And so, if you want to know what that is, that God has created for you to learn how to try to lose weight, keep listening. So the challenge that my sister invited me to do with her was called 75 hard. I had heard about it before. It is a common popular challenge where you adhere to 75 practices, where you do five different practices for 75 days.

The practices are to drink a gallon of water, exercise for 45 minutes twice a day, take a progress picture, read 10 pages of a nonfiction book and no alcohol and follow a diet. It can be any sort of clean eating diet, but just no cheats or anything. I have a pretty clean diet already.

And so what I really wanted was just to cut out the diet soda. And I have had some sugar free candy so I cut that out as well. And then I use this as an opportunity to really stick to my safe eating plan and part of that safe eating plan, if you don’t know what that is, you can listen to my podcast on creating a safe eating plan.

But, for me, it was mostly to not eat standing. So I really challenged myself during this time to make sure that every bite of food that went into my mouth, I ate seated. So that was pretty cool.  So I’d heard of this challenge before. And the truth is, I’d never been interested in it until my sister said she did it and I was like, what?

You did it. That’s amazing! I was just amazed that she did it. Well, I think I was more amazed that she did it and I didn’t know that she did it. So once I found out that she had done it and she completed it I was like, oh my gosh, if you ever do it again, let me know. Maybe I’ll do it with you. See, the challenge was really created for mental toughness. But I was gonna do it just because my sister did it.

So I first heard about it on Mother’s Day with my sister and three weeks later, she called me and said, hey, do you want to start June 1st? Which was like three days later. 

So she says she didn’t have any plans to start again, but then I get a call on a Monday and she says, hey, we’re going to start on Friday. Do you want to do it? And I was. Do you want to do it with me? So I listened to the podcast describing how to do it, and I decided I would take the leap with her.

And so although I learned many, many, many things along the way, what I really loved was how this taught me, not mental toughness, my friends, not a relationship with my sister, my friends, but how to simply try softer. And so that’s what I want you to hear in this podcast. And then I also want you to hear what I’ve put together for you so that you can learn how to try softer yourself. 

So the first thing that I learned was how to be flexible. I think the try harder approach would say, manager time. Get clear on where you’re wasting time. And all I said was, hey, why don’t I be a little more flexible with my time? Let me experiment with a few things. I experimented with waking up earlier, not because I had to, that was another thing that I realized I have a choice in all of this, but because let’s just try waking up a little bit earlier when my brain is super active.

Let’s see if I can rearrange. Let’s see if I can do some of my creative work earlier and then that would give me a little extra time to enjoy the activity and the extra workouts later. And I tried that. Being flexible allowed me to make sure that my day was what I wanted, got me what I wanted, which also opened my eyes to places where I was spending my time that wasn’t actually getting me what I wanted.

Maybe I was some, “The try harder way” would say, oh, you’re wasting time. What I could say when I tried softer was, oh, you know what? This actually isn’t getting me what I actually want.  I’m spending some of my precious energy and time and actually not getting the results that I want. 

So by allowing myself to live my life, I could, the way that I wanted to, I could see all the ways I was allowing my day to not be my own, simply out of habit, which what I mean by that is I did this over the summer. And so I believed that I had to be home with my kids at certain times.  And I recognized, oh my gosh, that’s just an old thought. My kids aren’t even awake. Denise, you have more flexibility than you even realize. So out of habit, I was just used to believing that every moment that my children are awake, I should be home. 

And when I realized that that thought was keeping me from actually having the life that I wanted.  I could decide when do I want to be home? When do I want to spend time with the kids? When are they available? When are they not with their friends? And I could be more intentional with my time in a way that got me what I wanted. 

Which brings me to the next thing. As I started to recognize the ways that my voice and the ways that my words were indicating that I had to try harder. I would say things like, well, I have to go do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then when I realized, no, you don’t Denise, my attitude softened and I would say, oh, it’s really important to me.

It’s really important for me to get this second walk in. It’s really important for me to tell this client that I need to move to a different time or I’m not available. It’s really important to me to honor that commitment to my friend, to go walking to her. It’s really important to me. I remember one time I had to say to my husband over the weekend, honey, it doesn’t matter to me what we do this weekend, but on Sunday, can you please, please, please just encourage me as much as you can to get that second workout in, which usually was a walk.

Or I’ll tell you about some other fun things that I did for my exercise, but I was starting to ask for what I need in a real soft way and not believe that inconveniencing someone else meant that I shouldn’t do it. It started to be nice to me. This is another thing nice to me in a really unique way that I hadn’t explored before.

So I’ll, so since I had to do, do you hear that in my voice already? Since this challenge required workouts, I thought, well, how can I make them more fun? I learned how to put the bike hitch, I learned how to put my bike rack on my car and ask my husband to air up my tires and I was able to do that all by myself, put my bike rack on and off, put my bike on and off because we don’t live in a safe place to ride my bike from my home.

So I learned how to do that easily. I lined up talking dates with friends as I would walk. I noticed that my feet started to get pretty sore, so I would ice my feet. And I actually needed to buy new shoes, so I bought new shoes. I tried some new workouts. Things like Soulcore and Soulcore is like a stretching exercise that you do to the rosary.

Like I already said, I started to bike more, I started to use my foam roller more, I started to go to the gym more, and use new machines. It was so fun. I continued to look for ways that my life was improving by doing this challenge because it was very easy. My brain wanted to say, oh, it’s so much work, you shouldn’t do this.

