Summary 

Sometimes life throws a curveball, and this week, that meant a surprise mom duty moment for me. But rather than skip a podcast episode (which I never do), I’m sharing a gem I’ve never released here before. This episode walks you through exactly how to evaluate your weight loss results like a rockstar, without drama, guilt, or throwing in the towel when the scale doesn’t budge.

If you’ve ever told yourself, “It’s just not working” or spiraled into shame after a pound crept up, this episode is your antidote. I’m breaking down why overachievers tend to avoid evaluation, how to flip discouragement into data, and why this ONE weekly habit might be the most important meeting on your calendar.

Learn more about the group: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/group 

Get the Hormones Training: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/hormones

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why I used to treat the scale like an exam I was scared to fail—and what finally changed that.
• The sneaky reasons overachieving women avoid evaluating their results (even when we’re great at tracking everything else).
• How to stop saying “It’s not working” and start asking better questions that actually move the needle.
• The power of self-compassion (even if it feels awkward AF at first) and how it literally rewires your brain.
• My go-to weekly evaluation questions that take less than 20 minutes—but have helped me and my clients lose weight and keep it off. 

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

• Get the Hormones Training by clicking here.
• Want to work with me? Learn about The Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group by clicking here. 

Download the full transcript here.

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  Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. Today I'm taking a little bit of an unexpected turn because of some scheduling things with my kids. As you all know, if you are a busy professional working mom, sometimes scheduling stuff comes up and I am now having to take care of my kids when I was supposed to be recording this week and next week's podcast episodes. So instead of skipping the week, because I don't think I've ever missed a week on this podcast ever since its inception, I've decided to bring back one of my most favorite topics and calls that I've never actually released on this podcast before, but I have done a class on it in the past, and that is how to evaluate your weight loss results like a rockstar. Most clients that I've worked with and I have talked with, so many of you do not actually have an objective. Process in place to evaluate your results on the scale. You probably don't even have actually a process to evaluate the results you most want in your life, whether it's in a relationship or in your professional career. And when you don't have a very clear evaluation process that is built into the routine of your week to week. Schedule, then it is no surprise when your results are also waxing and weaning. You feel maybe confused about why the scale is not moving at the rate that you want it to move, or why you're not hitting your strength goal, or why you're not hitting that relationship goal or that professional goal you might feel confused or overwhelmed, or you don't even know what decisions to be making to achieve your results. And that is usually because you do not have a clear and objective evaluation process in place. And that's what we're going to get into in today's call. So I'm not going to belabor and explain this anymore. I'm going to just dive into the call that we had. This was from about a month ago that I shared this call on Zoom, but I never released onto the podcast and I'm going to tap into it today because. My mama heart has to go and take care of my kids, and I couldn't record this episode that I had initially wanted to record. I promise you it will be coming soon don't worry. But I want you to go and listen to this episode and if you love it, if you're taking something away from it, I would love to hear from you. Send me a DM over on Instagram, I am @burnstressloseweight. And I am also available via email. If you want to email me your takeaways and how you're going to maybe consider implementing this into your life, send me an email at [email protected]. I hope you love this episode. If you love the work we're doing, we still have a couple of spots left in our upcoming cohort. The next group is starting on July 9th, which means like we are right there, right around the corner. And truly, this group is going to help you feel better as you're losing the weight you want to lose so you end this year with the best, best, best year ever. If you're interested in working with me, head over to burnstressloseweight.com/group. You can get on my consult calendar where we can talk, and I really hope to talk to you soon. Okay guys, let's get into it and I hope you love it as much as I do.

  Welcome back, my friends. I feel like all the topics that we've been doing on this entire coffee chat series have been the favorite parts of hitting goal weights. Your wellness goal, your weight loss goal as a busy professional, and what I have realized when I think about the coffee chat series that we're doing in today's topic, which is really, one of my favorite topics is there are very specific strategic gaps that I have noticed as a trend specifically for overachieving professional women. I've talked with so many friends and colleagues and fellow moms who are busy, professional working moms, and I have asked them a series of questions like what has really gotten in your way? Where was your planning? Where was your nutritional support? Where was your fun, your play? Where was your evaluation process and really taking a fine tooth comb over. What are the gaps for smart women to feel like they have a tough time hitting their goal weight, hitting their wellness goals? And this is one of the biggest strategic gaps that I have found across the board with smart overachieving women in literally every industry. So it's fascinating because in training and in school we get tested, right? So I, I don't know about you, so I'm just gonna share a little bit about me, and then we're gonna get into exactly how to evaluate your results, weight loss, and wellness results like a rock star, which means no drama in school. We would take tests right at the end of a marking period, or at the end of a semester, you would take a test and that test would tell you really how you did over the course of the whole semester. I hated exams. I hated taking tests, and a lot of my hate for evaluation. A lot of my fear around evaluation and grades, like getting an A versus a B versus a C, it fills me with a lot of dread. I felt really scared about taking exams if I was not 100% sure that I was going to ace an exam, that I was 100% like really solid in the subject. I felt really afraid of taking the exam. I felt really afraid, like, am I gonna do okay? Am I gonna