Episode Transcript
[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, so we are gonna talk about little quits and how they are slowing down your weight loss. And this is. It's not that you are quitting a hundred percent. You aren't like, screw it, I'm just gonna stop trying to lose weight forever. But it's a little quit. It is the small ways in which we slow down our progress and we stop making progress. And it really stems from how we're thinking about things. And I would say a little quit stems from feeling discouraged. Often it comes from unmet expectations. But so often we're just. We have such a small, narrow view of what we're looking at that this number didn't align with what I wanted. So therefore, ugh, I'm just feeling so discouraged, so frustrated. So now, like, I give up. And sometimes we give up for the day, and we're like, screw it. I blew it. I've ruined the day. I'll start over tomorrow. Sometimes we think, ugh, screw it, I ruined the week. Sometimes even it's, I ruined the month, where there's no way that I could. If I lost one pound in two weeks, how am I gonna lose four pounds in the next two weeks? Like, how is that even possible? I couldn't possibly do that. So sometimes it's. We throw away a couple of weeks, and it's, ah, I'll start over next week. But before I get too ahead of myself, I want to share an example, because I was coaching my son's soccer team this morning, and we are. I think this is our fourth game, and the boys are roughly four to five years old, and they are learning, and they are picking this up, but most of them came in not really fully knowing how to play, not having played. And for my son in particular, he did a program at school where he's learning skills, but I don't know that they're necessarily having a scrimmage. And so they're still timid around the ball and. And even with a little bit of physical contact. And it's like they're. They're learning, but they're young. They're four. Okay. But anyways, they needed volunteers this year, so I was like, fine, I'll do it. I really wanted my son to Have a coach that was not me, to be fully honest. I wanted him to be able to learn from somebody else. And I just, I thought he would respond better if there was another person who was the coach and not mom. Just because right now he's, he can still be a little clingy and that's totally fine. But I just, I want him to have exposure to other people, to other coaches, things like that. But they needed coaches. So I was like, fine, I will step up and I'll help and. Because I would rather be the coach and have him play than not have enough coaches. And he doesn't get to play like that. That was kind of my rationale. So I've been coaching and I think I would be a killer coach for kids like 12 and up. I've played soccer my entire life. I've played it all over the world. I know this game. I still actually have a lot of really good ball skills. I'm like, who girl? We got some skills now, granted again playing against four year olds, but it's been so fun. Anyways, the whole point of this though is we started the game and the other team scored twice and actually I believe they scored once and then we scored on ourselves once. So we're a couple minutes into the first quarter. We do five minute quarters and so we're a few minutes in and we are down 2 to 0.
[00:03:27] We are not that far into the game. And so I am not out there telling the boys they scored first and now we're down by two points. So we're probably not going to win this game. So don't even try, don't even worry about it. We should just give up now. Nobody is thinking that two minutes into the game. No, no, no. And because we weren't thinking that and it was like, play, have fun, kick the ball, you know. And I'm giving them cues not just to score, but I'm helping give them the action items that they need to do that will allow them to score right. Or to prevent scoring. So we finished the first quarter and we get a water break and it's now tied and it's two to two. And I'm like, awesome, you guys, you're doing so good. And then we play the next quarter and it's a five minute quarter and at halftime we are up by two, maybe three goals. And technically we're not supposed to keep score right like the boys do, of course, and I do in my head a little bit. But technically we're not supposed to be scoring until they Are nine and up. But it's halftime and now we're leading by 2. And then over the next 2 quarters, we end up maintaining that lead. So we go on to score another four goals. I think in the second half, I can't even remember. I need to start writing this stuff down. I need to start tallying and doing all that. But it's hard to try to do all the things when I'm out there also playing ref. So that's the other thing is the coaches are often the referees. It's. It's been a lot of fun, but we end up finishing the game and winning. And so looking at the beginning, look how the game started, you would have thought we would get blown away, that we were going to get blown out of the water, right? Two minutes into the game and we're down by two. Usually not a good sign, but there is still so much of the game left to be played. This is really important for us to look at and to see is how many times do you start working towards a goal, a destination, an end result that you want to create and you give up too early, you quit on yourself. And it's not always a big quit. It's a little quit, It's a little give up.
