22: The 2 Questions To Get You Unstuck On Your Weight Loss Journey

Want to get unstuck by simply asking yourself 2 questions?

When we feel stuck in our health or weight loss journey, it can be difficult to see a way out. We often blame it on our circumstances (hello, perimenopause!)

But by asking yourself 2 basic questions, you can help yourself get unstuck...so that you can ultimately reach your goals!

In this episode, we talk about

• The 2 questions that can get you unstuck
• How to guide your thoughts and feelings to change your situation
• Why you need more than a meal plan to lose weight (and what you need instead)

Plus, you'll hear about two of my students who have used these questions to get unstuck, and the results that it gave them!

Links mentioned and ways to connect:

• Feeling stuck and need more support on this framework? Check out The Method, the only perimenopause weight loss program built specifically for moms! We cover this approach and so much more. Check it out here!
• Need to get unstuck with a simple set of meal plans that move you into action? The Supper Club is exactly what you need!

Ashley Malik is a women's health and life 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 (00:05)

Well, welcome back, my friend. I am so excited that you decided to tune into the Family Fork today because we are going to talk about something that I know is something that you are struggling with too.

Raise your hand if you feel stuck, stuck in everything, like stuck moving your life forward, stuck in maybe getting ahead in your career or working on that side hustle or stuck in your health and your weight loss journey. To be really honest with you, I feel really stuck right now. And that's hard for me to say because it is my entire career to inspire you.

on how to eat well and how to work out and how to lose weight and perimenopause. So when I feel stuck, that really makes me think, my gosh, what do I need to do to get my brain unstuck? How can I figure this out so that I can help you figure this out too?

You know, I started this year with huge ambitions for where I wanted my life and my health to be for my 50th birthday, which is in April of this year. And I feel like even though the entire month of January has already passed us by, I feel like I'm just now getting started with the new year. I have felt so stuck.

I imagine you can relate to this, but the beginning of this year has started off really, really rocky. There's just been a lot going on in the world, like California wildfires, political changes, lots of crazy weather here in Colorado, just so many different things going on. And as moms, it's really easy for us to look at our lives and say, yeah, I know there's a lot of stuff going on, but I just have to keep going. I've got to pull myself together.

But when I took a few minutes to take an inventory of what my life has actually looked like for the last three months, and I want you to do that too, I noticed that there were a lot of things that I was taking care of that were keeping me stuck and actually stopping me from getting ahead in my goals for my business, my health, and my personal life. I've spent a lot of time helping to take care of my parents. My dad has Alzheimer's and he needs a certain level of care.

And my mom, she's his primary caretaker, but a lot of things that my dad used to do, he can't do anymore. And so now my mom is having to take care of those things, but she doesn't necessarily know what to do. So that means I'm spending a lot of time helping her with things like finding a plumber or finding someone to help when they had mice in their kitchen or helping with car repairs and home projects. And then when I was doing my inventory, I also just recognized that

Everyone in my entire family has been sick for the last three months. We've had colds off and on. We had norovirus over Thanksgiving. The dog has even been sick. There's been like cold after sickness on repeat and it has been so difficult. know, Suraya, she's my six year old. She just needs a little bit more care when she's sick. And that means that I have to deprioritize some other things so that I can care for her.

She has also been very busy with school projects and dance. The dance competition season just kicked off at the beginning of this month, which means we are spending a ton of extra time doing dance and dance related things. And there have been a ton of days off from school. I don't know how it is for your school district, but honestly, I feel like in ours, it seems like there are two or three days every month where kids are out of school. Now,

Sure, I may work from home, but owning my own company means I have to balance all of that stuff along with my work, days off from school, keeping my kiddo busy, taking care of the illnesses. It's just been a lot. So maybe you can relate that when I say I feel stuck and overwhelmed, maybe you can feel that too. And honestly, I'm not trying to complain, but I really want you to do a detailed inventory like this.

It is really going to help you see what things are demanding more of your time and attention and where you might be able to pull some levers to get unstuck.

So last week, things really reached a breaking point when Suraya turned six and we celebrated her birthday. Now, a quick backstory here. At the end of last year, I had definitely stopped watching so much of what I was eating and that was okay. I was in this like workout phase where I was building muscle. I was eating more carbs and with the holidays, I definitely let more sugar sneak in and my calories were probably a lot higher than they needed to be.

and I definitely gained weight in the last half of the year. So as we moved into January, I had some pretty aggressive weight loss goals, but when Suraya's birthday rolled around, she decided she wanted cupcakes instead of a cake. And so I thought, okay, you know what? I'll just make it. I'll make some cupcakes. Well, as per usual, life got busy and I ended up buying a Funfetti

cupcake boxed mix from the store. Now it was gluten free, but the number one ingredient was sugar, not even flour, it was sugar. And each cupcake had about 20 grams of added sugar. That is a lot when you're trying to stick to no more than 20 grams of added sugar a day, 20 grams of sugar in one cupcake is a ton.

