Episode 6 Transcript

Want Weight Loss Success? Avoid this #1 Mistake to Reach Your Goal!

March 29, 2023

Lucy: Raise your hand if you have tried countless times to lose weight! Here's the deal, friend! Today, people can see my weight loss success. Yet, in my lifetime, I have made over 60 weight loss attempts. Adding up to more than 1200 pounds lost. Which is the equivalent weight of five full-sized refrigerators! But, the weight always returned! The failed products and strategies cost me more than $25,000 and a lot of time and energy!  So often it felt easier to continue dealing with my weight problem than to lose weight. If you want to shift from feeling stuck to lasting success, there is one critical mistake that must be avoided. And, I'm here to share what I have learned to help you save a great deal of time, money and stress.  

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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:

This is what I consider to be one of the most challenging aspects of weight loss, tell me if you agree! It's when you look out there at all the diet and exercise options, and you're trying to decide what's right for you. Whatever path you choose, you will have to reinvent yourself and your life in some way.  The truth is, you must find satisfaction in the version of yourself and your life you are creating, or it will never last.  A low carb diet is one of the fastest ways to lose weight. Yet it's not something that everyone can sustain long-term. How does it feel to sit at the dinner table at Thanksgiving while everyone around you eats grandma's famous pie?  Oh my gosh! The best pies come from my grandma!  As a result, if you’re like me, you’ve encountered situations where you have battled feelings that you need to eat better to become healthier, while also wondering: “Why does it have to be so painful and difficult? Do I really have to change  EVERYTHING?! How much do I have to give up?!”  Perhaps you have even found yourself talking negatively to yourself when you are challenged.  You feel frustrated with yourself for not being more disciplined.  If you struggle with discipline, you’ll want to watch episode 3 entitled “What Diet is Best for Weight Loss Success, The Truth You Need to Know!” I’ll link it in the description box for those listening on YouTube and in the Show Notes for those listening on your favorite podcast app.  Here's the thing... we can't just put our lives on hold for a few months to lose weight, then return to our normal lives.  It is because of this approach that so many people lose weight, then gain it back.  This may also be why many people wish to lose weight quickly... like how quickly can I get through the torture until I can return to some normalcy in life again?  In a way, it's like diving into the pool and seeing how long you can hold your breath until you need to surface for air.  And each time you are considering the leap into the pool on a new product or strategy, you find yourself effectively wondering: “Will I be able to hold my breath long enough?” It is never effective to take this approach.  Among the reasons I enjoy sharing stories on my show is that they show the correlation between my weight loss journey and daily life.  After you hear today’s story, you may find yourself chuckling at me and thinking: “Whoa! You really did that, Lucy?!” If you're new here or simply forgotten, it's important to know that I worked on the international concourse at the Atlanta airport for a significant portion of my weight loss journey.  Now airports can be chaotic, but the international terminal is like the airport on steroids!  Airports have nuances that you learn when you work there.  Do you know that most domestic flights hold less than 200 people and turn over every 45 minutes?  Because of this, the terminal sometimes looks crowded, but it's actually a steady flow of people.  Additionally, arriving and departing passengers are in the terminal at the same time.  With international travel, everyone goes straight to immigration and customs after the plane lands.  The terminal may appear less crowded when only departing passengers are present.  It is common for an international plane to take about 2 hours to turn over, and often flights would sync up and go out around the same time.  In addition, an international plane can carry nearly four times as many passengers as a domestic plane.  Several flights from Atlanta to the United Kingdom and South Korea used those double-decker planes that can hold about 800 passengers.  Have you seen them?  Imagine your restaurant is one of the two dine-in restaurants on the entire concourse with 14 gates, and you have 2-3 servers and one bartender against a double decker flight with 800 people and additional flights down the concourse.  Things can get a little hairy!  Fun fact about me: I speak a fair amount of Spanish.  When we had Spanish-speaking passengers who spoke little or no English, I was typically the one helping them.  It was one of those hectic days, and I was mentally and physically exhausted after a hard shift.  At table 16, an unaccompanied man who only spoke Spanish arrived.  His business professional attire and polite demeanor indicated that he was traveling for business.  The fact that he sat at table 16 is significant because it is the table next to the only point of sale station for the servers. What I said to that man was not something I would ever be able to recover from if any of my co-workers heard it.  