get the A? And I think that it is that relationship with evaluation that especially for overachievers who have perfectionist type A tendencies, you really love getting the A and the gold star. It really trickles into how you look at your weight loss results, how you're looking at results in your relationships in the professional workplace. If you have a goal to get a promotion or to get paid more or to have some big dream, whatever your goal is. We have a really contentious relationship with evaluation, not because that's how we are all born. It's because especially overachievers have a really unfortunate relationship with evaluation just because of how we grew up, because of the way that we trained. So what I really wanted to do was highlight what is the reason that smart overachievers are not evaluating? What is the cost of not having a routine evaluation system built into your life? How you can do it without spending hours and hours of time, like how you can actually fold it into the reality of your life as a busy professional, and how I recommend you evaluate your weight loss results so that you can go from being stuck or more than being stuck. Most women are, you lose a few, you gain a few, you lose a few. You getting second in a cycle into creating what I want for anyone that's listening, really creating momentum towards hitting your goals and ultimately having sustainable results. Because again, this is one of those topics that I hear across the board where we can all lose weight. We've all lost weight before. It's not actually so hard to lose weight. You can kind of double down grit your teeth and muscle through any weight loss plan. We've all done it, but for it to be sustainable, which means it lasts through the seasons of your real life, it lasts through challenging moments with your marriage, with your children, aging parents, challenges at work, busy and hectic schedules after school activities, summer vacations, work trips can we hear that there are hundreds of flavors of obstacles and challenges that busy professional working moms face. Your results have to be able to stand the test of your real life. And I think that, you know, when we don't have the ability to really evaluate like a dark to a bullseye, where are the strategic gaps? It's really no surprise that we gained the weight back, right? We don't take into account our real life as busy professional working moms. So I just wanna share with you if you know that that has been one of your gaps, you're in the perfect place. That is exactly what we're going to cover today. And I wanna just take a minute to tell you a little bit about me, and then we're going to dive into this exact coffee chat. So if you're new to me, hello. I am Dr. Priyanka Venugopal. I am an OBGYN turned stress and weight loss coach. And a lot of what I share, not just on this coffee chat, but in the podcast and in all the classes that I give, and inside my group coaching program is very, very informed by my physician journey, my journey as a scientist, someone that is evidence-based and really looks at the data on what supports professional women, your hormone health and your metabolism, but is equally informed by my life as a very busy professional working mom. A few years ago, back in 2018, 2019, I weighed a little over 200 pounds. I was a literal expert in women's health, and yet somehow it felt like my results were very out of my reach. It's like I knew what to do, but I couldn't do it. Or I could do it for short periods of time, but I couldn't sustain it. And it was really kind of mind-boggling to me that as a smart woman who can achieve results in so many areas of my life, I got through medical school and residency and literally living what felt like, you know, a dream life on paper. I could not solve this one thing, and I was feeling deeply uncomfortable physically in my body. I did not feel like I had the energy to run after my two young kids. And there was a point that came, this was back in 2019, that I hit a personal level of frustration that really forced me to take a deeper look at this. So I wanted to share this because you can come onto this coffee chat. You can be here either watching this live or coming as a replay or listening to this recording, and you can absolutely consume this information that we're going to talk about very passively or you can consume it. It'll kind of feel good because it's like very, you know, motivating to learn something new. However, to take anything that we are creating together here on this call and putting it into your real life is going to require. Leveling up the effort. It's like thinking about this as an active sport, prioritizing it, and especially if you're a busy professional woman who might have the thought, I don't have enough time. So many other parts of my life need my attention. What about my kids? What about my marriage? What about my work? I hear you. And also the only way to overcome that is your frustration with where you are has to be so much. That it is the only thing that is going to motivate you to leave your status quo because the reality is what we're talking about today, to evaluate your weight loss results like a rockstar, which means without the drama, without the hullabaloo that your brain creates to do the work it takes, which can be really simple. It does require an effort. So I'm inviting all of you that knows you want to hit your goal weight this year. You want to create sustainable changes in your life where you feel better in your mind, your body, your soul, your spirit, your heart. I want you to know, you have to claim it. I want to encourage you to not think about this as a passive consumption video because I know how good those feel. I have a email full of webinars and calls that I have, like I'm going to get to one day, but you want results, I really want to invite you to claim it. So I wanna just start with that because I know how good it feels to passively. Listen, I want you to actively create results. So let's just start with, and if you listen to this a replay answer out loud, do you have an evaluation process that is routine and built in, like folded into the structure of your life as a busy, professional working mom? Do you have an evaluation process that is simple, it's repeatable, it's like just something that like you just do. Get it again into your life. Is it built in? Okay, next question. Why do you not have an evaluation process built into your weight loss routine? Really think about every other part of your life, and I think a professional career is probably the best example, like to become the professional that you are. You had to evaluate yourself. You had to evaluate what you knew. You had to find your gaps. You had to study those things that you didn't know well. You had to put in that effort to achieve your professional success. So why do we think that this result is any different? Okay. I'm gonna share with you the reasons that we don't have an evaluation process built into our weight loss routine.

