Podcast: Escaping the Yo-Yo Dieting Cycle: Crafting a New Narrative

Transcription of Podcast

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. I hope that you are feeling amazing, amazing today. Today, I want to talk to you about the stories that you tell yourself about yourself , your health and your wellness and your ability to be able to lose weight. What on earth am I talking about?

Let's take an example. , it is four years ago. February, March, 2019, 2020 even, my goodness, years are slipping past without me, anything happened that we can remember? Yes, four years ago, we went into lockdown. What happened in lockdown was our world was thrown apart. At that time, some people created habits that were not great habits.

A lot of people did baking and cooking and drinking more. I, however, sat in my little corner of Spain basically doing pretty much the same as I did. I used to go to market. I remember I used to wear my pyjamas to market and then come home and wash because that was kind of what we were advised to do.

Wash when you had been in contact with people, but I carried on doing the same things. I carried on eating vegetables and eating healthily. In fact, actually for me in COVID, I started doing more exercise once we were allowed out and about again. Why? Why did that happen to me? Is it because I'm Superwoman?

No, it's not because I'm Superwoman. It is because of the stories that I tell myself about me. Another way of looking at this is it is about my identity. , my identity is that I am somebody who prioritizes my health and wellness, and this is the way I eat. I eat healthy foods that I enjoy eating. , It didn't really make sense for me to then start baking cakes that I don't particularly like to eat.

Anyhow, yes, my kids made cakes, and my husband sometimes made cake, and I would happily enjoy them. But my general foundation of how I do things. didn't change because of the way that I think about myself. My question to you is how do you think about yourself? What are the stories that you're telling yourself?

It might be that you've had a long history of yo yo dieting where you have really deprived yourself and then you go to the other extreme where you overindulge, you deprive yourself, you overindulge. It might be that you've got to this stage where you just feel, oh my goodness, nothing works for me.

It feels so frustrating. I can't do this. Nothing is going to work for me. Well, if that is the case, I ask you to have a listen and really just get clear on those thoughts of what exactly it is that you're thinking. Because if you're busy thinking, nothing will ever work for me. Okay, you, when I say thinking this, you think about things on slightly different levels.

So your thinking brain will go, yeah, you know that that's not true, right? But if that's what your subconscious brain really and truly believes, it's going to make it very difficult for you to find something that is going to work for you to help you move forwards. There was a really interesting experiment that was done by a gentleman who was a psychology professor at university and he looked at the students and some of the students who joined college.

And got there and, you know, it was a bit more difficult than they had expected and what happened to those students was they basically felt, well, this is super hard, I'm gonna not turn up, I'm not gonna make any effort and obviously that meant that things got worse and worse and worse and this rather savvy professor decided to do a little experiment on them and think about how can I change the story that they're telling themselves and what he did.

was he invited them to come to an experiment now the experiment was actually on them but they didn't realize that and the experiment was that he was recording people's thoughts about what it was like to be a student and what these students had to do was start by listening to other people who had recorded Their story.

They were listening to the people who had been a year or two years ahead of them.

the story that those people told went like this. It went, you know, when I first got here, it was really hard and it felt really difficult. And I thought, I didn't want to put any effort in, but actually, I realised that what I needed to do was put a bit of effort in and, you know, start showing up for classes and start doing the work and actually it all turned out fine.

It was just a momentary blip. All of those students, the students who were having their experiment, all they did was watch this 30 minute video. That 30 minute video resonated with them. Obviously, it was a similar story that they were going through, but it helped them to rewrite their story.

This is just a momentary blip, I'm going to come out okay. But what I do want to do is put a bit of effort in and start turning up to classes and start doing the work. And guess what happened? Those people rewrote their stories and compared to other people who hadn't done, who were in a similar situation to start off with, but they hadn't done that experiment, the other people did much worse, they continued not going to classes, they continued not handing in their homework, as opposed to these ones who rewrote their story.

, how can this be of help to you? Well, number one, you need to understand what your story is. , you really need to get clear on those thoughts that are happening to you. And really, let down your worst fears. Put them on a piece of paper. Or, if you want, you can come to my coaching session next week. I'll tell you about that in a minute.

You can tell me there. , think about, like, what are those thoughts? I can't do it. It's not going to work for me. I've tried this before. It's so hard. I feel like I'm depriving myself. I feel like I'm either depriving myself or I'm totally overindulging and there doesn't seem to be any balance. I feel totally out of control.

I feel like it's such a big mountain to climb to change all of these things. Whatever it is that's going on for you, put it on paper or come and tell me about it and have a look at it. And then the next step is really to have a look at it and go, okay, how can I change this slightly? I can make progress in this.

Useful words for being able to make progress are, I'm working on this, or I'm striving to this. I am somebody who does prioritize my health and wellness. That doesn't necessarily mean that I have got my most healthy body yet, but it means that I am working on it. Now, here's another. thought experiment to go alongside with this.

Now have you ever seen that square where people divide tasks into important and unimportant and urgent and not urgent? There's four squares in a box and they can either be important and urgent, important and not urgent, or they can be not important. Now, I'm, apologies, I've forgotten the name of the gentleman who came up with this square.

We spend most of our life in the important, urgent section, doing things that are important and urgent. And sometimes we spend time in the square that is not important, yet urgent. How many times have we done things that, you know, we've done them through urgency and yet actually they're not really that important.

Now here's a question for you, which do you think your health and wellness comes into? The answer is, it's not urgent. It's not urgent, but it is important, and it's a square that we don't spend very much of our time in. It's never urgent to go to the gym. It's never urgent to do something like eat vegetables or not eat cake.

That's never urgent. But it is important. Is it important to look after your health and wellness? And the answer is, heck yes, of course it is important. It is one of those things that if we don't do, we know what the consequences are. I don't want to think about the consequences right now, but I think you get my message.

So my friends, two messages for you today. Stop being in the non urgent square. Stop putting your health and wellness, which is important, and move it up a little bit to urgent. This is something I do actually need to take care of. And have a think about how you can rewrite your story to make it easy and fun.

You can get there. Will there be obstacles? Yes, of course there'll be obstacles. But you can deal with obstacles. You can get to what I call Healthy Amazing You, which is where you're leading your healthy life, enjoying your healthy life, you have more energy, the weight comes down, and you just love it. Of course you can do it.

So my friends, next week, Wednesday the, is it the 28th? The 28th of February, at 8am Eastern Time, so that is 1pm. UK time. I have open office hours, Dr. Rolina's open office hours. It's just a come and chat, whoever wants to turn up, come and turn up. You can ask me anything. We can talk about this if you want to, or you can ask me other things.

It's just an open session to come and chat. I'll put the link in the show notes. You sign up and it will send out the email on the actual day. Now, if you are interested in getting support from me and you think, yeah, do you know what? I'm ready. I'm ready to do all of this work on my mind and my body.

And I, I really want support to get to Healthy Amazing Me, and I know that I need to make this a priority right now. If you're thinking that then feel free to book a call and we will chat, just a getting to know you call. And during that call we talk about what's going on for you, you get clarity on what's going on for you, and if you're interested I can tell you about my amazing program called Positively Healthy Weight Loss.

Which is a fabulous program which makes it all easy and doable for you. So my friends, have a lovely week and I will chat to you again next week, goodbye!