Summary 

The holiday season is here, and with it comes a whirlwind of social gatherings, traditions, and high expectations. But what happens when those expectations create stress instead of joy? In this episode, I’m sharing how overachievers can shift their mindset and approach to holidays—creating connection and joy without the pressure of perfection.

If you’ve ever found yourself scrambling to make everything “just right” for a special event or feeling overwhelmed by the invisible workload of the season, this episode offers a refreshing perspective. Learn how to navigate this time of year with ease, prioritize what truly matters, and set yourself up for success—on and off the scale.

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

Get on the email list: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/magic 
 

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• The three questions to ask yourself before any holiday event to shift your mindset.
• Why high expectations can lead to pressure, frustration, and even disappointment.
• How to collaborate with your family to share the workload (instead of carrying it solo).
• The connection between prioritizing your wellness goals and showing up powerfully in all areas of life.
• Why starting your goals in Q4 sets you ahead for the new year—and beyond.

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Download the full transcript here.

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  If you're in the US and you're listening to this in real time, then you know that it is Thanksgiving week. I've been dropping a few episodes here on The Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast over the last few weeks to help prime and empower you. Since this season, October, November, December is so full of so many social events, cultural events, religious gatherings, where you are seeing friends and family, maybe that you don't see during other parts of the year. Up until now, these past few episodes have focused on creating a feeling of control for how you show up in social scenarios, how you eat and how you enjoy yourself through connection and joy and conversation without sabotaging your dream body goals, without sabotaging your Monday through Friday efforts, without sabotaging the results that you have been creating on the scale. We've been talking a lot about people pleasing or eat pleasing. We've touched on that feeling of being rude when a gracious host, maybe offer something to you or saying no to something without feeling guilty. We've talked about that feeling of awkwardness you may experience when everyone else has a plate full of food and is on their second or third glass of wine, and maybe you're saying no. I cannot tell you how often I see smart, resourceful, overachieving women right off the bat Q4, it's that last quarter of the year. Maybe you have been working really hard towards your personal body goal, your weight loss goal, or even a professional goal. And somehow I don't know about you, but I have been feeling this a lot, especially in Q4 as well, myself, October, November, December, I feel this desire almost to take my foot off the gas pedal. Like I just need a break. I have been working so hard. so hard. I just want to take a break. And especially because the season is so full of holiday events and social gatherings, it creates so many convenient, compelling, and very convincing stories to just stop taking action. But this episode, and really this season of episodes is all about what the impact will be if you do not take your foot Off the gas pedal of this season.

  Hey, unstoppable friend you're listening to The Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Priyanka Venugopal, a physician turned stress and weight loss coach for professional working moms and the founder of The Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable small group coaching program. This podcast is going to inspire change at the root for you on and off the scale. I've lost a little over 60 pounds while being a busy physician mom with two young kids and an unpredictable schedule. And along my journey, which was full of many, many imperfect moments, I have learned how to skip past the fads and the gimmicks. I am on this mission now to share with you how you can have a real strategy and mindset skills to really have more of the life you want that you have worked so hard for. Let's get into it. Really thinking about November and December, in my opinion, is the best time of year to hold steady. When you become the person who feels confident, navigating social settings and holidays and celebrations that are full of food without sabotaging your body and weight loss goal, you will have learned this skill for life. So in my opinion, I think that it is one of the best best reasons to use November and December to lean into your biggest dream goals that you have for yourself and your body. I tell my clients in the Unstoppable group, this all the time, when I coach them on a special event coming up, maybe it's a vacation travel holiday, I help really guide them and help them craft Personal game plan for when they're walking into a social situation so they feel very empowered in executing it. Well, one of the things that I often say to them is this one event, this upcoming Thanksgiving week or weekend, the holidays in December is going to be your best teacher. And let me tell you, not only does it feel hella good to come back from a social gathering, special event down on the scale where your gut feels really good and you feel like you have all of the energy in the world, your identity starts to shift. You start to see how you are the person who can lose or maintain your weight literally anywhere. And that feeling that you have about yourself when you have that identity shift it is golden. Literally, it feels like the absolute best feeling when you can start to show yourself no matter where you are, no matter how busy you are, no matter where you're traveling in the world, no matter what social setting you're in, you never, ever, ever have to sabotage your body wins. Now, I will be honest, getting to that place of feeling confident in different social scenarios, in taking a plan with decisive decisions, which we talked about a few weeks ago, and really executing it from a place of power and ease and confidence does take a lot of Practice. That's literally all that stands in the way between where you are now and where you want to be. Practicing new skills. But one of the biggest obstacles, especially for overachievers who are smart women, you're used to doing something a few times and then Knowing how to do that skill very easily. We're very good learners. You and I are good learners. We're good students, right? You learn something once you do it once and now you feel confident in your skills and capacity But what we're talking about in terms of how you eat how you treat your body How you really take care of your rest and relaxation without using food or alcohol? This is a learned skill that may take you more than just a minute. It may take you some time. It might take some practice. It might take you navigating multiple social scenarios where you mess up and then you learn from it and then you learn again. But the biggest obstacle ends up being, especially for the overachiever who has type A tendencies, some perfectionist tendencies, you will go, you'll give it a try and It won't go perfectly. And rather than putting your foot further down on the gas to get really curious, to find the gaps, to practice again, this is where so many overachievers are used to taking their foot off the pedal. So to get to that place where you feel confident in any social scenario, any social gathering, that feeling that creates your identity shift is going to take practice.

