177 3 Mental Keys to Release Those Stubborn Last 10 lbs

When you’re down to those last few lbs, pain is no longer motivating you so it can be easy to make excuses - a glass or two of wine, a few handfuls of chips, dessert? Sure why not?! And months can go by without results. Let’s talk about what to focus on mentally so that you can get out of this common pattern and finally reach your desired body.

You’ll learn:

• 3 Mental Keys: Precision, Permission, Desire
• How to spot if subconscious fears are getting in your way
• How 3 day food tracking can be your best leverage

• Shape Shift Program LEARN MORE
• Instagram: @mindful_shape
• Free Self Coaching Resources
• Interested in getting coached by me? Go to my website mindfulshape.com

Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. I'm Paula Parker, and my work here is to offer you specialized mind and body practices to shift into the next version of you, one in which you feel in charge around food, great in your body, and more connected to yourself. So this episode in particular is for those women who have made progress, and you just have those last 10 to 15 pounds to go to reach your goal weight, or you are starting out, but you only have a little bit to lose, like you only have 10 or less that you wanna release. So when you're in this position, you're not typically in acute pain. 

Maybe you had released, you know, 20 pounds or 25 pounds, and you can think back to that point, and it was significant discomfort for you. And so you don't have that anymore, and so it doesn't act as a motivator like it once did. And that seems to be pretty normal in terms of behavior, is that we don't make a change until it gets pretty bad, right? Until we can't take it anymore and we're like, "Okay, enough's enough. I have to make a major change." So ideally, you know, we move away from that, and we move toward a compelling future. But for most people, that typically is a point of igniting change. Okay. So you probably have a vision for yourself and your body, and there's still times when, mm, you're just turning to food more often than you'd like, so you're just not following through or being as consistent as required for those last remaining pounds. 

So you're turning to food to relax or for comfort and to experience some relief from a hard day, or you find yourself indulging or getting a lot of pleasure when you're on your own. So there is a few more items of clothing in your closet that you are not gonna get into so long as you keep up this, like, emotional overeating or eating more than your body needs. So it's not super painful, but there is, mm, a discontent. You're not quite where you wanna be. And you just know, you know for you, that you could do it so long as you could learn the new skills, you know, be more consistent, you could do it. There are a few reasons that this point in time can be especially challenging. One is that we have all heard that the less body fat percentage you have means it's going to be harder to release weight, to release that excess body fat. So if you have an extra sixty pounds, it's gonna come off much faster than if you have ten. Okay. 

So yes, I would agree with that. But I just wanna offer you a bit of a reframe on that, which is less body fat doesn't necessarily mean harder. It's not necessarily accurate, because in many ways it's easier. You have all of these healthy habits. You know what works for you. So in many ways it actually is easier, but what makes it harder is that you're impatient, that you think it should be going faster than it's going, and it is going to be slower. Another reason that this is challenging during this time, this point in your fat loss journey or your health journey, is that you might have these thoughts, which is, "My body doesn't want to get to that desired weight. My body can't get to that weight." 

And we have these thoughts, and then they create feelings of, like, hopelessness or feelings that we are just, like, not motivated. Okay? So you're kind of feeling like you don't trust your body, and your body's working against you, and it doesn't matter how hard you try, your body just doesn't wanna be at that weight. Okay? And then the third thing that makes this challenging is subconscious fears. So fears that you have or judgments that you have that you may or may not be aware of. So they might be conscious, but oftentimes they're subconscious. And this is coming up particularly a lot with clients right now, so I thought I would address it. I'm actually gonna be doing a workshop in my group program, Shape Shift, on this exact subject, on subconscious fears. 

So the fears that we have that we may not even be aware of that are preventing us from making the changes that we need to make. So on the surface, we think we want the thing, but underneath, we have all of these fears about what that's gonna mean when we reach our desired Goal. And then these fears actually impact what we're capable of doing, how motivated we feel, how often we are able to be consistent, or whether we succumb to our excuses. All of those things are going to be driven by what you most believe is in your best intentions. 

