Summary 

Most overachieving women don’t struggle because they lack strategy—they struggle because of sneaky indecision. This week I’m sharing a private coaching clip from inside Burn Stress, Lose Weight, where we dive into the simple but radical power of decisive moments. These micro-decisions—made from fierce self-advocacy, not pressure—are where true freedom, time, and weight loss results are hiding.

If you’ve ever overcomplicated your plan, second-guessed your choices, or waited for the perfect time to start… this episode will shift how you move this week.

Learn more about The Unstoppable Group: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/group

Book your consult call: https://www.burnstressloseweight.com/connect

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• Why smart women secretly stay stuck in “I’ll decide later” loops
• How indecision quietly drains your time, energy, and results
• The difference between have-to decisions vs. want-to decisions
• What decisive decisions actually look like in real life
• How a simple framework can save you hours and move the scale

Listen to the Full Episode:

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Featured on the Show:

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Download the full transcript here.

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  Hey friends. Welcome back to the Burn Stress, Lose Weight podcast. Today I'm doing something a little bit different and a little bit special. I'm going to be sharing a clip from a recent teaching that I did with my client inside the Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group coaching program, where I was sharing the power of tiny decisive moments. If you attended my training last week, 10 pounds down, 10 hours back, you know how much I emphasize the power of tiny decisions. I've been talking with overachieving, very, very smart women across all fields, and it's quite fascinating how often smart women will overcomplicate their weight loss strategy with lots of bells and whistles, but they create a strategy that is not really sustainable or doesn't really fit your life. One of the things that I pride myself on, one of my missions for the clients that I work with is not just that you have a strategy that works, a strategy that supports your hormone health, your vitality, and of course your ability to lose weight, but a strategy that is simple that you don't have to overthink. That doesn't feel like a second full-time job. One that you can travel with and take with you in your busiest work weeks. But the thing that is missing for most of us is not having the best, most effective strategy, it's actually making decisive decisions. Decisive decisions are the type of decisions that you're making from a, no matter what non-negotiable place. Now, I don't mean we go to the land of deprivation and restriction, but we make a decision from a place of fierce advocacy. A part of you that knows you want to feel your best starting right now, you want to achieve a goal for yourself, and you want to do it in a way that doesn't feel terrible. So, because I love talking about this concept so much, I decided to bring this as a teaching concept inside the group, and it's now living inside the Unstoppable Video Library. But I wanted to share a snippet of this call with all of you so you can get a flavor for what it's like when you work with me inside the Burn Stress, Lose Weight program. It's a place that we have equal parts, curriculum, coaching, and community. And if you're listening to this podcast episode live, then I also want you to know that the Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group Coaching program is currently open for enrollment. You can get all of the nuts, the bolts, the  details, the exact dates, the investment, all of the details that you could ever want to know over at www.burnstressloseweight.com/group. There's going to be a button on the page that invites you to book a consult call with me, and the intention of that call is really designed for me to answer any questions that you have and also to decide if this group would be a best fit for you. If you have been eyeing this group for a while, I want to encourage you to make a decisive decision. I cannot tell you how often smart overachieving women believe that they need to go on this journey by themself, that there's some badge of honor if they go it alone, or because you've been able to achieve a lot of success in other areas of your life, that this is an area that you should be successful on already. While all of these thoughts might feel really true, they probably don't feel so great and they're likely holding back a lot of results. In my experience now, having lost a little over 60 pounds and maintaining it now for many years, I have realized that there is strategy, skills and mindset that have to come in equal parts for you. Not to just lose the weight once, but for you to lose it in a way that starts to feel like a lifestyle. When my clients go through our Magic Action Decisions framework, which I'm going to be touching on a little bit in today's podcast episode, you not only start to unlock a strategy that supports your hormone health and your vitality and your ability to lose weight, you create so much relief because you get out of confusion, overwhelmed. Second guessing. What should I be doing right now? How am I supposed to be eating right now? I'm traveling. What am I supposed to do? These are invisible moments that we are losing in living our best life, and I'm on a mission to help you change that. So if that is something that you have been eyeing, I really encourage you to stop waiting on yourself. Don't wait for life to get easier, or for the next season or the next year for you to take real decisive action. Simply deciding to come onto a consult call with me is the first step. It's a decisive decision right then and there that you're ready to prioritize yourself and to feel your best. And my goal for you is that you start the new year already down on the scale feeling better. Head over to www.burnstressloseweight.com/group to get all the nuts, bolts, and details. And of course, if you have a question, you can send us an email at [email protected]. Without further ado, let's get into this snippet from a recent coaching call that we had with my clients in the group where I spent some time talking about the power of tiny decisive decisions. So I recently came back from a conference where I spoke with a lot of very smart women, women that have all the gold stars and all the diplomas and all the A pluses