Lose Weight For the Last Time with by Focusing on FOOD

Okay, y'all, so this is Food Freedom Friday. This is the 7th one in the series. So I decided to do Food Freedom Friday because my mission is, yes, for you all to learn how to stop dieting forever, but I want you to achieve food freedom. Food freedom is when you can walk into a buffet of food and you're just like, I'll have a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and you don't feel compelled to eat everything. Food freedom is when you can go out with your girlfriends and they're like, don't you want to taste this? Don't you? And you're like, no, I'm good. Food freedom is when you can cook a whole entire meal and you're not like constantly biting and licking and tasting all the things. Food freedom is when food is just food. It's like it doesn't do anything for you, and it doesn't compel you to consume it. And so that is where ultimately I want everyone to get. You will get there by learning how to stop dieting forever. So if you're new to Food Freedom Friday, welcome. I've been doing this for the past 6 weeks, and you can go on my YouTube channel to go watch the, the other videos that I recorded, or you can check them out on my Facebook page. But real quick, the first week I taught y'all about freedom eating, which is when you will cut out the mind drama about trying to eat everything in moderation. In week 2, I taught you about how to crowd out the junky food so you can get more nutrient-dense food, but without depriving yourself and saying, no, I can't have that. Because y'all know, as soon as you tell yourself you can't have something, what's going to happen? You're going to eat it. So I taught you about how to crowd out your junk food, but not giving it up. But you can still get more nutrient-dense foods in week 2. In week 3, I taught you about the importance of sleep, the Luxe Sleep Strategy. And no, I didn't say you got to have 8 hours of sleep. I said it's not about the quality— quantity of sleep, the quantity of hours, it's the quality of sleep. So I taught you how to have a more restful, higher quality of sleep, even if you're only getting 5 hours of sleep. Hey, Heidi. Heidi just posted in our group. She was like, I'm getting like 6 hours of sleep because she's studying for her PhD. Week 4, I taught you about the 10-sip standard. For those of you who struggle with drinking water, I gave you a really quick, easy, fun hack that you can do no matter what your schedule is. I have a lot of teachers. Actually, the one client was a dentist that got me to thinking about, like, how can I help my clients drink more water? But they can't always, like, run back and forth to the bathroom. I work from home. My bathroom is right on the other side of that wall. I can go back and forth to the bathroom all day. But a lot of you don't have that luxury. You're in a classroom, you're dealing with clients or patients. And so it is difficult to drink a lot of water. So I gave you the 10-sip standard. I taught you about how to do that no matter what your schedule is. Okay? In week 5, we talked about the 36-hour meal plan, which is exactly what that is. A lot of us are intimidated by planning for 7 days, or you have, you know, families to plan for. 36 hours just makes it real simple, real easy, and it takes You can do it in 10 minutes or less. In week 6, I taught you about the satisfaction scale and how to use that to, um, just gauge when to stop eating— actually, to gauge when to eat and when to stop eating. And then I went on vacation last week, so there was no Food Freedom Friday. And now I'm back with the last part of this 7-part series. And I'm going to talk to you about— this is so good, y'all. I'm going to give you the 4 areas that you definitely need to focus on. And I bet you, you're not focusing on any of them right now if you're struggling with your weight. Okay, now, if you're on my email list, you get all of the notifications, the calendar holds, the replays. You get all of the information. So if you're new to Food Freedom Friday and you're like, I want to hear about Freedom Meeting, I I wanna hear about the 10-step standard. I don't know where to go. Go get on my email list. You can go to jenniferdent.com/foodfreedom, and you will be the first to know when I do series like this, when I have announcements, all the things, when I have special offers. So go to jenniferdent.com/foodfreedom. And if I were savvy enough, I would type that in the chat right now, but I can't see it. Oh, I see a question in the chat. Okay, I'll get to the question at the end. Okay, yes, we're gonna talk about that for sure. Okay, hold on, y'all, let me pop my chat out. OK. The other thing I just wanted to mention is all of these concepts that I have come up with to help you learn how to stop dieting forever and to