Why Is This Happening FOR Me

If you have been trying to drop this weight for what feels like forever and the same pattern keeps repeating no matter what diet you try, I want to tell you something. This is not a discipline problem. It never was. There is one question that breaks this pattern faster than any diet ever could, and most people spend their entire lives never asking it. Today I'm going to give you that question. I'm going to tell you about a client of mine who broke a 60-year loop the moment she asked it. And I'm going to tell you about a Navy SEAL who was perfect Monday through Friday and off the rails every Saturday, and what was actually going on underneath. I'm Dr. Ashley Lucas. I hold a PhD in sports nutrition and chronic disease. I'm a registered dietitian, and I'm the owner and founder of PhD Weight Loss, where to date we have helped over 13,000 people collectively drop more than 480,000 pounds nationwide. So pour your coffee, hopefully with a little heavy cream, and let's get into it. The question, you guys, is this: why is this happening for me? Not why is this happening to me? I want you to feel the difference. It's subtle. When you ask yourself why is this happening to me, it sinks, it's heavy, it puts you in the passenger seat. This passenger seat is not the seat you want to be in. Instead, when you ask yourself, why is this happening for me? It opens something. There is space in it. There's air. There is agency. And agency is what we want. Your ego will always put you in the victim mindset. Why is this happening to me? And I catch myself in this all the time, so you are not alone. When I catch myself in it, it does not feel good, and things don't work out for me, actually. So The version of you that keeps asking the, "Why is this happening to me?" will keep getting the same answer. You are a victim. Life feels really unfair no matter how hard it is. And I know life is not easy. I think that's the point of life, right? You are gonna feel like when you ask yourself this question, "Why is this happening to me?" Like your body has betrayed you. Your brain, which is very, very brilliant, it's also designed to prove whatever hypothesis you give it, and it will go and find every piece of evidence to make that story true, to make why you are the victim true. Now instead, the version of you that asks, why is this happening for me, gets a different answer. I want you to think that your body is a classroom and every single struggle is a lesson. If the same pattern keeps showing up for you in your weight in your relationships, in your work, it is not bad luck. There's something underneath it, and it's asking to be seen. Your weight— I want you to think about your weight, that it is asking you a really specific question. It's there for a reason. The question is different for every person listening, for every one of you. For some of you, it's going to be about self-worth. So as you're listening to this, I want you to think, okay, what is this pattern? What is my weight gain asking me? Is it about self-worth? Is about boundaries. For some of you, it might be about a form of comfort that you learned in childhood that you never questioned. To make this more clear for you, I'm going to share a few client stories because I think that it's a perfect example of what happens when you finally ask the right question. This client had been struggling with sugar for 60 years— not 16, 6-0— 60 years. And on one of our calls, she started tracking back in real time when the pattern for her actually started. She remembered that she lost someone she loved so much when she was really young, like 4 years old, and in the weeks after, everyone brought food. Casseroles, cakes, pies, cookies, like every person who came to help her family in that grief showed up with food. Now, her 4-year-old brain wired something in that moment. It wired that food equals comfort, food equals love, food equals safety when her world was falling apart, or whenever the world falls apart. And that every hard moment after that, the wiring got a little bit stronger. So if you can recognize in this that this is not a discipline problem at all, right? You can see this, this is not a willpower problem. This is a 4-year-old girl who learned that when the world really hurts, food is the answer. And then spent 60 years being told by every single diet program prior that if she just tried harder, if she forced it more, she would stop. The weight gain would stop. It would all solve. Now, the moment instead that she asked, why is this happening for me? What is the pattern? The whole entire picture opened up. She wasn't broken. She wasn't weak. Her body had been protecting her since she was 4. And as this grown woman, She got to thank her body and lovingly, for the first time, lovingly say to it, I am safe now, you can stop. That is really the work. Let's say that you've asked the question now and you understand that the next step is to look at the beliefs running the loop, because most of the loop is running on beliefs you don't even know that you have. I want you to see if any of these are yours, if they resonate with you. I'm only worthy if I look a certain way. My value depends on my body. I'll love myself when the weight is off. If I stop trying so hard, everything will fall apart. My body has betrayed me. My body is working against me. You guys, these beliefs run in the background 24 hours a day, and your body, it's so smart that it hears every single one of them. It is picking up on the way you talk to yourself, and it is responding to you. I like to explain it like this: if you talk to your neighbor the way that you talk to your own body, would your neighbor like want to move or hide so that they never have to talk to you? This is the same with your own body, right? Now, the new beliefs that we're planting instead sound much more kind, and, and they would sound like a conversation that you would kindly have with your neighbor. Something like, I'm worthy now. Instead of I'm worthy when I lose the weight, it's I'm worthy now. My body is my biggest ally. My body never makes mistakes. It's responding to the signals I gave it. When I change the signals, my body responds. I want you to think about these and see if any of them land as real. And you know what? It might not feel like it's true to you, but with consistency, as you say them over and over again, maybe your morning, afternoon, evening mantra, maybe it pops up on your phone throughout the day, something like that, and your body will start to resonate and it will start to feel like truth. It just takes time. Now I want to tell you about a different client as well, because these loops show up in so many different ways. We're all different. In how, you know, we store our trauma in a way and how we deal with safety. And this one is specific to what I see with high achievers. So this client of mine was a Navy SEAL. Discipline was his middle name. He was perfect Monday through Friday. His meal plan, perfectly on point. Workouts on point. Zero deviation. Tracking everything. Then Saturday hit and he went off the rails, like all the way. Sunday, he was drowning in shame. Monday, back to perfect every single week. He came to me and he was like, I've done so many more difficult things than this. Why