like they have above and beyond anything that I've ever seen really smart, brilliant women, and in talking with a lot of these women, some of them came up to me after my talk and they were asking me questions about weight loss and hitting a body goal. And I was asking 'em, so like, what are you doing? What's your strategy? And it fascinated me how complicated their strategies were. Their strategies, by the way, that were not working. That were not sustainable like they would, it would work for a little bit, but like not really work. And what a twisted roadmap they had created simply because they thought that losing the weight they wanted or achieving their body goal had to feel hard, had to be really complicated because they're used to goals being at the end of a really hard, twisty roadmap. But the reality is when we have a really complicated strategy, when we have a very twisty road, it will be impossible to stick within the long run. And what we end up doing without realizing it, especially when you're a very smart person, we will miss the mark. On making very tiny, very simple decisions that actually take zero extra time. And in my experience, and the thing that I'm the most passionate about and what my mission is for everyone in this group is when we can unlock and really like a dart to a bullseye, make those very tiny, very simple decisions we unlock in my experience, the ultimate freedom. Now you end up with that trifecta, the winning trifecta where you achieve your body goal as you feel better as you get time back. So the very first thing I wanted to briefly talk about is why is it that we ever stay indecisive? Why do we stay confused? Why do we stay overwhelmed? What indecision might actually look like? And particularly for smart women, it's sneaky indecision in your life. It's not the average bearer's, indecision. It is very sneaky. So I really want to highlight, so you can just start to become aware of what it looks like for you. And then I want to walk you through my process for how to walk out of indecision and into decisive decisions. Indecision in tiny moments is costing you your results on the scale this week indecision in tiny moments, and it will feel inconsequential. It will feel like, oh, it doesn't really matter. It's not that big of a deal. But if you added up just those small, tiny moments over the course of seven days, that is where your results are living. And I think that this was incredibly freeing when I realized this because it turns out you don't have to overhaul your whole entire life to have results simply overhauling tiny decisions. It's where you can unlock massive results this week, and I don't mean next week or next month or next season, when life is easier, when the job is easier, when the political climate is different. Like this is not about waiting until later, you can unlock feeling better and achieving goals this week simply by this one framework. Just ask yourself, how many minutes, tiny minutes do you think you waste in wondering, I'm not sure what I should be eating right now. Should I be eating a little bit or should I be eating a lot? Am I hungry? Am I satiated? Should I have two more bites? Should I have a snack between lunch and dinner? Should I be counting calories? Should I be doing intermittent fasting? What's my intermittent fasting window? Should I be counting macros? Am I eating grams of protein? All of these are very reasonable questions, so if you have those questions, I want you to know I see you. These are very reasonable questions, but the trouble for a lot of us, especially in this room, is because we're very smart. We want the best, most perfect answer to these questions. We never answer a lot of our open-ended questions, and so they stay spinning, open-ended indecision, and then our brain, when we don't actually answer some of those very normal questions, it'll default to your status quo, just so normal. So the very first piece of this process is to identify the mindset behind decisive decisions. We always say in this group that there's always two pieces to your winning strategy. It's going to be a mindset element and a strategic element. So the very first thing we wanna do together is identify your mindset coming into decisive decision. For most of us in this room, we have made many life decisions because we have to. I have to go to school, I have to go to work on time. I have to show up. I better do this task perfectly. I'm just thinking about operating room surgeon in the or. You don't wanna be making mistakes, right? Like I have to do this perfectly. I am supposed to take the case to soccer practice. I need to pay my bills. We are making most of our life decisions from our educational system on into our adult life. From I have to, I'm supposed to. I need to. I should. And you've gotten a lot of results because of that. But the mistake that a lot of us make is we bring that mindset, I'm calling this the have to mindset, into our weight loss goal, into our dream goals, into our visions, and when we do that, when we try to bring the, I have to eat this way, I'm not allowed to eat that food. I'm supposed to eat this way, we fill the journey with deprivation and disempowerment. So I want everyone to answer the question in the chat box. Open up the chat box. Have you ever had the thought, I have to eat this way? And if you have ever had that thought, what's the emotion that you have felt? I have to, I'm not allowed to restricted, devastating. Bound up. Right? And what's interesting is we don't even realize that we have these thoughts because they're so on autopilot. You just think you're telling yourself the news. So the very first step is to really become very aware of your internal soundtrack. I have to, I'm supposed to. I need to, I should, is going to create a feeling of deprivation, restriction, bound up, devastation. It not only triggers cortisol, it creates a really contentious, unhealthy relationship with food, right? Because your brain is very smart. It will push back. This is why you're gonna have those moments of like F it. Oh yeah. No, I don't have to. You know, you're like, you have to eat this way, and then the other part of your brain's like, no, we don't. And then you feel like rebellious. That's the smartest part of your brain actually, because it's calling out the lie that you've been telling yourself. It's a lie to tell yourself, I have to eat this way. No, you don't think that. That's the very first piece. We really have to start to catch. I have toss. I'm supposed, toss I Shoulds really are coming from the educational system. It's a very old