5 Easy Tips That Helped Me Lose Weight Without Losing Myself
It took me 7 months to lose 10 pounds and I’m glad it took so long.
I got on the scale, saw the number, and turned to my husband: “I think the scale’s broken.”
He stepped on and said, “Nope.”
What the efff??!
I started to feel a familiar tightness in my chest.
This meant I gained 20 pounds and didn’t even notice. Sure, most of my pants didn’t fit anymore, but I didn’t think it was because I gained 20 pounds. I thought I gained maybe 10.
We just moved across the country from New York City (where I’d lived my entire life) to the desert in Phoenix AZ (a place I loved and had traveled to multiple times a year for 10 years to learn about the nervous system before it was cool).
Turns out moving 2,400 miles is more stressful than I anticipated and I developed some not-so-great new habits (like eating burgers and french fries multiple times a week (not home cooked, hi 5 Guys!))
Even though we stopped eating all the burgers, I was still eating too much and exercising not enough.
I had a decision to make.
Do I lose weight? Or do I stay where I’m at with the possibility of gaining more weight?
Why I Wasn’t Sure About Losing Weight
I felt really confused about what to do.
Whenever this happens, I get a tightness in my chest that makes me feel like I have a giant boulder crushing it.
Part of this giant boulder crushing feeling was that for so long I tried to fulfill other people’s expectations of what my body should look and even how I should eat/exercise.
I went from being a size 0 and barely eating anything to being a ripped trainer to becoming super obsessed with being “healthy”- eating a specific diet, doing detoxes and coffee enemas, having perfect posture and only doing exercises perfectly that would “regulate my nervous system”.
Photo: Me, at the beginning of my ripped trainer era, fake boxing. I loved those sneakers.
It’s exhausting not knowing what you want and believing that you’re not enough no matter what you do.
Another part of the boulder crushing feeling was the fact that I was now 20 pounds heavier and if I kept doing what I was doing, I could easily get into dangerous territory- gaining another 20 pounds (or more) in the next year.
I really didn’t want to go down the road of other people’s expectations again.
But I also didn’t want to gain more weight.
So what did I do?
I decided to treat myself like one of my clients. If someone came to me with this dilemma, the very first thing I would do is focus on boundaries.
And that’s exactly what I did for myself.
Read on to find out how.
Tip 1: Pre-work AKA How You Can Approach Your Decision
Whenever there’s a boulder crushing my chest, I always:
Cry (water covers rock lol)
Watch Gilmore Girls reruns (helps with crying and introduces laughing- the opposite of crying!)
Then when I feel like the boulder has gotten a bit smaller and I can think again, I:
Take a good hard look at my boundaries
Steps 1 and 2 are optional for you— and maybe you have your own version of what they look like!
Anyway, back to boundaries..
I use Randi Buckley’s definitions of boundaries:
Boundaries are the conditions you need to live the life you want to live.
Boundaries are your values in action.
So now the burning questions that I needed to answer were:
What kind of life do you want to live?
What are your values?
How do those values relate to health, wellness, and exercise?
The life I want to live includes me being active, mobile, and strong for as long as I can be. I want to be the lady at 90 doing stuff that people are like, “is that lady really 90 and doing that?”
Something like this lady right here: 91 Year old gymnast.
Some of my top values at this point (because they can and do change!) include fun, strength, beauty, kindness/love, health, creativity, and curiosity.
If boundaries are my values in action, was I living in alignment with these values? Honestly? Not really.
If you want to see if you’re living in alignment with your values, think about something you did recently and ask yourself what values that action honors.
For me, if I were to prepare a nourishing meal for myself that would be in alignment with my values of kindness/love for my self and my body, health, and creativity.
This isn’t about being perfect or beating yourself up for not being perfectly aligned.
It’s about bringing a deeper awareness to your current habits and noticing if that's really what you want to be doing or not.
Then we follow it up with this REALLY IMPORTANT QUESTION:
Do you have the capacity to live up to your values?
When we first moved? I ABSOLUTELY DID NOT.
