In order to have a healthy mindset, we must change from the inside out. In last week’s episode, Healthy Lifestyle Mindset – Part 1, we talked about how we can create a healthy mindset using science. We learned how we can forge new neural pathways, building habits that serve our health and overall well-being.

In Part 2 of Healthy Lifestyle Mindset, we build on the science by exploring the math and drama of weight loss. Our language, emotions and overall history with food and ultimately ourselves can create unnecessary drama that keeps us from being our best selves. As we practice intentionally identifying and removing the drama from the equation, we begin to make better, healthier choices. With intention and without the drama, we are free to create the results we truly desire.

If you like what you heard today, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave a review. The more reviews we receive, the more women will learn about the podcast and learn from these lessons. If you know someone who is struggling with food, send them a link to the podcast and maybe they can find something here they haven’t heard before!

Listen to the Full Episode:

What You'll Learn from This Episode:

The mindset equation
The intentional and unintentional mindset models
How to identify the drama in your thinking
How to remove the drama from your mindset
How to use the math to create a new mindset

Featured on the Show:

The Blue Zones Project
The Vitality App
If you have any questions or ideas for upcoming episodes, send me an email at pat@beauprecoaching.com
If you like what you heard today, please head to Apple Podcasts and leave a review.
Join me in my closed Facebook group – It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight.

Full Episode Transcript:

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Full Episode Transcript

With Your Host

Pat Beaupre Becker

Welcome to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, a podcast for women approaching 60 who have been successful at everything but reaching their weight loss goals. Tune in each week for tools and strategies to help you lose weight, create a strong body, and support a healthy mind. Here's your host, certified weight and life coach, Pat Beaupre Becker.

You are listening to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight, a podcast with Pat Beaupre Becker, Episode 23.

Hello, my dears. Happy to be here. Now, in our last episode, we looked at our mindset and how the neuro connections that we memorize become a habit because we do them over and over throughout our history, and we repeat these thoughts and feelings because they're memorized, and even if they make us suffer, we continue to almost be addicted to them. Now, as you approach your 60's or if you're like me, and you're right in the middle, and if you still have not figured out your drama around weight and overeating, I am so happy you're here because I know you're here because you want to change and you want to grow, and you probably have tried over and over, and look, you're here. You're not giving up, and I love that.

That makes such a difference, because I didn't give up either, and as a result of not giving up, I found my way to a right-size body, and I eat foods that nourish and satiate me, and provide the energy that I actually need to live my amazing life. Now, don't get me wrong, there's lots of other kinds of drama in my life, but they're not necessarily like these deep, dark secrets that were lying underneath my weight issues, but they were not taking place because I was so distracted with food, right? If food is not a challenge, you then start to take on other challenges. Then, what happens is that you have other kinds of drama, but right now for me, food is not the drama, and I am so grateful for that. Now, your mindset is key to changing behaviors and not giving up on yourself, and I really want to emphasize here that I don't think you need to be fixed.

I think right now as you are listening, you are perfect the way you are. You have arrived at this moment at the perfect time for you to make changes, but you want guidance on how to lose weight, but this time, you're going to do it from the inside with your heart and your mind. Now, I want today to share with you a way to this mindset of looking at weight loss in terms of math and drama. When you can apply and identify what part of your 'Struggle' is math and what part is the 'Drama', you will be able to have a new perspective on an old problem. Now, when I ask a new client, "Why are you overweight?", not one person answers, "Because I overeat."

Our mindset drama causes so much suffering that drives bad habits of overeating. Now, the drama may have originated with your childhood, how you grew up and what you learned about food, how you deal with emotions, love, if you feel worthy, whether you use food for entertainment or whether you use food to punish yourself. The math accounts for what and how much food you put into your body. Now, I know if I look back on my high school years, they were filled with fast foods, fried foods, lots of sugar, and maybe your parents use sweets as treats to reward you, to celebrate, or even to just get us to be quiet. Then, I think about my meals, they were meat, and gravy, and canned green beans, canned corns.

