Rita Black: Have you noticed that the biggest challenge with managing weight around Thanksgiving may not be Thanksgiving, but the rest of the weekend? In this episode of Thin Thinking, I give you a quick and easy lesson on three key preparational tools to stay on track this Thanksgiving and all through the weekend. So come on in and get Thanksgiving stuffed full on a big serving of thin thinking.

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. Sound good? Let's get started.

Rita Black: Well, hello, and come on in. I know if you are like me, you are busy, busy, busy. So let's just all take a collective holiday, pre-holiday seasoned breath and settle in for a few minutes. And I wanna take care of you. Just take your cares away, care for the caregiver, right this time of year. We all have the normal stuff of life. And if that isn't enough, we also now have the holidays. So I'm not gonna take too much of your time today. I just wanna leave you with a quickie coaching session for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. But I wanted to do it early enough so that you could have time to let it seep through down to your subconscious mind all you thin thinkers out there.

Rita Black: These are three powerful, yet doable strategies that you can employ for any holiday. 'cause I know not everybody here is heading into Thanksgiving, and I use these hacks all the time, whether it's Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year or any other holiday for me. Three keeps it easy. You know, it's, it's easy to keep three things in your mind. Even a 60 plus year old brain like mine can keep three things top of mind, but probably not much more. And like I said, we're gonna keep it quick. Keep it easy, like cranberry sauce out of a can. So also something to make the entire Thanksgiving easier. You as a Thin Thinking Podcast listener can get in early on my Black Friday specials a week early because we're not really officially starting the Black Friday specials until Thanksgiving.

Rita Black: But you can get in a week early and not only save on our special hypnosis downloads, which you get 30% off all hypnosis downloads. But there's also 50% off our smoking cessation. You know, one session hypnosis smoking cessation course. And if you don't smoke or vape you might know somebody in your life who does is a really great bargain and it's a very successful course and you can do it from your own timeframe from your home. So it makes it super easy. And we also have 50% off my emotional eating toolkit, which is chockfull of hypnosis session meditation coaching for avoiding emotional eating and also managing emotional eating. If you you know, happen to be heading into an emotional eating episode and how to get yourself through it, process yourself out of it so you learn from it and get value from it rather than feeling shame and you know, doubling down on the emotions basically, because we can have an emotion eat over it, and then we feel bad.

Rita Black: So we have the shame on top of the emotion that's no good. We want to, we'll, we wanna learn and move through emotional eating. So that is 50% off. And I don't know about you 'cause there are a lot of emotions flying around the holidays. We also have my social light toolkit, which is really a chockfull of hypnosis and meditations for mastering social eating. So this might be something you're really interested in, especially for the holiday season. 'cause It gets into mastering over drinking overindulging being swayed by other people like saboteurs in your life. Oh, go ahead and, you know, have my fruitcake and go ahead and have some more eggnog. That's, there's a lot of that flying around the holidays. So the sessions in here are designed to help you prepare for social events. Also gives you coaching for when you're at social events.

Rita Black: There's even a recording in there that you can listen to in the car on the way to, in a social event to prepare your brain for success at all of these social events. And that is $80 off. So you can pair also the emotional eating toolkit and the social light toolkit together and save half price. That's a huge savings. So now without any further ado let's get into preparing your mind for a light and enjoyable Thanksgiving so you can be thinking about gratitude you have for all of your blessings rather than thinking about why you don't have an Alka Sal serve, because you can't believe you ate the whole thing. I remember those Thanksgivings, but no more, right? No more. Let's do this.

Rita Black: I think for a lot of people, Thanksgiving weekend can be so much fun. It's one of my favorite times of the year. I mean, you know, who doesn't like a weekend focused on eating and eating wonderful food, but it can also be a challenge if we aren't prepared. So the first tip or tool I wanna give you is to create a vision for this upcoming weekend. And what I mean by that is I would like you to take a moment out of your day. It only takes a minute to create a vision of how you wanna feel on Sunday evening, heading back into your life after the weekend. Why is this important? Because a lot of times we'll head into a holiday weekend and we have really, really good intentions about being good for the weekend, right? I'm gonna be good. I'm gonna really get through Thanksgiving and, and I'm going to, you know, just eat a little Turkey and I'm gonna do this. But, but it's a long weekend and a lot of times what will happen is we'll lose focus and, and we'll kind of fizzle.

Rita Black: And we, in order to use our mind really powerfully a vision what that will do. And, and not just like an image of how you how you wanna look Sunday, but, but really how you wanna feel Sunday feeling light, feeling like you really took care of yourself over the weekend, you exercised and pushed the plate away when you have had enough. You know, really create a, a vision, a powerful vision of how you wanna feel Sunday night. And what that will do for your mind is it will give your mind a further trajectory. It gives it very specific details. And it, it is really specific instructions like, Hey, mind, this is how I wanna feel at the end of the weekend. Let's make that happen because our mind works best when we give it very specific instructions when we are just hoping or trying to do good for the weekend that isn't being very specific. And oftentimes that's why we will fall off track is we'll, our mind will just kind of lose focus and we'll go back to our old behaviors.

