369-Weight Gain: Experiencing, Processing and Accepting a New Body Weight

GBTF369-Weight Gain: Experiencing, Processing and Accepting a New Body Weight

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This is episode 369 of the Going to Beyond the Food Podcast, and today it's gonna be all about weight gain, how to experience it, process it. Accept your new body weight. Ready? Let's do this.

Welcome back my dear listener of the going to be on the food show. I missed you. We took a six week break for the summer and now we're back. We're back probably right through to the end of the year with brand new episode. A lot of new things coming up on the podcast. I've met the most incredible people over the last six weeks that I'm excited to bring to you on the podcast. So you're gonna hear a lot more interviews, a lot more of my people coming live for you on the podcast and topics we have never discussed in and almost seven years of podcasting. We're gonna celebrate our seventh year in November of 2023. Just blows my mind to think about that.

So a lot of new things coming up, had a great break. over the summer. I, I don't have the typical relationship, to be quite honest with you, to vacation that I used to have when I was working for someone else, when I was in the corporate world. Today I have been running my business for almost seven years. I make my own schedule. I create what I want, I work on what I want, so, I don't think of vacation in the same way that I used to. So it's very interesting when comes summer, people are like, oh, when are you taking vacation? Where are you going on vacation? I don't go to vacation in the same way that most people do and typically, summertime for me is not vacation time, and I'm using air quotes here. Because I'm a digital nomad, 50% of my time is spent traveling in different places around the world, and I decide to stay home in North America in Canada during the summer, and I reserve time off my schedule when I'm in a new country to discover the culture, the museum hang around people from that country.

So for me, that's when my quote unquote traditional vacation are used and they're not using block of like two weeks in a week. They're like two to three days here, a long weekend over here. When I'm in different countries, So if you ask me what I did this summer, I worked on the business. I worked on going beyond the food.

I worked on the non diet coaching certification, looking a lot internally at our processes and what we're gonna launch for program. We did a massive survey of you guys, the listener of the podcast, people who follow me on social media, and we got a ton of feedback back on what kind of help you need and how you wanna receive that help.

So I spent a lot of time in the month of July reading your feedback and asking myself, how can I serve you based on. What you're telling me you need. So you're gonna see a ton of new stuff coming out, in the next few months. And some of you perhaps already started to experience this new going beyond the food. We launch a, workshop, which we hadn't done in a few years, like. Paid workshop with me in the month of July. It was a tremendous success. We're repeating it again in the month of August. We're gonna have a workshop and I'm gonna talk to you about this. So if you're listening to this live, we are in August of 2023. We are now launching our second, workshop called Women Beyond the Scale. This is gonna blow your mind. I am going to talk about what we're gonna talk about today, which is weight gain, but we're gonna deep dive into how our bodies, our human bodies manage weight and all the lies we've been told and all the actual truth.

That we've not been told about how our body handles weight. So we're gonna talk about set points. We're gonna talk about natural weight range. We're gonna talk about weight neutral health, because typically, again, on your feedback, you've given us the number one concern you have about gaining weight. Is what it's going to do to your health, right?

So we're gonna dive into what does actually wait impacts on our health and what does science tell us? and how can we approach health without being focused on weight? So we're gonna talk about that and we're gonna talk about self-acceptance. We're gonna talk about it a little bit today, but I'm gonna dive into the workshop a lot more on self-acceptance and how you can bring that.

Into your life and specifically around your weight, what can that look like for you? So that workshop is gonna happen on August the 20th, on Sunday, August the 20th, and it's our second paid workshop and we're gonna have more. one of thing you clearly told us is more Accessibility to our coaching, to our education at a more accessible price point. So that's why I started to launch those paid workshop at a smaller price point. So the workshop on, women beyond the scale is gonna be $37, and we're gonna continue to offer more of that for the rest of the year.

So that's what I've been doing this summer. Really busy in the business and servicing you better as things change and evolve. What do you want and how you want it. That's really what has been my focus this summer, which is why we're gonna talk about weight gain today

because. The number one point of struggle you told us you had was your weight. So today I want to talk about five fruits about weight gain. A mini lesson on experiencing weight gain, how to process it, and how to accept it. Now, if you're listening to this podcast for the first time and you have no idea about me and going beyond the food, if you're. Thinking that this podcast is gonna tell you how to lose the weight, this is not what it's gonna do. So we can end the listening of the podcast right now, and there is. Millions of resources for you out into the internet, even in the podcast world, that will service you with your desire to intentionally lose weight.

