CONSISTENT by Primal Potential

I'm excited! We're kicking off a new series today! It's called Fat to Fit and I'll be helping you move from wherever you currently are to further along the spectrum towards your goals. This Fat to Fit series is all about sustainable progress.

In part one we're tackling nutrition and looking at the kinds of small, achievable changes you can make to improve your nutrition in a way that leads to more fat loss.

In parts 2 & 3 we'll tackle improvements in mindset & fitness but, for today, we're focusing on food.

You likely fall into one of these categories:

You know what to do but you aren't doing itYou're confused about food & fat loss and aren't sure what changes to make or howYou feel like you're doing what you need to do but you aren't seeing results.Today's episode will provide strategies and suggestions for all three.

Before we dive into today's episode, I want to acknowledge that improving your food choices for fat loss can be really tough if you don't know what to eat or you're bored with food. I know I used to spend hours on Google looking for fat loss meal ideas only to find that they were either too expensive, used obscure ingredients I didn't have or took WAY too long to make. I'm saving you time & energy! I have curated a list of 100 fat loss meal ideas and dozens of recipes and I'll share them with you for free! Just click the green banner below and they're yours!

http://primalpotential.com/158-fat-to-fit-nutrition/

Today I am going to share with you some of my own personal weight loss success strategies.

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of comments and getting emails about how people wish they were as motivated as I am or had as much willpower as I do. It is not about motivation or willpower.

There is nothing I have that you don't have, except practice. I have practiced more and I have simplified more.

I'm going to take you inside my personal thought processes and into my daily life to show you these simple things I practice in order to create my own weight loss success strategies (without super human anything).

http://primalpotential.com/157-weight-loss-success-strategies/

Let me first share a few high level personal philosophies that set me up for success and then I'll get tactical. Here are my non-negotiable philosophies:

• I refuse to lie to myself
• I ask myself a lot of questions
• I won't make things more complicated than they need to be - I eat whole foods that I enjoy eating & I pay close attention to my body & the signals it sends me
• I spend more time DOING than PLANNING

So what does that look like on a day-to-day basis? How to I keep myself on track during the day through the normal ups and downs of life?

• I don't keep convenience foods around. If I want to eat, I have to prepare something. This forces "the pause" and eliminates mindless eating. Nothing is mindless when you have to stop what you're doing & cook instead of grabbing an easy handful.
• I create energy through movement (instead of always eating in response to low energy)
• I do one good thing first. I make sure I approach decisions from a positive, not negative, frame of mind
• I wear tight things. Around the house. All the time. This helps me keep a close eye on what is happening with my body.

I get a lot of questions about fat loss, family & friends. I guess, more specifically, I hear from a lot of people that their family & friends make their fat loss more difficult.

Today, I want to tackle those challenges (and I do believe they can be simply tackled without trading in your friends or abandoning your family).

A lot of this comes down to personal responsibility & understanding that you are the only one controlling what does (or doesn't) go into your mouth.

But, I totally know it's not as easy as simply ignoring other people's comments, questions or challenges. So today we're tackling fat loss, family & friends from both tactical & mindset standpoints.

http://primalpotential.com/156-fat-loss-family-friends

In today's episode I cover some of the most common challenges I hear about between fat loss, family and friends including:

• How to tell your friends that you're trying to make healthier choices without coming across as judgemental
• How to handle fear of missing out in social situations if you choose not to drink or indulge
• How to indulge in social situations without going overboard
• How to handle an unsupportive spouse or partner
• The ways by which you might be setting your partner up to be negative about the changes you're making
• How to handle a partner or kids who don't want to eat the healthier food you're preparing
• How to handle situations when your children or partner bring tempting foods into the house

Quotes in today's episode

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Today we're having another Primal Potential Book Club episode all about the end of self-sabotage!

I read a lot of books and I'm constantly going through books about health, nutrition & fat loss but I only want to share a book with you when I feel a sense of, "Oh my goodness, they NEED to hear this." I most recently got that feeling with a book that has nothing to do with fat loss, yet EVERYTHING to do with fat loss.

