20: 3 Taboo Things You CAN Do For Weight Loss

DId you know you CAN weigh yourself everyday while you're losing weight, if you want to? The world of weight loss is filled with so many "dos" and "don'ts", it can be tough to know what the right thing is.

But in this episode of The Family Fork, I'm pulling back the curtain to reveal 3 pretty taboo things that you CAN do on your weight loss journey. (I do all three of these things. EVERY day!)

Because all it takes for weight loss is a plan that works for your life, and the right mindset But in order to do that, you have to find an approach that truly works for you.

Listen to hear:
- 3 taboo things that I do everyday for weight loss, and you can, too
- How to manage your mindset and emotions, regardless of what the scale says
- Why being in midlife gives you permission to chart your own health and wellness journey

Can't wait to hear which of these taboo things you're going to try first!

Links mentioned and ways to connect
- The workout library I use can be found here (it's the only thing I used to lose 65 lbs!)
- Want my weight loss/health tracking sheet? Send me a message on IG, and I'll share you on a copy of the spreadsheet

Ashley Malik is a women's health and wellness coach, helping busy moms lose weight in perimenopause. You can learn more, and discover how to work with Ashley, by clicking here.

*** Ready to lose 15 lbs in 10 weeks? The Method gives you all the tools to make it happen! We start April 2nd. To learn more about The Method, click here!

Transcript

Ashley Malik (00:07)

Oh, hello there, my sweet friend. I am so glad that you're here today. I am just feeling all of these fields of gratitude and gratefulness and pride that this is the 20th episode of The Family Fork. You know, I started this podcast in September of 2024 and it really has been on my heart for a really long time. I know the struggles that I have had as a mom and

as a single mom for a long time and trying to navigate my own health while taking care of my family. It's been really hard and I've had so many challenges and sorry, I don't mean to get all choked up, but I am so honored to be able to bring my experience to you so that it can help your life and help your path be a little bit smoother. So.

I'm just grateful to have this opportunity and even more grateful that you are tuning in for another week. My hope truly is that you are getting so much value out of what you're hearing and learning. And I really hope that you're going away and implementing some of the things that you learn from these episodes because true transformation is found in the doing. So thank you.

Thank you for being here and welcome to episode 20.

All right, so as this recording goes live, it's the beginning of 2025 and I have kind of drawn a line in the sand starting this year and really just for the rest of my life. If you've known me for any length of time and I know friends mentioned this or they've said this to me before, they always say, oh, Ashley, you're just so buttoned up and you have everything put together for how you work and how you eat.

Honestly, this year, I just want to sort of tear down that belief that people have in me. You know, we talk a lot about mindset on this podcast and

One of my personal stories for myself is that I need to have everything in order. I need to do things just right. It's not really that I'm a perfectionist. It comes from people pleasing and from wanting to feel safe, which I've mentioned before I left an abusive marriage. And so I have a lot of issues around safety. So control is one of the ways that I work with that. So when I look at 2025 and

going forward and the fact that I am turning 50 years old in just a couple of months, for lack of a better phrase, I am ready to let my freak flag fly. I know that I do a lot of other things that people might think are weird or strange or nerdy or unusual. I'm actually a really big nerd. If you know me personally, you know that.

But sometimes I try and sweep these things under the rug because I don't want people to look at me and think, she is so weird. But as I get ready to turn 50, and as we've turned a page on the calendar for the new year, I want you to see my nerdy side. I want you to know all the weird things that I do. And that is really where the topic of today's episode came from because

As an educator and coach in the health and wellness and mental health space, I hear a lot of people talking about things that are taboo or things that you shouldn't do. So today I want to share with you three pretty taboo things that I do every day to support my weight loss journey. Now you're going to hear experts or people on Instagram say, oh my gosh, no, no, no, no, you can't do that.

You're not supposed to do that when it comes to weight loss. It'll create disordered eating or it'll create a control issue around food.

but I actually want you to hear a different side of the story and understand that if one of these things works for you or all of them work for you, then that is great and you should keep doing them. My hope is that by hearing some of these things that I do, you will feel a sense of permission to just try them out too.

