You Don't Need Motivation. You Need an Identity Upgrade

If you’re stuck in the cycle of starting over, binge eating, and waiting to “feel ready”… this episode will hit hard.

Because motivation isn’t the problem.

The real issue is that you’re trying to create a new body while staying loyal to an old identity.

In this episode, Kylie breaks down why sustainable weight loss has nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with who you believe you are. You’ll learn why high-performing women don’t rely on motivation, how standards eliminate self-sabotage, and how identity-based decisions make weight loss inevitable.

This is not a hype episode.
It’s an identity intervention.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why motivation keeps women stuck in the same weight loss cycle
 • How binge eating is a standards issue, not a food issue
 • The reason emotional eating is learned behaviour, not a personal flaw
 • Why structure beats discipline every time
 • How to stop negotiating with cravings like they deserve a vote
 • Why acting “as if” creates results faster than waiting for proof
 • How obsession with weight loss blocks fat loss
 • The skill that stops self-sabotage without relying on control
 • Why long-term identity change matters more than short programs

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BOMBSHELL BLUEPRINT WEIGHT LOSS FOR EMOTIONAL EATERS

Transcript

What is up you gorgeous, fabulous creatures and welcome to a brand new week, a brand new episode of the Losing It Podcast. You're here with Kylie Cox, Australia's emotional eating coach. And as always, if you're loving what you're hearing and you want to hear more, make sure you hit that subscribe button.

Make sure you're the first to know when a new episode drops because they are coming out multiple times a week now, honey, so do not miss out. Now, today we're going to talk a little bit about motivation because if you are waiting to feel motivated before you decide to change your body and your choices this year, get your little booty ready to end this year exactly the same way last year ended and the year before and the year before. Because I can assure you that the woman who loses 30 kilos this year, and that's just a random number that I chose, like this is not set in stone, you might want to lose two kilos, you might want to lose three kilos, you might want to lose 30, 40 or 50.

But the woman who successfully does that this year, loses that weight and keeps it off, she's not going to be the one that woke up inspired one day and just so super motivated and couldn't wait to get out of bed and reach her goals. Nah, it's the woman who got tired of negotiating with herself. She stopped letting her emotions run her mouth and she raised her standards so high that binge eating no longer had a seat at her table.

(1:13 - 2:33)

Now, like a lot of my most recent episodes, certainly this one's not here to hype you up, but it is here to hold up a mirror because the weight loss that you want this year is not going to come from motivation, it's going to come from your identity. And unless, if, when and until your identity changes, then neither will your weight. In fact, neither will no other shit in your life change if you don't change who you believe that you are at your core.

So today, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. Now, I'm going to start off today by sharing a little bit about how I used to be and it won't be very hard to see why I dealt with and suffered and procrastinated and was such a loser for so many years. Okay.

My former identity was one of always being scared. I always felt like I was a scared little girl. That's basically how I was.

I was just frightened of everything all the time. I felt like I was the girl that was always overlooked for opportunities, whether that be at school or whether it was in the workplace. I felt like I was only ever paid attention to in my life for my presentation, how I looked, how I was behaving, but certainly not for any of my skill sets.

So therefore, I was always really uncertain. I wasn't very sure of who I was and what I had to offer. I was scared, always so scared of making the wrong decision.

(2:33 - 5:55)

What if I make this choice, whether that be to spend money or to not spend money, whether that be to buy a car, to get a job, to buy a house, to go with a partner, to go away, to do anything at all. I thought if this is the wrong decision, it's going to screw up my entire life. So therefore, I would live in a place of always trying to play it safe and put things off and leave things to as late as I possibly could in order to assess all of my options.

I was the girl who avoided discomfort like we want to avoid an STD. I sought validation always and only via external attention. I also feel like I really ran.

When I look back over my 54 years, I really ran from any kind of hard work. I just really, I don't even know why, but I expected somebody else to do it for me. And I expected easy results.

And the minute things weren't easy, I quit. That is the story of my sad and pathetic life. I was a pathetic excuse maker.

I was a massive procrastinator. I was indecisive. I avoided taking action at all costs.

And one of the areas that really bled over into was exercise and my health and weight loss. I was the one who sat munching on M&Ms and Cheetos night after night, promising myself to start tomorrow. Because I was positive that I was the biggest victim of horizon thinking that you've ever met in your life.

And if you haven't heard me talk about horizon thinking in any of my previous episodes, horizon thinking is where you think, foolishly, that there is going to be a better version of you that's going to show up tomorrow. She's just over there on the horizon. You can see her.

She's just over there on the horizon. And she's the one that's going to show up tomorrow and be super motivated and excited and locked in. And she's the one that's going to change my entire life.