Then, in my teens, we may have actually seen some live food, which was lettuce. It was Iceberg lettuce, and it was usually drowned in some kind of sweet dressing. Then, my mom discovered Rice-A-Roni. Oh my God, convenience and a bit of a curiosity, but not for me. Let me not say that I did not appreciate the fact that that woman fed three children three meals a day for years and years and years, and I appreciate that. Mom, I really do, but if we look at the math of healthy body weight, you really have to discover what food that you will require to fuel your body and your activity level, and we have to find a balance, right?

We have to look at what food feels good in our body, what we know about food that is healthy for your body, what work for us at our age, and we change as we get older, and sometimes we develop food sensitivity, so we really have to experiment and find out, "What is the food that is going to be right for our bodies and the amount that's going to get us to either lose weight or to maintain weight?" Now, we also have to look at our hormones, right? If we're insulin resistant, we have to get the system aligned as part of the math, so that, all of that food portion is part of the math part of your weight loss plan. Now, we know math is incredibly useful, right?

In weight loss, it shows us the ways to our goal weight, but when we think of math, we kind of think, "Oh, cold, calculated, inhuman." Let me give you an example. You wake up in the morning, you get on the scale. You look at the scale, and that number, which is really just the calculation of your internal organs on top of your blood, water, skin and fat. That's just the math, but your brain says, "Oh my God, I'm never going to lose weight."

"Why can't I change? Why did I eat all that pizza? Oh, I hate getting old and fat. I hate myself. It's not worth it." Now, that is what I call the 'Drama', and we can see how our addiction to this drama will actually be keeping us from reaching our goal and has so many negative consequences.

Now, I like to think about the drama as falling into the category of this mind-body chemical self, which we talked about as habitual and historical, and sometimes hysterical, because we use the drama as permission to overeat. "Oh, you would eat too if you had to live with him. Oh, if she was your sister, you'd understand." We use drama to keep us from our dreams. "I could never take that risk. I'm too terrified", and drama gives us a reason to say, "Fuck it."

Now, when I was growing up, I thought drama was like the most important thing about life, right? It was The Supremes, The Four Tops, Mary Wells, The Beatles, and Ray Charles, and they were all teaching me that I'll be rescued, I can help myself, and I ain't too proud to beg, and don't forget, "My world is empty without you, babe", and the drama develop because even though I had all of these longings from this culture, really, no one came to rescue me. I wasn't the one they loved. I was the one they were with, and culture instills this dramatic message of longing, the desire to be chosen, and finding love outside yourself. Now, if you need to look outside yourself for validation to be rescued, and I'd like to say from what, you have developed a never enough mindset.

It's so common, right? "I was never the chosen one", "I'm not cute enough", "I'm not wild enough", "I'm not smart enough", "Not skinny enough", "Now, I'm not young enough or talented enough." I learned the mindset of not being enough, and the problem is when we look to external forces for our identity, for our love, comfort, fun, and confidence, and our worthiness, and sometimes even for entertainment, we never learn the skill of finding those inside ourselves. When we don't develop the ability to find what we need from the inside, food becomes the provider of that feel-good feeling, and sometimes, it's also the punishment, right? I can see so many times with my clients where we become our own judge and jury, and we give ourself the sentence to pain and suffering over and over again.

Now, now at the age of 65, I can see how all these messages created these chemical memories, and actually became part of my identity. Now, we innocently speak in dramatic terms about our lives, our problems in people, and what happens is again, we can easily become addicted to these intense feelings, words like 'Struggle', 'Devastated', 'Terrified'. "I was taken over by food. I found myself in front of the fridge. I don't know how I got there."

"I don't know how it happened. He made me do it. Oh, she hates me. Oh, he makes me want to kill him. They make me want to throw up. Oh, she is awesome."

"I suck", "I never will", "You always", "The most", "The best", ay yay yay yay yay. Now, I'm a film and a TV fan, and I can tell you, 'Westworld' is drama. 'Billions', one of my favorite is drama. 'The Americans' is drama. Now, even though some of these stories are taken from the headlines, they are written to heighten the drama so that you're sitting on the edge of your seat, feeling this intensity, and I used to think that this is what made my life interesting, right?

