Overthinking and the Weight Loss Journey

In today's episode, I'm talking about overthinking and how to avoid it on the weight loss journey. An AI generated transcript is below. (: 

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Begin AI Generated Transcript:

Welcome to the Six Miles to Supper podcast. I'm your host, Kayla Cox, and I've lost over £80 with intermittent fasting six days a week, eating whatever I wanted at my meals, taking a cheat day every Sunday and walking six miles a day. And I'm here to help you on your weight loss journey. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to remind you that I do have courses and coaching available.

If you are interested in that, you can use the link in the description to go to my slow and Steady Success Academy. All students inside my courses have access to office hours where you can get your questions answered inside a Zoom call. And if you enroll, you can get 25% off by using the coupon code pod at checkout.

In today's episode, we're going to talk about overthinking and why it's not a good thing to do on the weight loss journey and how you can stop it. Overthinking is one of those things that I think some people are just more prone to do, and I happen to be one of those people. I tend to overthink just about everything.

There are good things about thinking deeply about a thing, but it really can derail your progress when it comes to weight loss. So the first place that this can creep in is when you set up your goal weight. Back in March of 2014, that was when I had my I've had enough moment. I was so ready to get the weight off and I was just determined.

But it took me almost an entire year to get on the scale and finally come up with the number that I was shooting for. I didn't really know what a good thing to shoot for was. I, you know, like, I had always had trouble with my weight. I never was able to keep it off. So I kind of thought, well, I don't know.

Like, is the problem that I am getting down to, you know, to overweight and then that's causing me to not be able to maintain it. Like, should I be shooting for something higher? You know, and so I would just debate these things in my mind constantly. But once I finally got on the scale and I saw the number, I thought, okay, I just need to pick a number and try to get down to it and I need to stop overthinking it and just, you know, write down a number, pick a number, write it down, and then just go about the business of trying to lose the weight.

And that was the right thing to do in hindsight. The key here is that you just pick a number because once you pick something, you know, even if it's arbitrary, even if you're not really sure that that's going to be the right number. And look, any goal weight that you pick is going to be arbitrary, too. To some extent and you may not know until you get there whether it's going to be a good goal or not.

It's just an educated guess. So because of that, it's better to just go ahead and pick something. Once you've picked it, then you can start moving towards it When you're not really sure where you want to end up. It's going to be really hard to motivate yourself to stop overthinking your goal weight, to sit down. You know, if you want to sit down with the BMI chart, I think that's a great place for people to start.

And then just look at what a normal weight range is for you. I would pick something on the high end of normal or the low end of overweight. From what I've talked with other people and through my own experience, I'll say that's when weight loss seems to be, you know, fairly easy. It's not it doesn't take like super good consistency or a lot of restriction.

On the other hand, you know, once once you get or at least in my experience, once you get down into the normal BMI, like right there at that cusp between overweight and normal BMI, that's when the weight loss really slowed down for me. Up until that point, it was about a pound a week. Once I got down to that point, it was a third of a pound a week, and that was even with really good consistency.

So just some food for thought. So pick a number and go ahead and make a deal with yourself there. If you feel comfortable stopping earlier because maybe you just shot too low that okay, you can you can stop at a higher number. Or conversely, if you get down to that number and you decide I still want to lose, you know, five or ten more pounds or whatever number, then then you can move on from there.

But it's important to just pick something and start moving towards it. Think of it as the good enough goal, which brings you to the next step in the weight loss journey, which is to pick out your plan. And this is the place where so many people get stuck because of overthinking. They research and research and research, and there's all this conflicting information out there.

You know, if you go on YouTube or just, you know, do a Google search, you'll be able to see that there are a million experts out there with a million different opinions about which plan is best. And it can be overwhelming. It can get you stuck in inaction for years. And, you know, this is a big reason in 2014 that I stayed stuck because I was researching everything and I was so confused about everything.

I was just like, you know, like I would read stuff about kiddo. I would read stuff about veganism. I would read stuff about Carnivore. I would read stuff about, you know, like don't eat sugar or, you know, other people would say, Oh, that's fine. You know, like and counting calories is the way or you've got to cycle your carbs or, you know, and there's so much information out there.

The way to stop overthinking this is to break it down into a really simple equation, which is you need to burn more calories than you're consuming. Now, most people do this through a combination of eating less and moving more. And my own opinion on this is that the most important part is eating less. The moving part, I think, is very helpful for staying encouraged, having your your mental state, you know, in a positive place.

But as far as just from a perspective of can you lose weight without exercise, Yes, you can. So if you're right now, if the big thing that's messing with you is like you don't like to exercise and you don't know how to get yourself to exercise, then focus 100% on the eating and just don't worry about it, because you can certainly still lose weight.

When I look back, you know, I remember I spent days, weeks of just researching all this stuff, just researching, especially exercise. I was, you know, spending hours and hours at the computer thinking about these things, trying to figure out, you know, like, should it be high intensity exercise or is it better to do low state cardio or is it better to lift heavyweights or is it better to do, you know, more volume of reps but with with less weight or, you know, like there is so much stuff that I just filled my head with.

