Episode 312: How You Can Lose Weight in April

Hello everybody. Welcome back. So today, I want to do a little podcast on urges and the future you, and just reveal to y’all some exciting things that are coming up in the No BS Weight Loss Program starting in April. So if you don’t know already, I have an entire membership. If you’re listening to this podcast, you know that I have a membership, so that if you want to take the learning deeper, if you want to get support, if you want a community, if you want to be able to ask questions, if you want to be able to remove obstacles that are in the way that listening to the podcast doesn’t do for you, you can always join us. So all you have to do is go to joinnobs.com, and you can get started.

So what I want to talk about today though is, I want to really do a deep dive into urges, and why learning about your urges to eat is so important to your weight loss journey. So when you want to eat, when you want to overeat, it always starts with some kind of little whisper or even a loud shrill. Some of us just have this maniac shrill that goes off in our voice and she’s like, “Oh my God. You’ve had a terrible day. You might as well eat. You’re never going to lose weight.” And then, some of us have this very white voice, which is more like, “Hey girl. You’ve had a tough day. You know what you deserve? A treat for all that hard work.”

Every single time you want to overeat, it’s always going to start with some kind of thought. And what most of us do, is we don’t know how to pay attention to it. We don’t know how to listen for it. And then, the other problem that we have, is that when we do have urges, we have this idea that they have to go away in order for us to be able to lose weight. And one of the things that I’m going to be teaching next month is, that is not true. You do not need your sexy voice, your shrill, or your urges, to go away in order for you to lose weight. What you do need is you have to learn about why you have them and what to do when they start, what to do if you find yourself in the middle of them, and what to do if you do overeat. So I want to just talk a little bit about urges, because I think it’s important for all of us.

One of the things that is a huge misconception about urges is that, what I was talking about earlier, they have to go away in order for you to lose weight. Because most of us have this idea that, “Well, if I just want to eat, if my brain is asking me to go to the pantry and be a trash panda and clean out the Oreos, there’s no way I could ever lose weight.” And it’s really not true. Every single person that I know, including myself, that’s lost weight, has urges all the time. We just have a very different relationship with them. Very often, I want to eat shit too. I’m not joking. There is rarely a day in my life where I don’t think, “Man, tonight would be a good night to get down on some ice cream. Tonight would be a good night to have something sweet.” And nighttime is a big one for me. I also have a lot of urges to drink wine.

When I’ve had a long day, just like today, I got up this morning at 5:00 AM, I had work to do before work started. Then I went and worked out, and then I did five podcast interviews, plus a meeting, and now I’m having to rerecord this podcast because, bitches, I done recorded this one. My damn do-hickey didn’t work. And guess what? Now I got a tight deadline and I got to do one more recording. Do not sit there for a moment and think that I do not want to go to a bar tonight and have a couple of glasses of wine. If anybody deserves it, it’s me. That is what my brain is saying. It’s like, “Girl, you have worked so hard. You are even showing up for a podcast at 4:12. You normally are done with the day at this time, you should have wine.” It happens all the time.

The difference between someone who loses weight, or keeps it off, and the person who doesn’t is, when urges come up, they don’t make a big deal out of them. And I think that’s the most important thing that we can learn when it comes to our desire to want to overeat, your desire to eat junk, your desire to eat off your plan, whatever it is, it is redefining that relationship. And that fundamental relationship has to be, I am going to have urges. Now what? If you are going to have urges and your story is, “And that makes it harder for me to lose weight.” Guess what? Every single time you’re around your favorite food, every time you get stressed, anything that causes you to trigger into wanting to overeat, you are now living in low level anxiety. You are always on your guard. You’re watching for the big urge Bigfoot to come out of nowhere and be like, “Grr,” and get you and want you to eat.