  Number one, you might not have one or might not do it because you didn't know that you needed one. That's like the most common one. You're like, do I need that? Why do I need that? I know what to do. I didn't eat less. Move more, eat more protein. Go for walks. 10,000 steps. I just need do what I said I was gonna do, right? Most don't do it because they didn't know that they needed one. You think that you can just do it in your head? You might have this idea like, oh, I know that I didn't follow what I said I was gonna do, so next week I'm just gonna do what I said I'm gonna do. Those are kinda the common reasons. Another one was, it just seems annoying. It's cumbersome. Like I don't even know what, how do I evaluate my results? What am I supposed to ask myself? How am I supposed to do this? So when we have confusion around how to evaluate results, your brain will very naturally not do it. It's like, well, we're kind of confused about this. It's probably not that big of a deal. Let's just double down and like start from scratch again. But I really want you to think about this. As a smart, professional woman, you are actually already very expert at doing what you said you were going to do. You pay your bills on time, you pay your taxes, you pick your kids up when you're supposed to. You take them where they're supposed to, you feed them, you have a home, right? So smart professional women are already very expert at discipline. We're already very good at doing what we said. So that's not the actual gap, that's not the strategic gap that we have when it comes to why you don't have sustainable results on the scale. I really wanted to highlight this because if we don't diagnose the right strategic gap, you won't be able to solve the problem with the right strategy. So this is one of the biggest ones, and we don't know why is it that this week I did not. Hit my goals this week. Why is that? This month I did not hit my goals. This month we have to be able to like, again, like a dart towables, I figure out what they are. So most of the time, overachievers will not evaluate because it feels boring or tedious. So, Shelby, I'm thinking about use, sharing that it feels cumbersome a hundred percent. It is cumbersome. You might feel embarrassed or have some shame around lacking results. So you feel really bad about the fact that you're still struggling with this problem. You have embarrassment or shame about it. And very normally when you feel embarrassed or shame you hide like, you know what? Like fresh start. Let me not look at the data. Let me not step on the scale. Let me just double down, lose some weight and then I'll get into a rhythm with this, you might be someone that is not evaluating because you just love fresh start energy. It's like, you know, our weightloss results are kind of confusing and this has been up and down and so this is so messy that I just wanna like wipe it all clean. And I want a fresh start and I wanna just start from scratch that feels really good. Fresh starts, clean slates, blank planners feel really good having a lot of like confusing red marks. Nobody loves that. Our brains don't love that. The other reason, and this is more of a kind of subconscious reason that we're going to get into, is you don't know the answer for some of these questions. We're gonna get into what those questions are like you, when I, if I asked you like, so what happened this week? Like, why is a scale up a pound? Or why did you eat that food when you said you weren't going to, your initial, most reflexive answer might be, I don't know. I don't know. Priyanka stop asking me these questions. So when your brain goes to that, I don't know why. Again, it makes sense. There's a discomfort there. Your brain is going to want to not evaluate results. So I wanna just start by saying what we're talking about today is going to apply to results across the board with every corner of your life. This is weight loss results, this is relationship results, how you feel in a marriage with your kids, your professional goals. It is incredibly tedious, boring, and borderline annoying. Very cumbersome to push your brain to answer these questions. However, it is extremely effective. So I think it's really important that we ask ourselves the question, is my weight loss result worth it for me? To experience the cumbersome and the boring and the annoyingness of doing an evaluation, if I could tell you that this was a essential step to guarantee your results this year. Is it worth it for you? Is it worth it for you to do the boring, tedious, cumbersome work? What I wanna just start by saying is we have to first decide that the boring, tedious, cumbersome work, which is annoying and is irritating, is not a problem because these results. Are worth it to us. These results matter to us. The example that I often give my clients, I've shared it here, I've shared it on the podcast before, is I want you to imagine that your kid is waiting for you at the bus stop and you know that you have to go pick them up at four o'clock, and it might feel annoying to go get them. You might be interrupting your day. It might feel kind of like, oh, do I have to go do that? You would never leave your kid waiting at the bus stop just because it was annoying or cumbersome or irritating. Yet when it comes to our goals, our body goals, like how we are feeling, we are not willing to do the tedious work to claim our results, which is why that question is so important to answer. Are you willing to do the boring, tedious, cumbersome work of evaluating if your goals matter to you? So the next piece I wanna talk about is. This little graph that I've drawn. So if you're listening to this as an audio, I've drawn a line. It's a black line. It's this is a straight line where we all love having kind of a obstacle free process. You wanna have a straight line down. You wanna be able to maybe lose a one pound per week. You might calculate it out like a spreadsheet for hitting your goal weight. You wanna drop a half pound a week, one pound per week, and you just imagine if I just lost weight like this, then I would eventually hit my goal. But the reality is that because our bodies are not robots and we have dynamic lives, maybe if you are ovulating still or you still get a period, you have cyclical changes. Maybe if you work at a hospital, you have long shifts. Maybe you have certain times of the month that you have less sleep, maybe you have more stress at certain times of the week you might travel. There are certain real life circumstances that will actually be like obstacles. Your weight loss journey. So what typically happens for most people, for most professional women especially, is we will start at some point on the scale and either real life happens, you ate when you weren't, you know, you hadn't planned on it. You overeat something that you didn't plan on. You use food as a break from your real life stresses, or you didn't like actually think about how to have rest and fun without food. The scale's up a pound. What do you tell yourself in that moment? You stand on the scale. Maybe it's after a weekend, a date night, just a typical Tuesday. You stand on the scale and it's up a pound. What is the story you tell yourself when the scale is up a pound? Most of us will have a very normal three C story. So what's a three C story? It's convenient, it is convincing, and it is very, very compelling to just go back to your status quo. So you might have a thought like, there I go again. See, it's never going to work. This is so hard. I'll never figure this out. You know what? Why bother? Screw it. Can you hear these thoughts? And we talked about this in our very first coffee chat. These are low currency thoughts. The reason that we talked about low currency and high currency thoughts is because it's going to impact your results on the scale. So if you have not