When the scale goes up, I believe I'm not worthy of weight loss. How can I stop the self-sabotage?

All right, I am live. Hello, hello, hello, hello, my good people. All right, I'm gonna just give it a second, a couple minutes for you all to join in. It is 12:01 Eastern Time. On my clock, and it is time for Jennifer Live. So this is when I go live once a week or to answer a question or a challenge that is in the community. So if you are watching live, let me just double-check my own phone. There we go, we are live. If you're watching live and you can hear me, just say hello, and I can see the comments. Okay, my volume, volume is working. All right, so let's get into it. If you are new to me, I am Jennifer Dent-Brown. I am a life and weight loss coach, and I help women learn how to stop dieting forever. So if you are tired of being on the weight loss struggle bus, I am your coach. I help you learn how to change your weight loss result by first changing your mindset. So I approach weight loss in a completely different way than traditional diets. So what I like to do— hey, Sharla— is come on Facebook Live and all the social media channels. I also put this on YouTube and just answer a question or a challenge that either has come up in my Stop Dieting Forever membership, or it's one that you all have emailed me or DM'd me, because when there is one question that one of you has, I know more of you have that same question and/or that same challenge. And so I think it's useful for me to address it in a group setting so you all can be helped, and that's what I'm here to do. All right, so the question or the challenge that was emailed to me, and I apologize because I wrote it in my Spanish spreadsheet, but I did not write who it was from. Probably came from an email, but essentially she emailed me and she said her problem is that I sabotage myself. When I see the scale go up a few pounds, I believe I'm not worthy of weight loss and that it's my destiny to stay fat. Okay, so first of all, my heart goes out to you because I have been there. I know exactly how you feel. And I know the level of frustration that is like swirling around in your body because every time you get on the scale, your weight goes up. You've been trying to lose the weight. You get on the scale, you don't see that weight loss result that you believe you should have, and that first feeling of frustration bubbles up and you believe that you're not worthy of weight loss. I get it. I have been there and I 100% understand. So what I want to offer in my responses to these questions and to these challenges apply to how I approach a solution using my process. So using the Stop Dieting Forever process, I'm not going to give you the cookie-cutter response that you may find in some other you know, popular traditional weight loss program. I'm giving you my solution from my weight loss process, which I have used myself and I have used with hundreds of clients and have seen tons of success with them following this process. Okay, so I'm gonna repeat the problem again. She says, I sabotage myself when I see the scale go up a few pounds, I believe I'm not worthy of weight loss and that it's my destiny to stay fat. Okay, so when I hear that challenge and I hear those thoughts, I immediately in my own body feel hopelessness, right? I feel frustrated. Um, what I want you to understand is that these thoughts that you're having are just thoughts, right? It is not dictating who you are, even though I know in the moment it feels very frustrating. It feels difficult. It feels like your weight loss is hopeless and everything that you've been doing, it just isn't working. But in order for you to create the weight loss results that you want, you're going to need to separate your thoughts from your feelings, okay? You're going to need to separate your from your feelings. So what I teach in the process is that our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings drive what we do or what we don't do. This is, this is why we have certain habits that either help us lose weight or they help us gain weight. Okay, so this is what we call a thought-feel-action cycle. Your thought is that I'm not worthy of weight loss, and Your thought is that it's your destiny to stay fat, and that those two feelings are causing you to feel a certain way. Now, of course, when you're like— you get on the scale in the morning, let's just like walk through the day. I know this looks like— because I've been there, right? You get on the scale in the morning, you've been like doing all the things, thinking like you're cutting back on your calories and the scale should reflect that you've lost weight. You get on the scale in the morning You look down and the scale doesn't reflect what you think it should, and then automatically your thought is, I'm not worthy of weight loss and it is my destiny to stay fat. And so what those thoughts are doing are creating emotions, right? They're creating maybe an emotion of frustration or an emotion of hopelessness. And what do you do? You get off the scale, right? And then you go about your day, but you're carrying those feelings of frustration and you're carrying that feeling of hopelessness throughout