IOWL 281: Get Thin Quick – The Right Way – Part II

On today’s show, how to tune in and turn on intuitive eating that will slim you down.

Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss. I’m your host, Dr. Renee Stephens, and together, we’re accessing and adjusting the control panel of your mind, body, spirit system. Bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to the rest of your life. This journey isn’t about food plans and calorie counts. It is about learning to love and care for you from the inside out. So that it becomes natural and easy for you to be slim and healthy. Join me, as a former compulsive overeater, I have been where you’ve been, and I am here to help you create exactly what you want instead.

As a reminder, you’ll get many many more times out of this program then you put in, but you must put in to get out. While it can be easy to be slim and healthy, it does take a little bit of oomph to change. Because we’re in our comfort zones even if they feel rather uncomfortable, and we have to make some deep level changes to create that ease. So I invite you to listen to this program. Dedicate time each day to doing the exercises suggested. You can go back and listen to the early episodes where I outline some homework. Or check in to the website at insideoutweightloss.com where we have step-by-step classes to take you through the entire program. Whatever you choose, remember that the return on your investment is tremendous, but you have to make the investment to get the return.

Now take a few moments to drop inside and sink down within you. Becoming aware, perhaps just starting with your breath. Noticing the inhalation and deepening it ever so slightly or perhaps all at once. A nice deep and relaxing breath. Available to you 24/7/365. A deep and relaxing breath can be just the tonic you need, the guiding light. Down inside of your own experience. On the inhalation you breathe in freshness. Air that has never before been in your body that will nourish you. Freshness and new possibilities with each inhalation. New things that become possible that perhaps were unimaginable in the past. Breathing all of that in as you sink down inside. And on your next exhalation, letting go, letting go of anything that isn’t serving you. Letting go of old patterns. Letting go of tension and tightness. Available to you all of this with this very exhalation in the present moment.

And so as you breath in the possibilities, you breath in the freshness, the creation, the ability to manifest and you breathe out any tension or tightness. This becomes a lovely rhythmic pattern of breathing in and letting go. Breathing in and letting go. It is always there, throughout your life. Every waking and sleeping moment that you have. It’s so nice to remember that with each breath, we breathe in freshness, new possibilities. And with each exhalation, we let go of that which is no longer needed. It’s all there for the choosing, a reminder that we can let go of whatever it is that we desire, and we can breath in whatever it is that we wish to create. Perhaps what you’d like to create is an abundance of health, of vitality. An abundance of peace within your body, an abundance of slimness. I’d like to share with you a quote by Alan Cohen that says, ‘Abundance is not something you create. It is an existing reality that you recognize.’ Oh, I love that! So time on your next inhalation to recognize the abundance of healing, the abundance of health, the abundance of vitality, the abundance of slimness that is available to you. Step into that reality. Throughout this episode of Inside Out Weight Loss and beyond.

We’ve been talking about fast weight loss. Get thin quick schemes, and how you can do that in an Inside Out way. What we talked about last episode was the importance of recognizing your pattern with weight over time. What is your macro pattern? Your 30,000-foot view of how you are around weight? If you were to look at a line graph charting your weight over time, over the years, the decades, what would it look at? And I invited you to do this, because it is that perspective that allows you to see the pattern that you have been in so that if you want to change that macro pattern, you can. I see it again and again. Hope springs eternal they say. We get to that moment of acute pain the pants are too tight, the butt is too big. We can never over do it again like we did last night. We have a food hangover. The pain is excruciating. Oh my God, we’re gonna have to go and buy a bigger tent to wear around. Ugh, awful awful awful, and so we reach out, we become desperate. It becomes absolutely urgent to lose weight as fast as possible. And sure, I’ll go and I’ll do the cause stuff, the deeper stuff later, but right now, I just need to be able to breath in my own body. Pass the juice cleanse. Pass the starvation program. Whatever it is.

It’s that moment of acute pain that propels us into something extreme, and extreme by definition. Is it sustainable? Can you sustain extreme the rest of your life? No. And unfortunately, what happens after the extreme? After the pain of the acute moment of being too big fades away. Do you remember in the early episodes we talked about away from motivation? Things that make you want to run far and fast away from them? And these moments are prime examples of compelling away from motivation. That makes you want to jump into something as quickly as possible. By looking at your macro pattern however, you can see, ‘ah, is that something that I have done regularly? Do I tend to get motivated to lose weight the same time of year and every summer I slim down, and every winter I bulk up.’ Or ‘Every New Year I go on a new program.’ What is your pattern over time? Because understanding that pattern allows you to see what you’ve been doing so that you can do something different. And if you do something different, you will change your pattern. One way or the other, doing anything different is going to change your pattern.