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You know, it's not just me. I want all of us to start thinking a little bit more about what we do and what we need to do to lean into who we are, really the way we operate, the way we work and how we can make that work better for us in terms of our overall health and wellness and weight loss. So that's why today I'm sharing with you three somewhat taboo things in the weight loss world that you

actually can do if you are trying to lose weight.

Now, as a coach and a former therapist who works with clients even now around mental health issues, I do want to say that if you have eating disorders or a history of disordered eating, this might not be the episode for you. It might feel pretty triggering. But I also encourage you to listen with an open mind that there can be so many different ways to get the same results.

especially if it's something that works for you. So I'm excited to share these kind of taboo things with you so that you can hear them with a different perspective and see if one of these things actually fits into your own health journey. Perhaps that makes it easier and you'll actually see more results if you start doing some of these things. Okay, so one of the most taboo things that I do that a lot of experts might say is a terrible idea when you're losing weight,

is that I weigh myself every single day. Now I felt it, there might be a lot of eye rolls in this episode. So again, I just, I want you to listen with an open mind. When I weigh myself every single day, the other thing that I do is I take measurements of my body parts every single Sunday. And like I said, I'm a little nerdy. I actually have a spreadsheet where I track all of this and I've been tracking it for

I don't know, probably the last seven or eight years. And what I love about doing, why I love doing this is that in weighing myself every day, I have stopped having any emotional attachment to how much I weigh, full stop. I don't worry about what the weight on the scale says because I know that there's so much more to it than just that number. So I want to hit this from a couple of different angles. First,

Let's look at the data that you get from weighing yourself every day. And then I want to talk about the mindset around it.

When you weigh yourself every single day, it's easy to start noticing certain fluctuations based on a variety of factors. You might see fluctuations based on what you ate the night before. Like I s-

Like last night, I had spaghetti and the pasta sauce that I made, I knew it was extra salty. So I did, I saw a little increase on the scale this morning, but I also know that it's just water weight. So it's not a big deal. Everything that you eat, if you work out extra hard the day before, if you don't sleep well the night before, depending on your menstrual cycle, if you're still having it, all of these things can really impact what the scale says.

But when you are weighing yourself and taking your measurements every day or every week over time, kind of like the stock market, over time, you start to notice trends. And if you're tracking it along with like say how many calories you're eating or how many calories you've burned, it gives you a much better picture if you're trying to lose weight and the scale isn't moving.

It's this kind of data that's gonna help you understand what your trends are and how you can make adjustments so that you have more success with your weight loss journey. Because if you don't know what's causing you to gain weight or to stay stagnant at the same weight, then you don't know what levers to pull. You don't know how to adjust things.

I just had a conversation with a private client of mine yesterday and she said to me, Ashley, I am so glad that you finally convinced me to take my measurements. And she's gotten much more comfortable with the scale and her frequency of when she weighs herself, but she's gotten really good at taking measurements. the reason she felt this way now is because, well, so we've been working together for the last two and a half years.

And what's happening now is that she has lost a significant amount of weight. But currently those changes are looking different because she's building muscle and she's weightlifting. So what she was able to see is that even though the number on the scale wasn't necessarily going down, her physical body measurements are changing. And that is giving her a

great indication that what she is doing is working.

But I gotta say, without these data points, she wouldn't necessarily know that. She wouldn't know like, yes, this is working or no, this isn't working. She did say, you know, that her pants are fitting differently and her shirts are fitting differently. But honestly, she wouldn't know how much progress she had made if she hadn't taken the time to take those measurements and to weigh herself on the scale and then start to understand what that data looked like over.

Now if we take the idea of scale weight out of this concept, I want us to look at something that's a little bit different but also feels similar.

So I play the piano and I grew up playing the piano. I actually went to college and was thinking about minoring in music. I had this professor who really, really wanted to push me to be a concert pianist. And in the course of doing that, he just wanted to change everything, the way I put my hands on the keyboard and the way that I sat. And honestly, it just burned me out because I really liked playing piano just for the fun of it. But that's a side note.