But not this version of me. Not me today. Today me can't handle it.

This is a problem for tomorrow me. But today me is just going to keep eating. Problem is, today me showed up the next day and the fucking next day and the day and the day after.

And the horizon version of me, I don't know what happened to her. She got abducted by aliens or something. But she certainly never showed up.

So the only way that I could change my narrative last year and lose the 18 kilos that I lost was by changing the story I told myself. Now, please be clear, our identity is not actually a thing that is set in stone. Your identity is made up of the stories that you tell yourself about yourself.

And the stories that you tell yourself about yourself are made up of the stories that people told you when you were very young and in your formative years. So this is a topic that I've also touched on previously, whereby if your parents said to you, you're not as smart as your brother, or you're not athletic like your sister, or you're not artistic like your auntie or whatever it is, you took that on, whether it was true or not, who knows? You could have been very young, never gave yourself a chance to find out. But you took that on and went, yeah, I'm not the smart one.

Now, I don't know whether this was actually said. In fact, I'm positive this was never said to me by my parents. But somehow I created the story in my own mind that my brother was the smart one.

He was the academic one. He went on to study at uni and became a head of department within the education department. But because I was a bit more of the black sheep of the family, and I was a bit more rebellious, I decided that meant that I was the stupid one.

And I wasn't capable of any of those things. Was that ever true? Probably not. But I never gave myself the option to find out.

So I lived my life thinking I was the stupid one. I was no good. I was incapable of achieving anything.

(5:55 - 8:05)

And therefore, I didn't aspire to anything in my life. Now, bring that forth 30 years, and you want to look at it from a weight loss perspective. I had to realize that I actually could challenge myself when it came to my thoughts about who I was and how I was conducting myself and what I was actually capable of.

And it started with the first thing that I did, which was by raising my standards until binge eating no longer fit the identity of how I saw myself. And this is what most people don't want to face. You're never going to stop binge eating by trying harder.

It's not going to be a thing. Trust me, honey, if that was possible, your girl would have done it. Because I gave it a red hot go for 30 plus years.

The only way to stop binge eating, breaking promises to yourself is when it no longer matches who you believe you are. All those years, I continued to see myself as a pathetic loser. And I was just honestly waiting, waiting for the next disasters to strike my sad and pathetic life.

Because that's how things always went for me. I just thought that's how things go for me. So therefore, I believed I cannot control myself around food.

I cannot lose weight. And even if I do, it's always going to find its way back to my booty and just bring all its mates and they're going to have a corroboree there. Binge eating is not a food issue.

It's a standards issue. And your standards are based on your identity. And because my identity wasn't strong, it was pretty weak, empathetic, as in I saw myself as weak, empathetic.

I didn't hold standards of... I didn't hold high standards. I held the standards of a weak, empathetic, lame ass loser. Somebody that doesn't try very hard, doesn't care if they break their word to their own self, and really expects failure to come their way.

Now, let's circle it back to last year when I lost 18 kilos. That version of me who lost the weight, she decided that I would... Well, she, me. Let's not talk about myself in the third person.

I decided I was no longer entertained behaviors that harmed me or my goals. You think binge eating is like relatively benign. I mean, who's it harming? Nobody.

No, no, no. It's harming you the most of all. And if you're going to take care of anybody in your life, it better freaking be you.

(8:05 - 8:52)

Girl, girl, girl. It better be you. Nobody matters as much as you.

And I'm not talking about in a I'm talking about if you're not here, there's going to be a lot of people that would suffer. So I sat down early last year and decided to revisit my standards based upon how I currently saw myself. As you know, I had reached my heaviest weight in a really long time, which meant my standards were... Well, let's just be real.

They were complete bullshit. I didn't have any standards. I was happy to just eat and live and feel like a fat slob.

That was... This is me. I'm just putting words in my own mouth. This is how I felt.

But what I realized is I really started taking a step back and studying the people that I admire. And we have the advantage of doing this now. We have never had access to so much information as we have right now.

(8:52 - 14:54)

And it's very easy for you to take a step back and say, well, that's too much and it's overwhelming. But if you zone in and use it strategically, don't let it become your only form of entertainment or a pathetic waste of your time. I used social platforms as a strategic method of observation.

I started looking at the women that I admire, especially the women in my age group. Because, OK, let's be real, your initial sort of impulse is to look at the girls who are young and fabulous and they're sort of in their 20s or maybe in their 30s. And I would look at them and then feel like a sad sack of shit because I would think, well, that's like 20, 30 years ago for me.

I can't. I can't look like those girls. But why the fuck would I want to look like those girls? I'm not 20 or 30, nor do I want to be.

