"Help! I'm struggling to not eat AFTER dinner!"

All right. Hey, y'all. Hey, I think— let me just double check. Looks like we are live on Facebook. Let me make sure you guys can hear me. Okay. My own audio check. Okay, perfect. If you are watching live on Facebook, go ahead and say hi. Let me know that you're in the house on this Saturday afternoon. All right, y'all, I know you're busy, you got stuff to do, so let's just jump into the Q&A. And make sure I can see the comments. There we go. Good afternoon if you're on the East Coast. Hello, hello, hello! Come on in, say hello. Let me know that you are there. Hey, Keisha. Good to see you. My West Coaster, California in the house. Love it. All right, let's jump to the questions. And as you guys have questions, you can post them. I'm going to teach for about 30 minutes. So for those of you who don't know me and you just stumbled upon this video in my page, I am Jennifer Dent-Brown. I am your life and weight loss coach, and I help women learn to stop dieting forever. Hey, Sandy, good to see you. And one of the reasons why I wanted to start doing these live, like, little quick Q&As, because I get a lot of questions that people send me to my inbox. I'm very— and people tell me what they're struggling with when they join the boot camp. So just FYI, the next Stop Dieting in 30 boot camp begins on February 14th. Registration is now open. You can go to Stop Dieting in 30 to sign up. But I wanted to just address some of these questions. And y'all, I'm getting organized. I'm like putting them all into a spreadsheet because literally I had so many in my inbox and then I was like, all right, let me just like put them in a folder. But then they would go into the folder in my Gmail account and just like I wouldn't see them again. And so now we're getting organized. I'm putting them in a spreadsheet. I know who has submitted them. I know when I've answered them. Because you guys are telling me what you're struggling with and I'm here to help you. But if you're telling me what you're struggling with and I'm not answering you, then it's just kind of like, all right, I'm not really helping you. So I'm starting to see themes with the questions. So I thought it would be really important to just start addressing some of the bigger ones. And so I have two questions here that I'm going to talk about today. And if you're watching and you have a question, you can go ahead and post it in the chat. Um, okay, Keith has already put one in there, and I will see if I can get to it. If not, I'm going to put it in my spreadsheet and come back to it, and then I will answer it on a future— what I'm calling Jennifer Live. Okay, I teach. For those of you who know me and who are in my community, I teach with a whiteboard. Marker, mic. Like, this is how I teach. This is not like an answer that I'm giving to you, more generic, like on the podcast. It's very, very specific because I want you to understand that learning how to undiet your brain is like— you need to be a student. You need to be a student of thinking in this new way, what I call moving from your version 1.0 brain to your version 2.0 brain. Hey, so right now, the people who are sending me the questions, y'all, who I love very much, dearly, and the people what you're struggling with, these are what your 1.0 brain is thinking. And the version 1.0 of you is the one that believes that you need to be on a diet to lose weight. Okay, my job as your life and weight loss coach is to tell you, you do not need to follow a diet. To lose weight. You do not need to follow a cookie-cutter diet to permanently lose weight. Hey, what I am teaching you with the Stop Dieting Forever process is how to go from your version 1.0 brain, which is where you are right now— we send it so much love, but there's a better one— you're learning how to create your version 2.0 brain. It's version 2.0 of yourself. This is the Stop Dieting Forever mindset. And I'm just going to give you an example of what that looks like based off of a question that I received from Tricia way back in November. Tricia, I apologize, but I'm getting to the questions now. So Tricia sent me an email, and I know a lot of you can relate to it. Okay, so listen, she says, when it comes to weight loss, my biggest struggle is my habits of justifying my overeating. For example, oh, one more piece of pizza won't hurt. You never get pizza. Or says, I've already screwed up my diet today. I might as well just blow it and have the ice cream. And then she says, I know exactly when I'm doing this, but I eat the food anyway. I have come up with some responses, and I can tell myself for some of these situations things such as You've already lost 25 pounds, keep going. Or let's get that A1C below the pre-diabetic zone. However, I'll tell myself these things, but then I still eat the food, which