He asked about the pasta, simple enough, right?  As Spanish is not my first language and my brain was stuck, I used Spanglish to describe the pasta and slipped in the English name.  “It’s penne pasta, sir.”  I said.  Initially, I was unaware of what I had done, but as I looked at the man's horrified and confused face, I suddenly remembered: "penne" is the formal Spanish word for male anatomy.  I had just told this man that we serve penis pasta.  Somehow, we figured out the communication problem, and I endured 45 minutes of humiliation.  What's awesome about working at an airport?  Often, you don't see people again.  What is the wildest part of this story? It's not something I regret. Why?  To learn, you have to make mistakes, and when you make mistakes, you learn quickly. Losing weight is like learning a new language.  As you navigate life, you figure it out as you go.  Weight loss and second languages have something in common: they both require authentic learning! Here's the problem: most of the products and strategies offered by the weight loss industry want to sell you what I refer to as a "light switch approach," which means you can walk in and the problem is solved, but that takes away your ability to learn and, therefore, your ability to show up authentically during your weight loss journey. Why is that such a problem? Remember how I said I tried more than 60 times to lose weight before finding success? In all those weight loss attempts, I kept hitting a loop: First, a product or strategy would trigger my feeling of not doing or being enough. Further, I would act more on emotion than on an in-depth analysis of how the strategy or product would affect me over the long run, how much expense it would require, and what it would require of me long-term. As a result, the product or strategy would fail, and I would be more likely to blame myself than the product or strategy, resulting in even lower self-esteem.  After doing that 60 times, you end up feeling pretty bad about yourself.  This is a massive problem, because to find real, lasting success on your journey, you can’t trade your authenticity for strategies that appear safe.   Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who you think you’re supposed to be and the parts of yourself that no longer serve you and embrace who you want to become.  All those ugly things you can battle on a weight loss journey such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addictions, rage, blame, resentment, and grief are a result of trading your authenticity for the illusion of safety.  I promise you that if you put your values, habits and the things that light you on fire at the center of your weight loss journey and reject cookie cutter, one size fits all solutions that you will find greater, more lasting success.  Even if you occasionally screw up and do things like telling people that you serve penis pasta. The single greatest thing you can do for success on your weight loss journey is to close the gap between your thought and your actions.  The smaller the gap, the more genuine your journey and the greater success you will find.  If you’re going but, but, but…. the light switch solution sounds so appealing.  Is it really that bad? Know this: credible research supports that more than 80 percent of diets fail, and even fewer last.  If you’re looking out at the sea of content on the internet and feeling like you are failing while others are getting it right, know this: it’s an illusion.  In the United States alone, 36 million people who make major weight loss attempts light $26 billion dollars on fire each year.  Meaning they spend money and don’t get results. Why?  They are trying to step outside of themselves to accomplish their goal.  Effectively, they are trying to jump in the pool and see how long they can hold their breath and then hope they can piece themselves and their life back together once they get back to the surface for air.  Listen, I’ve tried to jump in the pool and hold my breath before, and almost drowned.  As I said, I made over 60 diet attempts and spent over $25,000 fighting my lifelong battle with obesity until I figured out how to successfully lose 100 pounds and keep it off more than 5 years. If only I knew then what I know now!  The endless frustration and failure that crushed my heart, soul, and bank account could have been avoided.  So you may be agreeing with me, but wondering: “Yeah, but how do I make that tangible?” Are you familiar with the game Jenga?  It involves stacking and rearranging wooden blocks, which is a game of both physical and mental skill that can be played by people of all ages and cultures.  It is a great analogy for how to integrate originality and authenticity into your journey.  During the construction and redesigning of your tower, imagine that you can slide out the blocks that don't work and slide in blocks that are even better.  The more you learn about the blocks and how they interact, the better able you are to make decisions aligned with your identity and core values.  When designing your weight loss strategy, there are three types of "blocks" that will offer authenticity to your journey and keep your tower from collapsing.  I'll briefly cover each one and then explain how it works when it comes to weight loss.  