EP 197. 3 things that are keeping you from losing weight (and it's not the food) 🤔

Bueno. Hey, Luxx Life-er, welcome to this week's episode of the Stop Dieting Forever podcast. I am thrilled to have your ears for the next couple of minutes. Today, I want to talk to you directly if you have been trying to lose weight and nothing seems to be working. I know how that feels. I know how frustrating it is. And I want to share with you 3 possible reasons why you have not been able to lose the weight that you want and keep it off, and none of these reasons have anything to do with what you're eating or what you're not eating. Yeah, I remember when I was struggling with my weight, I always thought that I needed to find the next diet, and the diet would always tell me like, eat these things, don't eat these things, eat these things in this combination, right? Or don't eat at this time. Like, was very geared and very specific to what I was putting into my mouth. Now, don't get me wrong, what you're eating definitely plays a part in losing weight. Um, but I want to talk to you about 3 things that you may not be considering if you are struggling with weight loss, losing it and keeping it off. But before we get into the topic and before I share with you the 3 things that you need to know, I want to make sure that you know about this free gift that I I have created for you. Did you know I have created a brand new freebie? It is called How to Lose Weight This Week Without a Diet. How to Lose Weight This Week Without a Diet. You can go grab it at jenniferdent.com/thiweek. If you've been rocking with me for a while on the podcast and you are vibing with the Stop Dieting Forever weight loss methodology, but you're not sure where to begin, you're not sure how to implement things into your daily life, you're going to want to make sure that you go download my free guide, How to Lose Weight This Week Without a Diet. And I think you're going to find it super helpful. So I'm not going to give you exactly what's in there because that will take the whole entire podcast, but I just want to share with you that in this guide, what you're going to find is that I teach you the one hack that you can implement immediately that will help you lose weight without changing what you're eating. I don't even like the word hack, but I can't think of a better way. I think it's like a mindset shift. But anyway, if you're like, Jennifer, that sounds too good to be true, right? You're going to tell me one thing I can do and it's going to change how I'm— how it's going to make me lose weight without changing what I'm eating. If you think that that sounds too good to be true, then you are my people. You need to go read it because you're probably thinking from the mindset of a professional dieter. A professional dieter, like, your brain can't even conceptualize how to lose weight without being on a diet. Your path to your forever weight will happen when you are able to shift your identity away from a dieter, away from the person who's always struggling with their weight. Away from the person who believes certain things about themselves and their inability to lose weight. And when you can shift away from that into the mindset, to the identity of a person who is healthy and you think like a healthy person, that's when you will finally be able to lose the weight and keep it off. So in this free guide, I'm going to show you how you can begin to make that transformation. Y'all know I talk about identity all the time on the podcast. So it's available to you right now. Go to jenniferdent.com/thisweek. I also put the link in the show notes. So that's jenniferdent.com/thisweek, one word. And you can— when you download it, you can also— you'll get the PDF. And I also recorded an audio version of it. So if you don't have time to sit down and read a couple of pages, you can listen on the go. Play it in the car, play it while you're doing chores around the house, and you can listen to my instructions and get started immediately. You can start with your next meal. So implement this mindset hack for a week. That's my challenge to you. Implement it for a week and see if you don't lose some weight. All right. Go to jenniferdent.com/thisweek to go download my free gift for you. All right. Let's get back to the topic at hand. Today's topic are the 3 things that are keeping you from losing weight. And it's not the food. First of all, if you're in this place of, like, frustration, you've been trying to lose the weight. My heart goes out to you. I'm giving you a big virtual hug. I get it. I 100% get it. I just remember, like, laying in the bed, just like, why? Why is this so hard? Like, why is it so hard for me to lose weight? I remember I used to have these like, "But you don't understand," conversations with my thin friends and with my boyfriend, who's now my husband at the time. And, you know, he could like drop 20 pounds in a week. And he was just like, "You just need to do this. You just need to do this." And