30 Years of Brutally Honest Weight Loss Advice in 15 Mins

If you’ve been dieting for decades and still feel stuck, this episode is your reset.

After 30 years of struggling with my weight, losing 18kg, quitting when I was on a roll, and rebuilding my identity from the ground up, I’m sharing the brutally honest truths I wish someone had told me earlier.

This is not another list of diet tips. These are the lessons that changed everything.

Inside this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why weight loss is not about motivation but structure
 • The real reason emotional eating keeps happening
 • How self-sabotage quietly destroys progress
 • Why fast results don’t equal permanent results
 • The difference between drifting and deciding
 • How to build self-trust around food
 • Why sustainable weight loss requires higher standards, not more willpower

If you’re a woman over 40 who has tried every diet, feels exhausted starting over, and wants permanent weight loss without obsession, this episode will shift how you see yourself.

Because the truth is this:

The weight is the symptom.
Your standards are the solution.

If this resonated, hit follow and leave a review so more women can break free from the cycle.

Get Kylie's exact weight loss Blueprint
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BOMBSHELL BLUEPRINT WEIGHT LOSS FOR EMOTIONAL EATERS

Transcript

30 years ago, I believed that weight loss was all about the food, what you were eating, how much you were eating, what the kinds of foods were that you were eating. 20 years ago, I thought that it was all about willpower. 10 years ago, I really believed that it was all about motivation, but now I know it's actually about... What's up, you gorgeous, fabulous creatures, and welcome to another week of the Losing It Podcast.

(0:25 - 1:26)

You're here with Kylie Pax, Australia's emotional eating coach, and I'm very excited to be here with you today. We are talking about 30 years of brutally honest weight loss lessons, and I'm breaking them all down for you in 15 minutes, so hold on to your pantaloons, honey, because they're going to be coming thick and fast. If you have ever struggled with your weight loss for more than once in your life, now, I'm sure all of us have struggled at least one time, but most of us have struggled over and over and over for our whole entire lives.

You know how we all like to have a certain career in our lives? What's your career? I'm a doctor, a lawyer, I'm a neuroscientist. Well, my career would be weight loss. I have an advanced fucking degree in weight loss, but I've never actually passed.

I have successfully failed for the last 35 years, so if this sounds like you, then I promise you this episode is for you. Now, before we dive in today, please take a moment to hit subscribe or share this episode with the bestie. That's how we're going to make sure that, firstly, you never miss a drop as these episodes are coming out multiple times a week, and secondly, to help more women get the information that they need to stop struggling with their weight and become completely unrecognizable.

(1:26 - 2:51)

So, let's dive in. When I was in my 20s, I thought that weight loss was all about the food. In my 30s, I thought it was about willpower, and then in my 40s, I thought, listen, I just need to get my ass motivated.

That's obviously what this is all about, but it wasn't. And the reason I know this to be true is because if it was truly about any of those things, you would be seeing my skinny ass prancing all around the internet in a bikini. I don't make the rules, I just enforce them.

It was never about any of those things. It was then and is now and will always be about your identity, who you believe you are, and the standards that you are currently upholding. And the decisions that I was making when nobody was watching are the ones that were keeping me stuck in the trenches of weight loss hell.

So, I thought if I could sit across from my 25-year-old self right now, what would I want to tell her? What's the information she needed that nobody was telling her back then because they were only feeding her weight loss bullshit stories like don't eat carbs, don't eat fat, count your calories, your aerobics. If I could do it all over again, what is the information I would want to take forward this time to empower me to get it right first time every time? So, if you are a listener over 35 today, I'm not here to give you hacks. What I'm actually going to do is save you another decade of frustration.

So, let's dive in starting with the first brutally honest piece of weight loss advice that I wish I knew all those years ago. And first up, it's not that you're confused about what to do. So many women tell me they're confused.

I'm so confused. I don't know where to start. That's absolute complete bullshit.

(2:51 - 3:26)

There is nobody on this planet that doesn't know what to do in order to get started. We're not confused. What we are is avoiding.

We know what works. We know different things work for different people. For some of us, you only eat when you're hungry.

You don't eat when you're not. For others, they work very, very well counting macros or calories and sticking to very strict systems. That actually does not work for emotional eaters.