Here are the 3 types of building blocks: One. Self-Awareness, which is the ability to examine and understand yourself. Two. Unbiased thinking, which essentially means the ability to get out of your own way! And, three. Your values, which essentially motivate you to live a life that is true to who you are. Now let’s cover each one a little more in depth!  Self-awareness is the first building block, which, if I'm being honest, sounds like a psychology buzzword. So, here's the deal. Do you remember when I told you I failed over 60 diet attempts and the weight always returned?  There was one pattern that connected them. In most cases, I failed to ask myself: Why did that strategy fail for me? I should have done that, so why didn't I? It was my sense of worthiness that held me back. I didn't want to look under the hood, so to speak, because I found it painful. Looking at the weight loss industry, I thought: "These are the experts. If I can’t do it, then it must be something wrong with me.” The truth is fear is not the biggest obstacle in the way, it’s a sense of worthiness. And, when you adopt weight loss strategies that further reinforce that feeling of unworthiness rather than self-understanding, you place a mountain on your road to success. If you want to shift, you must become curious rather than condemning yourself when things don’t work as expected. Self-awareness is essentially a mental muscle and as you build and strengthen it, you will navigate the sea of options with a special set of glasses that help you make better choices.  Being vulnerable with yourself can lead to innovation, creativity, and change. The second building block is unbiased thinking.  I could sling a bunch of psychobabble at you to explain this one, but I think it’s best explained by example.  Let me ask you a couple questions, and before I ask you these questions and you potentially feel called out, let me just tell you ahead of time that I am guilty of all of them.  First, have you ever joined a gym and then not consistently gone even though you tell yourself all kinds of lies to convince yourself that you will go? Or, how about this one… have you ever followed a pseudo-scientific or fad diet because it fits in with your food interests and preconceptions? Or, have you ever underreported the amount of food or calories that you are consuming?  These are all examples of biased thinking whereby you sacrifice your authenticity to maintain your ego.  So how do you shift to unbiased thinking? What the heck is that? In essence, unbiased thinking is developing a learning mindset.  Developing a learning mindset is when you approach your journey with the idea that you can’t just flip a light switch, you must tinker with a dimmer switch.  How to lose weight and keep it off is something that must be learned.  The third and final building block is your behavior and values which essentially means acknowledging and accepting your core-self.  The third building block is your behavior and values. In other words, how you are motivated to live a life that is true to who you are. Among the most compelling reasons I ever heard for losing weight was a person who said this: "I want to be able to look down and see my private parts for the first time after 14 years." And, you know what's rough? A lot of the weight loss industry asks us to step into superficial versions of ourselves while we struggle with an issue that has major impact on our life and sense of self. Here's the deal. Your core self is comprised of your values as your values create your behaviors and your behaviors lead to your outcomes.  If you want to change your outcome, you must change what you value. Whenever you consider a weight loss strategy, it's wise to ask yourself: "What must I value to adopt this?"  The easiest way to hold on to your values is to simply write them down.  This doesn’t need to be a long list, but what are the top 3 to 5 values that you do not want to give up as you move through your journey.  On my own journey, the 5 most important values I weaved in were: autonomy, authenticity, audacity, individuality, and tenacity.  Your values may be something different.  However, you risk losing sight of yourself if you do not put them front and center of your journey. No matter how you work with these building blocks, they will never let you down.  Finding authentic guidance and getting out of your own way are two of the most challenging parts of the journey.  Sometimes it's not that you don't want to break the loop that keeps you stuck, but that you don't see alternatives to the loop.  I have created a quick worksheet that will help you break the loops that keep you stuck by guiding you through a set of questions you can ask yourself for clarity and guidance. You can find it on my website, weightlosswithlucy.com forward slash episode 6.  Also, I'll include a link in the description box and show notes. As we wrap up this episode, this is what I wish someone had said to me on my journey that I'm going to wholeheartedly say to you: "You are completely capable of this journey. You are enough just as you are. It’s ok and best practice to get started before you have everything figured out.  You are fully capable of figuring everything out, and don’t need to be perfect.  It’s ok to tell someone that you serve penis pasta if it means learning and growing. You got this! Just keep going!  The only mistake you can make on this journey is to not be true to yourself.”  See you next time, friend!