help you lose weight faster literally came from my clients. I saw, as I'm coaching them, I saw what they were struggling with. I see, like, where they get stuck. And so my thought is, as a coach and as a business owner, I'm always solving problems. I'm like, how can I help my clients lose weight? And how can I help them get unstuck and they can lose weight at a faster rate? So like these concepts that I talked about— freedom eating, crowding out, 10 substandard, 36-hour meal plan— a lot of them came from my clients. So if you're interested in working with me one-on-one to get a faster result, to learn how to stop dieting forever, um, I do have one-on-one spots that I am— oh, that are open for the rest— are open for the rest of this year that I'm filling up now. So you can go to jenniferdent.com, um, forward slash consult to just find out more about what it's like to work with me one-on-one. You can go and see some of my clients, um, what do you call those things, testimonials and success stories. And if you know that like one-on-one coaching is the thing that you haven't done and you've tried everything to lose weight, but the coaching thing is the one thing that you just haven't done, then let's talk about it. Let's get on a call. It's completely free. It's actually a Zoom session for 60 minutes. You will tell me everything that you've been struggling with, and I will tell you 3, 3 or 4 things that I think you can do to get to the point where you can achieve food freedom. Okay. All right. So today I want to give you 4 areas, 4 areas that you need to focus on to lose weight permanently. And then I have a very special announcement at the end. Okay. So y'all can help me out in the chat. But when you think about losing weight, like in the past, before you knew about Stop Dieting Forever, before you met Coach Jennifer Dent-Brown, when it was time for you to lose weight, what did you do? What did you do? If I think about my own journey, and I struggled with my weight for like 2 decades, and I did a lot of diets, y'all, a lot of diets. So when I think about some of the things that I would do to lose weight, I would always go to the interweb. I would search for a new diet. Or, y'all, this is before, like, Google and the internet is what it is now. One of my really good girlfriends, we would go to the bookstore. We would go to happy hour at our favorite restaurant. We would drink. We would eat all the stuff. Then we feel terrible. And we would go across the street to Barnes Noble in Rittenhouse Square, for those of you who are familiar with Philadelphia. Which is not even there anymore, unfortunately. And we would go to the self-help diet health section, and we would look for our next diet. We would look for the book. We would look for the next personal development book that is going to help us get out of our misery. It's so funny now I'm thinking back. I remember the one book I got from there was called the Dukan Diet. And I think it was originated in France. And we did that one together, my friend Rachel. I would search for a new diet, right? So as soon as I felt terrible about myself and my weight, I'm like, okay, it's time to go find another diet because, you know, the next one is going to be the one that works. Or I would try a new workout program. I think I probably was the top spender at beachbody.com. I would wake up on Saturdays and lay on my bed and just watch the Beachbody infomercials. Like, that was my entertainment. Um, and I would get all of the programs. I had all of the equipment. Oh yes, Heidi says Denise Austin. Yes, I was a Denise Austin fan. Um, God, I remember doing Denise Austin like in high school. I had her DVDs. And how many calories a day did you say? 1,500 calories a day, right? These are the things, y'all, that we I'm gonna do, um, to lose weight. I would look and maybe like go to a specialty gym. As I like started working and had some money, I would go join these specialty gyms like Orange Theory Fitness and like, um, or go hire a personal trainer. I felt like if I paid them more money for a personal trainer, like this trainer is going to help me lose weight. All of these things— I would count my calories, like, um, Heidi just said 1,500 calories. That was good. You were doing good with 1,500. I was always in that 1,100 to 1,200 calorie a day range. Um, but these are the things that I was trying to do when I was like, okay, I gotta lose weight. Or I would like search all of Pinterest trying to find recipes and healthy substitutions for my junk food. Y'all, I thought that cassava chips were going to save my life because I could eat them instead of potato chips. And cassava chips, if you don't know, go look up cassava chips, because cassava chips, um, probably spiked my insulin levels just as much as regular potato chips. Um, yeah, 1,200 