Meanwhile, and sitting there not exercising and I did this for so long. I mean, I look back and I laugh at myself and I think, what on earth were you thinking? You know, like and the same with the plan, the eating plan. I would research and research and research. Meanwhile, you know, I would just be overeating constantly. So by 2015, I was I was doing more towards trying to, you know, practice intermittent fasting and things like that.

I really didn't have a plan yet, though. I was doing a lot of stuff, but no clear plan again, because I was just overthinking it. I was constantly reading contradictory evidence and then changing my plan accordingly and then not really having results and getting frustrated and then changing the plan, you know, And just in truth, not really having a plan, just trying lots of stuff.

One thing that kind of shifted my paradigm a little bit, it kind of helped me to call myself out on what I was doing. I remember I was reading a book and I think it was starting strength, My Mark crypto. But in it this author said that the way to lose weight, like if you're just going to lose weight, he said, eat nothing but chicken breasts for a month and let you lose £40.

I can't remember the exact quote, but that was that was the the thrust of it. And in that moment I realized, you know, that's the thing. I'm not trying to like, just lose weight, Like, that's not what I'm going for. And so I was looking for the wrong thing. When I was looking, I was always, you know, looking for the fastest way to lose weight or the best way to lose weight.

But that's not really what I was wanting to do. I realized when I saw that in black and white, like, Oh, this is the way that I could lose weight really fast. I knew, like if I do that plan, I will gain it. All right. That because there is no way for the rest of my life I can just eat nothing but, you know, chicken breasts.

And I think it was that moment where I really said to myself, okay, so what? I'm actually trying to figure out here is how do I eat the right amount of food? Like, I'm not really interested in cutting out, you know, you know, different whole food groups and stuff like that. I just want to figure out how to eat.

My plan is to help me learn how to eat the right amount of food. So January of 2016, that's when I finally wrote down an actual plan. And I remember I was just like, okay, is January is is time to, like, really knock this thing out? I've got to figure out a plan. And so I did. I sat down and I said, intermittent fasting six days a week, cheat day on Sunday, walk six miles a day.

So I had everything, you know, down on paper. I knew what I was doing, I knew what I was committed to doing. And that was my plan. And then and this is a this is a big part of stopping overthinking is once you've picked that plan, you commit to it and you just say, I'm doing this. And so I committed to six weeks in my mind because, you know, when I look back over my history, I realize like I was usually quitting a plan.

After about a week, I would give it a week and then I would quit. And then, you know, sometimes I'd be with something for longer than that. But generally speaking, I was thinking week to week, not like months of trying something consistently. Now, if you actually commit to a plan, it takes out the overthinking or it can you know, any time you start overthinking your plan, it means you're not really committed to it.

Now, I understand that it's really difficult to commit to a plan when you don't really know if it's going to work. And that's the thing. Before you've tested a plan, you're not really sure if it's going to work. So it can be hard mentally to truly commit to it. But if you commit to it and you, you know, you can give yourself an out, What worked for me was to say, okay, I'm going to do this plan and I'm going to try it for six weeks and if during that time I gain £10, then I will allow myself to quit the plan.

And I chose £10 because at that point I was around two or five and I knew that if I gained all the weight back, I would have been really upset with myself and it would have been really hard to like try again. So I thought, okay, £10. If I gain £10, I would put me to 15, which means I still would have, you know, lost £7 from my heaviest confirmed weight and it wouldn't be like completely starting over.

So that was an that was enough of a compromise for me to get myself to commit. And what has helped me since then, to stay committed to the plan and to try my best not to overthink it is to simply be committed to it and to remind myself if I ever do hear people, you know, like and I do, I hear people all the time trying to, you know, convince me that one plan is better than the other or, oh, you know, you should really be trying to eat this way or whatever.

The thing that has helped me is to just remind myself I'm committed to my plan and I know what works for me. I know what I feel best done. And if it works for them, great. But I don't need a plan that's different from what I'm already doing because I'm happy with it. In the end, I just decided, you know, I think humans are really adaptable that we can survive and thrive on a wide variety of food inputs, you know?

So I'm going to just eat what is available to me. I'm going to be grateful for every bite that is put before me. So that helped me to stop overthinking food and it really improved my relationship with food. I found stopping power once I said, you know, all the foods are allowed and I'm not going to worry about it.

And it's just given me a lot of peace. But everybody has to make their own minds up. I would say, you know, just figure out what works for you. You know, pay attention to how various foods affect you and and eat those, the things that make you feel the best and avoid those things that make you feel the worst and and just go based on your own experience.

So if how remote your eating is causing the scale to go up, it simply means you're eating too much. So don't overthink it. Don't don't like get it all in your head that oh, it means I need to like cut out this or that. It just means you need to eat. That's all you need to do. There's a lot of different strategies you can use to help yourself eat less.

You can cut out snacking, you can cut out distracted eating. You can just make yourself slow down while you're eating. You can eat from a smaller plate. There are plenty of things that you can do to help yourself eat less. So once you have your goal weight and you've got your plan, then it's time to start implementing. And this is yet another place where overthinking can really start to come into play because you're going to be constantly bombarded with information from all different camps about, you know, what you should be doing or what you should not be doing in order to lose weight.