mindset that has been trickled into your work life, your home life. It has gotten you a lot of gold stars and a pluses, but it doesn't actually make sense with the way you eat. And if you try to bring this mindset, I have to, I'm supposed to. I should. Into your weight loss journey and into the way you eat, your brain will brilliantly hesitate. It will fight back. It will negotiate really, really hard. It will push back with so many convincing, convenient, very compelling stories, and it will put you on very loosey goosey wobble ground. It'll be like, let's just see. We'll see how we, how we feel about this. Your brain will plant an exit strategy before you've even started. So step one is actually catching the story and the mindset you have before coming into decisive decisions, before coming into any decision. While you think I have to, I encourage you like the rest of this put it on pause. We have to really catch the mindset. The truth is you actually get to eat anything you want. Adult women, we're all adult women. The truth is we have to start telling ourselves the truth. We get to eat anything we really want, ever really and truly believe the truth of that. Can we feel some relief? I promise we can eat whatever we actually want. And this is where two things can be true at the same time. We can eat anything we ever want. It's totally true. And also the math always is going to math. So we can't rob a bank and not go to jail. That's my favorite example. So what that means is two things are true. We can't just eat anything, everything endlessly into perpetuity and also achieve the body goals that we want. So how do we allow two things to be true, to really make decisive decisions? This is where I really want to encourage everyone to challenge yourself, to answer the question. I can eat in a way that I choose and I love, and also make decisive decisions that support my goal. So two things can be true. I can love the way that I'm eating, also make decisive decisions that support my goal. And when you get to that place of, I want to do that. Now we get to point number two, which is an inflection point. I call it inflection points. Anytime you have a decision to make, okay, anytime it's like, I could do this, I could do this, I could do keto, I could do low carb, I could do intermittent fasting, I could count calories. This is where a lot of us Second point is, we waste a lot of time. You get into the land of overwhelm. What's the best decision? What's the most efficient strategy? I encourage everyone at this point, if you have not watched the nutrition video in magic Action Decisions, it's under 20 minutes. I walk you through the four specific points to help you design your. Way of eating that will free you from the decisions forever constrain the amount of time that you're going to spend on the decision. Watch the video under 20 minutes. Make your decisions right then and there. When you do that, just making those decisive decisions, you're going to save hundreds of hours of time. Okay, this is where I just wanna highlight what we start to do. You will make a decision like this is my plan for the week. We've all done this like Monday mornings. This is the plan. This is a good plan. I like the plan. And then at some point along the way, your brain is gonna be like that, like that other option might be really good, or that other thing could be really good. What if I'm missing out? We have fomo. What if maybe we'll see how we feel. Let's see how it goes. We have a lot of three C stories. And every time we start having thoughts like that about our plan, we're going to be full of doubt. We're going to experience wobble. This is very typically like the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Have you all heard that the grass level is green on the other side of the fence? The reality is the grass is greener where you water it. Okay? So this is where we are missing the mark. You make a decision and then again, this is normal. If you're doing this, I see you. We will start to think that the other options that we are missing out on is where the money is. It's more efficient. It would be more effective. It's better. It's tastier. I would lose weight faster. This is where we deprive ourselves of the real work, putting in the reps on what you said you were going to do. Lean in whatever your decision is. Lean in, nurture water, fertilize the grass that is right in front of you. I promise you it's going to grow. It's true that 10% may not be as fun as robbing the bank. Robbing the bank is eating whatever, eating whenever, like not having a thought about it. But my claim is eating whatever, eating whenever, doesn't actually feel good in the moment. We've all experienced that doesn't actually feel good in the moment. So what we're saying is there's a discomfort with making no decisions and in being in total wobble land, and there's a discomfort in making decisive decisions when you try to do things. In the moment, we're already over here. It's like, let's see, what's my mood of the moment? How am I feeling about this? Can you see where maybe, maybe you have had some indecision around tiny decisions, eating at hunger and satiety? Just knowing that if, if I get to say tidy, there's two bites left in my bowl, I can leave those two bites. You know, if you just leave two bites at every meal over the course of a week, that's a pound a week. But we think it's so complicated, we get so married to this idea that weight loss has to be hard and complicated and difficult, when in fact it's just following a few really. Simple, decisive decisions that will save you to me, the ultimate freedom when you're not thinking about it again and again and again made the decisions once and do yourself a solid and just stick with it. So I hope this teaching is helpful for you to all just see, and we've all been there. We're all gonna end up in the land of indecision. Like, I don't know, let's just see how I feel. Just catch it. The intention of this is not to blame yourself or criticize yourself or get mad. Just catch where indecision in tiny moments is costing you results this week and the tiny like constraint, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Make your decision and just move with it. I hope that you enjoy today's podcast episode, and you're leaving today feeling a little bit more inspired in where your results might be living. They are not living in overhauling your entire life strategy or completely throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping that something sticks most results on the scale, and you feeling better getting