FREE Weight Release Masterclass with Hypnosis

Rita Black: Happy New Year 2024. I hope you're looking forward with bright eyes to the new and shiny new year. All the potential for growth, new adventures, new relationships, new possibilities of all kinds. And yes, of course, the all, all-time, classic new resolve to release weight after the holidays. I know we all know how to release weight, so we're not gonna talk about the logistics of weight release. In this episode, we are gonna focus on something I feel is far more important for your success here in the beginning of 2024. And that is the you who is heading into refocusing or beginning your weight release journey. Let's face it, there is usually one common denominator present with any weight loss or get healthy attempt that you have been on in your life. And that is, drum roll please, your sweet self. You. So it goes to figure that the first place to start before you begin is with that very important person, you. So if you know you are on the path to release some weight in 2024 and wanna make it long term, join me for the first Thin Thinking episode of the new year. Grab your January Jazz hands excitement to get going and come on in.

Rita Black: Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn't start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80% of our weight struggle is mental. That's right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, I'm Rita Black. I'm a clinical hypnotherapist weight loss expert, bestselling author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process. And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years achieve long-term weight mastery, I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater. And after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds with the help of hypnosis. Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years. Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I'll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need, not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long term and live your best life.

Rita Black: Well, hello and happy New Year 2024. A quick New Year's shout out to all of our friends from all over the world, from Siberia to Sudan, from the Philippines to Philadelphia. Welcome to our global community where we gather to use our minds more effectively, to master weight and to build a powerful, confident and loving relationship with ourselves. You know, I was sitting there thinking about what would be the most helpful Thin Thinking thing to focus on. It's the first of the new year, after all, when everybody is still nursing their hangovers and sugar comas from the holidays, let's be honest. And maybe feeling some holiday overeating, remorse, or maybe not.

Rita Black: But you know, when we feel bad, guess what we do? We just then want to jump on or hop on that being good bandwagon, pull things together and start not feeling bad. Right? Let's get outta that yucky, bloated feeling. It's a knee-jerk reaction. And get into feeling good, raw, raw. I'm on fire. Dry January! No sugar, no carb January! Start the fast, start the cleanse, start the training for the marathon January. But whoa, whoa, just hold back for a moment and before you dive into whatever external weight loss regime or fast or medication or exercise program or anything else that you may be leaning towards on the outside of you, your Thin Thinking friend, yours truly, would like to have a heart to heart with you and to focus if we can, on the most important element that usually gets missed in any weight loss attempt.

Rita Black: And that one important thing is you, the you that is going on that journey. Because if you want it to be lasting and successful, that is where you want to start. Sound good? Now, before we dive in, I want to say I am also very, very excited to announce that my free masterclass that will help you get ripe and ready for the new year and dive into refocusing that will help you start the New Year's in an amazing mindset free of the self-sabotaging roadblocks called How to Stop the Start Over Tomorrow, Weight Struggle Cycle, and Begin Releasing Weight for Good is available now. And the link is in the show notes. I love teaching this masterclass because we really dig deep into the subconscious mental roadblocks that keep us struggling with weight and very specific mind shifts that you can make to break out of them and into the long-term success mindset that you want.

Rita Black: We really look at how, what, that start over struggle cycle is, and we look at how to break free from that. We do some hypnosis and people love this hypnosis session. So you're gonna leave this masterclass motivated and inspired with a clear mental game plan. This masterclass is the perfect companion to this episode. Both are designed to get you focused and ready each in their own specific way. So check out the show notes. It's easy, just sign up and get started.

Rita Black: Let's just take a deep breath and be here. Just be here now. So just take a nice deep breath in all the way down to the bottom of your belly and exhale. And be here present in our minds tuning into our body and our intention to create an amazing and grounded path forward with our weight into the new year. Not something frantic and panicked, but something that is lasting and powerful. You know? We come into the new year and like I said, we're all over the place. We've been spending at least a couple of weeks rushing around maybe being with family and friends, a lot of external focus, right? Presence and parties and endless dinners and very much out of the structure of our own life. So as we head into the new year's, our brains are kind of spinning and it's easy just to rush into the new year with a knee jerk reaction, to release weight and get refocused, but also just, you know, feeling kind of out of our element.