just makes me feel like food has no control over me sometimes. She finishes the email by saying, I currently weigh 210-ish pounds. And I've lost 25 pounds already with mindful eating and intuitive eating. I also hike 4 miles Monday through Friday. I also drink at least half a gallon of water a day and get at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night. However, I've been kind of stuck at the same weight for weeks and weeks and weeks. I'd love to see the scale go downwards again. I'd love any help from you. All right, thank you so much for that question. Oh, thanks, Keisha. Um, thank you so much for that question, Tricia. So let's just break this down real quick. So the first thing that you mentioned was the first thought that you had. It was definitely a version 1.0 thought from your current mindset, and the thought was like, oh, one more piece of pizza won't hurt. You never get pizza. But we're living with this 1.0 mindset, and we're struggling with our weight, have thoughts like this that we don't even recognize. We're just on autoplay. And as soon as you tell yourself you can't have something, guess what happens? You want it. As soon as she tells herself, I can't have the pizza, right? I never get pizza. She's justifying— first of all, she's telling herself, one more piece of pizza won't hurt. And then she's justifying it by saying, well, girl, you never get pizza. That is your bratty brain on overdrive. That is your bratty brain just giving you permission in that moment to eat the pizza. Now, eating the pizza is not the problem. The problem is that you're eating it from an emotional place versus an intentional place. The fact that you said one more piece of pizza won't hurt, 'You never get to have pizza' is an emotionally driven decision. It's an emotionally driven thought, right? It's your bratty brain being like, 'Oh, you never get pizza. Oh, you poor little thing. You deserve to have more pizza.' And so what happens? You go ahead and eat the pizza. Great example, Tristan. Thank you for providing— this is a great example of a version 1.0 thought from a version 1.0 mindset. The other thought that she offered was— hey, Brig— the other thought that she offered was, I already screwed up my diet today, might as well just blow it and have that ice cream. First of all, we already know that diets don't work. So the fact that you're following— trying to follow a diet is difficult. And diets are set up for us to fail because they don't teach you how to go from your version 1.0 mindset to your version 2.0 mindset. Mindset. Okay, so she's like, again, her— oh girl, you already messed up today, so you might as well just go on ahead and eat the ice cream. Tricia, in her 1.0 mindset that struggles with her weight, has not yet learned how to manage that bratty brain. She hasn't yet learned to think like a version 2.0 of herself more often. So of course, when her bratty brain is like, girl, eat the pizza, eat the ice cream, she goes ahead and eats it. Now, in her second part of her email, she did say she's got some thoughts that she uses sometimes, some responses that keep her like from making the immediate decision. So she says, um, 'You already lost 25 pounds, keep going.' Or she'll tell herself, 'Let's keep below the A1— let's keep the A1C below the pre-diabetic zone.' So she has some go-to thoughts that help her in the moment, but she still ends back here because she said she tells herself these things, but then she still eats the food And that just makes her feel like food has such control over her sometimes. So she's in this cycle. So she's part of like, I'm slowly aware of the thoughts that I'm having. And so she like tries to put perfume on the pain and tell herself, keep going, you've already done 25 pounds, push through with that willpower, you can do it. But she hasn't yet identified the reasons why she's having these 1.0 thoughts. That's the difference. Okay, so in the Stop Dieting Forever process, we don't just like erase the 1.0 thoughts and try to cover them up with 2.0 thoughts from our 2.0 mindset. We first have to understand where this is coming from, why our bratty brain is on overdrive, why our bratty brain is telling us, go ahead, eat the thing, eat the pizza, eat the ice cream. What is happening? And then when you can understand where that emotional decision is coming from, then you can clearly make a version 2.0 choice, right, from your version 2.0 self, which is you think following the Stop Dieting Forever mindset and thinking like your 2.0 version self. All of my Luxx Lifers in the Stop Dieting Forever program We're all working towards the 2.0 mindset. When you join the boot camp, the Stop Dieting in 30 weight loss boot camp, you get introduced to uncovering all of your 1.0 thinking, why you're having all of this, what these 1.0 thoughts. And then we talk