The Mindset Required for Your Transformation

Transformation doesn’t begin in the gym or the kitchen — it begins in the mind.

In this episode of the Worth the Weight Podcast, Coach Courtney dives into the mindset required to truly transform your body and your life. Drawing from her personal journey of losing 148 pounds, she explains why success in weight loss and fitness has far more to do with your thinking, discipline, and daily habits than any specific diet or workout plan.

Coach Courtney breaks down the key mental shifts that separate those who achieve real transformation from those who constantly start over. From making the decision to leave your old habits behind, to learning how to push through discomfort, stop negotiating with excuses, and stay committed long after motivation fades.

She also shares the powerful role that identity, discipline, and self-respect play in lasting change — and why real transformation happens when you become a different version of yourself.

If you've ever struggled with consistency, motivation, or staying committed to your goals, this episode will challenge you to rethink what it really takes to succeed.

Because at the end of the day, transformation isn’t given — it’s earned.

FOLLOW COACH COURTNEY:
Instagram - @CoachCourtneyTaylor
Facebook - Worth the Weight Fitness
TikTok - @coachcourtneyt

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, ladies, and welcome to the Worth the Wait podcast, where we talk about the mindset and habits behind real transformation. Because transformation is earned and your best life is waiting on the other side of consistency. I'm your host, Coach Courtney, and today I want to talk about the mindset you actually have to develop if you want long-term success. Because the truth is, most people quit long before their body ever had a chance to change. So stay with me to the end and find out how you can truly transform this time. One thing I've learned after losing 148 pounds and helping hundreds of other women transform their bodies is that weight loss is not always about food and it's not always about workouts. It is always about mindset and the battle that goes on in your mind. I see far too many women stop too soon because the level of discomfort that they're having and the level of sacrifice that they're having to put in, they feel like they don't see the results fast enough. So that's one thing I wanted to challenge today. Let's really take a look at that. What does that mean that you don't see results fast enough? What's the alternative? You quit and go back to doing what you were doing and lose any progress that you've made, or if you haven't made any progress yet, then add on to the weight that you were already upset about. So what is the alternative? Quit, gain more weight than you were to even begin with, get more depressed, more ashamed, hurt more, develop more health problems, take more medicine. This this mindset of I'm gonna try this, but if I don't get the results fast enough, I'm gonna quit, is going to keep you stuck. You'll never get to where you want to be unless you change that mindset. The first thing you have to think about with changing your mindset is you have to decide you're done with the old life. It can't be wishy-washy. It can't be, I think, I hope, maybe I can do it. You have to say, I'm done. And sometimes having a chip on your shoulder and getting a little bit mad is a good thing and can be the pedestal to get you where you need to go. Many people want weight loss, but they haven't fully committed. And you have to mentally break up with the habits that create the problem. And so it's a comfort versus transition thing. You have to be willing to transition. You have to have an expectation of knowing that you are going to stick in with it and you're not going to quote unquote quit because there's really no such thing as that. You just go to the alternative where everything's going to get worse. It makes no logical, rational, emotional sense whatsoever. You have to stay in the game if you don't want to spiral completely out of control. And you know you don't want to do that. You don't want to do that for yourself and you don't want to do that for your family. The moment I realized I had to change is when I realized that my family was living without me. And I was living on the sideline and sitting on the bench of my one life that I have. I was not wanting to go anywhere. I didn't want to be at any events because I was so ashamed of where I had let myself get to and how I looked and I couldn't fit into clothes. And and I also just felt bad. I had no energy. But above that, you know, in my small town where people knew me all the time growing up, they were going to know me and recognize me. And they were going to know, wow, she's almost 300 pounds. I mean, you could tell. I mean, I was morbidly obese. And I was hiding from my life. And so I knew that I didn't, I may not have known exactly what I was going to do at that point. I didn't have all the steps laid out in front of me, that's for sure. But I did for sure know that I was done with what I was doing. That is the first thing that you have to change. Another thing you have to do is accept that it's going to be hard. Many people fail because they expect the journey to feel good, or they expect the journey to not feel hard. And there is a difference in those two. And where I see most people is they don't expect the journey to be as hard as it's going to be or feel as hard. I