418: How to Release 5 lbs in 7 Days

A true decision is I've decided this is the year that things are changing for me. I've decided I'm releasing the weight. I've decided that I'm getting in better shape. I've decided I'm getting healthy. So the first day we really tapped into this idea of what are you deciding for yourself? Hi.

I want to welcome you to Midlife Conversations. I'm Natalie Jill, your host and I help midlife women redefine and rebrand aging. On this podcast, I do what I do best, taking complicated information and conversations around aging that are relevant to us now and breaking it all down simply with actionable steps that you can implement.

To level up your life, because your best years are yet to come.

I also regularly interview some of the most inspiring people living in their best midlife years. On this show, I cover topics about our health, hormones, navigating weight, blood sugars, our mood, focus changes, even our relationships, career changes, beauty, and more.

Today we're going to be talking about how to get five pounds off quickly. It's the new year. We all want to jump start. Let's talk about how to get a release, get a head start on things, how to start moving things in the right direction. This is for you, especially if you are a midlife woman and you're dealing with that midlife sickening and you know that this year is going to be different for you. But you want to jumpstart things. You don't want to spend your time trying to figuring it, figure it all out and be a detective. I'm going to get down and dirty with just these are the things that we do that are going to move the needle quickly. Now I'm basing this off of an experience. An experiment that I just did is an experience and an experiment I just did with 750 women where I did a seven day challenge. Where we did it was $7. It was seven days. You can't join it now because we already have completed it by the time you're hearing this, but we had 750 women go through this and my challenge with them was I my what I offered them, the challenge I presented was that I'm going to take you through my original seven day jumpstart method that I've revised for midlife women. And we're going to do this down and dirty really quick and it give you the guide and we're going to do these things each day and we're going to release the weight. And that's what we did. And the results blew my mind. Not only did these women show up and have these incredible epiphanies about their life, about what they wanted for themselves, about what they were learning, but they also started to release the fat. They released the bloat. They have truly jump started the new year. So I'm going to today go through the main things that we taught and you can take these with you and start applying them yourself and you can jump right into the new year if you want to go deeper with me. Full transparency. We are starting Total Body Thrive end of this month and there's room in that and that's where we take these concepts. But we go so much deeper and you really understand what's changing in midlife and we go a lot deeper there. And I'll tell you exactly how you can be part of that if you want in. But I'm going to take you through the challenge summary right now. And if you want to follow along and see the meal plans and all the rules and all the things I'm going to go over, you want to see this real time, live, what I would suggest is you go and either grab my seven day Jumpstart book, you can get this in stores, you can get it on Audible, you can get it in Amazon because we followed these basic principles. Or you can go on my website to the seven day jumpstart.com the with the number seven day jumpstart.com and you can download the full plan and then you'll want to do that with this. But let's just dive in now. First, why did I do this challenge for women? Why did I decide to do this? Well, every January, I do a series of free fat loss workshops. I call them Fat Loss as we Age. And it's a way to try on my coaching. And then if it speaks to you and you want more, I then open up my total body thrive for midlife women, where we go eight weeks deep on things and really see some massive transformation. But what occurred to me this year was what if I could just take seven days and let people try on the results first? So rather than learning all the information, let's just dive in, try on the results, get some results, and then they'll decide if they want more and they want to keep going or if they want to take these things and go on their own. And I'm so happy I did this because not only did 750women sign up for this, many of them showed up every day for this challenge. And when I saw the results, I knew I had done the right thing. So let's break down what exactly we did so you can start doing these things, too. So here's the rules, and I'm. And I'm reading them as I'm talking to you. So I'm going to be looking down a little bit if you're watching me on YouTube and if you're driving, you might want to come back to this later if you're listening to this on audio and. Right. Some of these things down. But here were the rules. The rules were no calorie counting. We're going to eat only unprocessed, natural, real foods. So foods that once grew, foods in their most natural state. We're going to drink a lot of water throughout the day. Simple thing, right? But we're going to do it. We're actually going to do it. We're not going to have any artificial sweeteners this week. We're going to use our hand for portion sizes. So very simple. But most people are not doing this, meaning we're going to use our fist for the size of the starches and the carbs that we eat, our thumb for the amount of fat and our palm of our hand to start with, having at least that much protein at each meal. So that was one of the rules. We were going to focus on eating and adding in healthy foods versus restrictions. So instead of saying all the things we can't have and we're not going to do, we focus on eating more healthy food, adding more of that in. We're going to focus on getting more deep sleep, more sleep. We're going to move our body daily. We're going to check in with our decision statement. I'll explain what that means in just a minute. We're going to celebrate small wins and that we're going to keep the group positive. So that was the rules. That was all of the rules. And my promise was at the end of the week, we