[00:00:02] Ready to lose 40 plus pounds without giving up happy hours, weekend brunches, or date nights. Then it's time to uncover the hidden link between binge eating and toxic relationships. And finally break free from both. Welcome to the Hungry for Love podcast with Jillian Scott. Y' all ready? Let's go.
[00:00:24] Hey. Hey. Welcome back. All right, today we are going to dive into the magic of believing in yourself. And so this episode is going to piggyback off a couple. So episode 117 is the Magic of believing new things, which is also really important. One of the greatest skills you can ever develop. And then also the bonus episode around Christmas Eve. So that was episode 118. So if you go back to the holiday episodes of 2024, there are some great ones there. But this year, I want to take it and really spin it into the magic of believing in yourself in particular, because believing in yourself is tough, but believing in yourself after verbal and emotional and narcissistic abuse is even tougher.
[00:01:05] So often we have someone else's negative words in our head and it can create a lot of self doubt, which is why I covered it extensively in episode 141 on the core four wounds of narcissistic Abuse. Self doubt. It is one of the hugely, hugely. I don't know if that's a word.
[00:01:25] It is one of the critical aspects that impacts us and the way that we take on the trauma and how we internalize it. It's so much of it comes out as self doubt.
[00:01:36] And typically someone dysfunctional and highly dysregulated had to put you down in order to make themselves feel better. So in order to feel better about himself, my ex would put me down or tear me down or make fun of me, things like that. But it was not because there was anything wrong necessarily about me. That's just how he learned and his brain processed. This is how I feel better. This is how I meet my needs. And this is often what happens with dysfunctional people, is that's what they do. They project their thoughts, their insecurities, their issues onto you. And so it's their projection masked as inadequacy. And you.
[00:02:17] But we take that on, we assume that is ours. And especially when we grow up that way, that is what we've learned. That's what we know. And so because we know it, because it's familiar, because we know how to survive, we know how to operate in it. Even if we kind of question or we want to challenge a statement or challenge their view or their belief, it's like they Dig in even harder. They find more evidence, more ways as to how they're right. They'll blame shift, they'll bring up totally side angle, side projections, right? And it's like you could be talking about dinner and then all of a sudden they're talking about how you failed a test in college or like something completely irrelevant. But now it's just this word soup of all the ways in which you suck. And it's hard, like it is hard to maintain your self confidence and self concept through that. And this is why emotional abuse is so insidious. It's why emotional and verbal abuse are just as painful, just as real and just as damaging as physical abuse. And because of our human brain's natural desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure, right? What the habit brain wants to do and it wants to avoid even the threat of pain, the fear of failure, the threat of failure, feeling guilty, shame, inadequacy, because we want to avoid even the threat of that, the potential of that. We go for what feels safe, even when it's not what we truly want, even when it goes against what it is that we truly want.
[00:03:45] So last year's message is still very relevant. Believing new things on purpose is one of the greatest skills you could ever have, and it's one of the hardest. But this year I want to put the emphasis on believing in yourself. Believing good positive things about yourself, your goals, your abilities. Believing that even though you couldn't get a spouse or, or somebody in the past to change, maybe you couldn't get a parent or a step parent or an in law to change or to change their view of you, you can change. You have power and ownership over your life.
[00:04:20] And choosing to believe on purpose means catching the default thoughts when they come in and consciously choosing to tell yourself a new story, a different story. This isn't that we will never have negative thoughts or critical thoughts. It's not that we will never experience shame or certain emotions. It's that we know how to change the story. We can better recognize when we are taking on somebody else's thoughts, somebody else's emotions, somebody else's views or beliefs. And we also learn how to change the story, how to shift. And sometimes it's a very simple, I don't say this to myself anymore. Like I choose not to indulge in self doubt. I choose not to indulge in worst case scenarios. I choose to not to spend more time thinking about my failure than my success.
[00:05:06] And this is where we want to look for equal air time. Yes, default thoughts are going to come up, but we want to look at catching them faster and changing them faster. And so however much time you catch yourself spending in the negative default stories of failure or inadequacy, I want you to spend just as much, if not more time thinking about what's possible, thinking about your potential, indulging in what some people might say is delusional.
