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Weight loss can be hard. We put in a lot of effort to eat the “right” foods and craft the perfect plan, but inevitably we make mistakes. And when we do, we think that if we just had more willpower, we could stay on the plan and get to our goal. 

But willpower isn’t what we need. Let me show you how to use your brain to help you lose weight without any more willpower than you already have…

Most of us know the weight loss journey’s ups and downs. Feels like being trapped on an elevator – we want to get off on the ground floor, but we can’t seem to get off before the doors close and we go back up again!

I battled during the years before I lost my weight. It was a constant slog of trying to find the “right” diet, struggling to not want to eat “junk” food”, watching the scale with dread, and hating myself when I actually got on it. There were the doughnuts I couldn’t say no to and the pizza I’d never leave in the box. I figured I was just weak around food and the key was to stay out of the breakroom or kitchen, to put all the food out of sight where it couldn’t trigger me to start eating.

Even when I avoided the food, it would still call me from the pantry or kitchen or breakroom. My mind was on the food, and it didn’t really matter that it wasn’t in front of me. I needed more willpower – I needed to be strong to resist the temptation of the food!

What I wish I had known back then was this: Willpower is like a muscle and it fatigues. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so worthless every time I gave in to a cookie after trying so hard not to eat it. You can grow your willpower muscle, but even at its strongest, you can still wear it out. Every time you think even the simplest thought about food when you’re not hungry and use willpower to resist it, you chip away at your willpower reserves. Little innocent thoughts like, “That looks delicious!” will start to deplete your willpower. After dozens (or hundreds!) of thoughts like this, resisting the temptation just wears your willpower out completely.

So how do you resist temptation?

By eliminating it in your mind.

Here’s the key: Your mind makes every feeling you have. So if you feel tempted to eat something off your plan, or to eat when you’re not hungry, you are creating that feeling of temptation with your thinking. If you think “I want that cookie” twenty times, you feel tempted to eat the cookie. But if you realize that your brain is creating your desire with its thoughts, you can choose other thoughts. You can go ninja on your brain and catch the thought creating your feeling of temptation. Then you can remember that the thought “I want that cookie” is easy, your brain is offering you the practiced thought, and you can choose a different thought instead. Your true desire is to lose the weight, right? You really want to see the scale go down more than that cookie. Besides, that cookie is from a supermarket and won’t taste that good. It’s not like it’s homemade and even if it was, would it be worth feeling like trash after you eat it, knowing you could have left it on the plate instead?

You get to choose a different thought. You get to practice the new thought. You can generate whatever emotion you need to feel great about leaving the cookie behind and you don’t need willpower to do it.

You just need a new thought and practice.

You don’t have to resist a feeling of commitment to your plan. If you feel committed instead of tempted, willpower doesn’t come into play. Commitment comes from practicing a thought like “I choose to eat to fuel my body”, or “I only eat when I’m physically hungry”, or “I stick to my plan from a love for myself”. Whatever thought you choose that generated that feeling of commitment, that’s the one you practice when you see the cookie. If you don’t feel tempted, you won’t eat it.

No willpower needed!

Yep, it’s simple. But I know it’s not easy. But we get to choose our hard, and whether it’s doing the work to lose the weight or continuing to stay overweight, both are hard. Hard is ok – we can do hard things! But sometimes having help to get through the hard is really useful. If you want help, I’m here for you. Email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and we can set up a mini-coaching session. I’ll get you started on your weight loss transformation and we can make plans to work together to go the rest of the way!

Here’s your video help for the week!

Does fasting help or hurt weight loss? What’s the right way to fast? What if I don’t even want to fast because it’s so uncomfortable? Let’s answer all these and more in this week’s post…

Fasting. It’s the “new” thing and it seems like everyone has an opinion about it. It used to be that the common advice was to eat every few hours to stimulate the metabolism, and if you went too long between eating occasions that your metabolism would grind to a halt and you’d be doomed to gain weight forever. Ok, I’m being dramatic. But isn’t it interesting how the philosophies behind weight loss can totally contradict each other and still be so popular?

