9 Signs Your Overthinking Is Blocking Your Weight Loss

If you are tired all the time and you cannot figure out why, you might be losing all your energy from the neck up. Seriously, there is a specific pattern I see, especially in high-performing women. I'm one of them, and I'm speaking here from personal experience. If you are one of these high-performing women, your brain is likely running 24 hours a day, analyzing, planning, probably some second-guessing, replaying conversations, running the household schedule while simultaneously running the mental spreadsheet of everything you need to do next all at once. If you're like this, your body is very likely quietly running out of fuel to hold you up. So today I'm going to walk you through 9 signs that you are just living in your head, and by the end I'm going to tell you exactly what it is costing your body and what to do about it so you can fix it. I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I'm a PhD nutritionist. I'm a registered dietitian. I'm the owner and founder of PhD Weight Loss, where to date we have helped over 13,500 people collectively drop more than 400 I'm also the owner and founder of Dr. Ashley Wellness, where we provide really high-quality supplements to support the weight loss and weight maintenance journey. Let's dive into it. Sign 1 is that you need proof to trust yourself. Even when you know something in your body, you need external evidence before you can act on it, right? Like a study or multiple data points or a second opinion, maybe a friend who agrees with you. You can't just know. You have to prove it to yourself before you can trust it. The second sign, you overexplain, especially your feelings, especially to people who did not ask for the explanation. You can't just say, hey, this is a no, right? You have to give 3 reasons why. You have to give the context, the caveats, the acknowledgement that you understand the other side. Your brain will not let a boundary just stand on its own. Sign number 3, you distrust your body's signals. When your body says, "This is off," your brain immediately asks, "Based on what?" When you feel tired, your brain says, "Push through anyway. You've not earned rest yet." When you feel full, your brain says, "Finish the plate." When you feel a no rising, your brain talks you into that could be a yes. Your body is speaking so clearly, and your mind is not letting it be heard. Sign number four: You debate yourself constantly. Every decision runs through a committee of internal voices. Should I do this? What if I do this? What are the 10 possible negative outcomes? What if I regret it? You can't move because the debate never resolves, and the debate never resolves because it's not designed to. It's designed to keep you thinking, which is where you feel most safe. Sign number 5, you measure yourself against your own past productivity. You compare yourself to the version of yourself 5 years ago when you were running on cortisol and adrenaline and you were calling it winning. And you use that version of yourself as evidence that you are now falling behind, when the truth is that your body was already telling you back then that the pace was not sustainable. You just kept overriding your body. Now, if any of what I just said feels like I was reading your mind, I want you to know that we can help you unwind this at PhD Weight Loss, because when the mental load is running really, really high, food alone is not gonna move the scale. So at PhD Weight Loss, we look at the whole picture— your metabolism, your history, your nervous system state— and we build a plan, a specific meal plan of what and when and how much to eat. And we support you with your lifestyle, and we build this plan around you as, as a real person, not just around the numbers we'd like to see on the scale. So if something like this interests you, go to myphdweightloss.com, or if you are watching this on YouTube, just click the link in the description and one of our nutritionists will get on the phone with you and we'll share with you exactly what a plan could look like. Sign number 6, you feel tension you can't name. This could feel like chronic tightness in your shoulders, your chest, your jaw. It could manifest as autoimmune conditions. It could feel like chronic pain. So many different symptoms can come about when our nervous system is hypervigilant like this. But if someone asks you what you're feeling, you probably have no answer. Your body is communicating with you in really strong physical language, and your mind is trying to translate it into intellectual that it can process. What's really there, probably some really deep emotions, does not get to land. Sign number 7, you are so exhausted by the end of every day, even when nothing big really happened. You did not run a marathon. You didn't do any kind of massive manual labor. You sat at a desk. You handled the kids. You managed a quote unquote normal day, but you're totally wiped out. That's because overthinking and this hypervigilance burns a lot of fuel, massive amounts of it. Your brain uses roughly 20% of your daily energy at rest, and when it is spinning and it is on high alert all day, that number climbs and your body pays. Sign number 8: You can't make decisions from the neck down. Everything has to run through your mind before your body is allowed to act, even things that your body clearly knows— which food it wants, what person it wants around, which room in your house you feel calm in. Your body has been giving you answers for years, and it knows all of the answers to these questions. By the way, but the mind has been overriding every single one of them. Now, one thing that makes this entire shift a lot smoother is when your body