Summary 

In this episode of the newly renamed Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast, I’m taking you on a journey of transformation. As a former OBGYN physician turned weight loss coach, I’m introducing my unique "Burn Stress Method," which emphasizes the importance of managing stress as a critical component of sustainable weight loss. This episode marks a pivotal shift in my approach, focusing on the overlooked role stress plays in sabotaging weight loss goals, particularly for high-achieving professional moms. Whether you're a longtime listener or new to the podcast, this episode lays the groundwork for a four-part series that will delve into the different stress types that can lead to overeating and how understanding these can help you achieve your dream body goals—and maintain them.

Learn more: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/ 

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why the podcast has been rebranded to "Burn Stress, Lose Weight."
• The three essential components of a successful weight loss strategy.
• How stress management is crucial for maintaining a nutrition plan.
• An introduction to the four stress types: Escapist, Procrastinator, People Pleaser, and Advocate.
• A preview of the upcoming four-part series on how these stress types impact weight loss.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

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• Get access to my new private podcast by clicking here. 

Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey, Unstoppable friend. Welcome to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast, I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, a physician turned a stress and weight loss coach for professional working moms who self identify as overachievers. I'm also the founder of the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, small group coaching program, where we take everything that you're learning on this podcast and we put it into real life implementation. As you can tell, we have a new name for the podcast. And if you pop over to Instagram or my website, you will notice that everything has shifted over to Burn Stress, Lose Weight, which I'm going to get into in this episode as to why I decided to do that. Let's get into today's episode where I'm introducing why it is not only a little important, but essential to burn stress to lose the weight that you have been wanting to lose. As you can tell, there is some big changes happening over here in the unstoppable orbit. The Unstoppable Mom Brain podcast has officially switched over to now being called the Burn Stress, Lose Weight. So I'm thinking about this episode as a little bit of a reintroduction of sorts. So whether you have been in my orbit for a while, first of all, thank you so much for following along. I'm so grateful to you. And I hope you've been getting so much value in our time together, or if you are new, today's episode is the launch of me teaching my process in a slightly new way, we're going to take everything that we have been learning on this podcast over the last almost two years. And really take it to the next level. This episode is not just a reintroduction, but it's really placing emphasis on one of the most overlooked pieces of your fat burning weight loss strategy that I have really seen coming up time and time again. After coaching high achieving professional working moms in literally every industry in my small group coaching program, when I break down what it takes to lose the weight that you want to lose, whether it's five pounds or over 50, there are three essential pieces that you need in equal parts to have a winning success strategy.

  Step one is really optimizing nutrition science to make you a fat burner. Step two is. really understanding the role and impact that stress is having on your fat burning abilities. And when we don't have proper stress management and stress coping skills, we are going to never be able to execute and implement step one, our nutrition strategy. And step three, dropping drama. From the journey completely when it comes down to it. And I have taken a fine tooth comb over the years that I have been coaching professional working moms and my decade of experience as an OBGYN physician. And I have really narrowed it down. What are the three, three biggest obstacles that I see professional working moms who identify as overachievers typically run into the obstacles will always fall under one of these three categories, nutrition, stress, or drama. I know that you might feel an itch to jump right into your nutrition strategy. And if that's you, I see you. It's like wanting the nutritionist or your personal trainer to just give you the PDF download with exactly what to eat and when to eat and how to eat or what not to eat. But the reason that I don't want to start there for this episode specifically is because it won't last forever. That plan that you make the nutrition strategy that is going to make you a fat burner. It's not going to last without unraveling this stress piece first. This is by far the number one most overlooked piece of most professional working moms, weight loss strategies.