The book is called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

The book is written for anyone struggling with internal resistance - excuse making, procrastination, quitting - and is perfect for individuals who are trying to get healthy, burn fat or improve their food choices.

In today's episode I share the passages that moved me the most & discuss how they apply to health & fat loss.

http://primalpotential.com/155-end-self-sabotage/

“There's a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”

This is 100% true of weight loss. It’s not the good choice that is hard. It’s the thinking about it. The debating. The internal arguing back and forth and the situations you create and battle with in your head.

That’s the secret that most people who have lost weight know that people who haven’t lost weight haven’t yet accepted: It’s not the fat loss part that’s hard. It’s tackling the junk in your head that is hard.

On the very next page he writes,

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands resistance.

I think if you have any amount of weight to lose you get this. I think you get this if you feel like food is controlling your life.

It's this sense that there’s the life I am living and the life I plan on living after weight loss. Or, the life I wish I could live if I could just tackle this battle.

What does resistance look like? What does it sound like? As soon as I explain how Pressfield explains it, I think you’ll start to see it pretty clearly in your own life. I know I can. I see it immediately in my clients. It stands out once you recognize it.

“Anything that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long term growth, health or integrity.

Here’s one of the first ah-ha moments I had when I was reading The War of Art:

“Resistance” can be an incredibly valuable tool. If we aren’t sure what we SHOULD be doing – what is BEST for us – look to where the greatest resistance is.

You can USE it in that way. The more important or significant something is, the more resistance we often feel.

That’s so true in weight loss. You know where I’ve seen this most with clients? Alcohol. There is so much resistance to dialing back or working on moderation with alcohol (for some people.)

Where there is the greatest resistance is often a fantastic indicator of where we need to be doing more work,

Now here’s what I think is scary: how does resistance gain strength?

From us. We feed it. We feed it with our fear. It has ABSOLUTELY NO STRENGTH of it’s own unless we fuel it with our fear and our belief and our focus.

We can choose not to do this. We can starve resistance by not giving in to it. When you give in to resistance, it gains power.

One of the most common forms of resistance is procrastination. We aren’t telling ourselves “no”, we’re just saying “later” (even though we know that we don’t do it later.)

I took a picture of the page Pressfield writes about procrastination. Well, just a couple sentences, really.

"NEVER FORGET: This very moment, we can change our lives. This second, we can sit down to do our work."

This second, we can make a good choice. This second, we can do something that will move us forward.

Pressfield writes about sex as a form of resistance – distraction – but I think his argument there is maybe even more true of food – I’m going to read what he wrote but replace the word sex with food, okay? You’ll love this:

“Sometimes resistance takes the form of food, or an obsessive preoccupation with food. Why food? Because food provides immediate and powerful gratification.

Resistance gets a kick out of knowing that it has distracted us with a cheap, easy fix and kept us from doing our work.

Of course not all food is a manifestation of resistance. In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterwards. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not real, but Resistance.

Uh – yeah, ya think? The immediate and powerful gratification? The hollowness afterwards?

Yes. And no.

Say no to that. That is fueling resistance.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

I used to talk myself into indulgences & exceptions by saying things like, "This one thing won't hurt" or "it doesn't make a difference." But the small choices can hurt and one thing does make a difference. In today's episode we're talking about how to make the small choices count.

One of the tough things about food choices is that they don't usually have immediate negative consequences but they do often have immediate positive consequences.

What do I mean?

Well, if you have a handful of M&Ms, your pants aren't immediately tighter but you do get an immediate sugar rush.

Imagine if our bodies responded to food the way Pinocchio's nose responded to lies. Whoa. Game changer, right?

Even though we can't see or feel immediate negative consequences, that doesn't mean they aren't there.

Today's episode is a short one but helps you see that nothing is without consequence, nothing is free and everything is either an investment in our health or costs us our health.

http://primalpotential.com/154-make-small-choices-count/

Today we're talking about some of the best vegetables for weight loss & how they make fat loss easier!

