When I was writing this example, I thought, you know what? This is probably more accurately a preschooler these days because we expect kids to have so much information when they come to school. But I’m gonna go back in my day. I’m gonna be 48 this year. 

So I guess in the early eighties you went to kindergarten  and learned  lots of stuff. You weren’t like, at least in my house, you weren’t taught a lot of things. I didn’t go to preschool beforehand. I didn’t know my letters until I went to kindergarten. 

And I want you to imagine little Denise going to kindergarten and her teacher being like, you don’t know your letters. Because I came to kindergarten with a lot of other information, I knew my manners. I knew how to say please and thank you. I knew how to dress dolls. I knew how to play with Barbies. I knew how to pick up my toys. I knew what my colors were. 

I knew shapes  and all of that was really helpful. But I didn’t know my letters, and until I knew my letters, I wouldn’t be able to read. And I want you to think of yourself as that kindergartner. You are coming into weight loss school and you know a lot of things. You know a lot of things about nutrition and exercise and hormones and supplements and all of that is super helpful. To help you lose weight.  

But now we’re in a different school and we’re in lasting weight loss school. And there are some things that you need to learn. There’s some skills that you need to develop so that you can have lasting weight loss. 

And so before I talk about those things, I wanna talk about the three reasons that you have not been having weight loss and the skills that you need in this new school of lasting weight loss school to bridge that gap. 

It’s very, very simple. There are three reasons you haven’t seen lasting results in the past, and those three reasons are that you’ve been focusing only on the physical  or the majority of your effort has been on the physical, focusing on diet and exercise. 

The second reason is that you have been missing a lot of the true obstacles that are standing in the way of you being at a lasting weight loss. You know how to diet and exercise all day long, but what you don’t know is how to solve for the things that are throwing you off. 

Do you hear me? I see. Soft. The things that are throwing you off, you simply stop dieting an exercise and make it mean a whole bunch of character flaws of you that you’re too weak, that you don’t have willpower. No. There are reasons that you’re being thrown off and you just haven’t correctly identified them, so that once you identify them, you can solve for them. 

And the third reason is that you’ve been relying on your own strength,  and of course, you’ve been relying on your own strength. You don’t even know how to access the Lord’s strength in this area  because the truth is, if you were anything like me, you would pray a lot.  Pray lots of novenas. Pray, pray, pray, pray, pray.

And that usually happened between the hours of like 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM and then I’d go on with my day. I’d pick up and go on my own strength throughout my day, and I had no idea how to access the Lord’s strength or even let him talk to me for the rest of the day, especially about food and weight.  

So it’s those three areas  focusing only on the physical, missing the two obstacles, and relying on your own strength that have truthfully been the reason that you can’t keep the weight off. So now let’s get to learning how to keep the weight off. 

Remember, this is lasting weight loss school. These are the things that we do in the weight loss with the Holy Spirit program. But even if you’re not in that program, I want you to start implementing these in whatever method you are using  to lose weight, to be at your healthy weight.

Okay, let’s start with number one. Focusing only on the physical. You have been pouring energy  and time  and money on the physical side of weight loss, which is of course important, but it won’t lead you to lasting weight loss, and that’s the diet and the exercise and the hormones and the supplements.

I was just talking with a brand new client  and she said, brand new, right? So it was our very first meeting and we were talking about the skills necessary for lasting weight loss, and she just said, I don’t, I just know that. I can’t eat sugar or bread and lose weight. 

And as you know, if you’ve been listening to this podcast long enough, my food rules are that you eat food, you love that you feel good about eating, and that is appropriate for the woman who will be eating it.

For example, whoever, if you have a busy night, maybe you, do fast food or takeout or something that is reasonable for that schedule of your day anyway, but. Helping her understand that you will never  be able to  eat food, like not bread or sugar. If that is in fact holding up your weight loss, you’ll never want to do that, not include bread or sugar in your meal plan.

If you really believe that is what’s going to get you to lasting weight loss, and that is what is necessary. You won’t ever want to actually do that long term unless we do these other skills. So simply believing, oh, I’ve gotta give up sugar and bread, I’ve gotta give up sugar. And bread gets you zero places  because you’ll be able to do that for a bit of time. White knuckling. 

And then there’s going to be a point where you’re like, well I’m, I’m tired of doing that. The goal of not focusing on the physical and truly focusing on the other two components of weight loss,  which are emotional and spiritual, will get you to a place that if you do not want to eat sugar, you won’t wanna do it.

You, it just won’t be something that you want or you won’t want to eat bread if you really think that’s holding up your weight loss. We’re just not gonna white knuckle. My point is we don’t do white knuckle through physical changes. In fact, this client even said, you know, it’s like, I just want to spend two months of just really buttoning up my food and eating good, “good”.