were going to release five pounds. We were going to get our energy levels up. We're going to reduce our bloating. We're going to have our clothing fit better. We're going to sleep better, we're going to be in a better mood. We're going to improve our focus on our energy and our clarity. Our physical measurements would start to change and our scale weight would begin to budge. And those. That's the promise. And that's what the majority of the group that did the plan came through. Now, some of you might be saying, how can you lose £5 in a week? And I just want to show you Something here. Let's talk about five pounds per minute. So these are two replicas of fat and muscle. These both actually weigh five pounds on the scale. So when someone says muscle weighs more than fat, that's not actually true. Five pounds of muscle and five pounds of fat both literally weigh five pounds. So you put five pounds of muscle on the scale or five pounds of fat on the scale, they both literally weigh five pounds. The difference is, and if you're watching on video, you can see fat takes up a lot more space than muscle. Fat takes up a lot more space. So the reason we want less fat, more muscle, one of the big reasons is this takes up less space. So if you take a woman, for example, 160 pounds scale weight, if they look totally different, it might be because of fat and muscle ratio. So when we talk about losing five pounds, can you lose five pounds and a fat of fat in a week? Well, you can definitely lose 2 pounds of fat in a week. No question. We can also lose more based on where we're starting from. But my promise for this five pounds was not just fat and it definitely wasn't muscle. It was also losing excess water and bloats. Now, you might not think that matters, but it does because we are typically carrying around a lot of excess water and bloat, and that puts us in a bad mood, and it makes our clothes not fit well. So when we can jumpstart things and tap into the fat and release that excess bloat, we are off to a great start, and we want to keep going. So that's how we do that. So how we did this was each day we had those rules, we had the intention, and each day they followed the guide. And we jumped on a brief call every morning all together. And the first thing I had everybody do was celebrate a win for the day. Now, why did I have you do that, and why do I want you to do that? Who is listening to this right now? Well, we, especially as women, tend to focus on what's not working in our life. What's wrong, what's broken, what we don't love, what we want to change. And we start to rule our thoughts with these things. And what I want you as a habit to get into is starting the day with something you're grateful for, something that's positive, something that's working, something, Something that you love about yourself. Now, this isn't about looking in the mirror and saying, you know, I am beautiful. I love myself. That's not what I mean. What I mean is going, wow, I showed up for myself. I showed up to this call. I've decided that I'm going to change my life. I'm proud of myself for my food choices. I'm really grateful I get to go for a walk today. I'm working on bettering myself. You want to start with some type of positive that you're excited about? Maybe you slept better, maybe you made better choices. Whatever it is, we want to start that day that way. So we started each session with, what is working? What are we celebrating? What is working for us? Then on day one, what we really dove into, and I want you to do this, too, is the power of deciding. So I say the power of deciding. Because deciding truly comes first in our lives. And we have chances throughout the day, every day, all day, to make new decisions. And most women, when it comes to changing our health or our bodies, our composition, we've decided the wrong thing. We say things like, nothing works for me, or my genetics suck, or things are broken, or things don't work how they used to, or, my gosh, my parents had this happen. Therefore, I have this. That's not the right decision. A true decision is. I've decided. I've decided this is the year that things are changing for me. I decided I'm releasing the weight. I've decided that I'm getting in better shape. I've decided I'm getting healthy. So the first day, we really tapped into this idea of, what are you deciding for yourself? What are you deciding for yourself? I'm going to ask you that same thing if you're listening to this episode. What are you deciding for yourself for this year? And don't start that with what you don't want. Instead, I want you to actually say, I've decided I'm getting healthy. I'm getting fit. I'm getting to be the strongest I've ever been. This is going to be my best year ever. But actually make a firm decision for what you want for yourself. The next thing we dove into on day one was the idea of eating real, natural, unprocessed food. Now, you might think that sounds super basic, but my question is, are you actually doing it in the world of gimmicks and marketing and so many different ways to eat and eliminate and not do this and not do that and give up this and give up that? I want to just ask you the basics. Are you eating real natural, whole food, food that actually heals us, that gives us energy, that gives us life, Foods that are real. So think simple ingredients, protein, like meats Chicken, fish, beef, Are you eating those? Are you eating vegetables, real whole foods? Are you eating low glycemic fruits like berries? Are you getting nutrients from that? Are you eating healthy fats, things like olive oil, avocado? Are you doing that? So focusing on eating natural, real, unprocessed foods. So day one, that's all we really tweaked. We followed the meal plan, we focused on decision, we focused on adding in unprocessed, natural, real foods. Now, day two, people were already starting to feel a little bit better. So what we jumped into then was the idea of protein loading first. Now, as we age, as we age, it's not true that your metabolism slows down. What is true is we stop progressing and we stop challenging ourselves and we start losing muscle. And when we start losing muscle, not only do we have issues with our bone health, but our metabolism changes because the more muscle you have, the more calories your body burns at rest. This is a great thing. So how do we preserve muscle? How do we add