The Inner Work You've Been Avoiding -- A Weight Loss Story

In this episode, coach John recounts a story of Cindy and her weight loss journey from 350 lbs to where she is today.

This offers a picture of what successful and sustainable weight loss looks like while begging the question, "How did she become this version of herself?"

John discusses the five non-negotiable steps that every person has to go through it they want to heal and lose weight for good. 

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Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Welcome back to the easy way out podcast. It's been a little while, but it's great to be back. And today I want to do something a little different. I wrote a post for my sub stack, which I believe there's a link to in my show notes. And I realized that I make these great substack posts, and I make great podcast episodes, but I don't share them on the same feed. And really, I should probably be incorporating them both. In fact, it's interesting substack at this, you know, what's like a newsletter website that also kind of turns your newsletter into like a blog. And it's kind of almost like a social media platform as well. It's pretty cool. But they also have a capability now where you can move your podcast over there, and they host it for free, which is nice. And you just read your posts, and every post becomes a podcast episode, you can obviously do, you know, regular podcast episodes where you're doing an interview or just talking shit, you know, to the microphone, but you also have these posts that are, you know, audio versions of your of your newsletters, and I think that that's really enticing. So I'm just kind of testing it out. Today, I'm just going to read you a newsletter. And I'll probably find it very hard to not editorialize, as I read through or occasionally I'll maybe change the wording but I'll try to just read and not get in my own way. So you're welcome to go along with this experiment with me. The title of this post was foolproof, your weight loss, so let's break it down. In this post, I'd like to break down Weight Loss Success in the simplest terms possible. By the end, you should have a crystal clear idea of what is required to see a massive change in your physical health and fitness. And so I'm going to tell you the story of Cindy So Cindy weighed 350 pounds in September of 2022. She entered a calorie deficit and began to slowly increase your activity using her daily steps as a metric after initial loss of four pounds. Her weight stayed the same for two weeks. She didn't panic. Soon, the weight began to peel off more steadily. Some weeks were more or less than others. One week she lose point seven pounds the next she might lose 1.5 pounds. She averaged that just over a pound loss per week. Nothing crazy. About six weeks in Cindy weighed 343 seven pounds down total. In that period, she became very comfortable with her calorie deficit. She found foods and meal timing that maximized her satiety since she felt it was easy. In week seven She reduced her intake by another 300 calories and the next four weeks she lost another seven pounds total for 14 pounds lost total. Over the next two weeks her weight remained right around 336 pounds. Her mind began playing tricks on her but instead of catastrophizing, she held course and kept faith that she was doing the right things the energy she would have wasted and freaking out now went towards self awareness and self care Cindy examined her stress levels and her sleep. When she resolved those issues, her weight took a sudden drop of five pounds. Sidenote, this is called the whoosh effect. And it's very real. It's something that I've talked with clients about all the time. A lot of times when you're stressed, your body will hold on to water and won't release it. There's a few different reasons why. And once you resolve that stress, it will like release it all at once. So Cindy saw a little whoosh effect of five pounds. But so now 13 weeks in Cindy has lost a total of 19 pounds in this phase and now she weighs 331 pounds. She kept her calories the same and focused on increasing her daily steps. From there on out. She even started doing some resistance training, nothing serious. just dabbling just a little while push ups, you know, pulling against the doorframe, doing some assisted squats, that sort of stuff. And if you have questions about how to do that you can you know, message me and I'm happy to share with you over the next three weeks she lost another four pounds for 23 pounds lost she was at 327 pounds. That was a pretty slow and steady weight loss. Nothing crazy. Cindy now took a break as 2023 began while everyone else was entering diets, Cindy was eating more intentionally, it was crazy. She ate it maintenance, keeping her weight steady after a couple of pounds of water gain after leaving the deficit. Totally normal. If let's say you're at 250 After your weight loss diet program, and then you go back to maintenance you can easily expect to go back to between 252 and 255. As long as you know that you didn't eat, you know 5000 calories, you know that that's water weight. Your body's water composition is just changing because you're eating at maintenance. It's nothing to be concerned about. It's very normal. So now the scale hovered at 329 or 330. For Sandy instead of you know her low of 327. Again, Cindy didn't freak out about this because she understands it's just waterways Cindy went on a vacation and then came back home and immediately went to a wedding after that. And after all that whirlwind of fun stuff she weighed in at 333. She didn't freak out She reduced her maintenance calories by 100 Mostly from carbs which she had over consumed on vacation three weeks later, she was solidly back at 329 to 330. Now side note if you do the weight loss math on that, how do you lose three pounds in three weeks by with