feels steady while all of it is happening. If you are in your head all day and you're dealing with the 3 PM crash, evening cravings, that is your body sending you signals that the whole system needs support. That's why I created GlucoCut Plus. It supports your body's natural GLP-1 activity, which is your own natural fullness hormone that your body makes. It supports steady blood sugar and energy across the day. It helps you hold on to your lean muscle mass while you drop weight, which is very, very important. And it is designed to work with your physiology without stimulants that would just add more noise and more pressure to a nervous system that is already spinning. You can find GlucoCut Plus at drashleywellness.com, or if you're watching this on YouTube, just head on over into the description and I'll include a link. Make sure you guys use code ASHLEY10 for 10% off your first purchase or 20% off your first subscription order with free shipping. Sign number 9, you override the feeling that something does not feel right with logical explanations. This is one that I have been working on hardest in my own life right now, and I wanna tell you about it because I know so many of you will see yourselves in it. Doug, my husband, is one of the most logical analytic thinkers that I have ever met. I love that about him. I think it's one of the reasons that we really work well together in business, but there has been a pattern We have been running for years where my body will get a sense of, um, this just doesn't feel right, and I'll bring it to him and he will give me a completely reasonable, logical explanation for why my feeling sense could be wrong. And most of the time I would fold, right? I would be like, okay, you make so much logical sense, this must be right even though it doesn't feel right to me. I would at that point drop what my body knew because his logic was quote unquote better than my feeling, right? Or my mind decided that. My mind decided, well, gosh, he's so logical, he's proving a point, it must be right, I must be wrong. Now I'm here to tell you, you guys, that my body was almost always right. And every single time I overrode that intuitive signal with someone else's logic, I lost a little bit more trust in myself. Which then created more anxiety because a body that can't trust its own signals is a body that has to think its way through every single thing. So if you have been overriding your own feeling of this does not feel right for many years, whether it's with a partner or a doctor or a boss or your own inner critic, the way back is not to argue better. It's not to get more logical or to be in your mind more. It's really about getting back into your body and to start honoring Honoring the signal even when you can't explain it yet. And so, you know, Doug and I have grown a lot in our relationship. And so now I can say, hey, this just doesn't feel right. And he'll give me a moment and he'll let me listen to that. And we can go back and forth and come to a compromise and make the best decisions for, for each of us. Now, what I want you to walk away with is that living in your head again is not intelligence. It might feel like it because you're spending a lot of time up there, but it's not. It's just a very old strategy that your nervous system built when your body was not in a safe place to feel. A lot of us are afraid to actually feel, and so we just suppress those emotions down and we override it in the way that I just shared in those 9 ways. Now, every day that you keep running this old strategy, you are paying a metabolic cost. Cortisol's running high even though you might be burning more calories. Cortisol is elevated, so you have a dysfunctional partitioning of the calories you do consume. Sleep is likely running shallow. Energy is running out by the mid-afternoon. And as a result of all of this, the weight starts to refuse to move because a body run by fear can't afford to release anything. Most of us come to weight loss from fear— fear that we are broken, fear that we have to think our way to the answer, fear that if we stop analyzing for one second, everything will fall apart. Instead, you're going to approach this process from compassion. You're going to approach this process from the choice to nurture The one body you have been given for the rest of your life. You only get one. Your body is not a problem to think your way out of. It's a home that has been asking you to move back into it. Your mind is a tool. It's not supposed to be the driver. It was never supposed to be. When you let it be a tool again and let your body have the wheel back, the body is the driver. Everything downstream begins to change, including your weight. I really urge you to try one thing. Pick one moment in your day where your body gives you a clear signal, a yes, a no. Oh, I really want that. And instead of running it through your mind for approval, act on it just one time. Try it and see what happens. This is the process of coming home to your body, feeling safe in your body, creating that relationship where you can hear what your body is telling you. I would love for you to share in the comments if you're watching this on YouTube How you relate to your body, how you might move back into hearing the signals that it's giving to you. What happened? And then share another moment where you listened to your body and what was the outcome. We're all a community here. If you want to go deeper on this, I have an episode called You Are Not Lazy: The Truth About Weight Loss that pairs perfectly with what we just talked about. Remember, you've got to step up to make the change. Lead with your heart, train your mind, and listen to what your body already knows. I'll see you next time.