about, well, how do I create— how do I start thinking more like my 2.0 self? The more you think like your version 2.0 self, this is where you want to stop struggling with your weight. This is when you're going to achieve your goal weight. So an example for Tricia, once she understands— one, she has the awareness that she's having this thought, this version 1.0 thought of like, okay girl, go ahead and eat the pizza. She's saying one more piece of pizza won't hurt, you never get pizza. When she understands why she's telling herself that and what, and what, what that's coming from, I'm just going to use my imagination. And I don't know because Tricia didn't say, but let's just say she had a hard day at work, kids are driving her nuts. End of the day, pizza night for them, and she's like, she had plans to plan a salad, and she's like, you know what, one little piece of pizza won't hurt. You never have pizza because she's struggling with her emotions from having a hard day at work and dealing with the kids. So she eats the pizza. But now her 2.0 self, same circumstance, hard week at work, same kids, same kids driving her crazy, right? Her version 2.0 mindset is gonna be like, you know what, I'm choosing to feel energetic over the pizza today. She believes, I'm choosing to feel energetic over the pizza today. Or she could just be like, you know what, I'm choosing my goal. She's been stuck at this 25-pound weight loss plateau. I'm choosing my goal over this piece of pizza, right? And the more that she is practicing and believing from her 2.0 brain, gonna happen. She's gonna break through that 25-pound weight loss plateau that she's struggling with. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead. If you guys have questions about that, and if I have time at the end, answer them. Hi, Cheryl. Hi, Sarah. Yeah, Brick says from an emotional place rather than from an intentional place. That's one thing. If you guys are taking notes, all good students take notes. So when you join the boot camp, I will help you, remind you, make sure to take notes. We actually have— side note, commercial for the boot camp— in the boot camp we have worksheets and we have a daily planner, 30-day daily planner, so you know exactly what to do as you're learning the Stop Dieting Forever process. So you don't have to just open up a blank piece of paper and start writing. We got the worksheets for you. Okay. Sure, I hope that is helpful to you as you journey on past your— I just want to make one more point about Tricia's email as I'm reading the third paragraph again. She says, I've already lost 25 pounds. But she says, I also hike 4 miles Monday through Friday. I drink at least a half a gallon of water. I get 7 to 8 hours of sleep. So, and she says she's stuck at this weight for weeks and weeks and weeks. I want— it's like, yes, you hike and exercise, that is great. Yes, you drink water every day, wonderful. But I want you to just remember that your transformation, your weight loss transformation, of you going from 210 down to your goal, your forever weight, Tricia, is going to come from focusing on going from here to here. The actions are going to come naturally, right? We want to just be like, well, I'm exercising and I'm drinking the water and I'm getting my rest and I'm doing all the things, but the weight's still not coming off. That's because we're putting all of our attention and our focus on doing the action. What you're going to learn in the Stop Dieting in 30 Weight Loss Boot Camp is how to focus your energy and attention here so we can be really clear what's happening here and learn how to create this. Okay, y'all got that? Good. Hey, Nayesha! Nayesha, round of applause! Side note, Nayesha is a member in the Stop Dieting Forever program, and she just posted in the group today. She She's beautiful picture. She's back in her size 8 jeans. She just dropped her first 6 pounds. We're in the middle of our 6-pound challenge. And so I just want to give a round of applause and a high five and celebrate y'all. Celebrate Naisha. Because when we celebrate one person, we can learn to celebrate ourselves more. All right, the other question which I am going to answer today. It was— oh yes, Danielle. So Danielle sent me this email on January 5th, and she says, um, my biggest struggle is eating after dinner. I prepare healthy, high-quality meals with lots of veggies and lean protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but then I raid my son's snacks. Last night I ate 2 chocolate chip bars and 4 bowls of Goldfish, and that was after 4 bowls of the Skinny Pop kettle corn that is supposed to distract me from my son's snacks. Thinking about not eating makes me eat, and I know that I'm not actually hungry. OK, Danielle, girl, I get it. I have been there. It's like the more we think about not eating, the more we want to eat, which is why cookie-cutter diets don't work. Y'all, remember counting those points for Weight Watchers and being like, ooh, I got 7.5 points left. What can I eat in the 7 points? And I wasn't even hungry. And all day you're looking and you're calculating and you're thinking about, oh, can I eat this? Can I not eat this? Is this going to work? But— and you're always thinking about food. You're all— and you're thinking about it in a negative place, right? You're thinking about it from your 1.0 mindset because Weight Watchers— I'm sorry— and other diets don't teach you how to think so you never have to be on a diet again. This is why I have created the Stop Dieting Forever weight loss process. 