Inside Out Weight Loss 268: When Success Leads to Failure
On Today’s show, what to do when your inner rebel - rebels to success.
Welcome to Inside Out Weight Loss, where you leave your weight struggle
behind and become naturally slender. I’m your host Renee Stephens, and
together, we’re accessing and adjusting the control panel of your mind, body,
spirit, system. Bringing ease and joy to your weight loss journey and fullness to
the rest of your life. This journey isn’t about food plans and calorie counts, it is
about learning to love and care for you from the inside out. So that it becomes
natural and easy for you to be slim and healthy. Join me, as a former compulsive
overeater, I’ve been where you’ve been, and I’m here to help you create exactly
what you want. By the way, you will get many many MANY, did I say that
before? MANY more times out of this program then you put in, but you must put
in to get out.
Now go ahead and take a few moments to drop down inside. Ahhhhhh and be
present with you. You can even, as you allow those thoughts and the cares and
all of the busyness and, I don’t know, even if there might have been a tad bit of
stress in your day….just let all of that float away, evaporate, dissolve and
skedaddle. Let it just float away. As you allow your awareness to sink down
down into your physical body. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like
my mind is floating all over the place. It’s way out in the future, or way in the past
or thinking about this situation or that situation and other people and all sorts of
things float through my busy brain. And it’s so nice to bring it back down, down
deep inside of the body. That’s right, some cultures actually have their center of
awareness, they believe that their mind is centered in their belly, can you
imagine? I’m guessing that most of us listening to this podcast think of it as
centered in our heads.
Now, just imagine for a moment that it does sink down, your awareness, your
consciousness, your sensory experience and sensory input, sinks down, down,
down, right down to your belly, and beyond that, from the base of your body, from
your perineum, you can imagine, a grounding cord, sinking down into the earth
beneath you. Deep, down, down, down, down wherever you may be, it sinks
down into the earth. Sinking down and connecting with all of the layers of the
earth and rooting in, rooting in so you imagine any tension or tightness, even
some of those straight thoughts if you want, go right down into the earth, send
other people’s energy that might be along for the ride with your consciousness,
send that down there too, just let it drip on down, flow, gosh, whatever it is, down
it goes, down through your body, into the earth. It feels so good to just let it all
go.
Now, you might imagine, coming up, a separate channel from deep inside the
earth, a separate channel carrying nourishing and fulfilling and revitalizing Earth
Energy. After all, we are made of the same stuff as Mother Earth, and so those
molecules can come up through the very soles of your feet. Bringing that energy
up through the soles of your feet, through your calves, your thighs, your hips, into
your belly all the way up up. Going to wherever that energy, that nourishing
earth energy, material substantive energy, from the earth is most-needed.
It goes any and everywhere that it’s needed, especially to your heart, because,
when you imagine, wonderful energy coming in through the top of your head, we
call this Universal Energy, any kind of energy that you think would be beneficial,
enlightening, inspiring, coming down through the top of your head. And of
course, that lightens up every cell in your body – goes everywhere that it’s
needed with just the slight nudge of your invitation, your intention to allow it to do
that and finds its way to your heart where it meets that Earth Energy. Now,
together there’s an alchemical process when earth and material energy and
celestial, divine universal energy meet in your heart opening your heart. Carrying
your intentions into reality. Yes, Mam! We like it when those intentions become
real, especially the good ones, the one that we are consciously intending, like
that slim, fit, healthy body that you are just itching/longing to live in now.
As your consciousness goes, so goes your body, by the way, that’s why we’re
here, you know. We change our minds; we change our awareness. We change
our consciousness to naturally slender, which can happen in an instant. You
know that by now. Come on! If you’ve learned anything from this, that’s what it
is. We become naturally slender inside, in our minds, intentionally in our spirits
and so follows the body. Mind first, body follows and it’s delightful having it
happen that way, because it’s so darn enjoyable, and easy and pleasant. Alright,
getting the psyche there, that takes a bit of work, that’s what we were talking
about earlier.
And on that note, I would like to give a shout out to somebody, a listener, an
Inside Out Weight Loss’er, named Lisa, who I think it’s been a couple of years
now, maybe a year and a half, maybe two years, I can’t remember exactly, that
she has been free of her binge eating pattern which was part of her life for
decades. Literally decades, a huge part of her life. And now, she feels largely or
perhaps completely free of that pattern, and she is a member of the
insideoutweightloss.com community. Because she continues to tweak her own
progress, and she also works and is applying these principles to some other
areas of her life, and on the forum she is incredibly supportive. She is someone I
think of that I think of as an elder in the site who has been through the program
and had a lot of success and is eager to just jump right right in, to support
someone else who is newer to the program, who is still, learning the various
things to do. Lisa is always there to be supportive and also very open about her
own situation. So I wanted to thank her publicly for being such a wonderful,
supportive, elder on the site who I am very grateful to know.