watched the high currency, low currency thought coffee chat after this video, after this call, I strongly recommend that you go and watch that. Okay, so you gained a pound and you tell yourself you're not disciplined. How does that feel when you tell yourself that you're not disciplined? There I go again. It's never going to work. Ugh, it's so hard. Why bother? That's another one. How do you feel when you tell yourself that? Very, very dramatic, convincing, compelling, and convenient story. Disappointed. Dread. Okay, so when you feel. Dread disappointment. Devastated. So discouraged with yourself. When you feel those emotions, what do you do next? You throw in the towel. I drew on the board. When you gain a pound and you tell yourself a story, like, see, there you go again. You're not disciplined. You'll never figure this out so hard. I can't believe you. You end up throwing in the towel and not getting deeply curious about why you gained that pound up on the scale. So if you're saying you're not disciplined, what exactly happened? If it wasn't disciplined, what exactly happened? What was the actual thing that happened in real time? What ends up happening because there is an effort. What I'm talking about is actually putting an effort in that moment to allow yourself to feel disappointed, allow yourself to feel discouraged. How normal of you, you have a human brain, right? So normal that you're disappointed in the scale being up a pound. Imagine that instead of taking your foot off the gas, which is what most of us do when we hit an obstacle pound up on the scale, you get rejected from a party. You don't get the promotion. You have a fight with your partner. Something goes awry with your kid. When we hit an obstacle, most of the time we take our foot off the gas. Why do we take our foot off the gas? The reason that most overachievers take their foot off the gas is because they don't want to feel an emotion. So in reality, when you really think about, you know, if you imagine weight loss and like your dream goal weight, but you have a little bit of a fear or a huge fear of failing, you're not actually afraid of the failure. You're not actually afraid of this pound up on the scale. You're not afraid of the missed opportunity at work. You're not afraid of the missed promotion. Most overachievers are actually hating and afraid of failure because of how you will treat yourself when you fail. Can you hear that? It's how you talk to yourself when you fail, how you treat yourself, when you feel disappointed or devastated or discouraged. How do we treat ourselves most of the time when we're not aware of it, and again, if this is you, this was me too for a very long time. I didn't realize that I was even treating myself in a really hypercritical very shameful way because I'm a generally half glass full kind of person. I'm generally an optimist if you just meet me out and about. I'm a very optimistic glass half full kind of person. I've always been that way. But my inner soundtrack, my inner monologue, when I failed at something, when I did not get the A, when the scale was up a pound, when I hit an obstacle in my work life or in my personal life, my inner monologue was C. There you go again. You're probably never gonna figure this out. I can't believe you. Can you hear that? That was my inner soundtrack, how I was talking to myself. So the thing that I was actually fearing was not the pound up on the scale. The thing I was fearing was how I was going to talk to myself when I did, and it is that one thing, my mission and really my desire for anyone that's listening to this is to understand the power of that low currency thought. When you tell yourself, see, there you go again. You're not disciplined. We'll never figure this out. I can't believe you. We drip in so much shame and criticism and blame and judgment and so much of that, that it makes sense that our very normal human brain is like, you know what? We can't do this anyway. We take our foot off the gas. We just don't want to hear it anymore. Now, one of the things that I didn't know for a very long time is that I even had an inner soundtrack. I thought, that's just who I am. That's just how I am. I didn't realize that the thoughts that I was having about my results, the thoughts I had about the pound upon the scale or the obstacle in front of me were actually thoughts that I could change. I didn't realize that for a long time it was like God was who I am. That's just how I do things, so it's no wonder. I didn't know that I could change my thoughts in which we're gonna talk about in just a few minutes. It's no wonder that I kept taking my foot off the gas and I kept recreating a lot of those results. So first and foremost, we really have to identify up until this point, up until you listening to this call right now, when the scale. Has been up a pound. When you were imperfect, you went off plan. You used food to have fun. You used food to take a life break, something came up for you and the scale is up a pound. The very first step in how to evaluate your results like a rockstar is to catch the story you have had up until this point. What have you made it mean? And that is an optional story. It's an optional story, and that is going to be, again, a very normal three C story that your brain will hold onto because it feels more familiar.

  Step two, we have to anticipate that when the scale's up a pound, you might feel disappointed about it. You might feel devastated that you didn't get what you wanted. You might have put so much effort in and you missed the mark on something. I was just talking with a client yesterday in the Unstoppable Group and we were coaching on this idea that if you put your full effort into something and then you don't get what you wanted to get. How would it feel for you? And she was sharing. She would feel devastated. You put your heart, your soul, your mind into something. You put your full effort and you don't get what you wanted. We get a little righteous, right? We get a little like this, like righteous indignation. Like if I put my full effort in, I better get the results I want, rather than the reality of I might put my full effort into this and there still might be a gap. I still might not get exactly what I wanted at the rate and pace that I wanted. I want all of us to imagine that we just signed up to let ourselves feel that discomfort and you kept your foot on the gas in that moment. So what this would look like is you have a plan, which we're going to be talking about in next week's coffee chat. You have a strategy that is giving you enough high quality nutrition that is supporting your hormone health, supporting your vitality. You have a strategy that takes into account your real life. Rest and play and movement. You have a strategy that fits into your life that will guarantee you results on scale. I want you to imagine you have a strategy like that, and then when it comes into real life implementation, maybe you're not perfect, you went off plan, something happened over the weekend, you had a date night, you overate something and scale is up a pound. I want you to imagine that it is so normal that you experience feeling disappointed. You feel? Ooh, there. I can't believe myself. I want you to imagine that in that moment though, instead of taking your foot off the gas where you just micro quit, you throw in the towel, you say screw it, and you like try to go to fresh starts. I want you to imagine in that moment you keep your foot on the gas, let yourself feel uncomfortable. I promise you that feeling cannot jump out of your body and attack you. Nothing is going wrong in that moment. I want you to hold some compassion for yourself. Like imagine that you were talking to yourself like you were four years old or five years old, and you, you know, you really wanted to get onto the soccer team and you didn't get