Rita Black: Now, the second one would be to build upon that and to have an actual four day strategy. I've been helping people manage their weight for over 20 years. And so I've gone through a lot of Thanksgivings with clients and I've seen something really interesting that happens over the Thanksgiving weekend. A lot of times people can do really well on the actual Thanksgiving day. They've really thought it through. They're making sure that they have you know, healthy foods for around, they're an actual Thanksgiving meal. Isn't that fattening? You know, if you look at Turkey and vegetables and things like that, yes, there's desserts and all of those things, but it actually can work out in our favor for weight management because it's not that awful of a meal, you know?

Rita Black: But what happens, and what I see happening again and again is people aren't thinking through the entire weekend because after their Thanksgiving, the first big challenge is leftovers. And a lot of times people can do fine at dinner, but then they get into the desserts and then they get into the leftovers and then they'll start binging and overeating. Then also Friday, black Friday is a whole different day in and of itself. There you have the leftovers, you have the sports games, you have a lot of socializing Friday, Saturday, Sunday, that even though you might, you know, hold it together and be really healthy on Thanksgiving itself, the weekend kind of wears away at us and we we often will then, ah, screw it. I'll, you know, start again. It's too hard, I can't do it. And we don't wanna get into that.

Rita Black: Oh, I blew it. So let's start over again on Monday. We really wanna stay with ourselves in these moments. And, and really when you think about it, weight management isn't just about being good, but it really, really is about how we communicate our, with ourselves and how we use our mind effectively. So having a four day strategy, I mean, by thinking each of those days through what is Thursday gonna look like? What is Friday gonna look like? Where are my challenges gonna be on Friday? Where are my challenges gonna be on Saturday and Sunday? How do I plan ahead to exercise and make sure I have the healthy foods and make sure I have the fattening leftovers put away so that I can stay on track all four days? Okay, so have a four day strategy.

Rita Black: The last tip, and this is really, really powerful, and I don't know, you might already wake up and meditate a little bit, but what I'm gonna suggest is that for each of the four days that you are going through the weekend that you, when you wake up in the morning to take a moment and pause and think that specific day through, where are you gonna exercise?

Rita Black: Think about what you really, what your intention for the day is. Oh, I really wanna connect with my family and friends. I wanna finish the day feeling light and lean and like I really took care of myself. I want to enjoy this weekend and not just the food, but, but being outdoors and the crisp cold weather. Well, depending on where you are in the world, crisp, cold weather, you know, I'm here in Los Angeles, but wherever you are in the world, you know, enjoying that autumn weather and really enjoying each day, like bringing that day in front of you and really creating that day. So often we live our life defensively and we just let the day happen to us, and that's where we fall victim to a lot of the old habits and even circumstances or other people in our environment.

Rita Black: So by creating a very powerful vision for each day and, and using that morning meditation time to really, really cultivate and create that day for you so you can step into the day knowing that you're, you are living into a day that you've created for yourself, this is really the beginning of mastery when we really can create our day ahead of time in our mind that, you know, practice our day ahead of time and step into that mastery. And also to practice gratitude. I think gratitude is very, very slimming, resentment guilt. Those are very fattening emotions, but gratitude. And so this is a wonderful opportunity Thanksgiving weekend is all about than so really thinking about what you're grateful for every single day, I think will also put your mind in a really wonderful mood so you can really experience the best of this holiday weekend.

Rita Black: And just on a personal note, I wanna thank you all for being a part of the Shift Weight Mastery community. As somebody who's struggled with my weight up and down the scale, 40 or 40 pounds for, for many, many years and then, you know, have, have been helping people for the last 20 years master their weight, master themselves having a powerful relationship with themselves, I like to thank you for being a part of this community and really for allowing me to be of service to you. I really appreciate you. I hope you and your family have, and your friends and your community have an amazing, happy, healthy, wonderful Thanksgiving weekend and really give yourself the time just ahead of time to really take care of yourself and set yourself up for success. I believe in you. I know you can have an awesome weekend, have an amazing time, and thank you for being a part of our community.

Rita Black: All right, so I hope that serve you. We, there's just three things. We we're gonna keep it top of mind as you head into the holidays and I hope you and your family do have that amazing weekend. And if you do wanna check out the Black Friday special, the links are in the show notes. Or you can go to www.shiftweightmastery.com/black Friday. That's www.shiftweightmastery.com/black Friday, four 50% off the emotional eating toolkit, the smoking cessation process that it's called smokefree 1 23 30% off all hypnosis downloads and $80 off our ma mastering social eating hypnosis and meditation and coaching sessions called Social light. And remember that the key and the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it. Have a great week and I'll be back next week, the day before Thanksgiving, with some powerful Thanksgiving visualization and mantras for you to get you through the holidays. So I'll look forward to seeing you then. Thanks for listening to the Thin Thinking Podcast.

Rita Black: Did that episode go by way too fast for you? If so, and 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 and to learn how to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode.