Below you will find a collection of topics I have covered in my daily newsletters starting from 28 August 2024.
Your FUTURE self
Stepping into this FUTURE-self gives you an experience of what it feels like to BE the person who achieves your weight loss goal and can help you BECOME that person.
One of the main things that holds us back from achieving our goals (whatever they are) is that we doubt our ability to do it. Past failures can lead to critical self-talk and a lack of confidence in our ability to get on the right path and follow it through to the end. We convince ourselves that this may work for other people, but not for us. I know my experience is that I was always wondering what was wrong with me. Can you relate?
So meeting this future self who has achieved the goal is inspirational. You will be amazed that she has some great advice to give you, and what you then realise is that all the wisdom, power and potential was always inside you.
It’s just a matter of being able to tap into it now to:
- help in those moments when you want to give in to the immediate pleasure of eating something that you know doesn’t support your weight loss goals
- propel you into the vision of your future best self and pull you towards your goal
- keep you aligned to who you want to BE and keep you in the process of becoming that person
- stop feeling like a helpless victim in the endless rounds of dieting and ever-increasing weight loss.
Did you know that adding emotion is a memory technique that is helpful when studying? Emotional arousal hardwires important details into your mind, making them easier to recall. This is because the amygdala and hippocampus are activated at almost exactly the same time and the emotion-focused amygdala helps the hippocampus store memories more effectively. (reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5573739/)
When our FUTURE-self shows us what it feels like to achieve our weight loss goal, we feel all the positive emotions associated with that and experience it fully. Then we can then easily step back into that peak experience and remember the details of how it felt and looked and sounded and feel the positive emotions again.
In this way we maximise and leverage off those powerful emotions to drive our actions and behaviour. Our FUTURE-self works FOR us to pull us towards our weight loss goal.
Doesn’t that make our FUTURE-self a weightloss superpower?
Body Talk
What is your current relationship with your body like?
• Do you feel and express appreciation for your body?
• Do you have negative feelings about your body – how it looks or how it functions?
• Are you comfortable to show your body?
• Do you accept your body the way it is and work in harmony with it, or are you trying to change it so that you can be happy with it?
Have you ever felt disappointed in your body?
• Perhaps you don’t look the way you want to – this is classic because all women are self-critical and have something they would like to change about their physical appearance. Women with curly hair want straight hair and vice versa. Short people want to be tall, tall women long to be petite.
I bet you can provide me with 5 things that start with: I’m too ….. or I’d like to be more …..
• Perhaps you don’t get the performance you desire from your body – you want to compete at high level in sport or achieve a stretch goal (like running a marathon for the first time). But your body goes into a relapse of exhaustion and never seems to develop the strength or skill level you want. 🙁
Have you ever felt betrayed by your body – like it let you down?
• This may be as a result of chronic illness that interferes with the way you want to live your life or the activities you want to engage in.
• It may be a sudden injury or acute illness that made you miss out on a special occasion you had been looking forward to.
• Perhaps you have been told that you have an “auto-immune” disease where the immune system accidentally attacks your body instead of protecting it. How could that happen? How can you trust your body when things like that to you?
Does reflecting on these questions reveal that your relationship with your body could be improved??
My Weight Freedom Academy course includes body talk – something I learnt about in my Holobody (holistic body) accreditation. It presents a whole new way of interacting with your innate body intelligence.
ENVIRONMENT
Have you ever tried to explain water to a fish?
Tricky, right?
Well, that’s kind of like us trying to lose weight these days. We don’t know we’re swimming in water, because we are immersed in it.
If you’ve been on the weight loss rollercoaster, trust me, you’re not alone. It’s like our bodies have a mind of their own, creeping up on the scales when we’re not looking. And getting those numbers back down? Well, that’s a whole other story!
(Unless you’re one of those lucky ducks blessed with a eat-whatever-you-want metabolism. In which case, we’re all a tiny bit jealous! 😉)
But here’s the thing – we’re swimming in what the fancy folks call an “obesogenic environment.” Put simply, it’s an environment that promotes high energy intake and low activity behaviour.
Our world is designed to make us consume more and move less. From schools to workplaces, from our cozy homes to the ads we see, everything’s conspiring to super-size us.
Want to know how deep this rabbit hole goes? I’ve got 8 eye-opening examples of how the obesogenic environment is shaping our lives. Spoiler alert: it involves addictive food, sneaky marketing, and even our jobs!
But don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom. Knowing is half the battle, right? And that’s where the Weight Freedom Academy comes in. It’s all about making weight loss easier and – here’s the important part – sustainable.
Curious to learn more? Contact me and let’s chat! I’m here to answer any questions you might have.
Remember, there’s no shame in struggling with weight in a world that seems designed to make us gain. The struggle is real, but so is the solution. And we’re in this together!
Keep swimming against the current
Coach Suzi
