324. Why You Haven’t Been Successful with Weight Loss

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 324: Why You Haven’t Been Successful With Weight Loss.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Alright my friends, listen up. I’m going to talk about weight loss today. I’m going to talk about food, and bodies, and all of those things. And so, if that is a topic that is triggering to you or not of interest to you, you can just skip this one and join me again next week. I have some people that love learning about this and I have some people that get bugged when I talk about it. So fair warning, I mean in case you couldn’t tell by the title that it’s today’s topic.

I love coaching people on this because it’s a really easy way to bring up a lot of drama, and noise, and stories that are not just impacting somebody’s weight and health. They’re impacting every area of our lives. They’re impacting our relationships. They’re impacting the way we show up as parents. They’re impacting how much we get done, our relationships with our goals. They show up in so many ways, the stories and drama that come up. And I like to bring those things up in people as a coach.

That’s part of my job I think, to bring up the stories that are negatively impacting people so that we can take a look at them and we can unwind them. And we can ultimately change them into stories that will serve you again in every area of your life. And there are just certain topics that because of the way we’ve all been conditioned, because of the challenges that exist by nature of being human beings with human brains that are just easy ways to bring up that drama and bring up those stories.

And so, for that reason I love coaching people on weight loss. And that is genuinely the reason. I honestly don’t love my clients any more when they lose weight, I really don’t. I can honestly say that. I can’t honestly say that about myself. I haven’t completely cleared my head of the stories that I picked up at some time as a young girl in this country that say it’s better if I’m smaller and thinner. I have done a lot of unwinding of that but not completely. But with my clients it’s very, very easy for me to love them regardless. I don’t know if you find that to be true.

It’s so much easier to love other people unconditionally than it is to love ourselves. So, I’m not out to help people lose weight because I think it makes them any better. And I want to begin with that because I also want to begin with explaining to you that the reason that you haven’t been successful at weight loss is not because there’s something wrong with you. I cannot state this enough. There is nothing wrong with you. You’re not weak. You’re not short on willpower. You’re not damaged or broken, you’re not flawed, you’re really not. There’s nothing wrong with you.

In fact, because it’s challenging to lose weight, the fact that it is sort of a primal response to not want to lose weight means that you’re working properly. The body is not designed to want to lose weight. It’s designed to want to store weight in case we might need it later. So, there’s all kinds of ways that the brain and the body work together to try to make that happen that affect you emotionally and just affect us in so many ways.

That’s why again, weight loss is such a brilliant way to evolve you to a healthier version of you, not just physically but mentally and emotionally, because it requires that we do all of that work. So, there is nothing wrong with you. You got that? If you take nothing else from this episode, that’s what I want you to take away, nothing wrong with me. I’m just a human with a healthy human brain. That’s why I haven’t been successful yet.

Now, I’m going to give you five things today to consider to bring awareness as to what might be going on for you in this area of weight loss. If you’ve tried to lose weight and you either haven’t succeeded or you haven’t been able to keep it off long term. I’m going to go through them one at a time. I’m going to try to give you as much as I can in the 30 minutes or whatever that I have here with you, to help you get leverage over yourself.

And I want you to know that if you really consider that I could be right about these things and you open yourself up to exploring them deeper then I promise you can achieve more success than you have in the past. Now, if you want more help with this, I’m going to be going into much more detail at the event that I’m doing October 20^th and 21^st in Scottsdale, Arizona called Macros and Mindset. And I’ve been talking about that event a little bit as we’ve had tickets on sale for it.

And I had so many people say to me, “I really want to come to this but I can’t travel for various reasons, can you please do a live stream?” And at first I said no, because we just hadn’t set that up. But then I thought, why couldn’t we? Why don’t we just set it up? With technology nowadays you can genuinely have just as rich of an experience over live stream as we can being there live. And so, I’m so thrilled to be able to tell you that we are now offering a live stream option.

So, if you want to join me either live in Scottsdale, Arizona, myself and Brad Jensen. Brad will be teaching the first day and I will be teaching the second day. We’ll both be there helping out both days. But that’s basically the agenda. And you can either come live or like I said, you can purchase a live stream ticket if you don’t want to travel. You’ll just go to jodymoore.com/mandm as in Macros and Mindset.