  You're brilliant at researching plans and Googling all the options and breaking out the calendar and making a to do list. But when it comes to consistency, actually taking the plan and putting it into implementation is You might notice inconsistency. Yes, the nutrition strategy matters becoming a fat burner with actual science backed decisions around how you eat and when you eat really does matter. But understanding that burning stress matters more because that plan is just going to collect dust in a drawer without this piece is an essential part of the process. With that in mind, over the next four weeks, I'm going to be dropping a four part series that walks you through the four stress types that drive over eating. Thank you, the escapist, the procrastinator, the people pleaser, and the advocate. I'm going to come back to these four different stress types later, so don't worry for the purposes of this episode. I just want to start with first painting a foundation, building a foundation for you on this episode, so you understand why this is so incredibly essential, how it's the number one overlooked piece of most strategies that you are trying to use to lose weight and when you understand these strategies How it is going to be such a game changer in you hitting your goal this year for the purposes of not just this episode But really this whole entire podcast when I use the word overeating I don't I just mean stuffed, stuffed where your gut or your body feels like, Oh, though, of course that also applies. When I use the word overeating in my orbit, I'm referring to eating any time that your body isn't actually hungry. When your gut isn't actually desiring food or giving your body food when she doesn't actually want or need nutrition over the next four weeks, I'm going to be talking about these four different stress types and how they lead smart, healthy, healthy, healthy Brilliant, resourceful working moms to have little bites and nibbles and licks and tastes. And those are the real reason that really sabotages your dream weight loss goal. Most importantly, there's actually a solution to this. The intention of this four part series is to walk you through exactly why it's essential to burn stress, to lose the weight that you want to lose. And most importantly, and this is why we're all here. To actually keep it off. You and I both know that we have all lost weight before. We're actually pretty expert at being able to lose weight, but if you have gained it back or had difficulty in maintenance, it is because of this essential concept. We let one weekend or one week of vacation or one work trip completely undo a week's worth of wins. If that sounds familiar to you, where you have lost weight before, but had trouble maintaining it, or you've hated your weight loss strategy, and so you couldn't stick with it in the long run. This is going to be for you. The reality is for your results to last a lifetime, you don't actually want a quick fix or a hack or a gimmick. I know you want to have hit your dream ideal weight yesterday, but the reason that you're here listening to this podcast episode is because I I am here as a physician and as a weight loss coach to give you science informed strategy. I'm going to be sharing every strategy on this podcast, every concept through the lens of being a professional working mom myself, where my life is also just like yours, littered with challenging moments, sticky situations and hard obstacles. You and I both know that signing up for the life of a professional working moms means we've also signed up for those challenging moments, the growth and the big things. And that means welcoming the stressful moments. I am not here on this podcast. at all to tell you how to live a stress free life. But I am going to walk you through exactly how we are currently engaging with very real life stresses and how that way of engagement can make or break your weight loss result. I'm going to call this the burn stress method. Now I didn't learn this in my decades of education. I did not learn about this in college, medical school, residency, or even early attending life.

   

  Up until a few years ago, if you had met me back in 2018, I was an overweight OBGYN physician, literally an expert on women's health. Yet I myself didn't feel completely in control of my body. If that has been your experience, welcome. I'm so glad that you're here. You're in good company. And I promise that you are not alone at all in that sentiment. I want on every episode to bust down any of the myths that you're alone in the struggle and understand that there is. literally always a reason for why you have the results both on and off the scale that you do. I wanted to highlight that I didn't learn a lot of what I'm teaching on this podcast through my education, med school, residency, attending life, because I want to highlight something that is incredibly important. Something I see coming up with professional women in every industry, being smart. Is not the solution to lose the weight you want to lose. Just being educated won't unlock the magical answers to lasting results on the scale. And in fact, the burn stress method is actually about challenging your most logical, practical mindedness to change a lot of your old habits after decades of education and advanced training with a wall of degrees hanging over my head, I did not know this information, which is why I struggled just like many of you to lose the weight that I wanted to lose. Why I struggled to get off the up and down rollercoaster that led to so much frustration. If you have ever felt out of control of your results, you've probably thought I know what to do. Logically, I know what to do. I have a plan. Why am I not doing it? That is the essential question that the burn stress lose weight podcast is answering. How is it possible for a smart resourceful overachiever to ever work in a way that is not aligned with her weight loss goal?

