Why setting a weight loss goal can set you up to fail – especially if you’re a High Achiever

BLOG SYNOPSIS

When you’re a smart and driven woman you’re often “in your head” a lot – which means it’s really easily to feel disconnected to your body.

As a High Achiever, you can often default to a pushing and forcing idea of success (how else are you gunna meet all those super high expectations you’ve set yourself?) However, this also comes at the cost of your own self-care and it’s very likely to manifest in a lack of wellness in your body.

You might be thinking to yourself , “Oh, I’m heavy” or “I’m feeling really uncomfortable” or “Jeez my stomach is getting big I hate it!”

And so it might feel like the next logical step is to say, “Righto, I need to lose weight”.

The problem with having a weight loss goal is that it perpetuates the idea that there’s something inherently broken with you that needs to be “fixed”.

It actually makes the problem worse because you attract what you most focus upon.

​​​​​​​When you are thinking about having a weight loss goal, there are so many opportunities in the day for you to fail – unless you approach it from a completely different perspective.

Here are some simple shifts in thinking that greatly improves your chances of sticking to your healthy intentions and succeeding long term.

​​​​​​​

> Visualise what you want to Attract not what you want to Lose 

The problem with having a weight loss goal is that you attract what you most focus upon. So if you’re thinking I’m feeling fat and gross and lethargic” by making a weight loss goal all you’re really saying is “I want less of the negative things I’m experiencing” which will actually attract more of them not less.

It’s not actually saying “I’d like the opposite positive experience instead”.

And when you apply a high-achievers work ethic to a goal that is “away” focused it becomes a tightrope walk where at any given moment you can fall off and come crashing down into the abyss of failure 

When you are focusing on the negative – you’re always just constantly fending off failure because you’re constantly judging if what you’re “doing” is being done “perfectly”. 

What’s interesting is a lot of people come to me for help with emotional eating. And the help that they feel like they need is that, “Well, I emotionally eat and I eat this crap food, so therefore I need to have a better strategy of eating healthy food instead or just not doing it at all.”

But the problem is that you’re focusing on the level of DOING and not focusing on the BEING issue.

Our body is just the projection screen for our mind.

> Focus on who you are BEING not on what you are DOING

If you’re seeing discord in your outer external circumstances, it’s because it happened as a thought form and then an energetic emotional body first. If you’re thinking of all the things you the foods you’re going to deprive yourself of, and the exercise you’re going to punish yourself with – all you’re going to manifest is more of the negative you were trying to avoid. 

And so, a lot of the times when people struggle with their weight, they’re already overburdened. They really feel things, they take things really personally, especially if you’re a high-achiever as well. You’ve got these really high expectations and you can be a victim of your own expectations you set for yourself.

Essentially, you’re trying to do and work away and try to action step and challenge and diet actually what is a problem of who you are being.

Most people think that they have to change what they’re eating in order to avoid emotional eating. Actually, what you need to do is change how you react to your emotions by creating better EQ, better emotional intelligence.

When you’re a doer, you’re just focused on completing objectives and the tangible problems that are right in front of yourself. So on the surface it seems like committing to a 12 week challenge or Keto diet is the next logical step for this excess fat you’re not enjoying. 

But the problem is that High Achievers and their tendency to discount their achievements still find themselves still not satisified with how their body looks, and still feeling hollow about whether or not they were strict enough in the process. 

If you’re saying to yourself “Hmmm, I still don’t look as good as I thought I was going to look” or “I still have this empty hollow feeling” or “Hmmm, I still feel like I’m a fraud.”

You can’t diet those feelings away

> Excess weight represents your reaction to stress – so reset your expectations

When you discount your efforts and achievements, and overset your expectations that’s how you set up the richochet factor. 

This is where you can be really, really good for a short while – but if you can’t be perfect at being good, you’re going be perfect at being horrible. And that’s when you start pizza, Toblerone and boxes of Shapes start falling into your mouth. Because you’re thinking, especially as a high-achiever, you’re expecting a result, and you do the things and you do the reps, and then you should be able to get your ideal perfect body at the end of it.