can't I hold the line on the weekend? You know, he was just distraught and he couldn't stand himself. He could not stand himself. Why was everything else in his life in perfect order except for this? Now here's what I told him and what I want to tell any of you who see yourself in this pattern. The problem is not the weekend. The problem is the Monday through Friday. Now there's this kind of spiritual energetic law underneath all of this, and it's this universal law. It applies whether you're religious or spiritual, secular, whatever your background is. Anytime you level up in your life, there is a force that shows up to keep you small. This is just the way that life works, and I call it the opponent. Your job is to see it for what it is and not confuse it with the truth about who you are. It is just there to provide resistance to force you to level up. Now, there's another law that matters even more here, and the real damage for this fellow is not the slip. The real damage is what he did with the slip, and the same thing pertains to you. You guys, one weekend binge is just one moment. 3 days of shame afterward is what wires this pattern in. The shame in this situation is the actual opponent. It is the resistance. It's not the food, because shame does the one thing that guarantees you will do it again. Now, this Navy SEAL was misreading his own biology. His nervous system had learned back in training, probably actually something that happened when he was really young, that vigilance and control equal safety. So he was running vigilance, hypervigilant, all week. And when anybody white-knuckle safety for 5 straight days, the body has to release the pressure valve somewhere. And Saturday, for him and for probably lot of you is where it lands. Now you can see this clearly. This is not a character flaw. It's not that more discipline is needed. This is just physiology and that wiring of the shame and control loop. Real safety is not control. Real safety is the felt sense that you are okay even when you're not performing. If he could feel safe on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, he'd not need to blow it up on Saturday. So the way out of this one is not more control. The way out is actually less. Softer weekdays, more room to breathe. This doesn't mean that you go and eat whatever you want, by the way. You live the lifestyle that supports your body, and in that you have pauses, pauses between the impulse and the reaction. That pause, that softness, is where transformation truly lives. So that could look different for everybody. What is that pause? What is that softness? Is it just taking a few deep breaths? Is it giving yourself some leeway to take a break and just sit down for a moment? Is it making the choice sometime throughout the week, or maybe every day, 10 minutes for something that you actually enjoy, something that brings you joy? So this Navy SEAL was totally misreading his own biology. You can see that his nervous system had learned back in training that vigilance and control equal safety. So he was running this hypervigilance all week, and I bet a lot of you do the same exact thing. When you white-knuckle safety for 5 straight days, the body has to release the pressure somewhere. Saturday is like that pressure valve. It's where it lands. You can clearly see that this is not a character flaw. This is physiology. If he could feel safe on, say, a Tuesday or a Wednesday, he would not need to blow it all up on Saturday. The way out of this one, of this loop, is not more control. The way out is actually less, right? Softer weekdays, more room to breathe. Now, I'm not saying this means just to eat whatever you want. You're going to need to eat the foods that really support your body, that allow your body to feel safe and, and rested and nourished. But there can be room for softness within that, right? So I want you to think of this like a pause between the impulse and the reaction. There's going to be some softness there because that pause, that softness, is where the transformation really lives. This could be for you if you are like this fellow and you've got hypervigilance, a ton of discipline. Maybe the softness is taking 10 minutes a day to start to do something that you really love, that really like fills your soul, that talks to you, that you really feel expanded in. Maybe that's going out in nature, maybe it's taking an exercise class, a yoga class, maybe that's creating something. But Feeling that softness and that flow and that ease during your day is going to be really important if this is a similar loop for you. So let me bring this together. I want you to walk away from this episode with one clear insight. I don't want a big thing of to-dos. I just want one insight for you. Both of these stories I told you today are the same story wearing different clothes. One woman wired food to safety when she was 4. The other man wired control to safety through years of training. Different routes, but the same exact problem. Both thought that they had a discipline issue. Neither of them did, and you likely don't either. Both of them were running a strategy designed to keep them safe, and both of those strategies had stopped working. I want you to look at your own loop. No shame allowed. Remember, that's like the opponent. It's not gonna help you. But I want you to look at your own loop with curiosity. What did your body wire to safety a really long time ago, probably when you were a kid, that's not serving you anymore? Was it comfort? Was it control? Was it being small so nobody would notice you? Was it perfection? Maybe it was rebellion. Whatever it is, that is not who you are. It's just a strategy your body picked up when it really, really needed one. And you can think it and put it down. Now, here is the whole practice underneath everything that I said today: give your body safety and find joy in the process. Because remember, this is all happening for you, not to you. So you're not going to try to find homework or find a new diet. You're going to return to safety and joy because those two things are what a body needs to actually release fat. And they're also what a life needs to feel like you're actually living. And when you catch yourself back in the loop, and you will, I promise you, because you're human and that's the whole point, I encourage you to say the words that I say to myself when it happens to me, because oh my gosh, I can clearly see my loops firing. And I say, oh my gosh, take a pause, and I say, what a pleasure I get another chance to practice this. Because a loop that gets curiosity instead of shame stops running. You can actually break the loop, just like these two clients did. Remember, you're not broken. You never were. You've just been carrying a strategy that was written for a younger version of you. And today, today can be the day that you write a new one. That's the whole thing, you guys. Now, if this episode was helpful to you, I would love to hear it. Drop your thoughts, your feedback, maybe any of the loops you see being wired down in the comments below, and we will all help to hold each other accountable. If you're watching this on YouTube, please subscribe so that you do not miss another episode. 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.