out of overwhelm in confusion and second guessing your strategy. Is living in tiny, small moments and when you can learn how to leverage that, when you learn which tiny decisions are going to most move the needle for you, you won't just get back 10 hours of time per week. You're going to do it while losing weight. At the same time, the Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group Coaching program, or what I like to very lovingly call the Unstoppable Group. Is a group coaching experience that is designed for smart overachieving women who have some perfectionist tendencies. You are someone that has gotten a lot of achievement in lots of parts of your life. You have a transcript full of a pluses, but maybe you're not feeling a plus. You might be someone that has gotten very used to and very accustomed to taking care of everyone and everything else, and you find that your personal goals and you taking care of your wellness, both physical and mental, starts to slip away or often gets deprioritized. But you're also here listening to this podcast because you really want to experience a change. You've realized that you don't want your entire life to pass you by and you want to start feeling better now, if that's you, this group might be the best next step. The Burn Stress, Lose Weight Group Coaching program is built into three separate components. The very first component is the video curriculum. This is something you unlock. The moment that you join the group, the moment that you claim your spot, you're going to get login credentials and access to a private portal that has videos to guide you on the exact simple, tiny decisions that are most going to move the needle for you. I walk you through how to make decisions around nutrition. Guilt-free rest and play movement and mindset in a way that you can actually fold into your real life. My claim is when you make certain key, tiny decisions and you learn how to stick with them from a place of commitment and desire, you will save hundreds of hours per year while achieving your goals. Now, the reality is it's not always going to be easy, which is why having the second component, which is coaching, is going to be such a key piece of your success strategy. It's one thing to make those decisive decisions and to have a strategy that you learn how to do in the video curriculum, but there's another piece of it, which is taking those decisions and putting it into real life messy implementation. Coaching is an evidence-based tool that has proven to help you feel better and really move the needle on your results. Inside our group, we have live weekly coaching calls. Every Wednesday and we have written coaching in between live coaching calls, and if you have to miss a call or you can't attend a call live one week, it's perfectly okay. We have a private portal and a private podcast housing, all of our call replays. The way that I think about coaching inside this group is it's equal parts personal mentorship where I move at your pace, whatever you come into the group with, whatever you want to get coached on. I meet you exactly where you are and you get to learn from the mindset, the strategies, and the obstacles. Other really smart women, which takes me to the third element of our program community, being surrounded with other like-minded women who are here not to commiserate, but to solve problems, to overcome barriers, to challenge their most limiting beliefs, and to do it in a way that is very empowered. Is intoxicating. You are going to learn from the obstacles and the coaching of other women in areas that you didn't even know you needed. I've had so many clients report to me that I didn't even know I needed to get coaching on that topic, but just that person getting coached on her marriage, her kids, her boss, her colleague, her friend, really helped me move the needle in something in my life. What's so fascinating with coaching around stress and weight loss is usually our coaching is not about food. My clients get coached on their real life obstacles because when you know how to get coached on those real life obstacles and you address your stresses and your frustrations at the root, it's really not a surprise when your urges and cravings to randomly snack and scroll and take a break from your life stresses starts to go down. This is why the entire premise of this podcast and the premise of this group is called Burn Stress, Lose Weight. Because these two strategies go hand in hand, our next cohort is about to start, and I would love to see your name join us. If this at all sounds something interesting to you, if you have been waiting to have a coach in your corner support you and show you your blind spots to help you catch your most limiting beliefs, to find your strategic and mindset gaps so you can uplevel your results this year I don't want you to wait anymore. Head over to burnstressloseweight.com/group. There's a button there that will invite you to a consult call with me. We can talk about your specific life, your specific goals, and I will walk you through exactly what it's like for us to work together. If you don't see a time or you have a question that you want to ask in advance, it's not at all a problem. I'm here to answer anything that comes up for you. You can send me a DM over on Instagram. I am @burnstressloseweight. Or send us an email [email protected]. There is literally no question that is too little or too big. I think about myself as an open book when it comes to the results you can expect in this group, and I'm here to support you in all the ways. I hope to see you on a call, and I hope you guys all have an amazing week, and before I let you go, I want to share a snippet from a recent podcast episode we had Katie over on the podcast where she shared her journey on losing 70 pounds while feeling more like herself coming at home to herself in our work together. You can go hear her entire podcast episode if you like. It was from a few weeks ago, but we've compiled together some of the best parts of the podcast where she really shares some of her journey and how having a coach who believed in her is what really helped her move the needle, particularly when she was hitting her own sticky, messy moments in the middle of her journey. We all have those moments that are sticky, messy, and really hard, and it's really, really nice. And dare I say, really important to have someone that believes in you, especially when you have those very normal moments. So I'm going to leave you on this podcast episode with that clip, and I hope you guys all have an amazing week.