And I also knew that I wouldn't have time to make my own frosting. So I bought the Pillsbury frosting that comes in like a paper container. For me, who has been eating anti-inflammatory for almost a decade, looking at the processed ingredients like the soybean oil and the high sugars that I was eating in the cupcake and the frosting, this whole experience just felt really overboard for me.

And unfortunately, when I ate that cupcake, I actually didn't just have one. I ended up having two cupcakes. So I want to be really clear. I am not judgmental at all. If you decide or you need to make cupcakes that are a boxed mix where that primary ingredient is sugar, there is no judgment. I get it. Sometimes we have to do just what we can in order to get by.

But if you are feeling low energy and you're having trouble losing weight and you're feeling stuck while you shovel in two high sugar, high fat, highly processed cupcakes, this is not gonna help you. And it was in this moment that I just started to recognize that I have probably been doing some emotional eating over the last couple of months, which maybe you can relate to that. Like when things get stressful, it's really easy to just say, okay,

I'm just going to eat whatever or I'm just going to eat whatever for this meal and I'll start again tomorrow or I'll start again on Monday. In reality, this is actually a signal that we are stuck in our brain and we need to sit down and figure out what is going on. We've talked about this in lots of previous episodes that you can have the right meal plan. I have the right meal plan. I build those meal plans for you in the supper club.

and in my group programs. But you have to look at what's going on in your brain. What thoughts are you having that are actually leading you to eat more when you feel emotional or stressed or stuck or frustrated? What is leading you to decide to eat two high sugar, highly processed cupcakes? What's going on in your brain?

I want to share with you what I've been journaling about in this season of being stuck.

There are two questions that you can ask yourself when you feel really stuck, like stuck in your weight loss progress. You know, have meal plans in front of you and you know what you should be eating, but you're still not making the right choices. So there are two questions that I want you to journal about that will help you start to uncover what it is that is keeping you stuck where you are. All right. The first question you're going to ask yourself, what is my current relationship to hard work?

I love this question. Let me say it again. What is my current relationship to hard work? My mindset coach asked me this question, and it has literally changed the way that I think about hard work.

I to think that I was a really hard worker, hard projects or hard things would come my way and I would just tackle them. I was sort of like driven by this idea that I needed to just get the thing done and get the thing accomplished and then I'd feel really good about myself. Now, some of this comes from the fact that when I was growing up, I grew up in a family of achievers. You were really recognized if you had achieved something like a good grade on your test or you'd gotten a good role in the school play.

But my parents worked really hard. My mom was an entrepreneur and she owned her own business and built it from absolutely nothing into a $10 million business. And she did that by working hard. She would work at night, she would work on the weekends and she was into her office early. She also did lots of extra things to try and improve her business. And I watched my mom really work hard.

Now, my dad was a judge. He was not an entrepreneur, but he was a judge. And I would watch him put a lot of effort and energy into his cases. He was in family law for a long time and he would hear divorce cases and different things like that. And I would watch him really labor over decisions that he had to make, especially when it involved children in the case. Now, aside from that, he also put in a lot of time and hard work

in mentoring and volunteering young students to help them understand how the law could actually be a viable career path. So if you're familiar with mock trial, my dad would teach mock trial teams every year and he did this for many, many years and he put in a lot of hard work in doing that. So I want you to think about what was your family like and what did you talk about

when hard work came up or when you saw hard work modeled, what did it look like? Who was working hard? And what did you take away from that? What does it mean to you now when you think about hard work? As I've done some work over the last couple of years, so it's pretty recent, in understanding my personal relationship to hard work, I've actually recognized that the idea of hard work

really triggers some of my feelings that I had from previous traumas.

