Summary 

Are you struggling to break old habits that seem to hold you back from achieving your goals? In this episode, I’m going into the process of habit change, using a story about my son learning to play piano to highlight how unlearning bad habits is just as important as creating new ones. Whether it's stress eating, procrastination, or being overly self-critical, we’ll unpack why we form these habits and I’ll share practical strategies for making real, lasting change—both on and off the scale.

Tune in to explore the brain’s incredible ability to rewire itself and learn how daily, intentional action can help you break free from habits that no longer serve you. This episode is packed with insights on why habits stick and how you can start creating new pathways for success.

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What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why unlearning bad habits is essential for growth
• The difference between actionable habits and mindset habits
• How to create space for new habits in your life
• Practical strategies to rewire your brain for success
• Why accountability and structure are key to sustaining habit change

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Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey friends, today we are talking about habit change. This entire conversation we're having on the podcast today is inspired by my kid. I'm going to tell you a story about him and how it really is creating this entire podcast episode around changing what we're going to call bad habits. Changing bad habits, changing really any habit can sometimes feel like a grueling experience. If you have ever tried to change a habit. You might have realized that it is not such an easy thing to do because our brains are brilliant. It wants to keep habits because it is a super highway in your brain. But at the same time, our brains are capable of change neuroplasticity. We're able to change habits, turn old habits into new ones with intentionality. And we're going to get into how to do that today on the podcast. 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. 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. 

  Let me just start out with the story. My son, who is nine years old, taught himself how to play the piano when he was four. So back in 2019, he learned how to play the piano on the iPad. There was an app on the iPad. If you're interested, drop us an email and I will send you the name of the program that my son used. It was right during the initial start of COVID. Actually, he was home from school, preschool at the time. And we didn't have really much to do with him. I'm having a laugh about this now, but like we had to survive being busy, professional parents. We had meetings, we had work to do. He would get put in front of this iPad and we wanted to find a way to entertain him without him just watching random shows on Netflix or YouTube. We found this app and he just fell in love with it. Now, even before the age of my son has been a musician. Through and through, I have so many adorable, cute little videos of when he's like two years old, holding a ukulele and singing songs from his youngest year. So he's always been a musician. It's just really been the cutest sight to see watching him grow up. But when he was four, he taught himself how to play the piano with this app. And we just, because of the way that COVID was set up, we did not get formal piano lessons for him for a very long time. And so for quite a while, he again, was just. Playing on his own through this app and along the way, he picked up some really bad habits. You should see actually by the time he was seven, he was playing songs that I could not have played as a teenager, despite having years of lessons. Actually, if you're on Instagram, I will post in Instagram stories, a little video clip of him playing the piano. It is truly a sight to see, at least for me as his mom, I feel this way, but it's really a sight to see watching his tiny little fingers lie across the piano faster than my brain can even comprehend. He just, he's really something. Because he's self taught, he did not learn with a formal teacher. He did not learn proper technique. He was just following along with his iPad. He also learned some really, really bad habits. He doesn't have proper posture. Some of the fingering that he uses on the keyboard is not correct. So while his bad habits didn't hold him back from learning the piano, he was able to get pretty far in terms of some of the songs he could play and his skills. These bad habits were starting to hold back his growth as a musician. When I got myself figured out, we finally were able to get him in with a proper instructor and teacher who could really take his musical abilities to the next level because he loves it so much. And let's just say between you and me. She is firm and strict and disciplined. She was talking to him and to me about how a lot of his habits, his posture, his fingering is actually holding back his ability to do more advanced pieces for him to play advanced pieces. Well, right for him to do well with the piano, he's going to have to unlearn some of these habits. So after getting some actual lessons with this legit teacher, he really came to this rude awakening. And I have to tell you, I'm going to share this photo as well on Instagram stories. You can see him just slumping slumping over the piano and just like. Just, he is tortured at the idea of unlearning what feels really natural to him.