[00:05:30] And we didn't quit. And that's why I'm so proud of them. Whether we won at the end or not, the fact that they kept playing, they kept trying, they kept getting better and better. That was huge. The assistant coach, he was taking some video and it was so great to be able to watch and to see how my son Caleb, he was going after the ball and he was going in the wrong direction, but he heard the cues and he turned the ball around and kicked it towards the goal that we're supposed to score in. Or how he was able to break through a bunch of people and take the ball towards the goal and he almost scored. He has improved so much. And we miss some of that, right? We can get so hung up on who won and what was the score instead of looking at the progress. And we often could see things. It's like looking at the big picture, we can see it all looking backwards now over the game. I can see it. But even being tied at the first quarter, there might have been a lot of people thinking like, ooh, this is gonna be a close game. Oh, they're neck and neck. We'll see what happens. And it was a pretty close game because we were only ever off by a couple of goals at a time. And so it's One of those things where there are so many comeback stories, right? There are so many amazing comeback stories in sports, especially when it comes down to the last quarter, the last period, the last inning, and they don't stop playing. They keep their eyes focused on here's what we've got to do. They never give up. And I think that is one of the most frustrating things. And it is like if you're ever watching a game, I remember watching some football games where it's like a team might come out in the first half and they play pretty well and then it's like they stop playing in the second half. It's like they forget what they're even doing.
[00:07:11] And it's so hard to watch. And yet so often that's what we do. We quit on ourselves early on. We quit in the first quarter, we quit in the first half and we can still achieve our goal, but we give up on ourselves. And part of what I realized today was I was doing a walk and listening to a training and recentering re grounding my goals, my mindset for the year. And I had looked at some data from January through March, and because of what happened in February and March, I decided I wasn't going to be able to hit a goal for the year. And I had already given up on that, which is ridiculous. We're a quarter of the way into the year and I had already, in this sense, had a mini quit. I wasn't giving up fully, but I was giving up on achieving this end result by the end of the year. And then I went through today and I started doing a little math and I was like, holy cow, I could actually hit this. Like I can't actually hit this goal. And it made me realize, oh my gosh, I did a little quit. I gave up on myself. I gave up on this goal that I had and I'm barely a quarter of the way into it. And it's because one or two months don't go the way that we want, one or two weeks don't go the way that we want. And then we're like, I ruined it. There's no way I could make this up. It's just not going to happen.
[00:08:29] And we give up on ourselves often, I think is a form of self protection. We could see it as self sabotage, but all self sabotage is, is self protection. I'm trying to protect myself from feeling sad or disappointed or frustrated or angry or something later. That's really all that's happening. That's all that's going on.
[00:08:50] So a Little quit is some form of I'm not gonna hit this goal. It's some thought, like a thought error in there around, I'm not gonna hit it, I've ruined it, I've screwed up somehow. I wasn't perfect, therefore I'm not gonna achieve what I really want. And so we either intentionally or unintentionally pull back. And I would say a lot of times this is unintentional. Again, it is that protective mechanism of it's the unintentional kind of starting to pull back. But it becomes that self fulfilling prophecy. And so the key problem here is that you don't feel successful. You're thinking about the results that you've created so far or a circumstance that's come up and it doesn't create you feeling proud or successful. And that's all that's happened, right? It's like something in your results, something in your upcoming circumstances has you thinking, I'm not going to hit this goal. And so we, because of that, we don't feel successful right now the issue is that we do this before the timeline that we've given ourselves is up, right? So it's like we give ourselves a time frame of a month or a half a year or a full year, but we give up. And we do this to ourselves so early in the game, right? We'll do this when we're a quarter of the way through, half of the way through.
[00:10:11] So when I talk about little quits, it's like the small ways that we give up. So. So it's like when we give up on our monthly goal when we're two weeks into the month, we give up on our annual goal when we're three months into the year.
[00:10:24] And I see this a lot when it comes to the scale because that is so often what we're using to measure our success. It's what we're using to measure our progress. And yes, it is a data point and we do want to look at it. We want a healthy relationship with the scale. I want to be able to step on the scale and have it not ruin my mood the rest of the day. And that also means that it can't make my day like so fantastically better. It has to be neutral. And it can be neutral when we are tracking other data points and when we are feeling good about our progress and our success that we've had so far. Which means we need to look often outside of just the scale. But I see this come up often because we have unmet expectations.
[00:11:09] So when we lose. So if you were to have lost 10 pounds, 5 pounds, 2 pounds, month after month, right, you might be thinking like, oh, no, this, something's gone wrong. I can't keep losing two pounds a month. This is going to take me forever to get there. And so you feel discouraged and you. Or. And you might even tell yourself something like, if I only lost 1 pound in the first two months, how could I ever lose 4 pounds? Or if I lost 1 pound in the first two weeks, how could I ever lose 4 lbs in the next two weeks to hit my 5 pound goal? So it's that subtle form of, I'm not going to hit this, so I don't want to feel disappointed. I'm just going to disappoint myself ahead of time by not fully committing, by not running through the finish to, like, back off. It's unintentional, but it's a way that you try to keep yourself from feeling a negative emotion.