For those of you who have maybe stumbled across this episode and don't really feel that you're an emotional eater, you would probably then work better just sticking to a system whereby you can count your macros, log them in an app, and that's fantastic for you. Good luck to you, honey. I'm sending you clapping hand emojis.

(3:26 - 5:44)

For the rest of us who are like me, we need a little more flexibility, less rigidity, less rules, more self-ownership of our choices. Eat when you're hungry. Don't eat when you're not.

Stop eating at 80% full. Plan your meals and then follow your plan and not your mood. But ultimately, you have to make decisions as if you already were that future version of self who has the things that right now you feel that you don't have.

You don't need another downloadable PDF and you certainly don't need a calorie target. What you need is to stop avoiding the discomfort of doing the things that you know you need to do. That ick feeling that we get in the afternoon when we start getting tired so we want to reach for sugar, the feeling of boredom and frustration at night or exhaustion or that little voice in our head when you try just a little something, like you have just one M&M or a bite of one cookie and the voice says, well, well, well, you screwed it all up now, you might as well eat everything.

That voice of negotiation, that voice of self-deprecation, that's the one that is keeping you stuck and it's the one that is holding you in the place where you've been treading water, trying to lose the same 10, 20, 30, 40 kilos for the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Sis, that ends today. You are now going to stop telling yourself that you don't know where to start and you're just going to start.

I promise you, if I had just started and stuck with it, I would have figured it out along the way. But I thought I had to have everything figured out before I could start and so I kept myself treading water, feeling miserable, wearing muumuu, looking at thinspiration photos, basically just feeling like a sad sack of shit. The second thing that I wish somebody had told me is that weight loss is truly not a ride in an amusement park, nor is it supposed to be.

It is boring AF. It's the most boring, repetitive, predictable, and yet simple thing on the planet and nobody likes boring ass activity. We want the transformation.

We want the fancy before and after photo and we want it to feel like an incredible transformative makeover. But honey, life is not an episode of The Biggest Loser and you're not on America's Next Top Model. Stop quitting because it's boring.

Most of the time, I wasn't quitting because the weight loss journey was so, so hard. I was quitting because it was so, so boring and I was tired of doing the same breakfast and then the same walk and then making the same decisions and stopping myself from eating the foods when I really wanted to eat them. It's the same thing day in, day out.

(5:45 - 8:15)

There is absolutely no drama or excitement in consistency and I was craving the drama and excitement. And what would that look like if you were doing it? It would look like you constantly searching for new diet plans, new weight loss plans, fresh starts, making plans but never executing them and doing consistent Monday reset. The breakthrough comes when you finally accept that your power lies in the boring ass daily tiny micro actions that whilst they seem insipid and dull and just mind numbingly boring, it's the compounding breakthrough of those boring ass activities that actually is going to get you the results that you want.

The third piece of information that I wish I'd known earlier was that motivation is absolutely useless without a structure to hold it steady. Motivation is a mood, structure is a system. So for 30 years, I kept waiting to feel ready.

Even today, I'm always going to be transparent with you. Today is a Monday, I woke up, I was telling myself yesterday, I'm going to be so motivated tomorrow to get back into the gym. It'll be amazing.

I'm going to do my thing and back into my routine I go. But when I woke up this morning, I felt anything but motivated. In fact, what I actually felt was a bunch of depression and anxiety, generally not conducive to outstanding results in life.

I needed to remind myself that I will never feel ready to start or get serious about my life and my weight loss goals. I just need to do the actions anyway. The women who finally lose weight generally don't feel ready.

They've just decided ahead of time that they're going to do the thing. They plan their meals before they're hungry. They pre-decide what their portions are going to be before they're feeling ultra emotional or exhausted after a long day.

Or they simply confirm with themselves through their standards that they're going to stop eating at 80% full and then they remove the argument before it even starts. The fourth lesson that I really, really, really, really pray and wish that I had known earlier. I mean, I really wish the weight loss fairies had come down from the sky and delivered this one to me on a golden scroll.

Emotional eating is not a character flaw. I used to feel like I was the most pathetic piece of trash on the face of the earth because I was an emotional eater. What I wish is that someone had told me I'm not weak.

It's purely a brain survival mechanism. Whenever you're feeling stressed, lonely, tired, overstimulated, your brain is instantly looking for relief. It's supposed to be looking for relief, otherwise you would be dead.

Food works and it works quickly, every time, all the time. So of course we just repeat that system. It doesn't make you broken.

