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Your Worthiness & Weight Loss

by | Jul 8, 2023 | Uncategorized

Unf*cking your weight loss is really about untangling all of the thoughts and feelings that we’ve had for many years about our weight.

  • What we should weigh.
  • What the scale should say. 
  • How we should look. 
  • What size clothing we should be in. 

All of that.

Becoming really aware. 

Not indulging in the drama and the confusion. Allowing the overwhelm that can come from reading, researching and Googling. Thinking about the next diet, the new workout, or the special supplement. Taking action from the place of where and/or who you want to be creating. Your new leveled up self concept. That is really what it’s all about.

In my podcast, I lay out tips, tricks, tools, strategies. What I would buy for my grocery list. How to make meal prep easier. There’s all kinds of very practical things. I know for myself, sometimes we need to be reminded that you can make this so much easier. 

At the end of the day, what this is all about is looking at our self concept. Especially if we want to, not just lose weight, but keep it off forever and ever. Why would that even be a question, you want to lose weight and then be done with it, right? 

Once I’ve arrived, that is going to involve actually being different. 

  • I have to think differently. 
  • I have to believe different thoughts about myself. 
  • My self concept has to change. 
  • I have to become a woman who doesn’t obsess about food or the number on the scale.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to lose weight. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to rock my skinny jeans. I know skinny jeans aren’t in style anymore, but I love skinny jeans. There I said it. Whatever jeans, whatever clothes, shorts, bathing suit, G string, I don’t f*cking care, whatever it is. It doesn’t mean that we don’t care and we don’t want more. 

I think we have to identify exactly what it is that you want. 

Who do you want to be? That’s the self concept that we kind of work backwards from. We have to reverse engineer it. I know it’s a lot.

Some of the things that come up when we think about our self concept, or we think about who we want to be, there’s this little thing that gets in the way. It’s this underlying, kind of nagging voice about being unworthy. I’m going to cue Wayne’s World. If you are who I think you are, you know the movie Wayne’s World, and you know that one of the signature lines of the movie is, “we’re not worthy. We’re not worthy.”

I’m not trying to tell you exactly what you think and feel. But in your way there may be a little underlying, nagging, irritating voice that tells you, you’re not worthy, or it’s not worth it. You’re not worth it. And that is something. 

First of all, you are worthy. 100%.

I know not everyone here has kids. If you don’t have kids, you were once a child. I want you for just a moment to reflect. If you have kids, 

  • Do you look at your kids and wonder what they’re worth?
  • How do we measure our children’s worth? 
  • Do we train them to measure their own worth by the grades? 
  • How fast they can read? 
  • Whether they made the sports team or not?
  • Whether they have a million friends or not?

It’s interesting when you really start to look at where our self worth comes from. A lot of it is from childhood. 

Sidetrack, but not really, I said something to my husband about somebody, like, what is wrong with that person? What is wrong with her? I wasn’t talking about myself, but I could have been. He said, well, as in most things, probably some kind of childhood trauma. It’s kind of a little joke we have between the two of us. We are both aware enough to know, and recognize, our own sh*t that comes from the way we grew up. The same in some ways, but different in other ways. 

If you struggle with self worth, it is okay, it’s totally normal. 

I don’t think people get out of childhood, without some kind of childhood wound as it were.  I am not a psychologist. I am not a psychiatrist. I am not a PhD. I am not a doctor. I’m not trying to be. But this is my take on it from working with 1000’s of women over decades. Plus my own personal journey was really about discovering we come into young adulthood and adulthood trying to feel valuable or trying to get somebody to tell us we’re good enough. We’re pretty enough. We’re smart enough. Everybody likes us. It’s like trying to get that value. 

It’s so interesting how that manifests for us. I think a lot of women get stuck in that struggle. That the only way I’m good enough, or I have my self esteem or my self worth is tied to a number on the scale. The clothing tag. If somebody out in the public says, Wow, you look good, then I must be good. I must be good enough. But without that, if the scale does not tell me the number, or nobody says, you look good, then do I not look good? Am I not good enough? 

