28: Ready To Give Up? Listen To This

Ever feel like throwing in the towel? Like you just want to give up on it all? This week on The Family Fork, we're diving deep into those feelings of overwhelm and frustration that can leave you wanting to escape to a deserted island. (And honestly, who hasn't felt that way lately?!)

But here's the thing: even in the midst of challenges, there are valuable lessons and opportunities for growth. This episode is your permission slip to acknowledge those struggles, but also to find the strength to keep going.

We'll explore two recent personal stories that highlight the feelings of overwhelm, failure, and uncertainty that can make us want to quit. Through these stories, we'll uncover four powerful lessons to help you reframe your thinking and move forward with renewed hope:

• Redefining Failure: Discover why failure isn't the end of the road, but rather a stepping stone on your journey to success.
• The Power of Mindset: Learn how negative thoughts can lead to negative choices, and how to break free from that cycle.
• Choosing Curiosity: We'll explore why curiosity is your secret weapon against defeat, and how it can empower you to find creative solutions.
• Creating Safety: Discover the importance of feeling safe and supported, and how it can give you the courage to try again, even when things get tough.

This episode is your reminder that you're not alone in your struggles. It's about finding the strength to keep going, even when you feel like giving up. Get ready for a dose of encouragement and practical advice to help you navigate the challenges of midlife with resilience and hope.

Links mentioned and ways to get in touch:

• Ready to transform your life and your health? The Method will jumpstart perimenopause weight loss, and give you tools for lifelong health!

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 directly with Ashley by clicking here.

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

Transcript

If you are feeling ready to give up, to just like give it all up, I need you to lean in and listen to this.

So if you are listening to this podcast, I know that you are a woman who is probably either moving into perimenopause or is in menopause and you're feeling all of the effects of those hormonal changes in your body. You're not sleeping well, you're tired, you're probably more agitated and edgy and you just can't lose that weight. And what's worse is not only can you not lose the weight, but you're gaining weight and you have no idea.

Why pile on top of all of that? You are overwhelmed. my gosh, you're so overwhelmed with family, especially, know, like we think that when our kids get older, they're going to be more self-sufficient and they are, but their challenges, their needs, they get bigger and more intense. So we have to put a lot of energy into them.

and you're holding down your career and you wonder all the time, am I going to be able to retire on time? Am I still even loving this job? And all the things that come with having that full-time job. If you feel overwhelmed and frozen by all of this, you probably just want to give up. You just want to give up. You want to just sell it all and I don't know, buy a tiny house on a tiny beach on a secluded island.

You just want to move away and never sign onto the internet again and read all of those like trashy romance novels or even all of those exciting, interesting books that you just don't have time to read right now. You want to go to your beach, go to your tiny house, seclude yourself and just read for the rest of your life. Doesn't that sound great? If you are in this season, I just want you to know I am in that season too.

You know, I may be a health coach and I work with women to transform their

I may be a health coach and I work with women to help them transform their lives around their nutrition and their health and their fitness, but I'm still a busy working mom too. And I'm susceptible to having seasons of struggle. And I have actually been feeling a lot of this in the last couple of weeks. And specifically last week, I just wanted to like burn it all to the ground and quit doing everything I was doing, pick up my family and

move somewhere where we could like be bartenders and play in the sand all day. If you're in this season along there with me, I want you to take a deep breath right now, just a really deep breath.

I want you to recognize that as hard as this season feels right now and as challenging as it feels, there are some lessons and some skills that we can learn in this really tough time that will actually help us to create a better life for ourselves.

Now here at the Family Fork, you know, we talk a lot about nutrition and how that works with our family or doesn't work with our family. But there's so much more to it. As moms, as women, we need to be able to feel good and strong and healthy and emotionally fit in order to take care of and manage and lead our families in the ways that we feel are important.

And so much of that comes from the food that we eat, but also the activities that we do together and really just how we relate as a family. So if you are feeling this intense need to just give up and quit everything, you are not in a good place to be able to feed or take care of your family in a way that will actually feel good for you. So today I want to share with you four lessons that

I have actually really had to learn and lean into in the past couple of weeks. And the way I want to share these lessons is I'm going to tell you two stories that have happened to me recently. Whether your current challenges are the same or not, I know that you will relate and you'll see yourself in these stories because they all have a similar theme of overwhelm and failure and confusion about where to go next.