Now as you look at that pattern of yours, that macro pattern. And I invited you last time to also look at how you have been feeling about your weight over time, and what it would look like if you charted that on a graph. Is that staying steady? Is that trending downwards? In other words, you feel worse about your body over time? Or is it trending upwards? Are you feeling better about your body? I hope it’s that, but I doubt it if you’ve been on a weight loss yo-yo cycle. Probably not. And there might be some understandings, some realizations that occur to you as a result of seeing the big picture so to speak, haha around your weight. Now you see this big picture, you want to change it, but alas, how? How can you change that pattern that you’ve been stuck in for so long? Well, after the break, we’ll talk about just that. You’re listening to Inside Out Weight Loss. I’m your host, Dr. Renee Stephens, and we will be right back.

Want to hear more episodes? Have a friend you'd like to share them with? The entire archive is now available at InsideOutWeightLoss.com/podcasts, plus we have a free gift for you there. The Inside Out Weight Loss Workbook that walks you through the crucial first steps outlined in episodes 1 through 18, plus you'll get to hear my story in the prologue. That's: InsideOutWeightLoss.com/podcasts.

We’re back now. Before the break, we were reviewing the big picture of your weight loss pattern, and the question becomes, how to make a change. We want to shift our focus away from the number on the scale over which we have extremely imperfect control. Don’t we know it? Because it can fluctuate particularly day-to-day by pounds just because of water retention and muscle mass and all sorts of things. It’s always been a very imprecise measure of what’s going on in our bodies. Let’s focus on something we do have 100% control over, which would be a process goal. A goal of doing the right things that you know will lead you to where you want to go in the future. You do things today. If you say, ‘okay, I know that today I did what I need to do to get to my goal of being slimmer and fitter and healthier and happier, then you can check that off your list each day. There is something so satisfying about making a check mark. Are you like me do you just love to make those check marks? I have added things to my list that I’ve already done just so I can go, ‘check I did that!’ I need recognition if only from myself.

So you can have that check mark because maintaining your motivation on a day-to- day basis is really important for making those day-to-day changes. You don’t want no motivation dip when the pants are too tight, or you put them in the dryer or you think you put them in the dryer. Isn’t that awful? ‘Well, I must have…did I just wash these? Er ah er no actually this is there stretched out state. Oh my God!’ Terrible. So, something you can do today and feel successful at, and the practice that I’m about to outline to you is in fact just that. And it starts with connecting in with your body. So let’s start from the beginning here. In order to be naturally slender, you need to be tuned into your body. This is a more of an intuitive eating approach. I am not going to tell you what you should eat, because I can never be as good at telling you that as your body. Your body is the ultimate authority on what suits you, what suits it, her, your body. She knows best.

So, I offer you the hunger diary. Do you remember the hunger diary? Have you listened for a while? Do you know what the hunger diary is all about? I know you have done food diaries, and they feel like being a cop on your own behavior. Sure they get you to clean up your act just because you have to write it down, you have to cop to what you have been putting in your mouth, and I get that. I know there is research that shows that when you do that, it improves your success. So there is value in that. It can feel a little traumatic or burdensome for some people, and really what does the trip, what we want, is to use a tool to reacquaint you with your body’s signals of hunger and satiety. Because you’re going to be attuning your intake, your going to be attuning what you eat to your body’s signals of hunger and satiety.

Now, bear with me here for a moment. I want you to imagine for just a moment, that you were aware of your hunger and your satiety. And that you actually consistently waited until you were nice and hungry to eat, and you stopped when you were satisfied. Just satisfied, not stuffed full but satisfied. Imagine for a moment a you who does this? Consistently, three times a day at least, she’s getting really hungry and then she’s eating to satisfy her hunger. Oh let’s get fancy here; she’s eating things that are particularly satisfying. So if she’s in the mood for soup, soup it is. If she’s in the mood for salad, oh yeah. If she needs some protein, goin for it baby! So she’s tuned into her body. Imagine that that is you who is eating consistently when hungry and stopping consistently when satisfied. What happens to your size over time? A week of that? A month of that? A year of that? What happens to your size? I know, you may be saying, ‘I wouldn’t know a hunger signal if it bopped me over the head. I haven’t felt hunger in years!’ I get it. That’s why you keep the hunger diary to reacquaint you with your body’s signals. I’m guessing that the answer to the question that I just asked is that if you were tuned into your body. Truly, you would be slimmer.

