Dear Shifters,
Happy Martin Luther King Day! I am including one of my favorite coaching about dreams in honor of the great man. Have a great day and don’t forget to have a dream. (Read below)
BTW The Shift Weight Mastery Process and Re-Shift (coming up this Saturday) are almost full. Please let me know if you are still interested or remind those friends and family that are interested to get in touch with me so that we can get them started. 323 988 4574. Thanks!!
Do You Have Dream? Don’t Wait for it to Come True
Is there life after we reach our goal weight?
Is it better, dreamier, more fulfilling?
Do the heavens open up and size 4 angels float down and strum harps the moment the digital scale readout lets you know---YOU’VE WON! You’re skinny! You’re one of us! You’re in the in club! You’ve made to that place where life is sweeter, the clothes fit righter, the sex is better, the jobs are more interesting, and people are always nice to you.
Hmm…that ideal scenario depends a lot on how, and who you are, when you get there.
As I have mentioned, before I made my shift my weight often neared or was even less than what I weigh now as I dieted and deprived myself for years. But I was far from a success—I was miserable and I still hated myself and had zero trust in myself as a person who had any skills to maintain whatever weight loss I had achieved. In fact, whenever I hit my “goal”, I got scared. The diet was over, the obsessive goal attained—now what? I have to live with myself? Yikes! I can’t do that! Even though I was skinny Inner Critic and Inner Rebel ran my show—where was the real Rita in all of this mess? Who the hell knew! Talk about inner oppression!
All of a sudden I got very hungry and that void that I had been filling with icky diet food hollered out for cake and hamburgers and whatever was fattening. “Don’t even think about anything with a vegetable in it!”—the void would spew at me. Fill me up or else! And I did, rather than have to face the life I avoided while trying to get skinny—I would comply eagerly—even though my heart was breaking knowing I would get on the scale tomorrow and the trip back up the digital readout would have begun yet again.
I have, in my years in the weight release business, worked with some poster children for other weight loss plans. These “success stories” lost all the weight they wanted to on
Lindora, Micheal Thurman, Slim Fast, Jenny Craig etc. They even had their pictures
plastered over the papers and advertisements for these programs. When they came to me, these pictures of the thin them were a mere memory—the weight had come back once the plan had been discarded or the weight loss goal achieved.
One client brought such a picture in to me, an ad in the Times for one of these “programs” There he stood smiling from ear to ear in his “after” pose, all toned and skinny, the washboard abs rippling under his tight t-shirt. He told me that the moment that photo session was over, he went out and began to eat himself back up the scale 50 pounds. “I just didn’t know what else to do, a voice in me said, okay you’re done now, eat!—and so I did”.
When our weight loss is only about reaching a number on a scale—we lose—but not in a good way. We lose the opportunity to really live our lives and to learn how to love and trust ourselves so that when we do reach that day when our ideal weight appears on the scale, it is only a small part of a celebration that has been happening all along. This celebration really began when you started your journey to weight mastery and finally began connecting to your true wants and needs.
The journey to long-term permanent weight loss isn’t about “before and after”--it’s about NOW—about loving yourself now. Showing up for yourself--NOW. Staying connected to yourself--NOW. Living the life of your dreams--NOW. Not letting some number on a scale give you permission to be okay or pretty or sexy or loveable or smart. Your key to releasing the weight permanently is giving yourself the permission slip--NOW.
So that when you do reach your ideal weight it will be a story more similar to a client of mine named Laura. Laura struggled with her weight all of her life. She had dieted and been successful a number of times but the success was short lived—she always gained it back. Her life had been pretty dedicated to losing weight, so much so, that she had few true friends and other than work, not much of a life.
When we started working together I asked her what her dream was she told me she wanted to study art in Italy for a summer. I asked her why she never pursued this dream. She said she never felt like she looked good enough—in her fantasy when she went to Italy she was thin. So then I asked her, if she was thin right now what would be stopping her from going right this very second and signing up. “Well I am not good at languages-my Italian sucks”, she replied. “I am shy and kind of scared to go there all by myself.” “So it really is more than your weight?” I asked. “Yeah,” she replied, “I guess I use my weight as an excuse to not put myself out there.” “Maybe part of your weight release is to learn Italian and join an Art Club,” I suggested.” Laura balked at the idea—“I have to be thin first then I’ll do that.” I pressed her—“but if you do these things now as you are releasing the weight you will build your confidence and expand your life--you would be loving yourself down the scale by living your dream NOW.” She got the point and began to take it to heart.
Now Laura was one of those people who would starve all day and eat all night. As we worked out a food plan that served her, she began to find ways of working living her dream in with her weight release which also helped her avoid night eating—problem solving at it’s best!. She joined an art club on Tuesdays and worked out 4 nights a week—something that she always considered a chore—but now looked forward to because she had the idea to listen to Italian lessons on her Ipod! She found that the trance state of exercise made her brain more receptive to learning. As she released weight, her Italian got better and her social network increased. As she grew thinner her confidence increased and she finally made her dream a reality and signed up for her summer abroad.
The day she stepped on the scale in my office she was in a hurry because she had to get to the passport office before it closed. She glanced at her ideal weight on the scale and said, “I thought it might be that—gotta go! And thanks—I’ll send you a postcard from Rome and it won’t have any meat sauce stains on it! Ciao!” She had become so alive in her life that the number on the scale was a mere afterthought. Even after her return to the states, Laura continued to live large without the large and was able to maintain her weight release. She told me that living her dream even before reaching her weight ideal was key for her. She learned that fat or thin, she was worthy and capable of living a full life—so that making it “all about being thin” didn’t frighten her, nor did she make the number on the scale the reason to give herself permission to love herself.
I am not saying you have to learn a language or learn to paint in order to lose weight. But the opportunity is yours to use this weight release journey to really step into your dreams by focusing on what you truly want out of life and to really honor yourself by making that a part of your journey down the scale.
Thank you for all being a part of my dream come true.
Happy Dreaming,
Happy Shifting
Oxox Rita
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