29: "I'm Not Motivated" And Other Thoughts You Believe About Weight Loss

How often do you feel stuck by your own thoughts? Constantly telling yourself, "I don't have time," "I can't stay motivated," or "This will never work for me?" This week on The Family Fork, we're diving deep into the limiting beliefs that hold us back from achieving our health goals.

It's easy to mistake our thoughts for facts, especially when they feel so real. But what if those "truths" are actually just stories our brains tell us to keep us safe? We'll explore six common phrases that women often believe about weight loss and healthy living, and uncover the reasons behind these limiting beliefs.

This episode will help you:

Identify your limiting beliefs: Discover which phrases resonate with you and understand why you believe them.
Understand the "why" behind your thoughts: Explore the three main reasons our brains cling to these limiting beliefs.
Learn practical solutions: Discover three actionable strategies to break free from these thought patterns and achieve your goals.

We'll discuss how to:

• Reevaluate your goals and break them down into manageable steps.
• Reverse engineer your goals by focusing on how you want to feel.
• Take accountability and delay gratification to create lasting change.

Get ready to challenge your beliefs, shift your mindset, and take control of your health journey. This episode is packed with practical tips to help you move from feeling stuck to feeling empowered.

Links mentioned and ways to get in touch:
Need a family-friendly (but healthy) meal solution? Grab your free meal plan here!

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.

Transcript

Ashley (00:05)
Hello there, my friend. Welcome back to The Family Fork. I, as always, am so excited that we get to spend this time together. So today we are going to go deep, which if you have been listening to The Family Fork for a while, you will know that going deep and sort of into the feels is one of my favorite things to do. Because honestly, if you struggle to feel good and have energy and lose weight and feed your family and take care of your full-time job,

And if you're like me, taking care of your aging parents is so easy for us to start having these thoughts in our brains that we eventually start to believe our fact or the truth.

What we're going to do today is we're going to look at six different thoughts and phrases that relate to weight loss and healthy living that we really, really believe and that our brain tells us our absolute truth. And we're going to look at why we believe those stories. Why does our body and our nervous system say, yep, those are actual facts. Once we figure out the why, then we're going to dive into solutions.

because the solutions are going to help you get unstuck if you're feeling stuck. And it will help you to start thinking some different thoughts that will actually help you to reach your goals. This is an episode where you're definitely gonna wanna take notes, but you're probably gonna wanna listen twice. I want you to listen all the way through and take those notes. And then I want you to identify which of those six phrases do you say to yourself most often?

Get a little bit curious. Does that phrase resonate with me? Is that a story that my body and my brain also tells me all the time? When we start looking at three reasons why you have these thoughts all the time, I want you to write down which of those reasons feels most relatable to you. And then I want you to really dig deep and say, okay.

Ashley's giving me some solutions and some ways to work with these thoughts so that I can actually feel better, have more energy, lose weight, feed my family, do my full-time job, and take care of my aging parents without falling apart.

All right, to kick things off, want you to close your eyes, like really close your eyes as long as you're not driving or walking, but I want you to close your eyes and I want you to hear these phrases that I hear all the time from women in my programs, my private clients, friends, family members. I just really hear women say these things all the time. So I want you to take a tally and see how many of these phrases you also hear in your mind. Okay, close your eyes, you ready?

All right, number one, I don't have time to eat healthy, work out or lose weight. Number two, I can't stay motivated. Number three, I'm not disciplined enough to lose weight. Number four, this will never work for me. Number five, my family won't eat what I serve, so I'll never be able to make this work.

And number six, I'm too old or too far gone to ever lose weight.

Now look at your notes and what tell me what is your total? There were six thoughts. So how many of those have you said to yourself before? Typically when I start working with women, they tell me that they've probably thought of four or five of those phrases before, but six is not out of the ordinary. Now, when you say these phrases, you know, like these thoughts running in your brain, like, my gosh, this will never work for me or

I'm just not disciplined enough to lose weight. I need you to start recognizing that these thoughts and phrases are not true. That's hard to believe, right? We're going to talk through this a little bit, but all of these phrases are just thoughts that you have about yourself. They're not the truth. Now the way to distinguish the difference is to say, all right, if I'm in a court of law,

and I say, am not disciplined enough to lose weight. Would a judge, would a jury, would they believe me? They might ask some follow-up questions. Maybe they would say, well, have you ever lost weight before? You'd think about it and say, well, sure. Yeah, I lost weight when I was 20. Or yeah, of course, I lost weight five years ago. It was hard to do, but I did it. So right then you have proven this thought of I'm not disciplined enough to lose weight.

you've proven that that's not true. It may feel very true that you don't have the discipline right now, but you can probably prove that you were able to lose weight at some point in the past. So it is possible for you.