(8:15 - 9:33)

It doesn't make you a failure. What it does is make you human and actually a very successful human. You have a great brain.

It's doing precisely what it's designed to be doing. But you getting relief from the stresses of your day or the stresses of your mind and you getting results of the outcomes that you want in life are rarely going to come from the same decision. I want to repeat that.

The relief that you're seeking from the stresses of your day and the results that you want to achieve in your life are rarely going to come from the same decision. One is going to pull you down further below the standards that you would normally maintain. The other is going to push you up higher.

Chocolate cake can only fulfill one of those emotional needs. And I promise you, honey, it's not the one that's taking you towards your dream body until you put in the effort. And it is going to be uncomfortable.

When I say effort, I just mean until you're willing to be uncomfortable. To build new coping strategies, you will naturally keep defaulting to your old ones. Not because you're lazy, not because there's something wrong with you.

Purely because your nervous system is running the same program it's always run. Take the time to start installing a new program. We spoke about this last week.

You need a new operating system. And the only way to do it is to start carving out some new neuro pathways. How do we do that? Repetition.

Repetition of a new chosen action over and over again. How you feel about it is irrelevant. You just need to get that shit done.

(9:33 - 9:51)

Fifth piece of brutal weight loss advice that I wish I'd known earlier was that I don't actually have a food problem. I truly, truly thought that I was addicted to sugar. And in some way, I probably was.

But what I really had the problem with was my standards. They were low and I kept lowering them every day depending on how I felt. This one really changed everything for me.

(9:51 - 10:30)

Most of us don't blow our week with one giant ass binge. That's not how it happens. We start loosening our standards just a little bit.

One little extra bite. One little unplanned snack. I'm just going to pop off to the shops and get just one little block of chocolate.

We skip the walk. We stay up too late at night. We don't fall off a plan like we're falling off of our cliff.

We drift slowly, insidiously. And that drift happens when our standards move from being rock solid to optional. The bathroom scale doesn't respond to your intentions.

It really doesn't give a shit. If you intend to start next Monday, it's going to respond to the behaviors that you have been carrying out for the past few days. And behaviors will always follow your standards.

(10:30 - 13:39)

We really need to raise our standards. And this is what I had to do. It hurt.

It sucked. I didn't enjoy it. I loved the outcome.

But the journey was brutal. I wish that somebody had told me, don't expect this to feel good all the time, every day. In fact, there will be days when you would rather rip off a limb than follow your plan.

But the outcome. The outcome. I remember finishing last year never having been so proud of myself in my life.

I just lost 18 kilos. I didn't solve cancer. In the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't anything noteworthy.

But the pride that I felt. Not about the 18 kilos. That was irrelevant.

I didn't give a shit about the number. What I was proud of was the fact that I didn't give up. I showed up every day for six months, whether I felt like it or not.

I walked rain, hail, or shine. I didn't do anything dramatic. I didn't do anything exciting.

All I did was consistently show up. And the pride that I felt, you would have thought I was getting a Nobel Prize. This was running down the street, telling people how amazing I was.

And all I really did was raise my standards. The sixth brutal lesson, and this one is going to hurt, is that the body you want requires decisions that you are currently avoiding. That future version of self isn't more motivated.

I know you think that she is. We all suffer from horizon thinking. I talk about it all the time.

It's where we think there's a version of you who's going to show up next Monday, and she's going to be the one to make your life amazing. She'll be motivated. She'll be inspired.

She'll follow the plan, not the mood, but not you today. Today, you, she just needs to eat chocolate. Nah, honey, it's bullshit.

Unless you start making better decisions today, there will be no better version of you to show up next Monday. It's time now to start going to bed earlier. Stop eating before you feel like you need to stretch your pants.

That future version of you isn't stronger. She simply made cleaner decisions. The seventh thing is that I wish I'd slowed down a little bit.

Fast results often, often are reinforcing the exact identity that you're trying to escape. I've done all the crash diets before, and the detoxes, and the lose five kilos in two week things. And yeah, sometimes they worked until they didn't.

So, because underneath it all, I still believe that I was the girl who couldn't go one day without stuffing her face with chocolate, then the girl who sabotaged was always waiting for me in the So, as I said earlier, last year when I lost 18 kilos, I was on a roll. I felt really powerful. I was unstoppable.