  So you might've had this experience too, especially if you have something you have done for years and decades. It just feels like that's just who I am. That's just who I am. Or that's just how I am. For my son, he really believes that a lot of the way that he plays the piano is just Who he is and how he is. He's folded a lot of his habits into his identity as a musician. So one of the things that I've been talking with him about, and it's hard because he's nine years old, but we can definitely talk about on the podcast is how our identity is actually not. At all our habits. What does, you know, this piano story have anything to do with burning stress and losing weight? Why am I telling you the story on this podcast? It is because to have new results, to be able to play that next level piece on the piano, to be able to lose the weight you want to lose sustainably means we have to first unlearn old habits, right? We need new habits. We need to take new action to hit our goals on the scale, off the scale, but for there to be space for new habits to come in, we have to unlearn old habits. Otherwise we start just really having a big tug of war. If we don't unlearn old habits and we just try to pile on new ones, you might notice if you have done that. I know I have definitely done that in the past. You won't get real traction. So before we get into how do you unlearn old habits, I want to first talk about what are some examples of what I'm going to call bad habits when it comes to weight loss, losing the weight you want, hitting your body goal, and then really sustaining those results for a lifetime. Some bad weight loss habits might be eating when your gut isn't actually hungry, eating to people please, maybe eating because somebody else is eating, eating because somebody has prepared food just because you don't want to be rude, eating to numb out or hide from an emotion, eating as a procrastination tactic. Maybe you think it's more productive to eat than to just take a real break. So you eat. As a procrastination tactic from really doing the work you have to be doing. Eating is your main way of celebrating yourself, right? You've worked really hard. You've been doing all kinds of things in your week and you're using food as your main reward. Here's some other examples of what I'm going to call bad habits as it pertains to weight loss, because they're not ones that we typically think of, but they're absolutely habits that are holding back dream results for you on the scale. One is being really self critical. Embarrassed or judgy. With what your results are today and with how you showed up towards your goals yesterday. Another bad habit is being really impatient with yourself in the process. Another one is being in a massive rush to see results. I'm kind of speaking on the same thing, right? Being in a rush or becoming really impatient with yourself is just a habit. It's a bad habit that Inadvertently will hold back results. Another bad habit, staying in indecision or making half assed decisions around your strategy. Keep thinking about planning, wondering, ruminating, second guessing on actually choosing your strategy and taking action on it. And the last one is procrastinating, procrastinating. On properly planning in a way to set you up for success. So the kinds of habits that I'm describing are, some of them are actually actionable habits, right? Eating when your body is not hungry, eating because you don't want to be rude, eating because other people are eating because you want to avoid an emotion. But notice how the second half of the types of habits I talked about were really mindset, being self critical, being embarrassed, being judgy, right?

  How you feel on the inside about yourself in the process on the journey, having impatience or being in a rush. These are all internal feelings that you have about yourself on the journey. And a lot of these are also habits. I think it's really important to understand why it is that we keep these habits, right? So you might logically have said to yourself, I know what to do. But I'm not always doing it. Or I know that being self critical is not helpful, but I can't help myself. Or I know that I'm emotionally eating, but I can't, I just can't seem to stop, right? You might have thought this way about some of the habits that I just described, and I want you to know why that is. Because when you know why, it's so much more simpler. Not always easy, but it's so much more simpler to start to unravel it. Every single habit that I just described on this podcast episode or on any previous podcast episode came for a reason. Every time we did an action like eat when we weren't hungry, eat to please someone else, eat to avoid an emotion, became self critical, right? Any of these emotions that we've just talked about, it was an action that we took that in some way, conscious or subconscious. So just really think about how every time you've ever eaten when your body's not hungry, maybe you felt stressed or bored or overwhelmed and you just use food to take a break, your brain experienced a reward. You ate and you got to take a break from stress. You ate and you got relief from your boredom or from your overwhelm. There's an actual chemical release of dopamine and endorphins that taught your brain because dopamine is not just a feel good chemical. It's a learning chemical. It taught your brain, Hey, this worked really well. We should do this again. I'm very much simplifying the process of habit creation in your brain, but really think about how every action that we have ever taken that created some type of a subconscious reward. Numbing out, taking a break, distracting from real life stresses and boredom was rewarded. So I'm going to go through a couple of examples. Stress eating is a habit that gets rewarded because you literally get a flood of dopamine and endorphins in your brain whenever you eat. And it's a welcome relief, right? Especially for the busy professional working mom who is doing so many things. You get to experience either numbing out or distraction or total break when you're feeling stressed. That break from your stress is your reward. Your brain learns this is really good. We felt really good. We should do this again. Your brain also learns one more thing. And we talked about this a lot in the stress series that we did a few weeks ago. Your brain also learns that we have to use food as our main source of stress.