mean, fat loss requires discomfort. No two ways about it. It is going to happen. And if you're feeling that discomfort, if you're sometimes feeling some hunger pains, that is normal. That means you're on the right track, not the wrong one. And you're probably going to feel some hunger, especially at the beginning, because a lot of times we get our bodies so used to eating so much, so much more than we need, so much more than that's healthy for us. And our mind and our body gets used to that quantity. And when you lower that quantity, it's going to fight back at first. And it's going to fight back in the form of hunger. And sometimes people will look at that hunger and think, oh no, I'm doing something wrong. This is, I'm not supposed to be hungry. You know, I heard that you can lose weight without ever being hungry. But in reality, you're going to be hungry at the beginning. Not all the time, of course. But sometimes when your body is getting back to baseline where you need to be, you're going to feel that hunger. When you start to work out, you're going to feel sore. When you are lifting weights, it's going to hurt. Your muscles are going to burn. It's going to feel like, oh my gosh, everything in my head is saying, stop. This is not good. But your mind's playing tricks on you. That's why it all starts in the mind. It is good for you. And your mind will not always give you that much problem. You're just at the beginning of the journey right now. And it's that's when it's going to give you the most problems because it's kind of freaking out and hitting the panic button on what are you doing to me? This is not comfortable like I've been, I've been comfortable. And so you have to just know that it's going to be hard and you have to accept that fact. Success requires doing things that you don't feel like doing repeatedly. Number three, if you're making a list and taking notes on this, number three, stop looking for fast results. That is the number one challenge that I see with the many, many women that I help and talk to on a daily basis, is they look for results too quickly and they get impatient because they feel like they're doing something wrong if they're not seeing the results that they've made up, or the timeline they've made up in their head. But it's not a realistic timeline. Time goes a lot slower in weight loss than what our minds want it to. So you have to stop looking for fast results. There's a lot of times that I will see people quit within two to three weeks of a weight loss journey. Real transformation takes months. It takes years in some cases, depending on how much what your goal is. If you're wanting to lose a significant amount of fat, if you're wanting to build a significant amount of muscle, that's going to take months and years to get to exactly where you want to be. So this thing of, you know, I've been on it for one month and I'm not seeing the results. So that means there must be something faulty with the program or there must be something wrong with my body. That's a big one that I hear. I must be broken. Let me go find out and get tests run to see how I'm broken, what's not right on me. When really you're not broken, the only thing that needs adjusting is your mind and your expectations of how long this is gonna take. But again, in that point, I go back to what I said just a few minutes ago. What's the alternative? It's like you're on this timeline that you set for yourself of, okay, I'm gonna do it for this amount of time, but then if it doesn't work in that time, I'm done. Well, what does done look like? What's on the other side of done? Doctors' visits, depression, shame, more weight, bigger clothes, less mobility, less endurance. I mean, that's not really, that shouldn't really be an alternative. So you this thing of I'm gonna do it and it's gonna have this result, or that's what has to change in your mind. You have to reframe that into I'm gonna do it, and this is going to be what I'm going to do until I see the results that I want, and then I'm gonna do what it takes to keep those results after. I'm never gonna go back to this old lifestyle because I don't want the results that this old lifestyle brings. Uh, number four, you have to stop negotiating with yourself. People sabotage themselves with constant excuses. I'll start Monday. I'll just have one cheat meal, it won't hurt me, I'll just have a bite, I'm too tired, I'm too busy. I had an unexpected, stressful event happen in my life. I'm moving. I'm, I mean, you name it. I got uh the flu so that instead of you know being down for two or three days, now that's gonna take me two or three weeks. It works against yourself and negotiating, there's no win in those excuses. There's no win for you. It's all a loss. It's discipline over emotion, discipline over circumstances. That's where discipline comes in, is through the hard times, through the stressful, uh, busy, crazy schedules, through the unexpected, stressful situations and emotional situations. That's where discipline grows. That's where discipline is needed. Follow through with commitment. It's so easy to be committed at the very beginning before you feel all the pains, before you watch everybody else do continue with their routine and their eating habits and their non-working out schedules while you're over there feeling like you're doing all this on an island sometimes, then you don't want to be committed anymore. And the that you make the excuses to get out of the commitment. But at