Those are the kind of feelings that give us that sense of just wanting to give up and just quit. So let's dig into a couple of these stories and then we'll look at the lessons that we can learn from these stories and how we can use those lessons to actually create a better, more hopeful future for ourselves.

All right, now, if you have been listening to the podcast for a while, I've mentioned off and on for, I don't know, the last four months that I have been plagued with all of these illnesses. Saraya, my six-year-old, she's in school, so of course she brings home all of the germs. And I love hanging out with my granddaughter, Charlotte, but she likes to share her toys and her food, so that's more germs.

I work from home, so I don't really hang out with people as frequently as somebody who might work in an office. I often feel like my immune system is just low and I have pretty much caught every cold that comes my way.

It has been really, really difficult. Well, about a week and a half ago, I was horribly sick and I decided to take myself to urgent care. My throat was killing me. It felt like I was swallowing glass every time I had to swallow. I assumed that it was strep throat, but obviously, you know, I had to go and get a culture done. So I went to urgent care and when the doctor saw me, he looked in my throat and I just could tell that he was really skeptical. He's like, no,

I don't think you have strep. Let's just test you for mono too. So I let him do the tests and he came back pretty quick and he was like, well, the mono tests came back negative. So you don't have mono. We'll keep an eye on your strep test. And if you have strep, we'll give you a call and then we can get you a prescription for that. So this was all at about 10 o'clock that morning. And by maybe five or five 15, I still hadn't heard anything yet. And I knew that the urgent care

closed at 6pm, so I finally gave him a call.

When I got through finally to the right people, they told me, sorry, you we just missed this report or, you know, that the fact that the culture came back positive for strap. And instantly I felt so annoyed because I thought, you know what? I just feel like the doctor was dismissing me anyway that I didn't have strap. And so I bet they didn't even watch to see how that culture came back. So I already was feeling frustrated. And then to make things more challenging,

I have a really severe allergy to penicillin, erythromycin, and all of the derivatives. So I have to be really careful about what antibiotic I take. And with strep, that is really difficult. It's hard to find one that works for me. So when I was talking to the urgent care at 5.15 that night, they said, well, we'll go ahead and call in a prescription. And I had already told them about my allergies. So they were going to call in a prescription for an antibiotic that would work for me. Unfortunately,

By the time they called in the prescription, the pharmacy was closed. And so I had to survive another night without any antibiotics. And I really was in a lot of pain just because they didn't call in the prescription before the pharmacy closed. So the next morning when I woke up, I got my notification that my prescription was ready, but it was for an antibiotic that has a 10 % cross reactivity with penicillin allergies. my gosh. So I had to call urgent care.

again. And this whole process went on for another two days. Me calling urgent care, trying to talk to the right people. And ultimately what they recommended was that I just needed to go to the emergency room and get IV antibiotics. Can you imagine the frustration, the stress, the overwhelm, the anger? I'm just like sitting there and I'm like, I have resources at my disposal.

I have experts that are helping me to navigate this path, but it still took me three days to get the antibiotics that I actually needed to get over my strep throat. And through this whole process, I could feel myself getting more and more negative and more frustrated and just wanting to quit, right? I just wanted to give up completely. I felt like, you know, people were kind of helping me, but

it wasn't helping me feel any better and I wasn't getting the antibiotics yet. So my brain was just sort of shutting down. And when our brain starts to shut down like that, we are not able to think of creative solutions. It can be really hard for you to see your way out of a negative situation when you're in one. And I know for me, my nervous system, my brain, they were in full survival mode. I was really, really sick.

And besides not feeling well, I was just frustrated and angry and hopeless that nothing was working. Nothing was going my way. So my nervous system, it was feeling really threatened and it was just shutting down. It's in these moments that our brain starts looking for all the things that are like the worst. my gosh, I see this that's bad and that's the bad and we lose this ability to think any positive thoughts.

or to come up with creative solutions. So I did finally get to a place where I got the right antibiotics and I didn't have to go to the ER, thankfully, but it did take a couple of days and I did finally start feeling better.