onto the soccer team. I don't know if they do that when they're five. I think everybody gets onto the soccer team when they're five years old. But I want you to imagine that there is like a little kid in you that is so discouraged that you did not get onto the soccer team, that you did not hit the goal. How would you talk to a really young child? We want to really validate. Oh my gosh. Of course you feel disappointed. That's so normal. I would be disappointed too. Your discouragement makes so much sense. I love you so much. I know this sounds almost like awkward and maybe cheesy, and especially if you're a practically minded overachiever, like, you know, like I am, it feels really like awkward because we are not used to talking to ourselves like this. However, there is data and studies when we have compassion for ourself, especially when you are hitting a failed moment. When you are navigating a challenging obstacle. When you activate compassion, your brain will release oxytocin and this will relax your nervous system. There's actual MRI studies, distress signals in your amygdala will start to go down when you practice self-compassion. And I think one of the biggest mistakes I used to make for a very long time, and I see overachievers do this time and time again, this might be you, is you think that compassion is complacency. Like, oh, that means I'm just going to brush my results into the broth and I won't be able to like get to work. Listen for us to hit our goal weight, for us to hit any goal, we're never going to brush anything under the rug. Never. Like that's just not going to be part of our game plan. However, criticism is going to kill the cat. You know, when you say like curiosity, kill the cat. No, it's actually criticism. Criticism will kill your results. It's going to kill your spirit. It's going to kill your belief in yourself. It's going to create so much harm and microtrauma in your body, in how you view your body, in how you view weight loss. In the entire journey that it's not a surprise if you throw in the towel. So step one, we have to catch what have the stories been up until now and the scale is up a pound? What have you made it mean? What dramatic story did you attach to the pound up on the scale? That's the reason that you recreate those results. Step two, we have to anticipate they were going to feel disappointed that if the scale's up a pound or we weren't perfectly on plan over the weekend or over date night, something came up that you're going to feel disappointed and discouraged. Step three, meet yourself with so much compassion. This is going to feel, I'm letting you know now super awkward for you. It's going to feel awkward for you. I wanna just let it feel awkward. Trust me. Let it feel awkward, actually leverage brain science and allow yourself to relax your nervous system the next step. Turn a sentence into a question. So usually when the scale's up a pound, we have a very normal, very reflexive thought, like, see, it didn't work. See, there you go again. We have to turn that low currency thought into a high currency informative question. So what that looks like is, instead of thinking it didn't work, which creates a discouragement and the disappointment and the despair and the disbelief, we have to flip the script into I wonder why it didn't work. And I want you to really think about the toned and the tenor with which you're asking this question. It can't be like a rhetorical jab at yourself. It has to really come from true curiosity. And this is where, you know, we were talking at the start of today's call. This is really coming to deeply curious. There's an effort here to actually answer. I wonder why it didn't work. It's going to push your brain. I say this because if you knew why it didn't work already, you wouldn't have done it. So when we ask that question, Hey self, we went up a pound, we had this awesome plan and we didn't do it over the weekend. I wonder why, was it a planning issue? Did I have a gap in what I planned for? Did I have rest in play built into my schedule? Did I use food to take a break from my life? Stresses? Did I use food to connect with people? Did I feel fomo? Like I want you to see what ends up happening when you take a closed ended sentence like, see, there you go again. See, it's never going to work. Ugh. You're just not disciplined enough and how terrible that feels. And flip the script and turn that dead end question. Low currency thought into a high currency informative question. I wonder why it didn't work. I wonder why I went off plan. I wonder why I used food to take a break from my life. I wonder why I had FOMO about the cupcakes. I wonder why I, in that social setting, I used food to connect with people rather than conversation. I wanted preface this by saying it might feel challenging to. Know how to turn your dead end low currency thoughts into high quality, high currency questions. That's what coaching is all about. This is what I do with my clients, is I show them how to do this on a week-to-week basis. If you don't know how to do this in real time, just try your best and also anticipate that your initial answer's going to be, I don't know. So if I'm like, why didn't it work? Why did I not follow the plan? If your brain offers you, I don't know, again, I want you to be like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We know that you don't know. Let's just take a best guess. So my daughter, who is six and a half, whenever something's kind of going awry for her, she has very much perfectionist tendencies, very unlike my son, and whenever she hits a roadblock. She like really gets very frustrated. She throws her hands up in the air. She's been doing this like thing where she growls. It's really cute to me. She's obviously very frustrated and I ask her, I was like, what happened here? And she like really tenses up her fist and she's like, I don't know. You might experience that like a little tantrum in your brain that's like, I don't know. And I want you to not let that be the end of the conversation. So again, imagine that you are talking with a young child that is saying, I don't know. That answer's not going to fly with you anymore. Don't let your, I don't knows, fly with you anymore. That's just perpetuating your confusion. It's perpetuating overwhelm, and it's not taking your brain to the higher quality answer. And so I want you to ask if you hear, I don't know, actually answer the question. Okay. I know you don't know maybe the exact right answer. What is your best guess? What's your best guess? Let's just take a guess. I know that practically minded overachievers don't love guessing, but guessing at the answer is better than not answering the question at all. Here's what happens when you start asking, I wonder why it didn't work this past week, and you really take a fine tooth comb and do a little inventory. Yes, this is tedious. Yes, it's going to feel boring. Yes, it's a little annoying. Yes, this does take, I'm telling you, no more than 20 minutes per week. If you put in 20 minutes per week to evaluate your results on a routine basis, you will save hundreds of hours per year. Hey, say this because I've done the math on this. Do you know how many hours we spend on telling ourselves the low currency? C, it's not gonna work. C didn't work. C, you're just not disciplined enough. I can't believe you. We spend hundreds of hours per year telling ourselves low currency thoughts rather than telling ourselves in short moments, 20 minutes per week, high currency questions. So this idea, 'cause I coach my clients on this all the time, this idea that I don't have enough time to evaluate my results, I wanna claim you don't have time not to do this. You don't have time not to do this. As a busy, professional working mom, if you want results, you don't have time to not do this. We don't have time to waste anymore