Have you ever daydreamed about the future version of you?

You’re at goal weight. You’re wearing clothes you’ve always wanted to wear. Maybe you’ve become a walker or a runner. Your life is perfect.

But then you wake up. You feel so far away from “future you” that you feel unmotivated. Like you’ll never get there.

That’s because you think losing weight will magically make everything right in your life. But here’s the truth: losing weight is great, but it doesn’t change many of the things you’re struggling with today.

Listen to this episode — Why Weightloss Isn’t a Fix All — for why setting a goal weight isn’t enough. You need to think about your goal LIFE.

And today, I’ll share how. You’ll learn:

• Why weightloss alone won’t solve all your problems
• Simple, actionable ways you can think about your future self
• How to set a goal life that excites you (even if your goal weight feels far off)
• Real-life strategies for handling the ups and downs of life without relying on food

If you’re trying to lose weight and every day feels hard, this episode is for you. I’ll teach you how to lose weight the way you want to live your life.

Because you deserve more than a goal weight. You deserve a goal life.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. Today I want to talk about a Facebook post that was going on inside my private membership the other day where I was working with one of my members through Future Self. She made a comment that when she tries to think about her future self, that her version is too fantastical, life’s perfect, she’s eating perfectly. When she envisions her, she’s like, I just don’t think that that’s really possible. Her life looks too perfect to me. And then she says, so when I think that, then I can’t think I can get there at all. So all I can imagine is I’m just going to be here for the rest of my life. So I want you to think about how perfectionistic this sounds. My friend Carl Ental, she has a great podcast. I think it’s in the nineties, but it’s about perfectionistic fantasies.

So if you want to listen to her podcast on that, I would highly recommend it if you tend to be a perfectionist. But let me give you my little spin. And when it pertains to this little area, a lot of times when we’re thinking about losing weight, we do create this perfectionistic ideal of what life’s going to be like. It’s almost like we think if I lose weight, all things will be right in the world. And the problem with that is that when you’ve lost weight in the past, probably the reason why you regained weight was because all things weren’t right in the world. That is not how our life is even set up. So when we are going to be losing weight, it’s really important that we do a few things, and I think one of the first ones is we do have to set a goal in weight loss.

Otherwise, it’s really hard. If you don’t set any kind of goals in weight loss, it’s really hard to go after things you won’t know when you’re on or off track. You have no guardrails, you have nothing to tether you to a destination and know if you’re working towards it or if you’re going sideways or going backwards. So we do need goals, but what most of us don’t do is we don’t set a goal life that we want for ourselves. We set what we call goal weight, and we’re very trained in the diet industry to come up with a goal weight. One of the things that I teach my members and that we do wholeheartedly is I want you coming up with the goal life. And that is where we start looking at what does life look like when I lose weight? How do I eat? How do I handle stressful situations? How do I do all those things? Most of us have never been taught to do that. So when my client was doing this, I said, I think the problem is that you think that when you lose your weight that now all of a sudden lots of bad things in life are not happening anymore.

And I said, the thin version of you has the exact same life you do now except she’s smaller. She can buy clothes where she wants, probably looks in the mirror and is proud of herself, likes the number on the scale. So she has these blips of moments that her weight loss is important, and then she has a whole life around her that was never about how much she weighed. A lot of us make this mistake when we are overweight, we think all kinds of things are happening because we’re overweight. Then when we lose our weight and all the shit is still happening, we’re like, oh my God, I still worry. I still catastrophize. I still fear what everyone thinks. I still cave to people. I still people please. Oh my gosh, weight loss didn’t fix all that. I’m just thinner. I just like what I weigh.

And then what happens is if your whole time your dream was fantastical, that life was perfect at your goal and you don’t have the diet to busy you because now you’re at goal, guess what you do? You eat your brain’s like, well, in order to feel better, it’s like if goal weight didn’t make us feel better, if being thinner didn’t make us feel as good as we thought all the time, we should go back to that eating thing. We can do that anytime, and that’s when we start sliding things back in. So I really think this is a key part of the ability to be able to keep your weight off, is to start the process with knowing more about your future life, your future self, and your future goal life that you want. So this is kind of a simple process and I want to walk y’all through it, but this is what I would suggest people do.

I want you to think about when, let’s say when I was at two 50, now I’m going to be really honest. When I weighed two 50, I never thought that I could weigh what I do today. I didn’t think one 50 was in the cards at all. I mean at all. So I did not do that, but I did do this, which I think is critically important for all of you that have a lot of weight to lose. Or if thinking about your goal life freaks you out. What I did was I thought about what I wanted my life to look like and I started making changes around that free of how much I was going to weigh. I set a goal life without a goal weight because it was too triggering for me. If I thought about losing a hundred pounds, I immediately would quit.

