Ashley (00:00)

Hello, my friend, and welcome back to the Family Fork. Today we're gonna get into something that I promise it's going to completely change the way that you approach your weight loss journey. And I am so confident that it will change things for you because this is how I help students inside of my programs to transform their own weight loss journeys. You see, here's what I already know about you. You have tried a lot of things.

A lot. I get it. You've gone all in on a new meal plan. Maybe you've tried whole 30. Maybe you got a gym membership or you're trying to work out at home. You've scrolled Pinterest late at night pinning chicken recipes that you promise you're gonna make this week. And maybe you're like me and you've even bought a new pair of yoga pants, thinking somehow that right pair of leggings, that is gonna be the thing to finally get you there. I know I've done this myself, by the way. So I totally get it.

Because there's something about a fresh pair of workout clothes that makes it feel like this time is going to be different. This time I'm going to show up. This time it's going to stick. So if you can relate to any of this, just trust me. We're in this together. So today I want to talk about what's actually going on when we do that, why we keep reaching for a new tactic, a new plan, a new program, and why none of it is working the way that you want it to. And more than that.

I want to share what I have seen over and over again in the women who do lose weight in perimenopause and actually keep it off because there is, there's a secret, there's a pattern. And believe it or not, it has almost nothing to do with what they're eating or what workout they're doing. It actually has everything to do with how they think. Now, I get it. This sounds a little bit woo-woo, but I want you to stay with me here.

Because by the end of this episode, I'm going to give you three specific things that you can start doing right now to begin shifting your mindset around weight loss.

And I promise, these are not soft, fluffy suggestions. These are the exact things that I teach inside of the method. So I promise I'm 100% confident that they work. So let's start all the way at the beginning. Let's talk about why we keep looking for a new tactic and why it feels so just like natural and logical when we do that.

So when something isn't working, your brain automatically looks for a solution. And it tends to look for the easiest, most familiar kind of solution that it can find. New recipes, new meal plan, different workout program, a gym membership, an app to track your food, something that feels like action, something that feels like momentum without requiring you to sit in the discomfort of asking why that last thing didn't work.

The reason your brain does this is actually pretty smart, but it's a self-protective thing. So if you try a new thing, a new solution to weight loss and it doesn't work, that is kind of painful, right? It doesn't feel good, but it is survivable. And it just means that that particular solution wasn't right for you at that time.

But really sitting down and asking yourself, why isn't this working? What's actually going on here? That feels like a much more daunting exercise or question because the answer, it might not be something that you want to look at. So a new tactic gives your brain an escape route and it lets you feel like you're doing something, like you're taking action and moving forward without requiring you to get honest about what's actually standing in the way.

So let me give you an example of this. Say you printed out a bunch of recipes from Pinterest. You went grocery shopping and you made one of those like beautiful, nutrient-dense dinners, and your family sat down and your kids looked at the zucchini noodles and they were like, Mom, this looks disgusting. And just like that, the meal felt like a failure. Maybe you felt like a failure. Your family didn't want it. And now every time you think about finding new recipes, that memory is locked in.

And your brain says, you know what, remember that last time? We tried that. It didn't work. Let's not do that again.

So instead of going back to trying some different recipes, you actually just pivot. You think, okay, what if I had a really great meal plan that was designed for families? Something where I could just make one dinner that works for everyone instead of having to cook separate meals. and then you find my 21-day anti-inflammatory meal plan and you think, yes, this is it. This is what I've been missing. I can make tacos for my family and have an anti-inflammatory version for me. Yep.

This is definitely the thing that is going to help me lose weight. So here is the honest truth. That meal plan, it is a great tool and it might help you lose weight. But if the thought patterns underneath haven't shifted, that meal plan is going to feel really good for like a week or two. And then it's going to quietly fade out of your life, just like all of the Pinterest recipes did.