  So we're going to keep using food or alcohol or the scroll. Another example, being really critical or impatient with yourself when you mess up. When you make a mistake, it's like having a stick in hand and you beat yourself to just work harder, double down, work more, likely got you some results in your younger years. Maybe in school or in the workplace, it pushed you and you got an A or you got that job promotion. And so a part of your brain experienced reward. It learned, if I'm really self critical, I will push myself to work harder. And if I just worked harder, that's how I get rewarded. So I want you to really think about how, what we are talking about on this episode, in terms of habits is first identifying how the habits you have up until this point, the habits that have created your results right now on the scale in your relationships in the workplace on and off the scale, how they have actually been rewarded. I want you to be really honest and objective here. We're not going to be mean. We're not going to judge our habits or judge, you know, the way that we've been rewarding ourselves. Let's just be really honest and take inventory. Look at all of the habits that you have that has created your current results on the scale, snacking and nibbling when you're not hungry, having to take a taste and a lick and a bite of the fresh baked goods, having to use food to numb out from your emotions or to distract from your life's stresses. How have you been rewarded for this? Really ask yourself, how have I been rewarded for overeating, snacking, nibbling, procrastinating, not planning properly, delaying a decision, holding back, hesitating. How have I been rewarded for this? And the second question I want you to ask yourself is how does keeping this habit. Despite the reward that is attached to keep giving you permission to not put forth your full effort. Now it is so good and so liberating to know that you are not just weak, right? Really thinking about today's episode as an awareness exercise to take a look at all of the habits you have and why you have them is going to help you see that your brain is simply hardwired loops, because you're making thousands and thousands of decisions per day. It's just hardwired some habits to help you feel better. That's all. So I can hear you asking Priyanka, how do we change this? Like I can see what my habits are. I can see where I am going off track, going off plan, where I'm eating, when my body's not hungry, how I'm using food to take a break from my life. How do we start to change this? The very first step is really accepting that changing any habit is going to require daily attention. Not half in, half out, half ass efforts, not a little bit now and a little bit later, true intentional effort. This doesn't have to mean hours and hours per day, but truly having mindful moments that are scheduled into your day where you're mindfully thinking about your habits is going to be the very first piece.

  The second, and this is a more practical, strategic decision for you to make, is choosing a different response and reward to your trigger. Let me tell you what I mean. Imagine that you experience a trigger. You feel stress, frustrated, worried, mad, impatient. Maybe your partner said something, or your kid did something, or a colleague or boss or friend said something, and you feel an emotion like stress, frustrated, worried, mad, or impatient. Maybe in the past your response would have been to eat, snack, graze, nibble, right? Just to take a break from your life. But rather than doing the old response, you have to have a different response decided. And then the second piece of that is when you do that new response, you have to feel rewarded in taking that new action. Imagine that every single time you did your new chosen response and you felt rewarded for doing the new thing. What do you imagine the lifetime impact of just that one skill would be? Your brain is going to want to do it again and again and again. And the more that you practice doing the new action rather than the old one, the more that you reward the new action, the more your brain is going to learn that This is a habit worth saving. This is actually one of my most favorite things to do with my clients in the Unstoppable group, which is my six month intimate, small group coaching program. One of my favorite things to do is we create what I call the three bucket system where we create actual buckets. depending on different life scenarios and different life circumstances, different responses. Imagine that your brain got to learn and you actually got to experience that you don't actually need food to feel better. I want you to think about the impact of that on your life as a busy professional woman. This has truly been one of the biggest focuses, especially this round inside the unstoppable group. And it's been really freeing and liberating to feel better as a busy professional. while hitting goals. When you learn how to do this, you don't just stop stress snacking and bored in a blank. You learn how to create new habits at the root while feeling better. Now I should mention, this is an important caveat that this does take effort.