And I would challenge myself to say, ooh, no. How is this actually improving my life? How is this making my life richer, better? Not taking away from what I want to be doing, but actually adding to what I want to be doing. And one of the ways was in listening to new podcasts and all of the ideas that sprang from this challenge, which I’m going to be sharing with you, “The Lord Created For You” in just a little bit, and the new books I started to read. 

And finally, the way that I started to be softer was to stay very close to my reason and to look at every time I wanted to give up and to just be so gentle with myself. And so what’s crazy is that my sister did finish the 75 hard challenge earlier this year. And then when she invited me to do it again, we were doing it with one of her girlfriends and probably three quarters of the way through I was talking to her and I was like, oh my gosh, you have such a busy day.

How are you going to get your walks in or are you going to do them? And she goes, Oh, she’s like, I gave up on that weeks ago. I was like, what? I was speechless. I was like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe you quit. I mean, I didn’t, I wasn’t shaming her, but I can’t believe I didn’t know.  And she goes, I didn’t want to tell you cause I didn’t want to  encourage you to give up or you know, steal your motivation.

And, you know, after she said that, I was like, well, well, thank you. You know what, actually, thank you for not telling me because it probably would have given me a pretty good reason to give up. And by the time she told me, I only had like 30 days left. And so every time I wanted to give up, even including the time that my sister said, it’s not the best time for me.

I thought to myself, well, Denise, you could give up and I would always give myself permission. Denise, you can give up. You don’t have to do this. And then I would say, well, okay, well, why would I give up? And then I thought, because my sister stopped and I was like, well, I don’t like that reason. Because you guys, one of my rules that I live by is I don’t make decisions for myself based on what other people decide for themselves. 

Like , that doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would I choose something for me? Just because you chose something for you.  If I don’t love that. And then another time I wanted to give up was because I could tell my husband was frustrated and he wanted to go do something. I don’t recall what it was and I just thought, Oh, Denise, you could not do this. And I thought, well, then why would I would give up? Why? Because he’s inconvenienced. Well, I didn’t like that reason either. A  couple other times it got late and I had to do workouts at like nine o’clock or go for a walk or go to my basement. And I thought, well, I could just give up.

And then I was like, well, you could, but why? Just because it’s hard? Inconvenient? I didn’t like that reason either. And so trying softer just met me where I was. And I was like, Hey, Denise, you don’t have to do this. It’s okay. Do you want to give up? And after I talked to myself a little bit, I was like, you know what? This will all be over in 45 minutes. And we won’t even have to have this conversation. And each day I just learned how to make it easier and easier for myself. You know what? If we wait till noon to do our first workout, it’s probably going to feel really hard later in the day. Maybe we make sure the first workout is before nine o’clock.

That’ll really help. So I learned ways and hacks to make my life easier. For example, one of the things that you had to do for the challenge was to read 10 pages of a nonfiction book. And on the days that I went to the gym, I would take my son, that was fun, and I would read while I was riding a bike. And so I just tried to see what ways can I help myself?

What ways can I support myself? Okay. And so you can take all of the things that you just heard, being flexible, kinder to yourself, allowing yourself to live the life that you want and that your day is what you want and not what you want just out of habit. Knowing that you have a hundred percent choice for everything in your day. 

And if you choose to not do something or you want to give up, give yourself that out and talk to yourself and then decide if that’s still something you want to do and just love your reasons if you do. Well, soon into this challenge, the Lord revealed to me, and thank God he did, because this was also another reason why I didn’t want to give up, was because I knew I would be releasing this to you.

I was like, this is very interesting. People love having challenges. People love results. And I would say that the biggest lasting result of me doing this challenge is what I’m going to reveal right now. People love being told what to do. They love having a community of  whether it’s one person or a hundred people all working towards the same goal and they want it to kind of stretch them just a little bit like it doesn’t really make sense.

Parts of it make sense and are very simple for them to do. And the other parts are like, ooh,  that’ll be kind of hard. But it’s actually something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. And so I thought, how can I create something like this for Catholic women, something that would lead to lasting results, something that would lead them closer to the Lord, that would lead them freer from feeling something that would also lead to lasting weight loss results, something that would also release them from the worry that they feel about food. 

So often, what should I eat? What shouldn’t I eat? And I also wanted to incorporate something that is so powerful in my life. And that is the Surrender Novena. And so I have created a 63 day challenge based on the Surrender Novena. And it’s 63 days because it is seven novenas back to back to back. And during this challenge, we will also be incorporating four other spiritual practices that will help you integrate what I feel to be the most essential elements of the Weight Loss with the Holy Spirit lifestyle. 

With the weight loss with the Holy Spirit program that now only helps you lose weight, but leads you to living a lifestyle where food and weight are no longer a problem. And so it’s in these 63 days where food and light, we’re food and weight are no longer a problem. And I want to reveal to you what this 63 day challenge is all about in my workshop, surrender the missing piece to lasting weight loss, where I’ll be teaching you how to surrender your food and weight struggles to the Lord by practicing five simple spiritual disciplines every day with our community and with your own community five days a week simple spiritual disciplines every day for 63 days, supported and guided not only by the Surrender Novena, the Holy Spirit, but surrounded by a community of other Catholic women who are doing this same challenge. 

So I invite you to come to my workshop, Surrender the Missing Piece to Lasting Weight Loss, and get all the details about this challenge so that you can do this and you can participate and you can know all, you can know exactly how to implement surrender. You can know exactly how to use surrender as the secret weapon to ending all of your food and weight struggles. So go to weightlosswithaholyspirit.com and get your spot today.