Summary 

We’re diving deep into the messy middle—the part of your weight loss journey that no one talks about enough but everyone experiences. If you've ever felt like you're doing everything right but still aren't seeing results, this episode is for you. It's not about discipline. It's not about willpower. It's about identifying the strategic gaps that have quietly been stalling your progress and learning how to finally fill them.

In this second part of the 10 Phases series, I walk you through phases 4 to 7: the turning point where things can either fall apart or finally come together. You’ll learn how to handle discomfort, what to do when your plan goes off the rails, and how to keep going even when things get messy. 

🎉 And don’t forget—we’re celebrating the 3-year anniversary of the podcast! Get all the details below!

Enter the Giveaway: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate

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

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why the middle of your journey feels so hard—and why that doesn't mean you're failing
• The #1 mistake overachievers make when they “diagnose” why their plan isn’t working
• What antifungal foot cream can teach you about ineffective weight loss strategies (yes, really!)
• The one emotional skill that most smart women were never taught—but need to master
• What to do after an off-plan moment so you keep your foot on the gas instead of spiraling

Listen to the Full Episode:

Enjoy the Show?

• Follow: Get new episodes in your feed every single week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google or search "Burn Stress, Lose Weight" on your favorite platform.

• Rate & Review: Take a few seconds and leave your review in the stars and comments of this show.

• Instagram: Come hang out with me on Instagram, you'll find me in your daily feed @burnstressloseweight

   

Featured on the Show:

• Want to work with me? Learn about The Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group by clicking here. 
• Enter the giveaway by clicking here.
• Listen to Part 1 of the Weight Loss Series by clicking here.

Download the full transcript here.

•  

   

  Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight Podcast, where we are doing a whole series on the very normal phases of weight loss. This episode today is all about the sticky middle, the messy middle, the part of the journey that not enough people are talking about, and it's very normal because we don't talk about this enough. You're very overachiever, smart brain believes something is going wrong, and this episode is all about de-stigmatizing this part of the journey. It's such a normal part of the journey. It's where your transformation will happen, where you start turning the ship around where you start solving this problem once and for all. If you don't know what I'm talking about, make sure you pause this episode. Go back to last week's episode where I get into phases one, two, and three. Where most overachievers get stuck, you might end up on the rollercoaster of up and down, up and down. You create a lot of distrust and disbelief with yourself. It's simply because you're in phases one, two, and three. It's okay. We're going to talk about exactly how to solve this. In this week and next week's episode, and I mentioned this in last week's episode, but if you hear the occasional airplane or bird or wind, it is because I'm recording this podcast episode outside mostly as a celebration to me, but also because this is where I just feel the most creative, and that is what I wanted to come through on this podcast series. And if you did not know, we are celebrating the three year anniversary of this podcast. We're going to have a whole host of winners for the celebration. You can get all the details on how to participate in this podcast celebration with me over at burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate. Without further ado, let's get into today's episode, the 10 Phases of Weight Loss and Wellness. You might have found yourself on a roller coaster of phases one, two, and three again and again and again. You've gained weight, lost weight, gained weight. Lost weight. Clients that come to work with me are now aware that something has been strategically missing. Clients that come to work with me, they're coming in, it's phase four now, and they're like, there is a gap. There is a gap in my strategy. I know that I want to solve this problem and I know that something is not working. Clearly, me relying on motivation is not enough. Clearly there's something missing in my strategy because I'm a smart person. I solve problems in every other part of my life and I just can't solve this. There must be a strategic gap. And it turns out, every time I hit a life obstacle, I end up giving up on myself. I end up throwing in the towel. Something is missing. So when clients come to work with me, we get into phase four. I call phase four, diagnosing the real problem up until phase four, when you were in phases one, two, and three, part of the strategic gap was you thought, I'm just not disciplined, or I just need to buckle down harder. Right? That's diagnosing the wrong problem. You might've thought something like, I don't have enough time. This season is really hard. My partner's not supportive. My kids are being troublemakers. I don't have time with work and with all of the laundry list of things that you probably have as a busy professional, this is diagnosing the wrong problem. I've given this example on the podcast before, but it fits really well so I'm gonna use it again. It's like trying to treat your menstrual cramps with antifungal foot cream. In no scenario is it going to work. You can have the Cadillac of antifungal foot creams, the best of the best, and you will just rub your foot raw. You'll waste time, money, energy, bandwidth. You will create so much frustration because your menstrual cramps will not improve. So again, it makes a lot of sense if we have. Thought that the antifungal foot cream is going to solve the problem, but we know that it's not working because it hasn't worked. Right? Phase four is where I help my clients diagnose the real problem. If the real reason that you have not yet lost the weight you wanted, had nothing to do with discipline, it had nothing to do with how much time you had. It had nothing to do with how supportive or how obedient your family and kids and your colleagues were, if those were not the real reasons then let's get to what it, phase four is identifying your strategic gap. I love doing this. This is something that I do with my clients before they even come to work with me on a consult call. If you and I have ever talked in a consult call, we really start to identify what your strategic gaps have been. You probably have more than one, and that's okay, but we have to identify them. So then we move to phase five, which is proper planning. We're gonna get to that in just a minute. You actually have a plan that has a shot at working. Here are the most common strategic gaps that I have found in clients that come to work with me. This specifically applies for professional women who have, again, overachieving tendencies. You may or may not identify as a perfectionist or type A person, but you love hitting goals and you hate making mistakes. If that sounds familiar, then these are your strategic gaps. Strategic gap number one, you didn't actually love your plan. I remember for me, when I was trying to lose a lot of weight for my wedding, I was willing to just do whatever because I wanted to lose weight for a very special event. I did a hundred calorie oatmeal packets. I was eating a lot of lettuce, a lot of salads. I was hitting the gym, the treadmill, which was like my least favorite activity six days a week. I was tracking every single calorie and point that I was eating. And it worked. I lost a lot of weight for my wedding, but I hated that strategy. I hated that way of eating. And so the day after my wedding, I wasn't gonna continue it. I stopped eating the, the oatmeal packets. I stopped doing lettuce, and I gained the weight back. So strategic gap number one is you didn't actually love your plan. Now I wanna be really careful here and fully forthcoming. You don't actually have to love your plan all the time. There are going to be moments if you want to achieve your goal, that you have to know how to say no to snacking or eating something that maybe is not what you decided you were going to eat. I wanna be super transparent. You have to love your plan and you don't have to love it. All the time, every single minute of the day. I think that that's really important. Otherwise, we can kind of come in with these wonky expectations of what it's like to lose weight, that you have to be happy and excited and loving your plan all the time. You don't, but you have to overall love your nutrition strategy if you want to be able to sustain it for a lifetime. Another reason that you will not love your strategy is if your strategy was not comprehensive. Really often when you're in phase two, which was you just consume and plan calories and points and macros. Most overachieving women don't actually have a comprehensive strategy that takes into account guilt-free rest and play. And I know this sounds almost crazy because what does playtime and resting have anything to do with weight loss? Because overachieving women are taxing their brains with thousands