The truth about maintenance
Jan 18, 2022Hello ladies, welcome to the podcast. So today I'm going to be talking to you about the reality of maintenance. So I've been in maintenance for over a year, it's coming up to 18 months, and previously in a year, if I had lost the weight, I would have put on three stones by now. This used to be my trend.
So I wanted to talk to you about the reality of maintenance and talk to you about five main learning points that I have learned over this past, nearly 18 months, so that I can share that with you so that you can know about maintenance as well.
So, as you know, I'm recording this podcast a little bit early because next week when it's actually aired, I am going to be in America for my coach's mastermind. So I go every six months to really work on my own self coaching on my own brain, how I can learn how to serve my clients better by going to this mastermind where a lot of other coaches come together and we work together to enhance the client experience. So I'm excited to be able to go there and really work on my brain so that I can bring you even better, even more simple, doable coaching so that it can help you even more.
So, remember, if you are interested in joining the group coaching program for February, the enrollment is open and I would be honoured to be your coach. I am doing free consults all throughout January. So please go to www.amruticoaching.com to find out more information. You can go to the "work with me" tab and there you will be able to book a free consultation with me to see if we're a good fit for working with each other. Now I would be honoured to help you through this journey of yours. And I know that if you're listening to this podcast, there's something that you can relate to. So if that is the case and you're thinking "hold on, if it's possible for Amruti, it's possible for me too" I just want to let you know, I'm a simple, normal woman - there's nothing special about me in that way. And that if I can do it, you can definitely do it. Especially after decades of worrying about my weight, of being on the next diet. If now I am able to maintain my weight using mind management tools and it doesn't phase me by doing this. I know that I'll definitely be able to do this for the rest of my life. If I could do it, you can do it too.
Okay. let's start off with point 1 about the reality of maintenance. So these are the main things that I learnt over this last year and a bit. And the first one is that even when you get to goal weight, life is 50 50. So a lot of us think that when we get to goal weight, it's going to be amazing. We're going to feel so great all of the time. But what we forget to think about is that actually when we get there, yes, it feels great for a few minutes. And then if you've not sat in that accomplishment and everything, since you started, then it doesn't last very long. And then it's kind of a bit of an anticlimax because you're like, hold on. This is what I was waiting for. I was waiting to get to this goal weight, I was waiting to feel amazing and yeah, it lasted a minute and then it went. So that's what happened with me initially. I was expecting it to be all rainbows and daisies. I was expecting my life to be amazing all the time. And actually what I realised is that even when I got there, life was still 50 50, but it was just a different 50, 50, still 50% positive emotion and 50% negative emotion.
But because I wasn't pushing away the negative emotion anymore, because through coaching, what I learned was how to feel my emotions, then what I decided was that the negative emotion that I was going to feel was going to be intentional. It was going to be on purpose. I'd rather feel the negative emotion in my business to help more people, and go through that shame, go through that disappointment, go through that humiliation in the process, learn how to fail a hell of a lot and then learn how to pivot in my business. And this was actually learnt in my weight loss journey. When I was able to feel my emotions, when I was able to not use food to make me feel better. And I knew that I could rely on my own brain to do that, it changed everything for me because I didn't then have to rely on the food to make me feel better.
And I think that actually, when I went through this in the actual weight loss journey, because I was able to deal with negative emotion, I was able to normalise it. I was able to normalise failure and that actually made me a better entrepreneur because in the entrepreneurial world, when you're actually building your own business, a lot of it is negative emotion.
When you have not done marketing before, when you've not done different things that are unusual to you, when you're able to feel that negative emotion, then it is all worth it. I always think about when I am thinking, should I write a post or shouldn't I write a post, a lot of the time my primitive brain says to me, no, no, you don't need to share that. No one wants to hear it. But actually when I get into the place of, "even if it helps one lady change the way she's thinking about herself, that will be worth my negative emotion. That will be worth me feeling that just so I can help her." And I realised that when I became a doctor, I thought that I was becoming a doctor to help people.
And what I've really realised and what I've really lived with in the last year, over a year, is that as a coach, I actually deeply help people. Someone said to me once, I'm so proud of you, you're saving lives." And she wasn't talking to me as a doctor. She was talking to me as a coach. And that really sat with me that really resonated with me because what I thought about was, yes, I am saving lives. I am saving all of you ladies from a lifetime of pain and a lifetime of struggle. Because I am empowering you to learn how to manage your mind so that you can experience the negative emotion and not make it such a big deal, not make it as if you were doing something wrong, help normalise it. And when you are normalising it and when you are expecting it, then it doesn't mean that you are doing it wrong or anything like that. But it just means that you are living an authentic human experience.
