The Easy vs. Hard Road: How to Stop Feeling Stuck and Start Moving Forward

Do you ever feel like your health is an uphill battle—like you're stuck on the "hard road," where every step forward feels exhausting, and progress seems impossible? Maybe you're trapped by the weight of past “failures” or overwhelmed by an uncertain future?

In this episode, I’m sharing a powerful past workshop inspired by Chasing Cupcakes by Elizabeth Benton—a life-changing book about rewriting your story and proving your limiting beliefs wrong. Together, we’ll unpack the key hallmarks of the hard road, discuss how to recognize them in your own life and, most importantly, how to choose the easier road instead.

In a month when everyone seems to favor radical changes and quick fixes, this book is the ultimate roadmap for long-term progress, real growth, and lasting success. Tune in now to learn how to leave your past where it belongs and start rewriting your story—your way.


References

Chasing Cupcakes: How One Broke, Fat Girl Transformed Her Life (and How You Can Too) by Elizabeth Benton


Audio Stamps

00:30 - Dr. Rentea announces an upcoming paid podcast option with behind-the-scenes insights, listener Q&A deep dives, and exclusive workshop content. Today’s episode serves as an example, offering a sneak peek of a past workshop on choosing the easy versus hard road.

03:22 - Planning ahead and creating simple systems, like meal prep or backups, helps to reduce decision fatigue and make healthy choices easier during busy times.

12:27 - Shift your focus from chasing novelty and intensity to embracing consistency and building on what has worked for you in the past.

20:20 - Avoid making yourself a victim of external factors, and focus on making decisions based on principles rather than emotions, keeping long-term goals in mind instead of striving for perfection.

30:15 - Dr. Rentea shares the hallmarks of the "easy road" from Elizabeth Benton's book: “Chasing Cupcakes”.


Quotes

“When you have too many options, you actually do worse. So one of the things I want to suggest today is that maybe the road is easier if you constrain your choices.”

“The barrier to entry is a lot lower if you're asking yourself to do a little thing versus if you make it this big project.”

“We're always either winning or learning. Period. There's no version where it's a failure.”

“If you never again, in this lifetime, cared about the opinions of what someone else thought about your