Another way to determine the difference between a thought and a fact is to look around and see if other people are doing it. So maybe you say, you know, this will never work for me. I'm in perimenopause. I'm getting older. It's just impossible for me to lose weight. But I want you to look around. Are there other women who are getting older who are in perimenopause and who have lost weight? If so, then you're probably just having a

It's not an actual fact for you, even though I get it. It feels very, very true. Believe it or not, when you are thinking these phrases are truth and not just thoughts, what your brain is trying to do is to keep you safe. Now that seems a little bit weird, right? Like safe, safe from what? Your brain is trying to keep you safe from taking a risk.

or doing something.

Your brain is trying to keep you safe from taking a risk, doing something with an uncertain outcome. It's keeping you safe from failure or rejection or isolation. And when your brain switches into the safety mode, it loses all ability to process information logically or to come up with creative solutions. So give yourself a break and some grace because this is what your primal brain is designed to do.

I've talked about this in previous episodes, but your brain only has three jobs to seek out things that are pleasurable, to avoid pain and to conserve energy. So when you believe the phrase, I'm not disciplined enough to lose weight, your brain is actually helping you to conserve energy. It's not coming up with creative solutions. It's not wasting time trying to figure out how to increase your discipline so that you can lose weight.

I want you to dig into why.

I want to dig into why your brain moves into this safety and protection mode when you have these thoughts that feel like truth, but your brain sees them as actual truth. Now there are probably more, but typically I see that there are three reasons why you would believe these thoughts are absolute truth. All right, so let's take the thought of I don't have time to lose weight or

I'm not disciplined enough to lose weight. One of the reasons that your brain might see either of those things to be true is because you have tried to push yourself too far out of your comfort zone or maybe...

One of the reasons that your brain might see those things to be true is because you've actually pushed yourself too far out of your comfort zone, or maybe you've pushed too quickly out of your comfort zone. Learning how to lose weight, it actually does take some skill and some knowledge, and it requires you to grow. Now when it comes to growth, I want you to imagine a target, like an archery target, where there's three concentric circles. And in the center, the bullseye,

is that's your comfort zone. And the comfort zone is just what it says, where you're most comfortable. And you're comfortable there because things are predictable. You know what's coming up. You know what's going to happen. And you know how to react. When you're in that comfort zone, you know how to problem solve. So that's the center. Now I want you to think about the outermost circle. That is called your freeze zone.

Now the free zone is where you find yourself when you set a really big goal like losing 20 pounds in a month or maybe you've decided that you're going to work out seven days a week and cook healthy meals every single day. So you set these really huge goals and when you say to yourself, I don't have time to lose weight or I'm not disciplined enough to lose weight. What can, what I

you set these really huge goals. And so when you say to yourself, I don't have time to lose weight or I'm just not disciplined enough to lose weight. What I can often pinpoint is that you've gone from your comfort zone, that center bullseye to your freeze zone where your brain no longer knows how to problem solve. Nothing feels predictable and you just are stuck. You don't even know what to do next.

What you need to do is get yourself into the middle zone, that second concentric circle, which is called the growth zone. Now the growth zone is about 20 % outside of your comfort zone. So think about like a health or a fitness goal that you've made before. You see this a lot at New Year's when everyone decides they're gonna go to the gym. So you go, you sign up for that membership and you commit to going

six days a week.

Now, if you haven't been going to the gym and all of a sudden you're going to say, I'll be there six days a week, that is actually gonna put you in that outer circle, that free zone. What you wanna do instead is say, huh, how could I get into my growth zone? What would that even look like? Maybe it's just committing to two days a week in the gym for that first month. And then once you're able to make that a habit, it's committing to three days in the gym in the second month.

When you're taking a smaller risk and jumping only 20 % outside of your comfort zone, like two gym days instead of six, it doesn't feel as risky. It's a manageable leap from zero to two days, and your brain and your nervous system will feel safer with this transition, and you'll actually have a better chance of sticking to it.