I wanted the standards that fit my life, my body and my lifestyle now. And that's the women that I started following. So I would just say this was a little side note.

I had not planned to talk on this, but cull your following list. Please cull your followers list, whether that be Instagram, FB, whatever it is that you're following. Cull it down, even just periodically, so that the things that you see on there are truly motivating, inspiring and fit the stage of life that you're in now.

So the standards I set for myself were very quiet. You don't need to get a megaphone and start shouting to people, I'm not eating that anymore and that's no good for you. Don't you realize that those things cause cancer and those chemicals? Nobody wants to hear that shit.

The standards you set should be very quiet. And quite frankly, you need to put yourself in a position where you no longer argue with your standards. You don't negotiate with your standards.

The standards have been set and they are now the deciding factor for every choice that you make. And once you do that, you will find, well not just once you do it, but once you do it and you take action on it for a prolonged period of time, and prolonged is going to be different for everybody, but I can tell you for me, it was months, not hours, days or weeks. It was months that you will reach a point where doing the opposite of your standards, as in, well, I'm just going to binge eat tonight and I'm going to start again tomorrow.

No, acting that way starts feeling out of alignment. And it's not because the food changed or became less delicious, it's because you changed. Now, the second thing that I did was I rewired how I started to think about food, my hunger and the emotions behind that, because like I said, girl, it's never been a food problem.

Food is not the problem. Even your hunger is not the problem. That's why I say we can take all the GOP ones in the world, but that doesn't dull down your emotions.

They are the issue at hand here. And even deeper than just your emotions, it's the meaning you've attached to them. Because an emotion is relatively neutral.

It's just chemicals being released into your bloodstream. It's the meaning you attach to it. Like this feels uncomfortable and discomfort for me is scary.

Or I feel anxious and anxious for me is terrifying. Or that dickhead boss that I've got spoke badly to me and now I feel rejected and I just need to comfort myself. No, we're not going to fall into those traps anymore.

Hunger itself is neutral. Emotions itself is neutral. Even the food is neutral.

The chaos that we create in our minds comes from believing that we can somehow use food to regulate those feelings. And of course we cannot. Of course we can't.

Emotional eating isn't a personal flaw. It's just a learned coping strategy, which means if it's something you learn, then you can equally unlearn it. It's most important to remember that this type of awareness has to come before change.

It precedes any change that's going to occur in your life. Because you cannot fix what you refuse to see. Now the third and I feel like almost the most important thing that I did was I built structure that carried me on my worst days.

Nobody needs structure on their best days. Girl, you don't need no structure when everything is fine and fabulous in your world. But you need a structure to fall back on when the shit hits the fan.

Is that what they say? What a hideous little saying. I don't know. I think we're just going to annihilate that one from our vocab.

Okay, here's what I want you to remember. Nobody rises to the level of their motivation. Nobody, nobody, nobody.

You will always fall to the level of your standards. Your goal isn't to string a bunch of perfect days together and call that your weight loss journey. Your goal is to string a bunch of predictable days together via a structure that you built that lets you know even when things go flying at fans, I know that on those days I can still hit at least 7k steps because this is the structure that I follow.

Or I know that I will still be eating according to plan because I make sure I meal prep. Whatever it looks like. Most of you all out there aren't failing because you don't care.

I know you care. If you didn't care, you wouldn't be listening to this. You wouldn't be trying.

You wouldn't be showing up. You're in struggleville because you are leaving all of your decisions until the last minute and hoping, praying to the food fairies in the sky that you're going to feel motivated and strong enough to make great decisions all day long. But decision fatigue is a real thing honey and that's where progress goes to die.

Structure, standards remove all of that. Your worst days should still be looking like you being at least 60-70% aligned with your goal. That means having the non-negotiables in place like these are the meals that I planned and this is what I eat regardless of whether the dickhead boss showed up or not.

This is how I reset in the evenings after a really hard day. Or you might close the kitchen at certain times and say okay after 9pm at night, kitchen's closed because I know that I'm not hungry but I just go in there to have a little nibble on whatever is left over from the kids. Have a self-regulation tool that you use every day.

Not just when you feel like it. Not just when you feel like I'm in the mood and I need to do it now because that's going to help me know every single day. That's what your standards are.

(14:55 - 16:04)

Standards, setting higher standards for yourself is really self-respect in motion. That's what it looks like. Now of course the next thing that I did and so now I'm grappling with myself because I feel like this is always going to be the most important thing.

It's always going to be the most important thing. It's my fourth and final eating code which is act like the person you want to become. So I stepped into the shoes of the woman who has already lost the weight.

I had to. It was never going to happen without it and if you're struggling it's because you are missing this crucial step. This is the one where everything changes.

