Weight Loss, Wellness, and Jigsaw Puzzles: A Story of Persistence and Progress

Transcription of Podcast

Hello, hello, hello everybody. Welcome to Fit and Fabulous with me, Dr. Orlena. Today, excitement, excitement, I am going to tell you a story all about me, ta da, doing a jigsaw puzzle. You do want to know about me doing a jigsaw puzzle, I promise you do, and I will explain why it is relevant to health and wellness in a minute.

But before we start finding out all about the jigsaw puzzle, I will just give you a quick If you can see, if you're watching the video, you can see the amazingly difficult thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and what I learned from doing it. Before we start, Radiate and Renew is starting next week. Drumroll please.

We are creating four small habits in four weeks. This is for you if you feel stuck and you think, I know that I Don't have a knowledge gap. I have a doing gap. Perhaps you see yourself in the mirror or you see a photograph of yourself and you kind of flinch inwardly, you know what I'm saying, and think, I need to make some changes.

I know I need to make some changes. But, life, so busy, all these other things, and it just feels too much to really dive into what you want to, ought to, know that you want to do. , I have created Radiate and Renew, and the idea behind Radiate and Renew is just Four small little habits. They are small little things that are going to have a big impact.

In a year's time, you will look back and go, Oh my goodness, those four habits that I created really had a massive impact in helping me get to where I am. And in a year's time, you're going to be feeling a little bit healthier and a little bit slimmer and a little bit more like, Oh my goodness, I can actually do this.

Come and join us, Radiate and Renew. I will leave the details in the show notes. Okay, jigsaw puzzles. You do want to know about jigsaw puzzles, I know you do! Okay, this is a crazy, crazy jigsaw puzzle. It's a thousand pieces big. It's all totally insane. You can see, if you can see the picture, it is like forest with a giant European looking castle.

I don't know, somewhere like in Bavaria. One of those sort of Disney style princess turrets castle that you think does this castle really exist in real life now the thing about this jigsaw puzzle is number one it's got a thousand pieces that is a lot of pieces number two it's all green stroke yellow, stroke red.

A lot of it just merges into the same thing and you can't really distinguish it. There are obviously some distinguishable features like the sky is blue or white and the castle. Now why did I start doing this jigsaw puzzle? That is a good question. This jigsaw puzzle was gifted to my Children, for their 11th birthday in October and it is sat in the cupboard and I can just sort of see this thing going, oh my goodness, it's never gonna get used.

Now, a week or so ago, we had a rainy week, hooray, because we need rain, we've, we're in the middle of a drought, we've had some rain, that's great, we still have a drought, so we loved a bit of rain. I decided that I would get at this jigsaw puzzle with the idea that my kids would help, they were kind of keen for about three minutes.

I started with my kids, and then I decided I was going to carry on doing it. I actually quite like jigsaw puzzles. It's a bit of a crazy challenge. A bit of a, what am I doing this for? What's the purpose of this? But there is a certain amount of satisfaction. , as I have been doing this puzzle, it has been really interesting to look at it as a project or as a goal and draw parallels to any goal that we have, but specifically the goal that I help my, my clients with, which is weight loss and wellness.

, we started off the jigsaw puzzle, and we did the outside bit, as you do the outside bit. Now, you would think it would be really easy to separate the inside bits to the flat edge bits. But when we had done this, and we're doing the outside bit, I'm there going, oh my goodness, I just feel like there's some pieces missing, because I haven't got the pieces to do this and we had to go and we had to actually count them out and realise that there were indeed six pieces, we had missed six pieces.

But when you're going through that thought, your brain is saying there's some pieces missing, there's some pieces missing, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this. And each moment in time when I've looked at this and I take a step back and I look at this jigsaw puzzle and I think, oh my goodness, this jigsaw puzzle is totally impossible.

Why am I doing this? This is crazy! It's totally impossible. Then, I let go of that thought and I just get on with doing a little bit of it. , oh my goodness, I did the sky! I thought it was going to be impossible, and I did it! You put one down, and then suddenly, you know, you might try ten pieces, and you put one down, and you think, Oh!

It clicks in! Then suddenly you can get three or four more pieces, and then suddenly you've done a chunk. Now, I've I've got to the stage where I've, I've got to about 90 percent of it. Crazily, I've got 90%. All the way through this I've been going, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. Except I am doing it.

I am doing it. Then there's another thought in my brain which is, yeah, you are doing it, but you've got the most difficult bit. You've left the most difficult bit for last. All of that bit that is green and yellow, it is by far the most difficult bit. That is going to be super difficult. It is actually the most difficult bit because there's two bits which are green and yellow and red and it's difficult to tell whether the pieces are in one or another.

Looking at the pieces, there aren't any It's not obvious where the pieces come from. Quite often you just look at it and go, that looks like a piece of seaweed, and there's no seaweed in my jigsaw puzzle. , it's not an easy puzzle to do. And I have frequently thought, oh my goodness, I can't do this, I can't do this.

Yet, evidence goes against that. Now, a jigsaw puzzle is great. Unlike weight loss, Now, neither of them are linear. You don't lose weight in a linear way. What I mean is, most people don't go, Okay, I'm going to do this, and I lose one pound a week. I lose one pound a week. Now that does happen for a bit, but then at some stage that stops, and something happens, and then you have to, you know, recalibrate and do that again.