and thousands of decisions throughout the day. You're managing your kids and work, and your parents and family, all of the people in your life, all of the sticky, uncomfortable challenges that you have. If you don't build in actual guilt-free rest and play, your brain will steal it. That's where urges and cravings come from. That's why you will snack and scroll even when your body's not hungry. The next strategic gap that I'm seeing across the board, this is still a strategic gap for me very often I slip back into forgetting this and then I have to relearn. It is very specific emotional super skills. That moment when life circumstances are thrown your way, either with an aging parent or a troublesome like trouble with your kid or something with your partner, or maybe something that your colleague said or your boss said, or you're lengthy to-do list. There are a million flavors for the professional women where you're going to experience life stress, and if we don't have the capacity and the resilience to know how to handle that stress and still take action on our most important goals, then we are going to perpetually sabotage and undo our wins. You may or may not have heard me say this in the past, but stress on its own is not a problem. You don't need to wait for your stressful life scenario to end because the next one will just pop up. It's like whack-a-mole, right? Seasons come and go. There's always going to be the next flavor of stress or worry or overwhelm or frustration. Stress does not have to go away for us to take priority over what matters to us, so we're still in phase four. We are finding all of the strategic gaps so far, we have found that you did not actually love your strategy in a really, truly sustainable way. Number two, you didn't have certain emotional super skills. The capacity and that resilience to feel stress and still take action towards the things that deeply matter to you. And it's, again, it's not just to you. It has not been taught anywhere. And then the third one, and this is super important, most overachievers are actually missing a strategy on how to handle off plan moments. When you do go off plan for a weekend or the scale's up a pound, or you forgot yourself over a vacation, how do you handle that moment when you come back and the scale is up? Do you have a lot of scale drama? Does the scale follow you around like a dark cloud, you know, ruining your entire day? And the only reason that will happen is if you don't have a specific strategy on how to handle that exact moment. So phase four is all about finding your strategic gaps. It did not actually support your fat burning potential, or it was something that you couldn't sustain in the long run. The second one was emotional super skills, knowing how to handle stress and boredom and overwhelm without undoing your wins. And number three, I called this iteration capacity, which is learning from those off-plan moments, learning from the scale up without there being drama. Just being able to get back to yourself, putting in more reps, that's iterating, going again and again and again. Until you absolutely will hit your goal. This leads me to phase five. Phase five is filling the strategic gaps. Filling the strategic gaps require phase four. We had to find for most of my clients, when they come to work with me, they're actually missing a little bit of all of those examples that I gave. So we have to fill our strategic gaps with a comprehensive strategy that most importantly fits into your life. Now, if you've ever thought, I don't have enough time. I don't have the time to plan for this, then I mean, number one. Because of confirmation bias, you will completely make this your reality. And number two, you actually have a lot more time than you realize. One of my favorite parts about the Unstoppable Group is we fill phase five. The moment that you get access to the group in what I like to call the strategy mini class, this is where we go through my five part approach, which is having a nutrition strategy that recalibrates fat burning hormones, supports your metabolism, takes care of how your body is feeling, making sure you're getting enough of the right food. That's the nutrition strategy, but we have to also have strategy for guilt-free rest and play and movement and your mindset so that whatever strategy you have is actually going to be one that is sustainable. Phase five is filling the gaps with actually what was missing the last time that you tried to lose weight. Phase five is not about fitting you. Into a program. This is, I think, a big piece if you've ever wondered like, what about my unique life? What about my unique schedule, what about my unique obstacles? How does the Unstoppable group or coaching or this process work for me? Number one, I understand the sentiment because we are each unique. We all have unique lives and personalities and problems that we are navigating. And also it's so important that we learn the skill of taking a framework, which is what you learn with nutrition, guilt-free rest, play, movement and mindset, and you learn how to fit it into your life. We have to customize it to fit your life, actually fit your calendar, actually fit your personality. Actually fit your week so that you can take it and then iterate on it and learn from it, and modify it and evolve it and actually make it your own. We're about to get into some of my favorite phases, which is phases six and seven. Just to recap, phase four is identifying your actual strategic gaps, phase five. Is filling those strategic gaps and listen, you're gonna have a lot of excitement at the start of filling those strategic gaps. It's like you kind of teeter back into phase one. This is not a linear, by the way, I should have said this at the start of the episode. This is not a linear, like a treadmill approach. This is like amorphous. Okay, so you might hop from phase two to phase four to phase one, back to phase six, you're gonna go all over the place. So when you start filling strategic gaps and you start to see the reality of filling these strategic gaps is going to guarantee your weight loss results, you're going to have a lot of excitement. But now let's get to phase six. Phase six is all about letting yourself feel really, really uncomfortable, and here's why. So now that you've filled in the gaps and you have a comprehensive strategy that takes your body goals into account, that takes your life into account, it's put into the structure of your calendar. It fits into your week. You're gonna start implementing it. Now, you're gonna start feeling better. But again, just like the past, real life is going to happen. You're going to have something pop up. For you that you did not anticipate, and you could go back to the old way, the all or nothing. Either I have to completely give up on this goal, or I have to try to double down, which doesn't work. Or you're going to have to learn to feel really, really uncomfortable. This is by far one of the hardest phases. It is one of those phases that we don't want to be a part of our, our journey, and this is the one that we don't talk about enough. We don't talk about the terrible feeling, how crappy it feels to experience real life stress and then not use snacking and scrolling to numb out.