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

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Transcript

0:28

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast today. I want to announce something that's really exciting, which is in the coming weeks, we are going to have an option where there's a paid podcast as well. We're going to keep having the normal podcast as you've been listening to week to week. And I appreciate all of you so much. Some of you have really wanted more from me. You've wanted more episodes. You've wanted more behind the scenes. There are so many questions that we're getting all the time. And what I'm realizing is that. There is a whole aspect of a lot of things that I want to share, but it would really be for a more intimate community. And so in the coming weeks here, we're going to have an option if you want to do the paid podcast as well. And that would be an additional episode per week. It's going to be a mix of behind the scenes things. So me, for example, updating you a lot more about my journey, other medications that have been added to my weight management regimen supplements that I'm doing, or that I use with patients. There's just certain things that, I just don't know that it has a place in the general podcast. There's going to be a lot more of the fan mail questions answered there and I can go deeper there. I can do a lot more educating, just more than we can do on the weekly podcast. And then also there's going to be some other behind the scenes material that has actually not been released anywhere else. So for example, every so often I'm going to air on the, the paid podcast. Some of the workshops that I do within the RMC clinic. So I want to give you an example. There was one, and I'm going to show you that here today. This is actually from 2023. I went back in the archives. So, this is where we kind of really talked about what's the difference between using the easy verse hard road. It's sort of almost a book study, if you would, based on Elizabeth Benton, her book, chasing cupcakes. So I hope that you enjoy this episode. There are. So many that we do, like getting out of overwhelm, how to, interpret in body data. There's just so many different topics. And so I'm going to put a few of those, not all of those, but every so often on the paid podcast. So it's really going to be a mix that paid podcast. If you really want to go deeper, you want to ask me more questions on things you really want. More medical things, more behind the scenes, workshops that aren't aired, all that kind of stuff. I would recommend that you join that. This is going to be a little sneak peek today of one of the type of things that you will see on that podcast coming up. Also, just know I get all these fan mail questions and the regular podcast would turn into just me answering questions, which is not particularly the direction that I want to go, but I do want to answer them. Answer those for you. You can continue to submit those, but they will get answered on there. Also, I'm gonna give priority to people in that paid community over, people just submitting in general. So if that's something that's interesting to you, again, I don't know by the time this airs, if that's gonna be up already, but it might be in the coming weeks. But I hope you enjoy today's workshop that I did almost two years ago at this point about taking the easy versus the hard road. Enjoy. Okay, we're going to get started. Welcome to the weekly RMC call. We are going to talk about some fun stuff today. I think that the topic today is super, super helpful for, again, helping you to make this journey the easy road and not the hard road. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Elizabeth Benton's kind of what's the difference between the two. I love her book. We're going to talk about it. We're going to go through all this. The first thing I want to talk about, kind of just a frame, what we're going to get into is decision fatigue. And I want you to think to yourself, if you had to define what that was, what, I mean, it's pretty self explanatory, but what do you think you would come up with? Just think to yourself, if you want to pop it in the comment, you can just thinking yourself. So when I, when I think about decision fatigue, I think about all day long, we are making so many decisions that often we no longer have the energy for the things that really matter to us. Right? Like, hands up if that's you, right? you're sitting there for work, you're making decisions, maybe you have kids, you're getting them out of the house, maybe you're really concerned, does your spouse have a lunch to take, whatever it is. If you did that attention audit for yourself. So it's not only all the things you're doing, but all the things you're worried about the mental, the task load. Right. I don't know about all of you, but I have so many apps to manage all the things I have to do. And I just found a new one that I love, but I was thinking, wow, these are all the things that were kind of hope that if I don't get it out and put it on a list. It's another thing for me to hold on to and that I don't, that I don't want to forget to do. So the problem with decisions that you're having to make all day long, this is naturally happening throughout the day, but at some point we get exhausted. And so what I like to say when it comes to food and maybe some ways that we want to move our body or some steps that we want to take toward improving our health, we cannot be asking ourselves 24 seven to engage in complex conversations. Does that make sense to everybody who's listening? Like, do you think you would agree with that? It's hard to constantly say, well, I'm going to sit there and make a choice between if I'm going to have the cookie or the fruit, and I'm going to make this choice and that choice. And you're constantly asking yourself to make these hard decisions. So what I kind of put here is too many options we shut down. Often people think that they want like all the options in the world. But what I want to tell you from a, we literally see this from studies is that when you have too many options, you actually do worse. So one of the things I want to suggest today and kind of just, throw open to you is that maybe the road is actually easier if you constrain down your choices. So you say, Hey, you know, for breakfast, I'm really gonna just for the next few weeks, commit to either X, Y, Z. You're not saying like anything in the world is an option. You're just going to really constrain it down, that you kind of say the goals that I'm setting. Often you hear me talk about 1 percent upgrades, like the smallest thing ever that you're committing to doing. And the reason I do this, this constraint kind of