on the dramatic stories we tell ourselves of. See, there you go again. See's never going to work. You don't have time for that. I don't think any of us here have time to feel stuck and frustrated anymore. My mission for all of us that's watching this is you have a life you want to live. You want to solve this problem so you can go really live your life and feel the best in your body, right? Like hit the goals you want. Physically and mentally and emotionally, so you can show up and go like do your dream life. So I really wanna encourage you, you don't have time to not do this, but putting it into a practice might take a little bit of effort. What happens when you start asking high quality questions? Here's the second piece of the process. This is where there is an effort and it's worth your effort to do this. I wonder why it didn't work. Actually answering that question, you have to be honest with yourself. This is taking radical responsibility. So when I say radical ownership or radical responsibility, this is another part that can feel really disconcerting on how do I take radical responsibility without shame, blame, or judgment? And this might feel like a completely mind-boggling new process for you on how do I take radical responsibility without the shame and the blame and the judgment. I want you to practice. I just want you to try where you actually ask yourself, I wonder what didn't work? Where did I not plan for my success this week? Really, like I'm asking again, I want you to hear the tone and the tenor that I'm coming into this question with. Where did I miss the gap? Where did I miss planning for myself? Did I try to fit 25 hours of work into a 12 hour workday? Where was I wishful? Where was I winging it? I wonder why I did that. Oh, is it because I'm more used to prioritizing my kids and my family and my work over myself? Okay. It's good to know. Notice how when we start asking these kinds of questions, we start to actually get information. I. So now with that information, I want you to notice information just lets us pave the path for a micro tweak we can make for next week. So our options were the red, you know, the stuck frustration repeating the cycle where you just tell yourself a low currency dead end thought. See, it's not gonna work. See, there you go again. You're just not disciplined. Dead end done. You know, create your results again and again. Keep your frustration. You're gonna keep your results. What I'm talking about is we have to anticipate because your body's not a robot and you have a normal human, messy brain, and life is life and life is going to life. We're going to have real moments where the scale's up a pound. You don't execute perfectly when the scale is up a pound. We have to anticipate. Of course, I feel disappointed. Of course, I feel discouraged. I know it sucks that that happened, and also I wonder why it did. What happened here? What did I not do? What did I not plan for? What did I not prepare for? Did I use food in a way that food is not meant to be used? Where was my rest in play? Did I use food as my like main joy in life? When we actually answer that question truly from radical ownership, real responsibility without the shame and the blame and the judgment, now we have information and now we get to use that information. If you can see my blue dotted lines. To get on track, like you never left off adding in information with a small micro tweak. So when you do that, so the example that I've been giving is maybe I didn't. Actually prioritize any rest or play. In my week, I was so busy 'cause again, overachievers are so addicted to productivity. You finish your to-do list and you are like trying to get ahead on next week's to-do list and the week after that to-do list, you never actually gave yourself guilt free rest and play. Turns out when I don't plan for rest and play, my brain will very normally get it in the form of snacking and scrolling. How brilliant is that? If I don't give my brain guilt-free rest and play truly built into the structure of my life, my brain will steal it. And snacking and scrolling is the fastest way to do it. So I can learn a lesson if the scales up a pound. 'cause it didn't follow the plan. It's not for lack of discipline. It is most likely your brain did not get real guilt-free rest in play. That's all. So now imagine I'm like, oh, okay. Turns out if I actually had some guilt-free rest in play built into the structure of my life. If I didn't need food to take a break now, what would happen? What would happen next week? So then we take that information, we build it into the structure of next week, and now we run the experiment again. What starts to happen when you put the reps into this process and this is not a one and done. Okay. Evaluating your weight loss results is not a one and done situation. This is something you want to build it in. It is like the CEO meeting. That is the most important meeting of your week. It's like the director meeting that's going to help you run your life in the most effective way possible.

  It's going to save you hundreds of hours of time, like trying to make decisions in the moment. When you fold this into the structure of your week, 20 minutes, make it fun, like make it enjoyable. Get some music out, get out your favorite beverage, right? Like really make it enjoyable. What happened this week? What worked well? What were the things in my week that worked really well for me? Was it planning? Was it strategizing? Was it that restaurant? Was it that takeout? What worked well? What didn't work well? I wonder where the gap was. Did I not plan for something? Did I use food in a way to give me my joy to take a break from my life? Stress? I wonder what would happen. If I was able to create that without food. And take that information now, build it into the structure of next week, the key piece of sustainability, because this is part of what I am seeing as the number one barrier for professional women. We can lose weight, but then it's really hard to sustain it through those seasons of your real life. What ends up happening is when life changes, when you have real life obstacle with the work with your family, with. Something that makes weight loss or your ability to execute on your plan feel more challenging. We are not doing this. We're not doing an evaluation process on where was the hardship specifically for me this week. The kind of analogy that I like to give, especially when it comes to weight loss, we are using a broad brush to paint a fine painting. We keep using like it was a hard week period. What was hard about it? Let's get curious here, like let's get detailed, and I know that part of the reason we don't do this, why we don't get detailed in specifics because it is cumbersome and it's hard to do on your own right. It's really hard to start asking yourself the questions. You may not know, which questions to ask yourself. How do I get to that dart to a bullseye question and information to make that tweak? I always strongly encourage that anyone that really wants to do this work with high level. Effectiveness, work with a coach, you can still start incorporating this on your own. So I really want you to start playing with this idea, building in an evaluation process. At the same time, make it an like a meeting with yourself. The most important meeting of your week. Start to catch step one. What have been the stories that you have told yourself? If the scale is up a pound. Have you been treating yourself like a robot, like you're just supposed to be getting a week after week after week? Just think about what has been your convincing, compelling, and convenient story that has kept you stuck, that has kept you throwing in the towel. That's just you taking your foot off the gas. Step two, anticipate not if when the scale is up a pound, you're going to have a feeling about it. You're