Rita Black: So let's just bring our attention home within ourselves before we even just start. I know for myself, I have been very busy. My kids have been home, which has been great, but it's very distracting and interruptive to my now emptiness or lifestyle. And I know many of my students have told me they've been traveling or taking care of their kids or grandkids, and the present's just all the [inaudible]. So come back home here now to you and take another nice deep breath and set that intention for a powerful journey forwards into health and weight mastery, starting with you.

Rita Black: Okay, you, now welcome. Really welcome, welcome to this new year from this totally different place and this time where instead of the old thoughts and beliefs and habits that produce the old and ever so tired struggle results that have happened in the past, we are shifting into new beliefs and thoughts and habits.

Rita Black: And that my friend begins at the epicenter of you, you and your relationship between you and your weight. And it is a relationship. And if you've struggled with your weight in the past or present, I want to remind you there is you, you, your lovely self, and you are whole and complete and enough as you are. And then there is your weight, which is just whatever it is today. And it is not good. It's not bad. Your weight is just what it is, and it's your body and it represents also a part of you. And then there is your relationship between you and your weight. And that relationship chances are, is somewhat abusive and dysfunctional. Now, I wanna be clear, you are not dysfunctional. It's not your fault. It's not something that is missing from you. There's no missing elements, and that's why you struggle.

Rita Black: Your struggle has a lot to do with a lot of different things. You know? Our wiring starts early. We get imprinted from our family. We get imprinted from our society that we've grown up in that has got some really weird ideas about beauty and what is good and what is bad as far as weight. You get it from the media and the diet culture. So the relationship with you, between you and your weight isn't necessarily bad or good. It is just somewhat can be broken or dysfunctional, and it doesn't serve you. And if you haven't noticed, that relationship with your weight is one of the primary reasons that in the past you have struggled to take the weight off long term. Now here's the thing is that you have many other areas of your life that work for you, right? There are, you know, chances are if you have a job that you've been in, you have succeeded at working at that job and be mastering that job.

Rita Black: And if you're a parent or in a relationship, you know, you've, that part of your life, maybe it works. Hopefully it works really well. And there's definitely other areas of your life, hobbies that you have or your relationship with your pets, or there's so many aspects of our lives that work well and that our relationship with them works well. Our brain has a relationship with pretty much everything in our life. And many of those things for you works well. But we wanna focus here today on the relationship with weight and like a little relationship retreat to start to get you and your weight back together as a loving couple that can thrive and grow and be healthy together and achieve the goals that you wanna achieve together. Now, I remember my marriage and maybe if you've listened to me long enough, I I'm very candid about the fact my husband and I, we've been married together.

Rita Black: It will be 35 years, I think this year. I always forget, we've been married for so long now. It's, you know, kind of like as you get older you, you know, kind of forget, how old you are. Well, now our marriage is so old. I forget how many years we've been married, but long enough and, you know, there was a couple of times our early years were a lot more rocky than they are now. And one of the reasons is that around the time that my two children were very young, we almost split up. We almost got a divorce. And with anyone who has two very young children, and you know, both of you are working full-time jobs. You know that, that's so hard. It's, you know, one of the hardest one I meet people, young couples or young people come to me for smoking or for something and they say, oh, yeah.

Rita Black: And I say, how many children do you have? And how old are they? And then they're like you because they're complaining about the relationship. And I'm like, oh, I understand why your relationship's bad right now. It's hard. And it's, you know, rife with time to, you know, break down often in communication, a lot of resentment. So anyway, my husband and I were here and we went to on a relationship retreat. And, you know, at this point in our relationship, it was so broken down that any time we talked to each other about the main things in your relationship, like romance, finances what are the other things, you know, keeping the house, managing the house and kids, we would get in a fight, right? So we were reactive and defensive. So I would say to my husband, I could say, you know, like, oh, I just wanted, oh, what did you buy at the grocery store?

Rita Black: Well, you know, then he would just snap back at me and, you know, accuse me of, you know, being worried about money or something like that, right? So it was very, very broken down. And we went on this retreat, the amago, we did amago therapy, which I very much believe in. And amago therapy offers these retreats that are like a weekend and they guarantee or they say, you know a weekend it's like full day, two days. You can get reconnected with your significant other and get back to that feeling, that spark that you had when you were first, you know, you remember why you fell in love with them. And you know, for both of us, we were like, that's going to be, yeah, right amago. Ha ha! You know?