[00:05:30] You decide what you want to spend your time thinking about and cultivating and manifesting. That is power.
[00:05:37] That's what you can own. One thing that I remind clients all the time is that one, this will come up all throughout the year. We have certain expectations around when we're going to get triggered and what it's going to look like. And it can definitely come up around the holidays, but things will come up all year long. And this is good because it shows us our work, it shows us the next level, the next evolution of how we can get deeper and deeper into better seeing and breaking these patterns and these habits that no longer serve us. A couple pieces here that we want to look at is that when you feel triggered, what we want to do is look at it from two different angles. So number one is what might you need to pay attention to with your current situation.
[00:06:18] So if the self doubt is being triggered, if shame, if inadequacy, if fear, if hesitation, no matter what is coming up, if something is coming up for you, we want to look at, okay, so what is it about my current situation that is triggering this?
[00:06:31] And where can I self soothe? Where can I look for true potential obstacles and how I will solve them? How can I better address what my brain is offering me? Is this even a valid concern or a real issue that I should be addressing? Or is it really just my brain running amok?
[00:06:46] Okay, so that's number one. Number two is what is the deeper wound that this is triggering?
[00:06:51] And sometimes that is more of the work, sometimes it is less. About what's in the moment and the deeper aspects of truly learning how to believe in yourself, learning how to redefine and rebuild your relationship with failure and how to better see it as okay, this is a good thing, this can get me closer to my goals, but only if I learn from it and being willing to fail and to love on yourself, to have compassion, to stop beating yourself up, to stop self loathing and to instead turn that into curiosity and compassion so that you can learn from it. There are some really important aspects that we just don't have the awareness. Sometimes it's the capacity or even the tolerance for like our Failure tolerance is typically very low because that's not how we're trained in school. But how we're trained in school does not really fit real life. The way that I think about this often can be when it's like you have a bruise, right? So if you have. If I have a bruise on my arm, I can press a different part of my arm and it just feels like pressure. But when I press the bruise, it's tender, it's sensitive, it hurts more even with the same amount of pressure. And that is often what triggers can be. Sometimes it is the pressure of what's happening in the moment, and sometimes that can be painful, but sometimes it's more that it's a low level of pressure, but it's hitting a wound. It's hitting something that is deeper, that has not fully healed.
[00:08:15] So this just shows us where we get to work, what we get to focus our attention. And this healing work that we're doing, sports and physical therapy, has been such a great analogy of this, because I know for all of the physical issues and ailments that I've had in my life, the problem has never actually been the body part that's hurting.
[00:08:35] So when I was in college, I got patellar tendonitis, which is right at the base of my kneecap. So there was pain in my knees. And I kept thinking, I have a knee problem.
[00:08:45] No, actually, I didn't have a knee problem. I had really tight IT bands. I had an imbalance between my glutes, hamstrings, and quads. There were muscles that were too tight than others, too weak than others, and that's why there was pain in my knee. But it actually wasn't the knee that was the problem. And just like with my lower back recently, I had some lower back pain a couple days ago, and it was just sore and tight. And I kept thinking, oh, that's odd. This hasn't happened in a while. But I also knew this is typically not a back issue. When my back is sore, it's typically not a back problem. It is a glute problem. My glutes are either not strong enough or they're too tight. And I think right now, with how much I've been lifting and, like, my glutes are pretty strong, I think I would err more on they're likely too tight.
