it? How can I do this on the go? What do I do if my girls need me when I need to process emotions?”
My response was, “Who is stopping you from slowing down to do this?”
If you just came up with a whole list of reasons that you can’t stop and process emotions in the moment, you’re not alone. It feels like there are a million reasons, right? As BK said, your kids need you. Or you need to finish a project. Or you’re on the way to take the kids to soccer practice and can’t just pull over to deal with your emotions.
But why not?
Seriously, who is stopping you and telling you, that you cannot deal with your emotions? Who is telling you that you have to just press on and suck it up?
No one. Because no one else is the boss of you.
Here’s the deal. You are your boss. You manage your own time. If your mental health is not important enough to take care of at the moment, then your priorities are twisted.
If you’re late for an appointment because you’re dealing with some big feelings, that’s OK!
If your kids have to sit in front of the TV for 10 minutes so that you can sit in your emotions and recover from them, that’s OK! You’re going to be able to show up as a better mom once you’re in a better head space!
When you take the time to process your emotions, you also teach your kids by example how to process their emotions. It’s a worthwhile practice, for you and for them.
Another thing I told BK, was that this process goes faster the longer you do it. When you’re first starting out, it might take a while to really understand what you’re feeling and why. But as you get used to feeling your feelings instead of running from them, it doesn’t take as long.
What used to take me 20 mins to process, now takes 2-3 minutes. I sit down and tell my body (and my toddler brain because she’s usually the one who is pitching the fit!) Ok, girl, I see you and I’m ready to listen. I let the feelings process through my body. I acknowledge them and then they pass. And I can take a deep breath and keep going with my day.
Mama, if you’ve always believed that you lacked the discipline and willpower to achieve your goals, but you’re now realizing that that’s not your real problem, then I want to talk with you!
I help busy mamas like you create nutritional blueprints that include mindset work like this, to overcome the obstacles that you’ve always struggled with and finally build a healthy life. Let’s get on a healthy mama blueprint call and map out what you want your life and health to look like so that you can finally achieve all of your weight loss goals.
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