bringing it down. It's because really big tasks. Your brains usually procrastinate on it. You think it's so big, you overestimate the amount of time it's going to take to get it done. Same thing, by the way, with larger amounts of weight loss, people just shut down, right? The most loving kind thing we can do is just focus on the next one or two pounds, or maybe a five pound goal, something really like bite size and tangible, because suddenly your brain's like, yeah, I can do that. I can get on board. I can do that little task. But if you ask yourself, you do these massive projects, like I'm going to start exercising an hour a day. It's too much. And you shut down. The barrier to entry is a lot lower if you're asking yourself to do a little thing versus if you make it this big project, number one, you're freaking out. Number two, if I really asked you 10 out of 10, do you believe you could achieve it? You're going to tell me no. And you're not actually likely going to execute on it and carry through. And it's usually not going to become part of a long term habit change for you, which is really what we're going for. So what I really want to say is when I think about decreasing down decisions that you have to make, making it easy on yourself, we're going to talk about planning in a second, but I know I've, I've hammered that home a lot recently. But what I want you to keep in mind is that you always fall to the level of your system. So meaning, how are you always planning? What are you always doing? You will always fall down to that. I'm going to give you an example. If you have a week, that's extremely busy and you, the weeks before when life was okay, you know, we go through those periods. They would have this where you're like, yeah, life's okay. Like there's a lot going on, but it's not crazy. Right. And then we have just like, Ooh, there's crazy weeks. But during those weeks if you've not slowly just 1 percent upgrade build out systems and what I mean by that is maybe you have some meals in the freezer that are good to go if you forgot to go shopping and the house is kind of bare, or you you get home and you don't have enough time to be sitting there chopping veggies and stuff you have something to throw in the microwave that's a system, that's a process where if, excuse my language, it all goes to hell in a handbasket. I have that as a backup plan right that's a system that you build out. If you have not built out those systems, when life is crazy, you fall down to the level of what it is. And one of the things I think leads to that is that you're having to make too many decisions. I want to take the busy day example, you've been at work or you've been maybe at a family event. I don't care what the scenario is. You're making one decision after another, you are exhausted. Now you get home and it's the perfect storm because you don't have something prepped and perfect in the fridge, ready to go. Hold it. And so your instincts are, you're going to fall down to the easiest system, the things that you've built out, which is maybe you order takeout to come home, maybe you get something out of the freezer. We want to make these things as simple as possible and run on autopilot so that even when life is crazy, we don't have to make too many decisions. Part of that is building out a plan and practice. So that's what we all did all of this just to come to. This is why we use planning because with planning, it's one time of the day for a minute or two. Okay. Decrease the ask of yourself. It's one or two minutes when you're going to sit down and say, this is what I think would feel good in my body to eat. This is what I like to eat. If you've done any of the planning videos that I have in the RMC course, I talk about don't plan things you don't like period, not ever again in this lifetime. Are you going to plan something that you don't like to eat? You're planning things you like, you're looking at what's ahead in the day, most of us know, okay, I'm going to be doing X, Y, Z, or I might be out of town, or we sort of know what's coming. And so you get to plan for that right so that you're not sort of like so caught off guard. Now, of course, things are going to happen that you didn't expect, of course that's always going to happen. And you're going to get more and more skilled at how to deal with these scenarios, but in the beginning. You don't need to be making decisions 24 seven. You can make all those decisions in a minute or two, kind of lay out your day. And what would it look like if at every single meal or every single time you engaged with food, you just didn't need to have this big debate about it. Because you'd already thought about it when you were really level headed, when you were giving some focus, some attention to it. What if your day was not preoccupied anymore with, now I've got to figure out the meal in the middle of the day when it's hectic and it's crazy and a bunch of things are going on. Maybe you already have it prepped. Maybe you already have written out what options you want to go to. And again, we can really build that out. Because again, for example, if you're really busy, we want to have backup plans, and all of this, I don't want to overwhelm you, but what I want to suggest is, if you're not someone who's planning consistently, With what you're eating, what you're drinking, things like that. Start with, if you're doing nothing, with maybe just one meal once a day. Can you start with just planning that? You don't need to do all of it at once. No one's asking that. It's also not where it has to be super rigid. So I just want to open up and please let me know. I know we have some on here. If you are here and you have questions about this, Please bring this up. But I want to tell you don't need to start out with. I know some of you when you get the planner, you're really overwhelmed. You're thinking, Oh, my gosh, I have to do all of this all at once. No. The whole thing that we're working on is, is there a trouble zone, a challenge zone? Is there somewhere where I can plan it ahead of time so that I don't need to make so many decisions in the moment? Okay, how's that landing for everybody? Decreasing down some of that, those decisions. This goes, and this can go into many other areas of life. Like I feel like the, the biggest example, I've probably said it on here before, Barack Obama in the past, right? He had the same outfits every single day. He doesn't, he didn't waste energy on What am I going to wear that day? With women sometimes that's a different scenario, right? It's like, oh, you know But we all know like there are those favorites that we would go for and if we would just take the rest of stuff out Of our closet we'd have an easier morning or night when we plan