[00:09:32] So, yes, I could massage my back and that would feel good. But to actually address the issue, to get beyond just the symptom and to address the root of it, we have to address different muscles. And this has happened time and time again to where I know if I go see a physical therapist about knee pain and all they want to do is look at my knee, I don't go back because I know this is not a knee issue. We need to solve it elsewhere. And I don't always know exactly what the answer is. I think sometimes it's rest, sometimes it's strengthening exercises, sometimes a deep tissue massage that like, hurts, that sometimes can be really helpful and that makes pain go away. So I have also found and learned that there are a variety of tools and techniques that will work at different times, depending on what's going on. But sometimes I just have to go through and figure out, okay, what's going to work for this situation, because I don't know off the top of my head. And to be fair, neither does a doctor, neither does the physical therapist. That's okay. This gets to be my work and I get to explore and I get to see what works best for my body. And I'm going to trust that. And I'm going to trust that sometimes I know better than a doctor, A doctor that doesn't know me, hasn't lived in my body with my life. And there's a lot of that self authority and self trust that we build when we can say, I know how to handle this and I'm willing to test this out and figure out what's going to work for me. And if there comes a point where I've exhausted all possibilities and all the things that I know how to do, then it's time to go seek some, some extra help and support. In the past, I have been very quick to seek that support to where now I have a fairly large resourced tool bag in my opinion of how to address and how to solve problems. Because I have done that so quickly and easily in the past. So that's my take, that's what I prefer to do. But this will come up all the time. And seeing it from this level of what is the symptom versus what is the root cause. I talk about this frequently when it comes to emotional eating, right? It's not about the food, it's not about the cravings, it's not about sugar or even food addiction. It is truly about your resistance to feeling certain emotions, your resistance to low level chronic emotional distress and emotional pain.
[00:11:45] And this is really what it was for me was this low level stress and shame. And I don't think it was so much anxiety. But at times there was a lot of anxiety and fear, fear around what Am I doing with my life fear around? Am I wasting this one precious life? Will I spend my entire life and never do anything meaningful or anything impactful? There were some deep core fears that I had. Regardless of bills being paid or having a job or even being fairly fit, there was still this low level shame and self doubt and inadequacy. And I didn't realize at the time, I didn't connect the dots and couldn't tell that it was from years and decades really of chronic emotional abuse. And really that's how I had spent my entire life, was in one abusive relationship or another.
[00:12:33] And this is what we now get to address and we get to look at so same thing when it comes to trauma and with triggers. Sometimes it is the situation and what's coming up, but sometimes it's just pointing you to something deeper.
[00:12:49] So to look at this from more of a trauma relationship standpoint, I had an experience a couple weeks ago where I had a text conversation and I just felt like something was off and I couldn't quite tell, but like my body was very dysregulated and I couldn't figure out, especially initially, what was going on, like why did I feel hurt and sad And I couldn't even figure out what I was feeling to begin with. But it was this big emotion and it didn't sit right with me. And so I spent about an hour just sitting with the emotions and trying to figure out, in a kind of a relaxed setting too, of okay, what am I feeling here? And just letting my brain wander, notice what sensations I was actually feeling, letting myself explore potential connections. And what I noticed was that I was the sense of not being chosen, not being special, because I felt left out. It meant I was therefore unwanted, not chosen, not special. It was part of this, was what I was making it mean in my head.
[00:13:47] So the issue in and of itself was not really a big deal, but it was pushing on that wound, it was pushing on the bruise. It was a little bit of pressure to show me that I still had some things to address.
[00:14:00] And so these are key emotions, the being chosen, being special, feeling wanted. These are very key emotions that I've attached to men in the past, specifically romantic partners, because I didn't feel that way from a father figure. And so it was really good to see where I was making somebody else responsible for meeting my emotional needs so that I can explore ways that I can meet them for myself in a healthy way.
[00:14:27] But I also got specific and started to piece together and explored how it reminded me of When I moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, moved overseas as a freshman in high school, and I really felt forgotten about. I felt left out. I felt like life just went on without me. And to be honest, it did, and it had to. That was a good thing. I could not expect my whole high school to stop life and to stop moving forward just because my parents took a job in a different country. But I felt like life and friends went on without me. And even with email in 2000, 2001, it was hard to stay in touch with friends back home. And so that experience may have triggered even some deeper wounds of being unwanted and abandoned and just stories from my childhood that I hadn't quite put together. But it's just noticing this kind of cascade of, oh, what I was feeling a couple weeks ago was triggering, feeling left out, unwanted, maybe even abandoned, which then triggered. And memories of when I felt that in the past. And so it's not so much about the in the moment issue. That for me was really like, here are the deeper layers. Here are the things that I get to see. And also recognizing the in the moment was where am I making somebody else responsible for my emotions and for my emotional wellbeing and meeting those needs? And that's good because I've spent basically my entire life doing that. I spent nearly 40 years doing that. And so it's normal that will be. That default pattern will come up from time to time. I can be conscious and aware of it, but I guarantee it's going to come up. And it'll probably come up in the next couple of years. I do believe that I will get to a point where it doesn't come up or it comes up so infrequently. It's so rare. And how I see binging now of. I don't binge anymore. Occasionally I might overeat, but it's very rare. And that's how I see it. It's like I am going to really create the awareness and the compassion and the love and do the work to heal those inner wounds so that I'm not putting that responsibility on a friend or a spouse or even my son. Right. This is really addressing that codependent cycle that we get into, because that's what codependency is all about, is you are responsible for meeting my needs. I need you to show up a certain way, you need to perform a certain way. I need to control you or your emotions or your actions, your words, so that I can feel how I want to feel. It's good to recognize this pattern coming up in different ways and at different times. Because sometimes this is just. It's a habit that we learned.