Fasting is in now. And folks either love it or hate it. Some swear that it’s the thing that made weight loss work for them, while others say it made no difference. There’s another group who refuses to try it at all –  waiting an extended period of time to eat is too hard, too intimidating, too painful to try.  Hangry, anyone?

Whether you love it or hate it, fasting isn’t new. As a spiritual practice, fasting has been around forever. Even as a normal eating pattern, in the 1950s most people didn’t eat after 6 pm dinner to 7 am breakfast (a 13 hour fast). That’s even where the word “breakfast” comes from.

I used to be terrified of fasting. Every time there was a mention of fasting – in the bible, at church, in popular media for weight loss, I resisted the idea. That resistance came from my fear of hunger. I spent most of my life trying to avoid hunger, so much so that when I started looking for hunger to lose weight the sensation was unfamiliar. Still, my mind thought it was something to stay away from. So when I finally allowed hunger to be the reason to eat and I started losing weight, it was a complete overhaul of my thinking around food and all the other reasons I’d learned to eat.

Fasting is a direct challenge to those thoughts. If you want to know what your brain thinks about food, stop eating and tune in. You’ll be able to watch your brain do gymnastics to try to get you to eat! Even more than 14 years after losing my weight, I can still see some of the old patterns of thinking around food come up when I fast. Let me tell you a story…

Recently I got an email that the church was going to fast on a particular day. Now, I read the email and decided that it was something I wanted to participate in, so I planned to join the fast. It was only one day and the fast from dinner the night before to dinner the day of the fast. I was in the office seeing patients that day, so I packed my water bottle and headed in.

Now, in my office, I have snacks for “emergencies” in my desk drawer. I have Kind bars and small squares of caffeinated chocolates and a container of organic roasted cashews that my nurse gave me for Doctor’s Day. Since I rarely have a food “emergency” the snacks usually just sit there and I give them away if one of my nurses or colleagues is hungry.

It was a busy day as usual. You’d think that I wouldn’t have much time to worry about the fast – but my brain was very busy thinking about the food I’d already decided not to eat. Every time I came back from seeing a few patients to sit at my desk and chart, my brain would suggest that I eat something. A couple of cashews, a square of chocolate, something. But here’s the kicker: I wasn’t actually hungry. The vast majority of the time that my brain offered me a snack as a solution, it wasn’t for hunger. It was to solve irritation, or boredom, or as a reward or a break. I could be sitting down for two minutes to close a chart and my brain would suggest a snack. Once I realized that my mouth was dry because of the mask and what I needed was water – but my brain suggested a snack for that too. It was fascinating to watch how many times my brain would offer food as an option to solve problems that weren’t hunger. Of course, as the day went on, I had more episodes of actual hunger, but most of the time I thought of eating wasn’t related to being hungry. Fasting was a great tool to see my mind!

If you want to see what you really think about food, try fasting. You’ll see all the reasons your mind wants to give you to eat because you say no! The mind will keep trying because of the no. If you pay attention, you can see the mind work even when you’re not fasting, but the fast is a powerful tool to take the distraction of eating food away.

Learning to see the mind at work is a practice, especially if you’ve been eating for reasons other than hunger as most of us have learned to do over the years. Untangling all the reasons why we eat and changing the thinking around them takes work, but it can be done! But if you’ve been trying and struggling, you don’t have to do it alone. I’m here to help! If you want me to coach you to master your mind and successfully lose your weight, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and request a consultation with me. We can conquer your weight battle together!

Here’s your video help for the week!

We don’t like to admit it because we think we should know better, but sometimes we do make self-care=selfish. So how do we dismantle this belief? Let’s get to it…

Welcome to week 4 of the Self Care series! I’m glad you’re here because this thought about self-care is so common! Thinking that self-care is selfish is one of those sneaky background thoughts that we don’t really say out loud. We know self-care is supposed to be important and we kind of accept that it should be part of our lives, while in real life we can’t seem to get it in. There are so many other people in our lives who need things too! Now we feel guilty we’re not doing it AND selfish for trying to do it at all.