I'm like, "But you don't understand what I'm going through. I'm doing all the things and it's not working." Listen, I get the frustration. I 100% understand it. But when I was in that space, I knew that there was a way for me to lose weight and keep it off because I saw so many other people out in the world who didn't have a weight problem. And I'm like, they know better than me. What are they doing that I'm not doing? So I was just so hyperfocused. This is like my ADHD superpower, I suppose. That just kept me hyperfocused on this problem for decades. I was like, I'm going to figure this out. I am going to figure this out. So here we are, fast forward. But I remember how frustrating it was when you felt like you were doing all the things and nothing worked. So I just want to say, I hear you, I see you, I know you, and don't give up. Don't give up. Your body is 100% capable of losing weight. You just have not found the most effective way for you to lose weight and to keep it off yet. All right. So I'm going to put a yet at the end of that statement. So it is my hope with this podcast that I can help you troubleshoot where you are. So I'm going to give you 3 things that you may not have considered if you're struggling with your weight, and they have nothing to do with food. So we're not talking about food today. We are not talking about food. All right, so for those of you— side note— I am now recording the podcast on video, and I'm like looking at my hair as it's underneath these headphones. So the headphones are not sexy. They are big, they are clunky, they are totally designed by a man. I can tell because they're too big for my head and my ears, but I wear them because the sound quality is so much better. But when they come up with some, like, cute sleek headphones, or if y'all see somebody that knows, like, cute sleek headphones that you can wear to do podcasting, let me know, please, because I want to get some. Anyway, I'm just like, look, I'm distracted by my hair sticking out of the headphones. Anywho, neither here nor there. Let's talk about you. Let's get back to you. All right. So there are 3 things that you have not considered when it comes to losing weight, and I'm going to dive into all 3 of them. First one is mindset. Second one is your hormones. And the third one is sleep. All right, so let's dive into all 3. So when it comes to mindset, and this is a very common mindset issue that I find with most of my clients when they come to me, I remember I totally had this mindset issue, is that you expect to not lose weight. Subconsciously, right? Low-key, you're like, I don't think this is going to work. So you're unconsciously creating like this self-fulfilling prophecy. And when I think about that time in my life and where I was looking back, every time I would start a new diet because I would get all excited about a new diet because I failed the last one, deep down, I didn't really believe it was going to work because nothing had worked so far. Nothing had worked long term. And so what was happening was every time I started a new diet, I would like— I would be excited about it. I would be hopeful. But underneath all of the excitement and the hope and like the preparation was like, mm, I don't know if this is going to work, right? Because I hadn't created any evidence that I was able to lose weight. And it was like I could not believe that the diet worked until I lost the weight first. So how many of you all are in that position where you're like, I need to see some weight loss first and then I'm going to believe that this is actually working? But really, you have it backwards, right? You have it backwards. You need to believe that you can lose weight first and then you will lose weight. But I get it, right? I get it. The belief thing is hard to— like, you're like, Jennifer, you just don't understand. Listen, I get it. I understand. I do understand. Trust me, I do. You have to believe that your body is capable of losing weight. You have to believe that you just have not yet found the right way, the right method to help you release the weight. So if you believe— this is what I tell my clients when they, when they join my program and they come into the community. I say to them all the time, y'all, you've got to trust the process. You have to trust the process. You have to believe that this Stop Dieting Forever methodology, this method, is going to work for you and you will lose the weight. When you come in, and you got like one toe in the water, you got your big toe in the water, you're just dipping your toe in the water just to see what's happening around in here, it's not going to work for you. So this is the mindset shift. This is what the work we do up front when I start working with my clients, when you join Stop Dieting Forever, the group program. This is the work we do up front. Like day one, we are shifting and setting new expectations for you. And I'm teaching you how to create a new mindset. Because we got to get rid of the