Okay, let's move on to a couple of other phrases that you might say to yourself. When you think I can't stay motivated or I'm too old or too far gone to ever lose weight, what's going on here is that your brain is working really hard to avoid failure and shame and embarrassment. I know, I get it. This happens because you have had way too many

failed past attempts. You've tried, you've tried, really, you've tried to lose weight. You've told your family, you know, this is what I'm going to do. And then it didn't happen. Maybe you've even shared your goal with your coworkers and you've all started walking together and sharing healthy meals together, but you're not losing weight and you're embarrassed. Now, remember how I said that one of your brain's jobs is to avoid pain? Well, when you tell yourself,

I'm too far gone to ever lose weight. You are avoiding pain, the pain of failure. It hurts to fail. You start to think, am I a failure? Am I not cut out for this? Am I not capable of doing this? What will other people think? Are they going to look at my efforts to lose weight and laugh at me or talk about me behind their back? Our brain

does not want to feel these painful feelings of failure or shame or embarrassment. And so instead it reverts to coming up with a phrase that really feels true. I'm just too old for this to happen. I can't stay motivated. I'm not a motivated person. And so when you start believing that as truth, you don't have to risk feeling failure or shame or embarrassment.

This is your brain's way of problem solving. It says, you know, like, I see that this is gonna be hard and it's probably not gonna feel good. And therefore I'm going to believe this fact. I'm too old to lose weight and I'm too far gone to lose weight. And so when you start believing that as fact, what do you do? What actions do you take? You don't do anything. You don't make healthy choices with your meals.

You don't decide to get up and walk after lunch. You don't drink extra water. You just don't do anything. You get into that freeze state like we talked about in the last section. Now there's a solution for this, I promise. But before we get into that, I want to cover one more reason why your brain tricks you into believing that these phrases are so true. Imagine that you're saying, this will never work for me or

my family won't eat what I want to eat so I'll never be able to make this healthy meal plan work. When you are thinking these things your brain is digging in and staying stuck to those beliefs. It's constantly looking for ways to prove that those things are so true. So if you say you know what my family won't eat what I want to eat this will never work. Well

If you feed your family a kale salad with grilled tuna steaks because you believe that's what you're supposed to eat to reduce inflammation, get extra nutrients, your family is probably not going to eat that. But that doesn't mean that it won't work. But your brain says, see, I told you they wouldn't eat it. So when you try and offer zucchini noodles instead of regular pasta spaghetti noodles and your family says, no, not a chance.

I'm definitely not eating that. Your brain says, do you see what I mean? It's true. Your family won't eat what you want to eat. So this will never work. When you say stuck in your belief, what it does is it removes you from having to take accountability or responsibility for the actions and the choices that you make. Listen, I get it. I am right there with you. As moms, I know this happens because we're tired.

We're tired of trying to find a meal that our family likes and that makes us feel good and that also feels healthy all around.

You're tired of trying different approaches to lose weight or eat healthy. But if you can pin that fault on someone else, like, well, it's my family's fault that I can't cook healthy meals. It removes you from being responsible. I mean, you could say, know, hey, I listened to Ashley the other day on the family for, cause she has this really cool plan that lets me make tacos for myself and for my family, but we all get exactly what we want. Huh, that's pretty cool.

But putting the fault on someone else like your family means you've removed this ability to be responsible for the choices that you make, which means you're also removing accountability for reaching your goals because it's someone else's fault.

Maybe you have a different thought. Maybe your thought is you don't have money to buy everything organic. Or when you eat at your mom's on the weekend, she likes to feed you a lot of food that's not on your healthy meal plan. All of these thoughts are taking accountability off of you. And knowing that brain is in this survival and safety mode, your brain's conserving energy.

If you do this, you don't have to think hard about a solution or to be a problem solver. You can just say, yeah, I don't have any energy. This is not my fault. There's just nothing I can do about it. Our brain has gotten so good at keeping us safe as humans. That's how we've been around so long. It's really...

Our brain has gotten very good at keeping us safe as humans. That's really its only job. Remember, seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy and effort. And honestly, this is how we've had survived thousands of years as human beings. It's allowed us to survive and adapt. But if we want to make changes, if we want to believe something different, there are actually a couple of things that you can do. So I've...

three different solutions for you to help you start recognizing that you're having thoughts and that your thoughts are not actually truth. So let's dig into a couple of these solutions.

