And the second reason I am so grateful to be here today is because I’m actually out of bed. You see, I’ve spent the last three days flat on my back in bed with a fever and an upset tummy and it feels so good to be back to the land of the living. And that is why I thought I would come to you with this episode of how to leverage your sick days for weight loss.

And not only weight loss, but lasting weight loss. And I’m not talking about the few pounds that you lose in water weight, although I will discuss that just a little bit. I’m talking about the even more nuanced skills that we learn when we’re sick, that we can then transform and apply to our weight loss journey.

So let’s dive in. First of all, you will likely lose. It’s a few or several pounds of water weight. It totally depends on how long you were sick, how much you drank, your symptoms, were you vomiting, did you have diarrhea, all that jazz. But I’m really going to encourage you to not get on the scale.

Don’t think I wasn’t tempted this morning to get on the scale, to see how much weight I’d lost. But then I just realized I was setting myself up for a whole lot of mind drama. And the reason it would be a whole lot of mind drama, and I say it’s a whole lot of mind drama is because you may or may not know this, but recently I entered into a gut healing protocol, which was very effective for my gut yet put on 20 pounds on my body.

And so my new project is to say, how can I maintain that gut healing and yet lose some of this excess weight? I assume some of it was weight that I needed to gain. I’m not sure, but the point is that I will soon be entering into this season of intentionally trying to lose weight and this scale may be an indication of my progress. So therefore, stepping on the scale with a sickness would just throw me into a tailspin of Having a false sense of success or maybe a false starting point, it just wasn’t worth it.

That said, I like to ask myself, what do you hope you will feel by stepping on the scale? And my brain thought, well, I just want to see a lower number. So I said, and what do you think you will feel if you see that lower number? And that’s where I actually stopped to see the truth. And the truth is, that the number on the scale would give me zero actual information.

Zero. And so I thought, is zero information worth all the mind drama? I said no, not today. So I moved on with my day. So that’s that. But now, let’s look at how we can leverage our sick days to teach us about how to lose weight even better. And not only how to lose weight, but to maintain our healthy weight.

The first thing that I learned, and that you will learn, is how to be kind and loving to ourselves. You see, when we’re sick, We don’t blame ourselves. We’re not critical. Think about when your kid is sick. Do you blame them? Are you critical? Do you think, Look at what you’ve done to yourself! You’re so weak!

No. When we’re sick, it just happens. It happens from living in this world. I find that being sick gives us a chance to practice being nice to ourselves, making ourselves comfortable, and really tuning in to what we need. You see, in weight loss, we aren’t nice to ourselves and kind only when we meet our goals.

No, we can be kind and gentle and uplifting and encouraging and tender to ourselves during the whole journey. That’s how you maintain weight loss for the rest of your life. Not by being critical and condemning. We’ve got to be kind to ourselves. Number two. We tune into what we actually need. When we’re sick we have less distractions that allow us to truly tune into our needs.

We ask ourselves, oh, what do I need? What will make me feel better? And sometimes, what’s worth the effort to do? Because I know what will make me feel better later. Even though I don’t really feel like doing it. Like, Being in bed with a headache and knowing that that cold head wrap is in the freezer. And it will be so worth it if I could just drag myself downstairs to get it out of the freezer.

And it is! And if you don’t have one of those cold head wraps, oh my gosh, they are so amazing. They just wipe out the discomfort of a fever as well as headaches. I love them. Number three is patience and surrender. You know the body will respond only on its timing. Whether we’re talking about healing a sickness or weight loss, we can’t push the body to do what it’s not going to do, or not ready to do. Now that doesn’t mean we can’t try things and experiment with weight loss, but we’ve got to surrender the results.

That is key to this journey. Now I told you I’ll be starting this weight loss journey myself over the next few weeks, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m going into this as a scientist. I do know that my job is to walk closely with the Lord the whole time and let Him reveal what He wants me to know and do.

The results are totally in His hands. Number 4 is suffering. We know that suffering refines us and reveals what cannot be known in any other way. We don’t go through suffering for nothing. The Lord uses our suffering for many reasons, but relevant to this discussion, I’d like to look at what I know now that I couldn’t have learned any other way.

This is true for any suffering or any struggle in your life. So through this sickness, I have learned, it’s okay to be honest about my needs. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to inconvenience people. I also learned that I need to train my 14 year old to start waking up on his own. I also learned that my husband is such a great guy.

I got to see a really sweet side of him as he stepped in and helped out with our kids. Our boys are 14 and 7. So really, helping out means, one night he took one son to the movies, another night he went to Costco with my other son to pick up his glasses, and he picked my younger son up from school each day. Isn’t that so sweet? And then they would stop and they would get a little snack or something afterwards. I’ve learned from the sickness that I’ve kind of been blindly following this gut healing protocol and now it’s starting to feel a little pressure. And I think it’s time to start allowing myself to experiment and find what really works for me. I also learned from the sickness that I love the cold head wrap and if you guys don’t know about deep blue It’s this essential oil lotion from do TERRA and you rub it on your head. It knocks out a headache. It is just so amazing.

So let’s look at your weight loss struggle. All the ups and the downs, the triumphs, the trials, the diets, the wins, those things that seem like failures. What do you know now that you could have never known without having gone through all of that? Now that said, we get to take those lessons and move forward. And for everyone who’s listening, who’s over 40, who’s wondering why what they’ve done in the past isn’t working anymore, I have great news!

Because I know why it’s not working. I know exactly what’s holding up your weight loss, and it’s not a diet, or not enough willpower, or not exercising enough. You see, from all the women that I work with who are over 40, there are three things that are holding back their weight loss. And I will be revealing those three things in my workshop, Weight Loss Over 40.

What’s really holding you back? It’s January 26th at 9am, Pacific: 12 noon. Of course there will be a replay, but you definitely want to get signed up so that you finally know these secrets. Go to weightlosswithaholyspirit.com and get your spot today.