the end of the day, it's still an excuse and you've broken a commitment. So change that mindset, change that way of thinking, that framework in your mind. Stay committed through anything. Life is gonna life. Life be life, and it's gonna happen. Stress is gonna be there. That shouldn't have an effect on what you eat. That shouldn't have an effect on when you move. If we can put on clothes every day, and we can brush our teeth every day, and we can scroll on our phones every day through all of life circumstances, through unexpected events, then we can do this every day and through any anything. Moments you have to push back excuses are the moments that are going to get you to where you want to go. There were many times in my journey where there was unexpected circumstances I never expected. Within a year on my journey, I found out that I had thyroid cancer and it was spreading quickly. I never expected that, and that's something that could have catapulted me off of my journey. And trust me, don't think the thoughts didn't come and the temptation didn't arise to just say, you know what, I didn't realize this. This has changed the game. I now have cancer and I need to just take a break. I need to get off of this journey and give myself just some time to heal. That sounds wonderful and that sounds great, but it's not true. And it would have, if I would have done that and if I would have listened to that, I wouldn't be where I'm at today. I wouldn't feel the way I feel today, I wouldn't have the experience and the testimony I have today to help others. The excuses can sound so romantic and so self-loving, but when you push back all of the beautiful rhetoric and the the fantasy words, what have you really done? Stopped eating healthy, stopped moving. When is that ever good to heal? That's actually exactly what you don't want to do. And so that's what I did not do. I stayed the course throughout that entire thing. I never stopped. I stayed consistent. And that is what you have to do to see the transformation that you want to see at the beginning. You must learn to keep going when motivation is gone. Motivation is temporary, no matter what your why is, and it is important to know your why because that's going to help you at the beginning. But I say that because it's at the beginning. Motivation will fade, I can promise you. Even if it's to get off medication, even if it doesn't have to be just aesthetic, it doesn't have to be just I want to look better. Even if your motivation is, you know, I want to get, I want to reverse diabetes. I really want to take a stab at that and see if that will work for me. Even that will fade because of how hard it is. It'll wear you down. But habits sustain progress. That's why you need to put the right systems in place when motivation is gone. And what are those systems? It differs for everybody depending on your goal, but that's also where a coach can come in. That's where I come in. Already have those systems created, established, and planted and executed so that it's just another day for you, and you can lean on those whenever the motivation is gone. And discipline builds momentum. I can't stress that enough. The more you push through these temptations, the more you correct your mindset, the more you discipline yourself. Momentum builds, and the less you want to go back to your old ways because you've already invested so much. You don't want to throw that away. So discipline builds momentum, and momentum is what helps you stay the course, and it's what helps you not want to go back to your old ways. You have to become a different person. And what I mean by that is old habits created by the old body have to be looked at as such. That's old, that's not the same you. New habits create your new life and create your new self. And that takes time. It doesn't happen in a day. You can't want it enough one day for it to happen quickly. It happens over time. It happens by consistently staying the course every day through every event, through every occasion, through every circumstance, staying the course. You want to reframe your identity instead of saying, I'm someone who wants to lose weight, or I'm trying to build muscle, I'm trying to reshape my body, I'm trying to lose fat. I'm trying to gain mobility, be able to move around better, uh, prevent trips and falls. Instead of labeling yourself as that and thinking of yourself in that way, reshape that, reword that. I'm someone who trains. I'm someone who takes care of my body. I'm someone who eats healthy and tries to take care in the best way that I can of the one temple that the Lord gave me in my one life that he gave me. You start telling yourself what you are, not what you're trying to do. That is a big mental reframe that will help you get to where you want to be. I am fit. Even before you get there, in your mind, get there first in your mind. I am fit, I am healthy, I am energetic, I am confident. And I'm not saying one of those things where on day one you go look in your mirror and say, I'm confident 15 times. I've tried that and maybe it works for some people. It did not work for me. So I'm not gonna give people advice on things that I can't relate to that worked in my experience, but I am gonna say, start thinking that way in your mind. I am someone that trains. So what does someone that train does? They work out. You already are that person. So now your actions are just following who you already are. You're not saying, well, I'm this person that