mindset that believes that I am incapable of losing weight. We got to replace that with a new belief. All right? So that's probably the first thing. That's one of the reasons why you haven't been able to lose weight yet is because you don't believe you actually can. The second thing are your hormones. Y'all, your hormones. Your hormones may not be optimized to support weight loss. Now, a couple of years ago, I did an advanced training. I studied women's hormonal health at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition. But at that time, I was very much focused on knowing everything I needed to know about the 3 weight loss hormones— ghrelin, leptin, and insulin. Yes, we learned about all the other ones. So there's like 50 hormones in the human body. We learned about all the other ones. But I, in that moment, in that time, I was just very focused on the 3 weight loss hormones so I could learn turn this information and teach it to my clients. But here's what I want you to understand. There— yes, there's like 50 hormones in the human body, and they're all very delicate. It's a very delicate dance that they are, are, are going through, and that they, they're working every single day to keep your body humming and doing all the things that hormones do. So as I'm going through perimenopause right now, my hormonal knowledge has increased like tenfold. And I'm also understanding the impact of stress, how that has— how stress can affect your hormonal health. Stress is one of those things, y'all, like, we're just so used to being in a chronic state of stress because we're always just operating in that way. We don't really pay attention to the symptoms that stress can offer. Because we just think, oh, you know, I'm not sleeping well, or, oh, I got a little bit of indigestion, or I got a little bit of brain fog, or like, oh God, I get so tired in the afternoon. We think, you know, it's something else and we don't actually pinpoint stress. And let's be real, I don't know about in other countries, but in the United States of America, they're kind of like, it's a badge of honor that we get from being stressed. Girl, I'm so stressed. I've been so busy. I've been doing all the things right. It's almost like this, like, "Look at me, I'm so busy, I'm so important, I'm doing all the things, I'm doing all the things and I can't let anybody else help me. So I'm just going to be stressed." Like that's my badge of honor. Like I'm doing a good thing in the world. Girl, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop it. What you're doing is when you're subjecting your body to this chronic state of stress, what you're doing is you're disrupting your hormonal balance. And when your hormones are off balance, now it doesn't just mean your weight loss hormones. When your other hormones are off balance, imbalance, it could result in your body not releasing weight. So I want everyone— I want you to go put on your to-do list, put on your very long to-do list, to get your hormonal levels tested. I think it is crucial. I never had my hormones tested until recently as I was going through perimenopause and experiencing stress symptoms. I think I'm going to do a whole podcast on stress and how I am— how I've been working to de-stress and reduce my stress symptoms, which has been great. It's been working, working very well. But the biggest symptom that I noticed first for me, which I was like, mm, I probably need to go get this checked out, like, let's keep an eye on it, I don't know— my hair started falling out, y'all. I started— I had, uh, serious like hairline breakage around my hairline. And for those of you who know me, I'm kind of like obsessed with my hair. So when it started to get really thin, like my natural hair started to get really thin around my edges, I was like, what is happening here? So I did all the things like, you know, that Black women do. I put my— got my protective styles, I got my sew-ins, got my crochets, and my hair was not growing back. I was like, what is happening? And my hairstylist was like, oh, this is probably stress. So that's what— that was one of the things that tipped me off, and that was last year. So anyway, I've been paying attention to— that was my first big stress, um, symptom that I noticed. But I do have to say, the first thing I did do with the hair was I got Nutrafol. And I am not— like, Nutrafol don't sponsor me. They're not a sponsor of this podcast. But that works. I've been on it for 6, maybe almost 9 months. I started it, and I took a break, and then I came back to it. And my hair is doing so much better. So if you're dealing with thin hair, your hair is thinning, you're noticing changes in your hair, Nutrafol is not just like a commercial on television. It actually does work. So I'm going to put a link in the show notes. I probably have an affiliate code or like a discount code or something. I'll put the link in the show notes. Try it for yourself. Thing is with Nutrafol, and I talked to the owner of a stylist or the