calories, that, that was what I was getting, Gina. Um, so these are like the crazy things. Next, I couldn't even— I shouldn't even say that it was crazy. It was just what I knew to do. Like, these were the things that we were marketed to. Like, where is Denise Austin now, I wonder? Yes, I was very hungry. And so I never could follow 1,200, 1,100 calories. And I would always end up a little quitting on myself, right? Eating a little bit here, eating a little bit there. And then I would just give up. And then I'd go to happy hour with my girlfriend. And then we'd be like, oh my God, we're so fat. And we would go— the whole cycle would start all over again. Do y'all remember going out for the final supper the day before you start a new diet? That's when you like go to your favorite restaurant or you get all of your favorite takeout and you just eat. Or was that just me? Is anybody— can anybody relate to that? Was that just me? So these are the things that we thought we had to do in order to lose weight because we saw it in the magazines, we saw it, um, and the people around us. I remember I did a— was it a pod? No, I did a post about the almond mom complex, right? So maybe depending on what kind of household you grew up in, it was expected that you ate 1,100 calories a day and you worked out twice a day. These are the things that we were socialized to believe that we needed to do. But thank God, we are so much smarter now. Thank God, right? Thank God that I spent 20 years struggling with my weight so I could figure out what I'm about to teach you right now. The 4 things, the 4 areas that you need to work on. But as you were doing all of the things, the Denise Austin workouts, the Beachbody workouts, the 1,200 calories a day, counting calories, all those things that we thought we needed to do, here's what you were not doing. OK? You are not understanding why you felt compelled to snack all the day, all the time. I thought I just needed to find a healthier alternative for my potato chips and my tortilla chips. And then I was like, oh, kale chips, that's it. Oh, cassava chips, that's going to be the thing, right, to help me lose weight. But I couldn't stop eating them. It doesn't matter if I'm overeating a kale chip or a potato chip. It's still too much food. It's going to keep me overweight. I didn't understand why I felt compelled to snack. The reason why those other weight loss methods didn't work is because you don't understand why it's so hard to stop eating, even though you're like, oh my God, I'm full, I need to unbutton my pants. But you're still eating it because the food is so good. You don't understand how to stay consistent with your diet when you run into these common, what I call lifestyle problems, like dinner time with your family. Have— I have clients who have kids and trying to like be a short-order cook and cook a special meal for your kids and a different meal for your spouse, and then they had to cook the, the grilled chicken and the steamed broccoli thinking that's what they needed to do. Like, nobody has time to be a short-order cook every single night because you're trying to eat separate from your family because you're on this, you know, restrictive weight loss plan. So you don't know how to stay consistent when you run into a lifestyle problem like that. Another lifestyle problem that I dealt with was I traveled a lot for work. So there were always team dinners, team lunches, like there was always food around and I didn't know how to be on a diet when I was away for work. But when I was at home in my house, if I didn't go out, like, oh, I was good. I could do exactly what I needed to do on that diet. When you're trying to do those other things to lose weight, you don't know how to deal with what I call the sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts. You know, the ones that tell you, like, girl, it's Friday. You've been so good all week. You deserve to have a treat. Or it's Friday. Of course, we always have pizza on Fridays, right? Another sneaky self-sabotaging thought, which sounds terrible, but it's real, is your brain will tell you it doesn't matter what you're going to do, you're never going to be able to lose weight. So you know what? Just eat what you want because it's not going to work. How many of us have had our sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts sound like that and make us feel terrible. Okay, the other thing that you're not doing when you're following those other very traditional ways to lose weight is that you never know how to become so convicted with your goal that nothing can sway you. Nothing. Because if you have tried and failed so many times in the past, you know, you're kind of like, it's hard to believe that something new is going to work. So you kind of like put— I call— tell