158 How to Avoid Confusion, Overwhelm and General Disillusionment With Your Goals

If you ever feel confused, overwhelmed, and disillusioned with all the weight loss or general advice out there, I want to help you navigate that with an experimental approach. Learn how to cut through all that noise and run a personal experiment of your own with 3 simple steps. 

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How to deal with the information overload around fat loss
• 3 Mindsets that keep you stuck: Cynical, Escapist, Perfectionist
• The do’s and don’t to enjoy the process 

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Transcript

 Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker. My work as a certified coach involves helping you change what might seem unchangeable. So that could be your weight, that could be your tendency to reach for food when your body doesn't actually need it, or a glass of wine maybe, or even something about your.

Like a tendency to people, please. Today I wanna share with you exactly how to avoid the confusion, the overwhelm, and general disillusionment that comes when we're trying to go for something different, when we're trying to reach a goal or personal change, which of course is inherent in achieving your goals.

Let's first talk about confusion. I recently learned that the brain circuits that activate when we are thirsty are the same as when we are thirsty for knowledge. We wanna learn, we wanna know stuff. This is real. This is happening in your brain. And because we have so much information readily available, it's easy to get confused.

We. So much information. It's almost an information overload at this point. For example, I've mentioned the book Fast Like A Girl by Dr. Mindy Pells before on this podcast, and it was a great book for me. I really thought it was helpful in terms of her strategizing, mapping your fasting protocols to your cycle.

So I found it helpful and more of a balanced approach, but she essentially is hard set that fasting is the key for fat loss energy. Metabolic flexibility and overall health. And then at least in my space, the algorithm is showing me a lot of a woman called Dr. Stacy Sims, who now seems to be everywhere I turn doing all of the podcast circuits and all the YouTube circuits, all the interviews.

And she says, we really need to be fueling our bodies upon waking. I think I could be wrong. You can look it up. It's like the first 30 minutes or something. So what do you do? Right? It's easy to get overwhelmed and confused by these seemingly contradictory or somewhat contradictory messages, and it's easy in especially in this space to simply be like disillusioned and do nothing or.

You might feel a little disillusioned because you learned one thing and then the next thing you know there's new research that seems to undermine that. So I really get the frustration. Especially because we tend to have some limiting mindsets. I'm gonna go through them right now, and I want you to see if any of these sound familiar to you.

Your brain might offer up the cynical mindset, so you often think reaching your desired weight or your goal. Whatever your goal is isn't possible for you and you feel skeptical. You might be somebody who tends to ruminate on the past often saying things like, well, I've never been able to do that before.

Like it's almost impossible for you to imagine. A different lifestyle or you being a different type of person, you're very glued to how you have been in the past. When someone else offers you a solution, your automatic response is, I can't do that. It's just too hard. Like it's, it's beyond me. I am not capable.

Right. So then if you're in this cynical mindset, you either don't try. Or if you do, it's really half-hearted. You almost think ahead of time, like you could plan your food, but like, you know, you're not gonna follow through. So it's half-hearted. Okay. The second one I wanna talk about is escapist mindset.

This is when you notice that you often are permissive, like when it comes to food or a glass of wine or a cocktail, your thought is, I just want it. You can fall into that. Diet starts Monday, mentality really easy. So you have the best intentions to start tomorrow, like for real. Okay? So you're thinking, you know what?

Today I'm just gonna take it easy. But then tomorrow I'm gonna be on point with my protocol or on point with my diet or on point with my food. I'm just not gonna overeat or whatever it is. No sugar. But then what you notice is nothing really changes. You might be okay for like a day, a week, maybe, but then inevitably you go back to the justification.

I just want it. And then finally, the last mindset I wanna talk about is the perfectionist mindset. If you have the perfectionist mindset, you are often wishing that you could be more consistent. You are always thinking consistency is key, and you think that if you were more consistent, you would feel happier, but instead you actually feel very uncertain.

So to escape that feeling of uncertainty, you tend to do things like. Doubling down on structure. So becoming more rigid, planning more, but then you fall into all or nothing thinking. So this is when you know one candy leads to the whole package. One chip leads to whole bag, one cookie at lunch, leads to overeating at dinner, and then another snack at 8:00 PM Okay?

So for you. The journey for weight loss, the journey towards your goal really feels like a grind, and you can probably see how these three mindsets really limit us from taking action and taking that information and turning it into knowledge. So notice the difference. There's information, but if we don't do anything with the info, it's just really trivia.

If we act on the information, then it becomes knowledge. We can learn something, we can start acting in a different way. But these default mindsets prevent us from turning that information into knowledge. If you are someone who feels like they know what to do but aren't doing it, this applies to you. Also, you are unable to take action to turn what you know that information into something useful that you can use to inform your decisions going forward.