I think it’s important to recognize that this can be something you address. It’s not about going into your childhood trauma and calling your parents to yell at them. They did the best they could. They either did exactly what their parents did. Which was, you have to get good grades, you have to be a good person, and you have to be a nice girl. You have to like everybody, share all your toys, and you have to hug f*cking everyone. Or they tried to do the opposite of their parents, and they just didn’t give you any input whatsoever. You know, do whatever, that’s fine, great job, but I’m not even looking. 

I recognized that in myself. My parents had very overbearing parents that were like, this is what you’re going to do. This is what you’re going to wear for clothing. This is where you’re going to college. This is what you’re going to be when you grow up. That’s how my parents grew up, both of them separately. In reaction to that, I think what they thought was the best course of action

was to not pry in my life. Just not give me any guidance. Not really tell me anything at all. 

My mother has passed away, so there’s a lot of things I cannot reconcile with her. I have made peace with that. We did not have the best relationship and I have made peace with that. My dad is still alive. The relationship I have with him is great. I love my dad and I totally understand where he came from and the kind of parent he was. Sidenote, he has apologized on more than one occasion where he has felt himself not being a great parent. I think most of us feel like we’re not great parents. 

Weight loss would be really easy if it was just simply about what you eat and how you work out, nothing more. 

We wouldn’t even be talking. I would have given you an easy to follow meal plan that you could follow for the rest of your life. You would have lost the weight, and you would have kept it off. That would be that there would not be a diet industry. The reason I bring all of this up is to show you, it is more complicated than that.

If we were robots, you would get the right amount of food and the right amount of exercise. That would be that in this new era of AI. Artificial Intelligence. We’re humans with human brains,and it’s a beautiful thing. It’s kind of a shortcoming sometimes. It’s our humaneness, our thoughts and feelings that we think. 

I am my thoughts and feelings. I am my past. My self concept is all of this stuff that’s been going on for decades. 

If I grew up as: 

  • the bookworm, 
  • the social butterfly,
  • the party girl,
  • the chubby chick,

Then that becomes my self concept. 

I’m here to tell you that you get to decide. 

Our thoughts and feelings are not permanent. They are really about the context, like what is going on right now in your life? When you change your self concept, then you will actually have different thoughts and feelings, not 100% different. 

Imagine right now, if you were whatever you want it to be. 

  • An award winning author,
  • An Olympic athlete, 
  • An actress,
  • Somebody who lost weight and kept it off and made eating foods so easy. 

What kinds of thoughts and feelings would you have? That’s what I’m talking about.

I have questions for you. 

  • How could you transform your own life? 
  • What would that transformation look like? 

I would set a timer for two or three minutes. Write down everything that you would: 

  • Change. 
  • Level up.
  • Tweak.
  • Create from zero.

How could you 10x your results? In full disclosure, I do listen to a lot of business books and podcasts about business so I’m always thinking about not just how do I incrementally improve my business or my life, but how could I like 10x it?

  • How could you 10x your satisfaction? 
  • How could you make your weight loss journey fun, or enjoyable? 
  • Or simply not suck and feel punitive?

Those are questions I would ask. I would see what comes up from there. 

What if figuring out weight loss and how it works for your life is the same as figuring out how to solve any problem, or any challenge? Sometimes we think weight loss is that one thing I can’t figure out. That one thing that eluded me.

I have;

  • The house, 
  • The car, 
  • The career,
  • The marriage, 
  • The kids, 

As if we’re just collecting things in life. It’s interesting how that ties into our self worth, our worthiness. 

As I climb the corporate ladder or as I create more impact or more wealth or the amount of things I have. I’m collecting all the things. All the signs of my success. 

Yet, I don’t feel necessarily that I have control.

I’m not satisfied and I don’t know what to do about my weight or what I think about;

  • My weight, 
  • My body, 
  • My body composition, 
  • My health, 
  • The way I feel in my body. 
  • The way I feel in my clothing. 
  • The way I show up in my own life. 

