“It’s not hard. Eat less and move more.” 

Have people in your life given you weightloss “advice” like this?

And did you think, “No shit, Sherlock! If it were that easy, I’d be at my goal weight.” 

Losing weight can be lonely. It was for me. Partners and friends who haven’t struggled with their weight just don’t get it.

Because food is much more than “fuel” or “calories” to you. It’s comfort. It’s a break in your long-ass day. Sometimes, it feels like the only joy in your life.

You might think, “If they would understand and support me, I could lose weight.”

Wrong.

Waiting on support from people who don’t get it will keep you stuck. I share why in today’s episode, Why Weightloss Isn’t Just Calories In and Calories Out. And, what to do instead for lasting weightloss.

Hello everyone. Welcome back. So I am doing a spontaneous podcast. I was recording podcasts this morning and taking a break, getting ready to go to the gym, and I stumbled across this Instagram meme that just stopped me in my tracks. And I thought, I really want to record a podcast on this because I think it’s so important. So let me read it to you and then we’re going to talk about it. It goes like this. I love people that just go and wait for no one. The solo travelers, the people that go to bars and the beach alone, life will pass you by waiting to always have someone to go places with you. And I was sitting there thinking about that, and I’m going to start with saying, I think in weight loss, it is such a lonely journey. One of the things that I hear a lot of people say is when I’m trying to lose weight, no one supports me.

No one gets me, no one understands. And I just think that’s true. I think for a lot of women, we are married to people or we have family members who didn’t struggle with their weight. We have friends that have never struggled with their weight, and it can be really hard. And so you will hear people all the time saying things like, just eat less. Just move more. They make it sound like it’s so fucking easy to lose weight. And I always want to say like, well, no shit, Sherlock. If it was easy for me to just eat less, don’t you think I’d be damn doing it? I mean, people say that to me all the time. I’m like, well, what a simplistic view. Now does it take eating less to lose weight? Yes, that is a step, but there are so many things we have to learn as women in order to be able to eat less.

A lot of my clients, one of the things we worked so hard on, we have lessons dedicated to it. We have all kinds of trainings dedicated to it, to nighttime eating. As women, we can do really good all day long because we’re used to being on the go. We’re not thinking about anything other than the people we’re pleasing, the people that we’re trying to help out. All the commitments that we have, we are going and going and going. And then at night when the dust settles for the day and we try to unwind, we don’t know how In our brain, it immediately starts thinking about other things we probably should do, the things we didn’t get done around the house, the stuff we’re going to have to do tomorrow. Like our brain just gets hyper-focused on the continual showing up and doing and doing and doing.

And so we end up eating to shut our brain down because for us, for a lot of women, the only way we know how to relax, how to settle down, how to come down after the day, how to give ourselves a break, how to have any me time, it always involves food. It’s like we have associated that if we’re eating, then we don’t have to feel bad. We’re taking a break. It’s a good distraction. And part of weight loss is going to be learning. How do you go to bed at night without feeling guilty or as if you did something wrong because you decided to skip dishes or reading stories tonight, whatever that is for you. So what ends up happening is you start living this life feeling like, oh my God, no one supports me, which can be very true. But then here’s the other problem that ends up happening.

We start thinking, if only someone would support me, if only someone could understand, then I could lose weight. Then it would be so much easier for me. And then that gets us in a stuck trap. We spend our entire life waiting for the rest of the world to understand our emotional problems around eating. When the entire diet industry and most men, they just think of losing weight is a matter of calories in, calories out, sugar free, not eating sugar, not having carbs, counting your calories, just dying in your macros, joining a gym. So I want to say this because you can’t wait for people to understand you. Most of you are probably walking through life right now feeling like no one really gets it. You may have one or two girlfriends that you bitch about weight loss with and y’all talk diets, but they’re always talking about we need to join a gym.

Or they’re always talking about We should do this diet, buy these shakes, do these things, and you’re sitting there and something’s missing. You’re like, but you don’t really get it. When I am at home and by myself, I’m eating in secret. These are the kinds of conversations a lot of women aren’t having together, even if you have ride or dies, who bitch about their weight? How many of you are sitting around talking about how many times you’ve ate half a sheet cake because you felt so bad about yourself that you can’t lose weight or that you’re mad at your mother or your partner wasn’t asked to you? These are these kinds of conversations that I don’t think or had that often. Now, the reason why I’m bringing all this up is because you can’t sit around and think anymore that I have to wait until I find people to support me.

Number one, you have to support you first. Even if you did get a gang of people in your real life who talk to you about this stuff, if you don’t support you, it will fall flat. And here’s how I know how many times. If you have low self-esteem or you don’t think you’re good enough or whatever your story is, how many times said you did such a good job and you said, oh, it was nothing. How many times have has someone said, oh my gosh, you look so pretty today. Well, I would look better if I would drop these last 20 pounds. I want you to think about how often sometimes we actually have fucking support in our life, and yet we don’t even know how to take it. This is why I want to say the first thing we have to do is you need a program that is going to teach you how to support you.