owner of the hair salon that I go to, She's like, oh yeah, 100% works. She's like, but as soon as you stop taking it, your hair is going to potentially revert back to where it was unless you're doing something else to just improve your overall health. So just caveat for that. And it's not a quick fix. It takes 6— it took 6 months for me to see any type of like improvement. And you'll see even if you go to their website or their before and after pictures, you know, people have been taking it for 6 months, 9 months. I think at this point, because I get them, I get the 3-month refills, I think I'm on like my 4th one. So maybe it is almost, almost a year that I've been taking it. Um, but it does work. And okay, that's all I'm going to say about Nutrafol and hair. Let's get back to hormones. Took a little, took a little side road there. Um, but yes, everyone go get your hormones tested. Put it on your to-do list. Here's the thing though, Your primary care physician is not going to test you for everything. Simple reason is because they're not trained in hormonal health, so they're not going to give you the test even if you ask for it. They're not going to give it to you because they're going to get the results back and they're not trained to help you figure out what to do with your results. So we love our PCPs. They have their place in our lives for like getting flu shots and you know, checking out the other things. But when it comes to hormonal health and you want a full-blown hormonal blood test, you've got to go to a trained functional medicine practitioner. So go find one in your area. I'm actually working with one now, and that's how I was able to see all of my results from a full hormonal blood test. And I was like, oh, I was like, okay. So I knew there might be some issues But I was like, oh, I was really shocked about what the stress had done to my hormone levels. So now I'm on a mission to help everyone improve their hormonal health. So my functional medicine practitioner will actually be doing a workshop inside Stop Dieting Forever, which I'm super excited about. And I've partnered with a company which all of my newest private clients will have the opportunity to get a full workup of blood work, and we're going to be testing 100+ different biomarkers, including hormones, thyroid, heart, metabolism, inflammation, toxins, all the things. We'll do the test in the first month in which we're working together and in month 6. I now work with my private clients 6 months at a time. It's going to be a game changer for sure. But go get your hormones tested. Go find— go Google functional medicine practitioner in my area. If you're in Stop Dieting Forever in the group, make sure that you RSVP for the workshop on March 21st, where my person Julie is going to be coming in to talk to us about weight loss, stress, hormones, all the things. She's super knowledgeable. And that's all I'm going to say about hormones, okay? Your hormones may not be optimized to support weight loss. Now, I understand if this is something that is brand new to you and you've, like, heard about this before, it could be a little overwhelming. It's okay. Just as your, your health is a journey, right? Yes, you may be focused on just losing the weight, but optimizing your health, becoming well in your body, it is a journey that actually never ends. I was talking to my, my group clients about this recently, is that once you hit your goal weight, yay, we celebrate, but that's just one thing. Right. You're always— if you want to live a long, healthy life and like live your best life and be looking amazing and feeling full of energy and feeling good, this is what we got to do now. Okay? So you got to understand your hormones at a very specific level. So if you've never had your hormones tested, get them tested. And if you're like, I don't know, I need some help with that, book a call with me and we'll talk about private coaching and I will help you and I'll walk you through that whole entire process. But once we get your results back, we're going to start doing some support to improve your biomarkers. So at the end of the 6 months, we want to see some improvement. All right. So hormones, that's the second area, second reason why you may not be able to lose the weight that you want and keep it off. All right. The third thing, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, is sleep. Y'all, sleep. That's the one thing we kind of like, you know, we don't pay attention to. We're like, oh, you know, I'm good on 4 hours of sleep. Mm-mm. If you're not getting a good night's sleep, which doesn't— and I'm not talking about the hours of sleep, I'm talking about the quality of sleep. Your sleep quality, if you're unable to get into a restorative state of sleep at night, your sleep quality is poor. And again, it's very easy for us to overlook getting a good night's sleep, but it makes such a huge difference. I started having sleep issues a few years ago, and I was on a mission. I was like, okay, we