I would say this jigsaw puzzle is the same. There's a bit where you go a little bit faster and then, oh my goodness, things slow down. Then you do a little bit more and then things slow down. Now the difference with the jigsaw puzzle is I have got an amazing picture. I can look at the picture and I can go, oh yes, I am making progress.

I can see that progress. Now with weight loss, it's very often very difficult to see the progress. You might say to me, but we're losing weight. Yes, you are losing weight, but weight often fluctuates a little bit and it's not like you carry around like a picture of where you were. Your brain just gets to that stage of, it forgets, it forgets where you were and it becomes your new normal.

You may have lost five pounds in five weeks, but your brain quickly adapts to that new normal. That newness. Then you're thinking, I still need to lose another five pounds. I still need to lose another five pounds. As opposed to, my goal is ten pounds and I've lost five pounds. I've only got another five pounds to go.

That's not how your brain says it. Your brain is like, oh my goodness, you've still got another five pounds to go. As opposed to, hooray, you've done really well. Now keep going. , I wanted to just talk about this experience of setting yourself a goal that feels impossible but achieving it. Anyhow, I haven't quite achieved it.

I've got about 100 pieces left, obviously the most difficult 100 pieces, but my son put in 3 pieces today, before breakfast, so I am optimistic that by the end of the week we will have nailed this jigsaw puzzle. Even though all the way along my brain has been screaming. It's not gonna work. It's not gonna work.

It's impossible. You can't do it. You can't do it You can't do it and another part of my brain has totally ignored that and gone. You know what? I'm just gonna get on with it now. That's my friends is exactly How the same thing happens with weight loss and wellness part of your brain is screaming. It's not gonna work.

It's not gonna work It's not gonna work. Many of my clients who join up to my program My program is called Positively Healthy You. Positively Healthy Weight Loss, depending on whether you want to lose weight or not. So many people join it and go, I don't know, why is your system going to work? Like, I hear what you're telling me to do, it all sounds fine, but why is this any different from what I've tried about a billion times before?

I'm like, please, just get on with it, just try it, just do this and see what happens. After a couple of weeks, they're like, oh, it was surprisingly easy and they have lost weight. Oh, hooray. Now, I can explain why that happens to so many people, for individual people and I think part of it is, you try and do something, the reality is, you aren't 100 percent doing it, a lot of the time.

Until you've got that accountability and that group of people. Collectiveness of somebody actually keeping you going and keeping you going and looking at it every single week and being honest with yourself and going Yeah, you know what actually I ate a few more cakes or crisps or whatever it was than I really thought or admitted to myself I just wrote that off and went no, it's not gonna it doesn't matter Whereas when you're actually looking at your behavior and you're looking at your week every single week You're like, oh my goodness, when I do this, I get this result.

When I do this, I get this result. This is what I need to do to get to my goal of this amount of weight loss. Now, on a side note, I have stopped calling it weight loss goals, they're weight loss projects because goals triggers a little bit of anxiety and fear in a lot of people and I think this is because people have for so long had a goal and not reached the goal and been upset about not reaching it.

that it triggers a certain amount of stress and that doesn't work, you don't want to be stressed about your goal or project. I am renaming all weight loss goals, weight loss projects. It's just a project that you're working on. Think of it as having a jigsaw in the corner that you do from time to time when you want 10 minutes of relaxation or half an hour and you think okay I could do some Duolingo or I could do a bit of jigsaw puzzle and when I do the jigsaw I can see myself making improvements, making changes.

Think of your health and weight loss project as something that you do on the side. It's not something that takes over your entire life. You're leading your life, you're just making a few little tweaks. I hope that gives you a little bit of inspiration. My friends, you can make changes. You can get to healthy, amazing you.

I'm not saying you're going to get there in two to four weeks. I'm not going to say it's two to four months. It depends. Without chatting to you, I can't tell you a realistic timeline. But what I am saying to you is that Is that, if you want to get to what I call Healthy Amazing You, that is that place where you are just leading a healthy life with bucket loads of energy and you are the weight you want to be, you're the strength you want to be, you are doing it all on autopilot, you can 100 percent get there.

Now, it may take you months, it may take you years, depending on how much weight you've got to do. But here's the question for you. You're standing here right now, depending on how old you are, you may have 40, even 50 years of life left in you. Now, do you want that to be, I don't know, 30 or 40 years of, oh my goodness, struggling and thinking, I wish I felt a little bit healthier?

Or, you can make those changes now and lead what I call a vibrant rest of life. Doing those, doing the things that you want to do. So, growing old, being able to do the stuff that you want to do, and yes, lose weight and get stronger, and look after yourself, but do you know what? Buy yourself an extra ten years of life, really, you can, just by making healthy changes.

, I hope that has inspired you. Remember, if you want to make the four small changes, Four, excuse me, four small habits in four weeks. Come and join Radiate and Renew. If you're interested in my program and you think, do you know what? I actually, I really want to join your program because I understand that I need a little bit more support.

I need to make this more of a priority to get to where I want to get to. Then come and book a call. And this is what happens. We have a chat. I find out what's going on for you, if I think you're a good fit and I think my program will help you, I will tell you about my program. And if not, I will say to you, do you know what, actually, I don't think this program is the right program for you.

It obviously depends what's going on for you. , if you are interested and you're super excited to get to Healthy Amazing You, then book a call and I would love to chat with you. Have a lovely week. Bye bye.