The difference is, like for me, my and is, “I’m always going to have urges, and I’m always going to ask myself, “What do I want to do in this moment?” I’m always going to have urges, and that doesn’t mean I can’t say no. I’m always going to have urges, and that means sometimes I might even respond to them. Sometimes I might even eat over them, but I’ll never beat myself up.” There are so many different ways to have a relationship with your urges, but most of us that get stuck in yo-yo dieting, overeating all the time, and doing all the things, our relationship with urges is based on anxiety and fear, and then we wonder why we’re so on edge every single time we’re trying to lose weight.

It is important for you that, if you are going to lose weight, that you normalize all the things that happen around food. To lose weight, you don’t need a perfect relationship with food. To lose weight, you don’t need to eat perfectly. This is why, inside my program, I have come up with a lot of different lessons to tackle urges. So I’m literally going to read them all for you, so that you can know when you join No BS, we are getting to the root cause of all of your weight issues. When we talk about losing weight, we’re not just saying, “Here’s what you should eat. Here’s how many calories you should have.” We’re actually getting to the root cause.

For some people, the biggest reason why they overeat, the biggest reason why they can’t say no to their favorite foods, is because they have such a shitty story about them. They sit there and think, “These foods control me.” For example, if you think Oreos control you, guess what happens? If you go to the grocery store and you walk by the Oreos, your brain lights up with like, “Oh my God, danger food, danger food. You need to watch out. Whatever you do, don’t put those in the cart.” Then your sexy voice comes in, it’s like, “Yeah, but maybe this time will be different. Maybe this time will be this.” And you’re swirling. And when we are swirling and we have all of this going on, because we think we can’t control ourself with food, guess what we end up doing? We throw the Oreos in there, we go home, we eat a couple with that anxiety of, “Well, I’m just going to eat too,” while on the inside, there’s a small voice going, “Yeah, but you really can’t stop. You know those Oreos control you.”

We have to unlearn all that stuff. You can’t just believe everything your brain thinks about food. So in the new module about urges, the very first thing I’m going to do is teach you Urges 101. Why do we have them? Why are they normal? What causes us to have urges? I think it’s so important for everyone to really always understand why, because specifically with urges to overeat, so many of you are having them because you’ve never been taught a different way to deal with stressful situations.

I know a lot of my clients, I just coached someone this weekend and she was said, “I need some help because I just feel so unworthy. Every day, I’m eating. My husband’s at work and I’m sitting at home and I can’t get my shit together.” And she said, “I know what’s going to happen when you’re done coaching me. My husband’s having to watch my little girls right now, and I’m going to feel guilty that he had to watch the girls while I’m getting help on something I shouldn’t be doing to begin with.” That is such a terrible way to think about things. And no, I didn’t coach her on, “Well, they’re his kids too,” and stuff like that. That would be the easy thing for anybody to do.

So if you’re sitting there listening to me right now, and your first thought would be like, “Well, we just need to tell her that it’s okay. That’s his kids too.” That’s never going to work for someone like that. When someone’s carrying around mom guilt, we have to understand why do you have so much guilt to begin with? Why would you ever think working on yourself doesn’t have benefits for your children? Why would you ever think working on you doesn’t add to your relationship with your husband? We have to investigate all of it.

So in Urges 101, one of the things that I talk about in there is, we have to understand why do we want to eat food to solve problems that food was never intended to solve? And it’s such an amazing question, and I want you to think about this as a listener. Why? Where did it start for you? What happened in your life where, when you’re tired, when you’re stressed or you feel guilty, that you think, “I should just eat right now,” instead of questioning what I’m thinking. Understanding, what are the thoughts that would create these emotions? If nothing else, even if you can’t unwind all of the thinking so that you don’t have to feel so stressed all the time and you don’t have to feel overwhelmed and anxious and guilty, at the very least, have someone guide you through in those moments when that happens. If food isn’t the answer, what is it going to be for me now? And I think this is such an important conversation, and it’s a conversation that’s not being had enough in the diet industry.

