EP 191. How to Bounce Back from an "Eff It" Moment

Eff it moments happen. And if you have a healthy human brain, you will have a moment where you start something new and you're going to get to the point where you want to quit. It is totally normal. Your brain is like, what are we doing? You're doing all this stuff. You're making me expend all this extra energy. Like, we need to quit. We need to quit. And that's when those sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts get really, really loud. This is part of the process. Yes, effing up is part of the process. Now let's talk about how to bounce back after you've had what we call an eff it moment. You're listening to the Stop Dieting Forever podcast, episode 191. What if it were possible to achieve your goal weight and stay there permanently without dieting? Welcome to the Stop Dieting Forever podcast, where you will discover the key components that most diets won't tell you because they want you to keep coming back. Not here. This is your last stop on the weight loss struggle bus. I am your host, Jennifer Dent-Brown, life and weight loss coach, and I am going to show you how to stop dieting forever. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey, LuxeLifer, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about how to bounce back after you've had what we call an F it moment. And in our group, we spell F it E-F-F. You know what that is. And I wanted to talk about this particular topic because we're about 4 weeks into the new year when this podcast is airing. And 4 weeks ago, you may have been very highly motivated to lose weight. But now, not so much. That New Year, New You energy that we love has probably worn off, and it's a little bit more difficult to stick to your plan and stay committed to your goal, whatever you decided you wanted to do at the beginning of the year to lose weight. If this sounds like you, just know that you are experiencing the motivation meltdown. And it's totally normal and it happens to every single one of us. And when people join my program, I tell them to expect it. It's very subtle when it happens. And it usually comes in the form of a sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts. We call those SSSTs. Like, you know, work has been really busy. I just haven't had the time. Or, oh my gosh, I have so much going on with the kids. I just don't have the time. Or I'm really tired. I just need to take a break. Or you just tell yourself— this is the procrastination lie— like, oh, I'll catch up later. Those are the sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts that seem very true. And when you know that that's what's happening, then you know that the motivation meltdown is actually happening. And when you can expect it, you can plan to work through it. When you're not expecting it, you end up quitting on your commitment that you made to yourself to lose weight. Now, you may be in the motivation meltdown right now. If that's the case, I want you to go listen to episode 37. I did a whole episode on breaking down what the motivation meltdown is. But right now, let's talk about bouncing back from an eff it moment. Motivation meltdown is different from an eff it moment. Eff it moment is steeped in feelings of failure, and maybe you feel burned out. That's different from just not being motivated. So let's talk about the eff it moment. Eff it moments are when you feel overwhelmed. It's when you just feel defeated. You've been doing all the things. Tried to change your diet, and you've been going to the gym on a regular basis, and you've been getting up early, and you drinking more water, and you're trying to get into bed early, and you're doing all of these things in order to lose weight, and maybe it's not working fast enough, maybe you're not seeing the results that you want to see, maybe you just have unrealistic expectations of what you think is going to happen just because you started drinking more water, Whatever it is, you know you're having an eff it moment when you just feel so overwhelmed with what you're doing and you also feel defeated and you're just like very unmotivated to try to do anything else that has to do with losing weight. This is what happens when you believe that you need to do all the things. You need to try to overhaul your entire life in order to lose weight and you make all of these changes at one time. And you don't know how to keep up with them. And when you feel overwhelmed because now you're trying to handle life as it was and life gets lifey, and then all of a sudden you're trying to create all of these new habits at the same time, yeah, you are going to feel very overwhelmed. And it's very easy to fall victim to a sneaky self-sabotaging thought and have an eff it moment. If you don't have the right support, So inside Stop Dieting Forever group weight loss program, we call it our Success Squad. If you don't have a Success Squad, it's really easy to become victim to these moments. If you don't have a coach on your Success Squad, it's really easy to become a victim of these moments because you don't have anyone to help you see what's happening from an outside perspective. All you know is that while you're in it, you feel like a failure. And maybe you feel burned out. You just feel tired. You're just like, I'm done. I am done. And let me tell