Because you see, the problem was never the meal plan or the recipes. The problem is the way you think about the plan and about yourself and what you believe is possible for you. Now, I want to ask you something, and I want you to just stop for a second and really think about this. When you are really, really struggling to lose weight, what are the thoughts that are actually running through your head? Not the ones you wish you were having, but like the real

hard thoughts, the ones that show up when you're standing there at the kitchen at six o'clock at night trying to figure out, what am I going to make for dinner? Or when your alarm goes off in the morning and you have every intention of working out, but when you get up, you're just not feeling it. What does your brain actually say in these moments?

For most of the women who come to work with me, the thoughts, they're gonna sound something like this. I am so overwhelmed. There's so much information out there, and I still don't even know where to start. I'm just gonna put it off for now. Or I can't get motivated. What is wrong with me? I set the alarm, I go to bed with good intentions, and then morning comes and I can't make myself get up. I just don't have it in me.

Or maybe it's this, which I probably hear more than any other thought. I just can't be consistent. I can do really well for a week or two, and then something happens, like a work trip or my kids get sick, I have a hard week, and I just fall off completely. And then I can't seem to get back on track. And I tell myself that if I could just be more consistent, the weight would come off, but I'm not doing it. So it's not going anywhere. Weight loss, it's never gonna work for me.

The thought that honestly breaks my heart every time I hear it, I just don't care anymore. I've tried everything: the meal plans, the gym, working out at home, different diets. None of it works for me. This is just what life is going to be like for me. I've pretty much accepted it. Can you hear what all of these thoughts have in common? Every single one of them is a conclusion, a belief.

a story that your brain has decided about who you are and what is possible or not for you. And those stories are what is actually driving your results, not the meal plan.

When you believe that you're not motivated, it is unlikely that you will work out. Because why would you? You have already decided in your brain that you're not motivated enough to do it. When you believe that nothing works for you, you actually stop investing time in new approaches. You might go through the motions for a little bit, but you're not fully in it because you're already bracing for disappointment. When you believe you aren't consistent, you skip the workout.

Or you skip a day of eating for your weight loss goals. And then you use that day as proof of what you already believe. See, see, I knew I couldn't do it. I'm never gonna be able to do this. Your thoughts are driving every single choice you make. And when those thoughts are working against you, there's no meal plan in the world that's going to be able to save you from them.

Okay, so now let me tell you what I have seen happen with the women who come into the method and they actually lose the weight and keep it off. They come in thinking exactly the same things that you have in your brain right now. I'm not motivated, I'm not disciplined, nothing works for me. I have already tried everything. So they walk in with all of these stories, and so we start working on those from day one because I know.

That the mindset piece, it's not just like bonus information, it is the foundation. And without it, nothing else holds on your weight loss journey. So here is what shifts for these ladies. The first thing I notice is that they actually start being nicer to themselves. Not in this like passive or cheesy kind of way, but they actually give themselves more grace. Instead of saying, I'm not disciplined, they start saying,

Huh, I'm learning how to make this way of eating work for my actual life. I have a demanding work schedule and three kids and a hundred things on my plate. Of course it's going to take some time to figure this out.

The woman who says this, she's not letting herself off the hook. She's giving accurate context. And accurate context is what allows her to keep going when it gets really hard. The women who keep the weight off, they also have a very different relationship with the timeline. They've stopped thinking of weight loss as a project with a finish line or an end line. They learn to understand really deeply that.

This is a forever practice. You don't just get to this number on the scale and then poof, you're done.

That health, weight loss, especially in perimenopause and beyond, it requires maintenance and attention for the rest of your life. And this shift in thinking is the biggest transformation

Because when you stop treating weight loss like a sprint, you stop quitting when it gets hard. You stop throwing the whole thing out because you had one bad day or a bad week. You just keep going. The other thing I see these women doing, the ones who start losing weight and are able to keep it off, and this is probably my favorite shift of all, is that they start building an identity around who they want to be.