[00:16:56] And when it's a habit that you learned, it's a habit you can unlearn. Okay? This is the beautiful part about it, is when we take ownership, when we take responsibility, I don't need anyone or anything else around me to change. I get to change. And then I also get to decide who and what I want to keep in my life and at what levels and what levels of access, to what degree. I get to decide that.
[00:17:19] But I'm no longer needing somebody else to change, needing somebody else to show up for me in a certain way to bring it back.
[00:17:27] Part of this was also what I was making it mean. And I think this is such a great question for us to ask about anything emotionally driven, emotionally charged is, what am I making this mean? What am I making this mean about me, about my life, about my career choices, about my ability to make decisions, about my ability to trust myself? That is such a key question.
[00:17:49] And then it's also showing me that over old wound that was getting triggered that now I get to heal on deeper and deeper layers. And I'm piecing together more aspects of the story because when I looked back, I never really forget that I lived overseas in high school. That's just a part of me, right? It's part of my story. But sometimes I forget the potential trauma or how that could have played into abandonment wounds from when I was a kid and just further triggered some things.
[00:18:15] So again, it helps me to choose a new story on purpose, to decide what is it that I want to think and believe on purpose now, in this moment. And it also gives me opportunities to rewrite old stories.
[00:18:28] And that's our work, is we get to decide now the new story that we want to tell. And I know I brought this up recently, within the last couple of episodes too, is especially around divorce, right? What is the story that you want to tell about divorce? Your divorce specifically, what do you want to believe about your divorce?
[00:18:46] Because again, I feel proud of my decision to get divorced. I am proud of my decision to leave a marriage where neither one of us were healthy or thriving. To leave a marriage that likely would have killed us on some level, truly from an emotional, mental, potentially even physical standpoint. Not that either one of us would have physically harmed the other person.
[00:19:10] But it eats away at you. It eats away at your soul. And emotional and verbal abuse can also create physical manifestations like autoimmune diseases, gut health issues, other health conditions. It can create physical manifestations, even from something like emotional abuse. So this is where it's recognizing. I am proud of my decision to leave because we were not the right fit. We were not a good pair. Not only did I change and outgrow him, but my ex also changed. As I start to think now about his thoughts and views and beliefs on different things, things we both changed quite radically and it was very much apart. It was like a big fork in the road almost. And I went right and he went left and that's okay. Letting him be him, letting him have his own thoughts, his own beliefs, his own relationship with God and how he chooses to see that and see the Bible and interpret it. There are a lot of things that I'm going to let him let them. And now I'm going to let me and let myself choose and make decisions for me. I get to see these deeper layers, new layers, new things, and also recognize if old habits and old patterns come up because this truly, at the end of the day, like this is not a problem.
[00:20:24] I'm rewiring my brain. I'm rewiring neural pathways that have been there for a long time, for decades.
[00:20:33] We've got to bring such compassion and such love to ourselves as we do this work.
[00:20:39] Believing in yourself requires an incredible amount of self trust. Because you are trusting and you are believing, you are committing, that you won't beat yourself up, you won't shame or self loathe. If you don't hit your goal, if you don't hit it in a certain time frame, you learn how to have your own back. Even when you don't get what you want the first time around, even when it takes you years of trying and failing and not getting what you want, it's that willingness to try something new to figure out what will work. This becomes our challenge is, okay, where do I need to try what seemed to work in the past? Where do I need to try the same thing and try to do it better? Or where do I need something totally different that is something that just comes with time, with practice and really building this level of self trust, of recognizing and seeing it, looking at it, eyes wide open.