Now if your question is, ‘I don’t know because I don’t trust my body. I feel like I am always hungry.’ When you eliminate hunger for emotional reasons. Hunger for boredom. Hunger for stress. Hunger because the food happens to be there and you get back down to the physical hunger. I’m guessing that if you were tuned into that physical experience, you would be slimmer. The only thing that can mess this up a little bit, is if you are eating a high sugar or sugar like substance of which there are a plethora in our society. That will make you hungrier more often, and is less satisfying then other types of food. And so it’s a really fine idea to be very conscious of any sugar that you consume and consume it with a great deal of respect. And mindfulness. My deal is that if I’m going to eat something like that, I need to slow down and enjoy it, and be present to it.

Anyway. So, what we want is to tune you back in to your body’s signals of hunger and satiety because as you eat to those signals, you will be slimming down and feeling better in your body. No food hangovers here people! Imagine, freedom from food hangovers. Ah! Halleluiah! How fabulous that would be. You’re going to notice those signals and the first step is keeping the hunger diary. If keeping the notion of writing down your hunger levels on a piece of paper on an app on your phone stresses you out, then you may want to use some EFT tapping to release that stress. Or it’s possible to start this daily practice without using the hunger diary. That’s another way to start; it’s just that the hunger diary tunes you in more quickly and more precisely.

So, I recommend starting with the hunger diary. What is the hunger diary? I offer a free one in spreadsheet format at my reneemethod.com website under Full-filled Downloads. Because it was something that I offered with my book Full-filled. So there is a free hunger diary spreadsheet there that you can go grab. And if you are a member at InsideOutWeightLoss.com, we’ve got the snazzy interactive version that you can open on your phone or mobile device and track it there. And if you want to go super low-tech, there is always the little tiny notebook. Ever seen those at the drugstore? They’re kind of fun. You can keep one of those with you and just jot down your hunger before and after you eat. You put your hands on your stomach. Just below your rib cage above your belly, and you check in, ‘am I hungry?’ You can note down any emotions that are going on. You can note down what you have eaten. There is space to do that as well, and most importantly, you’re going to start developing the habit of checking in with your hunger levels and how different foods make you feel over time under different circumstances. This is a ‘get to know your body’ tool for you. That’s what it is. It is not the police trying to control or restrict or judge what goes into your mouth. It is a training tool to get you to know. Think of it as a bonding exercise. Bonding with your belly.

So, bonding with your body is the first step of this daily process that you’ll be doing to accelerate your weight loss. Once you have been bonding with your body, and getting to know your hunger and satiety signals, you will become aware of when you are eating when you are not hungry, and when you are eating past satisfied. We all know the pain and discomfort of being too full. That’s a yucky yucky feeling. I hate it! The too full feeling. So, you want to notice that, and at the end of the day, or some time during the day, you are going to sit down and review the day past. You’re going to review the day past. We call this process the daily review. You are going to review, how did it go? Do I like the way that I ate? Did I eat when I was hungry? Did I stop when I was satisfied?

Most likely, especially in the beginning, the answer will be ‘no’. But the first question that I want you to ask yourself because I know how your mind operates is, what went well? ‘What went well today?’ You’re going to do your little review and ask yourself ‘well, what went well in the tuned into my body perspective?’ Did you choose the veggies when that’s what your body craved? Did you wait until you were hungry to eat? Were you mindful when you ate something that was very dense or sweet? What went well today? Did you work out? Did you move your body? Did you do something nice for yourself? Spend some time in nature? Listen to music that you love? Connect with a friend? Notice beauty? What went well today? So you will be reviewing what went well as your first question, and next week, we will go into more detail about the next questions that you will be asking yourself in this daily review process. Which because it’s daily is going to be accelerating your change, and includes an element of changing the habit as well as the secret sauce of changing the cause of the habit.

And that my friends, brings us to the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. Inside Out Weight Loss is produced by Andrew Frame of BAFSoundwork.com. Again, you can find that hunger diary free worksheet at reneemethod.com. I am your host, Dr. Renee Stephens, and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle from the planet enabling you to develop and share your abundant soul’s gifts. Join me as we evolve the world by evolving ourselves. Take good care.