Not who they've been, not the woman who can't get motivated or always falls off after a week or two. They create an identity for the woman they are actively choosing to become. Now, sometimes that identity is connected to a vision of where they want to be five years from now. What does her life look like? How does she feel in her body? How does she show up for her family and her career and herself?

But sometimes the vision it's a lot closer than that, like next month or next week.

And for some of my students, a couple that I'm working with right now, they are working on 24 hours at a time, just one day. So who do I want to be 24 hours from now? Am I making choices right now that the me of 24 hours from now would actually make? Asking yourself this simple question can really help you stay on course. So here's what this looks like in practice. Let's take workouts, for example, because

This comes up all the time. So if you're still living in the like, I can't get motivated story, you look at the idea of a morning workout and you say to yourself, I wish, I wish I could make myself get up and just do it. I've tried. I've laid out my clothes the night before, set multiple alarms. I just don't have whatever it takes to actually get it done. And so you keep wishing and not doing the workout.

And then every morning that passes without a workout, it just quietly confirms that story a little bit more.

But on the flip side, the woman who has started building her new identity, she says, you know what? Working out, it's just who I am. It's what I do every morning. It's my thing. Even when the workout is 10 minutes of squats and a short work walk on the treadmill, even when it's the absolute bare minimum version of what she'd planned to do, because maybe that's all she had that day. She does it because she has decided that she is someone who moves her body in the morning.

It's just not up for negotiation. That is just who she is.

Now let's be clear. I don't want you to think that these women are people who just kind of naturally feel this way. They don't. They built it very deliberately and slowly with a lot of mornings where they did their non-negotiable workout even when they really didn't feel like it. Lots of imperfect days where they showed up anyway and they still counted that as a win. That repetition over time, it became her identity.

Once it becomes your identity, the choices that you make, they get a lot easier because you're not fighting yourself every single day about who you are or what you can do. You've just already decided.

And here's what else shifts when identity changes. When the scale doesn't move for a week or two or more, which it's not always gonna move every day, the women who have built this identity, they don't spiral. They don't take a plateau as a reason to quit because their sense of who they are is not tied to a number on the scale anymore. It's tied to the choices that they're making every day. And they're making the right choices so they know that they're on track.

even if the scale doesn't reflect it yet.

I guarantee this is such a different experience than what you have probably been living in, where the scale is basically your only indicator of progress. And one bad week or a couple of days, it just unravels everything. So, how do you start shifting the way you think about yourself and your weight loss when you've been thinking those same stories for so long?

I want to give you three very specific things that you can start doing right now, not next week or when that vacation is over, but right now. The first thing I need you to do is to be aware. Start noticing the thoughts that you have around your weight, nutrition, your body, your workouts. When you sit down to eat a meal, for example, what is your brain saying? When you think about going to the gym or getting up early to do a workout.

What automatically comes up for you when you look in the mirror in the morning or get dressed? What story does your brain hand you in that moment? Most of us, we're just not really paying attention to these thoughts because they happen so quickly. They're like automatic and they feel like the truth, but they are not truth. They are simply your thoughts. And there's a huge difference between the two.

When you think, no matter what I do, I just cannot lose this weight. I want you to notice that thought. And then I want you to notice how does that actually make you feel? Because that thought probably makes you feel pretty defeated, maybe hopeless, maybe super frustrated. And when you feel that way, you're not going to make choices that actually move you forward. You're going to stay right where you are. Your thoughts are creating your feelings.

And your feelings are driving your choices. That is how progress happens or it doesn't. So the first step is building awareness around your thoughts and your feelings.

The second thing you're going to do is write down your thoughts. I know, that sounds like journaling. Journaling is like homework. And I know that you don't need more homework. But I really need you to do this for one week. Because when you write your thoughts down, you're going to see patterns that are hard to see when those thoughts are just moving around in your head.