But I want to give you today, like I said, five reasons that you haven’t been successful yet at losing weight. And of course, why you still can in the future.

Alright, number one, most of us have been conditioned to associate food with emotions in two ways. We associate food with positive emotion first of all. This is when people tell me, “Hey, I don’t want to not eat cake, it’s my son’s birthday.” So, on my son’s birthday maybe I’m going to feel really happy, I hope that my child will be happy. I hope that we’re going to have a fun day. We’re going to celebrate this boy and how much we love him, and how glad we are that he came into our lives and that he’s still alive and seems to be doing relatively well.

And all of that positive goodness that a birthday represents means we should have cake. Do you see how we have associated cake with birthdays? Now, we associate various foods with all kinds of events. We associate, I don’t know about you but I associate cookies and treats with Christmas and candy with Halloween and Valentine’s Day. These are holidays like this are positive events usually. Of course, mixed bag when it comes to things like this. We can sometimes have a lot of sadness around holidays.

But overall, the idea is that Christmas, we’re celebrating the birth of Christ and we are celebrating our families, and being together as a family, and maybe college kids coming home. And this is all good things. So, for sure we have to have cookies. I mean thanksgiving itself is all about food. So, I picked holidays but you can associate this with all kinds of things. Maybe it’s whenever you watch General Conference you have cinnamon rolls.

General Conference for those of you who are not members of my church by the way, it’s coming up first weekend of October, everybody is invited to watch it. It’s on TV. But it’s a time when we receive counsel and spiritual messages from our church leaders. And we get to stay home and watch it on TV as an added bonus in our sweatpants if we want. So, we all look forward to General Conference. And so many people tell me, “Well, I can’t watch Conference without cinnamon rolls. I can’t go to the movies without eating a tub of popcorn. I can’t do these things.”

And I’m like, “Okay, it’s okay, I’m not telling you, you have to get rid of these things.” All I want you to do is notice how we have associated foods usually not the highest nutritional value foods either, with positive events. Alright, that’s the world we grew up in most of us. It makes sense then that when I say, “No, what if you just watch Conference and you don’t eat cinnamon rolls.” A part of your brain’s going to go, “What, wait, not fair, I don’t want to miss out on something.” So, we associate it with positive events.

We also associate it with actually negative emotion. Here’s what I mean. People tell me all the time, I say, “Well, why did you eat that thing that you didn’t want to eat?” And they say, “Because I was stressed, because I was overwhelmed, because I was bored.” And when we talk to our friends this way, we’re like, “I was just so stressed. I’ve been so stressed lately, I’m eating so much chocolate.” We all nod our heads in agreement like, yeah, sister, I can relate to that.

And that makes perfect sense to us all that if you’re stressed you’re going to eat chocolate as though chocolate is the answer to stress. So, it’s going to take care of the stress. It does take the edge off the stress for a minute. It balances the stress out with a little bit of a dopamine hit that lasts unfortunately not long at all. But I think when we slow it down and really consider it we all can see that actually chocolate is not the solution to stress. There’s a lot of other much more useful solutions. Again, nothing wrong with having some chocolate. I don’t care if you do.

I’m just saying, may not be the way if you’re trying to lose some weight. So, listen, do not underestimate the power of your brain’s association with food and emotion. That is a really complicated thing to overcome but it is something that can be overcome. It genuinely can, I promise you. It can be managed at least to the point that you’re able to achieve whatever goals you want. But if you’ve never thought about that before or you’ve never worked on that before, you’ve never been taught how to do that, that’s what I’m going to be teaching you at Macros and Mindset.

We’re going to into extreme detail on it. I’m going to break all down for you how to do that and how to not just do it while we’re together that day. It’s going to be something you’re going to have to do on going to rewire your own association. Alright, so that’s number one, we have been conditioned to associate food with emotions.

Number two, the culture and society that you’re living in might not be setting you up for success. I was going to say is not for sure setting you up for success. But I can never say for sure. I don’t know who’s listening. I don’t know what your culture is and what your society is. Maybe in some places it is setting you up for success. But in a lot of places, in first world countries in the world anyway I’m pretty confident saying that your culture and your society is not designed to help you lose weight. In fact, it is designed to cause you to gain weight.