So what you might think is, "Well, my best intention, what's best for me is to release this weight, like to be in my most ideal health, and body, and feel agile, and feel so good." But if you are acting out of alignment with that, we know that you will always be acting from a place of believing that something is in your best interest. So if you're not acting in accordance with healthy living, like working out, eating the way you wanna eat, then we know, "Oh, okay, there's a part of me, a deeper belief, maybe a subconscious belief, that it isn't in my best interest. What is in my best interest is coming home and eating everything in the house. What is in my best interest is having a couple of glasses of wine." Why? Because that's what you actually believe, and it... You'll see it based on your behavior and your actions. This is zero judgment. We just wanna know, oh, it's not because of lack of willpower or discipline, it's because on some level, this is what I actually believe, so we wanna do the work of cleaning that up. 

So I'll give you some examples of some subconscious fears that come up a lot, which is, "What am I most worried about when I actually reach my goal?" It could be it's unhealthy to be that weight. Maybe you've never, maybe you've never been at that weight. Like it's been high school, and you don't even know at this age if that is a healthy weight for you. So there's a subconscious fear that it's unhealthy. You will have judgments like it's vain, that you are vain, that it's superficial, that it means something bad about you that you even want it, that you shouldn't want what you want because of body positivity, because there's more important things in the world to take care of or to care about. And so there's a lot of this fear of what that means about you, that you are wrong, that you are bad, that you are unworthy because you do want that thing, right? There might be a subconscious fear that you can't keep it off. "So even if I do release the weight, well, I'm not gonna be able to keep it off anyways." You can imagine how that's really gonna impact how you show up, your willingness, your willingness to go all in. And then of course, there's the obvious, which is what other people say. So for some people, compliments like, "Oh, you look great. You've lost a bunch of weight" that can feel very uncomfortable. For some of us, nobody will notice, and that feels very uncomfortable. How could nobody notice? Okay. Or the, the general attention of people noticing your body- Feels not safe. It feels unsafe to you. You might worry that people are thinking like, "Who does she think she is to wear those, you know, bright pink tights and that crop top?" Or that short dress or that short skirt or anything like that. Who does she think she is to wear a bikini at that age? Right? I don't know. But there's thoughts that we have about what other people are gonna say, think, and that is a fear of ours. 

We don't want that. Why? Because we will be rejected. On a subconscious level, you think, "I'm gonna be rejected," that it triggers that lack of belonging. One of our primary needs - is belonging, and so it will confront that part of ourselves. So we need safety, we need belonging, and we need dignity, which is worthiness. Yeah? And so a lot of our subconscious fears are in relationship to that. So safety, it's not safe because I'm outside of the group if I reach my goal. People are gonna comment, people are not gonna like it, people are gonna be jealous. Or belonging, I won't be the same as my friends. Maybe I'm the only one that's not eating the cake or the only one that's not drinking wine. That feels like I'm not participating, I'm not having as much fun, I'm not part of the group. And then dignity is maybe this is wrong or bad. 

So this comes up for a lot of clients when we've grown up with parents for whom food was a big part of showing love. So if your mom always baked for you, and then part of being accepted was to enjoy the baking or to go out for treats and that was just part of your world, it might almost feel like when you don't do that, you are rejecting her, or you are not going to be accepted if you say no now as an adult to dessert, the homemade dessert that she made. If you only have two bites of it, what is going to happen? It will feel like what you are doing is wrong or bad. Our sense of dignity is threatened. So think of your body as really a window into your subconscious. So if you've ever gotten on a train and you've had a bad feeling about, you know, that guy across from you, it's your, just your body speaking to you, right? 

Or maybe your boss promised something and you really wanted to believe it. You really wanted to buy into it, but something inside of you just said, "Mm, something's off here." Like, "I, I don't know if that's true." So your body won't lie, and we really wanna get good at paying attention, attending to our bodies so that we are picking up on what your subconscious believes. Because if you are- Worried that people are going to think something negative about you, that feels a certain way. Okay? 