Rita Black: But we get in the car and, you know, our son was not even a year old. He was maybe eight months old, and our daughter was three. So it was a feat in and of itself to cover because we don't have relatives that can come and, you know, at, we didn't have at the time. And we still don't, we don't have any relatives that live near us that could come and hang out with our babies. And so we, I mean, we, God bless our friends, we, you know, got people to cover four or five hour shifts with our very young children and people pulled together. 'cause they all knew we were going through a tough time. So it was a wonderful community effort. And I remember getting in the car with my husband and heading off to that first thing.

Rita Black: And even though we were kind of like, you know, not, didn't have a lot of hope, we kind of looked at each other and we're like, wow, just the fact that we have a whole weekend without our kids, things are starting to look really good for us. You know? And, you know, 'cause we forgot, you know, we really did love each other. It's just that when you're caring for two young children all the time and working all the time, you just get so stressed out, you don't know who you are. And then we remembered who we were kind of in that car ride over. And the whole weekend was great because it was, we kind of remembered, well, we did remember, and we learned to communicate with ourselves each other more powerfully and listen without defense or reaction. And that's what I wanna talk to you about today.

Rita Black: Because often in our relationship with our weight, we are very reactive, very defensive. We give up on ourselves very quickly. And this is why I wanna talk to you here at the beginning of the year, as you embark upon whatever focused weight management journey you are going to go on. It's a useless journey unless you have a connected relationship with yourself and are on your own team. Because most of the time when we are starting these types of focuses we don't even believe in ourself or respect ourself or know how to inspire ourselves. So guess what? A week, in two weeks in the next month, by the end of February, this weight thing is long forgotten, you know, thrown by the side of the road. And, you know, we're back in our old habits. So I wanna break through all that, and like I said, just give you some real, three what I consider, where your relationship or most people like, I don't wanna say your, but when we struggle with our weight the main things that have been out of place are these three things.

Rita Black: Because here's the thing, think back to the times in your life when you were having a successful weight release. Because I know there have been times in your life that you did have successful weight releases. Maybe you released all your weight, or you know, you released some or part of it, or, you know, there's probably multiple times you had some success, and then something happened where you gave up or you stopped because it got too hard or boring, or you got off track or you got sick and, or you went on a holiday, or you went through a really stressful time in your life and you just never got back on track. So think about that every single time. The trip back to the weight struggle didn't start on the scale, started in your mind. So from my perspective, there are three parts of your self relationship with weight management that need repairing when we are struggling.

Rita Black: And so in our little relationship you know, our weight relationship seminar today, our little, it's not a weekend, sorry. But you know, our little podcast episode we're gonna work on three things. We're gonna work on self-respect in the area of weight. We're gonna work on self-belief in the area of weight. And we are gonna work on self inspiration in the area of weight, because these are, from my perspective, three things that I think are missing for most people when they're perpetually struggling with their weight and not able to get started or to keep going.

Rita Black: So let's dive in. So let's talk about self-respect. You know? And this really has to do with the way that we self see ourselves, the lens through which we judge ourselves, our weight and our weight loss attempts. You know? And obviously we see ourselves very negatively. You know? We have 80,000 thoughts that go through our mind a day. And you know, a lot of them do circle around food and our weight and our behaviors with weight. And, you know, we, for the most part, those thoughts are very negative. You know? We, our brain is already negative, negativity, biased. But when it comes to our weight, even more so, we see ourselves as lazy. I mean, these are, these are words I'm using because I hear people describe themselves like this all the time. I'm lazy. I'm an impulsive addicted overeater, I'm a bottomless pit. You know? I'm gross. I'm, you know, unlovable. I am fat.

Rita Black: Many people tell me they wake up into this vicious thinking. And I remember because I did it myself when I was struggling with my weight. And then we continue to have these vicious thoughts throughout the day, and then eat often to drown out the vicious thoughts that then create the feelings. But they come back even more. So after we've eaten to drown out those feelings and thoughts. And when we go on diets, these beliefs are still there. This negative self-respect, there's lack of self-respect is still there, but it all gets pushed into the darkness under this idea of being good. So I wanna talk about being good. So being good is really interesting because when we go on a diet, when we pull it together at the beginning of the year, often what we do, and, and you know, the best of us do this, is we see ourselves as being good now to the brain. That's, this means really nothing but to ourselves. And the way we self see ourselves for a brief time, we get a respite from the negative thinking. And when we're being good and perfect on a plan, or a regime or something outside of ourselves you know, being good, being good.