it out, whatever it looks like but it's like how can we make this an easier road for you and part of it is Decreasing down decisions that you're having to make 24 seven. Let's stop asking your brain to have to do so much work because remember, it's always trying to solve the problem that's in front of it. And so if it's always a problem that I don't know what to eat or how to eat or what to do, then it's continually working on that instead of other things in life that might be more important to you. Okay. So along this, vein, if you would. And, and this, by the way, I'm going to put all this underneath the video. Okay. So don't worry about it. As I'm going through the characteristics that she's lifting for the easy road and the hard road, don't worry about it. Cause I'll have it underneath the video replay. Okay. So this is coming from the book, chasing cupcakes. I'm obsessed with this. You guys know this. I recommend the 24 seven it's chasing cupcakes by Elizabeth Benton. Again, I'll put the link below this. It's also in the course, but, right in the beginning, this is page 49. She talks about these characteristics of the easy road and the hard road. And before I even get to that, I want to read you the quote that, and I'm sorry if you're sitting on here and you've already, I know some of you have already read this book. I read this book like again, yearly. And in the beginning I read it like multiple times the first year, because it just had so much good mindset stuff. So there's this quote, and of course it's unknown who said this or where it's coming from, but so here's the quote. Why do you always insist on taking the hard road? One friend asked another confused. The friend replied, why do you assume I see two roads? So that's what I want to point out to you here. I think that's a lot of what we're here to do in this clinic, which is, I think a lot of people come into working on their health, working on keeping weight off, whatever the goal might be. And they think this has been a 50 year problem for me, right? Like this is not uncommon when I bring people in the clinic, I just talked to someone earlier today and there's this narrative, like the story of having carried, this has been a problem my whole life. I haven't been able to figure it out. It's really hard for me. And that's okay to come in with that, but realizing if we stay there, it creates a very hard road for us. One of the reasons being, if you think about what I just said before, your brain is constantly solving for what you give it. So if you say, this has always been a problem for me and I've never been able to figure it out. It's always finding all the ways you've never been able to figure it out. It's always kind of like dumping on you, so I want to go over today. What are some of the characteristics that she brought up of the easy road versus the hard road? And maybe you could think about in your life, is there any way that I'm making it harder than it needs to be? And could I work on more of that easy side? Let's go through each of these. Again, I'll put it underneath the video, but I just, I think that this, I don't know, this just really resonates with me, a lot of them. And you'll see when I put it up, Some of them I have that were particularly like, they really stood out to me, but I'm curious for you, which ones really stand out to you. And these are not like numbered, but she has, how many are on here? I don't know, eight or 10. Okay. So number, this is characteristics of the hard road. So if you're taking notes, you might want to just write hard road. All right. Number one that she has on here, valuing novelty, new approaches and intensity over consistency. All right, let me read that again. Valuing novelty, new approaches, and intensity over consistency. This breaks down to, and by the way, I have this conversation with all of you, none of you in here do not know the information. No one's like, oh really? That's the good, that's the food that would make me feel good, that would work for me? It's not a knowledge problem. It's sometimes stopping this perpetual quest for more information, right? In fact, a lot of what we do here is we stop inputting so much new information. Yes, there are some videos, but at the end of the day, a lot of the call to action is like, Can you go and do this, right? Today, I would love for you to have a little bit of that planner filled out, right? That's ultimately the step I'd like you to take. Not just sort of, thinking about this stuff. But you don't, what if you, what if you didn't need to find new approaches anymore? What if it was really about looking at what are foods that I've had in the past that I actually love? What about these failed diet attempts? I'm seeing in quote marks here if you're listening to the audio. What if there were actually elements of it that actually really worked for me? What if I pull those out? Many of you have done some type of a keto diet and of course you could never stick with keto, but you actually liked a little bit lower carb, not where you're going to like force yourself into a certain carb number, but you actually feel pretty good with that. So it's like, Oh, that's good information. Nothing new is happening here. I'm just taking some data from the past. I'm going to build it into the present, but I'm not going to go out and try to find some new guru who's like, Eat these grains and not those and makes it really complicated. We know it's all kind of garbage. Like everyone has some type of version of what they're selling. And what if you didn't need that like novelty and it's super intense in the beginning, but then it fizzles out. What if your work was really figuring out the consistency? Okay, so that was number one that she brought up number two that she has on here is putting off until later what you don't feel like prioritizing today. I think that this is usually a problem of procrastination is usually a magnitude problem, you've decided that you're going to do these 900 things. So I always say like you're gonna change everything overnight. And a lot of the time in the beginning, I'm just like, can we get the water up? And sometimes that like, I, I can tell people are like, really? Like that's, but, but if I'm sitting here and I'm hearing that there's no water, how are we going to sit there and be hitting nutrition hard when you're not even hydrated? It makes no sense. Sometimes when you're sitting there and you're, you're putting stuff off, it's always like today is not really a day when I'm really engaging with taking the best care of myself. Okay. Cool. I think the question is, how can we way decrease it down so that you can do something for yourself? What would it look like? And how can we get that done? Another one she has