'Cause I want y'all to get off of the damn diet. Hey, so Danielle, I want— first of all, I want you to just like take a minute and give yourself an internal hug from the inside out and just tell yourself it is okay. It is okay. You have been trying and you've been working on your weight, and yes, that is a wonderful thing. I don't want you to beat yourself up because you've been doing great all day, but then you're struggling at nighttime. I want you to just know that what you're dealing with, you are not alone. You are not alone. There's so many of us who are stuck in this 1.0 mindset. And this is what we do. We set ourselves up to overeat at nighttime, simply because we don't know how to think like this yet. Right? Notice how I said yet. You have an opportunity to learn how to go from here to here. But right now, I want you to just like give yourself some love. Give yourself some grace. You're showing up for yourself. You're reaching out for help. You're sending me an email and you're like, this is my situation. I'm struggling with it. I can already tell that you are committed to figuring out what the problem is. Okay, so give yourself what I call an internal hug from the inside out and just say it is okay that you ate the chocolate chip bars and the 4 bowls of Goldfish and the 4 bowls of Skinny Pop popcorn at night. It's okay. Okay, now, now that we can breathe again and know that you are normal and what has happened is completely absolutely normal, and that this is just an opportunity for you to learn from yourself— we call this failing forward in my program— we can now, like, open ourselves up to thinking about this differently. But while we're beating ourselves up because we had an overeat, we can't— we don't hear anything. We, as students, we're not learning anything because we're so busy. We're like, oh, I knew I couldn't do it. This is a problem. I'm struggling. I— this is like so messed up, right? But when we can just say, you know what, it's okay, this happened, I'm ready to learn from it, what do I need to do next? Like, we can open ourselves up to learn from it. There's probably a couple of things here, Danielle, and I would love to see you in the boot camp, but there's probably a lot of 1.0 thoughts that are happening because you're trying to follow a diet. That are not serving you. Hey, and you're— it sounds like you're very, very— not strict, but you're very, very— what's the word— focused during the day, because you say, I prepare healthy, high-quality meals with lots of vegetables and lean protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And that is great. However, I want you to really just question the thinking, your thought process behind doing those things. Okay, so remember when I talked about, um, Tricia's example in the, the previous question that I answered? What is your thought process as you're preparing these super healthy meals, right? If your 1.0 thinking is still in effect even though you're preparing these healthy meals, and your 1.0 thinking is just playing in the background, guess what's going to happen? As soon as you— as for you, again, you get to the end of the day and you've been using this willpower to follow your high-quality meals and lots of vegetables and lean protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and you haven't yet resolved the emotions that are driving the need to emotionally eat, guess what's going to happen? Soon as you see your son's chocolate chip snacks, You're going to eat them because you haven't yet identified what is that emotion that has been percolating all day. Now again, we want to just like put perfume on the pig. We don't want to address all the emotional stuff. We're like, let me just focus on high-quality vegetables, lean protein, breakfast, lunch, dinner. I can do that. But if we're not addressing the true reasons why we're overeating in the first place, We can be— use that willpower all day. We can use it for a week, but as soon as we get to the weekend, weekend brain kicks in. Talk about that in week 3— or no, we talk about that in week 1 of the boot camp, how to avoid weekend brain, right? Or