So we wanna pay attention to that because then that might allow you to see inside of your subconscious what you truly believe. For example, if you drop some weight and a friend comments, and maybe they say something like, "Oh, you were already thin enough before," what does that bring up for you? Right? "You didn't need to lose any weight. What are you doing? You shouldn't be so restrictive," these kinds of things. And you feel when she says that like you've been punched in the gut, that could be a signal into what you believe. So your subconscious fears about not being acceptable because of your weight, being too superficial, not being healthy, being too restrictive, being weird or outside of the group, all of that. So it's an opportunity here to really, as I say, address it, be aware of what they are, and then clean it up, to check in. What do I believe about my body and how I want to be from a conscious place? 'Cause then we can make decisions from your prefrontal cortex, from being in alignment with what you truly want on a conscious level, not letting your subconscious, these subconscious beliefs kind of run the show. So how do you wanna eat? How do you wanna show up with food? What do you want that relationship to be like? 

What's normal for you is unlikely to be normal for everyone in your family, for every one of your friends, or all the people that you work with. So there will be probably opportunities for this to come up. It's not wrong. You simply have a different idea of what's normal or serves you. So what you're doing is not wrong. What they're doing is not wrong. It's just are you making the conscious decision, and do you like your reasons? And many of us don't even question that until we have a big goal. We really wanna get fit. We really wanna reach our desired weight. Then it brings all this up, and so we get the opportunity to look at it and heal it. Oh, there's where my wounds are around my body image, around self-acceptance, around safety and belonging and dignity. Oh, here are my wounds. Okay. So if you aren't aware of these subconscious beliefs, they will continue to prevent you from making progress, and you'll feel like it's... You probably make up a story like, "Oh, I just keep failing. I just can't do this. I just need to figure it out. It's a lack of willpower, something about my character or my personality." Or I lack self-discipline. These are common stories or narratives that we come up with to make sense of our reality. It's not that. It's that the result you say you want, so that desired weight, that physique, that relationship with food or that level of health that you want, when that doesn't actually feel safe in your body for your nervous system. 

So if you ever felt uncomfortable because you sensed your friends or your family member, maybe a cousin or your sister or your mom was jealous of your looks, if you ever felt more attention than you wanted from a guy, from boys when you were younger, from a teacher looking at you a little bit too long, your body remembers how unsafe that was and it will protect you fiercely, okay? So let's talk about solutions. I want to offer you a new perspective here. There are three areas to master or focus on. 

The first is precision, the next is desire, and the third one is permission. So let's talk about precision. What do I mean? Let's go back to the it gets harder. That means the less body fat you have means it's just going to be slower, not harder. You've got to get really practical here. So just remember, how does fat loss work? We impede it by eating. Left to its own devices, our body will release body fat, right? So it will release a little muscle. Like if we don't eat, it's going to release a little muscle. It's also going to release fat, excess body fat, because it uses it as energy. So we have to remember that it doesn't really matter how low you will get in terms of body fat percentage. If you, even if you have 10 pounds to release, your body is capable of using that excess fat for energy. This is also an opportunity to double down on deciding to be someone who doesn't require any evidence to believe. 

So there are two types of people. There are the people who need a ton of evidence before they will even believe that it's possible. But I want you to consider that you could step into a different version of you who doesn't require evidence to believe, that you just decide that's happening, I will do what it takes to make it happen. The next when it comes to precision is take a look at where your leverage is. I love the mantra, the anchor thought. I like to call them anchor thoughts. Precision is my leverage. The more data you have, the better. 