my clients, like, you just put your— you're, you're just putting your big toe in the water and say, let me see if this is going to work. Let me see if this Jennifer knows what she's talking about. But you're not 100% committed and convicted to your goal or to losing weight. Those are the things that you were not doing. Those were the things that were keeping you on the diet cycle, right, of like let me try to be restrictive and eat less and work out more to lose weight. And then you don't know how to address those obstacles. And so what happens, you end up eating. So just to go back to the example that I gave you with my friend Rachel, we used to go to happy hour every Thursday and Friday and brunch on Saturday. That was my buddy. And we would just lament about life. And we were both single and trying to date. And we had these jobs that we were trying to, like, figure out our way. And we would drink, like, have our lovely, like, little pity party, like, girl, I can't believe that happened, and eat all the things. And then we would look at each other after we finished eating and drinking all the things, like, okay, what, what, what, what diet, or what are we going to do on Monday? Like, how are we going to, like, make ourselves better? Because we were very much into personal development. We had to make ourselves feel better. Um, but that was my experience of like just being on that cycle, and I know that may resonate with some of you. Um, and I would love to know like what was your experience of being on that cycle. But here's the thing, because there's so many of my clients I see on the cycle, here's the thing. I want you to quit spinning your wheels thinking all of that stuff is going to work eventually. I want you to quit chasing what you think you need to be doing. Um, I want you to stop doing all of this. I'm going to tell you exactly how to do this, because once you stop doing all of this and getting off of the cycle, you will actually have an opportunity to lose weight when you focus on these 4 areas. And y'all, I bought out my whiteboard. Special occasion. Okay. Oh, hey, Sherry! Hello! Hello! Okay. And you know what? My background is blurred, isn't it? So let me unblur my background. Okay, voilà! The magic of the special camera. Okay, y'all, these are the 4 areas that I want you to focus on because these are the areas that will help you stop dieting forever, and these are the areas that will get you to food freedom, and it will keep you there. That's the other thing I really want you to understand is that, yes, you can lose weight doing all those restrictive things for sure. You can lose 10 pounds, you can lose 20 pounds, you can lose 80 pounds doing all that stuff. But are you going to be able to keep it off? I know for a lot of us, we're in so much pain and so uncomfortable and so like emotional— emotional pain, not physical pain, but just uncomfortable with our weight that we, um, oh, I just lost my train of thought. See what happens when you don't have caffeine in the morning? Um, what was I going to say about the emotional pain? Because it was very important. Oh, I know what it was. We're so— we have so much pain emotionally. We're experiencing so much pain emotionally because of this weight. We'll do anything to get it off quickly, anything to get it off quickly. The problem is we don't think about what are we going to do after we get the weight off? What is going to be the plan after you lose a 10, 20, 30, 40, 80 pounds, whatever it is? We don't think about that. And I'm starting to see so many conversations of people— this is just a total side note— who are taking the weight loss drug because they're in so much emotional pain and they're just desperate to get the weight off. I get it. I understand. Been there, done that. I have done weight loss drugs in the past. You don't think about what's going to happen after you lose the weight. You don't think that far. And so one of my, my missions in this, in this world is like, okay, so I'm going to teach you how to stop dieting forever. You're going to get to your forever weight, but you're also going to know how to experience food freedom. And that's what's going to take you through after you lose the weight, after you hit the goal. Okay, so back to the 4 things, the 4 areas that you need to focus on, because when you're doing the traditional stuff, you're not working on this stuff. Let's see if you can see that. It's a little light. Let's try a different color. Can y'all see that? You're gonna be focusing on food. Yep, you heard me. Yes, you're gonna be focusing on food. Okay. And I wanna explain to you what this acronym is. This will get you to stop dieting forever. Don't you love this? Don't you? You're going to be focusing on food to stop eating food. Feelings, obstacles, objections, and