I’ve got weight loss tips for you! Do you feel like you’re doing all the right things, but the weight is just not coming off? So many women feel this way and it’s because there are misunderstandings about the phases of a weight loss journey. A lot of women feel their body is ‘broken’ because they see other woman losing the weight so it must be that something is wrong with them, right? It’s not! In today’s podcast episode I talk about some weight loss tips, how the weight gain might have happened vs. how to approach the process of losing weight, and the mindset shift you need to experience to start you on this journey. Today’s episode is totally going to rock your wellness!
Disclaimer: This podcast does not constitute medical advice. You should always speak to your doctor before changing your nutrition or exercise habits.
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Weight Loss Tips – EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips 1:06
Okay, I am about to shed light on a huge reason that many women feel stuck on their weight loss journey, their wellness journey, whatever it is for you. This is such a powerful mindset shift that so many women need to make.
Lauren Chante 1:27
So I just want to preface this episode by telling you guys you’re going to want to share this, you’re going to want to screenshot it. Put it on your Instagram Stories, tag me in it, text it to friends because this one piece of clarity can really make everything make so much more sense. It can make you feel lighter, it can make you feel less anxious. And ultimately get you much better results on your journey than you’ve ever gotten before.
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips – 1:54
A lot of women that I talk to in my breakthrough calls or in my clients sessions with my actual clients, or even in just the DMS on Instagram or on Facebook Messenger, they’re struggling with feeling like I’m eating healthy, I’m eating clean. I’m not losing weight. I don’t really know what to do.
Lauren Chante 2:15
From that point, a lot of them either feel like their bodies are broken, because they know they’re putting good things in their body but nothing is changing. Or they get kind of desperate and they start jumping from diet to diet, trying a lot of restriction, trying eliminating food groups, doing anti inflammatory diets. Just things that are really strict. They find those things are very hard to stick to. Maybe they create an impact in their body for a little bit, but then the weight starts to creep back on from it. It’s just a really frustrating and stressful experience for them.
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips – 2:50
Ultimately, it just leaves you feeling lost, a little bit defeated and kind of with this lingering feeling that if it’s so easy for everybody else, then something must be wrong with you, right? Which is really, really untrue. When you feel that way, it’s extremely toxic and it begins to leach into more areas of your life than just your wellness and your journey with your body. It’s not even true and the feeling is coming from missing a key piece of understanding.
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips – 3:22
This understanding that I want to share with you guys is that weight gain is not linear. Weight gain is not linear. If you’re not familiar with the word linear. Linear means a straight line. So when you took math in middle school, maybe you were learning algebra for the first time, you learn to plot an X axis and Y axis. You learned to draw on that graph different lines. There were curved lines but the most simple one that you learn to draw was a straight line that went through two points and just kind of went up and up on a diagonal forever. That straight line slashing to the corner of the page. That is linear.
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips – 4:03
That means things are constantly changing, things are happening constantly. And in the case of weight loss when we think of linear, we’re thinking of evenly distributed over time, right? So when I’m saying that weight gain is not linear, I’m saying that you, in your life if you’ve gained weight, probably have not gained a pound a week every single week from the day that you were born. That’s probably not how your journey went.
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips 4:34
For most of the women that I talk to the way that journey goes is more like this. You were doing really great through your 20s, maybe through your early 30s, then you had kids and for a lot of women, there’s like one specific point. It may be their pregnancy, or the newborn years, where they can pinpoint that was the year I gained a lot of weight. That was the season that I really was unable to treat myself well. That was the experience where I was not at all connected to what felt good in my body. I was just struggling through life and I was in survival mode. For most women that’s how things go.
Lauren Chante – Weight Loss Tips – 5:24
Another similar experience might be somebody who came out of being overweight as a young person, as a child, or as a teenager. Then they really got it together in their early 20s. Then somewhere, when life started to get busier and they started to get more responsibilities, the weights started to creep back on.
Lauren Chante 5:46
But again, the point is, you weren’t just that straight line headed to the corner of the page forever. You didn’t just gain a pound a week, every week from the day that you were born. There was one season on that curve. There was one big blip. You had a straight line going from left to right and then all of a sudden there was a big blip where things changed.
Lauren Chante 6:21
Now it’s so important to understand that when you look at yourself in the mirror and you see your body at this weight that you don’t feel comfortable at, you don’t feel good in your skin, your clothes don’t fit. That was the product of that season that you went through. It’s not necessarily the product of what you’re doing on that day that you look at yourself in the mirror.
Lauren Chante 7:25
I know some people who are over 300 pounds, who have some of the best, healthiest diets healthiest cooking they I have ever seen. Because right now is not when they gained their weight. They gained it maybe in their late teens or in their 20s when they were housing liters of soda every day and eating fast food. They’ve slowly chipped away at making so many changes to their diet that they have really wonderful eating habits. Really, really wonderful eating habits, which as a side note is one of the things that’s so frustrating about fat shaming. There actually are a lot of people who would be classified as fat who have done so much work on learning about nutrition and learning about nourishing their bodies, that they’re actually doing a lot better than some of us who are “skinny” right? So never judge a book by its cover.
