5 Reasons Now Is The Right Time To Start Losing Weight [Ep. 71]

This is the Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast. I'm Lisa Salsbury, and this is episode 71. Five reasons now is the right time to start losing weight. Welcome to Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well; the podcast for women who want to lose weight, but are tired of counting and calculating all the food. I'm your host, Lisa Salsbury. I'm a certified health and weight loss coach and life coach, and most importantly a recovered chronic dieter. I'll teach you to figure out why you are eating when you aren't hungry, instead of worrying so much about what you are eating. I've been thinking about the holidays. And I mentioned last week, how now is really a great time to start and. I just wanted to expand on that idea today and also go a little bit deeper. My handling the holidays episode from last year gives you six specific tips to sort of make it through the holiday season, without quote unquote, going off the rails. You know, these tips are there for you for specific situations. Like I address buffets and dinner parties, as well as some of the scarcity we feel. Around holiday food, like the specific things like fudge and pie and those things that we get just seemingly at that time of year. But today, I want to talk about why we would even want to try any of those tips. Why not just let it ride for the rest of the year. Why not just coast through till January and wait to make that new year's resolution. If you aren't already progressing towards your weight loss, why would you want to start now? And here are my top five reasons. Number one. Because we are always busy. Now is a good time, because if you don't do it when you're busy, You won't ever learn to do it. And this is one of the most common reasons I hear people say I'm just too busy right now. I'm just too busy to do it during the holidays. So many of my clients have asked me, should I start now? Because I've got this trip coming up or I've got family coming into town or it's soccer season and we are gone every weekend. And they asked me this year round. They asked me this in April, in July and September. And this is always how our lives are. I think there's a meme that says adulthood is saying, but after this week, things will slow down a bit. Over and over it until you die. I mean, really the holidays are busy. Sure. But so is every other season of your ear. So if we say we can't start because we're busy. But then we'll never, ever start. Last year I had an accountant come to me in January. And say, I don't want to overeat my way through another tax season. And he did it. He was like, this is my busiest time of year. And that's why. I'm going to do it now. He made it through the tax season and he lost weight at the same time. The holidays are no different for the rest of us, non accountants, right. If you don't want to overeat your way through the holiday again, remember that every month is busy and now is just as good a time to start. This busy is the same as other busy. Okay. Number two, this is a big one. If we wait until after the holidays, we reinforce the diet cycle where we are dieting, or we are bingeing slash cheating. This is where we are either on or off a diet. We are either trying to lose weight, air quotes, or we are eating again, air quotes, whatever we want. What if we enjoy something. In the middle. What if you enjoy all the foods, but you don't make yourself sick. Now is a good time to start getting into moderation. Rather than being on or off. Try just prioritizing what it would feel like to eat too enough. Leave a few bites behind and see how that feels. I noticed last week at Thanksgiving dinner that every plate had food left over on it. This is actually not normal at all for my family. Like in years past. But the older we all get, the more we are realizing that, as I've said many times before the clean plate club is dumb, but also just that we don't have to clean our plates to indicate we enjoyed the meal. We don't have to overeat at Thanksgiving just because there are lots of good foods to try. We took some of each side dish and then tried them all. I noticed it up and down the table for almost everyone. And no one felt deprived because they didn't finish what was on their plate. If we wait until after the holidays and tell ourselves we can't possibly lose weight now. We are effectively telling ourselves that it's impossible. Not to overeat and we're reinforcing that diet overeat cycle. It's simply just not true. That we can't, that it's impossible not to overeat. Listen again to the hunger scale episode, it's episode 63 in the back to basic series. Where I covered just the hunger scale. This is the absolute top tool for you to implement. So that you are not waiting and so that you can break free from this diet. Cycle. Just do this one thing. And not only will you be well on your way come January 1st, but you'll also have a much more pleasant holiday season with fewer times. You have regret from being overly full. With digestive distress and gas and bloating from simply too much food. So just to review this one. If we wait, we are reinforcing the diet cycle, and this is one of the most important things. I want you to be able to drop. We want to drop the idea that we are on a diet or off a diet. All right. At rolls into number three. Which is, if we wait until after the holidays, this reinforces there are good and bad foods. So similar to number two being on or off a diet. When we think we can't lose weight during the holidays are now is a terrible time to start. It's because we think we'll holiday foods are bad. You're telling yourself that holiday foods are bad and that you can't lose weight while eating them. But that January foods are good. You'll throw out all the carbs and leftover snacks from the new year's Eve party. And then, and only then can you start to lose weight? When we label holiday foods bad, we are going to inevitably feel bad about ourselves for eating them. And then we continue that negative self-talk spiral by saying, there's no way I can possibly do this. I'll have to wait for the new year to really get on top of my eating. How many times have we said that? The other closely related thing here is we are also labeling holiday foods as scarce. Not only are they bad, but they are scarce. We hardly ever get this. I talk about this specifically in the holiday episode from last year, and I promise. You can actually make pumpkin pie anytime of the year they sell canned pumpkin year round. They saw the ingredients to make your grandmother's fudge recipe year round. These foods are not scarce. And all that Christmas candy is just regular candy packaged in red and green. Holiday foods aren't bad or scarce. They are foods we can enjoy. And still stop when we've had enough. They are foods that we can make year round. If we really want them. You want a pumpkin pie in April for Easter? Absolutely do that. But chances are, you're going to want lemon cake at Easter and that's totally fine. If you don't want lemon cake at