on here is focusing on your skill set more than your mindset. So this I think is really relating back to number one where you keep thinking that I have a knowledge deficit somehow there's some like magical person is going to have the answers for me. And what if that doesn't exist what if it's really just I learned to trust myself for I learned to listen to myself again. I trust that what I'm doing when I'm doing it, it's the right move for me, I don't keep thinking that if I hear some friend doing some other plan that, Oh, I got to go like, go try that. It's like, no, I have faith and confidence that I'm figuring it out. I stay rooted in the data. I stay rooted in just really a sustainable approach that I'm going to call on that instead of seeing constantly what other people are doing. Okay, any thoughts that you're having? I'm checking in with you. Is any of this resonating? You're like, yeah, I've always tried to find something else. Anything like that? Okay. I'll at the end, I'll ask you kind of which one really hit home most for you. All right. This next one. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing that. It's a lot of these just like, keep an open mind. And again, we're talking about the hard road and then the easy road is just a mirroring of this. So we won't spend as long on it, but it's just kind of gets you in the zone. All right. The next one on here is investing energy in the problem instead of acting on the solution. Did anyone's brain just pop off as I read that. Let me read it again, investing energy in the problem instead of focusing on the solution. Can I tell you how you know you're doing this? It's when you can tell me perfectly the problem, but you can give me no answers as to how you're going to solve it. So this is, a thing that I heard years ago when I started to do coach training, this lady who ran the school, who does this coaching school, her rule for how she ran it or how she runs it, I should say, because it's very successful. When an employee emails her, they need to write what the problem is, and then they need to outline what they think the answer is. And she will say yay or nay, and then she'll go from there. I want you to start to do this for yourself. I call it like being your own CEO. You have got to outline some solutions for yourself and not stay in the problem. Stay in the problem looks like this. Haven't lost weight weight's up. You know, it's like, all right, awesome. You have justified the problem. Slow clap. We know what's going on. That's great. But now are you going to give me part of what you think the solution is, how you can do it differently next time? What is a learning? We're always either winning or learning period. There's no version where it's failure. So that is part of, I just love this. Investing energy in the problem instead of acting in the solution. So love that one. That's a really like, that's one of my like top ones. Okay, this is another one that's really speaks to me. I don't know if it will resonate with you or not, but it's making yourself a victim of factors outside of your control, making yourself a victim of factors outside of your control. So, I mean, the classic example that I think of here, and I'm wondering, you can share with me in the comments if you think of something, but sometimes, you'll be at an event. And you might have done all the planning in the world, I'm going to start with protein and veggie first, or I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and then you're totally thrown for a loop. You get hungry quick us before too quick. It's not there what you expect, but it's like you did the best you can there, but you beat yourself up as though you somehow could have changed it. A lot of times there are going to be scenarios that are out of our control. And then why we would beat ourselves up again, usually pretty darn useless. Okay. But just realizing it's like, did I even have control over that or am I beating myself up for nothing? Okay, another one on here. We are getting to the middle to the end. Face your tracking here. All right. Making decisions based on emotion instead of principle. That one's like a eh for me. I think basically what she's getting at is a lot of people, maybe you're emotionally fueled when you're reacting to things, which, Again, we are emotional creatures. You're going to have emotions no matter what. And we'll get more into this, we can process, we can react, we can fight. It's sort of this fight or flight. But I think what's really getting, what she's really getting down to here is, you might get angry or you might get frustrated, but then can you come back to but what's important to me, what's actually happening here. Again, I want to come to wait for a second. I think where this could apply, making decisions based on emotion instead of principle. Let's say you get on the scale and the scale's up. Okay, great, you got the data, you know what's going on. The emotionally fueled you might get really frustrated, might have sort of like an eff it day, you know, things like that. The principled you might be like, I'm so proud of how I'm taking care of myself and how I'm showing up differently, that's really irrelevant. It's a gravitational pull on the world, there are a million other things that could be going on. The principled me does not eat anymore based on those emotions. I listen to the fuel that my body needs. I care about hydration and exercise, things like that. So that's how I take it. You might have a different spin on that. I think some of these are a little bit like open to interpretation. Okay. Trying to do everything right instead of focusing on doing the right thing. That's another one, right? Trying to do everything right instead of focusing on doing the right thing. I think, again, this is the weekend warrior where you're doing everything and you're trying to like overhaul all the things. I just usually don't see the best long term outcomes with it. People can like bust it out for a month or two and then it's just You know, so usually the people that do the best, they're like, I've just started to like slowly increase water. I've just started to be a little bit more mindful with it. I, I added a little bit of some protein with that meal. It's not sexy. It's not like, Ooh, look at what you're doing. But long term it works. So that's what I think of yeah, every decision, like maybe you're having some skittles, maybe you're doing whatever, but that's not just because at that moment, you think that that's not the perfect thing you overall you're making decisions, that overall you're focusing on doing, doing the right thing. Okay. All right. These, we've got three more, these, these two of these, before we get to the third one, we're another ones