muscle? Well, definitely we're going to want to work out and, and do resistance training, but we also need to make sure we're adding in adequate, significant amounts of protein. We have to be eating with protein, we have to be leading with protein. And when you're doing that, you preserve muscle, you're able to add muscle, but you're also going to feel a lot fuller, you're going to balance out your blood sugar better, you're going to stop cravings, you're going to feel more satiated. So adding in protein. So day two, we really focused in on how do we add in more protein, how do we make our meals protein focused? And the next important step we talked about was the idea of eliminating what I call false assumed truths. Now, false assumed truths are basically fat. It's the beliefs we've been telling ourselves for years and years and years that have become a story that are not actually factual. So what I mean by that is, let's just say you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. This is one example that is a fact that you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Your blood sugar and your A1C might not be what you want it to be. What's not true is what that has to mean for you. What we hear is, oh my gosh, I'm on medication the rest of my life. I can never eat these things again, I'm going to be overweight. That's what we hear, that's what we are looping in our brain. But that's a false Assumed truth. The real truth is this is your diagnosis right now. But what that has to mean for you does not have to mean doomsday. So we are carrying around as midlife women so many false assumed truths around our age, around our labs, around our diagnosis, around what someone else has told us. But we really worked on day two at how do we recognize and eliminate these false assumed truths? Okay. Each day I also brought on, and I'm going to show you some of them here. If you're watching on video, just countless transformations that of people that have gone through this method with me on bigger levels. But I brought on each day two people or so that would share each day. And on day two, I happened to bring in Landa and let's see, I brought. No, I brought in Kristen on day two. I brought in Land on day three and Lisa on day three. But we shared from real people. I had other people besides me sharing about their testimony and what changed for them and how these small principles made a big, big difference for them. And they will for you, too. Okay. So on day three, we kept building each day. So we built on the unprocessed natural real foods. We built on false assumed truths, and we started adding in some other concepts. And I'm going to tell you what these were. I told the group that I really wanted them to go watch this one particular movie that I absolutely love. And you could put this in your list to watch, too. It was so good. But there is this whole idea of. And Wayne Dyer said it first, if you change the way you look at things, that things you look at change. And this ties on to our false assumed truth. Right. If you believe something's going to be a problem for you in life, it will continue to be a problem. But if we start looking for the opportunity in that we nip the problem. So there was a movie that I absolutely love. It's a chick flick. It was with Amy Schumer, and it's called I Feel Pretty. And if you get a chance, I want you to watch it. And the reason is in this movie, basically, Amy Schumer shows up at this average midlife woman. And you can feel it in the movie that she's not feeling great about herself, she's feeling bad about herself and she wants to make a change. And she goes in to a cycle class, a soul cycle class, and she's on the bike and she's looking around all these other attractive women and people that look fit, and she's feeling more and more insecure about herself. Well, they Start the class. And something happens. She gets her shoe caught, she falls off the bike, she bumps her head and she's unconscious. And in the next scene, she's waking up with the staff from the class and she's like, what happened? And they're telling her she fell and they're giving her a water. And she gets up and she's rubbing her head and she looks in the mirror and she sees that she's a supermodel. So now she's no longer this average looking woman, she's a supermodel. And when she sees this, her whole demeanor changes, her whole attitude changes, and she goes about her life believing she's a supermodel. And her whole entire life changes just because she starts believing she's operating from a different place. It's a fabulous movie, I love it. But my point behind that is on day three, what I asked and what I'm asking you right now is how can you start shifting how you're looking at things? How can you start operating and looking at things and taking actions from a different version of yourself, a different belief set? Okay, then we got to day four, and now day four, people were already sharing in the comments. They've released two pounds. They're feeling energetic, things are feeling better. They're already feeling so amazing. So on this day, what we got into adding was, we got into adding the idea a few things. One, that you don't always have to have breakfast food for breakfast. That's right. You can have steak for breakfast, you can have chicken for breakfast. There's lots of ways to add in protein. So we talked about how it doesn't matter about having traditional breakfast food or lunch food or different or dinner food. It's about getting adequate protein, carbs and fats in for you and choosing what's going to work for you. We also talked about adding in walking after meals. And the reason for that is when you eat a meal, your, your body is producing. You know, you have blood sugar going up, your body secretes insulin. But we have this blood sugar raise after meals and we don't want you to have that continual high blood sugar. So when you walk after meals, you are helping to lower your blood sugar right away. We're getting in more steps, we're getting more movement. It's all helping with fat loss. So we added that in. We also talked about the importance, what I showed you a little bit earlier, about muscle versus fat and how when we look at plans and lasting ways of eating weight, we want things that work for a lifetime. Not just a temporary phase. We don't want things to have a start and a stop time. You want to think, is this