got to figure this out. I was willing to study everything about sleep that I could because I wanted to improve. Because I— once I was like, okay, once I have the knowledge, once I've quote unquote solved the problem, then I can help my clients with their sleep issues. And teach them what I've learned. So I started using the sleep app Sleep Cycle to understand my sleep patterns, right? That was kind of like the beginning journey. And you put it on your phone, you put your phone on your nightstand at nighttime, and it like, it tracks some stuff from your, like, the way that your movement, your sleep movement, from your breathing. Tells you and it gives you a whole little report at night. So start there. If you've never tracked your sleep or you don't have a sleep tracker, start with the Sleep Cycle— sleep cycle app. And I will put the link in the show notes so you can find it quickly. So that was the beginning. Eventually I got an Oura Ring. O-U-R-A. Oura. And that changed the game for me. Many of my clients now have an Oura Ring. In fact, we did a whole Oura Ring clinic inside, um, the group. I think all of my private clients most recently, they all purchased Oura Rings. It makes such a difference. This is more data that you can understand what is happening at nighttime, because just because you're asleep doesn't mean that your body is getting the restorative sleep and the rest that it actually needs. So when I got the Oura Ring, I was shocked to discover that most nights my body was in a physiological state of stress. Y'all, this was like, okay, this was like, okay. So I had the hair thing first and then like months later I was seeing like, oh, I'm still stressed out when I go to sleep. Like, okay, this is like something we need to do. But I was still at this point where I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. So again, we're going to talk about stress on another podcast. But I saw that I was— my body literally was in a state of stress. My parasympathetic nervous system was in a state of stress when I was sleeping. So when that's happening, my heart rate is elevated and my HRV was low. My heart rate variability was low, which means I was not getting good quality sleep. I imagine this is the case for many of you. If you're struggling with losing weight and being able to keep it off, it could be that you're not getting a good night's sleep. Y'all, sleep should be the easiest thing to do, the easiest thing when it comes to getting— being healthy. So when I was able to see this data with the Oura Ring, I was able to experiment with different sleep strategies. And I could see if they were working or not by looking at my Oura Ring data. So one of the biggest ahas that I had was when I was coaching late or working late at night, because I used to do 7:00 PM coaching calls, I was teaching late at night or just in here working and like working till like 8:00, 8:30 PM Eastern. And then I would try to go to bed by 10:00, go to sleep by 10:00, 10:30, because I like to get up early. My body was still wired, right? My brain was still like, it was still going. So that was like descending into my body because our brain controls our body. And that's why I wasn't getting a good night's sleep. Even though I was like physically tired, I was able to go to sleep very, very quickly. My body was not getting rest. So I was able to start doing different experiments of like, oh, let me see what happens when I stop working earlier. What happens on the days when I do some tapping at night before I go to bed? Tapping is an emotional freedom technique. What happens when I do journaling, like writing out my thoughts or like planning my day? Like what happens when I do these different things? Oh, the transition time of like ending my workday, like physically ending my workday, closing my laptop, walking out of the office, closing the door, like all of that. And like telling my brain like, okay, we're done working now. We can stop thinking about work. Stop thinking about your business. Go to sleep. Start doing— I started doing all these different sleep strategies and then I could see which ones were working and which ones weren't. So that was the beauty of having an Oura Ring to understand my sleep. So there's like a dozen sleep trackers out there. I'm not familiar with all of them. I know Apple Watch is one of them. So you can wear your Apple Watch at night. Fitbit, I think, has one. So there's a lot of different sleep trackers. Invest in one. It's so important to understand what's happening at nighttime because that's the easy— I think that's probably the easiest thing to fix, really, is to improve your sleep. All right. So those are the things, right? Mindset, hormones, sleep. Those are the 3 things that you probably are not looking into or not even aware of that could be keeping you from losing weight and keeping it off. So I'm going to, I'm going to like go over the solution real, real quick again. So learn how to reprogram your negative thinking by creating