I've mentioned before that years ago, like, I don't know, 14 years ago, I left an abusive marriage. And what I was experiencing in that time was that no matter how much work I put into that marriage, no matter how much I supported my husband through rehab, through giving him money to support his gambling habit, to clipping coupons and saving money for groceries because there was never enough money, no matter

all of the hard work that I put in, it never changed the outcome. And what I've come to recognize now is that when I think I'm putting in hard work, there's a story in my brain that's saying to me, you can put in all the hard work you want, but it's not going to change the outcome. And so if we kind of come into this current day and this situation, being stuck, eating cupcakes, gaining weight since the end of last year,

It's been really helpful to journal about my current relationship to this hard work. What is my current relationship towards working hard and hitting my weight loss goals? Am I feeling like any work that I put in isn't going to yield any results? Because honestly, my primitive brain wants to look at the last three months and say, well, see, you've been eating healthy foods and you still gained weight. This isn't going to work for you.

But when I look back at my tracking sheets, which I've talked about in the last couple of episodes, how vitally important it is to track what you eat, what you weigh, what your measurements are, everything. And so when I look back at my tracking sheets, I'm like, yeah, I can absolutely see why. Because I've been eating ice cream with homemade magic shawl, because I've been eating cupcakes, because I've been eating blue corn tortilla chips, like they're going out of style. So.

While the things that I'm eating aren't like horribly unhealthy, well, the cupcakes are, but the reality is that I've been eating high fat, high sugar, high carb and higher calories. So of course I'm stuck on my weight loss journey. But when my brain wants to say, I don't know, this all feels like hard work, feels like hard work to do the nutrition plan and to eat on plan and really balance out my macronutrients.

My brain wants to tell me this thought, like, well, you can do all of that, but it's not going to get you the results anyway. And so I remain stuck.

So first, you have to recognize what your relationship to hard work is. But then, what do you do about that? So sometimes hard work, it just feels overwhelming. And when it feels overwhelming, it's because we don't know what to do next. That's typically how overwhelm feels. So in that instance, if hard work feels overwhelming to you, like you have a new nutrition plan or you've just started in the supper club and you're like,

This is so cool. But when you get right down to it, you're like, I just still don't even know where to start. When you find yourself in this situation, I want you to take bite sized pieces. I want you to get this inertia going because if you do a little bit, like the first day of your nutrition plan, you're actually just printing everything out and getting it ready to have handy in the kitchen. Then on the second day of your new nutrition plan,

You're just reading through the whole thing. You're not actually taking action on it yet. You're absorbing the information that's there. Because if you try and sit down and read the whole thing and go grocery shopping that same day and then plan to implement everything the very next day, that can feel really overwhelming. And it can make it seem like, oh my gosh, this is such hard work. I'm not capable of doing this. But when in reality, you just need to scale it back.

and do some of those smaller bite-sized pieces.

Another thing that you can do when you feel stuck and paralyzed by hard work is to rest.

Being able to recognize your need for rest is so important because if you think about it, say like you've been working the entire week long and on Friday you're like, okay, I got to get my grocery shopping plan for the weekend so I can get it done on Saturday because we've got a birthday party on Sunday and a family dinner on Sunday night or whatever else you have going on. If you don't find time to rest, you're going to get to the end of that crazy week and you're going to feel stressed and overwhelmed and that's

is going to keep you stuck. However, if you can rest and whatever that looks like to you, know, for some people it's extra sleep, for some people it's unplugging from social media, maybe it's a coffee date with your spouse or your best girlfriend or your sister. When you rest, it calms your body, it calms your brain. Your brain doesn't feel like it's in this high panic or high protection mode and then

When you go to do the thing that feels like hard work, it doesn't feel as overwhelming, especially if you've been able to chunk it into bite-sized pieces. When you rest, your brain rests, and you don't feel like you're running from a bear, and you can actually come back to the hard work and tackle it in a more sustainable way. So when it comes to the question of, what is my current relationship to hard work?

I want you to journal about what hard work looked like when you were growing up. Did it look difficult? Did it look like it had great results when the work was put in? Or did it look like the work was hard and there wasn't really anything to show for it?

you will really find that your brain begins to change when you can do a couple of things. When you can pause or rest, when we start to feel anxiety or overwhelm when it's associated to that hard work. And I want you to notice how you're feeling. We've talked about in previous episodes how our feelings dictate the choices that we make. It's not the situation that we're in, it's the feeling that we have about it.

So if you take a minute to pause and then you notice, how am I feeling right now? What choices am I making based on how I'm feeling? And then I want you to reflect, okay, is this the way that I want to feel? Is this the way that I want to move forward? Why is this hard work feeling so difficult? And what can I do to make it feel easier and safer and more sustainable?

