From Fat to Thin Thinking

by Rita Black

  Find a Solution. Mary begins to use some of her Weight Mastery skills to find a solution. Below are three common problem-solving options Mary might use.NOTE: No matter how much damage has been done, there are always a few short steps you can take to get back to Weight Mastery.

  Rework your food for the day. Alter your food plans for the day to allow you to come in at your Daily Calorie Budget and be on target for releasing weight.

  Mary figures out the slice of pizza was 400 calories and the candies about 80 calories. Luckily, she had tracked her food earlier and knew she had eaten about 540 calories before she overate. With the additional pizza and candies she had consumed 1,020 calories. She subtracts her Daily Calorie Budget of 1440 from 1020 in her head and knows that she can just eat a lighter dinner that evening (380 calories) and still be on track for the day.

  Focus on re-balancing later in the week. You can be okay with the fact you went over your Daily Calorie Budget for Weight Release and can make it up on some other day by altering your food intake or exercising a bit more.

  Mary decides she will make up for going over her calorie budget by 540 calories by skipping her treat tonight (150 calories of ice cream) and using the calories from an additional hour-long walk that she will take on Saturday (390 calories) to compensate.

  Or, Mary could decide to dip into her 700-calorie exercise savings and apply it to this calorie overage. She would still have 160 calories in her weekly exercise-calorie savings.

  Be okay with going over. You don’t have to meet your exact weight goal every week. You can still release weight for the week but maybe not as much, but that’s okay. Releasing is releasing.

  Mary realizes that if she stays on track the rest of today and the week she still will have released nearly 3,000 calories, which isn’t quite a pound. She decides to be okay with it. She reminds herself it’s more important to keep up the good habits and release slowly than go off track for the rest of the week and start over on Monday.

  Apprentice, can you see how Mary used some of the Nine Skills to help her work out these solutions? Tracking her food and exercise helped her think things through and get right back on track.

  T—Take a lesson and step forward to weight mastery. Mary thinks over what happened and realized that she was in the habit of heading to the staffroom when she was stressed. This realization allows her to think what she might do instead. She decides a better way to relax would be to go for a walk or sit at her desk and take a few Shift Breaths. Mary moves on with her day and has a masterful week and weight release.

  During your 30-Day Thin Thinking Practice, you will gain confidence in problem-solving and staying on track. While the mechanics of the S.H.I.F.T. Technique may seem time consuming, I assure you the time it takes to summon your Inner Coach and figure out a winning solution is far outweighed by the hours, days, or even weeks wasted in fat thinking and the Weight Struggle Cycle.

  Remember, it is consistency and not perfection that keeps you on the road to Weight Mastery. Weight Masters got that way by putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward.

  Case Study: Too Much Time?

  It was almost time to break for lunch during a Shift Weight Mastery Process seminar when Debra raised her hand. She said, “These huddles make a lot of sense, but I don’t have time in my day to do all of them. I wake up, and I am off to the races. How can I fit in this self-coaching? That’s an extra half hour in my day that I don’t have!”

  I answered, “Remember, this positive way of communicating with yourself and guiding yourself through your day is replacing the time you used to spend struggling with yourself and your weight. How much time do you spend in the morning beating yourself up mentally about overeating the night before?”

  Debra raised an eyebrow. “I definitely spend a few minutes doing that.”

  “The time you use talking negatively during the rest of your day probably adds up, too,” I offered.

  “Okay, I see what you are saying. It’s not so much that I am adding to my day as I am changing the way I communicate with myself and take care of myself.”

  “Exactly,” I told her. “It may seem like extra time, but it isn’t. And in the long run, you’ll save time. Can you give it 30 days to try on for size?”

  Debra took the Inner Coach offensive strategy session by the horns over her 30-Day Thin Thinking Practice.

  “I can’t believe I was worried about my time. Showing up for myself with positive self-coaching sessions throughout the day made me feel better. My huddles helped me follow through on health behaviors and release weight, and it saved me hours of feeling bad about myself. My new relationship with my Inner Coach is addictive. I love the time we spend together setting myself up for success.” Debra T. (Released 47 pounds, maintaining for 2 years.)

  WEIGHT MASTERY SUM UP

  SKILL 7: Communicating with Your Inner Coach

  Communicating consistently with you Inner Coach is the most important skill of the Nine Skills, because it keeps you motivated and on track using the other skills to release and maintain your ideal weight.

  There are two types of ways to communicate or “huddle” with your Inner Coach

  Proactive “huddles” focus on planning ahead and creating strategies for success. These huddles happen weekly, daily, even hourly if needed.

  Defensive “huddles” are interventions focused on intercepting going off track and falling into the old fat-thinking Weight Struggle Cycle and getting right back on track and into thin thinking.

  APPRENTICE PAUSE: Are you beginning to see the potential for a beautiful relationship happening? You and your Inner Coach are embarking on the most important journey to Weight Mastery. When this skill is in place, all the others line up behind it and create a powerful synergy that stretches beyond your old way of being into a powerful way of self-care and self-respect. Are you willing to respect yourself? Are you willing to work powerfully with yourself? I bet you are.