[00:21:31] And when we do that with our emotional eating, with our dieting, with our weight loss goals and journey, when we do that and we are very much aware and clear and focused, so often the truth will be made apparent. You will learn and you will be able to see and recognize when it's time to shift.
[00:21:49] But this is a necessary skill to have because we never learned this in school we learned, follow the formula, follow the study guide, and you'll get the right answer, you'll get the good grade, you'll get your A. But real life, real results don't work that way. It's more the exception than the rule.
[00:22:06] Right? And so we have to change our relationship with failure. We have to increase our emotional tolerance for it. Which means I think of it as expanding your capacity to not just feel failure, to feel like a failure, but to feel all the emotions that come with your version of failure and where it is right now.
[00:22:24] And it's choosing on purpose to believe in yourself despite the fails, despite the past attempts. And when you bring in that love and the compassion and you can learn from it, that is the only way you will do it. And that is probably hands down one of the most pivotal things that changed in my weight loss and emotional eating journey. And one of the reasons why I was able to go from binging nearly every day to never again was because I looked at my emotional eating, I looked at my overeating, I looked at any binge anytime that came up.
[00:22:57] And I had so much love and compassion. And I decided on purpose, no shame, no judgment. And I was gonna notice the sensations that came up in my body and I'd allow them to be there, but I would decide very consciously, I can do this, I can figure this out. I'm now doing something different, things that I haven't done quite before.
[00:23:18] And I'm doing it in a new way and to some extent for the first time. And I'm not gonna get it right all the time. And that's okay. I did not go into it expecting that I was going to stop emotionally eating forever.
[00:23:29] I actually didn't expect to stop binging all of a sudden. I very much thought that would be a process.
[00:23:35] And I would say I stopped binging. And it really then was just like, it was just a little bit of overeating, a little bit of emotional eating.
[00:23:44] But I can't even remember my last binge. It was that long ago.
[00:23:48] And that is possible for you too.
[00:23:51] But sometimes we need more of a process, we need a little more hand holding, we need more support and how to do that. And we have a multi pronged approach like what I bring.
[00:24:01] I don't see anybody else in the diet, weight loss, healing space is bringing these concepts around. Diet trauma, emotional eating, binge eating, relationship trauma, other aspects that we go through. Like nobody is bringing this together like me. And so because of that, because I see things differently and in this new and unique way, that is the healing journey, that is the approach, that's how we solve it is with this multi pronged approach of looking at what's happening in the moment, looking at your relationship with food, looking at relationship issues and like your relationship with other people and yourself, looking at trauma, bringing all of this together. Because that undercurrent of emotion, even if it's a low level kind of always there can be a huge driver of a chronic overeating or emotional eating habit.
[00:24:50] And that's okay. We have to look at it with love, with compassion, and when we can accept what is, then we can truly change it.
[00:25:00] But we have to look at it. We have to be willing to hold so much love. Give yourself a big, giant, big hug as you are looking at this and addressing it.
[00:25:10] And then it's the willingness to try something new.
[00:25:14] Usually just one thing, just a little bit better.
[00:25:17] It's like small, simple steps.
[00:25:20] Slow and steady wins the race, right? And we don't want to go slow and steady, right? That's boring.
[00:25:27] We want the big, sexy, fast results. Okay? That's how our brains are wired. That's how a lot of marketing and like how a lot of programs are sold, especially in the diet and weight loss space.
[00:25:37] Right? Of course we want that. But ultimately it's like, why do you want to lose 20, 30 pounds? Why do you want to lose a hundred pounds? It's because you want to feel a certain way physically, you want to feel a certain way, but you also want to feel emotionally a certain way about yourself. You want to have certain thoughts about yourself, and you get to have those thoughts about yourself. Now you can have any thought you want, whether you weigh 100 pounds or 200 pounds or 300 pounds. Like, you can have the exact same thought because I guarantee you can have the thought of, I'm not thin enough, I'm not pretty enough, I'm not whatever enough. And it does not matter what the scale says. You can always have that thought. You want to know why I know this? Because I've had that thought. I've had that thought at 150 pounds, at 125 pounds, even at 108 pounds. Like, even when I was underweight, it was like I didn't. It was like, I don't look good enough or I don't look like I have the right size or the right shape unless I am, like, grossly underweight.