We start off by exploring how you can determine which vegetables are the most (or least) fat loss friendly and then we take a closer look at cruciferous & allium vegetables and the ways they support fat loss.

Allium vegetables & cruciferous vegetables support insulin, metabolism, detoxification & much more. They are certainly some of the very best vegetables for weight loss.

http://primalpotential.com/vegetables-for-weight-loss/

What a special episode today! Some of the amazing folks in my Winter Fat Loss Fast Track are sharing their progress, struggles, challenges & successes! Yup! Real life success stories!

My hope is that you can see yourself in them & have hope in your ability to transform, to get consistent & to achieve the results you want.

http://primalpotential.com/152-success-stories/

Last week I shared a personal episode about my experiences with binge eating. I talked about how & why I binged & how I stopped. The response to that episode was overwhelming. Whether you could relate to binge eating or just emotional eating and overeating, hundreds of you reached out for help and support.

Today I want to help you take that next step. I want to cover how to stop overeating & repeatedly giving in to temptation.

So many people feel like it's beyond their control - like they just can't stop. You can. I will help you.

http://primalpotential.com/151-how-to-stop-overeating/

I was a champion overeater and binger. I used food to cope with emotions and I would often eat until I felt (or became) sick. I felt that in many ways food owned me and had more control than I had. I was wrong.

There were a few strategies I began to gradually implement to help me radically change my relationship with food, my mindset & my body.

I strongly encourage you to listen to the episode because I think it will be helpful to hear exactly how & when I'd implement these strategies.

The first step I encourage you to take, before implementing any of the strategies described in this episode is to identify the lies you tell yourself. For me, the lies were often, "I'll start tomorrow. Just this once. It won't hurt. I deserve a break."

I want you to challenge those lies and ask yourself, "Is that true?"

When you tell yourself, "I'll start tomorrow", is that true? Do you? Or is this how you make yourself feel good about being indulgent? Are you telling yourself what you want to hear?

Then, you can try one of the following 4 strategies:

1. Just for today
2. The 3 questions
   1. How do I want to feel in 1 hour?
   2. How will this choice make me feel?
   3. Is it worth it?
   
   
3. 1 more (rep, choice, minute, hour)
4. Do not go back to what broke you

In today's episode I explain how these work & how I apply them in moments of indecision.

I want to challenge you to pay more attention to your body & less attention to everyone else's. I want to show you how to interpret the signals your body sends every single day & use them to your advantage.

The reality is that your body is constantly communicating with you. It's letting you know what's going right, what's not, which hormones are struggling and which ones are cruising right along.

Many of us, however, are so busy living life & paying attention to other people and things that we don't pay attention to the signaling & signs of our own bodies.

Today we'll take a dive into keeping a journal of what you eat & the signals your body sends without the cumbersome tasks of counting calories or macros. We'll uncover the common sense approach to fat loss & hormone balance.

The primary signals we get from our bodies related to fat loss & hormones are quality of sleep, hunger, energy, mood & cravings. Those are the signals we'll evaluate today.

http://primalpotential.com/episode150/

Do you ever have silent debates with yourself? You know, you make a decision to eat clean & then find yourself debating Girl Scout Cookies?

The cartoon depictions of the devil & angel on opposite shoulders certainly originated from someone who knows exactly what I'm talking about!

In today's episode we're talking about how to win internal debates and how to identify, understand & overcome them.

http://primalpotential.com/149-how-to-win-internal-debates/

Have you ever heard the Cherokee story about two wolves? I share it on this episode & adapt it to the internal debates I have over food & health.

A fight is going on inside me. It is a constant battle between two lions.

One is stubborn & lazy. She is greedy. She stands for pity, guilt, resentment, lies, abuse, avoidance, excuses, exceptions and delays.

The other is beautiful. She is hopeful. She is strong. She is optimistic. She is determined. She cares for me, believes in me and knows that everything is possible. She is my guardian and wants to guide me to my potential.

The same fight is going on inside you and inside every other person, too.

Which lion will win?

The one you feed.