But, did I now? Yup.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not forget about capacity. Especially when it comes to your body.
When you’re trying to fulfill other people’s expectations of what your body *should* look like or how it *should* perform, it is very easy to ignore your capacity.
So looking back at my situation, I could say I was honoring my capacity. Was it the best way to do that? Maybe not, but I’m glad that I didn’t make myself feel like sh*t about it.
Living in alignment with your values isn’t about being perfect. Before I would have made myself feel really bad for “letting myself go” so to speak but life happens and sometimes you don’t have the capacity to do all the things or even think about doing them.
And when I say I didn’t have the capacity to live up to my values, I’m talking about some aspects of the health and wellness portion of it. It’s not like I started to be mean to people because I didn’t have the capacity to be kind.
I made the decision to not be overly concerned with how much I was eating and exercising.
This leads us to the next tip.
Tip 2: Decide what Matters Most to You
After figuring out that I DID want to lose weight and build muscle, it felt like the giant boulder got smaller but then slid into the recesses of my stomach.
I was still worried that I was going to slip back into the all or nothing mindset and ignore my capacity.
So I did a really hard thing:
I started small– WAY smaller than I wanted to.
And, I didn’t focus on my weight which was hard because at this point my wedding rings weren’t even fitting me anymore and that was scary.
I knew if I started small I could be super CONSISTENT and since my larger goal is to be a 90 year old lady doing cool stuff, that’s what I needed to do.
My focus was (and still is) on building strength AND not over doing it. Movement feels really good to me, especially strength training. I knew that once I got in the gym and started lifting again it would be easy to do too much too soon.
So if you’re contemplating weight loss and want to introduce more exercise into your life the first thing to ask yourself is:
What matters to you?
Strength?
Balance?
Flexibility?
Dancing like no one is watching?
Which leads us to the third tip about how I lost weight without losing myself.
Starting small.
Tip 3: Start Small
So how do you start small?
Remember we talked about our friend capacity?
Capacity is the first step to starting small.
And that means asking questions like:
What do you realistically have time for in your schedule?
AND
What are your energy levels?
This can be tricky because you may not understand your capacity until you have overdone it.
That was me.
I eventually learned I needed to set a limit of three exercises per gym session. It killed me because it doesn’t seem like much, but I knew I wanted to stay consistent and if I overdid it, I could lose a week recovering.
Spoiler: sometimes I did too much and then needed time to recover.
It’s okay if this happens– in fact, it’s normal! You didn’t do anything “bad”.
Take the time you need to recover and then get back into things. Do not succumb to an all or nothing mindset.
It’s been 7 months since I started.
I’ve lost 10 pounds and gained a lot more stamina, energy, and strength.
I am able to do more than 3 exercises (usually between 5 and 7) without needing a whole week to recover and the best part is I really do feel like myself (yay!)
When you start small, it may seem like you’re barely doing anything. You need to remind yourself that what you're doing is LEARNING about your capacity.
This is SO KEY to staying consistent and in turn it helps you EXPAND your capacity because you have a clearer understanding of what you are actually capable of.
For example, let’s say you wanted to start going for a walk 3x a week. You might try going for 15 minute walks to start. It doesn’t sound like a lot but going for an hour walk and then being too sore or tired to walk and needing a week of rest will make it so much harder to stay consistent.
If you found that 15 minute walks felt pretty good and you recovered no problem then you might try 20 minute walks and continue going like this until you reach your goal of an hour walk.
Starting small and learning about your capacity will lead you to long term gains.
That’s why, in the beginning you’re better off doing too little consistently than too much inconsistently.
Tip 4: Let Your Values Influence Your Choices
Now this tip might not surprise you, because we’ve already talked about values and boundaries above, ha!
For the first two months I strength trained at least 3x a week, and I still ate too much. (Hi small steps!)
After going through so many different diets from super restrictive, such as eating 18 points according to a Weight Watchers book I found (this probably equaled about 1,000 calories a day) to kind of restrictive (not eating certain foods that a naturopath said were “bad” for me like potatoes and anything with potatoes in it), I wanted to tread very carefully.