That’s what she said. And then we just explored. Okay. And then what?  And what  you, my podcast listener and I both want for you  is to get off the cycle of the, I’ll be good for two months, three months, two years, and then it all falls apart. We’re just not living white knuckling anymore. It just doesn’t make sense.

It is the answer to why are my results not lasting? Why can’t I keep the weight off? Because you have only been focusing your time, your energy, and your money on the physical side and white knuckling through it. 

Again, it will not be helpful for lasting results because you haven’t identified the patterns and the habits. That are throwing you off, and that’s what we need to do. We need to solve for this so that you know that changing the physical is not where to start, okay? Just believe that,  and it’s not where to put your effort. 

Where to put your effort is emotional and spiritual. another way I can prove that the physical is not the answer is because focusing on the physical and learning about how to change things physically would be the answer if you did not know what to do. But in general, you do know what to do.  

But there’s something standing in the way of you being able to do it lasting, and that something that’s standing in the way is the emotional and the spiritual. So let’s address the emotional missing  true obstacles  you haven’t yet pinpointed exactly what’s standing in the way of you being at a healthy weight, which I just like to say the things that throw you off. 

Whether it’s fatigue, emotional stress. Physical pain, sometimes pain is a big trigger for us. It’s what are the ups and downs of your life that we need to help support you through that  instead of turning to food  and, once you identify those things, you uncover the hidden blocks. Then we just solve for them, because I promise you, everything in life is solvable.

We either change it with your mindset or we come up with some practical solutions or both. But everything is solvable. You aren’t broken, you aren’t weak. You do have willpower. 

We just need to give you some tools to be able to, number one, identify what throws you off  the true cause. 

Sometimes my clients will say, well, my cravings are what thrown me off. Okay, well maybe, but do those cravings come outta the blue or can we identify certain times when you start to get this craving, is it a true craving for the food or perhaps it’s just an escape. Something stressful happened and your brain’s like, Ooh, I know what will make you feel better. 

And we just go for that because we’re having emotional pain. I had a client tell me that she  went on vacation and she just felt so good about herself. She wrote down the food that she was eating. She felt like she enjoyed her food and felt really, quote good. She said the word good. I was really good.

And then she thought, I certainly have lost weight. So she comes home from vacation, steps on the scale, did not lose weight, and starts to say to herself all the negative things. And one of the things that she started to say to herself was, I’ll never get off this rat race. I’m never gonna get off this rat race.

She felt despair. From that feeling of despair, she went to go eat sugar and when she ate some sugar, then she just ate sugar most of the day. And so she could say, you know, looking at, without dissecting that, she might say, oh, I just, you know, felt sugar cravings. Do we feel sugar cravings? Or was it truthfully the way that we were talking to ourselves? 

And saying, I’ll never get off this rat race. And then negativity, that makes us feel in despair and hopeless, and nobody likes to feel hopeless and in despair. So of course we go to the sugar,  we go to the foods that release that dopamine that will feel better. So you can see it’s very clear that we can identify what are the things throwing her off. And solve for them.

As I record this, we’re in the middle of Lent and our lint and fast, is to stay away from the scale. One of the reasons I have people stay away from the scale, okay? Maybe the only reason is because it’s very distracting. 

If we are going to use your time and your energy and your emotions on something, I want it to be in something that gives you progress, that works on the solution, that’s focused on problem solving. 

I don’t wanna distract you by putting you on the scale and making your brain believe that because for one week you  opened your eyes and were doing something that was life-giving for yourself. That stepping on the scale and not seeing those physical changes negated all of that.  

No, I want her to live in that energy of seeing how she was on vacation, showed up for herself, wanted to keep track of her food, wanted to get prepared for our very first session together.

I want her to stay in that energy, that energy where she feels celebration, where she feels powerful, where she feels in control. 

There’s just no reason, in my opinion, to create obstacles just so we have to coach ourselves and get distracted through them, especially in the beginning. Why in the world would we make our lives harder in the beginning, which is another reason why we make an easy to stick to meal plan. 

We’re learning the skill of. Thinking through your day and anticipating your needs, let’s just make it easy. Let’s let all food be a possibility. We need to make things easy. Build skills one thing at a time.  

Okay? So again, focusing on the emotional. Learning how your brain works, learning how when your brain detects danger, you go into survival mode, fight, flight, and freeze. That is when you stress eat. Learning how your brain works will teach you how to calm your brain down when you are in a stressful situation.