Rita Black: I'm being good. I'm eating the chicken and the broccoli, I'm being good. I'm getting up and exercising every day. I'm being good. When we self see ourselves in this way, it feels great. And we get these dopamine, dopamine hits reward hits when we get on the scale and the scales down, or just the way we see how good we are being. And we get a little addicted to that, which, you know, is fine and great. But the problem is that the moment that we aren't it, because we're in this being good state, it is a state. It's not a, it's not we aren't becoming anything. We are just being good. And it's, it's a mode we go into. It's like a gear we shift into. I'm being good shifter, you know, like I'm shifting into good mode. And then as you know, what comes up, what comes down must come down.

Rita Black: When we get off track or the day doesn't go as we plan or we, you know, go to the party and we overeat and we see ourselves as then being bad, all of that being good, like fairy dust, sparkly butterfly unicorn stuff quickly fades away. And we're back in that pit of being bad, the vicious self speak, the negative feelings. And so we then, you know, feel bad. And then we will look for the next thing to get back to feeling good. And this is kind of the perpetual cycle we end in. It's an, an addictive cycle. We do get addicted to it because the promise of being good and that feeling are very seductive. And especially when we're vulnerable and feeling bad, it's really easy to wanna just get back to that feel good state. And that's very understandable.

Rita Black: And then when we feel bad or when we get off track, often we will overeat and there's a release from that restriction of being good. And that's like kind of a double, double dopamine hit. 'cause We get to feel good and then we feel bad. But we, but before we feel bad, we usually, you know, go, screw it, I'm just gonna overeat, we overeat and then we feel bad. So then what happens is, in the cycle, we see ourselves perpetually failing and we develop an opinion, right? We look at ourselves and like, oh yeah, look at you. I have no respect for you. So how do we begin to earn back our own self-respect?

Rita Black: Well, there's two things. One is that I'm gonna cover with you today. One is to release resentment. And the other thing is to re-identify how we see ourselves. We need to be aware of the resentments and own them and just let them go. In the shift weight mastery process, we do a resentment exercise or a forgiveness resentment forgiving our resentments exercise. And a lot of you might be thinking, well, why would you do that? Because actually, I, the resentment keeps me motivated, but actually it works against us. A as you can see, this, this lack of respect really does make us give up on ourselves and have a very low opinion of ourselves. Gonna do a little exercise forgiveness exercise. A really quick one. I just wanna give you an example of this. But I think this will be really helpful for you to begin to see what's going on lurking underneath the surface, and how you can begin to connect, reconnect with yourself by forgiving yourself and, and, you know, digging up these hidden resentments and beginning to let them go because you know, they're there in the darkness.

Rita Black: And when you hold anything in the hidden, in the darkness or you know, shadow self, when you bring it to the light, when you get aware of it, when you become conscious of it, when you can have some compassion around it, then you can let it go and it lightens your load and it, it really doesn't, ima an amazing thing of which is reconnecting you with you. So, take a moment and let's think about a few different things. I'd like you to now think about any way that your weight has impacted your health. So you might have some resentments around that. Maybe you have health issues, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, joint pain you know,, a condition or maybe you just don't feel as healthy, your energy isn't good you are more lethargic. You know, maybe you have a resentment about that.

Rita Black: Like, ugh, my weight is, you know, keeping me from really good and vibrant and or it's causing these issues for me. It's causing my pain, it's causing my knee pain. And you know, if I, because I can't lose the weight, you know, I'm in pain. And, and so there's a resentment about that, or maybe you have a resentment about your relationships, right? Like how weight has impacted your relationships. Maybe you don't feel as romantic or as attractive, like with your partner, or maybe it's kept you from pursuing relationships or maybe just in your platonic relationships you are more suppressed or you let people dominate. Or you, maybe you're passive maybe you're not, maybe you're the opposite, but what is there anything? Because oftentimes we will have resentments with our weight in relationship to our relationships. And then the last area, so I'm just pulling up a few of these, there's obviously more but maybe you have resentments around weight and your being fully realized in your life.

