Updated: December 12, 2023
Episode 167: Weightloss And Grieving [VIDEO]
Listen On
Losing weight sometimes can feel sad.
We think it’s all rainbows and daisies, so when we feel sad we are left confused and wondering if we’re doing it wrong.
Losing weight isn’t just about eating less food.
It’s also a journey of letting go of habits you’ve used to comfort yourself, like eating at night or “wining” with your girlfriends about life.
About the time we start liking our new life we realize the old version of us is “dying.”
And sometimes we lose friends, clothes, lifestyles, and identities.
Today I interview grief expert and Master Coach Krista St. Germaine.
We talk about weightloss grief and grief in general so you can not only lose weight but keep it off for good.
Transcript
Podcast 167. Interview with Krista St. Germain
Signup for Corinne’s free weightloss course at www.pnp411.com and get added to her email list!
Corinne had a special guest on the podcast today! Krista St. Germain is a coach that discusses grief.
Even if you haven’t lost someone significant, we all deal with grief at some point. Sometimes we grieve friendships. Sometimes we grieve getting to overeat or having to eat less. Sometimes we grieve the changes that Covid has brought into our lives.
Krista mainly coaches widowed moms. She lost her husband four years ago. She went to therapy, but she was still struggling. She ended up joining Brooke Castillo’s Self Coaching Scholars and it helped her so much, that she decided to become a coach.
We have a concept of how we should be grieving. That there should be stages or there should be an end to it. That’s not how it goes.
A lot of Corinne’s members think something is wrong with them because they still have food urges or don’t have the body they thought they would after losing all of their weight. Reality is that thoughts are coming and feelings are present. Judging yourself for them is counterproductive.
Corinne lost her grandmother years ago. There are still days where she grieves for her and cries. Instead of judging herself for it, she tells herself, “this must be a day where I really miss granny.”
Grief is the natural response to loss. It’s just thoughts causing feelings about something that has happened. We’re humans, so we’re always going to have thoughts, which means we’re always going to have feelings.
When we aren’t allowing the emotions, that’s when we experience suffering. When we just allow the emotions to be there, that’s when we can process them.
A lot of Corinne’s members are afraid to journal because they think they’re going to unearth all of these painful things. It’s better to open this up than keep it closed because those thoughts and feelings are going to wait for you, they aren’t going anywhere. There’s no amount of avoidance that will make them go away.
If you put everything on a piece of paper, you realize that you just have a lot of sentences in your brain. When you believe them, you feel terrible. You can choose whether or not you believe them. It’s easier to argue with those thoughts when they are on a piece of paper then when they are bouncing around in your brain.
We can experience sadness and see it as part of the normal human process. We can’t have the highs without the lows.
We can still feel connected to someone through the memories that we shared with them.
With everything going on in the world right now, we are experiencing loss. Loss of the way we thought things were going to be.
The five stages of grief is one of many theories of grief, but it isn’t always the most accurate. Some people don’t experience some of the stages and feel like something is wrong with them. It was originally created based on the process of dying, not on mourning the loss of someone.
We all think there’s a right way to do life and if we can figure out the “right way” we’ll feel better or we’ll lose weight or whatever it is we are wanting.
There’s a fake belief that one day we’re going to fix all the old thoughts we have and that they’ll never come back. They’ll always come back and that’s not a problem unless you make them a problem.
The new normal is helpful if done in a useful way. The concept of the new normal says you’ll never go back to the way it was and you just have to settle and get used to the new normal. It’s said in a way that the new normal is worse than the old normal. Whatever we want to create in the future can be whatever we want it to be. The new normal is not something you just settle for.
Post dramatic growth is when you use trauma to change your life for the better, instead of getting to an acceptable level of functioning. You can grow or bounce forward.
Trauma is not a circumstance because what is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another person. It’s just how we think about what we have experienced.
Some people argue for their trauma or their pain, but know that you can decide if you want to keep it. Holding on to it just causes you to suffer over and over in your present state because of something that happened in the past.
We can still not wish something had happened and still decide who we want to be.
So often we’re trying to use food to numb our feelings. We have to remember that numbing with food isn’t always helpful, but we don’t have to be constantly figuring out what is going on in our brain. It’s okay to let the brain rest. The brain has a limited capacity to process. There has to be some balance between being peaceful or watching Netflix and thinking about our thoughts and learning to feel our feelings.
Corinne has had to work on judging herself for taking breaks. She would catch herself thinking that she was wasting her time when she was trying to relax. She now loves watching TikTok for 30 minutes because she doesn’t have to think. She considers it a productive break.
We’re all trying to do so much. It’s no wonder we go to bed exhausted every day. Quiet time in the shower or a walk outside can be a really great break for the brain that can help us to be more productive.
See links below for ways to find out more about Krista or to listen to her podcast.
Membership will open again on June 17th. Are you ready to become a No B.S. Woman?!?!
Links