You know, if you bring this up with people, you're going to get lots of opinions. You're going to get a lot of advice. And, you know, my personal advice here is that if you don't want that kind of stuff, just don't talk about the fact that you're losing weight, that you're on a plan or anything like that. Just keep, you know, keep it to yourself and that that'll help you to have less advice thrown at you.

But even even if you tell no one, you know, likely you're going to see it on YouTube or on television. There's going to be, you know, various fad things in the news about, oh, you get to try this diet drug. Are you going to, you know, do this new exercise? And there's just a lot that can kind of cause you to doubt the thing that you're doing.

One thing that really helped me a lot was to go on a low information diet, meaning I just stopped consuming most news. I didn't watch the news anymore. I really limit my YouTube consumption. And, you know, I avoided and really when it came to like all the weight loss things, I completely avoided those in 2014, 2015, I was going on different websites, you know, that would, you know, talk about different ways to lose weight.

There was one blog in particular. This girl had documented her weight loss journey, but she had gained the weight back. And so I was always like looking, you know, watching her story, like, oh, is she going to figure out how to get the weight back off and I realized that I had to stop looking at all of it.

So, you know, when it came to things I was going to watch or things I was going to read or things that I was going to listen to, I just avoided all things diet and exercise related. And instead I just focused on like motivational things, uplifting things, inspirational things, things that would make my life better and my attitude better.

And I'm really glad that I did that. And I told myself, if I ever actually have a problem, then I'll go and try to find the solution. But until such a time, I'm just going to keep it all turned off. So protect your mind, you know? And that includes like turning off things like this podcast, my YouTube channel.

If those things end up messing with you and you find that you're not being as consistent, then don't watch it. You know, if something helps, you keep it in your life. But if something is just causing you to overthink things, get it out of your life. The last area that overthinking can creep into is the tracking. So you know, you've got a plan, you've got a goal, you're implementing, and then you got to be tracking in order to decide, you know, like, is this plan working or do you need to implement some changes into your plan so that you lose weight?

And so the tracking part is tricky because weight fluctuates right now, if you have not weighed and you're trying to lose weight, I would encourage you go get on the scale right now. Just face reality. It's I know it's scary, but it's one of the best things you can do on the weight loss journey, because then you'll know you'll know exactly where you are and you can start tracking your progress.

But just know that weight fluctuates. You know, some people, their weight fluctuates by £5 within a day. This is why I really like daily weighing and then keeping track of that seven day average over time because you know, your weight is going to fluctuate up and down, up and down, up and down. And your cycle, if you're a female, is also going to cause weight fluctuations.

Generally speaking, people find their weight is a few pounds higher on their period than it is for the rest of the month. And if you know these things and you can just mentally prepare for the fact that it's not going to be a straight line down, but that you do need to be tracking so that you see what's going on, You're going to have a much easier time looking at things on a day to day basis or even a week to week basis.

It's really not going to tell you very much. And if you and if you focus on those things, it's going to be really easy to overthink it and to, you know, kind of panic like, oh, you know, like my weight didn't go down per pound this week. Does that mean my plan isn't working? Like, those types of overthinking instances are going to be very unhelpful.

Instead, just detach from that. Look at your seven day average over six weeks of time. Here's a little window into how my mind works, how much I can overthink things and worry about things. So once I started this plan and I was being consistent with it, in 2016, the scale started moving down consistently. I mean, it wasn't necessarily every single week it was down exactly £1, but it was consistent enough that I was like, Wow, I'm finally losing weight.

Do you know what I started to do? I started to worry that I had cancer or some other terrible disease because because I was losing weight. Because it was because before it had been so difficult to lose weight. And now here I was. I was eating all the food. I was having chocolate cake. When I wanted chocolate cake, I was you know, I wasn't doing anything for exercise except for walking and I was losing weight.

And so I was I was suddenly worried and I was over thinking. And this is one of those times when you kind of just have to say, okay, let's more likely let's try to be rational here that, you know, I suddenly have this terrible disease, or is it perhaps because I finally have picked a plan and have started implementing it consistently?

Sometimes you have to just give yourself a little sit down talking to you and tell yourself, you know, you're just overthinking it. You need you need to stop. Which is exactly what I did. So if you are in the habit of overthinking, I hope that this episode has helped you to kind of realize it, you know, kind of see maybe where you're overthinking things.

And so hopefully you can use that information and help yourself to stop overthinking in the future. Thank you for listening to this episode and I'll see you in the next one. Do you want to lose the weight without getting rid of the foods you love and that you know you'll go back to eating again anyway? My book Believe That Guide to Intermittent Fasting teaches you how to practice intermittent fasting so that you lose the weight sustainably and keep it off for good.

You can get the audiobook read by me for free when you sign up for your 30 day trial of Audible. The link is in the show notes, and if you've gotten value from this podcast and you'd like to let other people know about it, it'd be great if you could leave a review on either iTunes or wherever you get your podcast.

Thanks.