It just freaked out my nervous system too much. I’d had too many pass fail diets, and I didn’t have any of the training that I give y’all in the podcast. I didn’t have anything that I teach inside my no BS membership. So if that’s you, I just want you to think, you do not have to think about all the weight that you have to lose, but you can start thinking about what is this goal life that I want? And I’m going to give you some questions in just a moment, but for the rest of you who don’t mind thinking about bigger goals and thinking about the end picture and it kind of excites you, I just want you to do it in a better way. So we’re going to think about our goal life, and if you include weight in that, that’s great. If you include clothing sizes, that’s great, but I want you to be thinking about if I was two 50 and I was thinking about it, I’d be like, all right, one 50, here’s what I will be doing.

For me, thinking about my goal life back then is I really wanted to be an exerciser. I had watched my brother play sports his entire life. My friends played sports. I could never play sports. I was the girl that got benched in PE because I remember a teacher one time telling me, none of the kids are going to want you on the team. They’re not going to want to pick you, so I’m just going to set you out. You just watch, you’re too big. I just had time after time like that. And when I was growing up, I always wanted, wanted to be in sports, but I was just too fat and no one would give me a chance. And so when I got into my twenties, one of my dearest, bestest friends throughout my twenties, she was a runner, and I remember she used to go on walks with me and stuff, and I wanted to be a runner.

And then when I married my husband, he played racketball. I taught myself how to play racketball just to spend time with him and it would kick my ass royally, but I loved it. And then his brother was a triathlete and his brother was one of the first people that he probably doesn’t even remember this conversation, but I was at my mother-in-Law’s house. I had just started taking better care of myself. I was walking, making small changes, probably had lost about 20 pounds. And I was asking him about, he was training for what was called an Ironman, which is a very big ass deal in the triathlon world. And he looked at me and he said, are you interested in triathlons? And I looked at him, he might as well have flowers growing out of his head. I was like, I couldn’t do a triathlon. He was like, sure you can.

Like anybody can do a triathlon who wants to, you just have to learn how to do the bike, the running, the swim. He said, it’ll take time, but I think you would love it. I mean, from that moment on game on, I was determined to figure out how to be my goal. Life included movement. It was like one shot. Someone gave me hope and believed in me and debunked my entire story that I couldn’t. All of a sudden I was like, I just need to fucking try. I just need to learn. Anyone else. Even at my size, I was like, well, maybe I can ride a bike. Maybe I can learn how to do that. And then all of a sudden my brain was like, you know, got to why the Y was three miles away from my house with an indoor pool, and I was like, huh, I guess I could learn to swim there.

They have lanes. I wonder how that works. And so I started calling around. I was that girl that ordered a book to learn how to swim, and I had that motherfucker in a Ziploc bag on the edge of the pool, and I’d swim my lap, practice what the little thing told me to do, come back, read it, and do the next thing. I may have looked like the world’s largest bozo, but this bozo did some triathlons. So I was so proud of myself for having the courage to try. And so when you’re thinking about your future self, you do want to think about that future goal. So the other things at two 50 that I would’ve said would be like, I just want to be able to go out to eat and eat like a regular person. I want to be able to eat what I want, but not feel bad about it.

Stuff myself come home feeling miserable, and I wanted to be able to go out to eat and not be tempted to order shit that I didn’t really want, but just felt like everybody else is having some I could envision. I just kept thinking about what is it that I want so bad? I wanted to feel good about myself. I wanted to feel sexy. I wanted to be able to play with my kid. And when I really understand, understood what I wanted for my goal life, that made it easier for me to make sure that whatever I did to lose weight, it had to live into that. So if I wanted to be able to go out to eat and eat things I liked without losing control, that meant I couldn’t do a keto. It meant I couldn’t do some kind of crazy ass restrictive calorie diet.

It meant it was this natural filter system for like, well, here’s the ways that you’re not going to introduce things. Here are the things you are going to need to do. I had to keep going out to eat. We couldn’t take eating out off the table. Sometimes we ate out a little less, but I wanted to be someone that could go out to eat and eat comfortably, which meant I was going to have to learn how to go out to eat. And the only way to learn how to do that is not sit in my ass at home, avoiding it, and then panicking, fearing and binging every time I went to a restaurant. So when you paint the picture of what is this life I want to live? What does it really look like?

Then you have a filtering system for what you’re going to do to lose weight and what you’re not going to do to lose weight. It helps you create the weight loss that you want in a way that when it’s done, you have no reason to gain it back. I just want you to think about that. If you lose weight in a way that you actually, you wouldn’t want to walk away from it, but most of us, what we do is we lose weight in a way we don’t particularly love. You might not hate it, but you love the results. A lot of us will lose weight doing things like shake diets, ketos, all kinds of stuff. And look, I use keto all the time, but I’m not anti keto. I mean, I know it works for some people, but unless you love it, but if you love carbs, keto probably is not for you.