your day. And if you are an emotional eater, like 99.9% of us are who come to me— if you're an emotional eater, you have those feelings of frustration and hopelessness just percolating in your body throughout the day. And because you're feeling these uncomfortable feelings, you're going to find yourself— or maybe you won't even recognize that you're doing this— but you're going to start eating to compensate and to help yourself feel better, to calm these feelings down, right? To help these— help this feeling of hopelessness and frustration. And sometimes this thought of like, oh, it's my destiny to stay fat, comes up very conveniently when you're like at lunch or you're at dinner and you're like, see, well, it's my destiny to stay fat, so I might as well just eat all this food, right? Or I might as well just go back for seconds, or I might as well just order Um, the meat lovers pizza instead of whatever else I thought I was gonna order, right? So notice how these two thoughts that came up, that bubbled up for you in the beginning of your day— I believe I'm not worthy of weight loss, and it's my destiny to stay fat— notice how those thoughts that bubbled up at the beginning of your day are now impacting what you do or what you don't do throughout the day. Now just imagine this is one day. I'm just walking through one day of you having these thoughts. Imagine this is your thought process every single day. So every single day you are carrying this belief that you are not worthy of weight loss, and every single day you're carrying those feelings of frustration and hopelessness. And every single day you're using food to make yourself feel better because you're feeling hopeless and frustrated about your weight. Do you see how we get caught in this nasty little loop of weight loss and weight gain and weight loss and weight gain? So I wanted to share with you a solution that I teach in the Stop Dieting Forever process that will help you begin to break this cycle. Okay, so it's very simple, y'all. It's journaling. It's writing down— the simple act of writing down your thoughts every single day about your weight will help you begin to break the thought-feel-action cycle. The TFA is what we call it, because remember, when you're having this thought, I believe I'm not worthy of weight loss, and and you're having this thought, it's my destiny to stay fat, the resulting feelings are hopelessness and frustration. Now, when you're writing those thoughts down and other thoughts like it on paper, here is the beauty and the magic of doing this. And people are like, it's so simple, they don't want to do it, they think it's not effective, but it is the most effective thing you can do to break yourself out of this like self-deprecating, self-sabotaging pattern. When you're writing a thought down, when you're writing your, your thoughts down on paper and you're able to look at them in black and white, what you're doing is, one, is you're separating your thoughts from yourself. Very simple. You're separating your thought from yourself because when you're able to look at your thoughts on paper in black and white, it almost like it diffuses the power they have over them or over you. So think about the self-sabotaging thought that you're having just rolling around in your head all day. I'm not worthy of weight loss. It is my destiny to stay fat. And you're just going throughout your day, you're going to work, you're taking care of the kids, you're doing the things around the house, all that percolating in the back of your head. Um, it's my destiny to stay fat. I'm just gonna be fat. I'm not worthy of weight loss, right? And so you have these thoughts percolating and circulating and on autoplay all day, every day. But when you are able to take a pen and a piece of paper and write those thoughts down on paper, one, it slows your brain down so you're able to actually see what you're thinking. And here's the thing with the— with writing, y'all, this is where the magic is. When those thoughts are like on autopilot in your head, you just think it's who you are and it's just what you do and that's just your destiny. Right, it's your destiny to stay fat. But when you're writing them down, what you are able to see is that these thoughts that you believe are you are just sentences in your brain. That's it. They're just sentences in your brain. You're just choosing to continue to believe them over and over and over again because you've never done this. You've never been able to question whether they are true or not for you. The simple act of writing those thoughts down, looking at them on paper, gives you an opportunity to break this thought-feel-act cycle, right? It disrupts that thought pattern and it gives you the opportunity to be like, hmm, is it really true that it's my destiny to stay fat? Like, do I really want to continue to believe that today? Do I really want to continue to believe that I'm not worthy of weight loss, right? In that moment, you can decide whether this is something you want to continue to believe or not. But when you don't see it on paper, when you don't see your thinking on black and white, you believe that it is true. You believe it's your destiny to stay fat. You believe that you are not worthy of weight loss. Okay. So the simple act of writing, y'all, right? I'm not asking you to like go out and start training for a marathon in order to lose weight. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to learn how to write. You're going to learn how to journal and put your thoughts down on paper in a productive way. Okay, so you get to decide once you notice the thought, you get to decide, is this the thought that you want to continue to keep on believing. And here's the thing, some of y'all are going to be like, well, of course I believe that I'm supposed to be fat. Like, I've been fat all my life. Like, it's my destiny to be fat. Okay, we're not talking about the rest of your life. Let's look at this thought and like, do you want to continue to believe this for the rest of the day, for the next 12 hours? Can you believe that it is possible that it is not your destiny to be fat? Can you believe that it's possible for you to make different choices today, right? Just, just for today. Okay, so this is the beauty of writing down your thoughts every single day, because one, if you've had this thought percolating in your head, it's my destiny to stay fat, I'm not worthy of losing weight, and you've been in this self-sabotaging behavior for a long time, You're not gonna like wave your magic wand and it's gonna change. You've got to do this process every single day. And so this is the beginning of the Stop Dieting Forever process, is learning how to write your thoughts no matter how ugly you think they are, learning to write them and put them down on paper, and learning how to question them. Because as long as you are afraid to look at your thoughts on paper, the longer they're just gonna keep growing in your head, and that belief about the the uncomfortable thought is going to keep growing in your head. Hey, Nicole! Okay, so number 1, I— again, don't go out and start trying to run a marathon in order to lose weight. I want you to just do this very simple process, 5 minutes, okay? Every day, sit down. You can do it right now. You don't have to necessarily do it in the morning. You can do it at any point in the day. Take a pen, take a piece of paper, write your thoughts down about your weight, write your thoughts down about who you are, write your thoughts down, and then you look at each one. I like to write one thought per line on my piece of paper. I was gonna try to share my screen, but I don't see how to do that with this new Facebook interface, but you don't need me to share my screen. Just follow along with me, okay? Take a pen, take a piece of paper, write down, answer this question: what are my thoughts about me achieving my goal? Okay, and write them all down, and then look at one, each one, and say, you know what, these are just sentences in my brain. I get to decide if this is something I want to continue to believe today. Okay, the compound effect of you doing this simple action, 5 minutes every single day, is going to start changing the, the neural pathways in your brain, and you're going to start believing different things about yourself, and this self-sabotaging behavior is going to stop. Okay, but you've got to be consistent with it. Now, this is where a lot of people fall off the boat. They're like, oh, this makes great sense. They're gonna like, I'm gonna do this right now. But what happens is y'all are not consistent because you haven't yet built that discipline, that muscle of discipline to do this every single day. This is why in the Stop Dieting Forever membership you guys have access to the 90-day planner, the daily planner, which mine is downstairs. But here, here's an old one. We work on our goals 90 days at a time. Okay, so 3 months at a time, and in it are all of the prompts every single day and the questions and the activities that you do to get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper. And when you can do that consistently for 90 days, just imagine what the weight loss result is that you can create. Okay, so if you're interested and I know you are because you're watching, and losing weight for the last time, you want to get off the weight loss struggle bus, go to jenniferdent.com/bootcamp and get your name on the waitlist. I am redesigning the Stop Dieting in 30, 30-day boot camp, and I will, will be announcing all of the details very, very soon. But I'm super excited about it because I I have created a guarantee. Follow this process, you will lose your weight, or I'm going to give you your money back. Okay, so go to jenniferdent.com/bootcamp to get your name on the advanced notification list to find out more about the August launch and all the details leading up to that. Okay, now if you have a question or a challenge or something that you're struggling with and you want me to answer it in this scenario, right, on live, on Facebook Live, send me an email, jennifer@jenniferdent.com. Tell me what you're struggling with. I will add it to my list and I will answer you. Okay, all right, have an amazing day. Share this video with a friend who needs to get off of the weight loss struggle bus as well. All right, y'all, I'll see you in the next Jennifer Live. Bye!