I think you’re here for that and I’m all for it. 

I want you to get the career. I want you to start your business. I want you to buy real estate. I want you to buy a boat. I want you to have 20 cars. Whatever it is you want. But ultimately, when it comes right down to it, I think we’re all looking for peace, calm, assuredness, certainty, control about how we feel in our own bodies and in our own life. 

I think part of looking in the past at your childhood, or how you grew up, is not just to see all the things we did wrong but also all the ways that you succeeded. All the ways that you figured things out. How did you get from there to here? With your own brain because you were persistent. Because you showed up. You can do the same in your weight loss. I guarantee you.

I had a week of a lot of different feelings. If you’re not already on my Facebook page, you’ll see two posts, two very interesting but totally different things happened this week. I saw all of these things about this comedian. I didn’t know he was a comedian. I’m like, is this guy a country singer? There’s all this stuff about concert tickets for Matt Rife. I’m like, okay, he must be a country singer because I don’t really follow country. I really don’t go to concerts. I’m not cool and young. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m living in an alternate reality where I don’t know what everybody else knows. By now, you might know who Matt Rife is, but a couple of days ago I didn’t know. I went down the rabbit hole to try and figure it out. I did find some of his videos. I sat on my couch and I laughed. I had a good time.

It really got me thinking about having fun. How can I make my life fun? Life is 50/50, for sure. There are things that are going to suck, that will be out of my control. Sometimes you just have a poopy day and you just want to feel poopy. You just want to be in that mode. For that moment, the Matt Rife thing was a reminder of what feels good to me, genuine to me. authentic to me. Which is having fun and laughing my *ss off.

If you haven’t seen who Matt Rife is, I think you’ll like him a lot. If you need a laugh, I would watch a couple of videos and then ask yourself, how could you make today fun for you? What would be fun? Again, it’s just it’s just our thoughts. I could make pain bills fun. I could. How could I? Let me think about it. Just like how could I make meal prep fun? Or how could I make eating dinner fun? I know it sounds kind of like too good to be true. Maybe just watch Matt Rife videos, maybe just get a 8X10 glossy of Matt Rife to carry around with you. 

On the other side of the spectrum. A few days later, after discovering Matt Rife and thinking that I had changed my whole world. I discovered some secret that I was in the dark about.

I watched a movie, “A Man Called Otto.” Oh my god. So in just a couple of days, I felt like I went from just having fun, laughing, and finding joy in that to like, oh my god, this movie has emotionally drained me. I just felt like that is life. It’s like a Matt Rife Man Called Otto. 

It’s like a Matt and Otto sandwich. On one hand, you have something that is just hilarious and hysterical. You find joy and laughter and also connection with millions of other people who are enjoying that humor and who are looking for that fresh take. This person who’s not hard on the eyes either by the way. On the other side there is love and sadness. If you haven’t seen

“A Man Called Otto,” consider yourself warned. You might need Kleenex. It is a great movie. 

I just had the wildest week ever, in that I was caught in between these two things and enjoying them both. Enjoying crying. Enjoining feeling those feelings and not letting it mean anything. 

Sometimes we see movies, especially movies that depict people who are truly in love, truly connected, and they have found their soulmate. It’s all magical. It’s all romantic. It’s movie stuff. I could allow myself to go down the road of being like, Oh, my God, I’ll never meet that right person. I’ll never have my name on a gravestone with another person. I obviously went down that road, but I didn’t stay there long. I wanted to enjoy being able to feel those feelings. To feel very human and connected. To feel sad, hopeful, happy, all of it. 

That’s what Unf*ck Your Weight Loss is about. As much as I personally don’t like feelings, I definitely push myself sometimes right through them. I would rather not, I have a shirt that says “f*ck your feelings.” Feelings are just part of being human.

You’re going to have days that you don’t feel motivated, you don’t feel great, you don’t feel the fun and the joy and at all. It is okay. It doesn’t mean that is the way it is. I really think to help you get to your permanent weight loss, to the life and body that you want, it is about allowing all of the feelings. Then deciding sometimes I have thoughts, I have feelings, but I also have a self concept. 

