Episode 14 Transcript
Want a Successful Weight Loss Journey? You Don't Need Personal Growth. You Need THIS!
May 24, 2023 by Lucy Laramie
Lucy: What can you do to make your weight loss journey easier and create lasting success? There is a common misconception that weight loss is mostly about personal growth, and if you drink that Kool-aid, you're going to feel trapped in an endless cycle of frustration. That's the kool-aid I drank for over 20 years, and if I had this revelation sooner, I could have saved myself from struggling with more than 60+ diet attempts that cost me more than $25,000. You can save time, money and endless frustration by ditching a personal growth mindset for the tip I'm about to share!
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Lucy: Welcome to the Weight Loss Made Possible! I’m your host Lucy Laramie! When a semi-truck crashed into my car and flat-lined my life as I knew it, the recovery heaped an additional 60 pounds onto my lifelong battle with my weight. Do you know how kids get a little too heavy to be carried? The extra weight I lugged around was equal to constantly carrying 3 small children. My weight loss journey empowered me to lose 100 pounds and keep it off over 5 years! Yet, it wasn’t all that long ago that I lacked confidence about who I was and what I could do. Fast forward past many failed attempts and the lessons learned, and you will see the version of me today that looks better, feels better, is healthier, and has more freedom. I created the Weight Loss Made Possible podcast to share stories and the lessons learned from my journey and to give you simple strategies to help you forge your own path to success. If you want to become the champion in your weight loss story, you’re in the right place! Let’s get to it!
Lucy: For a moment, I'm going to transport you! Imagine a place where spring is pretty much year-round. There is not too much heat nor too much cold. The weather report consistently indicates a comfortable 72 degrees, and it's almost always sunny with a gentle breeze. It's perfect beach weather, and there are plenty of them! And, how does this place get even better? Tacos! Lots of tacos! If your mind took you to San Diego, then you are in the right place. It's that vibrant city in Southern California wedged between Los Angeles and the border of Mexico. During my late teens to early 20's, San Diego was home. Here's the problem I faced in San Diego! How do you get the full benefit of such a fantastic place if you don't feel comfortable wearing shorts, sleeveless tops and especially a swim suit? I feel that I missed out on the full potential of a city like that due to my weight struggles. Imagine that you are more comfortable with people looking at you strange for wearing pants or a long sleeve shirt on the beach than you are with them looking at you in a swimsuit.
If you're not familiar with San Diego, it is a city with a strong military community. Many families needed extra help while their partners were away for extended periods of time. In high school, I started a babysitting business to earn money. The list of families I helped had reached 50 by the time I graduated, and it continued to grow. This meant spending a lot of time with moms, and they provided me a totally different perspective than hanging out with other people my age. One of the moms took me to my first concert: Jimmy Buffet! Imagine you are invited to Margaritaville, but you aren't old enough to drink and don't feel comfortable in a bikini top and shorts. My life in San Diego was like that! Most of these moms had something in common: they were constantly splurging on diets and weight loss treatments in an attempt to lose the baby weight and feel comfortable on the beach. If your loved one is away for a long time, wouldn't it be fun to surprise them with an improved version of you when they return?
One mom was the wife of an Air Force pilot. He was away for several months for a project, so she wanted to surprise him with her weight loss when he returned. Several diets had failed in the past, but then she found success in a low carb diet. Atkins was the low carb trend at the time. It was a foreign concept to me, and the look on my face must have appeared pretty skeptical as she explained it to me! Yet, the more I watched her get results, the more curious I became. Would it help me with my weight struggles? Okay, time out! The purpose of this episode is not to tell you that low carb or keto is the simple solution! This story isn't about that, and keto is not part of my current lifestyle! The story must be understood in order to understand how the shift happened that helped me succeed. Okay, back to the story! As I followed her footsteps and lost about 50 pounds or so at that time, I was astonished that I reached a relatively normal weight. My success gave me a sense of pride. During that time, I even wore a bikini for the first time!
Low carb eating, however, became challenging! For someone making less than $1500 per month in one of the world's most expensive cities, it was a costly diet strategy. In spite of being young, the effects of not getting certain nutrients from my diet could be felt. In certain social settings, there were tremendous challenges to maintaining the willpower to stick to a low carb diet. Remember how I said I spent a lot of time with kids and moms? Think about how much willpower it would take to regularly attend kids' birthday parties and stare at cupcakes all the time. Can you say no to them? Each time? It's seemingly impossible to develop infallible willpower within yourself. It's no surprise that the 50 pounds were eventually gained back, along with about 30 more. The actual result was that I became a yo-yo dieter who had an unhealthy relationship with food, poor habits, and a mindset that challenged my self-esteem.