where I had like the little like line drawn. Cause it was really impactful to me. All right, so here's this one. Talking yourself into an excuse instead of talking yourself into progress. Anyone else might drop on that. Let me reread that. Talking yourself into an excuse instead of talking yourself into progress. Okay, that was a mic drop for me because I feel like how much time like let's imagine an urge or cravings there right maybe like so you're not physically hungry remember if you're physically hungry it's like what a boiled egg a cheese stick something like that's all that go eat that's not what we're talking about but if you have an urge or craving you're sitting there at night you're watching tv you're like I'll be like I would like the taste of a chip. I would like some popcorn. It's an old habit. It's, Oh, my spouse is doing it. You know, it's kind of stuff like that. If I think about this with, with that example, talking yourself into an excuse, instead of talking yourself into progress, it's talking yourself into like letting that happen. Right. Reverse talking yourself into progress is like, wow, I'm amazed that I'm even noticing that this is emotional hunger right now. That's amazing that maybe I don't need to act on it. And maybe I do, but I'm willing to take a few minutes to think about it. I'm willing to be really nice to myself. The fact that I even want that when I know I want these bigger goals, it doesn't, I'm not going to beat myself up anymore. Not freaking worth it, not doing it anymore. So that's the talking yourself into progress. Another big one that I see, and maybe these are big examples I had to work through. But talking myself into progress instead of talking, instead of making excuses, it's with me and exercise. So I would love for every day for me to get that 45 minute walk and the other things I'm doing. It doesn't happen every day. Sometimes I'm extremely tired. Sometimes it's a timing thing like childcare, like my husband will go to work and maybe I'm the one that's there until the nanny comes. There's this like transition, right? I'm still proud of myself. If I get a 20 minute walk in and I've had to remind myself, the talking myself into progress that adds up week after month after year. And every day, it's not a smaller walk, but that matters. Talking myself into like, no, even though you don't feel like doing this, I never feel like walking in the morning. I don't know if anyone, I don't know when you guys do these things, but yeah. Zero. My alarm goes off at five, five 40. I just get out of bed and I do it. I never feel like doing it. Never, ever, ever. But I like how I feel when I've walked. I, all of that. It's not even about, we've, we've talked about this. It's not about weight loss. It's just, I feel better. So that's talking myself into progress, this is who I want to be. I want to be this person that enjoys movement where it's easy, where my body is used to it, where endurance is up, where the breathing is easy, where I can be active with my kid. I talk myself into progress and I don't talk myself into the excuses of not doing it because not feeling like doing it just isn't appealing anymore after you talk to yourself in that way. Okay. Last one on here. I love this one as well. Focusing more on the journey and opinions of others than your own. Let's read that again. Let's read that again. Focusing more on the journey and opinions of others than your own. If you never again in this lifetime cared about the opinions of what someone else thought about your body. Your food choices, how you're taking care of yourself, what you're doing, all of it. I think we would all be in a better spot. Now, unfortunately, I think this is very human. And this is very human where we compare to others. Oh, how much have they lost? How much do have I lost? Oh, they're getting that result. Maybe I should do that, right? Like abandon ship on what I'm doing, go over to do what they're doing. This is a skill in life to always stay in your own lane. I learned this lesson. I share a lot of stories because this is how it sticks out to me, but you guys let me know if you can relate, but The time when I learned this the most, I was in medical school and I was always someone who wanted to help other kids. I've always had this like teacher nature in me. And I've always liked to like tutor and mentor and all of that. And I remember I wanted an anatomy lab to help a lot of kids and my sister, she's a chiropractor. She actually came in and helped me learn some of the neck and the back things. Cause she was doing the same thing at chiropractic school at the same time I was going through medical school. And she said, Mattia, focus on your own stuff and stay in your own lane. And I realized it was a really now siblings can do this, right? They can like snack us a little bit. You know what I'm talking about? Okay. But what it really helped me with is I needed to focus on my own stuff because I was really struggling in anatomy. I was having a hard time. I needed to do my own thing and not be sending out life rafts to other people. When you are sitting there in the judgment lane and you're looking at, well, what's their journey, what's their opinion, all of this, you have lost sight of what's going on for yourself. It's just like a check engine light moment when you're sitting there comparing to other people, let the, the, the envy, the jealousy, the whatever, let it be a guide to you what matters and what you want to achieve and why you use that. That's fine. But don't sit there and use it against yourself as though somehow your journey needs to be the same. Okay, let me know if you have questions on that but I think that's such a good one. It's just, whenever I get into comparisonitis, I just remind myself. My life will never look like someone else's period. There's no version ever kids, family, my biology, all of it. It will not ever compare to anyone else's. And it's totally unhelpful to compare. One of the main things I think about is my weight loss pace. It's been slower. Don't care because the weight stayed off, do not care anymore how quickly other people lose or don't lose. It's not my story. It's not my journey, not my deal to own. I don't need to care anymore to compare me to other people. Not helpful. So you stay on your own journey. All right. Which one, if you did take notes, which I know some of you might not have, cause I said, I was going to put it up. If anyone wants to share in the comments or if you're watching the replay later, was there one that stuck out the most to you? I'm trying to think here. If I look back at this, if I give you a second. Is there one that stood out to you the most? I think for me, to be honest, it's the investing energy in the problem