a new identity of the woman who can lose weight, the woman that can trust the process, right? And the woman who has the body that is capable of losing weight. Second thing you want to do is get your full hormonal blood workup, see what's happening in there, see what your levels are, and use supplementation. We can use nutrition. This is what I'm going to be doing with my private clients to get everything back into balance. So find a functional medicine practitioner to get all the tests that you need, not just your basic metabolic panel, which is what your primary care physician is going to require. And then learn how to track your sleep. Get a sleep tracker. I don't care which— I mean, I can't— I don't know all them, all I can do is recommend an Oura Ring. And because I love Oura so much and I talk about it so much and so many of my clients have one, you can go to the link in the show notes and get $40 off your Oura Ring if you've been looking to get one. I got Kevin one for Christmas. He loves it. We compare sleep data when we wake up in the morning. I'm like, babe, what's your readiness score today? Um, and see what's happening. See what's happening. And the other thing that I love now about the Oura Ring, they're always upgrading it with new things, but you can now test and see what your stress levels are during the day. So that has been a game changer, having that data. As I'm working on reducing my own stress, I can actually see, oh, it's working and what's not working. So it's amazing during the day. So that is, you know, super. I'm like, oh, what else are they going to roll out? And if you're like, Jennifer, it sounds great, it sounds all overwhelming, let's— okay, let's just talk about becoming a private client and I can help you with all three of these areas, period, because that's what I do. Um, and I want to help you unpack your eating habits. So I want you to think about weight loss in a more holistic way. I think when you have a dieter's mindset and you come from the world of dieting, you're very, like, one-sided when it comes to weight loss. You think, oh, I just need to, like, calories in, calories out. I need to exercise more and I need to eat less. And that's, you know, that's fine. You can exercise more and you can eat less, but that may not yield you the results that you want, especially as things shift and change. But the first, the most important thing that's going to be a game changer is your identity. Like, that's— you got to do— you got to do that identity work. You have to. Otherwise, you're always going to be that person that struggles with their weight. All right, y'all, let's do— oh, Colette, let's do stop and celebrate. Play the music. I want to stop and celebrate one of my private clients. She has, quote unquote, graduated. We worked together about 6 months, Tracy, um, and she said— she gave me a glowing video testimonial, but part of her testimonial, as she says, my results thus far have been better than I expected. With Jennifer's private coaching, I can now say that I am close to my lowest weight as I have been since I had my second baby 16 years ago. And this has been so different because I can eat what I want. I can drink what I want. Food is not a problem anymore. So I want to celebrate Tracy. She is doing phenomenal. We did a lot of— she's an executive director, got a big job, big title, doing big things in the world. And we did a lot of coaching on stress, managing stress. At work, at home, all the things. She got an Oura Ring, loves the data. So hats off to you, Tracy. We're celebrating you. If you want to hear Tracy's story, we did an interview, episode 150, Becoming a Better Leader Leads to Weight Loss, an interview with Tracy Richman. You can go back. I'll put the link in the show notes and you can listen to her full story. All right, y'all, thanks for tuning in this week. Be sure to check out the show notes for all of the direct links. I mentioned a lot of different things. Today for all of the resources mentioned in today's podcast. And y'all, if I mentioned something in the podcast and there is not a link in the show notes, just shoot us an email. We will totally send you the link and update the show notes, because sometimes I just be talking and I don't make a note of what I be talking about. So sometimes I forget. So if there's something that I mentioned and you're like, Jennifer, what was the thing you said? You mentioned this, like, you don't have it in the show notes, just send us an email. Clientcare@jenniferdent.com. Thank you very much. So also in the show notes, you're going to find ways that you can work with me as a private client, how you can become a group member, and you'll also find the link to your brand new guide, How to Lose Weight This Week Without a Diet. I invite you to share this episode with your friends. Share your thoughts with me by leaving a 5-star review. Thank you very much in advance. On your favorite podcast platform, and live luxe. I will see you in the next episode.