Rita Black: I have so many people when they enter into the shift weight mastery process, you fill out a questionnaire and it, it's a questionnaire really for you to dive deep into a lot of these things. And one of the questions I ask is, you know, how has your weight kept you from achieving things in your life? And it's amazing how many people want so much out of their lives and their weight is keeping them from that, right? They wanna travel they wanna start a business, they wanna be a coach they wanna be a leader. They wanna set a great example for their kids. I'd like you to take a moment and just think about a couple of those resentments. Like, what were the ones that popped to your mind first? Go ahead and take a nice deep breath in and close your eyes and just again, just notice the beating of your heart and be here now. And like I said, just bring a couple of those resentments to the top of your mind, and I'm gonna just have you place your hands over your heart. This puts us in sort of a compassionate position with ourself, opens up our hearts to ourselves,

Rita Black: And just think through one of those resentments. Maybe it's my weight has kept me from being intimate with my spouse. And just run that through your mind a couple of times. And then I'd like you to repeat three times to yourself. I forgive myself and my weight for keeping me from being intimate with my spouse. And take a nice deep breath in. And really fill that forgiveness and feel it melting that ice around your heart, that resentment. And sometimes it helps, and this is why I'm having you do it three times to really be present to it. Not just say, oh, I forgive myself, blah, blah, blah. But really, like, I forgive myself and my weight for keeping me from being intimate with my spouse. And take another nice deep breath in. Okay?

Rita Black: Now I'm gonna give you just some quiet time to do that three times. And really at the end of each for forgiveness, you take that nice deep breath in and wrap that around your heart. Good. Now let's do another one. Second one, maybe I represent I forgive my or if the resentment is, I resent my weight for keeping me from asking for a raise, right? I forgive myself and my weight for keeping me from, for asking for a raise. Whatever it is, just, and just, but you're saying it and you're present to it. I forgive myself and my weight for keeping me from asking for a raise. Usually the second time you feel a little more deeply and the third time even more deeply. And take that nice deep breath in, and again, just allow that breath to pull it in and pull it into your heart. Okay? I'm gonna give you a couple of moments to do that.

Rita Black: All right? Right. Good. So, and take another nice deep breath in and open your eyes. And this is something, how does that feel, by the way? How did that feel? And again, it might take a little while to get used to that, but this is an intercept, right? We're intercepting and digging in and pulling up. It's like pulling up weeds. You know, you can, diets are kind of like chopping the weeded off at the root, or not at the root, but at the top, at the dirt. You know? I've been out weeding in my garden and it's the winter, and there are these things that sometimes you pull 'em up and it's just, you're pulling up the leaf, but you know, the root's still going to come and that, that weeded is gonna come back. But this is really getting down at the root and pulling up the weed and, and you'll feel that connection to yourself.

Rita Black: I promise you, if you didn't feel it right now, you feel it later if you started to feel it. Sometimes emotions come up too. For a lot of people, when we're doing this in the shift, lots of emotions come up and it's okay. Just allow those emotions to flow. Alright? So once we have let go of our resentments, we want to re-identify we are re-identifying how we see ourselves and the lens through which we see. You know, when I did my couples workshop, they, we, they spent some time. It was really interesting because we had to sit down as a couple and identify ourselves as a couple. We are a couple who likes to dance. My husband and I, when we first met took dance lessons together. We took swing dance lessons together, and we took tango lessons. We did a tango on our wedding, which was super fun.

Rita Black: We did it to a John Cougar Mellencamp song. It was super fun. But, you know, so we sat down and we remembered that, you know what I mean? Like, when you're fighting with your significant other, you don't remember all that stuff. But when you sit down and have to go, oh, we are a couple who loves to go on road trips. We're a couple who believes in giving to charity or whatever it was. We sat down, had just write a list of how we saw ourselves together. And it was so unifying, I cannot tell you. And, and the same for yourself is starting to see yourself from a powerful place rather than just good or bad. I think that's often all we give ourselves in this area of weight. We're either being good or being bad, and we see ourselves as a struggler.

Rita Black: So we see our, we have this kind of struggle or identity, and we're either being good on the struggle or we're being bad on the struggle. So we don't wanna focus on good and we don't wanna focus on bad. But we, what I offer you as an identity that can really be powerful for you is the identity of being a weight learner or an apprentice of mastery. You know, why a student identity, because I'm stepping into this powerful lens that through which I see myself is I'm somebody who's learning. So that means I can make mistakes, right? I can no matter where I'm at on my journey, no matter how much weight I have to release, if I'm a student, I can start to look at myself really powerfully because students are curious. They learn, they self-correct? They keep moving forward.