I can get into the actions of that self concept despite my thoughts and feelings. I don’t have to because sometimes with the thoughts and feelings we can get really sidetracked. We can get super distracted, we can let those be reasons excuses for not taking action, for not moving forward and for not getting exactly what we want. Then our day, our week, our month, our whole year turns into Groundhog Day. 

Think about who you want to be. What does that look like? How could you transform your life? I mean that in every single way. 

Notice the ways that your self concept has changed. 

  • When you graduated college.
  • When you had your first relationship.
  • Your first job.
  • Your first promotion.
  • You bought your first home.
  • You had your first pet
  • You became a mom.

Those are all ways that your self concept probably did change. 

We can make those changes at any given time. One of the actions I think is very helpful and will transport your self concept if you allow it is exercise. That is one of the things I noticed in my own journey is that when I started to work out my self concept went from a girl who came out of college who smoke cigarettes and drink beer and went into a Jazzercise instructor. I then became a fitness professional. I became a personal trainer. I became a fitness manager. I changed my concept by taking different actions. 

It’s not because I was thinking how I could change my self concept. I just tried new things. I took that one step forward. I joined that next gym. I took that next certification. I just tried new things.  I got on stage as a bodybuilder. I opened a business. I became a mom. All of those things have been very transformational in the way that they have challenged my own self concept.

Your self concept changes in different ways. Even if you’re not a mom, you don’t own a home you have never exercised, what action could you be taking from the place of who you want to be? Let’s draw that self concept. Let’s create that self concept. Let’s do it. Put it in words, in writing, in pictures. I don’t care if it’s a vision board. I don’t care if it’s an etch a sketch, but let’s start getting into action. 

I know I took you all over the place. I am all over the place. But you know what? I’m also right here with you one year into Unf*ck Your Weight Loss. Let’s go. Only one life to live and this is it.

NOTES IN ANCHOR

Your worth is not connected to your weight. There I said it. I know it’s easy to feel that way, but it doesn’t have to. In order to not feel like your worthiness is connected to your weight, I think that we have to become really aware of exactly what it is that we want. Who we want to be. Then take action from the place of where and/or who you want to be creating. Your new leveled-up self-concept.

This is especially true if you not only want to lose weight but also keep it off forever and ever.

Sometimes, when we think about self-concept, we get this little nagging voice in our head that says we’re not worthy. That we aren’t good enough.

But I am here to tell you that you ARE WORTHY.

YOU ARE 100% WORTHY ALL DAY EVERY DAY.

If you struggle with your self-worth, that’s okay. It is totally normal. Almost everyone does at some point in time. But you do have the ability to let that shit go.

Let’s jump right into worthiness and weight loss on episode 53 of the Unf*ck Your Weight Loss Podcast now!

ABOUT THE HOST

Bonnie Lefrak is a Life & Body Transformation Expert and Founder of Selfmade, a program designed to help you tackle the physical aspects of health and weight loss as well as the beliefs and thoughts that drive our habits and behaviors. It is her goal to help women create certainty in their own lives, their own results, and their own abilities.

Weight loss is not about the one “right” diet – it is about MUCH more than that. Weight loss is not about the one “right” workout. Weight loss is not about being positive and putting a big smile on.

Weight loss is about FEELINGS. All of them. Not trying to bury them or hide from them but knowing and allowing the full human experience. Weight loss is not about grinding hustling and will powering your way to some end line. Transformation (when done well) is done from the inside out.

By addressing both the physical and mental aspects of dieting and weight loss, she has coached thousands of women ages 30-55+ from all over and helped them ditch the mindsets that are holding them back, achieve permanent weight loss, and get the bangin’ body of their dreams.

Bonnie is an expert at Demystifying weight loss. She helps you u****k your diet brain. She is on a mission to help women love themselves, to find PEACE in the process of losing weight, taking care of themselves, and leveraging the power they do have to become who and want they want right now.

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