  Here's the good news. This is in fact solvable, and there's a part of you, the part that's here listening to this podcast, that has a feeling of hope. You're here because you know that you have been missing something, and maybe there's actually a way to solve it once and for all. That is exactly what we're going to be breaking down over the next four weeks. Before I understood these four stress types, weight loss, and hitting my personal dream body goals, truly random. I did not feel in complete control or the number on the scale or how my body felt. And it felt like the people that were at their goal weight was like the special few. Maybe these special people had special willpower or just extra discipline. And now I know after multiple years of 60 pounds myself without the fads and gimmicks, working with professional women in every industry, I now know that that is not the the case. And this has truly led me to just be on a mission to help professional working moms feel empowered for their bodies to feel really in control over how they feel in their gut, in their skin, to be at the weight that they want to be at. Because when you get there, when you get to that goal that you have had for your body, where you feel comfortable and energized in your skin, it trickles into every other part of your life. And that is truly a feeling of unstoppable when you learn what stress type you are and you might be more than one or a combination of all four, you're going to start to see that your weight loss results or your maintenance is not at all random. In fact, many of your life results aren't random. There is a science to your behavior and why we do what we do or why we don't do what we say we're going to do. Your results on and off the scale make perfect sense. As I cover the four broad stress types, I will be referring to the think, feel, act cycle as a framework, which is described across many fields of behavioral psychology And it really explains the root of our behavior. It's going to explain every time you follow through versus when you don't. However, conscious or mostly unconscious, a lot of your behaviors and habits are. The best news is when we can understand our actions and the best news is when we can understand that our actions and our inactions are always driven by a feeling actions, like putting food in your mouth, snacking, nibbling, grazing, tasting, Eating those few bites past satiety, eating all the way to stuffed, planning one thing, but doing another, procrastinating or procrastinate working, hesitating, ruminating, second guessing the list of actions that I'm describing that impact your weight loss results go on and on and on your actions and inactions. When you combine them all together, create your results. Today, your results on and off the scale. The think, feel, act cycle. And what I love about using it as a framework to dive into your behavior is that it shows you, it shows all of us that our actions do not happen in a vacuum. Let me just say that again, your behavior, your habits, any actions that you take eating or snacking or nibbling when you said you wouldn't is not happening in a vacuum, eating those few bites or not following through on your plan aren't random. And when we can understand that all these actions that we are taking are driven by a feeling and you start to identify where these feelings are coming from, we start to create so much more control over how we show up over the next four weeks. We're going to be diving into the four different stress types and how unchecked feelings of stress, when you're really unaware of them, um, is what is driving smart, resourceful, professional women to sabotage their body goals. The think, feel, act cycle every single week is going to make your behavior 100 percent explainable. And when we can really understand what's driving our behavior, what's driving our habits, what's driving our actions, all of a sudden we're going to be able to solve for the real problem. I cannot tell you how often I see this is going. all over, you know, Facebook with my friends, with my peers, with my clients, how often women will be chasing, like running up the wrong tree because they're not hitting their goal.

  You might be frustrated about your results over the summer. Maybe you feel stuck on the scale. Maybe you gained, have gained some weight back. And the very first thing that most overachievers will do. Most women that I have talked to about weight loss will do is they will start to double down, buckle down with a brand new plan. I know that we all love to have a fresh start and a reset because we feel so good and excited about what we're You know, brand new, fresh starts. And there is a time and place for that. However, most of the time we are over utilizing fresh starts and restarts, and we're wasting an incredible amount of time chasing the wrong solution. One of my clients was sharing in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight small group coaching program around one of the results that she wanted to assess. She shared with me after we had started working together, she said, I need to reassess my plan. I didn't lose as much weight as I wanted to this week. And I think that I really need to figure out what's happening with my plan where, you know, where am I going wrong with my plan? What I need to tweak with my plan. And I said to her, hold on a second, let's actually, before we rehaul your plan and reassess your plan, let's actually first figure out. And assess how did you implement the plan you had in our coaching session? We were actually able to dive into, was it her plan that was actually missing something, or was it really her implementation and execution more often than not? It is the execution and implementation of the plan you have. When we got to really the nuts and bolts of my client's actual issue, she could see that reassessing strategizing or tweaking the plan would have been a complete, complete waste of her time, her energy, her effort, and her bandwidth. It wasn't addressing the real issue, which is why she didn't execute her plan with more consistency, just that small pivot where she got out of chasing, you know, a new plan, a new strategy, Googling and researching something brand new for her plan. And we just started focusing on what was it that got in the way of her execution and her implementation? We were able to identify her stress type, what was happening for her in the past week, the past month. And we were able to identify her specific stress type that led her to eat a couple of extra bites, let her to snack and nibble. When she was feeling that type of stress, that flavor of stress that led her to kind of go off plan on the weekend, go off plan in the evenings. And it was just those small licks bites, snacking nibbles, but her gut wasn't actually hungry when her body did not need nutrition that actually sabotaged her results. Just from that one coaching experience and that one pivot uncovering her stress type and starting to really understand what led to the behavior, my client stopped running up the wrong tree. Understanding the think feel act cycle as it applies to the four stress types is going to be like diagnosing the actual problem.