The next lesson is what’s hard about urges, and I kind of already alluded to that. This whole lesson is going to be talking about all of those thoughts that we pile on top of urges, like they’re too intense, they never end, I can’t say no to them, they shouldn’t be happening, there’s something wrong with me if I want to eat in response to my emotions. That’s what makes urges so hard. An urge to overeat, and I teach you this in the lesson, is a physical experience. Your body has a physical expression of wanting to eat. What makes it really hard is the extra anxiety and the shame that we pour on top of just a normal desire to want to end the day with ice cream. I’m going to tell all of you, there’s nothing fucking wrong with anybody who wants to overeat ice cream or cookies and stuff. Bitches, they were designed and engineered to be highly palatable and craved. Why would you ever think there’s something wrong with you, because you can’t say no to something that’s been engineered to be sexy as fuck?

And these are, again, the conversations that we have to have around these foods. The next thing is now we’re going to talk about breaking your habit eating. A lot of us, our urges aren’t that deep. Sometimes, we ain’t overeating because we had a bad day, sometimes we’re just very used to some bullshit grab ass and eating. This happened with me when I first started losing weight, and I talk about this in the course, that I realized that I was having an urge to pop Chicken McNuggets in my mouth in the car riding around town with Logan. If he didn’t finish his meal, guess who was the human garbage disposal? Me. I was like a raccoon in the night, over there scurrying through his bag, eating up anything he didn’t eat. Because my baby, guess what he did? When he had enough, he stopped. He didn’t think he was wasting nuggets like I was. I’m like, “Ooh, I don’t want that to go to waste.” So I had just a habit of being the cleanup crew for all the food.

So sometimes, we just have to learn, “Oh, so how do you break habit eating?” I want to say this, because a lot of you, you shy away from joining my program thinking, “Oh, everything’s so deep. I’m going to have to bleach my soul. I’m going to lay it out on a hot rock and let it just get melted away.” No. Some stuff we go deep on, but some of you ain’t got crap that that’s deep. But you are missing the easy shit, listening to the podcast all the time, and not learning anything about the basic. So I tell people all the time in this module, we are going to get our easy wins. We are going to nail that low hanging fruit so that you can get the motivation and you can get the momentum to keep going.

And so, for a lot of us, we just need to learn how to get better at spotting our habit eating. And then, when we spot it, how do we set up the environmental cues to break it? And when we are in the middle of it, how do you stop one without fuck-it eating and feeling shame? And this is all a process that we have to learn. Then, we’re going to move into restriction versus deprivation. So one of the things that’s super important for people to learn about urges is that, when you are doing my No BS program, I don’t set you up to restrict and I do not set you up to deprive. We are going to think about food this way.

Food must meet three criteria to earn its VIP spot in the belly. Number one, it’s got to meet our emotional need. Number two, it’s also got to meet a physical need. And number three, it’s got to meet a mental need. Sometimes, we’re going to say no to something that we really want because maybe we’re stressed, but we also know that tomorrow we’re going to feel like the ass if we eat it.

Sometimes, we eat our mama’s cookies because they are freaking special and they are delicious and we don’t get them very often. And we’re like, “This is a moment that I am very willing to have a cookie and really enjoy it and make it special, and I refuse to have regrets and I refuse to second guess myself.” And the thing that I want all of you to hear, is that if you eat something intentionally and special, that is not a recipe for weight gain, even if it’s a cookie, a ding-dong or a Twinkie. The recipe for weight gain is unintentionally eating things. Saying, “Well, I’ll never get this cookie again, so I better eat four.” Instead of, “I’m so glad my mama is still making my favorite cookies. I’m going to have one and I’m going to be so grateful and thankful and I’m going to enjoy every bite and it’s going to be just enough.” It all is about our thinking.