This is what created texture and depth, but drama mostly creates stress and negative emotions, fear, anger, sadness, depression, insecurity and hopelessness. Those feelings do not motivate us to self-compassion, and self-care, and self-regard, and these are required for choosing healthy foods and activities that will break away from this intense pleasures that the brain is seeking, so what do we do? What do we do, right? I'm going to teach you a way to sort through the math and the drama so you get to decide what you want, what you want to achieve in terms of weight loss by changing your mindset, but how do we do this? Basically, we learn to observe.

The first part, learn to observe, and I've given you the model before, and we're going to talk about the model again because the model is the perfect tool to reveal the math and drama of your weight loss. The model is, it's the circumstance gives you a thought. Your thought gives you a feeling. Your feeling drives you to an action. Your action is the result, so you could say circumstance equals thought, plus feeling, plus action, equals result.

Let's just say the circumstances is that our body needs food for fuel, so we're going to eat. The action is you eat more fuel than you need. The result is you store that fat, or if your action is to burn more fuel than you put in, the result is you release that fat, right? It's pretty much the math. When I ask the question to myself, "Why am I having trouble behaving in a way that serves my goal?", why can't I simply do the math?

What we do is we actually go back to that moment of choice, and let's say the moment maybe you decided that you had a plan, that you are going to eat on plan, and you decided not to eat on the plan, and maybe you had like five slices of pizza. Okay. We go back to that moment in time. What was the circumstances? Now, you might say, "Oh, I came home from work."

"It was the worst day ever. The traffic was horrible. I had this meeting that was so tense. My co-worker behaved like such a jerk, and you know, my lunch came, and it was the wrong food, so I could hardly even eat it." Now that, if we look at what part of that is a fact, the circumstance of what part of it is the drama, what's the math, what's the drama, I could say the math is, "I went to work."

"There were cars on the road. My co-worker said whatever he said using exactly the words they said. I skipped lunch or I ate lunch", and so when we look at the drama, we can see how the intensity of the emotion will change. Let's say the circumstance is Monday, 6:00 PM, you arrive home from work, right? Simple. No drama.

That's what goes in the C line. Then, we start to look at our thought. Maybe your thought is, "I just don't feel like eating what I planned yesterday", right? "It's like I'm too stressed out", and so that feeling that we have when we think this thought, "I don't feel like eating what I planned yesterday" is irritated and bored. That goes in the F line, right?

Then, what is our action? A, "Let's just call for pizza", and that is what you actually do. It goes in the A line. What's the result? You didn't eat what you planned, and you may have gained weight. When we get a result we don't want, then we call that the 'Unintentional model'.

In other words, this is just what happens by [route 00:13:58] without observation, without changing, without analysis, and it's actually you're not managing your mind, you're not directing your mind. Because of this CTFAR, we can see the math, which is the facts and the drama, which is all of the thoughts that we have, right? In that past example, the math is, "I had a plan for a meal. I didn't eat it. I ate food that added weight."

Now, the drama part of that example is the thoughts and the emotions that made you decide not to eat on your plan. Now, it may not seem too dramatic that you said, "I don't feel like eating what I planned yesterday", right? "After all, I'm the adult in the room. You get to choose", but if you see that the math to losing weight would be to eat on plan, and then you see you're not eating on plan, you can see that the drama is not helping you get what it is that you want. That feeling of irritation and boredom led you to eating off plan.

I want to give you another example of an unintentional model, and this is where maybe we don't hold ourself in such high regard, right? We talked about that not enoughness. Let's say I just think that I am a hateful person, I have this history, I feel bad about myself, and in believing that I'm a hateful person, I have really hateful thoughts, right? Then, I start to feel really hateful towards myself, and the result of that is behaving in hateful ways toward myself. Then, if eating is one way that I punish myself, it fits right in with those hateful actions.

Here's the math. The circumstance equals the thought, plus the feeling, plus the action, which equals the result. Now, in this case, it's actually also the drama, because the circumstance could be, "I ate off plan", and the thought could be, "I'm a hateful person. I can't do anything right. What's wrong with me?", right?

Now, this is again this dramatic language, and the feeling is terrible, so when you think that you're hateful and you're not successful or you can't do it, you start to feel terrible. Then, you start to behave in negative ways towards yourself, which then creates lots more drama, because if the result is that you're continuously overweight, you're having health issues, and then that's lots more drama. What do we do again now? Now we know, we see the unintentional model, we see how our thoughts create this feeling that drive the action of just making a mess of our lives, so what we have to do is we want to think intentionally, right? We decide, "I want to lose weight."