   

  We're going to get to, is it your plan or is it your execution of the plan? So that when you decide to solve the problem, you're actually solving the real problem. So let's just define for this episode, what is is a stress cycle. It is the most normal, natural, and primitive response that your brain has been hardwired with to survive. So stress cycles are normal. So let me preface this by saying that while we want to burn stress, We have to first also understand that stress is needed. Stress and our responses to stress in the right amounts at the right doses gets you out of bed in the morning. It gets you to work on time. It has you paying your bills. It has you picking up your kids when you're supposed to. If you see a lion, you will run. So having certain stress responses is perfectly normal, and it's a really important hard wiring of your primitive brain to survive. But here's where it goes awry. Your brain, when you are on autopilot, cannot tell the difference between a lion and a spreadsheet, a lion and that heated fight that you had with your partner, a lion and your kid getting bullied at school, a lion and that project deadline, a lion and a pound up on the scale. When your brain perceives a threat. And again, it cannot tell the difference between a lion, which is real threat versus the real life challenges that professional working moms have. It triggers a survival mechanism. Your stress type of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn gets triggered really massively, which impacts your weight loss results. Now you may land more squarely in one of these four categories, but in my experience, we often tend to toggle between the different stress types, depending on what scenario we're in. And what I have found is that. Each of these stress types, the fight response, the flight response, the freeze response, or the fawn response is associated with some type of overeating, snacking, grazing, or nibbling.

  You can have the Cadillac of nutrition strategies that will make you a fat burner. You might even be able to buckle down for a short while and see wins on the scale, but being unaware of your stress cycle response is going to undo your weight loss wins. Without the right tools that we're discussing on this podcast, when you experience stress, you will 100 percent ignore the Cadillac of nutrition plans. I don't want you to be confused by this. I don't want you to ever think that this is a weakness or you're lacking discipline. Your stress type is literally driven by the hard wiring in your brain. So the four stress types of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn is going to trickle into how you're eating and because I love a good name and I think it's really helpful to have a name for the different types of stress responses and how we are engaging with food. I have four different stress types as it applies to overeating. The first one is the escapist. The second one is the procrastinator. The third one is the people pleaser. And the last one is the advocate. Over the next four weeks, I am going to be spending a whole podcast episode on each of these four stress types so that you can start to identify your behavior, your actions. actions, some of your habits and your inactions with which stress type you are, you're going to start to catch whether you're snacking, grazing, nibbling, you ignoring the plan that you made on Monday morning by Friday night, you're going to start to identify- is this because of my fight response? Is this because of my flight response, my freeze response, or my fawn response? The intention of this four part series is to show you exactly how and why you're taking the actions that you are and how being unaware of your stress cycle responses and not burning stress at the root is costing you your dream results on and off the scale.

  I hope I made a compelling case for why it is essential to know how to burn stress, to lose the weight you want. And I really hope that you join me on this four part series where Where we get into the four different stress types and how they are impacting your results on the scale. Make sure that you are subscribed to this show on your favorite podcast platform. And if you loved today's episode, copy the link to this specific episode and share it with a friend or your local Facebook moms group, because I would love to get this information, overlooked step for most weight loss strategies into the hands of more professional women. And if you can take an additional 10 seconds and rate and review this podcast episode, I would absolutely love it. Your time is incredibly valuable to me. I'm so grateful that you're here listening to this podcast episode. I have found that when you drop a rating in a review, this podcast becomes more findable for more women to benefit from what we're doing here together. And I want all professional women to really benefit from the mission that we have here, which is to burn stress, lose weight and feel unstoppable. I'll see you next week, where we're going to cover the escapist stress type. Bye. Hey, Unstoppable friend, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and you feel a little bit lighter than when we started. If you've been feeling the desire to take your body and your goal more seriously right now, I want you to give yourself permission to stop waiting so that you can take everything that you're learning on this podcast and put it into real life implementation. If you feel the desire to start hitting goals and take this work to the next level. It might be time for us to work together in my small group coaching program. It is specifically designed for professional working moms who self identify as overachievers, who know that they want to have nutrition science on their side, they want to let go of fads and gimmicks and get coached on all of the areas that are creating stress. And learn how to burn stress at the root. You can head over to burnstressloseweight.com for all the details for when the next group is starting and how to join and if you have any questions or thoughts You can always dm me over on Instagram @burnstressloseweight. I'll see you guys next time. Bye