  It takes leaning in, putting in your full effort and prioritizing yourself. Even when it's the holidays, even when things feel crazy or out of control at work, even when situations are coming up with your family, with your children, with your partner, with your aging parents, when we do the work and put in the effort towards our personal dreams and body goals for our mind and for our body, we start to teach our brain that we matter. No matter what, it teaches our brains that we don't have to start and stop based on the life scenario that we are being dealt with. And when you do this again and again and again with practice, when you prioritize your wellness and weight loss goals through every busy season, through every holiday event, through every sticky scenario and any life circumstance, your brain learns, Oh! We matter to no matter what, when you get to that place where you are prioritizing yourself with an effort for your wellness and weight loss goals, here's what starts to happen. Here's the trickle down effect you end up because you were better taken care of. You end up showing up more powerfully in every other corner of your life.This is why my clients experience more presence and connection with their family, including their kids. And in their marriages, they feel more confident and more powerful in the workplace to advocate for themselves, to set boundaries, This is how you stop being distracted and you get more focused on any goal that you have. Taking care of and prioritizing your wellness and weight loss goals through this holiday season is not just going to help you right now. It is something your future self, when you wake up on January 1st, you are going to be so grateful that you just started now. Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about expectations and how expectations can create a lot of either disappointment, I know lot of just personal satisfaction and contentedness, no matter where you are and how you're celebrating this Thanksgiving or really any holiday season. But before I get into that piece of the podcast, I wanted to give you a tiny sneak peek and invite you to join my email list. If you're not already on there, I am beyond thrilled. Thrilled and so excited that I have recently created a new training that's dropping on Monday. And it's going to my email list first. So if you're not on my email list, head over to www.burnstressloseweight.com/magic and getting on my email list, you are going to be one of the first people that gets my brand new training. It is the weight loss and wellness hormones training. I cannot tell you how much misinformation is out on the internet, misinformation that is probably leading to a lot of people feeling very confused about their wellness. Maybe you feel fatigue, low libido, you have difficulty with weight loss, and because of what you are reading about on the internet, maybe what you see on Instagram or TikTok, or maybe what your cousin tells you, you might immediately jump to, it must be perimenopause. It must be my hormones. The answer to this is yes and no. It is absolutely true that after the age of 35, your hormones are changing and it is going to make a difference with your mood, your energy, your ability to lose weight, so many things. I decided after seeing so much misinformation on the internet and what I'm just picking up from a lot of my peers and colleagues who are other OBGYNs and from a lot of my friends that I wanted to bring my experience as a board certified OBGYN physician and as a stress and weight loss coach to bring together an evidence based training that will truly help you feel more empowered. It's true that your genetics and your age, and absolutely some hormones are playing a pivotal role in how you're feeling. But what I want you to know, and what I hope you walk away from in this very comprehensive training is that you actually have way more control over feeling better than maybe you realize. I just finished recording this yesterday and I shared it with one of my best friends. She is my OBGYN bestie from residency. And I shared it with her because I just wanted her feedback. I asked her to listen to it, to watch it with like a really critical lens. I wanted to get her like actual honest thoughts because I would tweak it if she felt like I missed something, or if she felt like I should explain something better, and she literally messaged me back asking me, how can I get this video to play in my waiting room for my patients? Because Everyone needs this information on this hormones training. I'm covering the three most important, most impactful hormone pathways that are impacting your wellness and weight loss journey and how you can take control without a phlebotomist. So I really recommend that you get on my email list over at burnstressloseweight.com/magic and I will meet you in your email inbox. I send a lot of emails to my email list with a lot of mindset tools, a lot of strategy, a lot of