   

  Why is it that a smart overachieving woman who literally knows what to do might undo her weight loss successes is simply because she did not have this one skill of letting herself feel really uncomfortable. You experience stress or overwhelm or anger or frustration or irritation with insert your flavor of obstacle. And we are simply very, very habituated using snacking and scrolling to tap out, to numb out. And if that's been you, it's so normal that your brain offers that to you again. But also there's a better way. I think about this as very specifically growing your capacity to allow uncomfortable emotions. It is not something you were ever taught in school, but it is learnable. It's growing this resilience on the inside that you don't have to tap out from your life. You don't have to tap out from that life circumstance that you've been dealt. With scrolling or snacking, I take my clients through a process where we actually learn real brain science to relax your nervous system, to relax your cortisol levels, and actually to be alongside yourself the way that you would be a best friend. If a best friend was experiencing stress or overwhelm or frustration or anger, how would you be with them? That's what I teach my clients how to do for themselves. So while it feels really uncomfortable, it can also be incredibly healing. Phase seven is the imperfect moment. So we have plugged the holes in your strategies comprehensive you understand that to achieve the goal that you want, there's going to be some moments of discomfort, and you're going to have tools in your toolbox that teaches you how to be alongside yourself. And even then, because you're a human and humans are imperfect, you're going to go back to an old pattern, whatever it is. You have an off plan moment that undo some of your wins on the scale. I call these plot twists. Our life is full of plot twists where you supposedly know what to do, and yet sometimes doing the thing you know is going to move you forward is really hard. And so your brain just goes back to old habits that are easier familiar, that feel like a super highway in your brain. Most overachievers in this moment. Don't know how to treat themselves. We go into shame or blame or judgment. We feel embarrassed and we go right back to phase three and four with all or nothing thinking. Where we think that we've gone backwards, we think that we've undone. A lot of our wins, we hide from our results. Maybe we stop standing on the scale. We stop gathering data, we stop showing up for ourself, or we try to go it alone, try to solve it alone to get back to where we were before we actually get support. It's really easy to slip into these old patterns and to not see some of your blind spots when you're not working with a coach to show you, but to me, phase seven, when you have imperfect moments and plot twists and you quote unquote undo or go backwards in your mind, you're only going backwards if you decide on purpose not to learn from the experience. You might need to learn a lesson 10 times before you have actually learned it. You know what I'm talking about? It's like, you know when you are doing complicated algebra or like an advanced class in high school or college, it's not that you just. In medicine, you learn. You hear the phrase, learn one, do one, teach one. That's not how humans actually learn. We actually have to see something many, many, many, many, many times. We have to do something many, many, many, many, many times to truly learn it, but we never give ourselves the grace or the ability to learn when it comes to weight loss. The problem right here is we don't put in enough reps, so you might have thought, I've tried so many times to lose weight, but what's really happened is a lot of phases one, two, and three, where you had lots of fresh starts and do-overs and fresh starts and do-overs. What we are talking about with phase seven is a little bit more sophisticated. It's a little bit more, it's a little bit more comprehensive. We have to put in a lot of reps while keeping our foot on the gas. If we keep putting our foot on the gas and then taking it off, putting our foot on the gas and then taking it off and putting our foot on the gas and taking it off, that's. Phases one, two, and three. You can see why you have starts and stops. What I'm talking about is you keep your foot on the gas even when it was imperfect. Even when you feel crappy, even when you feel really uncomfortable to evaluate and retrospectively look at what happened. Why did the scale go up a pound? Why did you go off plan? Why did you overeat? Why did you snack? When you said you wouldn't, you have to keep your foot on the gas and put in the reps. It's when you do that piece, that combined, keeping your foot on the gas while you put in more reps that will take you, I. To my favorite, which is phase eight, and that's transformation. Transformation is for me, it's better than excitement. It's better than motivation. Transformation is visceral. It heals the most critical parts of you that have been around for decades. It heals the most judgmental parts of you that have judged all of the times that you have failed in the past, and it gives you permission. To actually move forward. I'm going to be back next week with phases eight, nine, and 10. Eight is one of my favorites. I think this entire series is truly one of my most favorite series because I really want to normalize and validate every single phase of the weight loss journey. This is a wellness journey. This journey applies to any hitting, any goal, but it is one that I really want to validate for you. So I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. In recap, phase four is identifying your strategic gaps objectively. Phase five is comprehensively filling all of your strategic gaps. Phase six is feel that feeling of you're not going to use snacking and scrolling to numb out from life stresses. Phase seven is imperfect moments and. Actually keeping your foot on the gas while you put in the reps and learn from what happened. And next week, we're gonna get into eight, nine, and ten.

  Before you go, I just want to remind you to please help me celebrate the three year anniversary of the Burn Stress Lose Weight podcast. This podcast is truly one of my most favorite parts of everything that I do. I love sharing real stories. My real experiences are coming at you in this podcast who I love talking about science and strategy and mindset skills to help you feel your best, and I hope that you leave our podcast episodes feeling a little bit better as well. So if you would love to celebrate with me, we have so many amazing prizes and so many winners for the celebration. You can get all of the details over at burnstressloseweight.com/celebrate. I'll see you next week in the final part of the series. 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.