  _________________________________________

  Great job, Apprentice, I hope it feels wonderful to have ignited the powerful coach within you. Now onto Skill 8, Managing Your Inner Critic.

  CHAPTER 33

  WEIGHT MASTERY SKILL 8

  Managing Your Inner Critic

  SKILL 8: Managing Your Inner Critic. This skill shifts you out of negative self-talk and overwhelming expectations that cause stress and emotional eating, sabotaging your success.

  Have you ever noticed that more than half of the 80,000 thoughts that pass through your mind each day are negative? When you are stuck in fat thinking, those thoughts create a daily undercurrent of stress and anxiety. They eat away at your self-confidence and self-esteem, leaving you vulnerable to wanting to disconnect from the pain with food.

  Fat Thinking and the Inner Critic

  Your Inner Critic wields a lot of power over your relationship with yourself and weight management. Your Inner Critic is especially quick to take control of your beliefs and emotions with unrealistic goals and negative self-talk.

  Overwhelming Expectations

  Your Inner Critic holds you to standards that are impossible to live up to and overwhelms you with anxiety and a feeling of perpetual failure.

  “You must be perfect on your diet. If you aren’t, you have to start over.”

  “You are unlovable because you are not thin.”

  “You need to lose 20 pounds this month.”

  Negative Self-talk

  Your perfectionistic Inner Critic is in the habit of spewing zingers like these when you don’t measure up:

  “You blew it!”

  “Why did you clean your plate? You’re a greedy pig!”

  “No wonder you are fat! You’re too lazy to exercise!”

  Apprentice, don’t take these comments personally. Oh wait, you already have! My guess is that negative self-talk has become suc
h a part of you that you don’t even hear it. You’re stressed out, and guess what happens next? The fight-or-flight response kicks in, and you overeat to cope with the anxiety.

  Thin Thinking and the Inner Critic

  You can use the power of your relationship with your Inner Coach to counter your Inner Critic’s influence. Look at the critic from a different perspective, one where the critic is no longer running the show. In fact, you can see that your Inner Critic is just a scared and disempowered part of you that has inherited some negative beliefs from the outside world and bought into them.

  Are you ready to dismantle the power your Inner Critic? Great! You’re going to learn how to:

  Shift negative self-talk.

  Overcome overwhelming expectations.

  1-Shift Negative Self-Talk

  Often the Inner Critic’s voice becomes a combination of all the critics in your life:

  Parents

  Doctors

  Family

  Friends

  Media images

  This voice becomes louder and louder until it’s the voice waking us up in the morning, telling us we better be good today. The snarling disgust you hear when you look in the mirror or step on the scale is distressing. It’s the same part of you that yells you to sleep at night. “You failed again! You are an out-of-control addict!”

  Negative self-talk was the main driver of my client Sara’s weight struggle when she came to see me.

  Case Study: Sara and the Diet Doctor

  Sara spent several thousand dollars working with a diet doctor in one of the affluent areas of Los Angeles. The good news is this diet doctor gets great results! His patients are able to lose weight, which they hadn’t been able to do previously. Sara lost 60 pounds in six months. Here is how his system works:

  Visit One: You pay a lot of money to get on the scale, and the doctor tells you that you are overweight. He gives you a sheet listing the foods you can eat, according to his secret daily formula. Basically, it’s a two-meal-a-day, 500-to-700-calorie diet that includes a few ounces of protein, several servings of vegetables, and a fruit serving. (The “secret” is the diet is very low in calories. Shhhh!) You eat only the foods on the sheet, nothing less, nothing more, or, in the doctor’s eyes, you failed.

  Visit Two: You return a week later, pay the doctor more money, and step on his scale. If you haven’t lost weight, you have failed. The doctor admonishes you rather harshly and tells you to stick to the diet more carefully the next week. If you lost weight, you escape this scolding session.

  Either way you take the doctor’s food list and repeat the process again, returning to pay the diet doctor more money. Whether or not you are scolded depends on if you are “good” or “bad.” On and on this process of paying, weighing, and being scolded or not keeps going until you reach your goal weight. Then, you continuing seeing him—and paying for those visits—to maintain your weight.

  This sounds extreme, but isn’t that how it goes? If there isn’t a diet doctor yelling us down the scale, our Inner Critic is doing basically the same thing.

  After six months Sara got tired of the very low-calorie diet and started to slip. She stopped going to the doctor, because she didn’t want to get yelled at. “I started yelling at myself instead,” she told me during our session. “I couldn’t get through two days on the plan before I had somehow blown it. I was so stressed that all I could do was eat everything that wasn’t on that stupid sheet of paper. I not only have an Inner Critic, I have an inner diet doctor and my super weight-conscious mother inside my head, and all three are disgusted with me.”

  She sighed. “I need to lose the weight for my health, but I can’t get past this perpetual need to beat myself up and start over.”

  My response to Sara was “You don’t need to pull yourself together. You need to shift the power struggle between you and this inner critical voice that has a chokehold on you and your ability to be masterful.”