inspiration. So you can expect to get a lot of emails from me. Make sure you check your spam and promotions folder because sometimes that's where we end up when we are dealing with the internet, but my real desire with my email list is to teach and share and inspire you that it is possible to feel better in your mind and body. It doesn't matter how old you are. Your age does not have to be the reason that you're not feeling the way that you want to feel. And also one last thing I want to share before we get into expectations around the holidays is that enrollment for my January cohort of the Unstoppable group is going to be opening really soon. So I decided, especially after what I was sharing at the start of this podcast episode, that December is truly my favorite time to start. If you don't write off Q4, you're going to be so far ahead when everyone else is trying to figure out new year's resolutions and body goal resolutions. And how do I lose the weight that I want to lose, you will have already made headway. And I was thinking about how can I support my audience? And especially if you decide to work with me, my clients to get that headstart, that if you're an overachiever, you seriously love just starting in December, deciding to enroll in the January group in December is going to get you early access to my whole entire curriculum and my strategy workshop where I help you craft. Actually, your exact science backed strategy to become a fat burner, to lose weight while feeling better my clients. I mean, one of the things that I just love about the unstoppable group is while it's an intimate small group experience, clients get such a personal level of attention and feedback from me that it really does feel like a very personalized approach. So the moment that you join in December, you're going to unlock access to so much material and you'll start losing weight. Not only before January 1st, you're going to lose weight before we ever hop onto our first coaching call in January. Plus for those of you who decide to enroll in December, I'm going to have a bonus workshop just for you, it's going to be all about urges and cravings and how to navigate them with a lot of power with a lot of ease. And I'm hosting that just for my clients. So I want to make sure you know about all of this coming up. It's all coming down the pike. If you are on my email list, you'll be the first to know all the details and get ready right now. Because if you have been talking about hitting a body goal, if you've been thinking about losing weight, it's I want you to know that it is 100 percent within your reach. It does not have to be grit and grind. It does not have to be so incredibly hard when you have the right science informed strategy to make you a fat burner. And you have a coach helping you see your blind spots, helping you navigate those sticky moments. We are going to collapse the timeline on how fast you can get results. Okay. I feel like this episode today is kind of all over the place and that's okay. I'm here for it. I really wanted to talk and take a few moments to discuss and dive into this idea of expectations. I don't know about you, but whenever I have thought about a special event, you know, like those events that are just not my routine Monday through Friday, this could even just be a date night, something about date night feels special because it's not my usual day to day or night to night routine. Or a birthday, which happens just once a year, or maybe my anniversary, including right special holidays like Thanksgiving and the winter holidays and religious holidays coming up. What I realized when I think about special events is that historically, I have inadvertently put a lot of pressure around that event being perfect. I've had the desire to get it all perfect. So for Thanksgiving, this might look like I want to have the absolute best, most delicious dishes. And I want to have the most gorgeous spread and have the table look amazing. I want to have the cleanest house. Or the most well behaved kids or the most engaged and funny social husband. It's almost like this is sounding silly, even as I'm sharing it, but this is just where I've been. It's like, we think we're going to win an award or something for having the most perfect special event, right? But what I have also found is that desire for the perfect event also leads to us placing an immense amount of pressure and stress on the partner, on the kids, on our guests and on ourselves. We end up nagging our partners to be a certain way. We're like, you know, make sure you smile and make sure you greet everyone and make sure you're not annoying and irritable. Make sure you actually socialize with everybody. We might grumble and complain about the groceries and all the cooking that we have to do. We might yell at our kids, right, to show up a certain way or to be polite. We end up scrambling around trying to clean the whole entire house before guests show up.