decisions. Okay? When you are running around trying to follow your restrictive diets, you're not focusing on the reasons why you're eating and why you can't stop eating. Okay? You're not focusing on the reasons why you can be so good Monday through Friday, but as soon as— or Monday through Thursday, but as soon as Friday gets here, you just give up and go to town and eat all the things. I call that weakened brain. You're not focusing on how to overcome obstacles, right? I talked about the common lifestyle problems that a lot of us experience. You don't know how to eat outside of your house because you're so focused on like, I gotta follow this diet, I gotta follow this workout plan, I gotta be in bed at this time. You don't know how to live your life and like continue to lose weight if you go on vacation. You don't know how to overcome an obstacle like having to travel for work. You don't even know how to overcome an obstacle like how to cook your own food and still prepare food for your kids. Spoiler alert, you don't— you shouldn't have to eat anything different from your kids. Oh man, you can't see what I'm writing. Okay, it's very, very light. Well, I'll just walk you— I'll just talk you through it. But this is an acronym for— it says FOOD. F-O-O-D. If you're writing, you can write this down on a piece of paper in a column. F-O-O-D. Okay, feelings, obstacles, objections, decisions. So again, when you're doing all the restrictive things to try to lose weight, you're not focused on objections. The objections are your sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts. I'm not talking about an objection from your spouse or your partner. I'm talking about the objections from yourself, the ones that say, girl, you deserve to have a treat, or we gotta take a break, let's go get snack, right? Those are your sneaky self-sabotaging thoughts that you don't know how to deal with. And you also don't know how to— you're not learning how to make decisions consistently to support your weight loss goal when you're focused on eating less and exercising more, right? You don't understand, y'all. Weight loss is just— let me tell you something, here's a secret. Weight loss is nothing but a series of decisions. That's it. You're just making decisions all day, every day. That's it. But you want to become really, really good at making decisions. And so when you're so focused on, I don't even know how to make a decision if I'm not following what's already on this pre-prepared traditional cookie-cutter plan, then you don't know how to make decisions to support your goal. And you're going to gain the weight back. So these are the 4 areas that I have boiled down to help my clients. I call this a food framework, um, to get them to stop dieting forever, to get them to food freedom. Feelings, obstacles, objections, and decisions. And so here's my announcement, here's my announcement: I'm going to teach you how to look at these 4 areas in the most simplest way that doesn't cause you to have to like blow everything up in your life and try something new, right? It doesn't— it's not going to cause you to disrupt your entire lifestyle. So on November 5th, which is a Sunday at 7:30 PM Eastern time, I'm doing a free, free virtual training where I'm going to show you how focusing on food feelings of obstacles, objections, decisions will help you lose 10 pounds in 30 days without overhauling your— disrupting your entire life. And because y'all are busy, we have things to do. We don't have time to completely, you know, change our entire schedule so we can work out twice a day for 45 minutes. And when one of the workouts has to be outside, if y'all don't know what I'm talking about, it's a very popular weight loss plan. Right? We don't have time to go higher or the resources to go higher like a personal trainer or go to 5 AM boot camp classes every day. I want you to learn how to stop dieting forever in the life, in the schedule that you currently have right now, because I'm going to teach you these 4 things: feelings, obstacles, objections, decisions, and how you can use these 4 areas to focus on to lose weight and to specifically lose 10 pounds in 30 days. Okay, so you can go to jenniferdent.com/freetraining to sign up for this free virtual webinar. Um, I'm super excited about it. I have been like dreaming about it, and I have been working on this food framework for months, y'all, for months, since like July. And I can't wait to tell you more about it. All right, so let us recap. This is the last in the series of the Food Free— Food Friday Freedom Series— Food Freedom Friday Series. Um, if you're not on my email list and you're interested and you want to learn how to stop dieting forever, and you're like, okay, Jennifer kind of sounds like she might know what she's talking about, go to jenniferdent.com/foodfreedom to get on my newsletter weekly, uh, weekly email list where I send out a newsletter every week. If you're interested in private coaching with me and you want my brain on your body, you can definitely do that. Go to jenniferdent.com/consult, um, where you can sign up to work with me or schedule a time to talk to me. And if you're interested, I actually— I know you want to do this because it's going to be so much fun. Attend the free training on November 5th and bring your friends. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to teach you how to lose 10 pounds in 30 days during the holidays. Y'all, don't, don't sleep. Don't sleep. My clients lose weight during the holidays. Without disrupting your entire lifestyle. So that means, yes, you can have your auntie's favorite eggnog and still lose 10 pounds in 30 days. Yes, you can have your sister-in-law's pumpkin pie and still lose 10 pounds in 30 days. Okay? Okay. Are there any questions? If you're watching this— oh, we are— nobody's on Facebook. Oops. But if you do see this on Facebook and you have a question, simply put it in the comments and DM me, or DM me, and we can go from there. All right, thank you for attending the final Food Freedom Friday. I hope y'all have an amazing weekend. And actually, I want to address this question real quick. How do you reconcile the love of food with culinary exploration? I love food. If you don't know, I love food. I often talk about the really wonderful meals that I experience. I'm all about a wonderfully prepared, high-quality, fresh ingredients type of meal. Um, so that's just part of my lifestyle. So when you focus on feelings, obstacles, objections, and making decisions, You can love food and explore culinary whatever as much as you want to. Kevin and I, my husband, we just had our wedding anniversary, our 9th wedding anniversary on Wednesday. We went to one of the— Philadelphia has the best restaurants. We went to one of the top restaurants. Actually, the chef won Top Chef. I didn't see that episode, but he was like a winner of Top Chef. Um, the food is exquisite, and you have to make your reservations weeks in advance. And we were able to sit out on the roof, and it was an amazing food experience. I took pictures of everything. I just haven't had a chance to put it out on social media yet. But, um, it, it's never like, oh, I can't eat this because I'm trying to lose weight, or I can't eat this, or this is going to make me fat. I love trying new things. I love having really good food, and I think eating for pleasure is part of food freedom. Because when you're afraid of food, or when you are used to, like, you know, scaring yourself to not eat something, or telling yourself, "Don't eat that, that's bad, it's going to, like, make you fat," it's awful. It's no way to live. But eating for pleasure, oh, it's the best. Like just enjoying every morsel and every bite. It's the best way to live. That is food freedom. So you can explore culinary, culinary exploration all you want and have fun with it. All right. That was a good question. All right, y'all, you know how to reach me if you have any other questions. Yes. Mar says, I always eat for pleasure. Nothing stresses me out more than people saying I shouldn't. I know. And the crazy thing is, you know, I shouldn't say crazy. I keep saying crazy, but like when I think about my own journey, Mars, when I was on all of these diets, you know, believing I should be eating this and not eating that and like going to dietitians and people telling me I couldn't do this and I couldn't eat more than 1,100 calories because of my height and my bone mass. Like, because of all of that, like, that was just chronic stress I'm carrying around with myself all day, every day when it comes to food. And when you're feeling stressed out about food, you completely miss the joy of eating. I remember watching cooking shows on TV. You remember, um, what's her name, Giada? She's like a popular Italian chef. She used to be on the Today Show. Y'all, so nice to watch morning TV. She used to be on the Today Show as like a guest person, and she was so small. And I was like, how is she eating, uh, you know, all that Italian food and she's so small? Like, I was just so mad at her. Like, how is that even possible? Probably because she understood feelings, obstacles, objections, and decisions, right? She found the joy in eating. That's it. That's it. So thank you for sharing that, Mars. Uh, y'all, don't be scared of food. It's amazing, especially when it's really good. Now, what you should be scared of is standard American diet. Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, all the things. But that's a whole nother conversation. All right, you guys, have a fantastic weekend, and I will see you in all of the places. Bye!