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
100 calorie reduction? Well, normally, you would need to make a 500 calorie reduction. However, I'm noting here that she mostly over ate carbs on her vacation carbs are going to cause you to retain more water. So by cutting out only 100 calories and not overdoing it, she allowed her body to slowly return back to her baseline weight at this point by not not because she had gained three pounds of fat but because she had gained three pounds of total fat plus water. And once she reduced her carbs by 25 carbs a day for 100 calories, she was able to drop weight. And again, this might work differently for somebody else. But in this situation, it worked. So we're just manipulating carbs a tiny bit, which is preventing us from having to make a huge adjustment to calories. So we can really, once you understand how the body tends to work, you can prevent overcorrection. And that's a big part of long term weight loss success is making the tiniest correction possible for the best outcome because generally, we're taught to make wild over corrections. And our brains kind of have a tendency to do that anyways. And so learning to foolproof your weight loss is going to involve making very, very small changes when your brain is going Alert, alert, dive time I go, No, no. Okay, let's just calmed down a little bit. And we're just gonna pull the wheel slightly to the left, and that's gonna get us off the rumble strip. But that's all we really need. So as February turned into March, Cindy felt the itch to lose weight again, she dropped into a 500 calorie deficit and notice that she was losing weight quickly, was also incredibly hungry. Cindy realized that she was considerably more active than she'd been in September of 2022 when she started her first weight loss phase. So she added 200 calories back in, she felt better, and she lost about one pound per week for three weeks. Then she dropped that 200 calories and felt fine in the deeper deficit. So she she still got into a 500 calorie deficit. She just got into it a little bit slower because she could tell that it was taking a lot out of her and she got into that deficit just fine. Just by giving her body a little bit of time to acclimatized Cindy found herself more energized in this calorie deficit than she ever had eating quote unquote. Normally at 350 pounds, she dropped through the 320s into the 310s. For the first time in five years, she knew she had a long way to go her goal weight is 170. But she began taking success as a foregone conclusion. The fear of putting the weight back on dwindled as the subtle confidence grew. She added more resistance training and protein in order to begin building much needed muscle for the first six weeks in her regimen. Not that this weight loss phase. But when she started doing resistance training and eating more protein, her weight loss slowed down considerably. But again, she expected that she that's what she wanted was to start building some muscle. She knew that during that time, her rate of fat loss was going to remain unchanged no matter what happened on the scale, because she had grown confident and that you know, if she does the right things, the right things happen. She wasn't going to get psyched out by the scale not moving down as much because she was happy that she was putting on muscle. She wasn't just trying to get the weight off as fast as possible anymore. This was a huge distinction. She had never been in a weight loss program where she was trying to do the smartest thing for a year from now not trying to get weight off yesterday, she was investing in a game plan that was paying dividends and setting her up for future success. And this is partially why she was starting to be so confident about the end outcome because she wasn't working today. For tomorrow. She was working today for next year. And that allowed her to have confidence today and tomorrow to keep doing the things that she was enjoying doing. At the end of 17 weeks in a deficit Cindy had lost 20 pounds, she reached 310 pounds. And after going back to maintenance, she sat at 313 because of the increased water weight from going back to maintenance. So she was 37 pounds down from her starting way after two weight loss phases. Now a lot of people after investing this much time and energy would be really disappointed to have only lost 37 pounds. So that combined with the fact that she was so close to 300, it was tempting to try and force things and you stay in the diet a few more weeks just to get into the two hundreds. But she knew that that was a trap that was a place where if she just showed patience and stopped when her body told her to and went back to maintenance when she knew it was the right thing to do. Getting into the three hundreds was a foregone conclusion, she just needed to do the right things and the right things would happen. So she was patient, and she let that patience, assure her victory and make the overall journey much easier. Cindy had finally decided to stop trying to win battles at the expense of the campaign and to start putting you know the war before winning every single little battle winning every single little hill. And quite often this is one of the biggest reasons people fail is our brains get us to believe we need to, you know, take that hill over there when really we don't need to take it at all in the bigger picture and it's a huge waste of time and energy. And it's exactly the kind of thing that causes us to burn out. So he or she stayed at maintenance calories for four weeks, so kind of a little bit shorter of a break than she took the last time as April turned into May Cindy entered her third weight loss phase she was more confident than ever now. So she worked her way into a comfortable calorie deficit with