And so, in this lesson, I want to teach you about restriction and deprivation because, I don’t teach that stuff, but our brains have trauma, a lot of diet trauma. Every time you’ve done a restrictive or depriving diet, your brain remembers. So even if you’re doing my shit, you may still have this sense of restriction, and this is how you’ll know. You know that you’re experiencing diet trauma when you say, “I shouldn’t feel bad about this. I know I’m not restricting, I know I’m not being deprived, but I still feel that way.” In this lesson, I’m going to teach you how to unwind that, because that is a very missing component that’s not being taught right now, and I think it’s important. And if you want to overcome urges to overeat, it is one of those things that we have to understand and we have to know how to unwind.

Then, we’re going to go into no more nighttime meltdowns. This lesson is gold. If you overeat at night, you’ll love it. I go through the six reasons that we tend to overeat at night, and what to do during the day to set ourselves up to not have to eat at night anymore. Then, I go into making urges easy. This is where we start really defining that relationship we want with them. How are we now going to think about them? How are we going to normalize them and make them a part of our life?

And then, the last thing that we do, is we’re going to go through two lessons. One is, I’m going to tell you what to do after an overeat. You have to know what to do after an overeat, and it cannot be beat yourself up and shame yourself. I truly believe this, every overeat is trying to teach us a lesson, is trying to tell us something that we need to solve in our life so that we can have a better relationship with ourselves, our goals, our emotions, and our body. I really believe that. I don’t think any overeat should be wasted. And if you learn how to read the tea leaves of an overeat, you just get better and better at losing weight.

And then, the last thing is, it’s called the, “How we change.” Urges don’t unwind overnight. There is a very distinct pattern. And then, when you know the pattern of, “Oh, I’m supposed to be overeating this much right now. Oh, I’m supposed to still be experiencing urges this much now.” When you see the pattern, it’s so much easier for you to cut yourself some slack and to have some compassion, and also to have the commitment and willingness to keep going, even when you’re still overeating.

And then, the other thing that I’m doing in No BS in April is also rolling out the next module, which is the future self. Just learning how to be a new version of you starting today. How do you start identifying, when are you talking to yourself like old you, versus how are you going to talk to yourself like new you? We start talking about when do you start actually making tweaks and leveling up some of your decisions that you learn in the podcast? We talk about future you and self-care. How do you start putting in self-care right now when you feel guilty as shit for doing it, you don’t think you have time for it? If you think future you is caring for yourself, it means you today has to get started on doing some shit. And so, in this group of lessons, I really walk you through, how do you become that future version of you? How do you let go of your dieting past, so you’re not all the time thinking, “I’ve never been able to lose weight, I’ll never be able to do it.” We go through all of those lessons.

So the exciting part is, in April, if you join No BS in March, is we’re doing something we’ve never done before. Not only am I releasing brand new content, but I’m going to be taking the members through a live experience all month long. I will be watching the videos with them, then I will be helping people with worksheets, and our coaches will be having worksheet classes. We will be having special calls, you can ask all the questions that you have. All of our coaching will be around urges in the month of April. And then, we are going to have this really intimate experience with the entire membership. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever done in the past.

And if you can’t attend the live trainings, we are going to make sure that every one of the videos, not only do you have it in your membership portal, but that every time we do live walkthroughs with the worksheets and every time we do Q&As, that you get access to it so that you can watch it on your own time, so you can make all of this fit in your own life. So if you want to have the ultimate rewrite of your urges, if you want to end April then like, “Man, it is so much easier to stay on plan. It is so much easier to not overeat.” This is the month to get in.

So you can go to joinnobs.com. We would love to have you, you can check out everything that we offer, and now is the time. Do not keep sitting around thinking, “I should do this on my own. The podcast has all the information.” The podcast does not have all the information. I do not put everything in the podcast. Why? Because inside the membership, we need to be talking about this stuff. It’s one thing to hear it, it’s another thing to experience it. It’s another thing to get expert help, it’s another thing to be able to raise your hand and ask questions. It’s another thing to be able to type in and say, “I’m struggling with this. Who else has and what did you do?” You need a collective experience. So join now, no more waiting. Talk to you soon.