In playing the piano, there are lots of things that I use in order to understand, hmm, is my piano working correctly for me? Am I doing the right things to get the best sound out of my piano? I have measuring tools, like I have tools where I can measure the pitch of my piano, or I have someone come in once a year, sometimes twice a year, depending on the weather, to tune my piano, to make sure that all of the notes are working perfectly.

that all of the strings are in really good condition. Now when I play the piano frequently, I also make sure to trim my nails shorter because I don't want them clicking on the piano keys. But it also allows me to be more nimble on the keyboard when I have shorter nails. And that means I can play faster songs or more involved songs. When I was in high school, I tried to play with acrylic nails. It was super hard. It just didn't work.

So if we look at the maintenance of the piano the same way that we look at the maintenance of our body and our weight loss journey, it's really no different. There are measurement tools for the piano. That's like tuning my piano. But for your weight loss, that's the scale, the body measurements. It's giving you data. It's giving you information. And it's showing you exactly where you can pull different levers to get different

results.

Now here's where this gets tricky and why for some people this can be really triggering. It is all about your mindset and the thoughts you have around what the number on the scale is and what you're making it mean about you. Let's unpack that a little bit. When you get on the scale, the number, it's just a number. It's nothing more. It doesn't mean anything.

It's just a number. But what happens is that our brain tells us a story or a thought about that number. So if you get on the scale and you know, it's like after the holidays and you haven't really been watching what you were eating, you get on the scale during that first week of January and you think, my gosh, the scale is 20 pounds more than what it was before the holiday season started. So I want you to put that in your brain like,

this actually happened to you. And now I wanna ask you this question. What are you thinking and what are you feeling? Really tune in. What are your thoughts and your feelings about that 20 pounds? You might be thinking, whoa, that is a lot of extra weight. And you might be feeling some shame maybe because, my gosh, couldn't you have just taken some time to watch what you were eating a little bit more over the holidays?

Couldn't you have just worked out a little bit more so that you didn't gain all that weight? So you can see what happens. It's not about a number on the scale. It's what we make it mean. Does it mean that we are a failure because we didn't, I don't know, like you couldn't succeed in maintaining your weight over the holidays? Does it mean that you're never gonna lose weight because once that scale starts to go up, it just keeps going up and up?

Maybe you make it mean, you know, I'm in perimenopause and so it's the holidays, but it's probably just because of perimenopause and now I'm just doomed forever to keep gaining weight as I get older. We could make it mean something really positive, but more often than not, because our brain is wired to protect us, we see that number and if it's higher than we anticipated, our brain says, my gosh, first of all,

I don't want to feel the pain or the discomfort that that number is showing me and what I make it mean about me. That feels bad. That pain and discomfort of shame or embarrassment, maybe it's even disappointment in ourselves. It's also, your brain is also protecting you from saying, but you could do something about that. And you know, we could eat differently. You could move your body differently in different ways, but that

your brain sees as work. And remember, your brain is wired to resist extra work and extra effort.

So instantly you see a number on the scale and we attach this emotional meaning to it. And when we do that, that is when we really struggle with what that number on the scale is. Our brain is wired to stop at that point so we don't feel bad. We don't pay attention to it. We just kind of walk away from it. And if we feel bad, we try and find something else that's just gonna push away those bad feelings. Makes a lot of sense, right?

So while a lot of experts will say, don't weigh yourself every day, I want you to hear this different perspective. It is okay to weigh yourself every day, especially if you're tracking it in a spreadsheet. you like you're getting these other points of data, like body measurements, tracking how much you eat or how many calories you burn. All of that is giving you data. And if you can look at it as data and remove the emotion from it,

you're going to actually find that it's a really beneficial tool for you in your weight loss journey.

Okay, weight loss taboo number two is that I measure my food every single day. I always measure my food. And again, I can feel your eyes rolling and it's okay, but hear me out. Measuring your food is really keeping a dialed in look at your portion sizes. One of the most interesting things

One of the most interesting things that I found when I first started measuring my food is that I get to eat more. And I never could have told you that that would be the case until I actually started doing it. When I started measuring my food, I realized that my eyeballs didn't really understand how much is a cup or a half a cup or a tablespoon. And so when I started measuring and realized, hmm, okay, today I'm going to have seven cups of vegetables.

We think about that, like seven cups is a lot of vegetables, but when you try and eyeball it and you're not familiar with what your portion sizes are, you are automatically going to give yourself less because your brain, again, is like, wait, we gotta be careful here. We don't wanna go overboard. So you are giving yourself less food at that point, but when you start to measure, you actually get to eat the food.

the right amount of food that your body requires. Isn't that cool?