So what are you doing in terms of tracking so that you can be more precise with what you're doing? That might look like doing body measurements instead of weighing yourself, because when you get to these lower numbers, you might be putting on muscle, and you're not necessarily gonna see a lot of changes on the scale. So you could be taking pictures, again, doing measurements. You also are doing this because you don't wanna gloss over progress and minimize it. So often, because the process is slow, and we're with our bodies every day, we don't necessarily notice it. So if you have something that's much more measurable, and you have the data, you can take a look and be like, "Oh, wow. Yeah, I have lost an inch off my waist," or, "Oh, wow," like, " I can see a difference in these pictures." If you don't have that, if you're not tracking anything, you just won't be able to tell, and then your brain might tell you, "You know what? This isn't even working anyways," and you'll give up when you actually are making progress, and if you just keep on a little bit longer, you would reach your goal. The next is being precise with your intake. So I know on this podcast, and in general, I'm not a big proponent of tracking macros and calories and all of that. However, when you get down to these lower numbers, and you have hit a plateau, which I would say, like, let's say you've gone a month, and there's been no milestone, no low number in terms of seeing a, a new number on the scale. If it's been a month, then for sure I would say that's a plateau, and you wanna course correct. You wanna do something different. 

Now, you can take a look and say, "Okay, - how am I eating?" Like, I call it a protocol. "What's my plan, and am I doing the plan?" Like, am I doing it ninety-five percent? If you're not, then you know, okay, I just need to follow through on my plan. That's the problem. But if you look, and you're like, "Wow, I have been doing everything spot on this whole month," and you're not seeing progress, then you probably need more information to make decisions going forward. If you already think you're doing everything you can, get more information. So you might wanna take, I say, like, three days Maybe, you know, a couple of days during the week and a weekend day, or two weekend days and one day of the week, and just track. You're not trying to change anything, you're just tracking. There's so many apps, you can use them mainly for free. 

Again, you're not necessarily having to do this forever, but it's a great way to get some information, because you might be surprised, I was when I did this, to look at, "Oh, wow, I actually am overdoing it on the fats." Right? It's so easy to overeat fat, because in terms of my process, my goal in quantity is not a number, it's not a macro or a calorie, but it is how I'm feeling in my body. So I have this concept that I teach my clients, which is a golden zone. That's how I wanna feel. And if you can imagine, let's say avocado as an example. It's easy for me to imagine that I could eat a quarter of an avocado, or half of an avocado and still feel like I'm in the golden zone, how I wanna feel in my body. But in terms of calories, in terms of macro, that might be more food than my body needs, because I don't have a lot of extra excess fat that I wanna release, and that might be the difference between maintenance and releasing fat off my body. So this is good to know. 

Oftentimes for clients, it is also that they're eating a little bit less protein that they thought they were, or those weekends are adding up, the extra bites are adding up, the extra bites that you take after dinner because there's not enough to put into the fridge as leftovers, or snacks while you're cooking dinner, or you're grabbing things off your kids' plate. All of those can easily add up without us even realizing it. And again, it's not that we would gain weight from that, but most likely we will stay at maintenance. All right? Okay, so that first one is precision, what is my leverage? The next one is permission. And then I'll talk about desire. 

So I'm gonna kinda turn those around. So permission is... goes back to those subconscious beliefs. So you've gotta be aware of and address those subconscious fears about what it's gonna be like for you, that experience when you get the body that you want, when you reach that shape. So it might bring up a lot that interferes with your current identity. So maybe you think of yourself as somebody that's very laid back or like, I've heard this expression recently of like a chill girl, and in contrast to that, you might think, "Well, to get where I need to go, that means I'm gonna have to be really picky. I'm gonna be high maintenance. I'm gonna be the person at the restaurant who is asking for the dressing on the side and no, hold the bread," and all of that. And so it might be very confronting if you think of yourself one way, but then you think, "To get to where I need to be, I need to be a totally different way, and I have all this negative judgment about being like that." So that's okay. Again, as I mentioned, this is your opportunity to heal it, to really be there for yourself in a deeper way. So to own all of it. What if you are high maintenance? What if you are picky? 