your evening nighttime brain kicks in and you end up emotionally trying to fill whatever's happening with food. And in your case, it was your son's snacks. The chocolate chip bars, the Goldfish, and the Skinny Pop. And I love that it's Skinny Pop kettle corn, girl, because you know we got to get the skinny kettle corn popcorn because that's going to make us feel better. Hey, Tara! So just know that when you're not addressing the thoughts and the emotions that are percolating throughout the day, you can be as strict as you want. And this is why Diets don't work because we can follow a diet to a T, but if we're not addressing our emotional urges to eat that are coming from this 1.0 mindset, we're always going to end up eating the things that we really want at some point in time. Okay. So to answer your question, Danielle, when this happens again, I want you to one, question what your driving factor is behind wanting to lose weight. We talk about this in the first week of the boot camp. We uncover what our compelling reason is to lose weight. And some boot campers will find that their compelling reason, their motivation to lose weight, comes from a very negative place. And it's very hard to lose weight when you're operating from a negative place. So in the first week of the boot camp, we get real clear with our vision, right? Real clear with the compelling reason. What is it? Why do we want to lose the weight? And when we understand our compelling reason and it comes in, it's aligned in a place that feels good to us, we can start to look at our daily thoughts. So what are you thinking as you're preparing your, as you say, your healthy, high-quality meals with lots of veggies and lean protein for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? What are you thinking about yourself? What are you thinking about the reasons why you're preparing this food? What are you thinking while you're eating it? Are those thoughts coming from a negative place? Are they, or are they coming from a place of like love and this feels really good and I'm fueling my body with healthy food? Chances are it's probably the first thing, right? There's coming from a negative place because soon as you get to the end of— or is gone, girl, and you go to town. Right, so then we want to just like think about and try to uncover like why, why, what is happening at the end of your day. Because until you figure that out, you're going to have trouble getting to this version 2.0 mindset where you have learned. But in the boot camp, we go through all that stuff, y'all. So if you really resonate with Danielle and you really resonate with Tricia's situations on this side of the board, and you're like, definitely 1.0 version thinking all the way, then I want you to come join the Stop Dieting in 30 weight loss boot camp. We're going to uncover all this stuff in 30 days. You're going to learn my process, and you're going to learn all the strategies, all the tools, all the things that are happening that you're not even unaware of in 30 days. Right, so you can start working towards your 2.0 mindset. Now, are you going to go from here to here in 30 days? No. I like to say this is like learning a new language. Right, do you go from like learning, being fluent in English and being fluent in Russian in 30 days? No. It takes practice. It takes time. It's a skill, right? Something you need to keep working on and focusing on. Y'all know, if you've ever tried to learn another language before, if you stop practicing it, like how I stopped practicing Spanish in college, you kind of forget what you've learned so far. So you've got to keep practicing it. And this is why I've created the Stop Dieting Forever program, which you can join after you finish the boot camp, so you can learn to master everything you've learned in the boot camp, so you could become fluent You Version 2.0. Okay, so this is what I have created for all of my people who are just like sick and tired of the goddamn diets. And if you have tried every single diet and nothing else seems to be working, you have not tried this. I promise you, this will work when you put the work in. Okay, and for those of you who are like, work? And you like start crumpling and like falling apart and like, I don't want to do any work. Y'all, being overweight is work. Being overweight is work. Carrying around extra weight is work. Standing in the closet trying to figure out what to wear every day is work. It's mental energy. So if you're going to be putting mental energy towards something, you might as well put it towards something that's going to give you the result that you want. Eventually. Hey, all right. I want you all to go to stopdietingin30.com to register for the boot camp. We start on February 14th and registration is open now. Now, one more minute. I'm going to address Keisha's question, which