[00:26:34] And this is why. It is not about the circumstance. It's not about the weight. It's the story that you are telling yourself. It's the expectation, it's who you are comparing yourself to.
[00:26:44] This is where I know my brain is still going to come up with criticism. It's still going to have thoughts.
[00:26:50] My thighs are too big, I don't have a narrow enough waist.
[00:26:53] My brain will always find something that is like not good enough about my body and I choose on purpose to override it. I choose not to indulge it. I choose to think and believe good, positive things about myself and about my body and about my habits and about myself even as I'm on the way to the to a goal. This is how I lost the weight. It's what happened as I was losing weight and it's how I'm now able to stay in maintenance comfortably and easily because that is the same pattern that I have now.
[00:27:26] And it's the same approach that I'm taking to dating. It's the same approach I'm taking to saving money and potentially buying a house in the next couple years. It's the same thing that I bring to my business of I'm going to enjoy the journey, I'm going to learn from failures, I'm going to learn from different experiences, I'm going to get better and better and I'm going to think positively about it. I'm going to make this fun, I'm going to make this enjoyable. I'm willing for it to take a certain amount of time because I know that I can enjoy the process of creating it, enjoy the process of finding a future spouse. And even now, like dating somebody, it's like I'm going to enjoy the process of dating and being in this like fun new dating experience and just enjoy this part of our life and our experience because we're never going to get it back.
[00:28:11] Assuming he and I stay together. This is it.
[00:28:14] I don't have to be in a hurry to get married. In the past I was, but now it's like I can actually relax and enjoy this part of the journey, enjoy this process, not be in such a rush because I also have very realistic expectations about marriage and what marriage entails. And it is no longer this fairy tale, pie in the sky thing.
[00:28:34] Just like you have to know that a smaller body does not mean this fairy tale lifestyle. In fact, this is the challenge is that for some of you, there's fear around losing weight. There's fear of attracting the wrong person, of attracting and getting more attention, more male attention, more attention from toxic people. In a sense, on some levels, it is safer to keep the weight on. Because now it means less attention, less attraction, especially attraction from the wrong people. Okay, I got off on a side tangent there.
[00:29:05] Gonna come back to my notes and touch on this. And my personal take is that believing in yourself also requires a surrendering to God, the universe, or some kind of higher power. You're surrendering the timeline, the journey, the process of creating a goal, what that looks like, how long it takes, all of the details, right? It's like there is this surrendering and it's believing and trusting that the desires of your heart are there for a reason.
[00:29:33] They are there for you to follow and fulfill, no matter what anyone else says, no matter what past evidence might say or prove, no matter how long it takes. I have a couple of thoughts that you can also try on this year, and one of my favorites is what's for you, can't miss you.
[00:29:50] If it's meant to be, it's going to be right. It's that whole idea. What's for you? Can't miss you.
[00:29:56] Another one of my favorites that I told myself a lot, especially at the beginning of my divorce was you are getting everything you want. And sometimes that will feel terrible. And that's okay, right? I'm getting everything I want in this moment, and it feels like complete and utter shit. And that's all right. I can handle it. And another one that I learned, I would say fairly early on, like, definitely after college, was God will give you the desires of your heart. Sometimes it just doesn't look like what you think it should. And the best, one of the best examples and the first examples when I really saw this firsthand in my life, was running a bakery from Bangladesh.
[00:30:36] So I always thought it would be so fun. So, and this was like 2008 to 2010, I was like, oh, my gosh, it'd be so fun to have a bakery in this, like, cake and cupcake shop. I would love that. I liked to bake. And that thought just sounded so fun, so exciting. And I always thought maybe in the future, maybe in retirement, maybe one day down the road. But it was always, like, off into the future.