Give yourself permission to be that way. Give yourself permission to be superficial, to be vain, and just check. Like, what if it was okay, right? So notice how quickly we are to, like, reject ourselves, but if you look, there are ways in which you are very, you know, selfish and vain and superficial and all the things. And then there is so many ways in which you are the exact opposite. And if you take a look, if you really check in, you will find evidence for both. Why? Because you are a complex human being, and we have a little bit of everything. So you want to learn how to create that safety, that belonging, and dignity for yourself. So give yourself permission. Stop pretending that you don't want what you want. So this leads into desire. Pain is no longer your motivator, so you're gonna have to work towards a compelling future, a new identity, your future self, and you wanna make that very sparkly, so desirable that it's worth it. 

So now we have to draw the distinction because it's not the outcome that is going to get you through the hard times. It's the who you are becoming and being really jazzed about that. That is gonna help you get through the hard times. Why outcomes don't work is because We create goals from an idealized place. So what I mean by that is I used to have this neighbor, I think I've mentioned this on the podcast before, where, like, I just felt like she had the dream body. That's what I thought. She has a dream body. And one day I was chatting with her. We lived in this apartment. She lived across the hall from me. And we were chatting, and, like, she was really complaining about something and, like, upset. And this is kind of embarrassing to admit now, but at the time I thought, like, how could she be down? Like, look at her body, right? Like, her life must be so perfect. But of course, that's not the case. 

But we kinda live in this delusion that once we reach that goal, we get the promotion, or we live in the house, that dream house, or we make a certain amount of money, or we fit into that outfit, that we're not gonna experience negative emotion. We kinda delude ourselves into thinking that. But then what happens is that we get the thing. We've all experienced this probably with jobs or even with having kids, right? We get the thing, and it's more 50/50. Yes, there are great things about it that we love, and we wanna keep, and we wanna hold onto. But then there are also things that we don't love, that is not what we signed up for, and we have all this negative emotion. So instead, you just wanna be realistic about that. Who do you get to become in this process? That's what you wanna be thinking about. So for example, you can imagine if somebody was describing you, what are the qualities that you would love to overhear them say about you? "She's so confident. She really goes after her dreams. When she sets her mind to something, she achieves it," or, you know, "She's amazing. She's so inspiring. 

She has such a great attitude. She's so fun to be around." Think about that because that's the person that you really want to be, and none of that has to do with the size of your body. Now, yes, body goals, I'm all for it. Have a body goal. But we wanna broaden the scope about who you need to become to achieve that goal. So imagine if you were somebody who sets her mind to something and achieves it. You're gonna have to change to become that person, and then of course, you can use your weight loss goal or your health goal or your fat loss goal as a way to become her, to become a person who sets her mind to something and achieves it. 

So to summarize, if you wanna release those last few pounds, and you want to focus on what is required mentally, focus on precision, focus on giving yourself permission, understand what those subconscious fears are for you, and then lastly, desire. Focus on how you get the privilege, the opportunity to transform as a person, to learn how to feel all your emotions, to learn how to manage your mind, to learn how to move your body in a different way, and to learn how to really stand up for yourself in a way that maybe you never have before. So that's what I have for you today. I wanted to mention that there are two ways of working with me right now. 

I am taking on clients for private coaching, and I also have a group program. If you are interested in the private coaching, then that is really great for those of you who prioritize privacy and you want lots of scheduling options throughout the week. Go to mindfulshape.com and you can book a next steps call to explore that option. We can talk about it, see if it's a good fit. Or if you're interested in my program Shape Shift, where we focus on identity, embodiment work, there's mindset included in that, but we deal with things like subconscious fears, all of that kind of good stuff, all that juicy stuff. 

Then what you can do is jump on the wait list for early  access and some special deals, all the goodies for when I offer the next one, the next opening for that. So again, you can go to mindfulshape.com. You'll see a little link at the top for Shape Shift and then go to that webpage and then sign up, get on the list, and I can be in contact with you and let you know all the yummy details. Okay. I will talk to you again soon. Bye.