This sneaky thought needs reevaluation…

When I realize I have thoughts that cause inner conflict, my first step in evaluation is to question the thought. Is it true? So what about self-care is selfish? We think that if we take time for ourselves that we will be taking away time from someone else who needs us. We think our spouse or husband will have to go without because we did something for us. So we figure that if someone has to go without something they need, then it should be us, not them.

Sometimes this is the best decision. Some needs are that important! The problem comes when this is our default answer to balancing the needs and requests of the people in our lives. I’m convinced that the self-care movement comes from a push-back against this default thinking that we women have adopted.

Yes, I mean women. 

As a society, we are very comfortable with the role of the woman as the caretaker. We play that role at work, at home, and in relationships. We don’t have that same cultural expectation of men, so they don’t play it out. When’s the last time that you heard a man say, “I can’t go out/play ball/go to the gym”? They don’t. They know what they want and need to be the person they are and they plan for it, usually with other people helping to make it possible. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We as women might want to do the same!

So is it true that self-care is selfish? If we allow for it for men, plan for downtime for the kids, and hesitate to load responsibilities on others, then we recognize that taking care of human needs does matter. So caring for yourself isn’t selfish. That’s just a thought we have chosen.

Here’s the main reason I have a problem with the thought that self-care is selfish: It means that while everyone else can have normal human needs, the main caretaker can’t. To me, that lessens the humanity of the caretaker – the mom, grandma, wife, sister, daughter. That’s a whole lot of humans that are expected not to take care of themselves for the sake of others! That seems more like a man-made cultural construct than a godly love of humanity. 

We have value. Each of us has wants and needs and lives and relationships and dreams. To live the full expression of our human life we need to see the value in that life. We see it for other people. We make space and time and provide for others. Why is it so hard to see the value in ourselves?

Besides, who is supposed to take care of you? You raise your kids to become independent and take care of themselves, right? When your daughters are grown up, how do you want them to live? You’re really the only one who is assigned the role of caring for you as an adult. I’m not saying don’t accept help – absolutely accept any help you can get! But who else knows what will best fuel your body, what kind of exercise feels good to you, how much sleep you need, and what is fun for you? We spend so much time taking care of other people and studying and anticipating their needs that sometimes we forget what we even like to do!

You have lots of responsibilities and people to care for. So do I. I’m grateful I have them because otherwise, I’d be alone (and most days I’d rather have them!). But it’s also your responsibility to take care of yourself.  You have to be your own advocate. When you care for yourself, you have more to offer – to yourself, to others, and to the world. When you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t give as much as you have to give. And that’s a loss for us all.

Sometimes it’s hard to get the old thinking out and the new thinking in. What do you want? What do you need? Why haven’t you created it for yourself already? Maybe you need to let some things go so you can get more sleep. Or you might want to change your schedule so you have time to exercise. You might want to learn to meditate to manage your mind and stress. You may want to finally drop 20 pounds and feel better in your body. It might be that you want all of it and have no idea how to make it happen in your super-busy life!

I might be a little biased, but the way to get your life to become what you want it to be is with a coach. Changing your thinking alone is hard, but a coach can help you cut through the noise and find a path to where you want to be. I think having a coach is the ultimate form of self-care because fixing your thinking is the origin of any change you ever have or will ever make! Managing my mind is absolutely how I am able to move my life forward out of confusion and in the direction of my dreams. I want that for you too!

I want to help you get where you want to go! If you want a coach to help you finally get off the weight for good or cut through all the noise in your life to get to your goals, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s set up a consultation. You can get to the life you want!

If you have questions or want to talk more about how to change thinking so it works for you instead of against you, comment below and we’ll talk…

Here’s your video help for the week!

Y’all. I love this post! As someone who struggles with time scarcity, writing and rereading this post has helped me to reset my mind around how much time I have and how I choose to use it. I hope this post does the same for you in getting in your self-care!