And I have noticed in perimenopause, maybe you've seen this too, that small fluctuations have a big impact and it really goes both ways. A few extra steps in your day can help you to drop a pound or two, but a little bit of extra food can quickly result in gaining weight quite a bit faster. And again, that's just because in perimenopause, our hormones are all over the place and that is really tough.

So with perimenopause, watching your portion sizes and measuring your food or some people weigh their food, it's really going to help you have a better understanding of what you're putting in your body and making sure that those small variations do not throw you off because you know exactly what you're eating. Also in perimenopause, and we've talked about this in other episodes, how important it is to build muscle.

you've got to build muscle when you are aging. And as you get closer to menopause, it is going to help you with the rest of your life journey, the more muscles you have. So if we're measuring food and measuring the amounts of protein that you get, because protein is gonna help you build that lean muscle faster, it's really important to know, okay, so this is how much protein I need for today. And by measuring, you're accurately

going to get exactly what your body needs for your protein intake.

So you know you are doing the right thing to support your body in increasing the protein, increasing your lean muscle, which is going to increase your...

And so what's great about this is that you know you're doing the right thing to support your body by increasing your protein, which increases your lean muscle, which will increase your metabolism, which results in losing body fat, which that's really good. That's what we're after. Measuring your food or weighing it. A lot of people hear this and they're like, Oh my gosh, that is so tedious. That's so hard. I don't want to do that. And again, this is just your brain's way of saying, Oh,

that looks like a lot of effort. I don't think it's going to be worth it. So I'm just not going to do it. I'm just going to say no to that. But in reality, once you start measuring your food, you're going to get really good really quickly. Like within a week or two, it's happened so quickly and eyeballing, you'll be able to eyeball what those portion sizes are. So what I do is

There are certain things that I still measure every day like rice or my carbohydrates. My carbs and my proteins are something that I watch really carefully because I'm trying to build a lot of muscle. So I wanna make sure that I'm getting the right amount. So I still measure those. But my vegetables, healthy fats, some of those other things, I don't need a measuring cup or a container system or anything like that as often because I've been doing it for so many years. It's really easy for me to just eyeball that portion.

But what I do is at the beginning of every month, I measure out everything for a couple of days just to make sure that my portion sizes are on track. Because remember, when we eyeball it, we tend to give ourselves less. And once you get the hang of it, it is so easy to be out and about at a family barbecue or out to dinner at a restaurant. You'll be able to eyeball your portion sizes so that like there are certain restaurants that you go to where their portion sizes are

ginormous. And there are other places that you go to where they don't give you enough vegetables. So just based on eyeballing it, you can say, I'm going to need some more vegetables, or I only I'm going to eat half of this and I can take the other half home and have it tomorrow. You will understand how impactful it is to just watch your portion sizes, measure your food on a regular basis, and this is going to help you hit your weight loss goals.

All right. The last weight loss taboo that I do and that I want you to consider is working out every day. I felt it. More eye rolls, right? Working out every day is something that experts will say, no, no, no, don't do that. Your body needs rest. And I absolutely agree with that. But let me tell you how I do it because I think the way that I've sort of created it in my life, it works really well. And it still helps me to hit my weight loss goals.

and have rest days. When you work out every day, it starts to become such a routine. And the trick or the goal is to sort of make working out as commonplace as like brushing your teeth. You just get up, you do it. You don't have to think about what you're doing. You just do it. Again, I've mentioned in previous episodes that I work out at home and I use this online library of workout programs. I'll link to it in the show notes, but

It is the best way for me to create consistency of working out every day. And I have so many different workouts at my fingertips that on the days that I know I'm working like a particular program, you know, this past year I've been doing a heavy lifting program. I didn't even have to think about what I was going to do. I would just wake up. I would just wake up. I knew what workout came next. I press play.

I got my workout done and I felt really good, but it is important to rest your body. It is important to give your muscles a break if you're doing weightlifting. And if you're doing cardio, it's really important to do some things that are low impact. So a couple of days a week, I still work out. I put that in air quotes, but you know, I put on my workout clothes and my workout shoes or whatever I'm wearing, but I'm going to pick something that's quite a bit easier on my body or

I might even go outside and take a walk depending on what the weather is like or what the dog needs.