going to feel disappointed or discouraged or despair. You're gonna have an emotion. How normal, because you have a normal human brain that you just care about this, of course, you feel disappointed. Step three, let go of criticism and access compassion. This is the one that will feel woo to you. It might feel awkward to you because you're not used to doing it, but there's brain science here. I really want to help you leverage brain science. Because when you can have compassion for yourself on this journey, you'll physiologically relax your nervous system. And a relaxed nervous system is the only type of. Way to take radical responsibility. I really wanna highlight this piece. When you are hypercritical of your results, hypercritical of how you executed your stress date is so high cortisol levels are just shooting through your body. Because you're so critical of your results, it is going to be near impossible for you to take. Radical ownership of your results, it's going to be near impossible for you to assess what specifically happened that week for the results to be what they are. So I'm really making a strong plug for why compassion is necessary over criticism. It is going to relax your nervous system. It is going to lower your cortisol levels, it's going to release oxytocin. I wanna really make the case for why compassion is necessary and after you experience. Compassion. You have to get to being deeply curious instead of saying it didn't work, it's so hard. Flip it into a question, what exactly didn't work? Why was it hard this week? Did I not plan for something? Did I use food to take a break? Did I use food to connect with people? What exactly happened for me? And how can that information help me inform next week's strategy? The reason that I think that this is such an important process is because this is exactly how I lost over 60 pounds and have kept it off now for years. And I share this a lot, and this is something I talk about on the podcast a lot. It's something that I share in my webinars a lot. It's possible to lose a lot of weight and then. You're going to have moments that it goes back up. If I travel or if I have a particularly stressful week or something's really coming up with my kid or with work, the scale might be up a couple pounds because my brain might use food snacking or scrolling to again, take a break from real life stresses. But what doesn't happen anymore is a couple pounds up on the scale doesn't turn into the 60 pounds coming back up on the scale. And the reason is because of this. Process. And the reason this is so important to fold into our life is because when we start to do the reps on this, your brain will actually start to think in evaluation all the time. You won't have to actually, like in the beginning as I'm sharing, it's kind of boring and tedious, a little cumbersome, like you have to put it onto the calendar. It feels very effortful because it's not habitual. But what happens when you start putting in the reps, just like with anything, your brain actually gets rewired. You start thinking in solutions all the time. So one of the big differences between this red circle that I drew, the stuck and the frustrated, the low currency thoughts of, it's so hard, I'll never get there. I'm not disciplined. There you go again. That is marinating your brain in the problem. It's marinating your brain in just living in the land of stuck. What we are talking about here, when you start doing the reps on a week-to-week basis and you start thinking about, I wonder why this was hard. I wonder what got me stuck. I wonder why I didn't make a plan for this. I wonder why I didn't have a goal this week. When you get really curious from that compassionate place, you do that again and again and again. This is the wildest thing. Your brain starts to think in solutions in every part of your life. So what's been fascinating for me, and this is what I love about this work, is your children will benefit from this. This is not even about weight loss. This is about how you engage with. Any problem. So when your child comes to you, and this is real life, when your child comes to you and they haven't been invited to the birthday parties, or they got bullied on the playground, or somebody was unkind to them or they didn't get an A, and they come to you with their tears and they come to you with their sadnesses and their disappointments and their rejections, rather than you marinating in the problem and experiencing. All the worry and all the mom guilt and all of the fears that we have for our children, your brain will start to be focusing on solutions. When you do this work for yourself, you get to do it with them, which means you get to validate their sadness. You get to offer compassion when they're experiencing a rejection or a painful moment, and you get to redirect to, I wonder why that happened. I wonder why we didn't get onto the soccer team. I wonder what skills we were missing. I wonder what we could practice more. It's really wild to me. I get goosebumps every time I think about this because I've seen the impact for my 9-year-old and my 6-year-old. When we do this work, of retraining our brain from frustration to sustainable momentum, your entire energetic being shifts, something shifts in you. Not only will you lose the weight and learn how to keep it off for a lifetime, but a part of your identity changes and people will be able to tell your partner in your marriage, your colleagues, your friends, your children will be able to pick up. The difference in you because you will not be living in a soup of marinating frustration being stuck in the problem. So I really wanted to put a plug for not only why we don't evaluate results, but the cost of not doing this. Is you just keep recreating the same results again and again. And if that's been you, I want you to know I have been there every single time I talk about a new concept or I teach a concept or bring something to you that I really want to help you incorporate. It is not something I have plucked from the sky. It's not just something I read in a workbook or a textbook. It is real lived experience. My life as a busy professional working mom and how I lost 60 pounds while being a busy OB GYN physician, I'm bringing to you science informed strategy and real mom life strategy that won't just help you get to your goal weight. It will help you feel better inside out. And that to me is what lights me up. That's why I am doing. All this that I do because I want more professional women, more working moms to experience this. I have opted out of this, you know, like skinny life and just losing weight just because you want to lose weight because of toxic diet culture. I wanted to lose the weight that I wanted to lose because I didn't feel comfortable in my body. I wanted to come into my 40s with vitality. I wanted to protect my muscle. I wanted to protect my energy levels as I got older and with my OBGYN hat on. Listen, estrogen levels are going down 35 and up. Your estrogen levels are going down, and I think about estrogen as the master conductor of your entire body, your brain, your bone, your metabolism. And I realized if I'm not prioritizing my body, my mental wellness, my spiritual wellness, my physical wellness, nobody can do this work for me. But I also knew that for me to feel better inside out and for me to have that physical strength and vitality and energy that I wanted. I could not do the old way. I couldn't just do the calorie counting and the MyFitnessPal and let's count the macros and the points and let me just like focus on just another meal plan. Because if that was it, I promise you like we are smart people. We are smart people. We are actually very disciplined. If you're a professional woman, you are a smart and disciplined person. Don't tell yourself you're not disciplined. It's not true. It's not a