I wanted to talk to you today about something that we had an interesting
conversation with on the forum on insideoutweightloss.com, about this
phenomena when success leads to failure. I’ve never talked about this before,
but I was thinking about it the other day. That, we think okay well, success
begets more success. We can set up a virtuous cycle, which we’ve talked about
before –an awesome thing. You know, people often talk about the ‘vicious cycle’
when, ‘Oh I feel bad, so then I eat, then I feel even worse, and then I want to feel
better, so I eat again, and down we spiral. But of course, we can create a
‘Virtuous Cycle’ where we do something nice, something renewing for ourselves;
get out in nature for example. It makes us feel a little bit better. It makes us want
to do something nice for our bodies, which in turn makes us feel even better. Or
maybe we get some exercise in, ‘oh I’m feeling even better now’ and so on and
so forth. Virtuous Cycles are awesome and they can carry you along way,
creating a beautiful momentum.
And today, we’re talking about something that is a little bit different, which is what
happens when we experience success. And I know this pattern so well because
it’s happened to me so often. Not so much lately in the arena of weight issues,
because that’s not an active arena for me, being now naturally slender. But in
other areas, when I feel really successful at something, I’m like, ‘oh man I nailed
that,’ or say I get fantastic feedback, ‘oh that was the best Renee, you did such a
great job.’ I remember once, when I was working and my boss, there was a big
meeting with the CEO and I was really nervous, and my boss said, ‘okay, now
Renee is going to present first.” Having full confidence in Renee, because
Renee is always so good. He’d seen me present before, the same material, I
think, and I’m always so good, I always nail it. And I’m thinking, ‘oh yeah, I
always nail this, okay.’ So, you know how this story ends, and it is not
pretty. So, big meeting with the CEO, and I do my presentation, and because I
felt so much pressure to do well, and meet the expectations. I was no longer
relaxed; I was uptight, and I did a poor job. To me, it seemed like it was, a
completely uninspiring and such was the feedback that I got back. And that’s
the, that’s what can happen when we get all tied up in our own success.
So here is how that can apply to the arena of our weight and our bodies. Let’s
say, you’ve been doing great, you feel your clothes are a bit looser, maybe you’re
down a couple of pounds, a few pounds and you think, ‘oh yeah, I’ve made it,
now I’m successful.’ This used to happen to me when I would step on the scale,
and it would give me a number I liked. ‘Oh, okay, now I can relax,’ and I would
relax right into the cookies. Great, how to reverse that success and down I went
again. Really common pattern. It’s funny, because you’d think that we’d be
happy, and that would inspire us on. And, if you have any sense at all, in your
quote unquote success, that the success is a result of exertion. It is a result of
restriction and deprivation, then naturally, when you’re feeling good, you’re going
to want to relax. And if relaxing means eating things that cause you gain weight,
if those are your quote unquote, ‘treats,’ then off you go. Do you see how this
doesn’t work well here? By the way, it’s time for our break, you’re listening to
Inside Out Weight Loss, this is your host Renee Stephens, and we will be right
back.
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We’re back now, before the break, we were talking about how success can lead
us to failure, especially if you feel that there is any sense of restriction or
deprivation in your success. If you’ve had to buckle down, if you’ve had to work
hard to get there, naturally, getting there, you’re going to think, ahhh, I can
relax. This is why, it’s so darn important to have that sense of ‘aaahhhh I’m
relaxing’ as we go along. In other words, we want to be tuned into our bodies so
that our choices of what to eat and when to eat and when to exercise etc. Come
from a place of ‘oh, well, this will make me feel really good if I do it, so I’m going
to do it.’ Can you see how that’s different from, ‘I should choose the salads so I
will’ ‘I should choose the salad’ feels like hard work. If I said that to myself, I’ve
been on a salad roll lately. That’s not a food, on a salad, uh….kick, lately. And
eating salads for lunch for a while, and if I said to myself before I decided on my
lunch, if I said, ‘I really should eat the salad’, you know what, I wouldn’t want to
eat it so much. I’d wanna go and have something else. But instead, I think ‘Oh,
I’d really love a salad for lunch, it makes me feel so good.’ And so I keep on
eating the same old boring, you’d think I’d get bored with it, right? And day after
day, I keep on eating the salad. And I love it – it’s so great. So, so much
depends upon the way that you frame your behavior in your mind. The more that
you think this is the good thing that I should do, the more that you are bringing
along pressure with that choice. You’re bringing along a sense of effort with that
choice.