But if you can get up at the same time every day and create this habit or routine of moving your body, putting on your workout gear, you know, you can do weightlifting in the same clothes that you can do yoga. It's building this association for your brain that we are going to get up and workout. So my exact routine is that I wake up, I go to the bathroom, I step on the scale.

I put on my clothes, put in my contacts, and I head downstairs. That's it. Everything else can wait until later.

But by building this routine, it's created, just, never thought I would be that person who would get up and work out every day. But the routine and consistency of waking up every day, putting on the clothes, getting to the workout space, whether yours is in your home or the gym, it allows you to just not even think about it because it becomes second nature when you do it every single day. If you've ever read atomic habits, it's like habit stacking.

that you wake up and then you weigh yourself and you brush your teeth and then you work out. Each of these habits is stacked one on top of the other. So it just happens automatically.

Again, not every day does the workout have to be intense or all out, but if you keep that consistency, it's going to help you reach those weight loss goals. You'll actually learn how to better move your body. You'll understand how to listen to your body when your body is maybe saying, I need a rest, I need a break. You'll know, and you'll be able to give it something that's not as intense.

For me, the time in the morning, which is when I work out, is usually 4.30 or 5 in the morning. Again, I am letting my freak flag fly here because yes, I know it's very early. And I know that time doesn't work for everybody and that's fine. But even when I was like six or seven years old, I've always been an early riser.

My mom taught me how to turn on the TV when we only had, I think like six channels, and she taught me where to get a snack because I would get up at 4.30, even when I was younger. So I've just always been a morning person, so it works for me. But being able to get up at that time of the morning and do my workout, that is my time. It is my sacred time to help me wake up and set my intentions for the day. You know, there's nothing better than doing a really heavy workout.

of weightlifting at five in the morning, you feel like a badass for the entire day. You really feel strong and confident. And even if it's yoga, like I usually do yoga on the weekends, because it helps me be calm and peaceful and a little bit quiet through the weekend, which is when I know I need more patience because my daughter's around and sometimes we have less on our schedule or less structure or we have a lot of things going on. So,

I don't consider this workout as self-care. I think there are other things you can do to care for yourself to be rested and peaceful. But working out every day is really an opportunity to give yourself this reminder that you are confident, you are strong, and you can do this. And the more you do it consistently every single day, the easier it will become.

And then it becomes easier to hit your weight loss goals and your health and wellness goals, which is really truly what we're after. Yes, we want to lose the weight, but we also want to be healthy and strong for the rest of our lives, for our kids and for our grandkids. And that all starts today. So when you look at those three times,

And that all starts today. So when you look at these three taboos, the weighing yourself, measuring your food, working out every day, I really hope that this changes your mind a little bit or helps you to see a really different perspective. I know you hear, my gosh, don't step on the scale every day. But really, if you knew that that data and not, but really.

If you knew that could give you data and knowledge about your journey that would help you make changes for more success, don't you think that's worth it?

I really hope you take something away from our conversation today. If you think I'm totally weird and bizarre, I am so totally okay with that. The other thing, you know, I just thought about this and it's kind of on the fly, but I do have a tracking spreadsheet, like I said, that I have been using for years.

If you're curious to know what it looks like, just go ahead and send me a message over on Instagram at the Ashley Malek. And this isn't automated or anything, but I would be happy to send it to you, my weight loss tracking sheet, just a Google spreadsheet. But I'd be happy to share a copy with you in case it might help you to understand that all of these things can be points of data, points of information on your weight loss journey.

it will show you that we just don't have to be so emotionally tied to what it means when you measure your food at a restaurant or are you obsessed if you're working out every day? No, this is data. Really, we are creating a lifestyle. And if you can work consistently to create these habits and collect these points of data, it is going to help you to know how to keep going on your journey.

when you need to pivot what you're doing, when you need to make course corrections so that you can be successful to lose the weight and to feel really healthy, strong and happy. Thank you again so much for tuning into this 20th episode of The Family Fork. I am so happy that you're here in our community and I cannot wait to meet with you again next week.