[00:30:55] And then at 24, almost 25 years old, I got to do it. I got to run a cake and cupcake shop. And I was the cake lady now. I was not expecting that to happen in a third world country in Asia, right? Like, I wasn't expecting certain aspects of that, But God really fulfilled that desire. He gave me the desires of my heart. And I also realized I love baking, but I don't love Baking when somebody's paying me for it. I don't love baking when there's a timeline. I don't like baking or decorating a cake when now there's this fear and now I've included this exchange of money and I'm afraid of letting somebody down. Or now there's this timeline and there's these time crunches or like I realized too how much it was. Like I enjoyed it. But that is not what I wanted to do with my life. It's not what I wanted to do back here in the US but it was pivotal, it was instrumental that I went through that because that is what got me into entrepreneurship. That's what got me ultimately into coaching. That is how I found my purpose in a very indirect way. And part of the whole reason why I went to Bangladesh was because I didn't have any other options in the us I was living with my grandpa, driving his truck, no job. The job I had went under. Like the business went, fell apart and this third world country was literally my best option. And there was so much shame. It's 2010, I've been a couple years out of college trying to pay back student loans. They're now in forbearance because I'm not making any money. And there was so much shame. I felt like such a failure.
[00:32:27] But that is where God needed to take me in order to do the work he needed to do. Sometimes God takes you where you don't want to go. To create in you what couldn't have been done any other way. It was true for my life and that experience in my career, post college life was very much true.
[00:32:46] It was also true of my divorce.
[00:32:49] It was true in my marriage, my second marriage. Sometimes God takes you where you don't want to go because that is what is needed to get you to wake up and having the peace and the acceptance and the love and the compassion for yourself. Through that I wanted to create a healthy, thriving marriage and relationship with a spouse. And I thought it was going to be with one person. Turns out it was going to be with somebody different.
[00:33:14] In my mind, God will give me the desires of my heart. I am going to create that healthy future marriage. But it also required me to pursue divorce first because I realized that I couldn't do it with the person that I was married to at the time. I could not create the relationship that I really wanted. And to be honest, I don't think he was able to create the relationship that he really wanted with me. It went both ways. I had to be willing to now sit with, to divorces and what emotions come up with that, the shame, feeling like a failure, having, quote, failed marriages. It's really in how we think about it and what we make that mean and how we think about it in relationship to ourselves.
[00:33:55] But if we bring this back to believing in yourself, believing things that you can't see yet, believing in the impossible, it requires a lot of faith. And it's a choice.
[00:34:06] Believing in yourself is a choice. It's a choice that you get to make. And you can borrow my belief at times too. But the real superpower is in building the belief in yourself. And that's exactly what I'll help you do. I'm going to help you reclaim and redefine your self concept, your identity. And this won't magically happen after divorce, won't magically happen when you finish a degree, after you lose weight, once you find a new partner, when your kids go off to college. Like, it does not just magically happen the way we think it will. And that's a good thing because if it did, we would never have the chance to actually believe in ourselves. We would never learn things at this deeper level.
[00:34:47] But this is the foundation of the Reclaiming my group coaching program that addresses both diet trauma, disordered eating habits and relationship trauma because they are all intertwined and braided together and we have to slowly work on each piece. And the more that we can do that and address it, the more we get to the root issue, the more we find what's really causing the issue, causing the pain, because a smaller body doesn't fix. A broken self concept, a bigger bank account, a new job title, a fancier car or house, a new spouse, none of those things will truly change the way that you believe in yourself, the way that you think and talk to yourself.
[00:35:31] That is one of the requirements for healing. It's one of the requirements for achieving any new goal. Doing anything for the first time is we have to create this foundation of I'm willing to believe in myself. I'm willing to believe before I have evidence. I'm willing to believe before I have proof or before I think it'll be inevitable. If you were trying to lose 50 pounds and you got to 45 pounds down, you might think, okay, five more pounds, I can do this. You might have thoughts of like, all right, now I have proof. Now I have evidence.
[00:36:01] Can you believe that you can lose that £50 before you've lost one?
[00:36:06] That can be the challenge. But this year, and as we head into this New Year. Instead of hustling to change habits, I want you to lean into rebuilding the woman behind them, rebuilding who you are so that you can break the patterns that kept you small and you can reclaim a new identity.