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
but she decided not to do the same old routine because it was getting a little stale. And she realized that she was thinking that I have to do the exact same things if I want to have the same results. And that wasn't true, her brain was kind of telling her to she had to be a prisoner to her own regime. And she was like, Nah, screw that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna move my body anyway, I feel like because it's all the same. And so she tried some different things and the rower the rowing machine really grabbed her. She loved the challenge of it. She liked how the full body motion required not just endurance, but coordination. And Cindy hadn't felt coordinated in a long time. And even though she was only down 3740 ish pounds, the size of her stomach getting smaller, it felt good when she could kind of scrunch up at the bottom position of the rower and still her stomach got in the way. And, you know, the fat on her legs made it harder. But she felt so different that every time she got into that bottom position on the rower, she felt the difference she felt she felt the change that she had made in her body, and it was rewarding. So instead of focusing on the weight, she still had to lose, she let that reminder of everything that she had accomplished, which was proof that what she was doing was again, the right thing. Some days the rower was a meditative place, because her whole body was moving in sync, it felt like she was barely doing anything at all, when she got really into the rhythm of the rowing. Other days, she would get after the numbers, you know, she tried to beat her PR from last time. So she would partially be in sync. And other times she'd push and test the limits of her endurance and her pain tolerance and try to squeeze out a few more meters out of every 20 minutes session that she did. So that rower that one piece of equipment, adding that into our program give her really two different workouts that she loved equally, and depending on her mood that day, she could do either one and both were great. So by August, Cindy weighed 274 pounds. So over the summer, she had had a fairly successful weight loss phase. Normally, this would be a good time to take a break, because she had lost a good chunk of weight and had taken a while But Cindy felt great. She was losing steadily, her body was not saying hey, you need to stop. So by the book, maybe she should have stopped but she listened to her body. And she was like, I feel like going so she kept going and you're the boss, you get to decide these things, ultimately. So she continued in her group for another 10 weeks losing another 23 pounds. So she made hay when the sun was shining, you know, in the earlier phases, she wasn't feeling it as much. And so she didn't push it. So she picked her moment when she wanted to, like I said make hay and it was her third weight loss phase. And in the third weight loss phase, she was getting so much better at this, like weight loss is almost like a skill or an art. And it's something that like you get better at over time. And so that was partially why she was able to extend this weight loss phase, you know, an extra 10 weeks and knock off an extra 23 pounds. So in that 10 weeks, she did just over two pounds per week on average, which was actually the most weight she lost in the entire weight loss regime all the way down from 350 to you know to now that was actually her fastest weight loss. So she was just in the zone and it felt good. And she went with it. So Cindy hit 251 In early October, and her body was telling her it's time to rest. She knew she had pushed it, she had had her fun, and she felt the strong urge to go one more week. Why? Because that would put her below 250 pounds, which would mean she had lost over 100 pounds. But she knew even though her brain was kind of going crazy at the thought of stopping at 251. And then she knew when she went back to Maine and so it'd be 255 or 254. She knew to just let her brain be irritated by that number because it's completely arbitrary. And she had learned by now to almost take pleasure in that discomfort that her brain had over arbitrary markers of success. Because that's what old Cindy used to let boss her around. And that's why old Cindy never succeeded. And so New Cindy is succeeding because she's able to not be bossed around by the numbers. She gets to be the boss and ultimately the numbers will bend to her will her decisions because she's not letting arbitrary markers of success or goals change her story of what's happening. So the old Cindy definitely would have pushed one more week to pass 100 pounds loss and back at 310 That old Cindy would have pushed another few weeks then when Cindy really wasn't ready to push another few weeks. And so you know, stopping at 251 was symbolic for Cindy of how her mind had changed to work for her success rather than against it. Again, not feel like she had to take every single Hill on the battlefield just because it was there. So 251 Cindy took a break. And after three months off of maintenance because she had gotten quite a while she took a longer maintenance period let her body recover. And when she was ready to make weight loss her top priority again, she began her fourth weight loss phase. This was January of 2024. So to this point, she has lost another 19 pounds and just over 12 weeks, so about a pound and a half per week, which you know, she was hoping to do two pounds a week again, but progress has been slow because she's finding it hard to be in a deeper calorie deficit. She's got some stresses going on. It's okay not every day

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