you something. Failure and burnout are two things, two feelings that can eff up your weight loss if you're not aware of them, if you're not aware of what's happening. So you're like, Jennifer, OK, yes, I get it. I know what an eff it moment is. What do I do? I'm so glad you asked. First thing you want to do is I want you to normalize what is happening. Eff it moments happen. And if you have a healthy human brain, you will have a moment where you start something new and you're going to get to the point where you want to quit. It is totally normal. Your brain is like, what are we doing? You're doing all this stuff. You're making me expend all this extra energy. We need to quit. We need to quit. And that's when those sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts get really, really loud. If you're new to using mindset to work on changing your weight, which is what I teach inside Stop Dieting Forever, then you may have more eff it moments than someone else who's been following this process for a while. And it's OK. So you effed up. So what? Nothing has gone wrong, y'all. Write that down. That is a thought that you need to be thinking every time your brain is offering what you're doing is a problem, what you're doing you need to stop, right? Nothing has gone wrong. That's the anchor thought to normalize when your brain goes into problemville and you're like, what are we doing? And you want to quit, right? You want to throw in the towel and give up. This is part of the process. Yes, effing up is part of the process. Now let's talk about what you can do to bounce back after you have an eff it moment, right after this important announcement. Hey, Luxx Cipher, let me interrupt this episode real quick and ask you a very important question. Are you tired of losing and gaining back the same weight year after year after year? Guess what? It's not the diet that you're following that's the problem. It's your inability to understand the real reasons why you always end up eating your way back up the scale. The food you're consuming probably isn't the problem, but your inability to understand all the ways emotional hunger is keeping you overweight is the problem. So instead of swapping out foods for quote-unquote healthier options just to lose weight. Because let's be real, you can stay overweight by snacking on kale chips instead of potato chips. It's not the food, it's the quantity in which you're eating it. So let's get to the real reason why you can't stop with the BLTs. I'm not talking about the sandwiches, I'm talking about the bites, the licks, and the taste. Now this is where I come in as your private health, life, and weight loss coach. Private coaching isn't just about you shedding pounds. It's about transforming your entire well-being and shedding the mindset, the habits, and the behaviors that are keeping you overweight so you can eventually go on and live your luxe life. Private coaching is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is all about you. I want you to think about private coaching like this. Going to see Beyoncé at her Renaissance tour performing live is an amazing— it is life-changing. It is a truly transformational experience. That's like participating in the Stop Dieting Forever group program. Now, having Beyoncé show up at your birthday party with your friends and your besties to serenade you with a happy birthday ballad, singing your name, is like the private coaching experience. It is also an amazing, life-changing, and truly transformational experience as well, but it is just for you. Now listen, are you ready for that experience? Are you ready for the personalized Beyoncé serenading you experience? Are you ready to lose more than just weight? Then I want you to head on over to jenniferdent.com/privatecoaching to learn more, to view testimonials, and to schedule a complimentary 60-minute consultation to see if private coaching is the next best step for you when you think about your weight loss journey. You have spent so much of your life paying attention to everyone else's needs. I think it might be time for you to get the support that your body is craving. Have someone else pay undivided attention to you every single week with the main goal of helping you to lose weight for the last time and shedding everything that is keeping you overweight. All right, private coaching with me. Go to jenniferdent.com/privatecoaching for all of the details and to schedule your 60-minute consultation. All right, y'all, back to the episode. All right, welcome back. Now, once you've normalized the F-its, and that basically means you stop blaming yourself, it's not a problem, it happens to all of us, you are normal, it's all good, then you're ready to move on. Now you have a decision to make. You can choose to quit, you can give up, or you can choose to get back in the saddle and keep riding. Total side note, I have been watching The Crown. I am on episode 3, and boy, those royals are messy. But I was just watching an episode where I think it was Princess Anne was in the equestrian competition. And so I got the horse and the saddle analogy going right now. So, OK, you can choose to quit, or you can choose to get back in the saddle and keep riding. Now, one of my clients had lost over 20 pounds inside of the program, and she had about 20 more to go to reach her