As a coach, this is one of my favorite things to talk about. At some point, we’ve all told ourselves that the solution to all our problems would be if we had more time. We know deep in our hearts that if we didn’t need to sleep or if we could have 30 hours in a day that we could get everything done, life would be much more peaceful, and we could accomplish all our goals and dreams. It feels so true! But it’s a lie. So let’s get to it!

Ever watch someone else’s life and think, “How does she do it all?” Other people are working their full-time job, cooking full meals for their family, and publishing their latest book. Or they’re traveling and they meditate daily and they homeschool their kids and their house looks like it came out of a magazine. How is it that other people do all these things and you feel like you’re running and top speed, hair on fire, and you have a never-ending to-do list that seems to get longer the harder you work?

They must have paid help.

They don’t sleep.

Their husband must do more than yours around the house.

Who knows? It doesn’t really matter. The truth is that no matter what their situation, they have exactly the same amount of time that you do. We all have the same amount of time! Not convinced? Let me show you…

I like to think of time as the great equalizer. It’s our most precious nonrenewable resource! Time is a construct we as humans have defined and structured and whether we like it or not, we live within time. Every day has 24 hours, and we all get the exact same amount.

This is great news!

If time is a neutral construct and we all have the same amount, then we start on equal footing with the time we have. The only difference is how we spend it. This is where we have all our power – we choose how we spend our allotment of time.

Did you catch that?

We get to choose how we spend our time. Contrary to what we tell ourselves, no one has extra time waiting to be used up. We generally fill up all our time with something. When it’s all spent and we don’t like how we spent it, we think the solution is that we need more. The solution is to decide how we want to spend the time and then just do that.

We don’t do it that way.

We use our time with things that don’t matter (ever fall into a Facebook hole and lose an hour? I have). We binge-watch TV and then wonder why we don’t have time to create that thing we really want. We complain that we don’t have enough time, but the result of that is feeling powerless and subject to time. When we feel that way, we let time go by while we do things we haven’t thought through and we spend time mindlessly, like swiping a credit card and not thinking about how we have to pay for that later. It’s a completely powerless place to be.

But how we spend time is a choice. Are your kids in four activities and you’re running every day to take them to this or that? Why? Do you like your reasons? If you do, then that’s a good choice and carry on, sister! If not, then why are you spending your time that way? Do you like that you end the day with two hours of TV and go to bed later than you want and wake up hating your alarm every morning? Then why are you choosing to do that?

You get to choose how you spend your time and you have as much as anyone else. You want to eat real food for dinner instead of take-out? Figure out how to spend your time to make that happen. Do you feel best when you get a daily walk? Schedule your day (and the night before!) to be sure you block time for your walk. Whatever it is, you have time for it. You decide, you spend, you have the power over how you use your time. You’ll have to say no to some things – that is a good thing!  Be in power and choose how you spend your time. No one else can decide for you, so you get to be in charge!

I know it can be tricky – thinking we are at the mercy of time is an easy pattern to fall into and a hard one to get out of if you’re not trained to think differently. But that’s what coaching is for! If you want help stepping into your power and getting control of your time, your eating, your life, your weight, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com and let’s make time to work together. You’ve got an hour to invest in yourself – let’s go!

Here’s your video help this week!

Welcome back to the last week in our Finding Fullness series! It’s amazing how fast the year is going – already three months of 2022 are behind us! For us business types, Q1 is complete and we are moving fast into the 2nd quarter of the year. Whew!

It’s a good time to reflect. Planning for what we want to create takes intention, so taking a pause periodically helps us to see where we are, refine our goals, and troubleshoot. So how’s it going? Where are you on your weight loss journey compared to where you were at the beginning of the year? Are you still as committed or have you started the unintentional drift away from your plan?

If you’re still moving ahead with commitment and focus, good for you! But if you’ve started to fall back into old habits and have stepped off of your plan, you can recommit and restart right now. It’s ok if you’ve made mistakes if your next step is forward! No matter where you are, you can move ahead!

This week I want to talk about what to do if you overeat. We’ve spent the last few weeks getting clear on how full is enough and how to let your body help you in finding the right amount of fullness so the scale keeps going down. But inevitably while learning a new skill like eating to a just-satisfied level, there will be mistakes. Slip-ups. Errors. The question is, what do you do when you overeat?