This is nobody’s fault. I don’t think that it was set up this way on purpose. I think we just ended up here for a lot of reasons that I don’t really care about right now. What I do care about is that we are living in times that make it challenging. It does, makes it challenging. For example, we eat in western United States anyway, most people eat three meals a day. Now, I’m a big fan of eating three meals a day. I still eat three meals a day and I did all throughout my weight loss journey last year. So, I’m not telling you not to eat three meals a day.

I’m just saying, notice that is a cultural or societal thing that may or may not be necessary because do we need three meals a day? Do we need that every day? I mean maybe but have you ever paused to think about it? Some days I’m really hungry, a lot of times actually. I have a pretty good appetite.

But there are days when I think I’m not really hungry but it’s dinnertime. And some of my family seems to want dinner and I’m making dinner. And if I don’t eat then they’re going to ask me why. And maybe I’ll get hungry later so I should just eat because it’s dinnertime. Do you ever do this? So, this is just interesting I think. Why is it? I mean obviously we’ve set up three meals a day for a reason. But these are just the types of things that I want you to question. Do you need that much fuel?

If you’re consuming more fuel than your body needs to keep you doing all the things you want to do and that your body is able store in a reasonable way, not beyond how much you want to have stored. Then you may have to go against some of the societal and cultural norms in order to achieve your goals. You may have to just not eat dinner one day when you’re not genuinely hungry.

Another thing that happens in our culture especially if you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is that we have treats at everything. Every meeting we go to seems like we’ve got to have treats. I don’t know if this is a way to try to get people there. Maybe it’s just a habit that was created generations ago. I don’t know, but that is an example again of a cultural or societal norm that may be preventing you from meeting your weight loss goals. But the good news is all of these things are solvable.

If the way that you celebrate is going out to eat or going out to dessert and that’s not serving you then you’re going to have to interrupt that routine in your life. But again, through coaching I can help you through all the fear that that brings up. I know for a lot of people there’s a lot of fear around what will people think? What will people say? Will I make other people uncomfortable? Will they feel rejected? Will people tease me, or laugh at me, or think less of me, or judge me in some way? Or will I be able to do it? Will there be too much pressure? Will I just give in?

All of those things I can help you with but first and foremost I just want you to become aware. Just become aware that you may be operating at the effect of some cultural norms that you didn’t ever pause, and consider, and choose for yourself. See what I’m saying? Alright, that’s number two.

Let’s talk about number three. The number three reason that you maybe haven’t been successful with weight loss is because you’re a fog eater. Fog eating is when we are eating without even really being consciously aware of it. It’s that walking around the house, cleaning the kitchen and grabbing little bites of the crackers, or nuts, or whatever it is that you keep in the bowl on your countertop while you’re cleaning, grabbing those, popping some in your mouth.

Meanwhile you’re cleaning, or you’re talking on the phone, or you’re watching TV, or you’re driving or even watching a movie, things like that. Fog eating, you’re sort of in a fog and you’re putting food in your mouth. You’re not actually even really tasting the food. This is the bummer about fog eating, we’re not even really enjoying it that much. It’s just sort of a part of the busyness of our lives.

For some people this is making dinner and just taking little bites of the food as we make dinner or packing lunches for your kids for school. And as you pack the lunch you graze on the things that you’re putting in the lunch. So, this kind of just sort of mindless snacking that happens throughout the day, I know a lot of people tell me, it seems not that big of a deal. Yeah, it’s not a big deal. It’s totally fine to do it. Again, I don’t care if you do it or not. If you want to keep doing it, but it will likely prevent you from losing weight because actually all those little bites and grazes add up.

I always say, “Listen, if you’re going to lose weight, I am not a fan of the extreme ways.” Do you get those text messages? I get text messages that are like, “Click here and you can lose 45 pounds in two weeks.” And I always think, why didn’t someone tell me about this? And I asked Brad about it once actually and he said, “Yeah, it has cocaine in it but it does work if you want to try it.” I don’t know, some hard, heroin, cocaine, something like that. I was like, “No, probably not a good idea.” I’m not a big fan even if it doesn’t have cocaine or heroin.