goal. And her progress was interrupted because she had to have surgery. It was planned. It wasn't a sudden thing. She knew she was going to have the surgery, and she'd actually put it off for months. And she was worried that she was going to gain her weight back because she wasn't going to be able to move the way that she was used to moving, and she wasn't going to be able to exercise, and her mobility was going to be severely limited while she recovered from this surgery. She almost had an eff it moment, and she totally could have had an eff it moment, and I'm sure y'all would have been like, girl, yeah. I understand why you had an eff it moment. She could have had an eff it moment, and she almost did. But she logged on to the very first call that we had when we were doing our last 30-day challenge, and she just listened. And I saw her join on, and I can tell that she was not well. I could see it in her face. She didn't say anything. She didn't ask for coaching. She just logged on, and she just listened. Now, after that first call, I introduced the concept of a Success Squad. So she hooked up with a Success Squad, and she committed to staying in the game for this 30-day challenge. She later came to a call and said she was about to have a total eff it moment, like, I don't care, I'm confined to the couch, I'm just going to eat whatever I wanted to eat. She told me she was going to tell her husband to get the the gas station chicken, which is a thing here in the Philadelphia area. Like, she was ready to give up. But her single decision— she said, you know what? I'm going to log on and join this coaching call— changed everything for her. She went on to participate in the 30-day challenge, and she ended up being our biggest loser, having lost 12 pounds in 30 days. As you can see, she bounced back from having an eff it moment, right? So to bounce back from an eff it moment, you have to see first that it's not a problem. And second, you've got to decide if you're going to stay down or you're going to keep going. Now, even if the eff it does take you down and you go under and the frustration and the overwhelm and the feelings of failure drives you to get the fried chicken. It drives you to go get the donuts or the crumble cookies or whatever, fill in the blank, right, with your favorite food. And you have that eff it moment. And maybe it lasts a day. Maybe it lasts a week. Maybe it lasts 2 weeks. At some point, you have to say, OK, self, what I'm experiencing is 100% normal. Nothing has gone wrong. And believe that. Nothing has gone wrong. Yep, I spent 2 weeks freestyling my eating. It's OK. Nothing has gone wrong. And then second, in that moment, you get to decide whether you're going to keep going in the same path that you're going right now or if you're going to get back on that saddle and keep riding. Now, here is what's going to help you make that very pivotal decision. You're going to decide ahead of time what your effort strategy is going to be. Because remember, I said effits happen. Those moments are guaranteed. If you're a normal human being with a normal human brain, you're going to be very excited about starting a new weight loss program or weight loss process. And you're going to have a moment where your life just gets lifey. And you're going to feel overwhelmed, and you're not going to want to do the things that you were doing before that you know worked, and you're going to say, eff it, I quit, I give up, I need a break. So if we know that that's going to happen, guess what we're going to do? We're going to plan ahead for that moment. And so you're going to write down what your effort strategy is going to be. So one of the questions you may ask yourself is like, OK, effort strategy. Who's going to coach me through this? Well, if you're one of my clients, that would be me or one of the Stop Dieting Forever coaches. Who on your success squad can help keep you motivated? You want to have that one person or two people who can just like get you going and say, girl, come on, you know, shake you. I remember my mom used to say like, I need to shake some sense into you when I was a kid. I think now that's probably child abuse, but you need to have somebody in your success squad who can shake some sense into you when you need it. Another question and another decision you want to make ahead of time, you're going to just want to decide, okay, what self-coaching tool am I going to use and how am I going to reframe what's happening? So inside of my program, inside of my process, as my client, y'all learn the self-coaching tools. You know exactly which ones work best for you, and you know exactly how to use them to reframe the circumstance, right? So you can really, really believe, like, oh, really? Nothing has gone wrong here. So you're going to decide ahead of time what your effort strategy is going to be. Write it down, and then you're going to refer to it when your brain is offering you those thoughts that cause you to feel like a failure or you're just burned out. Because remember, I said earlier, those two feelings of failure and feeling burned out are— ooh, they can take you down. They can take you under. They can take you under. So all we're going to do is just decide ahead of time, like we're already agreeing, like, this is going to happen. I'm very committed to my goal right