First, I want you to reevaluate your goal and really take note of exactly what steps it's going to take to get there. When you reevaluate your goal and you write down those steps required to achieve that goal, what you're probably gonna find is that you are trying to go from your comfort zone, that center circle, far beyond your growth zone, and you're actually getting stuck in the freeze zone, which is that outer circle.

So remember that set of concentric circles?

Because in the center, we have that comfort zone. But your goal might be so big that you are unsure of how to reach it. So your brain, it quits being a problem solver. It stops being curious. So what you can do is look at those steps and say, like we talked about, maybe I'm going to go to the gym six days and I

So what you can do is look at those steps and say, you know, like we talked about, okay, instead of going to the gym six days a week, I'm gonna go to the gym two days a week. Now, one of the biggest struggles I see for moms specifically is that you wanna cook healthy meals. So what do you do? You go onto Pinterest and you pin like 20 recipes that look, my gosh, so good. And you print them out, you do the grocery shopping and you get all excited.

So you cook a nice healthy meal on Sunday night. And then you cook another healthy meal on Monday night after a long day of work. And by Tuesday night, you're actually feeling burned out. You've been working really hard to make new recipes. You've been working with these different ingredients and you've been trying to balance what your family likes and what you like and what everybody doesn't like. And what you've done is you have pushed into that freeze zone.

So I want you to pull your goal back and say, you know what, I can still reach my goal. But if I look carefully at the steps that are required to reach that goal, I've got to go a little bit slower. You need to go 20 % outside of your comfort zone. So maybe that's just cooking, I don't know, one new recipe every two weeks. Now, when I say that, it doesn't seem like a lot, right?

But let's be honest with ourselves. When life gets in the way, know, one of your kids needs a ride home unexpectedly and somebody gets sick and you have a project that keeps you late at work, all of a sudden, one recipe every two weeks, it actually sounds about right. But it still pushes you a little bit to grow some more, to find a recipe that you and your family will like, to find a recipe that feels really healthy.

So reevaluating your goal and mapping out those steps to get there is going to help you go from your comfort zone to your growth zone and not get stuck in that really big freeze zone.

The second way that you can help your brain get out of survival or safety mode is to reverse engineer your goal. So instead of saying, gosh, I want to lose 20 pounds. I want you to think first about how you want to feel. We've talked about this before. How do you want to feel? Now it's not how you want to feel when you lose the 20 pounds. How do you want to feel on that journey of losing 20 pounds? Do you want to feel determined?

or confident, maybe you want to feel curious. I think curiosity is such an underused emotion because when we get curious, we actually feel okay about taking some smaller risks. So how do you want to feel on that journey to losing 20 pounds? And once you decide how you want to feel, maybe you say, I want to feel confident and focused. Now I want you to zone in on

What thoughts do you need to have? Because remember, right now the thoughts are, can't stay motivated or I don't have time, this will never work for me. We need to have different thoughts. So if you know that you want to feel confident and focused, what kind of thoughts would you need to have? Here are a couple to try on. I'm learning something new and I may not be perfect as I go. It's okay if I try this and it

doesn't work the first time, I can keep trying again. Or I believe in my ability to get there eventually. I just need to keep going. Now, once you've thought about how you want to feel and you've written down some thoughts that you need to have, I need you to write down the actions that you will take. And a lot of this goes back to our first solution. What are those steps to get to the goal?

Because when you write down your steps to get there, before you've even started on that journey, you will be able to say, here are some of the actions I need to take. If I wanna lose 20 pounds, I probably gotta remove a lot of the processed foods that I have in my pantry. So maybe that's the only thing you do that first week and you just leave it there. Then maybe the second thing that you decide to do is to pick.

one recipe that you're going to make for one healthy meal that week and make sure and get your family's buy-in on that. And that's all you do the second week. And then maybe the third week you decide, I'm going to take a five minute walk after lunch.

By creating these manageable goals and knowing how you're going to feel, you're going to be confident and focused and you'll know exactly what thoughts you need to have. So when you commit to that five minute walk after lunch and you don't hit that goal every day, you're not going to say, I knew this would never work. I'm not capable of doing this. What you can say instead is, hmm, I think I believe in my ability to get the goal eventually.