Because as you know, if you’ve been listening to us long enough, a calm brain does not stress eat. learning. What foods create chaos in your life and is it the foods and the food substance that creates the cravings, which it might be, and that is kind of part of the physical. 

Or is it eating those foods in a chaos brain, a chaos, stressed brain?  It’s that stuff. When we start looking at the emotional side of weight loss, that you really can have lasting weight loss. No one’s ever told you that these are the things that you need to look at.  

You identify for the problems and you solve for them. And gang, I cannot say the emotional side without bringing this up. How you  talk to yourself. Oh my gosh, you guys, the more I learn about the Lord, the more I learn about me as his. Creature. 

The more I learn about how much he loves me, the more I learn about how  the way that I talk to me is how I’m talking to him. As the Holy Spirit lives in me, the more I see how  important it is.  To be kind and gentle and tender  with myself because I cannot be separated from the Holy Spirit. He lives in me. He lives in you.  

You guys, I used to have such a hard time  with the whole part of scripture that said I am a temple of the Holy Spirit, that he lives in us. I’m paraphrasing there ’cause that’s certainly not beautiful the way I just said that. 

I used to say, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that in my brain, but I never internalized it. This work helps me internalize that. I now see that the way I talk to me is the way I’m talking to the Lord. I don’t say that to criticize you.

I just say that to let you know it’s possible that you’ll start to be able to live with the Holy Spirit at most moments of your life, and that is why it is so critical on a supernatural realm to speak to yourself kindly. 

But I mean, the truth is, is that if we’re not even talking on a supernatural realm, if we’re just talking about weight loss, the way that you speak to yourself  will get you the results that you have. 

If you think you can’t lose weight and you say that to yourself all day long, I can’t lose weight.  You won’t try. If you say to yourself, I’m never gonna get off the rat race, and that feels hopeless. You never get off the rat race. If you say, I’m so weak. I have no self-control. I can’t believe you did it again, stupid. 

Watch the words you’re saying to yourself  each time you use that negativity. It’s zapping your energy. If you’re walking around all day feeling fatigued and exhausted, one of the best ways that you can start to create energy in your body and to give yourself more energy is to start talking to yourself  differently.

And the only way that will happen is to start to notice when you’re saying negative things.  Okay? Just be committed to becoming aware. Of the things that you’re saying to yourself,  it’s just the first place to start, and I promise you, with some intention of noticing that you’re saying things and deciding to not say them.

You don’t have to say, I’m the best person ever, but to just be say, oh wait, I’m not gonna say that to myself. Within seven to 10 days, you’ll start to notice your energy increasing. 

First step is noticing it. Second step is deciding not to say that, and the third step is to start intentionally noticing  the amazing things that you’re doing, the amazing things like you’re recording this podcast even though you kind of wanted to not record it right now. You wanted to go do some other, like check your email and things that didn’t feel quite as exhausting. 

Oh my gosh. Exhausting Denise. It isn’t exhausting. Recording a podcast is exhilarating, so I noticed myself saying something that was zapping my energy and then I just decided, no, I wanna record this podcast. This is gonna be amazing. She’s going to learn something that she’s never heard before. This podcast will transform. Her weight loss.

She will now know the key to lasting weight loss seat. You gotta talk to yourself like that, and then you accomplish the things that you want. It’s so amazing. It’s such a new energy, but you can do things like notice when you made an easy to stick to meal plan and you wanted to make a change, and you said, you know what? I’m not gonna make a change. 

Now. There’s nothing wrong with making a change, but simply saying, you know, I’m just gonna stick by my decision.  And love your reasons for it. Or you might say, you know, I am gonna make a change and I’m gonna surrender that change. I’m gonna write it down before I take a first bite. Wow. I really didn’t wanna write it down, but I did. 

Starting to notice all the good things that you’re doing releases a little bit of dopamine, so you’re getting these little dopamine hits in your brain all day long. And isn’t that why we’re turning to sugar? We need to start talking to ourselves in a way that is energizing, that’s uplifting, that’s positive, because a positive, uplifted, energized brain doesn’t stress eat. 

Okay? The other part of the emotional part of weight loss is starting to tune into your real needs. Being able to identify even what your needs are. Which is a skill. Oh my gosh, it’s such a skill.  What are my needs right now? It’s my need for rest. A hug, affirmation, approval.  What is my need? What am I feeling?

And you know, guys in the beginning of when you ask yourself, what am I even feeling?  Your emotional literacy is just gonna be really low. You’ll probably be mad, glad, happy, sad. But it might be fun to also Google Feelings Wheel and just start to check in with your feelings. 