instead of acting on the solution. I think that's the biggest one for me. And I wonder for you again, not, I'm not going to give away the whole book. I feel like it's not helpful, if you want to read it or if you like it yourself. But she talks about this, being a creative energetic problem solver. That phrase is burned in my brain. And so often if you're in a scenario where you're struggling, I think that. I want you to, ask yourself, like, if I was a creative, energetic problem solver right now, what would I be doing? What would I be focusing on? What would I try? If I made it easy, what would it look like? Ask yourself those questions. Okay, and then I'm gonna just real quickly here go through what she says the hallmarks of the easy road are. And again, it's very mirroring what we just did. So I'll kind of go through this quicker, but if we have any thoughts or any kind of insight on this, we'll come back to that. All right. So number one, valuing consistency over intensity and novelty. Got it. So consistency, I want you to ask yourself, what does that look like for me? This is a real where you need to actually parse it apart. Most people like like a frog out of their mouth. It's like seven days a week. I mean, it's funny. I don't know if we've talked about this before, but I did a mastermind with her. You know, she, every so often have, you can like sign up and there's a group of women, or I don't know if it's just women actually, but there's a group where you can go through it and she kind of leads it weekly. And one of the challenges she had to us is stop making a seven day goal and stop setting these things. Like if you're going to start doing movement or exercise, like, why are you going to set a seven day goal? You know, there's going to be a day in there where you're not going to be able to achieve it. So usually consistency, what does it mean for you? Like I need you to get really specific, really specific. Am I writing down breakfast? I don't know, six days a week. Am I journaling twice that week? Am I walking once really getting granular? If you do not do that, you're never able to know when the wind comes. That is usually 99 percent of you when I talk to you, I don't know, like if, if you're going through a struggle period, I don't know, I think blah, blah, blah. And then I'm like, okay, let's do the data. Like, let's actually write down what's going on. You're doing amazing. But you're not able to harvest that moment because you don't know what consistency or what progress would look like for you. Number two here. I love this one so much. When the moment you're in, leave yesterday and tomorrow out of it. Does anyone else feel just a little when you, when you hear that, when the moment you're in, leave yesterday and tomorrow out of it, it's like, let it go. This is when I, okay. When I read this and just having done a lot more of this work, I do not care about your past story with food and who you think you've been and how it's hard. What if none of that mattered anymore? Every day, you get to recreate what you're building and what you're moving toward. You can become a radically different person. I don't mean to be all like, you know, like such like, Oh, anything is possible. Literally, you do not need to keep repeating the past. You can create new things in the future here. It does not need to stay the narrative for you if we stop repeating it. So you can start winning the moments that you're in, and we can just forget if yesterday didn't go perfectly fine. Got it. If you want to do a write it down and move on sheet in the back of the planner, because you want to gather some data and learn from it. Amazing. But otherwise, we're going to leave that in the past. We're going to keep moving on. We're going to accept the wins and keep moving. Okay. Commit to improving your mindset and perspective every day. It sounds kind of preachy, but I do think that you can use the term like what you bathe your brain in like, you know that phrase like you are the top however many friends that you hang out with, whatever you're going to be consistently consuming listening to tuning into that is likely what you're going to be moving more toward. Just take an inventory of your life for a second like what are you reading is there a book you're reading. What are you podcasts you're listening to? What are you the friend circle? You're part of, maybe the marriage you're in, like, what is all of this forming you? Do you like the direction it's bringing you? Or do you want to do some tweaks to that? That can be part of the easy road. When I think about this investing energy in creating solutions or sorry, sorry, this committing to improving mindset and perspective every day, I consume a lot of podcasts. That are in this direction and they're varied and they're great. Maybe one day we can do one where we all kind of share what we like to listen to, because there's just so much good stuff and not to sit there and that you have to like, over consume all this stuff, but I find it's helpful that, well, one says something a little bit more science y, one says something a little bit more mindset, and then I'm like, okay, that's the one thing that you don't have, like one thing sticks out of all the things you do. And I kind of stay in the zone of I want to keep working on this. Okay, the next one here, investing your energy in creating solutions instead of making a case for the validity of the problem. That's one of my three top ones here. So let me read it again. Investing your energy in creating solutions instead of making a case for the validity of the problem. You know how we talk about, taking a little post it note and writing something on it and kind of putting it in a place that you're often reminded of it? I feel like this could be one of them. Because what would it look like if you were always really invested and open and curious as to what the answer would be and what would work for you instead of thinking that there's something wrong with you, that it hasn't been solved yet. What would that look for you? What would, what would that look like? We'll leave that open for a second. What do you think about it? So I had this example from the past week, like these past two weeks. So I'm at this transition where I let one job go. I'm fully doing the clinic now, a little bit of side work, telework for someone else. And this is, this is what I'm doing. Right. It's so exciting because I finally got to let go of this other thing. And this is all I'm doing. And there was this overlap period for a little bit where there was way too much going on. Cause instead of just one job, it was multiple all at the same time. And instead of ragging on myself, I just really started to look at, oh, well, how could I