I’m not a big fan personally of fast weight loss. I don’t think that’s usually healthy. I’m a fan of the slow painful, it’s taking so long because it’s then sustainable kind of weight loss. And so that usually means just a little bit of a calorie deficit. You just have to be burning a little bit more calories every day than what you’re consuming. It’s not a lot, it’s a little. And so those little grazes and bites, they do matter actually over time, definitely matters. So, fog eating is again something that I’m going to teach you how to unwind and cut out of your life.

If you’re going to eat candy, I want you to enjoy that candy. If you’re going to eat chips, or cookies, or whatever, chocolate chips, you’re going to eat something, soak it up and enjoy it. Don’t just do it mindlessly not paying attention.

Alright, number four reason you maybe haven’t been successful with weight loss is that your why needs cleaning up. Your why for losing weight is not healthy. If that’s not cleaned up, if your why is then people will like me better, then my spouse will be more attracted to me. Then I will like myself better, then I will be able to stop hating myself and judging myself, then I will be good enough. That is not a useful why, my friends. It might get you some temporary motivation, it might get you to move for a while, but I’ve never seen anyone tell me that that was their why, have long term success.

Success to me means not only weight loss but improved mental and emotional health. There’s a lot of people out there who are losing weight in a way that negatively impacts their mental and emotional health. That is not what I want for you because it often doesn’t last forever anyway. That’s when all the weight comes back on. So, we’ve got to clean up your why. Now, maybe your why is unhealthy. Maybe it is one of those reasons that I listed or something else that you think might be unhealthy. That’s okay.

I’m going to teach you how to get to a more healthy why. The truth is the healthiest why, let me try to give you the shortest example I can think of. When people say, “Well, then if it’s not for that reason, why would we?” And I did speak a little bit to that in the beginning because of the process required for weight loss and what that does for you overall in your life. But also, I found that the best why is not a heavy reason at all. It’s not, just because I love myself so much and I love my body. I don’t know. I haven’t found that to be effective either.

What I find is that the most effective why is a really light reason. It’s just because I can. It might be cool. Let’s just see what’s possible. See what I mean? It’s not heavy on the negative. It’s not heavy on the positive. It’s just like I don’t know, why not? Let’s just see. Let’s just make this a project. Let’s just see how it goes. Let’s just see what I could do. Let’s just learn a little bit as we go. Let’s experiment. Let’s get to know my body better. Let’s get to know food better. Let’s make this a fun project. Sort of like when you’re going to do a puzzle.

You don’t ever sit down to do a puzzle and be like, “Oh man, I really hope I can get this puzzle put together. I really hope I can do it. Do you think I can do it? I don’t know. I’m kind of afraid. What if I don’t do it? What if I fail?” None of that. You’re just like, “I think I’ll work on this puzzle.” And you work on it for a while and then maybe you step away, and then maybe you come back. But a puzzle is just for fun. We don’t hang a bunch of heaviness on a puzzle. That’s why people do puzzles, even though puzzles can be really, really hard.

People say to me, “I want to lose weight but it’s just so hard.” Guess what? You’re actually really up for doing hard things when you don’t put a whole bunch of pressure on yourself and make it mean a bunch of dramatic things whether you do it or not. Think about when you get done doing a puzzle how it feels. Cool, look, I did that. It doesn’t feel like, yes, now I love myself. Now I’m worthy. Let me show everyone this puzzle so they can all approve of me. It doesn’t feel like that.

Which means if you don’t finish the puzzle for some reason you also aren’t like, “I’m such a failure. I’ll never be able to do a puzzle.” That’s how we want to get with weight loss, honestly. That’s the healthiest place to operate from I’ve found, not just with weight loss, about any goal, but weight loss for sure. So, we’ve got to clean up your why. And again, I will help you to do that at Macros and Mindset, if you need some help go and register and I will help you there.

The fifth and final reason I want to share with you today, that you might not have been successful with weight loss is because we need to work on your relationship with food and your relationship with your body. Those are the two relationships that I find make the biggest impact on whether or not you’re going to be successful at losing weight. I want you to have a healthy, positive, loving, not heavy, again, fun relationship with food and with your body. So, this means we don’t want to be afraid of food. We don’t want to label foods good, or bad, or put all kinds of drama.