The problem is that this low carb strategy was adopted with a personal growth mindset, and I'm about to explain why that doesn't work! In the personal growth approach, the goal is to find out what is wrong and fix it. As a result, all I had to do was eat the right food consistently, and voila, problem solved! Understanding what hasn't worked in the past and correcting those things in order to create a better future is the essence of a personal growth mindset. This approach should lead to slow, steady progress if followed consistently. To succeed, you only need understanding and discipline. The problem is, for that model to work, you need your future to be just like your past for the strategy to keep working. This actually completely contradicts what growth is. Life doesn't work like that, does it? And, if you want authentic, lasting weight loss success, you probably don't want your new self to be like your past self. You want to build a new and improved you, right?
To solve this problem, you must ask yourself two questions. Think of your weight loss journey as your car. There are going to be fender benders along the way. If you focus only on repairing the car instead of revamping it, you are likely to continue getting into wrecks with your car. You must ask yourself: What is more important? Repairing the scratches with fresh paint or installing additional safety features to avoid future accidents? Here's the thing: You're going to keep crashing into what's right in front of you if you have a personal development mindset that constantly looks in the rearview mirror. So if a personal growth mindset is detrimental to weight loss, what type of mindset is necessary to keep your car out of the shop and away from expensive repair bills? The promise is that if you shift to a transformation mindset, you will find more success and fulfillment on your journey. What's the best way to achieve that? This leads to the second question you must ask yourself: do you want your past self driving your future or do you want your current self focused on the future navigating the journey? Effectively, do you want to be a caterpillar looking in the rearview mirror or do you want to be a butterfly looking down the road?
It's important to clear up the distinction between the caterpillar which represents a personal growth mindset and the butterfly which represents development and transformation. This choice point is critical to implementing any steps. Most people approach weight loss and dieting with a personal growth mindset similar to that of a caterpillar. Caterpillars have an insatiable appetite and thus are dedicated to endurance and determination. They thrive on self-confidence and stability. Yet, did you know that less than 5% of caterpillars survive to become butterflies? That's why some butterflies lay 300 to 500 eggs. Basically, just like weight loss, the caterpillar approach works until life pops up.
What is really needed is a transformation that allows you to invent something completely new, and this is what the strong caterpillars ultimately realize. As a butterfly, you invent a new version of yourself that brings beauty and freedom into your life. So, the ultimate question is this: Do you want to be a caterpillar or a butterfly navigating your journey? My hope is that you are wholeheartedly saying: "well, duh Lucy! I want to be the butterfly, of course!" And, if that's the case? What are the steps to achieve that so that you can get results that are different than you have gotten in the past? There are three common pitfalls to watch out for, and I'm going to share them and the steps to overcome them so that you can shift from a personal growth mindset to a transformation mindset and break free of the perpetual cycle of getting stuck.
FIRST-- You may be stuck in a caterpillar mindset if you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what to do about all the things life throws at you. The symptoms of being stuck in this mindset is constantly searching for "more, better or different." And, you'll notice that is a very common thing in the weight loss industry. This is when personal growth screams at you to take action in a "more, better or different" way, but if the action fails you tend to fall victim to your circumstances. When you fall victim to your circumstances, that ugly feeling of guilt that you haven't done enough overwhelms you. That's when you again go searching for "more, better, or different" circumstances, but effectively give up your power in the process. And, you do this by limiting yourself when you look in the rear view mirror to figure out and solve the problem. To shift from this personal growth mindset to a transformation mindset, you must shift from the idea that your journey is a given truth that only needs to be corrected or discovered to the idea that your journey is created. In a transformation mindset, you not only create your journey, but you are that creator. there is awareness that you have created what is in your life, and therefore, you have the choice to make something new. Instead of looking to the past to dictate what your future will look like, you look to your vision and declare it to be so.