So point 2. One of the other things that I learned was that I still overeat now and again, but it is much less than I used to overeat before the coaching journey. Now, when I overeat, I don't make it so much of a big deal. I say to myself that I am human and that actually, even though all of the six steps that I teach all of my clients and that I do myself, even though they are a habit for me and they come quite naturally to me now, because I've done them over and over again, I know that 80% of the time I'm going to be doing it, how I want to do it. And then 20% of the time I'm still not going to.
And that doesn't mean that I'm doing anything wrong. It just means that I'm human. It means that some of my old patterns will still emerge. And it means that I have something to work on so that I can continue to grow. I can continue to learn. Right? So even as a weight loss coach, some weight loss coaches will gain weight.
I know that when I gained a little bit of weight, it was much less so than previously. Before I would have put on three stones in a year, now I would have maybe put on two kilos over a few months, maybe six months or so. And then I would gradually lose that again, so the up and down wasn't as fluctuant as when I was losing and gaining weight.
So the yo-yo effect wasn't as big. It was if you think of maintenance as a line at zero and previously, when I was yo-yoing I was going up to plus 10 kilos and then minus 10 kilos. When I was in maintenance, I was going up one kilo and down one kilo. So there was a range of, instead of 20 kilos, there was a range of two kilos.
So there will still a little bit of a fluctuation, which is very normal, but it wasn't as huge of a fluctuation that used to happen prior to coaching. So I normalised that, that, yes, I am going to overeat sometimes. And that it isn't that much of a big deal. And that I can still maintain my weight even with the occasional overeats, but that I have exactly what I need to do. I know exactly the process. I know exactly what I need to think, feel, and do to get back to that weight that I would like to be. And also it became much less about the weight. I mean, I still weigh myself every day and I still keep an eye on things, but I go more by am I feeling good about myself?
Am I doing my self coaching? Am I managing my mind because I find that when my weight does go up a little bit it's because I'm not managing my mind as well as when I was previously. So I like to think of it as when my weight is going up it's a sign of a mismanaged brain. So I focus instead of on the doing of what do I need to do, I focus on my mind management, because that is the thing that always helps with this, because it's your thoughts that create your results. And so if I have a result that I've created of plus two kilograms, that's because of my thinking. So when I'm able to target my thinking, instead of my doing, then that's what's creating my results.
Okay. Now point 3. When I was in maintenance over the last year and a bit, I was aiming for consistency rather than perfection. So perfectionism was something that I really did need to work on as a high achiever, as a doctor, I was so used to perfectionism because previously it was life and death, right? If I made a mistake in my job, it could impact a patient's life.
There were times in A&E where, what I did actually did matter. So I was in this culture where if I got things wrong, there could be grave consequences. So my brain was still in that kind of perfectionism type thinking. So I had to really turn that perfectionism down and actually aim for consistency rather than perfection.
I had to aim for doing things even when they weren't perfect. I had to aim for getting things done even when they weren't at the highest standard. So I'll give an example. I had to plan my food when I was going out to eat at a restaurant and I didn't know the specifics of everything, but what I did was I aimed to be consistent in planning my food, even though I didn't know the ins and outs of everything.
But what I was able to do, I was able to control the things that I was able to control. And I owned that and I decided to focus on that, rather than things that I couldn't control. So with consistency, that meant doing a thought download even when I didn't feel like doing it in the morning, it meant planning my food even when I didn't feel like doing it, it meant setting my future self up for success. So that may have meant putting my clothes the day before so that when I woke up in the morning, they were ready. And it was forming that consistency, doing it even when I didn't always want to do it, overcoming some of that primitive thinking that I had and setting myself up for success.
So that was a really important point that I learnt in this maintenance.
Point 4 is evaluation. I learnt how to evaluate every single day. And this is a big part of my maintenance and I teach it to all of my students too. How do I learn from any overeats? How do I learn from days that I gave into urges? How do I learn from days that I didn't want to plan? How do I learn from days where my routine was different? Like when my son was in hospital, how did I learn from that? What did I get to learn about myself?
So I evaluated a lot during this, and some of the things that I picked up on where I got clearer about eating to enough versus eating to full. So I found out the difference between emotional fullness and physical fullness, and I think I'll do another podcast on that later on this year ao do listen out for that.
I got better at managing my urges. So I knew that they felt bad for a few minutes, but then they got better and I would rather have a few minutes of discomfort now than weeks of discomfort later when I would feel bad about my weight going up and everything not going exactly how I had planned.