And then when the new year hit, I just quit. It's not because I didn't know what to do or because I was lazy. It was because I still had the identity of that little ferret who raids the pantry at 9pm.

She was still there. And identity always wins. If you don't upgrade it, it will pull you back to where you feel most familiar.

Let me just make this clear. Not where you feel most comfortable, but where you feel most familiar. The eighth lesson, and oh, this one is brutal, is the hard way is the easy way.

We are all looking for the easiest way to lose weight. I wish somebody had just told me, girl, the hard way is the easy way. If I had just stuck with the hard, boring way of consistency, I could have been living in my ideal body for the past three decades.

(13:39 - 16:23)

But nah, nah, nah, my dumb ass kept to keep looking for easy ways out. I know consistency is not fun. It feels hard in the moment, but the regret that is compounded over decades, that's actually what's hard.

I wasted so many years trying to find shortcuts around the discipline that I needed that I can now very confidently tell you after 30, 35 years of research, there aren't any. There are no shortcuts. The hard way, showing up daily, following the plan, stopping at 80% full is actually the easiest path long-term.

That's the path that ends the mental chaos. It's the one that alleviates the starting over. There's no more shame spirals, no more Monday resets.

It's just a clean execution one time. If only somebody had told me. Okay, the ninth brutal lesson is that self-trust is the real goal.

For years, I thought the goal was a smaller body, a smaller booty. It wasn't. It was self-trust.

Every single time that we follow through, we're casting a vote for the woman that we want to be, that future version of self. And it's not just about the weight loss. It's your whole entire identity, your persona, your standards, your execution.

Women over 40 don't just want to be thinner. We don't care about thinner. We want to feel respect again.

We want to feel freedom again. We want to feel like we've got some dominion over our lives again, and that food is not in control of us or the thing that's holding us back from who we have the ability and the potential to be. And nothing actually builds self-respect faster than doing what you said you would do.

I broke my own self-trust so many times that in the end, my brain just didn't trust me at all. When I said I'm going to start on Monday, I already knew secretly inside that it was optional, and more than likely, I wasn't going to do it. I was just bullshitting myself so that I didn't feel like a total fucking loser sitting there on Sunday night eating ice cream out the bowl.

Self-trust is what we actually want, because when we've got that, we can execute on anything. We can achieve our career goals, family goals, love goals, lifestyle goals, and yes, weight loss goals. So sis, stop your lying ass from telling yourself you're going to do things if you know damn well you're not going to do them.

It's either a yes or a no, but there's no more wishy-washy in between. Now, the last and final brutal weight loss lesson that I want to share with you today is one that I know we have all felt, because it's really around the struggling and the sense of brokenness that we feel when we can't achieve what seems to be such a simple solution. I want to lose weight.

I mean, how fucking hard can it be? Eat a little less, make your healthier choice, walk around the block a couple of times, and it should be easy. But it's not when you haven't made a clean decision. When we are wallowing in half decisions, we create half results.

That's when we hear ourselves saying things like, I'll try, or I'll be good this week, or I'll see how I go. That's the kind of language that was keeping me stuck for 30 years. A clean decision sounds very different.

(16:24 - 18:01)

It's where you say, this is who I am now. This is how I eat. These are my standards.

And it feels a little scary, because it doesn't feel familiar to you at all. But it's the one that makes the most sense long term. If you want long term results, you've got to make your decisions based on a long term identity.

Does the identity you've got now fit where you want to be 5, 10 or 15 years from now? Because if it doesn't, it needs to go to the gallows, honey. We're so done with it. Let it's ghost try and haunt you and do like a Wuthering Heights thing from someone else's movie screen.

It's not welcome in your world anymore. Someone asked me the other day, if you could only give one piece of advice to women to help them lose the weight, stop the emotional eating, you know, all the things we suffer with, what would that one piece of advice would be? And I thought, if I could save you 30 years, it would be this. Stop trying to fix your appetite.

Start upgrading your identity. Raise your standards. Raise your identity.

Raise your outcome. 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 start asking yourself, what is one small decision I can make today just to be 1% better? That's all it takes for you to completely change your identity over the course of a year, become completely unrecognizable in six months. And when you do that, that is when you've got what it takes. I'm sending you huge amounts of love.

I can't wait to see you again next week. Until then gorgeous ones, bye for now. Thank you so much for tuning in.

Remember to shimmy your butt 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 way without losing your sanity. I will see you next week.