That is not what I do. So we're gonna talk about weight gain, but not with the eyes of, oh my God, I need to lose this weight. Instead, the lens I wanna take with you is, How can I experience weight gain, process it so that I can accept my weight and my body and myself so I can be living my best life? The number one thing I want to get us started on is a deep sense of knowing that nothing has gone wrong.

Is expected. It is normal that you gain weight after a period of intentional weight loss. That the weight loss is, when I talk about intentional weight loss is you taking action in order to lose weight. That's what we call intentional weight loss, not a weight loss that happens. While you just live your life and don't restrict, don't over exercise.

So I wanna be clear on that. If you've been to a period of intentional weight loss, like dedicated specific action dedicated to you losing weight, it is normal and expected that you gain weight after that period of intentional weight loss. Research is clear that the number one predictor of weight gain in human is having been in a period of intentional weight loss, typically called a diet or a restriction. Now wellness culture presents us with. Losing weight, quote unquote. Naturally, you should see me on the video. Right now I'm making all kinds of faces and using air quote, but wellness culture is trying to sell us that if we just eat perfectly and we eat clean, we're gonna release the natural way.

All of that is intentional weight loss. So if you've been through that period, it's. Normal. Your body did not wrong you. You didn't get lazy, so please stop the mental torture of something has gone wrong with you or your body. Nothing has gone wrong. It's expected. It's normal. I'm sorry to say that you didn't know that.

It's expected, so now you have two choices, A or B. If you want to lose the weight you gain, there's only but one solution. Go back on the diet, on the plan that made you lose the weight in the first place and commit to following that plan. For the rest of your life to the letter. Otherwise, you will again regain the weight again and again, and again and again.

Now, choice A, this choice, I cannot help you with that. It goes against my ethics, my values, but as I mentioned earlier, there is. Literally thousands of people, industry that will sell you a solution for that. I focus on choice B. Choice B is accepting that, controlling the amount of weight body has. It is not in your control, and I know you're frustrated with that because that's not what you were told.

That's not what you were educated to. I hear you, and I'm sorry that you were. Led to believe that you could control your body. But remember that there is multi-billion dollar industry standing behind this lie. That is that you can control your body and they have hundreds of product to sell you to support this ideology that you can control your body.

But yet here you are today. And it hasn't worked so. Step number one, accepting that the illusion that you being able to control your body is false, which is gonna move us into kind of step two of experiencing and processing and accepting weight gain, which is the understanding of acceptance, accepting your body weight.

It doesn't mean giving up. It doesn't mean of resigning. It doesn't mean suffering for the rest of your life. It simply mean that you are deciding to focus on what you can actually control. And accepting that there's things you cannot control, and focusing on what you can control, but you cannot control is actually what is causing suffering.

What's causing suffering, like emotional despair for you is not the actual molecule of fat on your belly. These molecule don't cause you suffering. What causes suffering is the thought that you should be able to control that molecule of fat on your belly. If you lose that and you accept you cannot control, then you can focus on everything else that you can control, like your mental health, your emotional health.

Working on health promoting behavior that have nothing to do with the weight on the scale. And let me just tell you this, there's hundreds of things you can do that have nothing to do with the weight. In the workshop we're gonna do on August the 20th, I'm gonna give you a list of a hundred different things you can do towards your health that have nothing to do with the scale.

So challenge me. There's a shit ton of stuff you can do. So acceptance means moving forward, reducing your suffering, working on yourself, but on the thing you can actually control, which leads me to point number three in processing and accepting weight gain, which is to change the focus. And I get it. It's hard because just like you, I was in there for 25 years. My entire focus was about the scale and the weight. So thinking that it doesn't have to be the entire focus of my life and my health and my attempt at getting a better life is. Weird, but I'm telling you that's part of the process of accepting weight gain is changing the focus, changing the focus from the weight on the scale to your mental health, to your emotional wellbeing, your spiritual wellbeing, to focusing on doing more of what makes you feel good in the moment. Right now, not we have been used to this concept of delaying. Feeling better until we achieve a number on the scale. The skill we need to develop is feeling better now, doing the things right now that brings you happiness, that brings you security, that brings you confidence. Right now, not when something else happened. And that's a skill in itself. And a lot of that has to do with, or it starts with what happens in your mind.