Rita Black: You can't unlearn what you learn. So I focus people like when I do the shift weight mastery process, we focus on the nine skills of weight mastery, because weight management is a skillset. It's not about being good. When you think about all the things you think about when you are being good on a diet, most of those things are probably skills, but you are seeing through the lens of being good or bad. And therefore your brain doesn't get it and doesn't learn anything. It only has a judgment. But if you're positioning things like, oh, I planned ahead and maybe I didn't plan ahead long enough, and so that's why I got off track. Oh, so next time I need to maybe plan a little further ahead. Then you're learning something instead of being bad and you can self-correct. And then therefore keep going on the journey and, and your brain is actually absorbing that information, making self-correction so that the next time it's gonna remind you our brain is like AI.

Rita Black: But if we aren't using the AI correctly, it's not gonna give us anything. So we wanna start to really look at our behaviors and what we're doing as far as weight management, as skills that we're developing. We are developing ourselves and there's no good or bad in that. There just is development and it's a continual journey. I still see myself as a student of weight mastery 28 years into maintaining my ideal weight release of 40 pounds. I mean, it's, you know, it's a new thing all the time because every year I'm a little older every year my body's doing something different every year. My life is a little, you know, like every month my life is a little different these days. And there is weight management tweaking of skills within all of that. We can never hope to be good for a long period of time.

Rita Black: That just isn't gonna happen. But there's always the possibility of learning. And when we see ourselves as a learner, then the mistakes become lessons and we get what works and doesn't work for you. You the beautiful you. So we are now building yourself up instead of your letting yourself down. So start advocating for yourself like you respect yourself as a learner and protect your learning journey. The idea is that the more you are clear that you are a learner and mastering skills, the more respect you have for yourself and your body. And this respect builds organically from you. Gradually learning about what works for you and your body and repeating those things and learning about what doesn't work for you. And letting those things go and keeping on moving forward on the learning journey, never giving up or starting over, which is so important.

Rita Black: So I'm gonna have you, we're gonna do a little, what is called a direct drive technique. I'm just gonna give you a new suggestion or mantra and then just repeat it powerfully back inside your own mind. And we're going to complete this self-respect chapter. Here I am moving in the direction of respecting myself and my journey to weight mastery. Go ahead and repeat that. I am moving in the direction of respecting myself and my journey to weight mastery. And one last time, I am moving in the direction of respecting myself and my journey to weight mastery. Excellent.

Rita Black: Okay, now let's move on to self-belief. Okay, so self-belief, our lack of self-belief and our belief in ourselves and our ability to release weight long-term is the number one, one of the number one reasons we give up when we hit plateaus or get on the scale and it's up. Or many other times when we say, you know, what's the use? I can't do it. It's too hard. We give up on ourselves. I can't do this. And by the way, we also don't believe in our body. We think it's broken, right? So surprise, surprise, this disbelief or our disbeliefs in our ability to be successful and our disbelief in our body is also lurking there in the dark.

Rita Black: So when you go on any diet or exercise or fast or have weight surgery, that disbelief, unless you are working on dismantling it, it comes back and it haunts you when you least suspect it, and it eats away at your resolve and resilience. So really quick, on a scale of 0% to a hundred percent and whatever number comes up first. 'cause That's what your subconscious mind is telling you. What do you believe that you are gonna hit your weight release goal and stay there long term this year? Whatever number pops into your mind first, take it. So whatever number you had, whether it was 50% or 75%, or 99%, whatever that number between that number and 100. So if it, for instance was 80%, and then the 20% distance between 80 and 100% is the amount of limiting beliefs that you have lurking in their in your subconscious mind, those limiting beliefs that are keeping you from believing in your ability to be successful. And these beliefs aren't even real. They're just self opinions that own us.