now, like, yay, rah rah, shazam! But I know at some point I'm going to have an effort moment, especially if that's your history. That's how you normally roll when it comes to trying to lose weight, we're just going to plan ahead for it. And maybe when you write it down, if you're like me and you're a visual person, maybe you need to put it on a Post-it note and stick it on your closet door someplace, someplace where you can see it. So when you're in that moment, you don't have to try to remember like, oh my God, I remember I wrote down a strategy of how to deal with this. What do I do? Post it on your closet door and break in case of emergency. Whatever you need to do to get your brain like snapping back in alignment and say, oh, this is that eff it moment that Jennifer said was going to happen. It's happening. And great, I have a plan of how I'm going to deal with it. That is it. And when you can do that, you will be well equipped to overcome any eff it obstacle when it appears. Even though when you're feeling terrible, when you're in it, when you're just like feeling like such a failure, you get on the scale and the scale is not telling you what you think it needs to be telling you. And you be like, I'm just doing all the things and I just feel so frustrated and the weight's just not coming off and something is wrong with me and I just don't know what to do, right? When you're having that, type of reaction, because you have now have this awareness and this new knowledge, you'll be able to see that those eff it moments are just temporary setbacks, and they don't have to take you down. And when you're a little further out from the eff it moment, you'll be able to look back and be like, oh yeah, I can really see that nothing went wrong. I can really see how I actually benefited from experiencing that eff it moment, because now I'm here on the other side, and I can appreciate it. Yep, that is the beauty of coaching. That is the beauty of knowing these coaching tools and being in a space where you can get coached. All right, Colette, play the music. It is time for Stop and Celebrate. All right, I want to celebrate one of our newest members. She joined Food Focus. It's a 30-day boot camp where I'm teaching my new food framework curriculum. And so we just finished wrapping up week 3. But during one of the calls last week, Joan shared a story with us, her experience. So she recently attended— was last weekend— recently attended a funeral. Of a dear, dear, dear friend who was in her wedding, she'd known for years, who died unexpectedly. And so she had to travel to another state. We were on the call. She was worried about the food. She knew that the celebration of life was going to be in a brewery. So we all know what kind of food is in a brewery. And she said, I love beer. Like, I'm going to be grieving. Like, I'm afraid about gaining weight. And she's like, what should my plan be? She was like, should I take my own food to the brewery? Should I, like, prepare food for me and keep in the hotel room? Like, she wanted a very, like, specific, detailed plan of how she was going to try to overcome this eating obstacle. And I told her to focus on one thing. Like, forget all the things you think you need to do. Listen to your coach. Focus on one thing. Allow yourself to grieve. And I said, I want you to focus on your friends that are still here. I said, just do that. Focus on your friends. The food will become secondary. Well, she came back after the funeral. She gave us a full report. She said, and I quote, I took every advantage to talk to every single person that I had not seen in more years than I can count. And she said, I concentrated on being there and not the food. She said it was that easy. It was that easy, y'all. Weight loss doesn't have to be complicated. Our brains want to make it complicated, but it was that easy is what she said. And to celebrate, she came back the exact same weight that she was before she left. The fear of gaining weight and eating her feelings and eating the grief did not happen. And so for that, we want to celebrate you on the podcast, Joan. Good job. All right, y'all. Thanks for tuning in this week. Be sure to check the show notes for direct links to any of the resources that I mentioned in today's podcast. And you can also find direct links on how you can work with me, how you can lose weight for the last time, by becoming a private client or working inside the Stop Dieting Forever group program. I also, before we go, invite you to share this episode with your friends. Maybe you want to put together a success squad, and you're like, but I don't really know what we should be doing as a success squad. Share this podcast, this episode with them, and y'all can talk about it, right? And I would love to hear your thoughts about podcasts. You can share them with me by leaving a 5-star review on your favorite podcast platform. All right, y'all, live luxe, and I will see you in the next episode. If you like today's episode of the Stop Dieting Forever podcast and you want to learn more about creating a lifestyle instead of following a diet to lose weight permanently, be sure to visit JenniferDent.com. There you'll learn more about my unique weight loss process and how it can work for you. Go to jenniferdent.com to discover what you can do to stop dieting forever.