Bad Days on the Weight Loss Journey

In today's episode, I'm talking about bad days on the weight loss journey. Here's the link I mentioned to Jocko Willink's Good speech. An AI generated transcript is below.  

Links:

Private Coaching With Kayla

Sign up for my weekly newsletter

My Books (ebook or paperback) on Amazon:

The Laid Back Guide to Intermittent Fasting: How I lost Over 80 Pounds and Kept It Off Eating Whatever I Wanted

Overcoming Weight Loss Obstacles: How To Keep Going When Things Get Difficult 

Get the audiobook for free with a 30 day FREE TRIAL from Audible

My young adult fiction novel: Escape From Olshek's Castle 

ALL THE INFORMATION CONTAINED ON THIS PODCAST IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. IT IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR MEDICAL ADVICE. YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CONSULT A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL BEFORE GOING ON ANY DIET OR EXERCISE PROGRAM.

Begin AI Generated Transcript

I. 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 want to let you know that I am offering the all access pass for my academy. So what this means is that you can pay a monthly subscription for access to all the courses inside my academy. That also gets you access to office hours with me and to a weekly group meeting that will do on Zoom.

This meeting will have a topical component based on the group's needs, and I'll also be taking questions and I will answer them in depth inside the meeting. In order to get access. All you need to do is log in to the course and then go to the weekly group meeting module, which should be located in the course introduction for whichever course you're in and if you'd like to get your all access pass subscription, you can click the link in the show notes.

Thanks. In today's episode, we're going to talk about bad days on the weight loss journey. Now, the thing about bad days is that when you're going through it, they're not fun. They're actually quite bad. That's why we call them a bad day. And I know that it sounds trite, you know, when when someone says, oh, well, there's always a silver lining in every, you know, bad thing.

If you just look on the positive side, some good can come of it. But I have found that this is so true on the weight loss journey. I thought it might be helpful to take you through several different specific examples of my own weight loss journey to show you how you know, some of the roughest times that I had were actually the things that ended up being the best for me.

And I'm just going to go in chronological order. So the first bad day I had was my I've had enough moment. Now, for those of you who have not heard this story. I got tagged in some Facebook photos back in March of 2014. And as I sat there in the bathroom, you know, I remember logging in to Facebook and I and I saw these notifications and it said, Oh, you've been tagged in some photos.

And I remember thinking, oh, I wonder, well, you know, when would was that from? And that I thought, well, it's probably just, you know, just my kids because I always avoided the camera. So when I clicked on the notification, I started seeing all these pictures. I was like swiping through and I didn't recognize myself. And I remember in that moment I was so humiliated.

I was embarrassed. I was really angry at the person who had posted the pictures. I was angry at Facebook for having the stupid tagging feature. I remember being very upset, just, you know, crying. And I remember thinking, you know, maybe my family would be better off without me. And in that moment, I called out to God. I was like, I, I need help.

You know, I can't do this alone. So even though that was my low point, it was also this turning point that happened to me because it was in that moment that very, very low time when things started to change. As soon as I said that little prayer, I remember just having some clarity, just, you know, like just sitting there, things that I really had not realized until that moment I started to realize.

And one thing was I realized that all this anger that I was feeling and I mean, I was blaming everybody. I was really mad at everybody else. You know, I was mad at the person who had posted the photos. I was mad at Facebook. I was mad at all the fast food companies. I was mad at all the food companies in general.

I was mad at my kids because I thought, well, it was the pregnancy's that really put on this weight of the minute. My husband, because he never had to worry about his weight. You know, I was just mad at everybody. And then as I sat there, I realized I have no one else to blame. This all falls on me because I am the one who took every bite of food.

I am the one who, you know, decided every day, you know, should I sit here or should I go for a walk or should I, you know, this bag of chips or should I just not? And from that day forward, even though it was by no means an overnight transformation, because you'll you'll hear, you know, how long this whole process took.

But but it was the start out of doing just a little bit better with my eating doing just a little bit better with my relationships, communicating just a little bit better, taking a little bit of time for myself, you know, trying not to be resentful of things, trying to say no to people so that I wouldn't be resentful.

But it all started because of one really bad day. So, you know, time rocked on and almost a whole year passed with no real progress being made, even though I knew, like, okay, I want to lose weight. I was trying to figure things out, but I wasn't really taking any action, not consistently and not the appropriate kind of action that would actually help me lose weight.

I was in the gym. I had I was there like on a free seven day trial thing, and I was working out really hard. And and I realized, like, I really need to go weigh myself. And this was a very difficult thing for me to do because I had not weighed in years. I mean, I had had my third child and had not weighed.

And I knew that, you know, I wasn't going to like the number, but I was pretty sure I was pretty sure the number would be like 185. I thought know, probably like 175, but maybe it's 185, maybe it's gotten that bad. And so I got up the nerve. I was like, okay, I just I need to look at that number.

I've got to know. So I went to the locker room and I climbed up on the scale. And then I looked at the number and I saw £222 staring back at me. And I felt like I had just gotten socked in the gut. You know, I was I was just so embarrassed yet again about like, how far off I was in my self-perception.

And so I felt really bad in that moment. It was a really bad day when that happened. But I learned something really important in that day, which was I had the power to make it so that I was never in that place again, that I was never blindsided by what I weighed, because that was the day that I'd decided, okay, daily weighing, that's for me.

I just, you know, I'm going away for the rest of my life so that I always just know where I'm at with my weight. And I think that has been a huge reason why I was able to not only lose the weight, but more importantly, keep it off, because it has kept me accountable in maintenance, which is where I always struggled.