I talk a lot on this podcast about mindset, mindset, work, thought work. What does that mean? So when we change the focus on the weight on the scale, we bring the focus on all the craziness that happens in our mind, all the thoughts we think, all the self-critical thoughts we have about ourselves and the rest of the world, and the judgment and the never ending questioning of everything we do, and always trying to be better and do things better.

We look at all these thoughts and these demands that we have in ourselves, and we answer the question is this thought is this pattern of thinking helping me feel better right now? Or is it actually hindering me? And then we start quote unquote marrying our thoughts. Right. When a thoughts is not serving us anymore, when a belief is not serving us anymore, we change it.

We let it go and bring a new thought or new belief in. That's what I mean by changing the focus. So change the focus from the number on the scale L to the quality of your thinking, which leads me to number four, the number one place. We need to start, or at least I believe that as women who have been obsessed with shrinking our body, where I believe we get the biggest bang for our buck to change the way we think is with food.

Because food has been the, I'll call it that our food, our eating pattern have been our. Object of torture because that's what we believe would change the number on the scale. So we have all kinds of crazy ways of thinking about food that no longer serves us in the world where we want to accept our body weights.

So we need to think about food in a new way. We need to neutralize all food. We need to learn to think about food in a way that will not create obsession and will not create rebellious eating patterns so we can eat calmly, naturally, and peacefully. Like all the other people in our life who've never been on a restrictive plan, they just eat when they're hungry.

They stop when they're full. They eat what they like. In order for you to have these eating behavior of calm and peace and satisfaction, it's gonna be through the way you think about food. So the first kind of focus for mindset work, thought work, I suggested to be around food using by far my favorite process, which call is called Intuitive Eating.

It's a process created by, my teacher and mentor, Evelyn Tribole. Which takes us through a 10 step process to change our thoughts about food so we can change the way we feel and our behavior around food. And the fifth step to process, to experience, and to accept our new body weight is to become radical.

In choosing love over fear in every part of our life, literally in everything. There's a concept that we teach in all of my program, including on dietary life, which is self-compassion, and it's something that, that as former. ER of food, former people who believe they should be in a smaller body, we don't have a good grasp on because we cannot be compassionate with ourselves. While. Holding the belief that something is wrong with our body. Something is wrong with us for not being able to control our body. The two go against each other.

So when we let go of this ideology that we should be able to control our body, that we should be in a smaller body, and we want to accept what we need to learn. Self-compassion and the best way for me to simplify this process is being radical in choosing love over fear in every choice that you have in your life.

It's gonna be hard. Like I'm saying that and really exaggerating the work hard because it is hard for us to become, to learn, to become compassionate. But the cool thing is once you have learned and experienced the power of self-compassion, oh men, You never want to go back on being hard on yourself, judging yourself, criticizing yourself, thinking something is wrong with yourself, and harming yourself because you know how good your life can be and how great you can feel

when you show yourself self-compassion when you show yourself love-based choice. You can do hard things. You can learn this. You can embrace it. You can learn to practice it until it becomes second nature. I just want to end this podcast in saying this, my sisters, you and I have been doing hard things our whole life.

think about this. I. We've deprived ourselves. We have physically starved ourselves. We have been the most critical person on ourselves. We have thought thoughts about ourselves that we would never think about anything else like we have been. Hard on ourselves. We know how to do hard things. We can learn to experience, process, and accept weight gain.

We can do this, I believe in you. I've seen it done hundreds of times over and over again through the amazing. Women that have had the opportunity to coach over the last eight years, I believe in you. I know you have the capacity to do this work, and I will uphold this belief for you until you build the skill.

To believe in yourself in the same way that I believe in you. I trust that you can do this work. I trust that your body can manage its weight 100%. I trust that your mind. Can be compassionate with yourself, so let's do this hard thing that it is experiencing, processing, and accepting weight gain differently.

If I can be of support in this journey for you, come to the workshop on August the 20th. The link will be in the show note to our round this post somewhere, or join us inside of and diet your life and we will do this work together. I love you, my sister, and I'll see you on the next episode of the Going to Be on the Food Show.