help myself? I know I'm booked out more than I've ever been booked out in my life. Don't enjoy it for those two weeks, but it's the price you pay to have to have a nice community and build the things you want. And I really started to get invested in just thinking along these lines of energy with creative solutions, instead of saying, well, it's too hard and I'm too tired. Like I started to notice, I would get up in like, you're so tired. And I was like, I got it. You are more tired, Matea. I love you. I understand. You are more tired. However, you also have a lot of ways you can help yourself. And that was so much more helpful than me staying rooted in what I thought the problem was. Because ultimately it was not a long term problem. Okay. All right. Few more on here. Take advantage of all that is within your control and don't waste energy or place blame on what you can't control. If you're someone that tends toward a lot of anxiety, that can be just like some of us have more anxiety than others. And so sometimes like you'll hear therapists, they'll say, Hey, make a list. I want you to put in one column, what is in your control in the other column, what's not in your control. Okay. And what's interesting is a lot of life is not, not in our control. And so I like to say the things that we can control, I like to kind of stay focused on that stuff. And then we get to build that out and we start to realize, Oh, wait, actually this is in my control and that's in my control. And we start to build that out and actually helps us to feel better, but that's actually a skill to build that out. Okay. Few more on here. Practice principle based reactions instead of emotionally fused reactions. I think that entails creating a pause. We talk a lot. I mean, we have the compassion pause that I talk about, which is, okay, you kind of pause with food, if you, if you're having an urge or a craving and you say, Hey, you know, what do I really need right now? And you just give it a few minutes and you just start to like build out the emotional vocabulary. This is what's actually going on. I might want to eat food right now and it's not solving a physical hunger and I might still go do that. That's fine. You have the permission slip, you can always go do whatever, we're not doing restrictive eating, that's fine if you want to go do that, but really starting to realize that, I don't necessarily need to do everything out of, out of an emotion, I can take a little pause, let that kind of wear down a little bit, and then based on what my principles are, act from that. Okay. Few, few last ones here. Focusing on doing the right thing instead of focusing on doing all the right things. Okay. We already talked about that. These last two again are little highlight that I have keeping your eye on your own work. Waste no energy comparing your journey to someone else's. And then the last one on here is seize every opportunity to break away from the past patterns. So now that we went through these, Okay. Give me a comment if you're here and able to, tell me in the comment, was there one that stuck out the most to you? I'm going to give you my top two. It's this last one, seizing every opportunity to break away from past patterns. I love that. This thought of I'm not defined by the way it's always happened in the past. I often tell myself this line, this is something that I've done. It's not who I am. So I don't care how weight came on. I don't care what patterns have been there before. That doesn't mean that it's subject to stay the same. I have power over that long term. And then number two, I like you're investing your energy and creating solutions instead of making a case for the validity of the problem. Maybe that's why this book has always been like such a foundational book for me because this is this is creative energetic problem solver mode. It makes me feel empowered about something that I felt plagued my life. And I think that's the place we want to get to is this might always be something that for life you kind of manage or think about or work on and it gets easier and easier because you figure out what all those things are, but it's like, can we have, I don't want to say like a happy spirit, but can it be easy the way we're doing it? And then that's going to go into all our, all other areas of our life as well. All right. So I'm going to leave it there. I did a lot of talking today. If you can, in the comments, I want you to put what is one thing that you are going to take from today's session. And if you're doing, if you're team replay, put it underneath the replay, okay? In the comment section when you're listening to the replay. What is one thing that you either are going to think about more, maybe a good question, or something you want to go work on? Okay? Love this. I'm seeing here stay in my lane. Yes! Me too. Me too. I can't tell you how good that is for me. I want to keep focusing on creating solutions and not so much on the problem. I think there are phases that I go through in life and it's kind of like ebbs and flows where I'm really like, this is the problem, you know, and it's, it's fine to define the problem, but to, to be more in the solution. Love that. So stay in our lane, all of that. I'm going to put all of these below the replay in case you just want a quick reference. I know all of you don't have the book, nor do you want to have the book. The other thing, let me give one last plug if you don't have this book. If you're someone that's like, well, I'm starting a journal, but I'm overwhelmed. I don't know where to start, things like that. In the back of here, trying to get to the beginning here. She has 200, prompts and questions to ask yourself. I'm So I, in the past, when I first started doing this work with losing weight or working with weight loss clients, all of that, I would recommend that they literally one question per day that they would literally in the planner. So you can do this with the planner that you were sent. You know how in the back there's thought work and there's a page for each day, and I mean, you can use more if you want or less, but I would write one of each of these questions on the top of each of those pages. If I wasn't like overly inspired that day with what to write, it's like, it kept me moving forward. It kept the arc going because she's thought of a lot of really good questions. You're like, Oh, when you read them, you'll be like, wait, why do I, you know, why do I stay in jail when the door is so open? And you're just like, I don't know. I might be the only one, but she really resonates with me. All right. I'm going to leave it there. I hope you all have an amazing rest of the week. I'll see you next week, same time. All right. Have a great week guys. Thanks.