You have to learn how to be someone who eats carbs like anybody else. You have to appreciate which carbs make you feel better, which ones kind of drain you, the ones that kind of drain you. You have to learn how to eat those when you don’t need as much energy. You have to learn how to give yourself permission so that you don’t eat too many and then further drain you. There’s so much we have to do. So when you lose weight doing things that support the kind of life that you want, you don’t have reasons to walk away from it, because I don’t want anyone losing weight, only loving the results on the scale, but not loving what they do because at some point, you’re going to get to where you need to go and you’re not going to have the scale to motivate you anymore.

You’re not going to have the scale to keep you on track. Once that stops and you’re just weighing in each day and there’s nothing exciting happening, and you’re stuck with a bunch of eating that you don’t even love, well then you’ve just created a lot of misery. And if misery is what you’ve created with your lifestyle, you will break. Your brain will be like, oh my God, every day is so hard. I don’t like how I’m living. This is too much. I’m just going to go back and get some of those old thoughts that she had, like a little won’t hurt. Let’s just eat this. You need a break. That’s how we get back to gaining weight. Now, there is another part of your future self that really will help you make sure that you’re losing weight in a way that you can keep off too often.

So we have got, this is the goal life. I want to be able to do these things. We also have to think about future self and how she handles your current life because you’re going to get smaller, but there’s some things that never change, and unless you lose weight, learning how to no longer rely on food or quitting to get through these things, you won’t be able to lose your weight. So we want to be thinking about future self. What does she do on all the days? She doesn’t want to do things because she’s going to wake up and not going to want to make a plan. She’s going to wake up and not want to, she’s going to want to sleep in instead of working out. She’s going to want to have drinks on Friday night rather than waiting until Saturday because that’s what she, maybe let’s say that on Saturday it’s going to be date night with your husband or your girlfriend or your wife. And on Friday though, the girl’s come and knocking, Hey, so-and-so broke up with her boyfriend. We’re all going to go out and we’re going to drink margaritas and eat chips. Make her feel better.

Future self has to know how to handle those situations. She’s going to want to go, she’s going to want to go to both. She’s going to start wanting to do all kinds of things. She’s going to want to not stick to plan. She’s going to want to not go and drink water instead of margaritas. So you have to think about her. What situations is my thin future self going to run into where she’s not going to want to do things? Because as I lose weight, I have to know how to talk myself into it because I’m going to not want to do things for the rest of my life. That is just how we’re all wired. You also need to think about what does future self do when she’s hurt, when somebody says some bullshit stuff to her, what is future self doing? When people forget her birthday, don’t thank her under, acknowledge her under appreciate her.

If that’s happening now, don’t think being thin all of a sudden brings out everybody with their tambourines and symbols to celebrate your ass every day. If your boss right now is not giving you good feedback at work and you can’t stand it, and every day you worry about, am I going to get fired? They should appreciate me more. If you’re in that anxious mode when you’re dieting, it may be a distraction, but when you’re no longer trying to lose weight, you’re still going to feel the same way. What are you going to do? What does future self do when the scale’s bouncing around? How does she handle it? What does future self do when she’s working late and she feels like it sucks and she shouldn’t have to? What’s future self doing and thinking When she’s rushed, she’s got too much on her plate. What’s future self doing when she’s missing a meal?

You want to paint a picture. Now, you don’t have to do this in one setting. This is one of those things where you can literally buy a notebook called Future Self. You can just every few days write things about situations you’re having and you can just be like, you know what? This is the way I’m currently handling it. My future self. She’ll be handling it this way. I think this is what’s different between me and her. So what can I do today to start acting more like her? Because that’s the key. When y’all are thinking about that version of you who hits their goal weight, she’s living your current life, she still has the same obstacles, the same problems, probably the same people around her, but you need to understand that she just shows up differently when shit hits the fan in life because she’s learned how as she loses weight, she’s losing weight.

It’s really important for you to learn how to navigate all this stuff because when you’re losing weight, you’re taking away the food. But sometimes people replace, if I’ve been dealing with sadness or feeling underappreciated with food, I might be dealing with it on the way down the scale with dieting. I may still be feeling bad, but I’m like, yeah, but I’m really focused on losing weight. Well, one day that goes away. So we want to make sure that you’re really learning how to handle situations in life so that you become a different version of you who can handle their life without having to eat or without having to diet. Alright, I hope that was helpful for all of you. I just think it’s such an important conversation. Be thinking about your future self, and if you want more help with it, consider joining us in the No BS Weight Loss program. We will teach you how to lose weight in a way that when the weight comes off, you don’t want to gain it back. I want you to learn how to love your life. I want you to learn how to handle your life while you lose the weight. Talk to you next week.