Here’s what often happens. You sit down to a meal with the family and you get caught up in a lively conversation when you realize you ate more than you needed. Your stomach is a little (or a lot!) too full. Or you put more than you needed on your plate and felt guilty about throwing the food away, so you ate it, and afterward, you regretted not dumping the extra food in the trash. Or you missed lunch and decided to make up for the missed meal by eating more at dinner, only to discover that your stomach really hadn’t changed in size and you couldn’t fit extra food in there without feeling overfull.

This is what we high-achieving, accomplished women do: We fuss at ourselves. I mean, keeping on track, following the straight and narrow, being disciplined and sacrificing is how we got where we are today, right? If you make a mistake, you have to be corrected, right? And we learned to correct ourselves hard so we don’t have to be reprimanded by anyone else because it’s embarrassing to have someone else tell us we were wrong. So you tell yourself how stupid you were. You should know better by now, for goodness sake! Why can’t you just do this simple thing and stop eating when you’re full? And you say much uglier things to yourself than these – I know because I’ve said them.

The problem with talking to yourself like this is that you’re much more likely to quit on yourself. Maybe you should just learn to be happy despite the extra weight on your body that you don’t want there (you can be happy and overweight). You already screwed up, so just eat the candy bar on the counter or have the doughnuts in the break room. So your beatdown turns into a downward spiral that ends with shame and more overeating than just one meal. Flogging yourself just doesn’t get you to take loving action for yourself.

Have grace. You are a human, and you will make mistakes. We don’t want to make mistakes because we think that mistakes mean we are weak or broken or just wrong. But a mistake doesn’t mean any of that. A mistake is “an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result”. That’s it. If you overeat you took an action that produced an unwanted result. No problem – you can decide to take a different action next time.

Taking the sting out of a mistake helps us change more quickly. Adding blame and judgment to a mistake creates a detour you don’t really want to take. But if you can realize that you can pick up and move on from a mistake immediately, you can move forward toward your goal directly instead of getting caught up in frustration and hopelessness before you regroup and start again. 

Here’s a secret of weight loss: No one has ever lost weight perfectly. Everyone makes mistakes all the way down the scale. You will never meet any person who has successfully lost their weight who one day woke up, flipped an internal switch, and from that point forward they ate perfectly and the weight fell off. I made mistakes all the way down the scale. I still do – but I see them faster and get back on track so I stay at the weight I want to be. You can make mistakes and still lose weight!

So what do you do? Just restart. As soon as you realize you overate, restart. Don’t eat a cookie too because what the heck, you’ve already blown it. Don’t decide to start over on Monday or tomorrow – that’s what people on diets do. You’re building a life and relationship with food that you want forever, not living on a diet. So you ate too much – wait until you’re hungry again. Not hungry at dinner because you overdid it at lunch? Cool – skip that meal. You can eat again tomorrow when you’re hungry. You can start over right now and the judgment can take a back seat. It’s not helping you anyway, but starting over right now will help you. Remember, when you make a mistake it’s a chance to take care of yourself, not beat yourself down. I promise, when you are gentle and kind with yourself, you’ll get back on track and get closer to your goal SO much faster. So offer yourself some grace and get going again!

You CAN do this! We’re going to look at some ways to practice taking care of yourself over the next month, so keep watching for these posts to come out for you. Make sure you’re on my list so that you won’t miss any of my free help that’s here for you. And if you want the support of a one-on-one coach to speed up your success, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s talk. I can take one more client while I’m getting the course ready for you, so don’t miss out if the one-on-one approach is what you want!

Here’s your video help for the week!

It’s a new week and we are rocking right along! This is week four in our Finding Fullness series and I’m really excited to help you get even more dialed into your fullness so you can eat, be satisfied, AND watch the scale go down. It’s possible, I promise!