So, I looked at my values when thinking about food and what to eat.
I figured at this point in my life it would be kinder to #EatTooMuch than not enough after so many years of eating too little.
There are situations where it’s difficult for people to lose weight even if they are exercising and in a calorie deficit, but for the most part, it is true that eating less and moving more helps you lose weight.
(Side-note: If you are doing that and still not losing weight it could be due to a thyroid issue or possibly hormone imbalances. It might be worth going to a doctor or practitioner experienced with these situations to see if there is an underlying cause for not being able to lose weight).
For myself, I’ve learned the best way to eat less and move more isn’t about focusing on eating less and moving more. It’s to focus on honoring my values. This is the key for me to stick with any habit. It has to feel like I’m being ME.
Things to consider for yourself:
What are your values? (I know I asked you this already so if you answered it then great, if not, here’s another reminder!)
What would it look like to honor those when considering eating less and moving more?
What is the easiest place to start that feels good to you?
**And don’t forget** When you move more, especially if you are doing something strenuous, you will feel more hungry because you are using more energy.
This is another reason I didn’t focus on eating less right away. And it’s another reason why going from very little or no strength training to a lot is also not usually helpful.
Tip 5: Don’t Forget the Underlying Puzzle Pieces
Being a high achieving perfectionist type of person, it’s easy for me to fall into an all or nothing mindset.
Actually.
I thought I had an all or nothing mindset problem.
But really..
I had an understanding-my-capacity problem.
This led me to:
Spend so much of my life doing things beyond my capacity (especially with my body) to prove myself worthy of existing
Feel fatigued from doing too much
Be scared of doing too much and then not do anything
Fall into the abyss of existential dread (AKA my couch watching reruns of early 2000 classics such as Grey’s Anatomy and Gilmore Girls)
Please do not skip my third tip: starting small!
This might be one of the hardest and most important steps if you tend to do all or nothing.
Remember: doing less is not doing nothing.
It took about 4-5 months for me to really see the results of my efforts. I kept going even when I didn’t see results because I was feeling stronger and my energy and mood was improving AND I knew I was in this for the long run.
Could I have lost 10 pounds in 2 months? Absolutely.
Was that in line with my values at this point in my life? No.
Given what I know about my history and my body, I knew that setting a goal of about a year was the way to really learn what my capacity was. I realized that I didn’t really understand it.
Allowing myself a year left room for mistakes such as overdoing it and then needing some unplanned time off and very very slowly creating a calorie deficit.
If you’re considering losing weight and you have a history of trying to control your body to fit other people’s expectations or even just to feel in control of something, I would encourage you to spend the most time thinking about what your values are and what very small things you can start to consistently do vs tackling the perfect workout or diet.
Imperfect Steps Lead to Long-Term Changes
This is the healthiest and most me way I’ve lost weight and the thing that I’m most proud of is that I’m really learning about my capacity- when it’s okay to push myself a little bit, when I need to do the bare minimum, and when I need to rest.
My workouts weren’t perfect and neither were my meals. Sometimes I took an entire week off to rest if I needed to without that turning into a month or months of not strength training.
It’s possible to lose weight and/or get stronger while staying deeply connected to your body. Being deeply connected to your body doesn’t mean that you never make a mistake or that you are 100% motivated all the time.
If you want to strength train, sometimes you’ll need to go to the gym or do your workout even when you don’t feel like it. This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “disconnecting from your body”, rather, it means that you’re honoring your value of consistency or whatever value matters to you the most in this instance.
Bringing awareness to your capacity, honoring your values, and nourishing yourself well are the foundations to long term consistent strength/muscle building and weight loss.
I know how difficult it can be to not see changes immediately– and sometimes it might seem like “nothing is happening.” But this idea that “nothing is happening” and switching gears to something else or doing more and more is how people end up disconnected from their body. Stick with these tips and you will notice big changes long term.