If you let go of the ‘should’ if you let go of the judgment, the good choice/the bad
choice, and simply make the choice that feels best, you also release the pressure
and the stress. Does that make sense? Same choice, different reaction to the
choice, so much of what we’ve been talking about, of what we do talk about here,
is all about this. About bringing that sense of ease, of choice, of freedom to your
decisions. It can be such a shock; I’ve had so many clients tell me this. It’s such
a shock to discover that you actually DO like to eat the healthy choice. You do
prefer to eat, to that place of feeling just right. Of feeling satisfied. It’s actually
more pleasant than feeling over-stuffed. Who knew? We never stopped to
think. We were so busy worried about being good or bad or whatever the heck it
was. So complicated. But simplify.
When we experience then our clothes feeling looser, how are we to
respond? It’s certainly exciting or heaven forbid you get on the scale. The scale
is just really fraught with emotions. I mean what’s it gonna do for me? Get on
the scale it’s good news, OMG, I better keep it up. Immediately I’m feeling the
pressure, like I was in that business meeting. Or get on the scale and it’s bad
news, ‘oh you weakling, you have no willpower, you terrible person.’ Now I’m
feeling beaten down and awful. It’s the can’t win for losing model. It really sucks,
excuse me for saying that, but it does, it’s no fun. So, I just say, you know what,
just toss out the scale and check in with your clothes, much easier. If you can
handle it, toss it out, put it in the other room. I’ve had people give their scales on
loan to their friends. Hide it in the attic. At least make is inconvenient. For some
people, checking from time to time on the scale is a good thing. But more cases
than not, it’s a good idea to just take a break from that judgment device.
So, when you’re feeling successful, if that seems like it creates pressure for
you. ‘Oh, now I’ve set a new standard, now I gotta keep up with it. Oh my gosh,
what does that mean, oh, I’m on a roll. Oh, I hope I can make it to my goal. Gee
that’s successful, but it’s not good enough.' All of that baggage is so heavy; it
weighs ya down, literally. One way to deal with this, I might add, that I found very
handy, is to refuse to let my ego, my graspy little ego, identify with the
success. Remembering, I’m not the number on the scale. I am not my body. It’s
great to have the experience of success. It is an experience, wonderful, I like it,
very nice, but it isn’t who I am. It doesn’t mean where I’m going. It doesn’t say
anything, really about anything apart from the fact that it feels good now. And
disconnect my ego from the feeling of success. This is very helpful because
then, when I slip up, and my graspy little ego wants to connect with failure. ‘Oh,
you’re such a loser’, ha, I wish. ‘Oh, you’re such a failure, oh you screwed up
again,’ and on and on and on. Then it’s easier for me to be detached from that
as well. To say, ‘okay, huh, interesting, my pants are a little bit tighter in the
thighs.’
That’s where it always goes for me first, in the thighs…isn’t that
interesting? Well, let me take a look at what I’ve been doing and feeling. ‘Have
I been tuned into my body? Have I been taking care of myself? What’s going on
for me?’ And it allows me more space to entertain those thoughts and to mine, to
harvest, the learning from that experience which is where all of the juicy, growth
and goodness comes from, those slip-ups. Another core concept here, is that
there is no such thing as failure, you now this, only feedback from our
bodies. So, it’s not success, it’s not failure. It just is. It’s experiences that we
like. Experiences that we don’t like. Experiences that we want more
of. Experiences that we want less of. So, notice for yourself. Do you have a
little inner rebel who doesn’t want you to be successful because that means that
you would be buying into the establishment’s idea of feminine beauty? Which is
so narrow and oppresses women, etc. etc… those inner rebels can get goin, you
know what I mean. They can get a little bit on their high horse. Just let it go, let
the ego go, it doesn’t mean all that. How about just letting it be what it is. Feels
good, doesn’t feel good. So simple. So many things are.
Now, if you’re thinking ‘well, that’s easier said than done,’ I suggest a wee bit of
tapping, Emotional Freedom Technique, tapping, on this very issue. And the
phrasing would be something like this, mind you, I’m going to actually tap on
myself as I’m explaining this to you because then I get into the mode of:
‘Even though I feel so much pressure because I’ve been successful, and I have
to do as well or better next time, I’m letting all of that go now, and inviting in
something in much better. Even though I feel so much pressure from being
successful, now I have to meet or exceed that, and it’s just too much for me, I’m
letting all of that go now, and choosing to relax and enjoy where I am today.
For example, you could say:
‘Even though, my inner rebel doesn’t want to conform to my
parents’/society's/whoevers’ expectations, I’m letting all of that go, it’s way too
complicated, and inviting in simplicity and ease instead as I enjoy where I am
today.
Something like that, what I recommend. And that, my dear friends, brings us to
the end of our show today. Thank you for being present. Inside Out Weight Loss
is produced by Andrew Frame of BAFSoundworks.com. This is your host Renee
Stephens, and I am on a mission to eradicate the weight struggle and help you
develop and share your abundant soul’s gifts. Join me as we evolve the world by
evolving ourselves. Take Good Care.