So when you write your thoughts down, you'll notice that the same thought actually shows up across very different areas of your life. It's like that I can't get motivated thought. Does it come up around your workouts? But does it also come up when you think about meal planning for the week or when your kids ask you to go for a walk or play in the park and you just can't make yourself do it? Does it show up at work when you have a big project on your to-do list that you just keep pushing off till tomorrow?

Your brain has stories that it uses in every area of your life, not just around your health. So once you can see this pattern, you can start questioning those stories. Is this actually true? Or is just this just like the default story that my brain uses when something feels hard or things might not work out the way that I want them to? Because I can't get motivated might actually mean I'm scared to try something that might not work again.

I cannot handle another failure right now. That right there, that's a completely different conversation. And that thought is something that you can work with because it lets you see that it's not a motivation problem. It's actually your brain trying to protect you from failure or disappointment. So it totally makes sense. But in actuality, that story, it's not serving you anymore.

The third thing you're going to do this week is decide if you actually want to keep the thoughts and stories that are automatically going through your brain. Ask yourself really honestly, is this thought serving me? By telling yourself every single day that you're not motivated, is that working for you? Or is it actually stopping you from getting up maybe just two mornings this week to do a 10-minute workout before work? Just two mornings, 10 minutes, that's it. Has the

I'm not motivated story helped you do that? No. And if not, then I need you to consider that you don't actually have to keep that thought. You're allowed to set it down and question it. You're allowed to replace it with something that is actually going to help move you forward.

Now, to be clear, this is not going from I'm never motivated to, I'm a morning person who loves to get up at 5 a.m. and work out. No, no, that is too big of a jump. Your brain, it won't believe that because it doesn't feel right real yet. But what about this? I'm not feeling motivated today, but maybe I'll feel differently in the morning. So I'm gonna set out my workout clothes tonight so that if I wake up and I'm feeling ready.

It's just going to be easier for me to get it done. That's a really different thought, right? It holds the door open and it gives tomorrow a fighting chance. And that might be the one thing that gets you moving two mornings a week, which is going to give you 20 minutes of movement more that you weren't getting before. 20 minutes that becomes a part of who you are. And that is how it starts slowly and consistently.

So I want to leave you with this. When women come to work with me, they all start in this same place. Every single one. I'm not motivated, not consistent, nothing ever works for me, no matter how hard I try. I've tried everything and I've just given up. Every single woman who has come through the perimenopause weight loss method has said some version of this. And truly, the single biggest shift they make, the one that

Actually helps them to lose weight and maintain that weight loss, it's not a new way of eating or a different workout. It is the moment that they start changing the story that they tell themselves. When you change the way you think, you change the choices you make. And when you change the choices you make consistently over time in a body that is finally being supported in the right way, that is what helps you lose weight.

And keep it off for good.

This is why from day one inside of the method, I teach this concept before we ever get to meal planning or recipes or anything else. Because the nutrition information, the family-friendly meals, the framework for making this actually work with your real life, I can give you all of that.

But without the mindset piece to support all of those tools, you're going to be right back in the same place that you've been, starting and stopping, trying something and then quitting, looking for that next magic solution. I don't want that for you. You have been in that loop long enough.

So if you are ready to actually do this work alongside a group of women who are in the exact same season of life and dealing with the exact same things you are, I would love to have you inside the method. You can find everything that you need to know about the program at Ashleymalik.com And I'll also put a link in the show notes. And if you have questions, just come find me on Instagram at the Ashley Malik, send me a DM.

Tell me that you just listened to this episode and fire away with your questions.

And if this particular episode resonated with you, one of the most helpful things you can do is to share it. I want you to text a friend who's still out there trying to find the right plan, the right program, the right meal prep strategy. Because what she's really looking for is not another tactic. She needs a new way of thinking about herself and what she is actually capable of. And that is what we do here, one episode at a time.

Thanks for spending time with me today, and I'm already excited to see you back here next week on the Family Fork.