But the problem is, it needs to be on who you are being, how you process emotions, how you think about yourself, how you speak to yourself in the mirror. You can’t beat yourself up at trying to love yourself, you have to embody this love at every cell of your being. 

And so, a large part of the work that I do is really helping women understand that it’s not actually about the weight. It is about the weight because it shows us how we’re not showing up for ourselves – but it’s actually not about the weight, it’s just the symptom of the underlying condition.

One of the first things I get women to do when they are thinking about working with me is I get them to fill out a Feminine Power Diagnostic quiz. They can see what the actual things are leaking their power when it comes to their body – but also when it comes to their career, the time that it takes for them to do their job, how much are they wrapped up in their identity of making sure that what they do is what makes them valuable as opposed to who they are.

The excess weight is just a representation of your reaction to stress.

If you take doing away from a high-achiever or an overachiever, they’re like, “Argh, what do I do, what do I do? How do I be? I don’t get this.”

And that’s the kryptonite that happens – because essentially the excess weight is just a representation of your reaction to stress. There’s these extra layers that are trying to keep you protected from whatever threat, mainly self-imposed, that’s making your body feel like there’s some kind of threat.

Essentially, as you get better with your EQ, as you get better with your reactions to stress, then everything else just sort of sorts itself out. And who you are being is somebody who treasures your body enough to do the healthy things for it, treasures your body so that healthy foods and healthy options and making sure you stop to eat is a normal, effortless and easy decision to make.

The last area that we work on is relationships. Your relationship to yourself, to others, to your clients, to your coworkers, to yourself and to your soul mate, your significant other.

> OUTER SUCCESS, INNER FAILURE – Recognise the False Positives 

When I would work with women about their body, they’d be thinking, “Okay, can you tell me what foods to eat? Give me a meal plan.” I’m like, “No, I’m not giving that to you because that’s not the issue. The issue is that you’re giving too much of yourself there, you’re working too hard there, you’re not taking enough self-care with yourself there, so all the food actually has nothing to do with it. It’s just the outer leaves. And we want to work with the stuff that’s right at the root of the problem.”

I was having a chat with a lady today and it was really interesting. She had done some bodybuilding shows in the past and she said to me, “They were actually like false positives.” And I totally knew what she said as soon as she said it.

Because on the outside, when you struggle to commit to those challenges and those food plans and all that kind of stuff, you look at these people who are succeeding, you go, “Ugh, if only I could be like that, if only I had arms like that, if only I had abs like that, if only I cared about myself enough to measure all the food, but it’s just too much in a hard basket.”

But it’s a false positive, right?

Because the success that you’re seeing on the outside – and I don’t mean this in every single case – but so often it’s because that person just is more successful at depriving themselves, more successful at sacrificing their time with the people they love the most.

I used to sit across from my very best friends, my husband, and look at the chips on this plate and just be like, “Nope, nope, nope, nope. If I can just deprive myself long enough then I’ll finally be happy.” And it never works that way.

So many people that I have seen create epic body transformations have actually had it because there’s been some other chaos in their life and they sacrifice their relationships.

> Look for the root of the problem 

Have you ever noticed that sometimes people can lose a bunch of weight really, really quickly, like within a couple of weeks and like way faster than you could ever do on a diet? And that’s because they’ve had a marriage breakdown, or they’ve had some financial crisis, or there’s been a death in the family.

That’s because your body’s internal stresses, survival switch, is on a fight or flight. So it’s gone, “Oh, wow, I’m going to have to get really skinny so I can run away from this threat, because it feels like a life-threatening force that’s surrounding my environment.”

Then you can see people who actually do the opposite where the body actually just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. And that is because the body interprets the stress in your life as being something as a low-level chronic threat. And so, the body takes on more high fatty foods, craves for high fatty foods, makes it feel lethargic, makes it want to curl up on the couch and not do any exercise – because it’s storing fat for winter. It feels like there’s this impending famine.