Every weight loss phase needs to be as good as the last one or not every phase is going to be as slow as the last one, like you never know exactly what it is her priority is just forward progress and just doing the best she can. And she will work through her stresses as she has before, she's more quick than ever to do that. And over the next few weeks, she'll figure it out. And hopefully her weight loss will continue at a nice clip until she's ready to end this weight loss phase. So as of now in April 2024, Cindy weighs around 232 pounds, she's 118 pounds lighter than when her journey began. So this is a huge change in her body composition. She's a completely different person, so to speak. And remember, this was the lady who for the first two weight loss phases she did she was not losing big chunks of weight. She was, you know, eking out 2720 pounds here, and in about a year and a half, she's 118 pounds lighter, you know, so whenever things are going slow, remember that a year two years from now is gonna come whether you want it to or not. And you know even if you lose weight slowly Listen, that two years is gonna come around the corner. And at that point, you're going to have what you what you want, you're going to have your dream. So sometimes if your progress is slow, I mean, by all means trying to figure out a way to make it faster if you can, but at the very least take slow progress over no progress because it adds up. So at no point did Cindy ever lose more than about two pounds per week on average. And that was only during her smoothest streak. For the most part, Cindy was losing between a pound and a pound and a half per week. She took ample breaks. She enjoyed the holidays, she went to weddings and celebrated with everybody stuck trips, ate Fine Foods, she didn't put her life on hold to make big changes. She just started one step at a time. Remember when she started it was just she was eating a bit less and moving a bit more. And that's the trite sounding advice that everyone gets. But when you when you apply that advice inside the suite of other mindset changes that allow for a large scale weight loss program to work. It really is the baby step toward a better new life. And so as she focused on those baby steps, and learning how to let her brain work advantageously rather than disadvantageously, her life that had been constricting her slowly gave way to her growing sense of self and well being her permission to put herself first more and more Cindy still has about 62 pounds to lose before she gets to her quote unquote goal weight. Personally, my money is on her succeeding. How about you This is what life changing weight loss looks like. This is not one grand solution or achievement but a pathway that opens up to those who find it those who are willing to learn how to disassemble some of the ways their brains have been taught to learn via conditioning, you know what the fitness industry has taught them what the self help industry has taught them, or the self help hive mind, whatever you want to call it. And it's an industry, but it's also just kind of a an aspect of our culture. So maybe you're asking yourself, okay, but how did she learn where her thinking needed to change? Notice how many times throughout the narrative, I mentioned that she didn't freak out, something happened where normally we would all freak out because things are going too slow. Or there's unexplained, you know, weight gain, or things that just tend to mess with our heads, especially when we work very hard for weight loss, you know, and then you go back to maintenance and you see yourself gained four pounds. It's easy to freak out super easy. Even people who are super experienced with this, ie yours truly experienced this stuff. And you're sitting there being like I know better, but my brain is freaking out right now. So how did Cindy learn? Where where her thinking needed to change? How did she learn how to fully get out of her own way? How did she stay so consistent this entire time? How does she not emotionally eat? How did she regain her motivation to move from when she was 350 pounds and you know, barely took 1500 steps a day? Well, the truth is Cindy wasn't perfect. Her thinking still, you know developed over time she she learned how to get more and more out of her own way throughout her weight loss process. She learned to be more consistent over time, she learned to emotionally eat less than less she got better at moving according to her native motivation over time. So she wasn't perfect at these things when she started however, the one thing that that's missing from the story is what happened before September 2022. What happened before Cindy ever started losing weight before she lost that first pound. You know, if we asked, you know a lot of people we'd say oh, they're our weight loss journey began in September of 22. But for Cindy, her weight loss journey started much earlier in 2022. And for her the most important successes occurred before September before she ever lost a single pound because the truth is Cindy's ability to get steps and eat less was never really the key question. She knew she had that ability. It was just a question of unlocking it. Her desire to live healthily was never the issue. It was how do I reckon with these other desires to hurt myself and stay stuck and stagnant? The reason Cindy had been heavy since childhood. The reason she got to 350 pounds in the first place and stayed there for almost five years was that she had learned to harm herself as part of a suite of survival mechanisms.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
When she found and disassembled those structures of survival that had been built in the worst times of her life, she found the freedom to live for the moment according to her desires and her values, rather, rather than her worst fears, I think the same success is possible for you. But as strange as that sounds, you need to stop focusing on the weight loss per se, and start focusing on the core issues that are running the show. That's what Cindy did in the months leading up to her weight loss. She worked on her mind and her heart, she got to know the things that had got her to 350. She didn't just say, Okay, I'm at 350, I got to solve this. So many times, we sit there and treat our weight, like a problem to be solved. And yet we showed no interest in understanding the problem. We just want the solution. But how are you going to solve a problem that you don't understand? How are you going to solve an equation that you're not willing to look at? This is us trying to throw answers at a math equation? We're not even willing to try to understand it's like 17? No, 42? No, three, correct. Okay. But why you don't know because it's an accident. Basically, when you get it right. When you learn to examine your life fully. Before you start learning losing weight, you get to really understand why you got there in the first place, which shows you exactly what you need to change on the inside to allow weight loss to happen. So if you want to go on a journey similar to Cindy's, you'll have to do the following things first, number one, and by the way, this is where we actually foolproof weight loss, it's before the weight loss happens, per se. I mean, some people do this stuff that they start coaching, and they'll start losing weight on day one, because they're just ready, they drop into a moderate calorie deficit. And then they learn the rest of these things as they go. Other people, they they need to take time, they need to really focus in on motivation, or emotional eating, or one of these other steps before they're ready, right, just like Cindy did. But one way or another, if you're going to have the success that Cindy had, you're going to have to do these five things, these are non negotiables. If you want to lose the weight and keep it off, you can lose the weight, you can white knuckle it and lose a lot of weight. I've done it, other people have done it, most of the people who lose 100 plus pounds, they found a way to white noclip, they found a system that worked for them. And they just stayed focused somehow through grit and determination. But that doesn't change the structures that live on the inside. And as soon as you let up off the gas of those behavior changes, those structures go right back to work the same way they did when you were 350. This time, when Cindy gets to 170, those structures aren't going to be there, they're simply not going to be there because she's disassembled them. So the five steps number one, you need to simplify weight loss, you need to understand the two core principles of weight loss and how to personalize the rest for success. There are only two undeniable laws of weight loss, you need to be in a calorie deficit. And you need to manage the stress that that deficit causes. Now, there's a lot that goes into that, but the rest is very personalizable. And there's there's tips for success, there's best practices, but you know, a lot of people will come to me and they'll say like, I know how to lose weight. I just don't know how, and I totally understand what they're saying. Because they they're saying that like, Hey, if you gave me $1,000, to lose a pound, I could figure it out. And if you did that over and over, I could probably figure out how to lose a lot of weight. This is why we see people, you know, they find ways to lose 50 100 200 pounds. So people can learn how to lose weight sort of intuitively, by eating less and moving more. So in that sense, they do understand how to lose weight, they just don't know how they just don't know how to actually change their behavior according to that intuition. However, on the other side of the coin, when people say they understand weight loss, they're really, really, really wrong. And it's not their fault, I don't think because how would they have an accurate view of weight loss when they are inundated as we all are with reams and reams of bullshit from the fitness industry and culture at large, you know, because the fitness industry is putting stuff out. But then you also have like the news and other now we have podcasts we have people sharing information, and oftentimes doing so without the expertise or even the experience to filter any of that information. So it's just like, ooh, this sounds good. Scientists found that if you eat broccoli, you're gonna die tomorrow. Okay, great. And we've all seen that headline, you know, and then three years later, it's scientists have found that people who eat broccoli live 15 years longer than other people. It's like, okay, great, this, this stuff gets sensationalized. And that just adds to the kind of fuels the fire of you know, the fad diet cycle we go through and fitness always looking for the newest shiniest thing, we don't really want to apply the tried and true principles because our constant failures convince us that they don't work when actually the tried and true principles work once you address these inner issues. So by going on this inner journey, you get to take a tunnel through the mountain and you don't have to deal with all the fad diets. You don't have to listen to anybody on Tik Tok ever again, you don't have to listen to what what somebody said on the news about oh, if you drink this, you're never gonna lose weight. You get to just block all that stuff out because you know, okay, actually my weight loss is going to come from these core principles. I'm going to follow them and the rest is completely personalizable and if somebody on the