discipline issue. If it was a discipline issue, you would've solved this. So I think that it's. So important that we start to identify what were the strategic gaps so far. In this entire coffee chat series, we have identified a few things, low currency and high currency thoughts. That was the basis of this entire series. I will put the replay, if you're watching this as a replay, I'll link the replay below. It has been living in our private Facebook group, but I know some people have had some issues with the, you know, being on Facebook and they wanna be off social media, so we are going to make this available outside of the private Facebook group. Low currency and high currency thoughts are going to either keep you stuck. In your life with the results you have, or they will help you uplevel every result you have. And I think today was a great example when you have thoughts like, it's so hard, I'll never get there. There I go again. Just catch. How does it feel when you tell yourself that, right? It sounds practical. It's really prophetical when you tell yourself it's never going to work, I promise you it will never work. Rather than really turning around low currency thoughts, into high currency questions, which is I wonder why it didn't work. Let's get curious. Let's take radical ownership. Where were the gaps? Where did I deprioritize myself? I remember there was a time that I was prioritizing the laundry getting done over me preparing and taking care of my body. The laundry is outpacing on our list of priorities, like what has happened here. So I share this. I'm going off on a little rant because when we can understand that our dream results. On the scale and in our life are available to us, to any professional mom. I don't care what time you have, what your profession is, if you have overachieving tendencies, you have specific strategic gaps. Your low currency thoughts are your number one barrier. You will not be able to catch them on your own. I highly, highly encourage that you work with a coach. The second one is really understanding how to evaluate your results like a rockstar. Without drama, you're gonna have an emotion about it. It's not a problem. Just knowing how to turn around low currency thoughts into high currency questions will help you leverage results. And next week's coffee chat, I'm going to be talking about something really fun, which is what is the pieces of a strategy that will help you have guaranteed results? I talk a lot about, you know, people will get really attached to these nutrition plans like you have a PDF, and if you just follow the PDF, then you'll lose the weight you want. Again, if that really worked, then that would've worked. The reality is we need a much more comprehensive strategy to hit our goal weight. So that is coming to you all very soon. If you have any questions about this part of the process, drop it in the q and a. I'm here to answer any questions. If you're watching this as a replay, send me a DM on Instagram, @burnstressloseweight, or send me an email info@theunstoppablemombrain.com and I can answer any questions for you and the next enrollment.

  The Unstoppable Group is opening soon, and if you want to make sure that you get a head start on claiming your spots, spots are limited, you can head over to www.burnsstressloseweight.com/group. You'll get all the details. Shelby, do you have typical questions that you ask yourselves at every evaluation? I do. So one of the questions, there's usually a set of five to six questions that I recommend the you ask. The very first one is. Did you have a goal? Oh, that's the very first one. Did you actually have a goal for this week? A lot of the times we like think we have a goal, but you didn't really have a goal. So it's no surprise again that your plan is very waffly. It's like, are we losing half a pound this week? Do we wanna lose a pound? Is weight loss even the goal this week? Like what is our actual goal? The second question that I recommend asking yourself is. Did you have a plan that you were actually committed to? I want you to really hear the full question. Not did I have a plan? All of us have plans. We make plans. We love making plans. Did I have a plan that I was actually committed to? Did I make decisions in advance that I was actually committed to? Most of the time, these two questions are where the strategic gaps are. You did not actually have a goal for the week. You were just like, I'll just lose some weight. It was like very super specific, really broad. The second question is, you have a plan, but you didn't actually commit to the plan on purpose. The third one is didn't emotion get in the way? So you have a plan that maybe you felt committed to, but then you felt stressed, or then you got into a fight with your partner and you got annoyed, or you felt some worry because your kid didn't get invited to the birthday party, or they got rejected from something, or the scale was up a pound. So you had some disappointment over that, and emotion got in your way. So an emotion drove you to take your foot off the gas. That's going to help you understand what was the emotion for me that let me take my foot off the gas. And the last question is, what can I learn from my answers and these questions that I can incorporate into next week's strategy? So that's my set of questions. Also, depending again on like what your specific journey is, what your actual goals are, we modify these questions to really fit into what your goals are. But that's kind of in a nutshell, the typical questions that I ask. So, recap. This is a strategic gap that most of us are having. I really want you all to incorporate this as a routine into your week. Like really train your brain. Let yourself feel disappointed. Keep your foot on the gas, ask the questions. And again, I strongly encourage that you work with a coach. It does not have to be me. Have a coach that can really help you see, it's like I call these tacks in your ass. Low currency thoughts like, oh, it's so hard, it's not working. I'll never get there. I'm just not disciplined. I call these taxing your ass. They're a big pain of the ass, but it's hard to see because you can't always see your blind spots. So again, I really encourage that you work with a coach that knows how to do this work that will show you thet in your ass. And push you and challenge you to ask the harder questions, push you to feel the discomfort of answering those questions and building them and folding them into your real life. I hope you all enjoy this call as much as I loved delivering it. And again, reach out to me, @burnstressloseweight on Instagram. Email me at [email protected] or book a consult call and let's talk on Zoom. Let's talk. And decide whether we should work together in the Unstoppable Group, which is my six month small group coaching program. I hope you guys have an amazing day, and I will see you at the next one. Bye. I hope you enjoyed today's call. It was really one of my favorite topics to teach inside my entire diagnostic toolbox series. And while I had said I wasn't going to release these all on the podcast just because of scheduling and my mama bear life. We had to make it happen. So I hope you all enjoyed today's episode and you found it valuable. And if you know that this is work you want to do with someone, if you don't want to do this alone, you want actual strategy and proven process to help you cross the finish line with you achieving your weight loss and wellness goals, I would love to see you in the Unstoppable Group. You can head over to burnstressloseweight.com/group. You get all the details. You can get onto my consult calendar and we can talk. About whether it's a good fit for you. Okay, my friend. I'll see you later. 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 wanna take what you are 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.