Your conscious mind might set an intention to stop it enough, but your actions contradict it. Because your subconscious mindset is cynical. This won't make a difference anyway. Maybe it's escapist. I can start tomorrow. Or perfectionist. I'm off track already, so screw it. So what's the solution here? We have a ton of information.

We tend to get confused, overwhelmed, and disillusioned. And then we also have these mindsets that keep us locked in an old way of thinking that doesn't serve us and doesn't motivate us to take new action. Here's how we can overcome all of that. The best approach is to adopt an experimental mindset. So think of this as strategic thinking or a strategic approach, versus trying to find the perfect weight loss strategy.

So you're committed to experimenting, not tied to a certain weight loss dogma or some sort of weight loss plan. Let's go into three steps of how to create an experiment. Step one is to observe yourself in your current life, and then ask what would be fun to change? Is there anything that you wanna change?

What would be fun to change or shift or have more of? The second thing is create a what if statement. Based on every idea you can think of that might produce the result that you want, the change that you want, the shift that you want. And at this point, you're just writing out everything that you can think of.

Go through your list, choose one. From there, create a low stakes experiment. This is like a mini, a micro experiment. So, for example, I am going to whatever the action is for a duration, so I am going to meditate for 10 minutes, five days a week. You are not committing to anything more than that. Then you can reflect and you can decide, this was great.

I wanna keep doing this. I wanna increase the time. I wanna do it every other day. You get to decide to what extent it was serving you, but you. Are able to sell yourself on the idea because you're only committing to amount that seems very reasonable to you. So try stuff. This is how we turn that information into knowledge.

So if something appeals to you, whether that's you listen to Mindy and you're like, you know what, maybe I will try that, you know, insane. 36 hour fast to kick it, my fat burning. Okay, great. It doesn't mean that you're gonna need to do that. Every week or for the rest of your life, it doesn't mean anything about you if you are going into it with the right mindset.

So if something appeals to you, if it seems sensible based on the information that you have, and you have done extensive information, like I am talking, like you have done some sort of long form content, maybe that's a two hour podcast with somebody and then you research them or a book, you read their book versus a.

10 minute YouTube clip or an Instagram reel, right? Then try it if you want. Don't be beholden to anything. Just because you try one thing from one person doesn't mean you can't try something from another person. They don't always have to contradict each other. Take a look at where they overlap. So again, knowledge is when we take that information and we try it out, we test it, we utilize it, then we know we have knowledge because we have evidence whether something serves you or not.

Whether that's, you know, a fasting window of 16 hours, or as Dr. Stacey Sims recommends is just not eating three hours before bed. Okay? So it doesn't have to be everything. You just can be particular with choosing something. And trying it. If there's something that you've been curious about trying when it comes to eating better, moving your body, or just overall health, why not do it only as an experiment so that it doesn't feel so high stakes?

Okay. To sum up, I wanna give you some do's and don'ts to avoid the confusion, the overwhelm, and feeling disillusioned. Do be open-minded, but as my favorite professor, Dr. Huxley, who I named my dog after, used to say, not so open, that your brain falls out. Don't be attached to one thing forever. Be fluid. Be flexible.

Do trust yourself to make reasonable decisions. Don't be mean to yourself about making what you now think of as a mistake. AKA, the master cleanse or that apple diet you did for three days, or the fruitarian diet or the macada nut diet, like I've heard it all, we all have done at least one thing in the past that gives us those shame shutters today.

It's okay. You need to be willing to be wrong. You need to be willing to make mistakes in order to try new things. And last one is do make it personal. And what I mean by that is there is so much, quote unquote good advice. But will it serve you like you want a question and you just wanna do a test with yourself?

Will it serve your body at this age? Will it serve your goals and the lifestyle that you want? Your values, what really matters to you? So just take all of all of the information and just set it up against. What you think will serve you and your lifestyle and your circumstances. There's not a one size fits all for anything health related.

Right? And an obvious do based on what we talked about today is develop an experimental mindset. The end result is that you will enjoy the process of achieving your goal so much more. Alright, I hope that was helpful. If there's something that you wanna try. Do it as an experiment and just see what happens, and then email me and let me know.

You can email me at paula@mindfulshape.com or you can jump into my dms. Just let me know what your experiment is or what you're going to try. I would love to know because I run a program called Experiment and I'm always looking for new creative, fun experiments to try and to share with others. So you can go to my Instagram, which is Mindful Shape.

Okay, I'll talk to you again soon. 

Bye.