We have to change our internal dialogue, otherwise it won’t matter if you’ve got a thousand cheerleaders around you. If you don’t think you’re good enough or whatever, it will always fall flat. It will be a temporary blip, and then you’ll go right back to feeling gross about yourself. But the second part is if you don’t have anyone in your life that you can have real honest conversations about why you’re eating what you think about your body, the problems in your life, you’ve got to go find these people. We can’t wait anymore for the world to get right, to get in place to support us. In order for us to lose weight, we have to figure out how to support ourselves. And part of that is finding a community of people that actually get it. And that is inside my No BS weight loss program. Those women are talking about real shit all day, every day, helping each other.

But most importantly, it’s not even just about helping each other with I tried this or I do this, or this is how I like to think about it. The real support is in going in there and breathing a sigh of relief. I am not the only one. We have thousands and thousands of members, and the vast majority of them never post, but they read and they follow, and they get in, they get this, I am part of something bigger feeling I for the first time feel understood. Maybe I’m not as broken as I think. And they get that every day just by looking at the level of conversations that we’re having. And I know it because every day we have someone who writes into us personally because they don’t want to talk out loud in our group and they tell us, please, please keep the community as great as it is because it is my lifeline.

Whenever I think something’s wrong with me, whenever I think no one gets it, I go to our group and I read the stories and I watch women helping each other and telling each other things that they’re doing and trying and telling people that it’s okay and I get what I need just from that. So I wanted to talk about that today because I do think it’s important that you’ve got to quit waiting for people and you have to go at it. That might be joining my membership. It could be finding your people in your circle around you, whatever it is. But I want you to challenge yourself to give yourself what you really need. Give yourself every advantage to losing weight. And I want to end with this. My son, who most of you know is on the autism spectrum. And for years we just didn’t know what was going to happen.

He’s 21 now going on 22 in October, and he recently just started driving on his own. And not just for a while, he was just driving in our neighborhood. Logan is so smart about he knows what he wants and he does not care how long it takes. He is all about starting and trying and taking small steps until he gets what he wants. And one of the things he fiercely wants in this world more than anything, is friends and connection. It is not easy for my baby, and he wants it so bad, and instead of sitting back and whining about it or thinking he can’t have it, or focusing on how hard it is for him, he has taught himself how to drive to restaurants. He goes out to eat by himself, he goes to all kinds of, he’ll go to the mall by himself. He’s putting himself in situations to meet people, to strike up conversations. And he’s doing it all solo because he told me, well, how else would I meet people?

They’re not going to come to my house. And I was like, you are right. And he has been so bold. We have house cleaners that come to our house every week, and he ended up talking to one of the ladies and asked her to lunch. And one day I was just saying, where are you going today, son? He’s like, oh, I’m going to pick up Anna. I was like, well, who’s Anna? The only Anna I know is my mother. I was like, ma lives in Florida? And he’s like, she cleans her house on Monday. And I was like, oh yeah, Anna. It didn’t even dawn on me who he was talking about. And I said, y’all are going to lunch. He said, yeah, we always end up chatting when she’s here. And I asked her if she’d would want to go to lunch. And she said, yeah, so we’re going.

And he went and he picked her up. They’ve gone to lunch a couple of times and he amazes me. It would be so easy for him to sit back and let life pass him by. It would be so easy for him to wait for people, wait for his parents to take him places. All of that would be so easy. And he has chosen to just be brave and courageous and to try things. And that’s what I want for you. I don’t want you waiting for people to finally get on board and understand why it’s so hard for you and for them to change. One of the funniest things I heard was the other day was it was another Instagram meme where someone said, all y’all wanting people to support, you are asking people who can barely support themselves to do the job for you. And I was like, isn’t that the truth?

I mean, I love my father, but I waited my whole life for him to just love me and show up and tell me how great I am and how proud he is of me. And I was like, I’m not even telling myself on a daily basis that I’m proud of me. I’m not even showing up on a daily basis supporting me. There’s too many days I’m doubting myself, holding myself back. And I think that’s important for all of us to recognize. So here’s what I want for all of you. I want you to question, what are you waiting for? Who are these people you are waiting to support you, to cheerlead you, to understand you? You may not have them in your life, and that’s okay. So many of us just don’t naturally have that in our life, and that doesn’t mean that we’re surrounded by assholes sometimes. It just means it’s people who don’t understand what we uniquely go through when it comes to weight loss. And if that’s you, I want you to consider no bs. I’m going to tell you we fucking get it. I only hire coaches who have been members of my membership site, who understand, who have already shown up, who’ve done the they know, and we want to help you. So if you’re interested, you know where to find us. Otherwise, I hope you have a great week and I’ll talk to you soon.

Oh yeah.