[00:12:01] And it's funny because I will use this term and this concept in body pump a lot. So our tracks are usually. They're like five and a half to six minutes long for most tracks. Now, they used to be four to five minute, like four, four and a half minutes. Now most of them are like six minutes. They are long. When you are doing six minutes of squats, like, that's a lot. But what I tell them to do, especially when we get into the last round, as I. And towards the last half of the last round, right towards the very end, they are fatigued, they are tired. And I tell them we are going to run through the finish. We're not physically running, but we are going to run through that finish line. And if you've ever seen sprinters or runners, track athletes, whether you ran, or maybe you've watched them in the Olympics, or maybe you've had a child who's ran track or something like that, or even something like cross country, right, where there's a finish line, you literally run through the finish. You don't slow down. You do. The whole point is you do not slow down right before the finish line. You go as hard as you can all the way through and then you start to slow down. That's the key. And so that's what I tell them often is we have to run through the finish. And so often we're not doing that with our monthly goals, we're not doing that with our annual goals. And it was so interesting. I had. This was, oh, maybe a year or two ago, there were like some. I have different times in my life and in my business where like I had set a goal for. I think I had. I can't remember now if it was like how many clients or if it was a certain amount of money I wanted to make. But it was like it came in the last two days of the month. It was like one client, then I signed one client two days before the last day. I signed a client the very last day of the month and then I signed a client the first of the very next month. That's what it looks like to run through the finish. It's. I don't get discouraged, I don't give up on myself. I don't say I only have two days left, so I'm probably not going to hit this goal. No, I keep going all the way through and I hold the space that I can feel any emotion, I can feel anything that comes up. I can feel disappointed, I can feel frustrated and I don't have to buffer. I don't have to turn to food or alcohol to feel better. I don't have to try to resist and stuff it down. I can just recognize I feel this way and now can I just allow myself to feel it and then I'm going to learn from it. Because often I think what also comes up is shame.
[00:14:26] And shame will shut you down. And this is a big one because not only do we feel disappointed, not only do we feel frustrated or some, a variety of other emotions, but then we feel shame and we don't want to look at it. We're like frickin A, like, that didn't work, I suck, I failed yet again.
[00:14:46] And now we don't evaluate, we don't learn from it, we can't see where we can take ownership. Because if this, if I created this result, even if it's not a result I wanted, if my goal was I wanted to lose five pounds last month and I lost one, I have to look at, okay, I lost one pound, all right, that's great. And I didn't meet my expectation, so why not? And if I can look at all of my responsibility, if that was 100% on me, I can now look at, okay, what got in the way so that I can make sure it doesn't get in the way next month. And when it's me, when I am responsible for my results, I don't need anyone or anything else to change around me. I stay focused on me. And often this is where we're going to find those gaps, we're going to find those voids, we're going to find the ways and, like, the little things that we have to keep cleaning up.
[00:15:38] So what does a little quit look like? So this would often sound something like, screw it, I won't hit my goal. Might as well just eat right. Like, I've already blown it. I've already ruined the day. I've already ruined the week. And it's that kind of getting caught up in perfectionism and that perfectionist fantasy of, I have to be perfect, otherwise I'm not going to create the results I want. And I have never had a client who has been perfect. And y'all, for the record, I am not perfect either, okay? Never have I ever had a perfect client.
[00:16:10] Every single one of my clients have lost weight. Every single one.
[00:16:15] So you don't have to be perfect in order to achieve results. In order to create the body you crave, you don't have to be perfect. And this is hard. This is a deeply ingrained pattern. This is what we have to work on. Especially when we've been in toxic relationships or we grew up in a really dysfunctional home. We thought we needed to be perfect. We had to show up a certain way to keep certain people happy.
[00:16:40] And we have to retrain our brain. We have to rewire this process where it becomes so easy to just fall into that. Like, it has to be perfect. I have to say the right thing, do the right thing, appease this person, keep them happy, placate them. And it's like, I have to show up in this perfect way, whatever perfect might look like, otherwise, I'm not going to create what I want. And sometimes it. Like, it's that feeling of safety, feeling of security, right? So this is where we really want to be onto ourselves about where are we holding ourselves to some kind of unrealistic fantasy of perfection. And be really honest with yourself.
[00:17:22] True change can happen when you tell yourself the truth, when you stop lying to yourself.
[00:17:28] And I can say this with so much conviction and compassion as somebody who spent a lot of time over the last entire life, over the last several decades, lying to herself.