[00:36:25] Reclaim the woman that you were always meant to be. The Reclaiming this is a group coaching program where we talk about food and weight loss and body image. We talk about relationships and divorce and shame and trauma and abuse because it is all intermingled. It's part of the same puzzle. This is not a weight loss program. It is a self worth and body and identity reinvention. It is so much more than just weight loss because it's not going to mean a damn thing if you still have a life that you hate, if you're still living in abuse and trauma responses. This is about becoming more of who you are, more of who you want.
[00:37:06] This is identifying your desires, what you want for your life, and leaning into that and letting that be good enough to be able to walk away from something or someone. Because this isn't what I want for my life. To let that be good enough to feel justified and to feel like that is a good enough reason for walking away from something dysfunctional or toxic. And I'm going to help you activate the woman you already are. The woman who's already inside of you, who just wants to come out, who's been stuffed down, who's been told she's too much and yet not enough, who's too loud, too boisterous, too needy. And it's now time to come back home. Come back home into your body, create a sense of safety and peace and to really create that vision for your life that you want and to go out and design it on purpose. Intentionally reclaim your body, reclaim your confidence, reclaim your sense of self worth. I'm going to help you do that. To become the version of yourself you've always dreamed of, the one that you knew that you were capable of but that you were likely punished, mocked or neglected for being or for simply wanting.
[00:38:14] This is for women who are done performing. You're done shape shifting. You're done trying to fit into somebody else's box. You're done chasing worthiness through food, weight, body size, relationships, who you're with, who you're not with. It's about reclaiming and redefining your self worth, your self concept. It's a foundation on which we build everything else. This is how you become the woman who can trust herself, who can feel her feelings, who doesn't run from discomfort and finally stops Abandoning herself, who chooses to disappoint others over disappointing herself, who no longer throws herself as this martyr at the mercy of somebody else. And somebody else's wants, dreams, desires to stop giving up on yourself, that vision for your life and to create it with an approach that accounts for the trauma, that accounts for the abuse, that accounts for the neglect, that accounts for all of these mental and emotional aspects that we are now dealing with.
[00:39:13] Because it's not as simple as eat this. Not that it's not the whole story, it never was. But especially after being in narcissistic and emotionally abusive relationships, when we grow up with childhood trauma, that is never the whole story.
[00:39:28] I'm going to help you to redefine that, to see the bigger picture and to now put all of these pieces together in a way that works with your body, with your lifestyle, with your nervous system. Because you can do this. You can do hard things. You can do big, incredible, bold, amazing, life changing things. And that is possible for you this year. If you would like some help and support in doing that, I would love to be there. I would love to help and be a coach and be a guide for you and also invite you into this community where you're going to do it with dozens of other women.
[00:40:02] One of my personal goals is I want to help 30 women lose 30 pounds within this container this year. So there likely won't be 30 people in it at any one time. The intention here is people come in, you work with me, you get results and then you feel good doing things on your own, being able to run with it from there. I'm going to be here for a season. I would love to be part of that healing season of your life, part of your journey.
[00:40:26] I don't expect to be the whole thing. I don't want you dependent on me. That is not the goal, that's not the purpose.
[00:40:32] And I love it when I have clients who are making incredible progress, seeing incredible results, and they also feel incredibly confident in their ability to keep doing that, to keep creating that for themselves. That is wonderful. If you would like to learn more about working with me, either in the group or within private coaching, you can schedule your free
[email protected] schedule. Find a day and time on my calendar that works for you and I'm going to help you really define where it is that you want to go and what that bridge looks like. How do you get from here to there in a clear, concise and realistic way?
[00:41:09] All right, that's it for today. I hope Y' all are having a fabulous week. Happy New Year and I will talk with you again soon. Here's to creating the life and body you crave.
[00:41:24] If this episode resonated with you, you it's time to break free from destructive cycles around food, alcohol and toxic relationships. Your next step Book your free Break the Cycle call where you'll finally see why your binge eating and relationship patterns are so deeply connected and how to break free from both for good.
[00:41:45] You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love.
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[00:41:59] It's time to break the cycle. I'll show you how.