it doesn't compare, it doesn't align with my actions. But I'm just gonna try to push myself to do the actions anyway. It's just a harder way of thinking about it. And the last thing I want to leave you with is self-respect is the ultimate driver. Weight loss isn't punishment. Workouts are not punishment, it's self-respect. It's self-respect, and I go back again to respecting the body that God gave you. It's not really ours. We didn't do anything to create ourselves. We were created by the one holy Lord, and it is our responsibility, and we're supposed to be a good steward of that temple, of our bodies. That way we can live longer, more prosperous, more joyous lives. We can impact more people, and that's the whole goal, anyway. What we're here for is to help others, to help others to bring them closer to the Lord. A tool and a resource that we use for that is our bodies. And if our bodies are not healthy and our mindset is not healthy because of what we've done to our bodies and because of the shame, you're gonna want to hide instead of being able to impact someone. You can't impact anyone hiding and sitting on the sideline of your life. God didn't create you for that, and you don't want that. You know it doesn't create happiness and joy and fulfillment. So a first step in being able to get those things is first having the vehicle to get there, and the vehicle is your body. So self-respect is the ultimate driver. And one thing I want to note on this too, a very important point that I've heard a lot of women say and I want to address, is they feel that doing something for self-care and for themselves is being selfish. And I'm here to tell you loud and clear that it is not being selfish. Eating healthy the majority of the time, you know, eating healthy 90% of the time, indulging 10% of the time, that's not being selfish. Taking a few minutes out of your day to work out, keep your muscles strong, keep your hormones balanced, that's not being selfish. In fact, I would challenge you to look at it the opposite way. Not doing that is being selfish. Not eating healthy is being selfish because it's going to ruin your body, it's gonna ruin your health, and you're not gonna be able to be there and show up for your grandkids, for your kids. You're not gonna want to go to their extracurricular activity because you don't want, you want to save yourself the embarrassment of the crowd seeing you. But that donut was good. That's actually being selfish. And I'm not saying this in any critical way to make you feel guilt or anything like that. I'm trying to show you the mind shift that keeps you stuck right now. It's not even correct. The mind shift of I don't want to do that and be selfish and then I'll feel guilty. It's actually being selfless. You're taking care of yourself in order to take care and support others and impact others. You're putting on your mask before going and helping that other person in order for you to be able to help that other person. So that is a mind shift that I really want to hone in and I really want you to hear me on that. Self-care, working out, eating healthy, providing healthy meals for your family, that is not selfish. It's a requirement to be able to keep your tool sharp, and your tool is your body. When you start respecting yourself more, your habits will start changing. And if you're listening to this and you're waiting for motivation to show up, don't wait. The truth is that the life you want is waiting on the other side of discipline. And using these tools that I've mentioned in this podcast today is how you build discipline. You don't just wake up with discipline. It's not something you just automatically have and you just turn on the button and there it is. It's built over time and one good decision, one right decision at a time. And you build it slowly. And once you start showing up for yourself consistently, everything changes. Using these tools is how, and making sure that you are creating the right expectations for yourself in your mind, and making sure you keep a check on your mind that your mind is in the right space and place to start, to continue, and to complete the journey, then to maintain. Those results. If you like what you've heard today, or if you have questions on what you've heard today, please feel free to reach out to me. I am at Worth the Weight Fitness. I'm on all social media platforms. You can also email me at C Taylor at worth the letter T weight W-E-I-G-H-T fitness.com. C Taylor at worthtweightfitness.com. Don't hesitate to shoot me an email. Give me your comments. Let me know your thoughts on this podcast. I welcome feedback. I welcome others' ideas. I welcome things that I may not even have thought about. It's we help each other, we empower each other, we support each other. And I don't shy away from others' opinions whatsoever. I encourage them, in fact. So please give me feedback. Let me know what you think. Let me know how I can help you. And stay strong. I want to encourage you. You can do this. Anybody that makes the decision to do it can do it. You don't have to have a special talent. You don't have to be of a certain age. You're never too old. You're never too young. You can start making the right decisions today. One decision at a time creates discipline. Discipline creates momentum. Momentum creates consistency, and consistency creates results. I love all of you. And until next time, I'm Coach Courtney. Thank you for listening to the Worth the Wait podcast. Bye bye.