Christmas, if that's not your tradition. Enjoy those traditions, but don't lie to yourself that you can't get them at other times of the year. You could, you just don't want to. Remember that when you're eating past your physical enough, the food doesn't continue to taste better and better. This is actually really fascinating experiment to do with yourself. When you continue to eat something that you think is really delicious. And he really examine each and every bite and this, by the way is not to be done like at the Thanksgiving table or at a Christmas party. This is an activity that I have my clients do with just themselves at home. I had a client do this with Oreos a couple of weeks ago. And she was like, well, I hate Oreos now. And that's, I feel bad about that. That's not really the point, but the point is that with each and every bite, especially past fullness. Fullness. The experience and the enjoyment of the food actually decreases. So, if you really want to enjoy that slice of pie, that grandma only wants to make once a year. Then savor each bite. And enjoy that experience without decreasing your enjoyment of it. By walking away from the table. So full of food that your stomach is in pain and you end up beating yourself up mentally for overeating. Now you feel gross in your body. You're full of regret. And that did not make grandma's pie taste any better. The overall experience is actually worse. When you overeat it. If you just have the amount. That works well for your body in that moment. It's going to be really enjoyable. Okay. Reason number four, that waiting until after the holidays is not a good idea, is that it reinforces the idea that losing weight requires an overhaul of your lifestyle. Remember, losing weight is not about eating as little as possible and exercising as much as possible. It's about eating a little less than you currently are eating. I promise you, this is how you can lose weight. If you are in maintenance, like you aren't on a steady gain. If you haven't been gaining like a pound a week over the last several months. If you're just kind of maintaining your weight. You only need to drop your intake a little bit, according to your hunger. Because if you're maintaining your weight at the amount you are eating. Then you drop it a little and you will begin to lose weight. Many of my clients come to me and they say, I gained 30 pounds in 2020, or I gained X amount last year, but then they actually, haven't been gaining lately. Most people come to me and they are kind of in maintenance They're maintaining their current weight. They notice that they gained, but then they stopped gaining. Or maybe they've just been at this higher weight for a long time. So this is actually good news. It means we just need to drop intake a little bit. And we do this by watching for the times when we are overeating past physical enough and start there. So this isn't, like I said, at the beginning of this, of this reason, it's not an overhaul of your complete lifestyle. You just watch for those times that you're overeating a little bit. So this could mean, uh, that mid-morning or mid-afternoon snack. That's habit. But you're not actually hungry. This could mean that you're over eating dinner by like five or 10% every night. So we scale back by four or five bites every night, you either just leave that on the plate or you scale back your helpings, a little. Or it could mean that you're overeating dramatically on the weekends where your weekday meals are pretty on track, but you notice that on the weekends, you are constantly feeling very full all weekend long. So just look for those times that you're overeating. And look for the times you can create small reductions. That is not lifestyle overhaul. We don't need to do that during the holidays or really any time. But when we think, well, I can't do it now. I have to wait till after the holidays. Generally, what we're thinking is it's going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of overhaul of what I'm currently doing. And I promise you can start losing weight with a few small changes. We are looking to change just a few tiny things about how we view food and think more about. Why we are eating when we aren't hungry. Like those habit times that snack habit, times that I talked about rather than specifically the foods you are eating. So small changes. Look for those times that you tend to overeat and just start there by scaling back a little. All right. And number five, the last reason that now is the perfect time to start losing weight. Is this gives you momentum. You don't need a new year's resolution. You're just going to keep being consistent. You might be thinking, well, what kind of damage can I really do in the next five weeks? I mean. Kind of a lot. And I don't actually mean on the scale. I mean, if you are completely ignoring your hunger and fullness cues, and also deciding all this holiday food is fun because it's bad and scarce. We're actually damaging our relationship with food. The thing is that new research is suggesting that the typical American actually only gains about two pounds during the holiday, not the five to 10. We've been told. But. The bigger problem is that it's two pounds every year and then two pounds in the summer. So it's just kind of the constant gain over year, over year. That is the issue for Americans. We are gaining as much on average as what we have thought in the past, but it's less about the number on the scale for me and more about the mentality here. If you were thinking about your health during the holidays and prioritizing your self care. By honoring your hunger and fullness cues. You are creating such a better relationship with yourself than thinking. I'm just going to let myself go this holiday season. If you finish the holidays, even two pounds down instead of two pounds up, that's a four pound swing that gives you momentum going into the new year. You will feel confident and ready rather than like you're about to climb Mount Everest on January 1st to attack this weight loss goal. I am still in full swing. Seeing clients this month, we are not taking the month off and I am ready to talk with you too. So if you want more help with this and accountability to actually make it happen this year, if you want to sail through the holiday season with way less stress about your weight. Now is the time to get a free appointment scheduled with me. You can choose a 30 minute consult to see if my coaching program is a perfect fit for you. That's called a strategy session, or you can choose a 50 minute get unstuck session and we really dig in and do some coaching and see where you really need to begin with your weight loss. And we'll see where you're getting stuck. Both are available on my calendar through the end of this calendar year. Those get unstuck sessions were a special for November. I decided to extend them. through the end of this calendar year, so Both are available on my calendar. And I look forward to speaking with you soon. Thanks again for listening to the Eat Well, Think Well, Live Well podcast.