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Use or somebody on a podcast says that what I'm doing is wrong, they can bite me because I know I know what's up. So simplifying weight loss allows you to a be successful and be put blinders on to all just the constant, just the sheer volume of noise that's out there around fitness that tends to throw us off course, because I can't tell you how many times I'll see a client beyond a program and and they're doing well, they're doing great. And they'll come to me and they'll be like, I heard that if you're this, this and this, you should do this. What do you think? And I'm like, Are you losing weight right now? Yeah. How do you feel? I'll feel okay. Okay. Why on earth? Would we need to talk about this other random crap? Like it's a complete non sequitur. It's a complete distraction. I mean, other times, if somebody's like, hey, I want to try this thing. It sounds fun. And I'm like, if it doesn't interfere, like go for it. Like, again, you get to personalize, but we all know the feeling of you know, being on a plan or something. And then we hear somebody say, like, oh, well, you got to do this. And then all of a sudden, you feel this pressure, like, oh, no, I'm not doing that do I need to change? No, the pressure is taken away, you get to personalize according to what sounds fun and what sounds good to you. But there's no pressure. And so in this way, it's flowy. It just weight loss can flow according to you know who you are, what you like, and how your lifestyle already is. Number two, you need to learn to observe life before you try to change it. Like I said, it does no good to try and fix a car's engine, if you're too afraid to pop the hood or the bonnet, if you will, if you're in a non American country, you have to be willing to look at the issue before you change it. And almost nobody begins a weight loss program with a sincere self inventory. Almost nobody even asked the question, Why am I overweight to begin with?

Unknown Speaker  26:39  
It's almost never happens. And let alone do people actually dive into that and say, Okay, I'm overweight, because I eat too much. And I don't move my body. Okay, why is that? Well, I've got that. Like, we just don't do that ever. And we just dive into, you know, okay, I'm going on a diet, I'm gonna try to lose weight, I'm gonna try to lose weight, I'm gonna try to lose weight. And we try to try and we never set ourselves up for success. If you're tired of failing with weight loss, understand that you've never done it in a way that was even close to set up for success. Number three, you need to deal with the shame blocking you from your inner world. A big reason why you don't pop the hood and investigate your engine, so to speak your heart or mind is that you're terrified of doing so in the past, every time you've done that shame has punished you for it. Shame is a complex emotion. But I've spent a lot of time trying to understand what it is and why it does. And I think I have a pretty clear idea at this point of how shame affects weight loss. And it's the takeaway is that it has a couple functions that seem unrelated. But if you you know, like, you can be on a walk and you know, that voice says, Well, five minutes isn't enough, you need to do 10 That can be the same shame. That's also telling you don't go for a walk. It's raining outside. So how can the same emotion be telling you not to walk and also be telling you to walk too much shame is very, very tricky. Shame, we don't understand it. The there's nobody really ever explained it to me, I just had to kind of figure it out for myself and really think about the evolutionary context in which this emotion formed, just like all our emotions, and what that might tell us about how it's affecting our ability to lose weight, how it's affecting our ability to do a self inventory. So shame is sort of like the bouncer at the door telling us we're not allowed to in our own club. And we're like, but I own the club. And the bouncer is like, Ah, no, it's you don't want to see this, this is terrible. You should be really ashamed of yourself, this is not good, go away. And you turn around and walk away and be like, Well, okay, that's how we relate to our inner world. And so many people never are able to make any sincere progress, progress with anything of substance in their life. Because of this, this alone. Shame is an M after but it's also once you understand what it is and what it's doing and why it is one of the easiest things to learn to cope with. Number four, you need to regain your innate motivation and energy looking for motivation. And energy is basically a waste of that energy, because you're not going to find it on the outside. It's just one of the many reasons you don't have it. Rather, your issue is that you don't have access to the motivation that's already inside of you. Human beings are motivated. Look at all the crazy stuff we do. We are motivated. Alright, she was not that we're not motivated. Our issue is that we we don't get to examine our motivations. And we don't get to align our actions with the motivations that are arising from our values versus the motivations that are arising from reactivity. So Cindy learned that most of our issues with motivation arose from inner rules, a network of shame and a fear and obligation that in effect, stomped out her her innate source of motivation. And once she learned what was happening and why she was able to start to notice her net motivation and respond to it, nurture it, and just like nurturing a little seedling, you know, in the beginning, you really got to protect it, you got to baby it a little bit, but then over time, that seedling becomes a full grown plant, and he's a little less nurturing and he's a little less baby and