Most people think that they know what they do, and therefore they think the problem is that they just don’t do it enough.

What they know to do is to deprive and punish themselves and they just think other people deprive and punish themselves better than they do, which actually is probably the case.

> Get clear on WHY it’s important to you (and replace the “away” from motivators) 

That’s why we work so closely with women when it comes to their body – but it’s also about their image, how they see themselves and how they talk to themselves in the mirror, how they perceive other people judge and view them – taking the emotional charge around, getting rid of that stress, like there’s this low-level long term anxiety.

And when you can start unpacking the different areas from your career and from your relationships, that’s when it sort of starts to easily and effortlessly untangle itself.

I guess my little moral of the story is that if you are somebody who is going, “Righto, I need to stick to a meal plan, I’ve got to lose the weight because I’ve got to go the gym, I’m going to smash it and then everything is fine,” you and I probably aren’t going to be a good match to work together – because there’s heaps of people that can give you those meal plans, that can help you balance out those macronutrients.

Me? I kind of would actually ask the first question of: What’s the purpose? Why do you want to lose it in the first place? Why is it important to you?

> Reveal the Self Rejection and Release the Hidden Handbrake

Then I would also probably most likely uncover a deep-seated sense of self-rejection. Because what normally happens is, why is that important to you? “Well, because then I’ll be free to be me, then I will finally be happy, then I will be able to attract a quality mate.”

There’s all these things that we just think a light, happy, healthy body is going to give us. But when you actually unpack it and you see that there’s another handbrake, there’s one foot on the accelerator and one hand up on the handbrake. And so, you might feel like, “Yeah, I’m all gung-ho!” But if you truly were all gung-ho and totally onboard with that, being a high-achiever, you would totally be able to make it happen, right? It doesn’t make sense that you couldn’t make it, that you keep on doing it for two weeks and then you give up.

> Uncover the Purpose of your Excess Weight 

It means that there’s a larger part of you that doesn’t want to do it – because you have the excess weight there for a purpose. And usually it’s to keep yourself safe, keep an external distance between you and others, that stops you from being vulnerable.

Your body just thinks it’s storing fat for the winter, right? But from a deeper psychological level, it’s because you feel threatened, it’s because you don’t feel safe to be seen, it’s because you feel like if you keep on worrying about things then they won’t happen. But actually, worrying about it and paying attention and keep on running down that negative, negative mind spiral, that conditional self-approval just means you’re just going to keep on going around and around in circles.

If you are a woman who wants more for yourself, who’s already done the diets, who’s already realized and recognize that you can have short term success when you punish yourself – but you can’t have long term sustainable results or happiness – and you’re getting to a place where you’re like, “You know what, I’m too smart and I’m too far along this game to keep on allowing my success in one area of my life come at the expense of another.”

If you have decided that you love yourself enough and you stand up for more and you believe that women truly can have it all… And even if you are a mother and you are standing up for your children and for them to see that it’s okay for a woman to say what it is that she wants and for her to be fully expressed as a feminine and powerful role model, then reach out.

You can go to www.mymindcoach.com.au/potential.

That’s where I explain how you can do this Feminine Power Diagnostic test. I set aside a quick power call, just a limited number of 15-minute power calls each week where I can chat to you and see what’s actually going on for you. Because I can tell by the results what would be the fastest to help unravel your stuckness. So definitely check that out.

We’ve also got a cool Facebook group called My Mind Coach – Rising Queens. And that’s all about helping you design your dream life without sacrificing your body or selling your soul. I’ll put that link in the bottom too. Because you just need to be around people, around other women who want the best for you and don’t take those negative stories that you tell yourself, or the media tells us, or society or the collective consciousness tells us, and we think somewhere along the lines it’s true.

So if you want to lead yourself better and become the reigning queen in every area of your life, check it out. Talk to you next time.

Bianca x

The advice I’ve shared with you today lies in feminine energy which is one step of my signature system the Body Confidence Blueprint. You can download your free training by clicking the banner below.