All right, the next question I want you to journal about when you are in a season of stuck is, what am I making this mean about me? So I want you to think back to a time when you have felt really stuck, especially with your health or your weight loss goals, and maybe that's you right now. What are the first things that come to mind? For many of us, it's like, I should be able to figure this out or,

feel so stupid or I don't know what's wrong with me. Something must be wrong with me that I can't figure this out. When I talk to my clients and my students, I often hear them say, I just can't stay consistent or motivated or I can't stick with it no matter what I try. But the reality is that all of these thoughts lead you to feeling stuck.

I want to share a story about a client of mine. name is Megan and she is really amazingly successful and a leader in her career. She has worked so hard to get where she is and she's very well respected in her field. So she feels really good about the work that she does every day. But when it came to being at home, she was actually feeling really, really stuck because she noticed that her daughters who were in high school, that

they were making really poor food choices. And she was struggling with that because they were athletes. They were super active in their sports and activities. And she just felt really stuck when it came to figuring out how do I feed them?

You know, Megan was trying to eat better and healthier and a little bit more anti-inflammatory, but she couldn't figure out how to get her kids to eat this way. So Megan wondered, what do I need to do to encourage them to stay on the path of healthy eating? She really felt stuck with that. And she even said to me, and it just broke my heart, she said, I feel like I'm failing as a mom. It was so frustrating to her. She was making this mean that she was failing as a mom.

This right here is a prime example of when your thoughts drive you to make certain decisions. So when Megan felt like she was failing as a mom, like there she was trying to manage her own career and her health, but she didn't know what to give her girls. And if she tried to cook, she would like just cook up something quickly because she didn't have a ton of time. She was really busy at her day job. So she didn't always have time to cook something healthy, but whenever she picked up takeout,

She was trying to choose healthy options, but it just never felt like it was hitting the mark with her girls. They weren't super excited about what she was bringing home. And if she did get cooking done, they weren't super excited about that either. Now, as a mom, you know that you want your kids to be at least a little bit excited about the foods that you're making. So Megan was making this mean that she was failing as a mom and that she wasn't helping her kids to feel better and do better with their sports.

because they weren't really being fueled properly. So what can you do when you're in this situation where you feel this stuck? mean, many of us just sort of shut down, but where I worked with Megan was in asking her, how would you like to feel? And I want you to put this in your journal. How would I like to feel? What would you like to feel about this situation?

When we dug into this question, Megan uncovered that in her career, she was a very, very good project manager and was able to lead teams and direct different team members to accomplish all sorts of things. It was very easy for her to project manage at the office. When she project managed at the office, she also noticed that she felt very confident and self-assured and organized and on track. So,

we decided to take that same philosophy that she used in the office and put that into her family so that she could continue to feel confident and organized and on track.

Basically, Megan started project managing her family. She started having a weekly meeting with her family to sit down with them and say, okay, what do you want to eat this week? What kind of activities do you have going on? She started delegating at home. Her girls, they were old enough to start doing some very basic cooking or basic meal prep so that when she got home from the office, it was easy for her to put some things together for dinner because a lot of the stuff had already been cut or chopped or whatever.

And by getting her kids involved and asking them what they wanted to eat, having conversations about healthy choices, and then getting her kids actively involved in preparing meals in whatever way that looked like, she actually started to feel more confident, more self-assured, and more on track when it came to feeding her family because they were all on the same page. I was so thrilled because she no longer felt like a failure as a mom.

And it was all because we asked that one question. How would you like to feel about this situation? She took those feelings that she had at work, confident and self-assured, and she used those feelings with the situation at home where she had previously felt stuck. And as a result, her girls started helping with the meals. Everybody started eating together and they started having more fun talking about what kind of meals they were going to make.

It almost became this fun family activity instead of feeling like she was failing as a mom because she couldn't feed her kids the food that they wanted or needed.

Okay, we're still tackling the overarching question. What am I making this mean about me when you're feeling really stuck? I want to share another story about a student of mine, Laura. So she was really struggling on a girls weekend trip because she didn't want to be a burden. She had already started shifting her nutrition. She was trying to eat healthy and anti-inflammatory. And she knew that girls weekend, was filled with alcohol and pizza.

and late night sandwich runs and snacking from the local convenience store. Laura kept telling me that she didn't want to be a burden. She had decided that she'd just not eat the way that she wanted to, because she didn't want to be a burden to the rest of the group. And this was really making her feel stuck, because she was also noticing that this was coming up in other areas of her life. Like when she was eating with her husband, she noticed

she would deprioritize her own needs. So she felt really, really stuck.

