Confident Eaters

(CE) Sick of resolving to lose weight? Here’s a better, bolder goal
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Georgie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Confident Eaters Podcast, where you get proven methods to end overeating, emotional eating, and stressing about food. We are heading for harmony between your body, food and feelings, hosted by me, Georgie Fear, and my team at Confident Eaters. Kelly flipped through the pages of her journal like a breeze fluttering tree branches. How fast they whipped by, she thought. Starting off a new year, she didn't want to write another resolution to lose weight. She had written that down every year she could remember, and she was just sick of it. She did still want to lose weight, but was starting to think it just wasn't going to happen.

She imagined herself at 85 years old, far in the future, her wrinkled, arthritic fingers still writing in neat cursive. 2065 resolutions. Lose weight. It was a [00:01:00] ridiculous image. She wrote down some resolutions, or goals as she preferred to call them, about volunteering and building friendships. Kelly had been really successful at reaching goals like those.

Just a handful of years ago she had wanted to start donating on a regular basis to charity, and now it was second nature. She set a goal of being a better listener last year, and has seen that really pay off. In fact, she enjoys socializing more now, a great deal more than she used to. But the topic of her weight bobbed back to the surface of her mind like a persistent rubber ducky.

It refused to sink, to go away. She felt like she needed to address it, but how? She flipped back through her journal data, where she had, off and on, kept track of her habits. She stopped counting calories a long time ago. And now she had tried to keep track of how many days a week she did the things her coach, Georgie, recommended.

She saw little charts she had drawn logging how many times she felt hunger in the month of July, whether she stopped at [00:02:00] satisfied or over eight at each meal in August, and a long run in October where she was killing it with limiting her sugar intake. Oh yeah, then Halloween came and it's blank for two weeks after that.

Looking at her recent notes in December, she thought, Hmm. The days that I logged. I check off almost every box on my nutrition habits, but definitely the days I didn't log anything probably weren't as successful. The days I'm on, I'm almost always a hundred percent. Kelly and I met just before the new year to discuss her progress and intentions for 2025.

She shared with me her frustration over what felt like an inability to succeed with weight loss paired with an inability to just let it go. It's basically torture, she told me. I can't stop caring about it, but I also can't seem to get anywhere. I know a lot of people out there find themselves in situations that quite similar to Kelly. They have tried to just not care about their weight, but that didn't last. They've tried to take steps which should be [00:03:00] effective at reducing their body weight. Things which experts agree on, like eating more fruits and vegetables, drinking fewer sugary beverages, and learning to eat because they're hungry, not just bored.

But the consistency of their practice hasn't added up to being quite enough to show a meaningful difference on the scale. If you're thinking, yeah, Georgia, you're talking about me. I want to help give you some direction. Honestly, it doesn't matter if you hear this episode in January or mid May or any day of any year. If you're stuck in a spot where you're trying with your nutrition, But you're just not improving or getting anywhere.

Let's get you unstuck. The first thing I'd like you to do is set aside any self judgment or shame that you're harboring for yourself. If you're thinking, uh, I should have solved this by now, or I'm hopeless, or I didn't try hard enough, I need to have more willpower. I'd like you to set those thoughts aside in a box marked.

Unhelpful. Instead, please open the box of helpful [00:04:00] thoughts I've placed on the seat just to your left. Go with me here. And shake its contents directly onto your head. Now you've installed some new thoughts, which aren't so judgy and will better set you up to succeed. They include, hey, losing weight is hard.

It takes many, many tries for most people. Even if I haven't found what works for me yet, I'm wiser and more capable every year. This year, I'm going to learn new stuff and keep improving, and I don't have to go it alone. There's experts who spend their lives studying this stuff, and I can get help and support.

Now, let's look at the things you have been trying to do. We want to examine each one and see if it's worth continuing to pursue, if we want to edit it, or if we want to just let it go. Grab a piece of paper and write down, To help myself lose weight, I have been trying to and get that list started. Let's say your list says, To help myself lose weight, I've been trying to [00:05:00] eat only when I'm hungry, go to the gym six days a week, cook more at home, eat less takeout.

So, taking these one by one, Eating only when hungry is a great goal for weight loss. It's one that honors your mental health and body, leads to increased awareness of your body's signals and moods. All around, good on you if this one made your list. Same if you put down stopping at satisfied, which is a separate skill, but both of them are excellent foundations for shedding excess weight.

Let's look at go to the gym six days a week. This may be a good goal for you, but if you've been at it a while, and you're just never ever hitting that 6th day, why not edit the goal to be something you can have more success at? Going 5 days a week might be more realistic and less stress inducing.

And if you haven't been going to the gym at all, start with a smaller number, 1 3 days a week. You can always add more days down the road. Anything on your list that you've been trying to [00:06:00] do that scares you, or seriously stresses you out, could probably use an edit. I'm not saying don't ever do something that scares you, because many worthwhile things are scary.

But if you're looking for a routine, consistent thing that you can do day in and day out, don't put scary on there. Scale it down until it's less daunting, and as I like to say, Crappy day proof. You need to be able to look at your list and say I can do that even on a crappy day. Moving down our hypothetical list, we come to cook more at home and eat less takeout.

This is also a helpful behavior to aim for, but the way it's written, it's not quantifiable, so not something you can actually keep track of. By getting a bit more specific, cook at home three nights a week or eat takeout no more than one night a week, Either one of those, you could work on that concretely, and more importantly, you could track it to see if you're successful. So now you have a list, maybe with some edits of the things you've been trying to do to lose [00:07:00] weight.

I want you to pick one of them. It's hard to set the others aside. I hear you. But if you've been trying to do 10 things and not getting anywhere, you aren't doing enough of them enough of the time. So let's begin with one and nail that sucker at least 85 percent of the days in the next month. For most months, that means you need to hit 26 days of yes, I did it. Get to the end of a month with at least 26 X's and you can add a second one. So we've set aside the shame and unhelpful blame. We revised our list of desired behaviors and we chose to laser focus on just one. Are we set now? Almost! The last piece I want to set you up with is a commitment to transparency and honesty with yourself.

You don't have to let anybody else know what you're working on. You don't have to tell anybody else what you had for dinner, if you ate past full, if you ate cookies cause you were bored, but you need to be 100 percent honest [00:08:00] with yourself. Some days my clients realize they're just checking off boxes because they tried to do the thing even if they didn't actually do it.

It can feel so uncomfortable to leave a box blank, or to admit that they didn't do the desired behavior, that fudging the data makes them more comfortable. If having a coach or trainer view your log makes you feel more inclined to perform for them, because that's a real thing that happens, it might be best to keep your log private, so you can more easily be 100 percent accurate in your tracking.

Kelly went back to her journal after our call. And she wrote her goals for this year. For the first time ever, I will be 100 percent honest with myself about what and how much I'm eating. Now that was something she had never before resolved to do. But it's not difficult to recognize how this is a necessary step on the road to weight loss. I think 100% honesty with herself was a brave, wise goal to set. [00:09:00] So if you wanna join her, I'm all for it. Let's make it a great year.