"I want to learn to eat healthier", and so now, we have to take your mindset, which is your thoughts and your beliefs so that you can take the action that will get you there. Seeing the unintentional model in writing, it makes conscious, "What's going on in your brain?", that habitual and historical thinking, so let's use our mind to reframe our mindset by creating an intentional model. We decide, "Okay. I'm going to plan", and by planning what I'm going to eat ahead of time, I'm actually activating and strengthening that prefrontal cortex, which is my brain's Chief Executive, right? It's expert at understanding the consequences of behaviors.

It allows you to plan, to learn. It actually is the seed of impulse, control, creativity, invention, communication. This is the part of our brain that's really good at the math, so let's take the drama out of our language, right? Now, we're going to notice that if we're using dramatic language, that we're actually adding drama to a simple situation. Let's create the intentional model.

The circumstance is the same, right? "It's Monday, 6:00 PM. I came home from work." Same exact facts as we had before, and your thought is, "I will eat my planned meal even if I don't feel like it." Now, if you're thinking, "I'm going to eat my planned meal even if I don't feel like it", and you believe that, what's going to happen is you feel committed, right?

You just ... It's just a done deal. You're going to do it. Then, your action is to eat your planned meal, and the result is you ate on plan, no drama, weight loss probably, maintenance, yeah. We can take this intentional model. We can use it for stress relief, all those thoughts we had about the job, all those thoughts we had about the day.

We can reframe it, and what it does is it gives us the motivation to actually take the right action to reach our goals, but there are so many thoughts that we have to look at and reveal, and we really just do one thought at a time, and it all adds up just like math. In summary, what I know for sure is that you can make key changes by changing your mindset, right? Create a new vision of who you want to be. You're going to find yourself facing new challenges, but they're not going to be the same old problems you always face, especially when it comes to overeating and being overweight. We know we can change our brain.

We can create the conditions to develop a new chemical chain reaction, right? We use the model, the intentional model and the unintentional model to see what's going on in our brain, and to practice the better message that's going to get us to eat right and to treat ourselves better, because when we identify that negative thinking and see how often that we are thinking negatively, then we can change. Then, by repeating the new way, the intentional model, we can create a new habit. When we understand the difference between math and drama, we can focus separately on each of them, right? For eating, for health, and weight loss, there's the math.

Thinking for health, happiness and weight loss, there's the drama, so use the model to see why you have your current results in unintentional model, and then you create the desired results and the intentional model, and then we'll practice the bridge from how to get from here to there, but identifying the drama in your language and changing that drama to more factual, neutral circumstances is key to getting there. What comes after that? Then, it's up to you because I think therein lies our glory and our gifts. Now, I want to talk about my favorite things, 'Blue Zones Solutions'. Okay.

There's a book, a website, a movie, and basically, the Blue Zones are the areas in the world where people live to be over a hundred with lots of health. In my opinion, what's the point of living a longer life span if our health span isn't very good? What they've done is this Blue Zone actually teamed up with AARP, and they did these projects where they created Blue Zones in the United States, so they studied the Blue Zones around the world, and then they learned from them, and then applied them to different communities in the United States. It's really fascinating, and I definitely ... There's a link in the show notes where you can actually go and read about it.

Now, they also have something called 'The Vitality App', and what this does is it actually, you put, answer these questions, and it will give you from your current practices what your expected life span is, and how you can increase it by changing certain things about your lifestyle. This is created in collaboration with the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and I think it's pretty fascinating, and I encourage you to do it. Thank you so much for listening to It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight. I hope you enjoyed and found this episode useful as you create a new future for the natural weight that feels good to you and allows you to live your life joyfully. Remember to let your friends know how to listen, and how they can find me on Facebook, on my website by going to www.beauprecoaching.com.

Spread the word, spread the work. I hope to see you in a couple weeks where we're going to talk about the power of inquiry on your weight loss success, how to use powerful questions. See you then. Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of It's Never Too Late to Lose Weight. If you liked what you heard and want more, head over to Nevertoolate2.info/guide to download your quick start guide to jump-start your weight loss brand and begin creating an amazing life you love.