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Then eventually, you know, a sapling becomes a tree. And at that point that suckers kind of growing on its own, and you can kind of leave it alone and just trust that it's going to take off. And that's how our motivation is, you know, we baby at the beginning like an incubator to get it, you know, through that, that chute that germination, sapling stage. And if we do that, and we protect it, nurture it long enough, it will grow to be a formidable force that we can rely on to keep us moving in ways that are good for us ways that cause us to win and have the things we want. Because motivation is tied to desire. So we can't have desire without motivation. So imagine having a bunch of desires but not accessing the motivation to attain those desires. Doesn't that sound like a form of torture? It is it is, it really sucks, and you deserve to get free from it. Number five, dismantle emotional eating, just like motivation was suppressed by these networks of rules shame, the obligation, Sydney's emotional eating was compelled by many of these seems same structures, or ones working in similar fashion as are yours. So attending to one of these things like if you tend to emotional eating, it's going to help you find freedom with motivation, and vice versa. Did I say that? Right? If you attend to motivation and energy, it's going to help you dismantle emotional eating. And if you work on emotional eating, it's going to help you nurture that motivation and you know, cultivate more energy. So these steps were exactly what Cindy learned about these are the this is the process she went through before she ever started losing weight in September, there is no way around the steps. This is what you need to do. If you want to lose the weight for good. There is no other path. This is it. If there was a sneakier, slicker, faster way, then that's what I'd be telling you about. You have to stop trying to take shortcuts around the inner work because all you're doing is trying to hike up bullshit mountain. And I'm saying let's take the let's take the easy way this this is hard, right? It's hard to take any journey, right there's going to be some effort in it, there's going to be we're going to trip sometimes we're going to have to deal with obstacles. But this journey no matter how scared we are of it is so much easier than the constant Sisyphean path of failure and self hatred. This is a path of healing. This is a path where every step along the way, your difficulty rewards you with feeling lighter and freer and more confident. Whereas in the old way, you're just going to push that same rock up the same hill, and you're never going to feel better about yourself. Everything's just going to slowly get worse and worse and worse this way has its difficulties. In some ways. It's the hardest thing you'll do because it takes bravery to look inward because of how much shame has punished you in the past for doing so. But if you can recruit a little bit of willingness you can you can do this. And from where you're sitting right now, it may look like an ocean to cross right and you have a leaky canoe.

Unknown Speaker  32:46  
And I That's how I felt when I was 423 pounds and desperate and bedridden in the worst throes of PTSD. Imagine that you didn't have a leaky, can you imagine somebody pulled up with like a nice sailboat and was like, Hey, do you want to ride? You'd be like, yeah, because that sounds pretty good. See where the vessel that can make the journey and someone who knows the way right? This is why I do what I do. There's no other reason. Like there's other stuff I could be doing, I made the crossing. And I thought really long and hard about how I could do it better what personally, you know how I could grow more and could have made it easier on myself could have done it, you know, more fully in a sense of on the inner work side of things than not just on the getting the weight off, you know, and over the past few years, I've been trying to teach people how to take the easiest path across this, this gap, right how to how to sail across the ocean in the fastest way possible how to how to make it around the mountain. And, and this constant war that we have this constant just cycle of failure and shame and self hatred. That's why I do this. This is I didn't grow up wanting to be an emotional eating coach, a weight loss coach. In fact, I remember when I first was realizing I needed to do this, I didn't want to I was like I don't want to be a weight loss coach, I don't want my life to be about weight loss. I'm tired of weight loss, like I want to just move on, I really was resistant to it. I didn't want my life. There were other things I wanted to do other careers that I thought sounded more adventurous or cool. But at the end of the day, I was like I made it across and almost nobody does. And I have an ability to map out what happened to think about it in an abstract fashion that helps me you know, plan routes that are faster and more efficient. And I have an ability to help ferry people across. I just couldn't I couldn't not do it. You know, so this is this is partially I know this post is a lot of things. It's there to inspire you to show you what's possible. It's there to challenge you to finally do the inner work and stop taking shortcuts. And that's not like some tough talk or you know, it's just like please, please do this. I know it's scary. I know it's hard, but you know, you can actually enjoy the crossing and the hard moments. You can go through them with people who care you know, me and other people

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