And as I started to feel better, I was able to just take a deeper breath. I was able to feel a little bit of gratitude for having the resources and the time and the capacity to advocate for what I needed to cure my strep throat. And I kind of felt like, okay, I'm getting out of this. Maybe this is the turning point and I won't be sick back to back like I have been.

because in the meantime, I was also changing a lot of other things. I tightened up my nutrition even more. I started gargling saltwater every single day and I started drinking a lot more tea. So I was trying to do everything I could to support my body and I felt, okay, I'm feeling better now. I've got the right antibiotics. This process is working. Hopefully this will lead me to feeling better. All right.

So I want to put that story, the strep throat story in a bucket. And I want to tell you one more story that has happened in just the last couple of weeks. And then we're going to dive into the lessons that we can actually learn from these stories. We're going to relate them back to the stories that you have in your own life, where you are feeling so challenged and frustrated and hopeless, where you just want to give up. Okay? We're going to get there.

So the second thing that's been happening for me lately is that I am turning 50 in just a couple of weeks.

One year ago, I set out with some really big goals for myself, for my health, my business, my family, of really how I wanted things to look when I turned 50. And when you put a goal out there for yourself, it's always, it just feels attainable, right? And you get excited about it. But then what happens? Life, life gets in the way, right? Things happen, you get sick, there are challenges at work, something happens with your family.

all of these things start getting in the way of your goal. And that has really been my experience for this last year. Even though I had these big goals and I was so excited about reaching them, one of my really important to me goals was getting my body to look a certain way by the time I turned 50. Now, to be clear, I wanna be fit, but for me, it's not actually about being skinny. Honestly, it's about being super strong.

and very healthy and very flexible. Because if you are strong and healthy and flexible, you can do a lot more in your life. I wanted to be 50.

I wanted to turn 50 and still be able to play with my granddaughter on the floor, walk and run with my dog twice a day and play with Saraya and know, do all of the fun things that she wants to do in the backyard like dance and gymnastics. And I even want to try a somersault or put a cartwheel in there too. So my goal did involve some weight loss, but again, it was more about getting my body to a particular shape that felt good to me. I started struggling with this goal.

in November and December because that's when I started getting these like back to back colds and illnesses. I had the flu. We had norovirus over Thanksgiving. my gosh. It just seemed to keep coming. And on top of that, I am fully in menopause. I had a hysterectomy about two years ago and I was able to keep my ovaries, but menopause, has fully set in.

And now just in the last couple of months, I am starting to experience what a lot of women talk about where that visceral fat around your belly just kind of hangs out there. And no matter what you do or how you eat or how you work out or don't work out or whatever, it just doesn't go anywhere. And that is frustrating.

So as I got into the end of the year, and now here we are in March, I recognized that not only had I not lost weight, but my weight had actually gone up. And that was incredibly frustrating. So I tried some different approaches that I like to use with my clients and my students, because honestly, there are so many different levers we can pull around weight loss. So it's not always just like, are you eating the right amount of calories? I really

Got focused. I adjusted my macros. I tried carb cycling which has worked for me in the past Carb cycling is where you eat a couple of days in low carb and then you eat a day in high carb and then you keep repeating that cycle Over the holidays. I kind of just decided to eat whatever I wanted and I was still eating anti-inflammatory So no gluten no dairy. No soy. I didn't have much alcohol, but I wasn't really

counting my calories or my macros.

What I discovered is that nothing that I was doing was working and that was frustrating because I had worked so hard to create a goal and a vision for where I wanted to be when I turned this milestone birthday of 50 years old, but nothing was working. And you can imagine when you feel like nothing is working, what do you want to do? You want to give up, right?

And just like we talked about in the strep throat story, when nothing is working and you feel frustrated and feel like you tried absolutely everything to, you know, like in this case, lose weight and nothing is working, you just want to quit. In these moments, you lose your capacity for creative solutions. You don't hold yourself accountable to fully understand, gosh, where are things breaking down? Why isn't this working?