Why? Why is this so important? Because you are changing things from the inside out. We all try and live from the outside in. Let me buy this bigger house.

This will make me happy. Let me buy these shoes and handbag and this will make me happy and I'm going to leave my man and I'm going to get this new man over here and that will make me happy and it's fantastic. I'm excited like we should all have things that we want in life.

And also you will know from maybe having attempted some of these things in the past that they make you happy for a little bit. You get the thrill and it's fantastic. There's nothing like bringing home some new shopping bags and you've got the receipts and they're all falling out of there and you pull things out and they're shiny and glossy and new and it's fabulous.

(16:05 - 20:12)

You get that high and that rush. Love it. Your sis loves a good shopping expedition but you can't sell me that you haven't had times where the shit that you bought at that shop that you feel like you just had to have when you went to the mall then comes home you dump it in a corner and half the time you don't even take it out the bag.

Because it's not, it doesn't make you happy. We can't get happiness from the outside in and if we do it's really temporary. Our happiness actually comes from the inside out.

So you are not going to act differently once you lose weight. Did you start acting differently after you bought the shoes? No. Maybe you did if you maxed out your credit card like I've done so many times.

You need to act differently first before you can lose the weight. Why? Because identity always comes before any evidence will show up. If you are waiting for the scale to drop so that you can start acting better and being more enthusiastic and now I'm motivated, good luck to you my friend.

That is just not how it works. Your future self, that version of self that is, you can see her in the distance, you can smell her, you know how amazing her life is and how incredible things have gone for her because you can feel it in your waters. But she's been built through the tiny little micro decisions that you make today.

It wasn't, I'm going to reiterate, it's not, she wasn't built through stringing a bunch of perfect eating days together. She was built by how quickly she recalibrated when she didn't make perfect eating decisions. So ask yourself, what would that version of me, that future version of self, what goals would she be setting and in order for her to achieve them, what choices would she be making right now? And then you've got to start choosing that and you've got to do it when it's boring, when it's predictable, when it's uncomfortable and when nobody is there to cheer you on.

That's especially when you need to be doing. Now the last thing I want to say to you and it was the thing that was the hardest for me. In fact, given what I shared with you at the because I was a big ass quitter, but committing to this for the long term was the biggest change and made the most impact for me because I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't decided that I was in this for the long haul.

Whether I saw results or not, I was not going to quit this time. When you join one of those short 30-day challenges or it's a two-week challenge or even a 60-day challenge, it's great, it's fantastic and you can be very motivated in those team environments. However, short programs like that can change your behavior temporarily, but what they won't do is change your identity permanently.

Only long-term commitment can do that. This is why I say make sure that your following list on your socials is really positive and enforcing the people and the results and the tactics that you want to see because you're building something permanent here. This is not another quick fix.

It's not even just a focus for 2026. Oh, do you like that? That's your Disney rhyme for the day. Consistency is what is always going to win.

So I want you thinking in blocks of 12 months, not 12 days and let's think about rather than setting goals like I want to lose weight, how about we start setting some standards? How are you going to show up tomorrow morning? Because how you show up will determine who you become and who you become is what is going to give you the outcome of whether you're happy with the results or whether you're not. Honeys, I know this was a bit of a hard words episode today, but sometimes we need that love and kick up the booty because I just really want to reiterate, you don't need a fresh plan. You need to stick with the plan that you already got that you keep quitting on.

Nobody needs another restart and no one needs any more motivation. What you actually need is a higher standard for who you are and how you treat yourself because once you decide, I do not abandon myself anymore. I won't be that version of self.

I'm not that woman and everything else starts falling into place. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not even going to happen perfectly, but it will happen permanently.

So the question for you to really focus on today is not, can I lose the weight? Will I ever be successful? Is this ever going to happen for me? No, that's a bullshit energy. That's an energy of fear, deprivation and lack. We're not going there.

(20:12 - 20:36)

Your question needs to switch and it's now going to become, how long am I prepared to keep living as somebody that quite frankly, you've already outgrown? Thank you so much for joining me here today. And as always, please remember the only person who has the power to change your life is you. When you step up and realize that it's your identity that is shaping your choices, your decisions and your outcomes, not your circumstances, that is when you've got what it takes.

(20:36 - 21:01)

As always, I'm sending you love. I cannot wait to see you again in the next episode in a couple of days and until then gorgeous ones, bye for now. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Remember to shimmy your bar over to KyliePax.com and join me inside of the bombshell blueprint so you can stop emotional eating and start losing your way now. You'll also find helpful notes and resources inside my past podcast that will help you lose your weight without losing your sanity. I will see you next week.