This week I decided to name this class Get Out Of Your Head because we spend SO much time in our head, working out all the situations we face and weight loss is no different. It’s staggering how many thoughts we have each day. The last estimate I read was somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 a day – it’s just amazing! Our brains are constantly running, solving problems, considering situations. Actually, by adulthood we’ve learned to spend most of our time thinking instead of moving, sometimes I think we treat our body like a transporter to carry our brain around from one thing to another!

Our brains are powerful. We are problem solvers, and we’re really good at this work. When it comes to weight loss, we are fully ready to apply all the brainpower we have to find the solution. We think that if we apply all the knowledge we have to the problem of being overweight, we can solve it – it’s just an information problem. So we try to figure out the best combination of foods, the right intervals to eat, the combination of macros we need, and the cardio and strength training workout that will get us the results we want. if we can just find the perfect formula, the excess weight will just fall off and we will finally be living in a body that we want! If we can find the formula…

But, you have more than your brain working for you on this problem. Even though we like to rely on our brilliant brain, you also have another helper to help you reach your goal: Your stomach!  We’d like to think that we can measure our food and choose the times we “can” eat, but if you’re using hunger and fullness as the gauge for eating, your carefully crafted plans are often not going to line up with what your stomach says. So who wins, your brain or your stomach? I vote for the stomach! First, all the fancy diet plans that you’ve attempted with your brain haven’t been all that successful in the long run. Second, your stomach was created to give you the sensations you need to govern the times and quantities of food that you need – why not use it?

I can hear you arguing with me already. “But I want to eat all the time and if I did that, I’d just gain weight like crazy!” Yes, you would. But I’m not suggesting that you eat whenever you want, just when you’re hungry. It’s not the same thing. If you missed it, go back to the last series on finding hunger and you’ll see exactly how to identify true stomach hunger. Finding fullness requires us to pay attention to the physical sensation coming from our stomach while we fill it during a meal. So how do we do it?

First, it’s easier to hear that quiet signal if there are fewer distractions. Turn off the TV, close your laptop, lay down your phone. While you’re eating, don’t do anything else, except enjoy the company you keep. If you’re alone you’ll hear the signal more clearly, so don’t fall into the trap of multitasking during your meal. You waited to be hungry, so enjoy the food you’ve been waiting for!

Next, check in with your body. Most of the time you’re thinking about things while you’re doing others. While you’re eating, you want to make every effort to be present. Taste the food, feel it beginning to fill your stomach. Ask yourself how full your stomach feels. Is the hunger going away? How much more do you need? One way to do your check-in is to put your fork down every few bites.  While you’re not looking at your plate to choose the next bite, feel your body. Is it satisfied yet? Make sure you’re asking your body if it’s satisfied. Sometimes your body is comfortable, but your mind wants more food!

The process of dropping into the body is about awareness. I like to think of it as actively moving my attention from my head down into my body. It’s a shift from my casual normal awareness in my thoughts to sensing what is happening in my belly. What sensation is coming from my stomach? How full am I? Is there any pressure or tension in my stomach? Is my stomach feeling peacefully full yet? I want to leave room for a square of dark chocolate at the end – if I take another bite, will I have room for it?

The more you practice shifting your awareness and observing the sensations from your body, the better you’ll be at it. We learn over time to ignore the signals our body gives us. We hold it when we ought to go to the bathroom, we stay up when our body wants to sleep, we wear high heels because they’re cute even though they hurt our feet. The entire shapewear industry is built on us learning to ignore the discomfort of being enclosed in a lycra casing all day! Of course we’ve gotten away from our hunger and fullness signals because we’ve gotten those scrambled too. But we can get them back!

Keep practicing – you CAN do this! Getting to your goal takes practice and commitment, but you will get there if you don’t give up. If you have questions or need support, drop a comment on this post and I’ll be happy to respond. And if you’re ready to invest in yourself with personalized one-on-one coaching, I’m here. I can take one or two more clients while I’m getting the online course launched (and once that’s out, no more private clients until my class is well taken care of!). So if you know you want the accountability and customized support of your own private coach, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let me know you want to schedule your free consultation!

Here’s your video help for the week!

(describe dropping into the body, checking in, clearing away distraction)