Start to get, increase your emotional literacy. I should do a podcast all on that. Identifying your needs, meeting your needs, knowing what you enjoy, what your uniqueness is, setting down other people’s rules. Noticing when you’re believing that you should do this or should do that.  See, that’s the stuff that makes life feel heavy. All the shoulds.  

And if we can release you from the shoulds. And tap into what the Lord expects of you. Oh my gosh. Life gets easier. Life gets lighter. And you might notice that one of the things that we need to solve for is your life feeling heavy and burdened and overscheduled and overextended. You potentially could be doing more than the Lord is even expecting from you.

And if you are trying to do more than the Lord expects from you, then he can’t give you strength for that. Which I think is a beautiful segue to number three. One of the things that’s been holding up your weight loss or keeping it from being lasting is you are just relying on your own strength to do this.

You have been carrying the load of life, the load of weight loss all by yourself. You just don’t have to do that anymore. The more you talk to the Lord, the more you bring. Your food and weight struggles to him. The more you learn how to surrender, which I love the surrender novena, you know that. 

And it’s one of the reasons why I love our 63 surrendered challenge. 63 days. It’s grounded in the surrender novena. So not only are you saying the surrender novena for 63 days, so it’s seven surrender novena, seven times nine is 63. 

But each day you’re learning how to. Surrender your food and weight struggles to the Lord. There’s just a very simple system that you do three daily disciplines to surrender your food and weight struggles to the Lord. You just don’t have to do this on your own anymore. 

And when you are inviting him in, when you are doing the daily habits. The daily practice that we have that we call the surrender method is you say the surrender novena, you check in with the Lord in the morning. We’ve got specific questions that you connect with him on. You make an easy to stick to meal plan. You can connect with him at night. 

And we have a fifth one that’s more advanced. It’s not part of the challenge, but it is part of the entire surrender method, and that is when we’re looking at your mind and running thought models is a self-coaching model where it just helps us get real clarity on. The thoughts that we’re thinking and the results that we’re  giving.

It’s very much based on, second Corinthians ten five that says, take captive your thoughts and align them with the Lord, which a hundred percent assumes that the thoughts going on in your brain, which are like 60,000 in a day, will not all be aligned with the Lord. Did you guys know that? You’re only conscious of five to 10% of the thoughts going on in your brain anyway. 

Which means 90% are subconscious, but they’re still driving your behavior. It’s just super important that that advanced,  self-coaching skill where you’re really becoming aware of your thoughts and aligning them to the Lord  is where an aligned brain with the Lord does not stress eat. 

I mean, you guys, you can see how all of these skills are leading you to a place where you’re emotionally and spiritually balanced. And when you’re emotionally and spiritually balanced,  you can’t help but be physically balanced. 

And if there is a gap in the knowledge that you need  to create the physical change that you want,  then all we have to do is solve for it. We go get that knowledge and apply it. We get the knowledge and apply it. 

See, you guys have the knowledge and what’s standing in the way of your ability to apply it is the emotional and spiritual things that are emotionally throwing you off and the lack of spiritual support. Not that you’ve been doing anything wrong, it’s just been a titch backwards. 

Once you’re  emotionally and spiritually balanced, emotionally balanced, spiritually strengthened, you become physically well, and if there is a gap in what. Needs to happen for you to be practicing  to get the physical result you want. Then we fill that gap, get the knowledge, and apply it. 

I hope that feels really simple to your brain. The world has been teaching you to start with the physical, and guess what? There’s a percentage of people that, that’s all they need to know. Do the physical. That’s all they need. 

And then there’s a group of people that that’s not what they need. I’m gonna raise my hand on the second group. I need to be emotionally balanced. I need to be spiritually strengthened. And then my physical,  feels more simple and gentle. I need to sleep more. All right? So I need to solve for that. How do I sleep more?  

See?  Makes sense and  from being emotionally balanced and spiritually strengthened, my client who believes. I can’t have sugar and I can’t eat bread if I want to lose weight, if that is in fact true, because she might have found that her physical body has balanced out and she’s at her healthy weight.

But if she finds that, oh, you know what? I need to not eat bread and not eat sugar. That will be something she chooses to do. She will gladly do that because she wants the physical results that will come from it, and she won’t need sugar or bread to help her get through life. It will do nothing for her. She does not need it to cope with life because she has other emotional supports and she’s spiritually strengthened. 

So my friends, I hope this has been so helpful for you and has made sense of why you haven’t been able to keep the weight off.  And I hope this gives you so much hope because there is a solution, there is a solution. 

And if you wanna be part of hundreds of other Catholic women who are living the solution, come over to Weight loss with the Holy spirit.com and we’ll get you started today. Or feel free to email us at [email protected]. 

All right, everybody, have a blessed day.