  Katie: When I first joined Unstoppable, I was just a couple months postpartum with my second son. I had been flirting with weight loss, coaching a lot with podcasts, things that I had found online, but I fell in love with your podcast and that's what brought me to you. My weight had fluctuated quite a lot, especially in my adult years, going up and down 20 pounds multiple times a year until I got pregnant, and then it just went up and up and up. Basically, there were periods of time where I was really, really, really. Structured. I would track every point, every calorie, everything went in and I was really hard on myself, and I would kind of double down and double down and double down. And then when I start making mistakes, there was no compassion. There was no gentle veer back. It was either I gave up completely or I would just beat myself back into submission. So I came in with this attitude of I know what to do. I just kind of need accountability. What I learned. Through the program is that there are, am I allowed to say swear words in the ass, so those are really essential to be pointed out to you. Being able to see those threads that are invisible to me, having somebody seeing all those connections and being able to pull them together, you can't do that on your own. Pointing them out to me is what really challenged me and pushed my success forward really fast. I lost a lot of weight off the bat would we say 40 pounds within the first six months glowing so fresh with new thoughts and ideas and excitement. Becoming a fat burner, and knowing what that felt like. That turned out to be pretty much essential. I used to be so sensitive to hunger. I would get. So stressed and upset about being hungry and worried about it. So first of all, recentering into a more normal metabolism has given me the space to experiment more with which foods actually feel really good to me and when am I actually full and how much do I really need? I learned that really early in the program, but then comes in like all the emotional side, eating for emotional reasons, and that's the second piece. Learning that skill of what to do with an urge and how to respond to it becoming. Comfortable with that situation of not having a perfect moment. You have to just take the leap on it and just believe it. 'cause I definitely relate to that, where I'm like, it's too good to be true knowing maybe it won't work for you. That's definitely possible. Yeah. And if that happens, you'll still figure it out. I've gotten really aware that if I'm having a negative emotion, that there's probably something that. I'm missing and that needs attention. It's not comfortable, but there is kind of this sense of empowerment where I get a little bit of an excitement out of like, okay, let's, let's figure this out. I feel like I've come to myself, I'm more authentically myself now without this kind of cloud of anxiety and worries and criticisms. There's already so many pressures in the outside world. I don't need to add to it by not trusting that I can handle it. Now, I've been pretty steady for a few months where I'm at my goal weight. There were many moments when I was in the sticky, messy middle, when I could have easily reverted to the old way. But having you there sticking it out with me, giving those like kind of gentle guidepost. It was everything in the moment, because otherwise I would've reverted fully and then I would've had to come back. Just borrowed your belief basically. I just trusted you in the moment. I think people who are interested in losing weight spend a lot of money in their lifetime on finding the right strategy. If you put it in perspective of how lasting it is and how. Comprehensive It is. Right. Spend a lot less time thinking about all of that than I ever have in my life. It's like almost like a negative time investment. Yeah. Because it's not just about the decisions around food and exercise. You naturally start applying the same structure to other areas of your life. I have things from Unstoppable that are now creeping over into my workplace. Even things I'm doing at work differently because of magic action decisions and my whole house is on autopilot now because of magic action decisions. It's really, really nice to have a support person who I feel like you know me better than I know myself at this point at times. And having someone who pays attention to you and knows your patterns and can point them out to you just makes more progress than you make on your own. 'cause I've always been a person that listens to self-help podcasts, and that's one of my top values is just growth as a person. Yeah. And I have never felt as transformed as I did from Unstoppable. 

  Dr. Priyanka Venugopal: 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 bulls, when the next group is starting and exactly how you can join. Okay, friend, I'll see you next time.