   

  We put a lot of pressure on ourselves and other people simply to feel a certain way that we think we're supposed to feel on special events. It's kind of funny, even as I'm sharing it, and it's rather a bit backwards. If you really think about the whole purpose. of social events and special gatherings. And I'm talking even about weddings, like even your wedding day, right? How much pressure we put on ourself for it to be this quote unquote, supposedly perfect day. The goal is to create a feeling of specialness, love, connection, joy, right? We want everyone to feel feel that feeling to commemorate the specialness of an event. But what we forget is how we feel preparing for and going into the event is how we create the feelings that we want. So if we're feeling annoyed and pressured and stressed and irritated, You can imagine that ultimately the time of the special event, the actual execution of the special event, we are not going to magically switch over to and toggle into a feeling of joy, love, relaxation, and connection. It's fascinating actually. So I want all of you, which you know I love doing to take a little inventory, be objective and curious and a little playful with yourself. And think about your last few special events. Think about maybe your last birthday, your last anniversary, a holiday, a date night, a wedding, any celebration that felt special for you. How did it actually feel? And the part that I want for you to get curious about is to ask yourself, what might the experience of that special event have been like if you simply shifted your expectations? Now I can hear you saying, Priyanka, like, I'm not going to just throw it all away. Like, I can't have a messy house and not cook food and have my kids acting like animals. Like, we need to have some expectations. The answer is yes and yes. Sometimes, again, as overachievers, we have this tendency to be very all or nothing with how we think about special events and even expectations. So this is just an invitation to release your all or nothing thinking. Here's how I propose you do that. I'm going to share three questions that I encourage you to ask yourself today, this week, before you walk into your next special event, whether it's Thanksgiving coming up this week or your holiday coming up in December. Ask yourself question number one, how do I want to feel during this event? Number two, what really matters to me most? And number three, how can I show up in a way that aligns with what matters to me? You might notice after answering these three questions, a few tiny shifts. Maybe you have a conversation in advance with your partner and your kids, and you ask them, you tell them what's important to you, what matters to you. Maybe you ask them what's important to them and what matters to them. And you actually collaborate on creating that experience together. You know what's amazing and what I have found not just in my own work with myself, what I see with women across every industry, women, especially moms, take on this invisible burden of creating the best event for their families and loved ones. But what if you didn't have to do this at all solo. What if you collaborated and brought in your family so you did it together? And I don't just mean where you are directing the family like the director of a ship and like you're telling everybody what they have to do like the taskmaster, but just imagine that you made this collaborative.

  Imagine that you got to shift your expectations of your family, right, including your kids, including your partner and for yourself, so that going into the work and going into the experience of your holiday wasn't all placed on you. A reminder that I often like to tell myself is that there is no badge of honor for being the most overworked. There's just fatigue and sometimes a touch of resentment. Which just takes away from the specialness of what we are trying to create. I wanted to share this really tiny but mighty concept because I know there's something in the air that happens in the fall season between October, November, and December that brings out these high expectations that we have, not just for ourselves, but that we place on our loved ones. We place on our friends, on our peers, on our family, and we want people to behave a certain way for us to experience it. But in my experience now, and this is just after coaching clients in every industry, on every topic, this way of coming into special events and holidays just creates so much pressure and frustration and even disappointment when those expectations are very naturally not met. So if it feels disconcerting to shift your expectations, let it be disconcerting and just go and experiment. Just this week and see how you really feel. Start with these three questions. And I recommend that you take five minutes, not when you're driving, but when you have five minutes to actually write down your answers and journal on this and remind yourself of your answers on a daily basis, as you go through the holiday season. Number one, how do you want to feel during this event? For me, I usually want to feel relaxed and connected and calm and sometimes even joy and just chill. Number two, what matters to me the most? Usually for me, what matters to me the most is having conversation with my friends and family that I maybe don't talk to all the time, that I don't see on a day to day basis. Number three, how can I show up in a way that aligns with this? This means really getting into the nitty gritty detail of how am I going to show up? What will I be doing to prioritize what matters to me? What will I not be doing to prioritize what matters to me? If my For example, if my priority is to have conversation with the friends and family that I don't talk to very much, that means I might not be nagging at my kid to behave a certain way, or I might not be worrying or spending any time on getting the house completely perfectly picked up. We get to ask ourselves how we want to show up, what we want to do and not do. Not do is the most important to be able to show up the way we want. And bring this to your mind on a daily basis so that you remember how it is you want to feel and what matters to you most. I hope you all have an amazing time with your family this week.

  If you are celebrating Thanksgiving, or as you go into the winter holidays, be safe, be healthy, and make sure that you get on my email list today burnstressloseweight.com/magic. So you're the very, very first to get my hormone training when it drops on Monday. Have an amazing week, my friends. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast today. I hope that you are leaving today's podcast episode feeling a little lighter and more inspired than when we started. It turns out that you don't need to have a stress free life to hit your goals on and off the scale, but when you feel more empowered to respond to your real life stresses with true strategy, we will game change how we show up and how we hit our goals. If you want to take what you're learning here on the podcast and put it into real life implementation, it might be time for us to work together in the Burn Stress, Lose Weight, Feel Unstoppable group coaching program. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com and you can learn all of the details, the nuts, the bolts when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.