You aren't able to get curious and say, am I tracking correctly? Is there something different that I need to do? And you just sit in that frustration. You don't have the capacity to even think or be curious about other options that might work for you. So this is a deep dive on really where I have been in the last couple of weeks, but I want you to keep these stories in mind. The strep throat story that

I took forever to get a diagnosis and that was on the tail end of like four months of already being sick. And then this idea of not hitting a health or a fitness or a weight loss goal for a milestone birthday, which was something that I had set out and planned for a year ago. Like I had a whole year to get where I wanted to be and I wasn't gonna make it. So I want you to keep these stories in mind. And I also want you to think about where in your life do you have stories

that are similar right now. Where do you have challenges that are similar to mine where you just keep trying and trying and advocating for yourself, continuing to believe and hope that there's a way forward for you and that you can actually reach that goal, but you keep getting beat down because nothing is working and you're trying different approaches and you're trying to pivot and still nothing is working and you just wanna give up.

If you feel like you can relate to all of this and you have situations in your life that feel really similar, I want you to dive into these four lessons that you can take away from almost any challenging situation. I want you to be able to reframe the way that you're thinking about your hard times and your challenge so that you can actually move forward, so that you can feel better. Reach the goals.

so that you can accomplish what it is that you set out to do.

All right, lesson number one, failure does not mean that you'll never figure it out. Our brain likes to look at failure as a threat because failure, actually it's subjective. And of course our brain always goes to worst case scenario. So let's say you had given yourself a goal of losing 10 pounds by your spring break vacation, okay?

and didn't lose 10 pounds by your vacation, but you lost seven pounds. You could say, I failed. I totally failed. I didn't reach that goal. But instead we have to rewire our brain to recognize that failure doesn't mean bad. You didn't reach the goal, but guess what? You still lost seven pounds. And can you look at what else you learned in that process that might help you to lose the final three pounds?

or if you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently? Failure, it doesn't mean that you'll never figure it out. Failure just means that approach, it wasn't right for you in that moment. Failure means that there are different things that you could try. It means that you need to learn different skills or have more information under your belt in order to accomplish your goal. Failure, it does not mean that you'll never figure it out.

because you will.

Lesson number two, negative thoughts lead to negative choices. Ugh, this is so true. You know, when I was eating over the holidays, I knew that my goal for fitness and health was coming up in just a couple of months, but I had already been trying some things and I felt like my weight loss had completely stalled. My fitness, everything was just at a standstill. So as I'm having these negative thoughts, like, yeah.

never going happen. I'm not losing weight now. Why bother? Guess what I was doing? I was eating desserts. I wasn't moving my body as much as I needed to. I wasn't making great choices overall about what I was eating. And therefore, because I was making negative choices, I wasn't actually reaching my goals. So I could say, yeah, sure. I've done everything in the last year to get my fitness level that I want to be at when I'm 50 years old.

But the reality is that's not true. Because I ate a lot of desserts. I had a lot of appetizers. I overindulged for many days, more than my fair share. That is not doing everything. But because I was leaning into those negative thoughts of, it's never going to work for me, tried everything, I might as well just give up. I went ahead and I made choices that actually did not give me the results I was looking for.

So when you are in this challenging situation, I want you to think about what are these negative thoughts making me do? What are they leading me towards that's keeping me further away from actually reaching my goal? The idea that negative thoughts lead us to negative choices, believe it or not, this is your brain survival mechanism. It looks and it's like, gosh, we're trying, we're working so

We're doing everything we can to lose weight and it's not working. So instead of looking like a failure, I'm just going to quit because I would have to use more energy, more effort, more thought in trying to come up with like a new solution or a different solution for my weight loss.

It's easier for your brain to conserve energy and just to like sit in that negative thought of, well, it doesn't work for me. See, I've tried everything and it doesn't work. We have to learn to guard against your brain's survival mechanism. And the best way to do that is by recognizing when you start having those negative thoughts, what are those negative thoughts leading you to do that keep you further away from your goal?

