Okay? So stick with me. So this recently happened to a client of mine, she’s made tons of progress, so much progress, and then she had family in from out of town, and she said, Oh my gosh, Denise, I just fell back into my old patterns. I just didn’t want to do it the new way. My brain just said it was so unsafe to do that. 

And she started to go on to tell me, I just can’t trust myself. I just lie to myself. I just can’t do this alone. Alright, so you can hear just the despair in her voice. And so we got a chance to look at that, because that thought, I can’t trust myself, I just lie to myself. It doesn’t come from the Lord.

That’s what we call tornado thinking, it feels just critical and not motivating and feels very defeating. So we helped her make some sense of what happened in her brain and I want to do the same thing for you. So remember, our brain’s three jobs are to be very efficient, to not expend more energy than it needs to, so it doesn’t want to do the hard thing.

It seeks pleasure and it also tries to keep you safe. And so she had a break in her routine by having family and from out of town so to expend extra energy on these new ways felt too much to her brain. It was just easier and more efficient to act in the way that she was familiar with, by the way she acted around those people and those patterns that she’d gotten into.

So it makes total sense that her brain would resist changing in this new scenario, in this out of routine scenario because being out of routine already expends more energy. Secondly, her brain was trying to keep her safe by avoiding danger. And one of the things her brain thought was dangerous was being different than the other people who were staying with her. She had been working really hard on seeing the glass half full and being a positive  person. And apparently her company was very negative people in her perception.

She said they were people who saw the glass half empty and was running out. And it was just easier to be like them. Which you guys, wanting to fit in is just very primitive in our brains. You can think of many, many scenarios where we try to fit in even though we’re not teenagers anymore. Even though we’re not grade schoolers, we still want to fit in.

We want to fit in with our church friends. We want to fit in with our family.  We don’t want to be an outcast. We don’t want to be different and her brain was just trying to be safe. The coolest  part is that she could detect this while it was happening, isn’t that amazing? That is just so amazing.

That’s what brings me to what this doesn’t mean. So your brain will offer you that you haven’t made progress, that you’ll never figure this out, and by her simply recognizing that it was easier to be like them shows me that she has made so much progress. She is so aware of her thoughts. She knew exactly what she was doing.

She even said to me, I chose to do that. And so if you find yourself out of routine, falling back into patterns that were familiar to that specific routine, whether it was vacation, visiting someone else. Someone else’s house or having guests in your house and you find yourself doing patterns that are familiar to that scenario that you have somewhat unlearned in your regular routine, just recognize it doesn’t mean that you haven’t made progress. 

You have made progress in your normal routine. You just haven’t practiced them in this out of routine yet. That’s all. Which is one of the reasons we make game plans. Game plans are where we decide how we want to handle these new situations. And I have a whole podcast episode on how to do that. Just recognize you haven’t practiced the new habits in the out of routine scenario. Doesn’t mean you haven’t made progress. Even if you found you have gained weight during this temporary out of routine scenario, let’s say you gained five or 10 pounds. Let’s go even 20. Let’s say you gain 20 pounds practicing these old behaviors or these familiar behaviors in this out of routine scenario.

That doesn’t mean you haven’t made progress  because you know, once you’re back in routine, what to do. And as I was talking to my client, we got to a place where she recognized that it was absolutely true that she knows exactly what to do next. She understands why her brain was trying to keep her safe.

And now, that situation has passed; now that she is back into a familiar scenario,  she knows exactly what to do next, which brings up the next thing. Your  brain may want to say, see, you’re so weak. You’ll never figure this out. You’ll never be at a healthy weight. That temporary break in routine, that temporary out of routine scenario says nothing about your future.

It says nothing about what you’re going to do in the next 10 minutes. It says nothing about what you’re going to do in the next year or next month. You get to choose what you do going forward. You get to choose what you do the next time you’re in that scenario. You get to choose if you’re going to make a game plan, if you’re going to plan to be different, if you’re going to plan to sit down and talk to your brain about all the things that could come up  and then solve for them. 

So you had a temporary situation where you were in an out of routine scenario and your new habits did not transfer. In fact, you were simply using the familiar behaviors that you know in that scenario. That’s all. You don’t have to make it mean anything else. You have still made so much progress. You know exactly what to do next and you get to think and feel and choose how you act going forward. 

The wheels did not come off the bus. You have not negated all of your progress. In fact, I would ask you to ask your brain, how is it that you have made even more progress by seeing yourself behave in a way that you didn’t want to? And here’s what’s so crazy guys, is every single day we act in a way that you didn’t want to or do things that we don’t want to do or have learned from, like, ops don’t want to do that again. 

So for example, if I’m in a bad mood and I’m rude to my husband, don’t want to do that again. I get to go apologize to him. I also get to know how to not overstress myself. Maybe I had too many things on my to do list that I was feeling pressure and overstressed.

I just use it as a learning opportunity and to know that I’m not a garbage wife. I’m not a garbage human. I just learned what worked and what didn’t work and I get to change it. 

And it’s funny when it comes to weight loss, we make it mean so much. I have no willpower. I’ll never change. No! We just learn and we grow, we learn and we grow, and that is the PhD of being at a healthy weight is not making it mean like I have to give up and I can’t do it. No, let’s learn from it. Let’s grow from it. 

Let’s go back to what was working. You do know exactly what to do next. And if you’re listening to this podcast and you say, that sounds cool Denise, but I really don’t know what to do next.  That’s not a problem because I’ve got the answer for you. I want you to come to weightlosswithaholyspirit.com. We have a simple process that teaches you how to surrender your food and weight struggles to the Lord in a step by step way to lose weight in a way that is 100 percent guided by the Lord, surrounded by a community of other Catholic women. 

Doesn’t it just feel so lovely? There’s nothing to figure out and oh, by the way, you get to eat the food you love in a way that you feel really good about. We teach you how to eat the food that you love without guilt. I promise you. It is the answer. It’s the one thing that you haven’t tried if you haven’t come there. 

It’s the one thing that you cannot fail at. Recently, I was working with a client and she said, oh my gosh, this is the first time I don’t feel like I’m failing or cheating by eating the food I love. I’m like, I know, isn’t this way? of losing weight, just amazing. 

All right. Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast. Have a blessed day. I’ll see you at weightlosswiththeholyspirit.com. God bless.