Rita Black: And in our vulnerable moments on our weight journey, that negative critical voice will spew these disbeliefs in your face and break you down. You are never gonna lose weight. You have a slow metabolism. You can't get below your set point. Don't even try. You're never gonna keep that weight off. You like food way too much to keep your weight off. You blew it like you always do. Look at you, you can't even feel deprived. You have no willpower. You are a bottomless pit. You are a helpless sugar addict. You have impulse issues, you have an oral fixation. Why are you even trying? You're too old. Why are you even trying? You have never succeeded before anything sound familiar? And then we feel bad when our critic comes swooping in. And so guess who swoops in right after the critic? Why that little inner rebel to finish the kill? I mean, it disguised in trying to be nice, but hey, everybody's eating. Why can't we? You already blew it. Go for it. Oh, it's too hard right now. Just relax and we'll focus on that next year or next month or next week or next life. Life is too short to work this hard.

Rita Black: This is stupid. Let's just have fun, right? And because that is what we're in the habit of doing, connecting. How do we shift so that we can believe in ourselves when we need to shift that voice of that critic and that rebel into an inner coach that is in there in the moment when you need faith and direction rather than scolding and disconnection. You know recently in my monthly membership we had this really great discussion about the gray area between the black and white of good and bad. Because that gray area is a very weird feeling. When we get off track, we often feel weird uncomfortable and vulnerable. Because we don't often know what to do when we don't have good or bad or off track or on track or giving up. It's just that moment where we have to have faith in ourselves and come in with a guiding voice and really kind of be our own bridge across that gap of unknowing that gray area.

Rita Black: And this is so often why we fall is because not because we lack willpower, and not because we lack inner strength or resilience, but because we lack that voice that can come in and say, Hey, you're okay. I forgive you. You know this, you got off track. What did we learn here? What's our next action step? Let's just, let's just keep going. I mean, it would be exactly what a friend would do if you fell down or if you were having a bad day, or if you shared your inner life like this with a friend. They would, they would immediately of course say, oh, you, you know, look, you didn't eat that much. And you know, you can, you can eat something healthy now. Let's just go, go sit down and move forward. You're fine. You're great.

Rita Black: Don't worry about it. What did you learn here? Let's keep going. You know, just, just coming in with a different tone and a different voice, an observing voice, a curious voice. How can I get you to the next step voice? This is the voice that you really want to start to cultivate that. And, and when you develop that inner coach voice that is curious and compassionate, it can pull you across that gap of getting off track and get you back continuing on your journey instead of disconnecting from yourself and going back to the beginning and starting over. And just FYI there is so much going on in this gray area and, and in these moments and this bridge across the gray to yourself and moving forward that I am actually dedicating an entire podcast episode coming up this month. So I'm not gonna dive too much deeper into this other than to say one, start to notice the way that you give yourself the excuse to give up or the way that you talk to yourself that is disbelieving in you.

Rita Black: So just start to get conscious to that, because often it's very unconscious. Write them down or just take note. It's very subconscious. And number two, think of a different voice. That inner coach that is committed to getting you back on your journey ASAP because we often give up, we overeat, and then it takes a while for us to be willing to recommit again, right? So we get into that inner coach work a lot in the shift. And this is huge, that just that transformation from the critic to the coach is transformational for people sticking with it and really beginning and, and deepening, beginning or deepening their journey to long-term permanent weight mastery. So let's end this chapter with another mantra. Just, I'm gonna say it and you can repeat it. I believe in my ability to stay with myself on my long-term journey. I believe in my ability to stay with myself on my long-term journey. I believe in my ability to stay with myself on my long-term journey.

Rita Black: For our last one, let's talk about self inspiration. We come to the final part of our weight relationship workshop. And let's face it, sometimes it's hard to get excited about releasing weight, especially when the skill isn't moving or you've lost hope in yourself or your body. When we struggle with weight, we are so vulnerable to short-term fixes. We just want to get the weight off because it's so painful to feel chaotic with weight and filling out of control. So we want the answer now. We want to get all the weight off now as quickly as possible so we can be out of pain. So we go on the diet as a knee jerk reaction to get out of the pain, but we're not really thinking about the long term. We're just thinking about the pain and how we wanna get out of it because it's so painful, hating ourselves and not feeling good in our bodies.

Rita Black: And then I think that when we're in that honeymoon phase, it's feeling good. It's easy to inspire yourself when we're in that high of being good. I'm being so good. Oh, I'm so inspired and it's, I'm so motivated. But then we get into that foggy area where we've released enough weight to be out of the pain, but we aren't exactly where we wanna be either. But because there isn't that pain or that self-hatred it becomes a lot easier to loosen that grip, right? And then we start to get a little off track, maybe the scale's down 10 pounds and we go out and celebrate with food because the scale's down. And this becomes a cycle. We hate ourselves and we're in pain. So we do whatever we can to get out of that pain very quickly. We feel inspired to do that, and we lose some weight and then we get out of the pain and we don't hate ourselves as much, but now we don't know how to stick with it because we don't know how to inspire ourselves and we keep looking in the wrong place, nothing to inspire us.