I saw. Oh, Keisha. Okay, so Keisha, Keisha, I cannot answer this question in a minute, but you're in the program, so maybe I will address it within the Stop Dieting Forever program. But Keisha's question is, how do you manage weight loss when you have experienced emotional trauma? First of all, have experienced emotional trauma. All of us can look back in our past and recognize some sort of emotional trauma that we have experienced. And for most of us, that's probably why we're overeating in the first place. Okay, what I— to— and this is a very generic answer, but Okay, I know there are different levels of trauma, and I know there's like different depths of it. But what I want you to recognize, Keisha, and for anyone else who's resonating with this question, is that it's one thing to like spend your time trying to figure out where the trauma occurred and trying to figure out why you're overeating because of that trauma. It's another thing— and for some people, that is like exactly where they need to be. But for other people, the work is really just understanding the emotions that are happening in this current moment. The work is understanding— we talk about this in the boot camp— is becoming emotionally literate, right? And becoming emotionally illiterate so you can identify exactly how you're feeling right now. I think we talk about this in week 3 of the boot camp. Most of us are walking around and we don't have a good handle on what our emotions are. Somebody says, girl, how you doing? You're like, oh, great, or I'm terrible. Like, there's nothing in between. We don't know exactly how we're feeling. So it's very important to become emotionally literate, and that is part of creating the Stop Dieting Forever mindset. So we do talk about how to do that. And y'all, that is like— that is the work for a lot of us. Definitely was the work for me. When you can become more emotionally literate— and Keisha, you know, we use the emotions wheel, we do the models, like, you know that stuff— and the more emotionally literate you can become, then the more you can emotionally empower yourself. Okay, so for like Danielle and Tricia also, they both said like they just feel out of control when it comes to food. They are out of control with the food because they are out of control and out of touch with their own emotions. So overcoming the control, or what I call food freedom, achieving food freedom, where food no longer has control over you and you can look at the pizza, you can look at the cookies, you can look at the skinny kettle corn and it not move you at all, you have no desire to eat whatsoever emotionally, that is achieving food freedom. Achieving food freedom comes when you practice emotionally— emotional empowerment. And there's a very specific way to do that. And we talk, and I teach you how to do this in the boot camp. Okay, so that is something that resonates with you, and you're like, ah, I need to become emotionally fit. Like, I need— that's like, y'all, that's for most of us, that is a final frontier. That is the one thing that is keeping you from your forever weight is because you have not yet been able to really hone in and understand your emotions and the emotions that are driving you to eat. When you get that, the sky is the limit. And that's, that's, that's a lot of the work that we do in the Stop Dieting Forever process. Okay. All right, loves, I love you all. Hopeful— actually, not hopefully, I know it was helpful. Share this video with a friend. If you're like, girl, I think she was talking about you, go ahead, share it with her. Go ahead, sign up for the boot camp, stopdietingin30.com. And if you have questions, if you have things that you're struggling with and you want me to address them in a future Jennifer Live, send them to me in an email. I said, y'all, I'm getting organized. I got a whole little spreadsheet here. I got some more stuff to go through. Whatever you're struggling with, send it to me in an email and we will get your questions answered. You're very welcome, Sandy. Hi, sweetness. Keisha says, I need to practice emotional empowerment. Keisha, I want you to watch that need, right? Anytime you say, I need to do something, you're pushing against it. I want you to find the place where you're like, you know what, I'm choosing to do this right now, right? I'm choosing to get in touch with my emotions. I'm choosing to learn more about my emotionally driven eating. I'm choosing to do that for me versus like, I need to do it. Okay, and that's for anyone. If you catch yourself saying you need to do something. Oh good, Judy says she is very excited for the boot camp. Good, Judy, I'm excited to get to know you inside of the boot camp. All right, I will see y'all in the next Jennifer Live, and I'll see some of y'all in the boot camp. Have a great rest of your day. Bye!