All right. Lesson number three, curiosity is stronger than defeat. So when I was really struggling with my strep illness, I was 100 % defeated. just, couldn't see any way out of the situation. I really, really wanted to avoid going to the ER for IV antibiotics. And yet I just sat there and felt sad and frustrated. And I kind of just lived in that feeling of defeat.

A couple of days into my illness, my husband had actually taken our daughter and some of our house guests up to the mountains for a couple of days and I stayed home to rest. I was too sick. When he got home, he was like, hey, you know, did you call Kara? Kara is my sister-in-law and she happens to be an emergency room physician. And I was like, no, I didn't even think to call Kara and get some advice from her.

When we feel defeated, we really have trouble getting curious, but curiosity is going to allow us to get out of a situation that we're in. So had I been able to think more clearly and not feel so defeated, I would have remembered, I can probably call Kara and have a really, I don't know, good heartfelt conversation with her about how I'm feeling and really see what she might recommend. That.

would have led me to healing or probably getting some antibiotics a lot faster. But instead, I just sat in that feeling of defeat. So remember, when you feel defeated and you feel frustrated, like there's no future or no hope of going forward, this is when you need to lean in to finding ways to get curious.

Lesson number four, our last lesson, creating safety will allow us to try again. Now, when we don't feel safe, and safety can mean a lot of different things. It can mean we don't feel confident about what's happening in our future. Like, you know, we don't have control over...

When we don't feel safe and you know, safety can mean a lot of different things. It can mean that we feel confident about what's happening in our future or we have control over what's happening in a particular situation. So when those things are missing, our nervous system does not feel safe. And that is when we slip very quickly into survival mode and we stop getting curious. We start having those thoughts that get us further from our goal. But

If you can find a way to manufacture some safety or to see some things around you that help to keep you safe, it will allow you to keep trying again and again. When it was February, so just a couple of weeks ago, and I was looking at my weight and my fitness goal for my 50th birthday, it was really important for me to recognize I was still safe.

I actually did have resources at my fingertips that I could use to keep working and figuring out like, okay, what other levers do I need to pull for weight loss? What other levers do I need to pull for flexibility and strength training? Who do I need to talk to?

And as I started feeling like I could create this safety net of people, resources, the fact that I'm able to buy food that I need and that I want, the fact that I have a supportive husband who would just wrap me in hugs while I was crying and then help me put myself back together. I looked at all of that and I started recognizing that I'm safe. I have a safety net. I have resources and people and tools that will keep me safe.

And by recognizing that, it made it a lot easier to say, okay, it's February. I am not going to be at the fitness level that I wanted to be at for my 50th birthday, but I'm safe and I can continue to keep trying and trying and trying again so that I will eventually reach my goal. It may not be on my 50th birthday, but like we talked about, failure doesn't mean that we'll never figure it out.

So I continued to uncover some things that helped me to feel safe. I have what I need. I can be more calm and more patient about reaching my goal and I will get there eventually.

So as a takeaway from this episode, I really need you to write down these four lessons on a note card. And I want you to put them on your bathroom mirror. And I want you to take time every day to really reflect on these lessons and how you can apply them to whatever challenging situation you are in right now. So let's review them so you can write them down, okay? Number one, failure does not mean that you will never figure it out.

Number two, negative thoughts lead to negative choices. Number three, curiosity is stronger than defeat. And number four, creating safety will help you to try again and again and again.

If you are in the season where you are so ready to throw your hands up and just give up and sell everything and move to a tiny beach house and read all of the books, I really want to encourage you not to give up. There are lessons in these challenging times that you're experiencing right now. And if you can guide yourself to feel safe, you'll recognize that you're not failing. You're just learning your way through this journey.

you are going to come out on the other side feeling so much stronger and more confident and probably healthier and more able to handle what continues to come your way. This is life, right? Nobody gets out without a scratch. So I want you to just feel my love and encouragement coming your way. I really don't want you to give up. I want you to put these lessons on your bathroom mirror and let them serve as a

daily reminder that you will be okay. I promise you will make it.