  What if you listened to your Inner Critic through the ears of your Inner Coach? What if you experienced the Inner Critic’s perfectionist expectations, negative beliefs, and unrealistic demands not as the truth but as the ramblings of an amusing character that just happens to be in your life?

  Part of the “cognitive restructuring” that many Weight Masters use is learning to recognize their negative inner voice and separate themselves from it. When you poke holes in the Inner Critic’s voice, it begins to immediately lose power.

  I asked Sara to imagine that her Inner Critic was the over-the-top critical character in a movie or a real critic from her life. We gave the character a silly voice, and Sara imagined her Inner Critic saying a favorite criticism. With the following CBT technique, the Inner Critic seems silly and less of a voice of truth and more what it really is—a figment of the fat thinking mind.

  PUT THE CRITIC BACK IN THE BACK SEAT EXERCISE

  Apprentice, I am giving you the chance to show your Inner Critic who is boss. Get your pen and journal and complete this imagining process to wrest control from your Inner Critic. (I will use Sara’s process as an example.)

  If your Inner Critic were a character in a movie, who would they be? Or choose someone from your life that you don’t like to play the part. (Sara chose the diet doctor to be her Inner Critic.)

  ***

  What does your Inner Critic look like? (Sara’s critic is a 67-year-old man. He’s 5’5” tall and wears thick glasses and a white doctor’s jacket)

  ***

  What is a negative phrase that your Inner Critic tells you? (Sara’s phrase for this exercise was “You have no self-control.”)

  ***

  Now close your eyes and imagine your Inner Critic saying your phrase in a silly voice like Donald Duck or SpongeBob SquarePants. Thank your Inner Critic for his opinion and tell him to take a nap. Put him to sleep in a tiny box in the back of your mind.

  2-Overcome Overwhelming Expectations

  Our Inner Critic likes to overwhelm us with unrealistic expectations. Many times, those who struggle with weight put themselves at the bottom of the totem pole, helping everyone except themselves in order to live up to our Inner Critic’s perfectionistic standards.

  “I’ve got to be the perfect mom and do as much as I can for my kids. I don’t have time to exercise.”

  “My staff needs me, so I need to stay after hours to help them.”

  “I have to get everything on my list done in order to be okay for today.”

  If your Inner Critic stresses you with expectations, you probably turn to food for soothing. It’s a short-term fix and not a masterful one. Here’s how to curb your Inner Critic’s expectations.

  Notice the feeling of anxiety or being overwhelmed. This means the Inner Critic is stirring up expectations.

  Take a Shift Breath. Be present, and call your Inner Coach.

  Ask yourself “What are my expectations right now?” Chances are your expectations are distorted and unrealistic, but you may think they are kind and sensible. For example, you might say to yourself “I have to work late and then go home and do the kids’ dirty laundry and call my mom.” The underlying expectation is “I have to be a perfect employee, mother, and daughter.”

  Enlist your Inner Coach for help taming the expectations. This might mean being okay with less-than-perfect options, ones that don’t agree with your Inner Critic’s standards. Take a Shift Breath and think those expectations through with your Inner Coach.“Do I have to get all that work done for my staff today? Why don’t I just get the things done that are a priority and leave the rest until tomorrow? I will have the kids help me with the laundry, so I’ll have time to speak with mom and get the kids to bed at a decent hour!”

  This little huddle takes seconds and shaves a huge amount of stress from your life.

  Case Study Conclusion

  Over the
week following our meeting, Sara made a point to huddle with her Inner Coach when unrealistic expectations loomed over her. As she huddled with herself, she realized the work quota she set for herself might make her look good to the company but was more than she could do. She also noticed that her expectations weren’t even hers—they belonged to her perfectionist mother.

  “I decided my ego and Inner Critic could take a break. I was going to look after Sara and change my sales quota. When I calmed down, I found that I made about the same number of sales as I expected to. I was able to connect with my customers and give them good service, not just sell them something. It was a win-win solve for me, my customers, and my health but not my Inner Critic.”

  Sara came back after a few months of shifting and had released 17 pounds. More importantly, she released over a thousand pounds of her old negative burden of high expectations.

  “Learning to put my Inner Critic back in the closet, shut the door, and connect with my Inner Coach has made a huge impact on my weight and my life. I am loving myself down the scale without all the negative chatter. I am sure my Inner Critic is okay, too. If she gets bored in that closet, I am sure she will find a way to organize and make everything perfect!” Sara T. (Released 34 pounds and maintaining for 3 years.)

  WEIGHT MASTERY SKILL 8 SUM UP: Managing the Inner Critic

  Your Inner Critic can be managed. It is important to separate yourself from the negative self-talk and perfectionistic expectations that keep you struggling.

  Separate yourself from that negative Inner Critic by making him or her a separate character from yourself. Hear that negative self-speak for the inaccurate, fearful, and distorted chatter it is.

  By tuning in and recognizing that the expectations creating stress and unpleasant emotions are overblown and unreasonable, you take control and make positive changes.