[00:17:42] And I can say that with so much compassion for myself as well, because I was just trying to get my needs met, and I was kept trying to do it through other people, through other things, through food, food, through other substances, right?
[00:17:59] So don't make yourself wrong. But we gotta stop lying to ourselves. We've gotta tell ourselves the truth. And we can't do it with shame. We can't do it with judgment.
[00:18:09] If you want some help with this is how I work with clients. No matter how you work with me, this is what you're gonna get. So just as a little small seed, if you struggle with that, like perfectionism, shame, being able to evaluate and truly understand why you do the things you do or you don't follow through with the things you want to be doing, Come work with me, get some help, get some support. Okay? All right. So little quits you, maybe. So this is, here's like how else it might show up. So it might be that you stop planning, maybe you stop evaluating, maybe you stop doing small things like leaving two bites behind or you stop drinking as much water, right? You don't evaluate an overeat or an emotionally. You stop telling yourself things like, this is good enough. I don't have to run five miles, I can walk and get in my 10,000 steps during the day or whatever your goal is. Maybe your goal's three miles, maybe it's two, right? It doesn't matter what that number is, but it's like, what is the number for you that feels really good, that feels amazing. And it's, it meets you where you're at right now. And you will get 1% better day by day, okay? And I promise it's going to add up and it will compound. Here's the thing, it's not just going to get 1% better day to day. It compounds and it grows exponentially.
[00:19:27] But you've got to be willing to put in the time. And this is one of the hardest parts. It's to believe before you have the evidence to believe before you have the result. It is by far the hardest part of achieving any goal, but especially of weight loss, especially when you have so much evidence as to how you've tried before and failed. But I promise you, when you learn how to do this, when you can master this, when you can believe your future spouse is coming, even though you can't see him, even though you have no evidence that he's there. When you know and you believe and you trust he will come, well, you have to believe first falls so much in line with faith. We have to believe first.
[00:20:13] And we want to, we want to stop the little quits. The little gives give ups. When we quit on ourselves for the day, we quit on ourselves for the week, okay? Because another big issue that I see here is that these little quits often stem from shame, judgment, feeling discouraged, being attached to the timeline and when it was supposed to happen, how it was or how it has to happen in a certain timeline, right? And it's really easy to eat over these emotions because they feel terrible. Right? We don't want to feel shame and judgment and discouragement, but that's the cycle that we're living in. And so it's. It can drive our emotional eating even more. Right? And this is what I call unnecessary suffering.
[00:20:57] But you have the power to change it, okay? And you can still hit your goal for the month or the year, but your experience of losing weight is what's important.
[00:21:10] And so when you are doing all of these little quits and you're stuck in shame and judgment and feeling like this isn't good enough and it should have happened faster and I should be further along all of the shoulds.
[00:21:21] You could still lose £50 this year. But it feels dreadful. It feels terrible that you don't enjoy the process. You spend all year feeling like shit about yourself and about the journey as you're losing the weight.
[00:21:35] Nobody wants that. Right? Like we don't want that. You want to enjoy the experience. You want to feel proud of yourself, proud of your success, proud of your progress. We need to make our progress count.
[00:21:50] This is what's important, right? So we want to recognize when the little quits are like, when they stem from negative emotions that can sometimes cause us to overeat or have us overeating and emotionally eating.
[00:22:05] And when it creates this shame and judgment. And we. And so we have that, and so we have these little quits on ourselves. And now it's like it takes more and more to try to get started again, and we can spend time. We can actually be quite successful and still feel like it's not enough. I should be doing more. I shouldn't still be here. I shouldn't still be struggling with this issue, with this challenge.
[00:22:30] And I just want to offer that you are doing something that so few people are willing to do.
[00:22:35] Very few people are willing to have this honest look at themselves and their habits, are willing to look at their emotions, take responsibility for them and feel them and decide there are going to be times when you are going to feel bad. You do want to feel really sad and heartbroken or angry or frustrated.
[00:22:56] Your emotions are not bad. They are not wrong, and you are not wrong for having them. They are valid and you are allowed to feel them and you are allow. You don't have to, like, turn inwards and just blame yourself, but you also don't have to blame other people. And when we stop blaming others and we stop looking for other people to have to show up in a certain way, we stop trying to Control others to know so that we can feel better.
[00:23:26] Because that's exactly what we're doing here. When we get into these NAR relationships, the other person's trying to control us so they can feel better. And we keep trying to control them so that we can feel better. We just call it people pleasing instead of control or manipulation. But it really is a form of control and we have good intentions because we just want them to be happy. We don't want them to rage at us, we don't want them to say hurtful things. It is a self protection protective mechanism, but it is still a form of control.