I just need to keep trying. By reverse engineering your goal to determine how you want to feel and think, it's going to be so much easier to take actions that truly get you to your goal.

Now the third solution I have for you ties into not being stuck in your beliefs and really taking responsibility and accountability. So there are a couple of factors for.

So there are couple of factors involved in getting you from your comfort zone, that center circle, to your growth zone, which is 20 % out of your comfort zone. By taking some accountability for making progress toward your goal, you can decide what kind of sacrifices do you want to make today for the benefit of your future growth. Now, in this day and age, we are very much wired to look for dopamine hits.

You want to eat a salad for three days and step on the scale and say, I've lost 10 pounds. But unfortunately, that's not realistic. So in order to get yourself into that growth zone, you need to figure out how you can delay some of your desires now so that you feel better as you are on the journey of reaching your goal. So one example of doing this might be that you and your husband or your partner, you want to go out for happy hour.

And you can still do that, but in order to grow, you're deciding not to have the cocktails. Maybe you'll have the appetizers, but no cocktails because you know cocktails will increase your inflammation. They actually don't make you feel good. And it probably leads you to snacking a lot more and binging the next couple of days, which is not going to get you to your goal of losing 20 pounds.

Or perhaps you decide that sleep is something that is really gonna help you lose that 20 pounds. So instead of watching Netflix for two hours before you go to bed, you decide that you're gonna Netflix for 30 minutes and then put yourself to sleep because yeah, of course you'd like to watch for a long time, but it's not going to help you get closer to your goals. So getting unstuck from your beliefs,

requires you to take this accountability and to delay your gratification.

A hard one for many of the moms that I work with is getting up early to work out before your family is awake. Now, this is something that I do, but it didn't happen overnight. I've actually always been a morning person, but it's going to take you time to get to this place where you can truly get up early and get your workout in before your family gets up.

The idea here is that we want to increase our tolerance to being a little bit uncomfortable so that we can slowly but consistently reach our goal. So what that might look like is deciding to wake up at 6 a.m. and doing a 15 minute workout because that gets you a workout and you're done before everyone in your family wakes up and they need you. They need breakfast. They've got to get ready for school. They need lunch is made, whatever it is.

But then over time, can continue to increase that discomfort just a little bit, maybe getting up at 530 and working out for 30 minutes. Again, this can happen slowly, but what you're doing is you're taking responsibility and accountability for the fact that you can make some different choices. You don't have to believe, I'm not disciplined enough or I'm not motivated enough. You are.

You can watch yourself increase that tolerance to pain or discomfort. And if you do it slowly in these 20 % bursts, it is gonna be so much easier for you to gain confidence and focus and say, wow, I did it this week. I did what I set out to do. Next week, I'm just gonna wake up a little bit earlier and work out a little bit longer.

It is incredibly easy for us to hear what our brain and our heart and our nervous system are telling us and to believe that it's fact. You know, a lot of times people will say, I'm just not a morning person or I'm not a healthy eater. And you've put this in your brain as who you are. But honestly, it's just a thought. It is not a fact. Your brain does this because it really does not want to push out of that comfort zone.

It doesn't want to use energy to get there. And it definitely doesn't want to feel embarrassed or shameful or like a failure if you don't reach your goal. So as a result, you stay stuck and you just believe those phrases that run in your head. I'm not a morning person. I can't lose weight. And then what happens is that you can try some things, but

You'll never reach your goal because you're not finding a way to just move into your growth zone, that 20 % outside of your comfort zone. So like I said in the beginning, I really want you to sit with all of this. I want you to go back and listen to those six phrases that we talked about at the beginning. How many of those ring true for you? And do some of these reasons resonate with you that you're trying to do too much all at once or

You're trying to avoid this feeling of failure or embarrassment, or maybe you're just digging in your heels and staying stuck in your beliefs. I want you to work through those solutions. Write down on a piece of paper those phrases or any others that you say all the time that you believe to be true, but are actually just thoughts. And start using the solutions to dig through those so that you can actually have an easier time getting to your goal.

Your brain offers you millions, millions of thoughts every day. can...

It's completely in your power and your control to decide that some of those thoughts are not true. And by using this framework that we talked about in this episode, it will help to show your brain that there are other more positive and self-serving thoughts that you deserve to think instead.