Lauren Chante 8:10
But what we’re getting confused about is that eating well, eating healthy, eating clean, whatever you want to call it does not necessarily produce weight loss. There are very different ways of eating for weight gain, weight maintenance (meaning you’re neither gaining weight nor losing weight), and then for losing weight. Different seasons, different approaches, different phases of your weight loss journey.
Lauren Chante 8:40
So when somebody is eating really healthy or really eating very clean, they oftentimes find that their weight is staying the same pretty easily. They’re not really gaining weight, they’re not really losing weight. They’re kind of in this maintenance stage, and that may not have been what they were trying to do. They were probably actually trying to lose weight, overhauling all their habits and they’re getting frustrated because they’re like, “Okay, I’m doing so many things right? Why isn’t my body changing?”. And that is because what it takes to maintain your weight is not the same thing as what it takes to lose weight.
Lauren Chante 9:19
So herein lies a huge distinction and I can already feel through the digital space, the space time continuum here, that so many of you guys are having aha moments right now, right? So that’s why I talk so much with my students about finding your unique weight loss formula. The things that take people from maintaining weight with their healthy eating to actually getting the weight to come off are different.
Lauren Chante 9:47
Everyone’s formula for what that’s going to look like, A plus B plus C plus D equals the weight is finally coming off, is going to be different. Based off of your lifestyle, based off of your body, based off your body type, your age, your hormonal profile. It’s so important to recognize that just because you’re eating well does not mean that it’s going to create weight loss. Let yourself let go of any of the shame that you’ve been holding on to about the fact that you’re not losing weight. Any of the judgment that you’ve been feeling from the people around you, just let it go, because it should all make sense right now, right?
Lauren Chante 11:50
Then from there, understanding that weight loss is a different animal allows you to put a different set of tools in your box to tackle weight loss compared to the healthy eating that you’ve already created.
Lauren Chante 10:39
Now, some of you guys may be like, “Oh my gosh, I’m a little concerned that this might mean that my weight loss plan has to be restrictive and I know, Lauren, that you talk a lot about how it’s important to not be restrictive and to have food freedom and to say bye bye to diet culture and all that for my mental health. But I already feel like I’m doing so much right right now What else could I possibly do?”. I want to tell you guys that it’s usually really small tweaks. You do tend to need to be a little bit more strict with your habits during a weight loss phase than you do during a maintenance phase. But I’m gonna tell you guys, with the way that I teach wellness, it doesn’t feel like being strict at all. I should really say that I teach weight loss, it really doesn’t feel strict at all when you compare it to those traditional cookie cutter diets that most of you guys have been following like Paleo, Whole 30, Beach Body or Arbonne. All those types of things, it’s way easier.
Lauren Chante 11:42
It’s just with my students, their weight loss phase involves a little bit more mental work than their maintenance phase. They get to maintenance and they’re like “Whoo, life is good! Bras off, Pants off, let’s party!”. It’s like amazing.
Lauren Chante 11:59
So, all this to say you have to recognize the three different types of phases that you can have on your wellness journey, you need to recognize them and you need to start compartmentalizing your thinking. The way that you think about your wellness strategies. You need to be really intentional about defining what type of phase that you are in. If you are currently in a place where you’re eating well, and you’re maintaining weight, not gaining or losing, that is amazing.
Lauren Chante 12:29
I want you to look at what you are doing right now. And I want you to write that down somewhere because you know what works for you when you decide you want to be in a maintenance phase. And it’s so important to write that down and record it so that when you’re done with your weight loss phase, you can come back to it and you can look at it and you can see what worked for you for maintaining weight.
Lauren Chante 12:56
Oftentimes when we come out of that weight loss season, we need to spend a little bit of time allowing ourselves to loosen the reins on our healthy habits. To live a little bit, to have a little bit more freedom, to feel less stressed. And to have more enjoyment in our eating. And it’s really helpful to see a benchmark for where you were able to be without gaining weight.
Lauren Chante 13:25
It can help you to gain back some of that freedom that sometimes we lose when we’ve been on a long weight loss journey. This is especially important for anybody who has more than 30 pounds to lose, especially my friends who have 50 to 100 pounds. That’s a long road and you want to be able to have a light at the end of the tunnel for what life is going to look like at the end of that road. That helps to keep you motivated. It helps to keep you showing up every day for your weight loss journey with excitement for the future instead of dread.
Lauren Chante 14:00
If you find that you need help, really identifying what you’re doing right now, what’s working for you and helping you to maintain your weight, I highly recommend using Your Daily Journal. This is my journal that I created to help people take data on their bodies and figure out what’s working for them. It is what all of my clients use in order to figure that out and it’s something that is the only thing that’s available for purchase separately from my intensive programs. So that’s something that you can go get as a low cost, very low commitment thing for you guys to learn right now.
Lauren Chante 14:34
But I know this has really shifted some thoughts for you guys. I challenge you right now to screenshot this post to your Instagram stories. To think of three women right now who, maybe are struggling with doing really well with their eating but not necessarily seeing the results that they’re looking for. Send them this episode because we want to help people to get rid of that stress, that anxiety and that guilt that they’re feeling around this topic.
Thanks for listening to weight loss tips, on Rock Your Wellness with Lauren Chante! Don’t forget to click here to learn more about Lauren.