Rita Black: So rather than the short term fix, I invite you to think of the you you are becoming in the long term. There is a saying, and maybe you've heard me say it before, the pain pushes until the vision pulls. So what if you took all that you've learned today to reconnect with yourself and your body, to forgive yourself and your body, to create that powerful inner coach that can keep you going? And what if that inner coach helped you see the future? You are becoming that future. You, you are becoming you at your ideal weight. And this you at your ideal weight is not a skinny picture of you at the beach. It, it doesn't have to be even being able to see yourself thin. What I want is more of a feeling, a feeling of being on the future at your ideal weight. How would that feel?

Rita Black: Feel that lightness, feel that health, feel that vibrancy and, and this vision is a feeling because the emotional imprint in your body, in what helps your brain kick into that reticular activation mode, that emotion helps you move towards that. And the reason why I'm having you have a vision of you not at your ideal weight six months from now, but two years from now or two years into the future after having achieved your ideal weight, is that idea of that long-term permanent weight you, that you has been on a journey that you has learned to feed yourself in a way that you love, that allows you to live at your ideal weight with ease that you has learned to move your body lovingly in ways that you're willing to do and sustain over time. That you has learned how to communicate with the people in your lives so that they support you in your endeavor that you has set yourself and your relationships and your environment up for success long term.

Rita Black: So just get a sense of that you out in your life two years from now. Close your eyes. Get that feeling, get that sense. What are you, what are you wearing? And you don't have to see it, but just feel what you're wearing or you can see it and feel it if you like. Just feel what it would be like though to be in your body, in your life, at your ideal weight, caring for yourself, feeling connected, feeling confident, feeling that mastery of how you would feel that confidence of having maintained your weight for a couple of years. It's something we never think about, but we, I want you to stretch your mind into that because that is where you wanna go. That is where you wanna get curious. That is where you wanna start being now, because that being this now, that feeling, that feeling now is informing your mind, it's educating you, it's getting your mind ready for where you're going and creating the space in your mind for where you're going.

Rita Black: Because right now all we're focusing is on the lack what we don't have, what we, who we are not. And you've gotta start thinking about where you're going, creating that, that place, that feeling that you, you are becoming okay. You can open your eyes now that you exists and that vision is something that you can breathe life into and go to as a source of inspiration. So here's something you can start doing today that will help your mind start living in the space when you're in doubt on your journey. When you need some inspiration on your journey, you can ask yourself, what would the ideal weight me do in this moment? What would the ideal weight me say to the food pusher that's trying to get me to eat a donut? Or when you wake up in the morning and you don't wanna exercise, what would the ideal weight me do? Would the ideal weight me put their feet on the floor and just get up and exercise anyway? Or would they stay in bed? This is what I did on my journey when I needed inspiration or I felt lost. I sought the answers in my inspiring vision of who I was becoming. Now you have your, you, you are becoming within you. We sparked that here today. So great work.

Rita Black: Alright, so now let's create our last mantra. I am already that ideal weight me. It exists within me now. I am already that ideal weight me. It exists within me now I am already that ideal weight me. It exists within me now.

Rita Black: Good, great work. You've reestablished, respect, belief, and some inspiration back into your weight mastery relationship. I hope you have found this helpful, and please, please come and join me in my weight masterclass, How to Stop the Start Over Weight Struggle Cycle and Begin Releasing Weight for Good to get inspired and ready for that powerful you heading into the new year, ready to achieve long-term permanent weight release. We do that hypnosis session. We have a lot of fun. So you're gonna leave this masterclass feeling inspired, motivated, and ready. A deep alignment with yourself. The links are in the show notes. And so now remember that the key and the probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it. Happy New Year. I will see you here next week.

Rita Black: You wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release. Head on over to www.shiftweightmastery.com. That's www.shiftweightmastery.com, where you'll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release tips, strategies, and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book From Fat to Thin Thinking. Unlock Your Mind for Permanent Weight Loss.