SECOND You may be stuck in a caterpillar mindset if accept the temptation to see your diet or exercise strategy as a "given"-- meaning you accept it to be true and not expect it to change. Therefore, as part of your "more, better, different" mindset, you are on the hunt for the absolute truth. And, the part that makes this so hard is that when you are stuck in this mindset, it's often driven by the idea that there is something wrong with you, and once you figure out what that is, you can be fixed. This line of thought is caterpillar thinking, and it will result in getting stuck and beating yourself up for the mistakes that you make. Shift your mindset from seeking the truth within yourself and trying to discover what is wrong within you to having a conversation with yourself. On the most basic level, language is what separates us from all other animals—our ability to think, reason, and communicate with each other often for the purpose of creating action. Dhammapada said, “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.” These thoughts manifest themselves as conversations, otherwise known as beliefs or assumptions. Every single thought, decision, or interaction that we have is driven by the underlying assumptions for which we live our lives. The butterfly mindset asserts that you create your journey out of the conversations you have with yourself and others, then by inventing new conversations, you in turn create a new life.
THIRD Does this personal growth mindset sound familiar? You want to lose x number of pounds; let’s say 50! Ok, that’s straight forward enough. You just eat healthy food and exercise regularly. Eventually, if you stick with this plan, which demands discipline and effort, you’ll lose the weight, and you may even keep it off for a while. Studies show, however, that the majority of people who lose weight gain it back again. Why is that? The problem with personal growth is that it works by altering the content, or physical things in your life. But, the only thing that’s changed is the content. As an example, when I pursued a low carb diet after watching that Mom lose weight, I simply tried to add what she was doing to my life without changing much else or really stopping to evaluate why I was adopting those new things into my lifestyle and the impact it would have. A transformation mindset asks you to shift from the idea of content or physical things as solutions to context as a solution. Meaning your environment and circumstances. Context is the way of being that spurs your actions. Simply put, if you are a healthy person, you will take healthy actions. Coming from an unhealthy place, even if you eat less and exercise more, there has been no fundamental shift in your thinking, and so you’re sure to return to your old ways eventually.
Avoiding all the pitfalls of a caterpillar mindset comes down to asking yourself this one essential question: Will you choose the journey with the known or the unknown route? Most people will say: “Well, heck yeah I want the known route, Lucy!” The thing is the known route is not getting people results and keeps them stuck in a personal growth mindset whereby they never feel like enough. People who chase results using the "more, better, different" mindset can leave their comfort zone and push the limits of what is possible. Yet, there is a limit to how far a person can go when chasing what is possible. Who they are when they create those spectacular results is simply an inflated version of who they were before. Therefore, what can be created is still limited. If you want to break away from the pack and secure meaningful success, you must shift your mindset from focusing on what is possible to what seems impossible. This also means choosing to go down the unknown road. When something is impossible for you, it means you can’t get there from where you are now. Who you have been up until now is not the person who can accomplish this impossible goal. Therefore, you will have to completely redesign who you are. This evolved version of you is forged as you encounter all of the things that pop up when you venture down that unknown road. When you can't see what's down the road, it feels intimidating when you are unsure of what you will encounter. As you transform, however, the impossible becomes attainable. Embracing transformation means you like the person you are becoming today and in the future more than your past self. I don't know who Brianna West is, but she has this quote that says: "True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake. It is making the choice to build a life you don't need to regularly escape from." To create lasting weight loss success, you must develop a version of you and your life that you are madly in love with in order for the changes to last. If you've been continually following the known route and "failing" because you hate what you are creating, it's time to go down the unknown road that asks you to transform into a beautiful butterfly. If you've been coping rather than healing in all of your weight loss attempts, it's time to ditch the personal growth mindset and seek transformation. It's as simple as this: We repeat what we do not repair. If you want to jump off the yo-yo dieting crazy train, you must choose to heal on your journey and not simply attempt to cope. A weight loss journey is challenging and can feel completely overwhelming at times. If you're asking yourself: "Is this even worth it?" The answer is: absolutely! If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old. As this episode comes to a conclusion, my hope is that you stop beating yourself up over not feeling good enough and constantly searching for "more, better, and different". The "more, better, different" approach is simply like sticking a bunch of band-aids all over yourself, but the true healing actually comes from within.
If you liked this episode, please give it a like so it can help more people. And, if you're new here, don't forget to hit subscribe! I don't want you to miss out on anything that could help you on your weight loss journey. Until next time, don’t give up on the journey! It’s challenging, but it’s worth it. See you soon, friend!