  It won't be a perfect practice. You may go off plan. You might have a mistake. You might go off track and kind of revert back to an old habit. That's not a problem. But at the same time, changing habits won't happen on a wish. The good news is that being a smart, high achieving professional woman, you already know how to do hard things. So you're already ninja at this is just taking that same grit that you bring to every other part of your life to this one area, let it feel a little uncomfortable and do it anyway. My clients know this, but to really succeed at changing habits at the root, you have to have accountability. You have to have structure and decisions made in advance to support you. You have to have an actual proper plan that takes into account your real life. And I don't just mean a nutrition plan. I mean a plan that accounts for your rest, your play, your actual mindset, your movement, actually built into the structure of your life. And you have to have a strategy for handling when you do go off plan. One of the key things that I help my clients do in the group and what I know is so important So important is we have to know when it's time to stop planning and when it is time to start taking that plan and putting it into action. And the reason that you're going to hear me talk a lot about taking action, making decisions and moving all those decisions is because that is where your new habits will come from. Taking action and having repeated actions again and again is where our habit loops will come from because actions speak louder than words. Let me say that a different way. Your brain can be rewired with new habits. It's amazing. But for this to happen, you have to actually take an action and do it repeatedly. It's like with your kid. I love using kid examples. Imagine that you say to your kid, we're not doing any lollipops before dinner. That's just the words you've said. No lollipops before dinner. And now imagine that your child has A temper tantrum about it is for yelling and screaming and they start saying all kinds of things like, no, but you promise that coming up with all kinds of stories, this might be your trigger. The way that you might have responded to a trigger like a temper tantrum in the past might be that you give into the tantrum. So what does the toddler learn? The toddler learns that your know the words you said don't actually matter. The toddler learns when my mom says no. It doesn't matter because what she's really going to do is a yes. Your actions, which is how you responded to the trigger, is what teaches your brain everything. So I want us to take that analogy and how it applies to the next step. Changing the habits will be uncomfortable. In fact, think about the toddler example. The toddler might protest. What do you mean you're no means no? Right? If you say, we're not going to have lollipops for dinner. before dinner. And now they have a temper tantrum. That's the trigger. But instead of your response being to give in, to just give the lollipop, you hold your boundary, hold your no with firmness. Your toddler's going to start to learn as you repeat that behavior again and again and again.

  Oh, when my mom says no, She means no, I have to tell you like this exact example happening with my kid and the piano and He's having to learn how to sit at the piano again He's having to learn how to hold his wrists and how to hold his fingers. It is a little torturous for him I can see it. I can see how frustrated he gets and Also, I know I can see so clearly that him unlearning some of these habits that he has had is also going to You Grow his potential as a musician. This is exactly the same for anyone listening to this episode and thinking about changing habits and weight loss. It is uncomfortable to change your habits. It is. It's just like one of those things that there's no way around it. And also it is possible to change habits, learning the skillset. To experience fundamental change at the root for all of the habits that we talked about today, whether it's eating when you're not hungry, using food as a distraction from boredom or stress, using it just to people please, or simply being self critical. These are habits that we have likely had for decades. They are super highways in our brain. And also if you can feel that they create detrimental results in your life, they are also changeable, which is such an amazing realization. And for me, I know that when I experienced this and when I see my clients experience this. It is so liberating because now you start to see that results both on and off the scale are actually possible. I hope you all enjoyed today's chit chat conversation around changing habits and really think about what are your top three habits that you can see gets in the way of you hitting your weight loss goals. What gets in the way of you sustaining your weight loss results? What are your top three habits? And be really specific, as specific as you can be, think about what are your three specific habits that are holding back results for you this week. And ask yourself if you could just change and pivot instead of doing that specific habit as your response, picked a new response, what would the impact be? You on the scale, from what I guess, and from the work that I do, you would start hitting your goals this week, which means you would start having compounded success. Even before new year's hits. I really want that for you, my friends. And also if you are enjoying this podcast and you are taking something away from it, I would absolutely love it if you could take 30 seconds and leave a rating and review that really shares with me number one, that you're enjoying this content, that it's valuable to you. So I know to keep going and also leaving a podcast rating and review on whichever podcast platform you're on will help this podcast become more findable by other professional women, which is truly my mission.

  Thank you all so much for spending this time with me. And I hope you guys all have a great day. Bye. Thanks for spending this time with me on the Burn Stress, Lose Weight Podcast. 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.