In my programs, you can enjoy the journey of blossoming and growing and embracing your authentic self. It doesn't have to be a dark night of the soul. This is a journey ultimately toward ease and peace and hope. And this is not a journey that we take with pressure, shame and failure. This is a journey that we take through willingness and compassion and care. This is not a journey where you're going to be made to feel worse about yourself or feel more pressure, this is the opposite of that. And if you'd have no context for what a weight loss journey could look like,

Unknown Speaker  35:30  
in that fashion, of course you don't, because you've never even ever seen it, you have to see it. To understand it, you have to experience my coaching program to believe what's possible, and quite frankly, former clients hands up at some point, did you realize that what was offered in coaching was too good to be true. I tell this joke with my clients all the time, they get to the point where they're like, oh my gosh, they realize how deep what we're doing is that it's ultimately about way more than just weight loss. And, and I laugh and I'm like, I know, if I told people what, what we really did in coaching, they wouldn't believe me. So I can't tell people what we do. Because I would just sound like some internet huckster making outlandish promises. And you know, you can't promise anything, because this journey really depends on the people who take it, it's it really depends on their willingness, I can only do so much. You know, I wish I could drag people across the gap and, you know, force them to be better, but I can't, I can't, it takes willingness. So it's a it's a team effort, for sure. But what's possible here is sort of miraculous, and it takes it's taken me a lot of like, that's me being vulnerable, quite frankly, because I realized that in this space, there's the people who talk in that way and make those kinds of lofty promises usually aren't doing so in good faith and I'm trying to express to you how much better life can be I'm not trying to over egg the pudding. I'm not trying to make promises that that you know that you're definitely going to experience X y&z Who knows, man, I don't know. But this is this is a path toward hope. And if you want to try, like please do if you're feeling lost and scared and intimidated and terrified of failing again, like of course you are, why would you feel any other way after all you've been through, but you're not going to find a way around this process, you can find a different coach, you can find a different program a different, you know, a different sort of assistance across the gap. But you've got across the gap, there's no other way. So my invitation to you is to just come and dip a pinky toe in the waters, right, notice that nothing bad happened, your pinky toe didn't get immediately chopped off or boiled and acid, it's fine. And you just baby step a little further. And we've all you know, gotten into a cold lake or something, and you got to just baby step your way in. But once you do, you acclimatized, and then you feel good, and you actually feel better in the water than you did outside of it. And that's what this process can be like uncomfortable at first. But things can change really quickly. And in the coming days, I plan to make more posts, I plan to talk about each of these five steps in a little bit more detail, so you can watch out for those. But if you'd like to hit fast forward on the process of learning about these things, you can email me John at Oaks weight loss.com OA que es weight loss.com. Let me know that you're interested in learning about coaching programs or learning about this process, I would love to have a chat with you get to know you help you take your first steps. Listen, I'm not a pressure guy. I don't even consider myself a salesman. Technically, I am selling services, but I don't I hate sales. I know you do, too. All I'm going to do is try to figure out if you're a right fit for my programs, tell you about them and let you figure it out from there. Okay, again, nothing in this process is pressuring you, I don't like that. And I know that people ultimately have to want it. And if you don't want to be in my programs, you know, quite frankly, I don't want you they're not not not trying to talk like some, you know, like, Hey, get out of here. You don't want it get out it. Like it's just like, you know, coaching is hard enough. I don't I can't drag people, you know, if they don't want to be there, it just doesn't work. So yeah, there's absolutely no pressure. If it's a fit, it's a fit. So that's all for now, I hope that this was inspiring. I hope that this was informative. I hope that this gives you a lot to think about because we talked about a lot of different stuff from a lot of different angles. But this is a this is something that I think really needs to be talked about and thought about more. I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, I would love to hear from you. If you've been listening to my stuff, and we've never had a conversation, just email me and say hi, like, I would love to get to know you. Like, there's not a ton of people who listen to this podcast at this point. It's not like I'm going to be getting 1000s of emails, like we're a community and I would really like to know who you are and what you struggle with. At the very least I get to put a name to a face or face to a name and I get to quiz you about like what are your struggles? What topics would you like me to talk about and like worst case scenario, we get to say hey, what's up and you get to kind of help me craft content that's gonna meet you where you are. So again, total win win and you can contact me just to chat. So thank you for listening. I'd love it if you left me a review five stars kind words, John is the wind beneath my wings, etc, etc. Share this with a friend. Share this with an enemy. I don't care. I'll share it and thanks for listening and I'll talk to you again soon.

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