So I asked her, what are you making this mean about you? Well, we did a lot of digging and we were able to work through why she felt like she was a burden to other people when she was doing this. And maybe some of this will resonate with you. As it turns out, when Laura was younger, she was pretty much the peacekeeper in her family. And she did a really good job of flying under the radar and just doing what other people needed.

And in her younger years, that was a protection mechanism. It really made her life simpler and easier, safer, more predictable. But it turns out that not wanting to rock the boat in her family had become this thought in midlife that, well, I don't want to rock the boat on my girlfriend's trip. I don't want to rock the boat when I'm meeting out with my husband. I don't want to be a burden.

She made these situations mean that she is a burden if she wants to ask for what she needs when it comes to her own nutrition and eating. So Laura and I got really curious and this is exactly what I want you to do too. Where can you get curious? What would it feel like to do X? What would it feel like to ask for healthy anti-inflammatory food on a girls weekend trip?

How would you feel about that? What would that look like to you? And I really want you to go into detail here because when you start to get a little bit deeper on the detail, like if you say, we would arrive on a Thursday night and we would leave Saturday afternoon. So Thursday night for sure, all the girls are gonna wanna go out and they're definitely gonna have cocktails. And we know a couple of our girlfriends like to drink more than others. So how would it feel if I'm sitting there at the bar with

all of my best girlfriends, they're drinking, and I order a soda water with lime. Think about that. How would that feel? The more detail that you can go into, the better. So then you wake up in the morning and everyone is kind of sleeping in. And even though you want to get up and take a nice early morning walk, then you want to have a healthy breakfast, the rest of the group, they decide that they're going to do brunch at 11.

And the brunch place that they've chosen has this like huge delicious menu of French toast and eggs and bacon and sausage and pancakes. my gosh, all of the yummy delicious brunch and breakfast foods.

and they also thought it would be fun to order a bunch of plates and just share everything. So how would it feel to go to that brunch and say, you know what, I'm actually going to order my own meal. I'm just going to have some fresh fruits, some steamed veggies, and maybe some grilled chicken. Really think about that. How would that feel to you? If you are listening to this,

If you are listening to this and you're feeling yourself start to get anxious or bothered, this is a really good feeling to notice because when you start to get anxious, those thoughts in your head are going to lead you to say, well, I'm not going to order my own meal. I don't need to put my own needs first. I don't want to be a burden to anyone else. If they're sharing plates at brunch and I just want to order my own plate, I don't want to be annoying. I don't want to be a burden. I don't want to put anyone out.

But in reality, you are going to stay stuck with where you are because you are fearful or uncomfortable with advocating for what you need. So when you ask yourself, how would you like to feel, you can start to get curious. What would feel like a safe choice? Okay, so maybe you don't feel like, you know, if everyone's sharing plates at the brunch, maybe you don't feel comfortable asking for your very own fruit plate and steamed broccoli and grilled chicken.

maybe a safer choice for you in this moment, again it's like a baby step, is to have a fruit plate and some scrambled eggs on the side for yourself that don't have cheese on them. And then you can share a little bit of what else everyone else is having on the table. You see, when you feel stuck, you really have to examine these two questions. What is my relationship to this hard work right now in this moment? And what am I making it mean about me?

Because if you think the hard work's never going to get you anywhere, you will stay stuck. And if you make it mean, I'm not capable of doing this, I don't know what's wrong with me, I'm a failure, you will continue to stay stuck. But if you can start to recognize that these thoughts and feelings drive you to make poor choices, all you need to do is change that story for yourself.

What would I like to do about it? What would I like to feel about hard work? What would happen if I made a choice that advocated for myself? And if you can take those small steps into building what you would like your life to look like, how you would like to feel, it's actually going to help you get unstuck. And this will help drive you to continue to make different choices, better choices.

the choices that allow you to get where you want to be, which is unstuck and actually reaching your goals.

Okay, let's take a deep breath. I know that this was a really deep feelings oriented episode, but as I have always said, if all you needed was another meal plan, you would have lost the weight by now. So hopefully this helps you see that it is your thoughts and your feelings that play the biggest role in your ability to get unstuck and reach your goals.

So until next week, I want you to do a couple of things. I want you to take an inventory of what things have been going on in your life over the last couple of months. I want you to look at where you are stuck. And then I want you to ask yourself those two overarching questions. What is my relationship to hard work? And what am I making it mean about me?

And I really would love for you to share some of your thoughts with me on Instagram at the Ashley Malek. I would love to help you dig in a little bit further so that you can get unstuck and reach your goals.