[00:23:55] And that's a childish way to go about doing light.
[00:23:58] And. And so now as grown women, as grown adults, as for some of the men who might be listening to this podcast, as a grown man, you're listening to this and looking at how you can let go of childish ways and childish behaviors, one of which. And then the core overarching principle that I see is that you are looking for something or someone else to meet your emotional needs, for you, to make you feel something, when that's your job, it's your responsibility and it's nobody else's job to fix.
[00:24:34] And again, this is what very few people are willing to do for themselves. So I want to give you some praise here too. And to recognize like this is hard. Rewiring your brain habits, your thought habits, healing your nervous system, healing from toxic relationships, healing your relationship with food and body that has been completely destroyed for the past several decades.
[00:24:56] It's hard work.
[00:24:59] You are doing incredible and I want you to know that, I want you to feel that and I want you to believe that you are doing so good.
[00:25:10] And often this, like this really becomes the transformational work not just to create the body you crave, but the life that lights you up. A life that you are so excited to get out of the bed in the morning for and knowing that there's always going to be a 50 50. There are always going to be parts and times and aspects that aren't going to feel amazing.
[00:25:35] And that's okay. We can be there for them too.
[00:25:40] But don't give up. We are in April. I'm recording this mid April. Do not give up on yourself. Don't give up on your goals for this month or this quarter or this year when there's still so much the game left to be played.
[00:25:55] And it's not our job to know exactly when and how it's going to end.
[00:25:59] But you get to decide that you are going to Play hard, and you are going to run through the finish, and you're going to learn how to handle and tackle all of these obstacles and challenges that get in your way. Because this is real life. We can't lose weight in a vacuum. That's why the weight never stays off. It's because we keep trying to lose weight in this teeny, tiny little vacuum. And the moment circumstances change, the moment something happens, the moment you feel an emotion, you're face first in a bag of Cheetos or you're ripping open the freezer to find the ice cream, we're going to let go of that. We're going to let go of the childish behavior, and we're going to fully step into what this new relationship, body and yourself really looks like.
[00:26:46] Promise you're going to create a life that is so good, it's going to blow your mind.
[00:26:54] All right.
[00:26:55] Thank you for coming to my extremely long TED Talk.
[00:26:59] I have been. I want to. I have not started pitching TEDx talks yet, but that is one of my goals for this year is to have one, at least one booked. And it's so funny, because so many of my podcast episodes I'll get on, I'm like, yeah, maybe 10, 15 minutes. Like, it's probably not gonna be that long. 30 minutes later, I look at the timeline, and I'm like, oh, yeah, I have been talking for quite a bit, but I hope you enjoyed that little pep talk and that you found it motivating and encouraging. And, like, I. I really believe all of this. And we. Sometimes we have to trust and. And surrender. And surrender is my word. It has been my word since last August. I'm going to surrender to the process. I'm going to surrender to the timeline. I'm going to surrender to the growth and the areas of opportunity, the areas of growth that I have to go through right now. And I'm going to surrender. And one of my big things is, like, God, not my will, but yours. Can I surrender my hopes and my dreams to him?
[00:27:56] And one of the things that I like, one of my big goals, one of my dreams, is that God does something amazing with my life. I want to change the world. I want to change the diet industry.
[00:28:09] I have big dreams and goals, and there's a part of me that's clinging, I think, so tightly to the way certain things need to show up. And really part of that is, like, really surrendering and trusting that I will leave a legacy. I will change the world.
[00:28:28] And it may not look exactly like what I think it will right now.
[00:28:33] But I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to give up on myself.
[00:28:37] I'm going to really build a lot of trust and grit and resilience and I'm going to figure this out and you can too.
[00:28:47] If you would like my help in creating this life that is so mind blowing Good then I would love to chat. You can schedule a free consultation at www.bodyucrave.com schedule. I'll drop that link in the description as well as a link for the Work With Me page where you can learn about all the ways in which you can work with me. There are three and that will show you how to get the support. And if you like these podcasts and you want this like in a one on one or in a small group coaching environment, come work with me because I promise y'all, I will bring the heat.
[00:29:23] It's so good. All right, here's to creating the life, body and relationships you truly crave.
[00:29:35] If this episode resonated with 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. You'll walk away with fierce clarity and a game plan to step into a life full of fun, adventure and self love. Grab your spot now at www.bodyucrave.com forward/btc.
[00:30:10] It's time to break the cycle. I'll show you how.