I learnt about how to make doable, realistic plans for myself so that I was actually setting myself up for success rather than setting myself up for failure by setting unrealistic plans. I realised that planning was more about building up that relationship with myself, that I do what I say I'm going to do, rather than sticking to the plan, because that's what's going to make me lose weight.
I learned that one of the main things that I struggled with in this year was people pleasing. And that's what I worked on a lot in my evaluations. And I realised that I would often people please my family or my husband. And I often didn't realise at the time that I was people pleasing them. So for example, when I had planned for food on protocol and then my husband said, oh, let's just get a quick takeaway. I was like, okay, cool. As opposed to being like, it's okay, you can have the takeaway and I'll eat what's on my plan. I would sometimes do that, and I realised it's because I was people pleasing him and I wanted to join in with the celebration and things like that.
Now that doesn't mean you can't do that. But I realised that for me, that was something that was coming up quite often. I realised that I was people pleasing others. And I remember when I wanted to go out and I wanted to eat it all. Like I remember I went to a family wedding and I ended up eating way more than I would usually eat.
And I went back for seconds when I wasn't really hungry. And I had to work through some of this and the thoughts about some of this and it surfaced for me that I went back to my old way of thinking where I was the life of the party, I always had seconds, I always went back for more, I was always the one who had three desserts, things like that.
So my brain, when I was surrounded by these cousins who had grown up with that, it reminded me of that self concept that I used to have then. And so it was really interesting for my brain to go there again. And so when in my evaluation I was able to notice this and I was able to notice that when this was to happen again, how can I plan for it differently in future?
And that really helped in my evaluations. I learned from my evaluation that one of my main things to focus on was to be kinder to myself, that actually eating food off protocol wasn't as much of a big deal as how I beat myself up and criticise myself and judged myself when I did that. And what I made it mean about myself.
Like, I wasn't good enough, or I wasn't cut out for this or whatever it may be. I learned how to take ownership of my own actions and not blame it on people outside of me on coronavirus or my husband bringing lovely food, or my mum making the best food or any external thing. I was able to take responsibility and ownership of my own thinking, creating my results rather than blaming things outside of me.
And that really helped me because I realised that it was actually in my own control. It wasn't due to everything else outside of me. And that was one of the things that really helped me get back on it when I was not feeling as motivated.
I was able to see that in my evaluations, there are normal weight fluctuations. So for example, when I'm on my period, my weight goes up over three kilograms and then it comes back down to normal. And when this first happened, I was like, wait, I ate everything on protocol. Everything was fine. Why has it gone up three kilograms? And so I had to really coach myself during this year, normalising that and being like, this is completely fine.
Previously before coaching, I would have been like, oh my gosh, I put on three kilos. It's not working. Let me just give up. And ironically, that would make me gain even more weight, right? Because I would be giving up. So I was able to notice that pattern for me and correct that in my own brain during this year.
And I realised that I didn't need to beat myself up into self care. What I would often do is think you have to exercise, you have to do that to do your self care. I would beat myself up into self care and I realised that that wasn't really very caring. So instead of beating myself up into self care, I would decide to allocate time for self care, and I would decide to do the things that actually would care for myself rather than telling myself off into doing self care. So that was something that I learned from my evaluations as well.
And then the fifth thing that I learned was one of my struggles was the difficulty in sitting in the self concept of a person who just maintains their weight, who just has lost 42 kilos and keeps it off. I, in my brain, was still that girl who was 92 kilos, who always struggled with her weight. And when I was sitting in the food scarcity, like, oh my gosh, I need to eat this otherwise I'll miss out or if I don't eat it now, then I won't get it again... Anything like that, then this showed up even in maintenance, because I would be thinking it's going to come back, I'm going to gain it all again, it's not going to last. So that's how my scarcity thoughts came about.
So I had to really work on being in the self concept of a person who eats like a naturally thin person, who can say no when I'm full, who stops when they've eaten enough, who isn't too phased by eating out and knows that she will eat on protocol, who follows the six steps without much drama and who is able to follow through for herself and work on her thinking. When I was able to sit in that self-concept I was able to really bask in it and I was able to create that for myself.
So, this is all possible for you too. I wanted to do this podcast because I wanted to talk about the reality of maintenance and that it isn't all hunky dory, but it has evolved me into a person who can do hard things who can put my mind to something and go out and achieve it by managing my mind. By embracing that negative emotion, by embracing that discomfort that comes up and instead of shying away from failure, diving towards failure, failing a hell of a lot, because as I always say, massive failure creates massive success.
I'll see you all next week.
If you would like to join the group coaching programme please make sure you book a free consult at www.amruticoaching.com. I would love to speak to you and see if we're a good fit for working with each other. I can help you and I look forward to doing so!
Take care, ladies. Bye-bye.