A lot of people use these moral adjectives with food. That, I know I shouldn’t eat that. I am so ashamed that I ate it. See how those are moral words? Food is not a moral issue. I mean I guess for some people there is some morality that comes into eating meat and things like that. But for the most part, when I’m helping people lose weight, they’re using incorrect terminology which tells me they have work to do on their relationship with food, on understanding food, on not being afraid of food, but also not loving food.

This is what people tell me, “I just love food so much.” Okay that’s fine. I’m not going to take that away from you. But you do realize that food doesn’t love you back, some food doesn’t. The kinds of food that – I love cinnamon rolls. I’ve been working on my relationship with cinnamon rolls because cinnamon rolls are like that boyfriend that just doesn’t love me back. I’m like I just love him and he’s not really very nice to me. Cinnamon rolls do not do great things for my body, they just don’t. So, I’m always going to like them. I’m okay with that. I’m not going to try to unwind it.

I’m not going to be like cinnamon rolls are bad. I just want to make it a healthier relationship with cinnamon rolls. See what I’m saying? If the thing I look forward to the most in my life, and in my day, and in my year is food then we’ve got some work to do. We’ve got some work to do. I want to look forward to many other things more than food.

I’ll tell you, I realized this when I first cut Diet Coke out of my life a few years ago, this was the first time I cut it out and then I went back on it. But I am mostly off it now. But at any rate the first time I cut it out I remember thinking oh my gosh, if I don’t drink a Diet Coke every day at 3:30, what am I going to look forward to? And then I realized that was kind of a sad reality for me, that the thing I look forward to the most in my day was my Diet Coke. I mean okay, not that that’s bad. We don’t need to make it so heavy. I’m not saying it’s a moral thing.

I’m just saying, why don’t I look forward to seeing my kids come home from school? Why do I not look forward to all the amazing things that are happening in my business? Why do I not look forward to – there’s so many other things I want to look forward to. And Diet Coke was just taking the place of those things. And so, we’ve got to clean up that relationship with food. And the same with your body, listen, your body is amazing, I promise you. It’s amazing. It does so many things that serve you. It’s keeping you alive all day every day. And that’s no easy task.

And you don’t even have to remember. It just breathes and your heart just pumps blood. And your brain just talks to the rest of your body. And your muscles just response according to what you decide to do. And so many things that your body does miraculously, your body heals itself. You get a cut, it just heals itself automatically. You don’t even have to do anything. Even go to it’s beautiful, I finally just landed on bodies are kind of funny looking. They just are. They’re supposed to be funny looking. They’re not supposed to look like the Victoria Secret model, very few people do.

So, I’m pretty sure that’s not how we’re supposed to look. We’re supposed to be kind of funny looking. That’s it. So, we’ve got to clean up your relationship with your body. We’ve got to stop hating your body. We’ve got to love your body. And again, I’m going to coach you through this. So, if you’re like, “Yeah, that’s me, I have a bad relationship with food. I hate my body.” Then you’ve got to get into Macros and Mindset, come and hang out with Brad and myself in Scottsdale or join us virtually if that’s easier for you.

But I want to help you clean up these areas of your life because like I said, it will be fun when you lose the weight. And I’m confident that you can even if you never have been successful before. I’m confident that the tools that Brad and I together are going to offer you can get you there. But the most fun part will be all the other areas of your life, you hadn’t even considered that will change as a result of you being willing to do this work. And that my friend will be fun.

So, hope to see you there. Thanks for joining me today. Have a beautiful rest of your week and I’ll talk to you next time. Bye bye.

Who is your life coach? If you don’t have one I would be so honored to be your coach. I created a virtual coaching program called Be Bold that I want to invite you to join me in. We can address challenges, we can work on goals, and we can do it in so many different ways.

We have group coaching, individual private coaching, and online chats along with hundreds of hours of courses and content that I’ve created just for you. When you’re ready to really take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10x level, then come check out Be Bold at JodyMoore.com/membership.