something I consistently can do over time? Because you want to be able to build on that and make things a consistent lifestyle. Okay, day five. We added in a few more things. We added in the power of phytonutrients. Phytonutrients are what we're finding in fruits and vegetables. I am personally not a fan of. Not a fan of diets that eliminate entire food groups like vegetables. Now, if that works for you, no, knock on it, go for it. I am not going to stop you from what's working for you. So if you love eating a specific way and it's working for you, you don't need to hear me today. But if that's not you, what I want to tell you is to help us age well, we need phytonutrients. We need antioxidants. We need these things from fruits and vegetables. We have to get those nutrients in. When we completely give them up and we're saying we feel great, our stomach doesn't hurt. Got it. But did we really address what was going on and why our stomach was hurting? I'm not a fan of giving up whole food groups. I talk about adding them in if you want to go deeper on that. My second book in stores, which is called Aging in Reverse, I go really deep into the power of vegetables and. And why we want to have those and why we want to add them in. Now, before you say, but what about the oxalates? Got it. Yes, there's oxalates in kale. I got it. Most of us don't have an oxalate issue that has been totally overblown. Some of you might. Got it. Not stopping you from doing it. Most of us, that's not our whole problem in life. So we focus on adding in more vegetables. What I like about the way that I teach food eating, the way that you learn in my plans, in my programs and my books, is we make vegetables unlimited. You eat as many as you want, as many as you want. And same with low glycemic fruits like berries. We keep eating them. They're healthy. They're going to help us age well. It helps us heal. It helps with inflammation. So huge fan of those. On my plans and what we did during this challenge, we also talked about the power of getting sunlight first thing in the morning. You know, your body is designed to. We wake up, you have some sunlight come in. It turns on the cortisol as the day goes on and the sun sets, our body releases melatonin. We have a natural built in regulation system. However, we've been very messed up by, by modern society, right? We've got white bright LED lights overhead everywhere. We're constantly looking at our phone screens. We've got inside working too much, not outside enough. So we talked about how do we get in more natural light, how do we start to wind that down throughout the day. So this was all happening on day five. And by now everyone was fully into the challenge, getting results, following the plans, feeling really, really good. So then what we led into was the final steps on this. And this was the idea of doing a checklist every day and making sure we've hit these marks. Like, did we focus on hydrating more, carrying a water bottle with us so we're getting in enough water? Did we focus on eating proteins, carbs and fats and eating unprocessed natural foods? Did we focus on walking more, moving more, especially after meals, in getting in natural light? And then most importantly, did we work on, did we work on cleaning up our whole environment? And let me explain what I mean by that. Your whole environment is not just your pantry and your fridge. Those are important. We want to make sure we have natural, real foods around us. We're eating those regularly. But also it's, what are we taking in? What are we listening to? What's the noise out there? For instance, I told the challenge, when you're scrolling social media, if you're seeing people that are making you feel bad about yourself, less than not enough, you don't feel good. I don't want you to follow them, me included. If I make you feel like that, do not follow me. I don't think that's healthy for us. You want to always feel wherever you're getting your information from, especially if you're in learning mode about leveling up your health and your body. You want things that are helpful to you, not critical. Things that make you feel empowered, like you can do this, like you can get to the next level, that you can do this versus making you feel bad about yourself and like, things are just not right. So focusing on cleaning up your environment. All right, that was a lot of information. I know I just fire hose all that out at you, but I wanted to make sure you had it. So where do you go deeper on these things? Let me give you a few options. The challenge is over. We completed that. But however, if you do want the seven day jump start to follow the meal plan that they followed the book is in stores or a newer version electronically. If you go to the seven day jumpstart.com you can get that whole plan. It's got everything detailed out there for you. How do we go even deeper? A few options. Number one, this whole month, depending on when you're listening to this, I've got some free fat loss as we age classes and I'm going to go it's not a fire hose like this. I'm going to go deeper into the foundation on what how we can change our patterns to make things come to fruition. Those classes are totally free. If you go to Natalie Jill class.com Natalie Jill class.com you can find those classes. I've also got the next round of Total Body Thrive starting starting at the end of this month and you can find that on my website@natalie jill.com or you can just go to total body thrive.com total bodythrive.com I do highly suggest that before you buy Total Body Thrive that you do attend one of those free workshops. I really recommend that for a number of reasons, but number one, it's a way for you to try on my coaching and make sure I'm the right coach for you because I set the whole foundation during that class and I know that you'll have make the right decision if you're in that class first. And also because I always offer special pricing on those classes versus just buying it directly from my website and you can only get that information from being on the class. So you can find those classes at Natalie Jill Class.com Anyways, I hope this was helpful today. Whether you run with these tips on your own or you join me in one of those upcoming classes. Happy New Year and here's to a really healthy, fabulous year for you this year.

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