About four months after I weighed myself for the first time, I had another really bad day and that was the day that I injured my back doing a deadlift. Now I had lost about £17 by that point and so I was making pretty good progress. Now, I didn't think at the time I really kind of thought, I'm not losing weight nearly fast enough.

I don't really hurry up, which is one big reason why I injured my back because I was pushing myself too hard. But I remember, you know, I went to do this deadlift and I knew that it was really heavy. And you know, there was a thing in the back of my mind that said, this is probably a bit too heavy.

I should wait until I can do this. Lower weight was really good form and, and then, you know, move up. But I was in a rush and I remember when I picked up the weight, it was like I saw like a snap of a white light go off, like in my vision. And so I set the weight back down and I had injured my back.

And I don't know to this day, like what was the technical injury? I just knew my back hurts really bad and and I was in a lot of pain. I could not work out for several days at all. I mean, and I just kept, you know, taking Tylenol and Advil and stuff like that. I didn't go to the doctor.

We were tied on money at the time, and I was just like, well, I mean, all they're going to tell me is, you know, basically just take these painkillers or whatever. And I was like, I'm not going to take really strong painkillers. And so I just decided to tough it out and so for the weeks following, I was in pain.

So this is like a whole period of time, or I was just in pain. And the pain, you know, it lessened over the course of time. And then what happened was I kept trying to start working out again. And what ended up happening was I kept injuring myself because I was not ready to go back into those workouts, or at least maybe I was trying to lift too heavy still because I was still in a hurry.

And eventually I got to the point where I said, okay, I really need to heal. I can't do this anymore. And at the time that felt like defeat. Not only was I in like physical pain, but I was just devastated because I thought, well, now I'm definitely going to gain weight because I can't lose weight without really hard, intense exercise.

I just I had this in my mind, but this was actually one of the best things in hindsight that could have happened to me, because once I couldn't focus on the working out, I had to focus on my eating. And this was really the root of all my weight problems. It wasn't that I was inactive, although that did not help things.

What was really my problem was that I was an emotional eater. I was a chronic kind of overeater, and I didn't know that about myself until I could only focus on that. How this looked in reality was, you know, I decided all I could do for exercise was walk. And so I had a set goal for myself. And so what started happening was on those days where normally I would have just been inconsistent with my intermittent fasting, you know, broken the fast, early or whatever, just because like, well, I'm hungry, I wouldn't do that.

I'd be like, Well, I can't afford to do that because all I'm doing is walking. So I've got to be really, really careful here. So I would just not break the fast and instead I would go for a walk about, Oh, well, I've got steps again, so let's go for a walk. And as I started to do that consistently, I started to learn about myself that, oh, you know, so many times when I am eating, it's for the wrong reasons.

It's not because I'm actually hungry, it's because I'm stressed or it's because I'm bored or I'm procrastinating and learning. Those root causes of my weight gain has been so helpful, both, you know, to get it off, but also to be very watchful of myself in maintenance because those, you know, bad habits can creep back in. Another silver lining from that deadlift injury has been I have been better, although certainly not perfect about listening to myself when I kind of get that intuition that I'm pushing myself a little too hard, that I'm expecting too much out of myself.

And so that has been, you know, just a lesson that I've learned. And I'm just now starting to get back into powerlifting after being away from it for about eight years now as of this recording. And and so I'm trying to be very careful that when I am lifting weights, I'm not going to re injure myself, that I really, you know, listen to that voice that says, okay, you know, it's good to push, but not too hard.

Now, the last bad day, really bad day that I had, it was in 2015, and that was when I almost quit the weight loss journey completely. I was just really feeling like it's time for me to throw in the towel. Now, remember, by this point, it had been almost two years since my I've had enough moment, and at that point I was sitting around, you know, like maybe 208 or so.

After two years, basically, I lost £14, which, you know, in hindsight I think that's good. But at the time I felt like that's complete and total failure. Like, what am I even doing? This is this is ridiculous. I was feeling really down because in my mind, you know, I should have had this weight loss thing over and done with within a few months.

I mean, that's just how it was in my head. But fortunately, in 2015, I had really been listening to a lot of self-help like audiotapes and CDs and just motivational material on YouTube and reading self-help books. And, you know, I thought, okay, you know, I need to I need to try to learn from this. There was a quote from Henry Ford that I liked to repeat to myself, which was, you know, failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

So I thought to myself, okay, instead of quitting, I'm going to see if I can just learn from this. So, yes, I'm not satisfied with my results. So how can I try to learn and then begin again more intelligently? I looked at my spreadsheet where I had, you know, logged my weight and I looked at my notes because I had made, you know, notes in the margins of like, okay, you know, this is what I've been doing this week, this is what I've been doing this week.

And that was when I saw, you know, how often I had been quitting on my plan and how often I've been, you know, changing things up and how inconsistent I had been. And so in this Google doc that I had, it was my notes for 2015. I wrote this. I have learned that whatever I do needs to be sustainable throughout my life.

Not I can do this for two months. I need to be able to modify for life. And I look back on that statement and it makes me smile because that was my aha moment, you know, where I really finally, finally out of, you know, years of hearing people say, oh, you know, weight loss is really about permanent lifestyle changes, all about lifestyle change.

I had heard that a million times in my lifetime, but I finally got it. I finally realized my problem is I'm not sticking with anything. I'm trying to be unsustainable in everything I do. So instead I am going to move forward with sustainability as my is my top goal. So I'm not going to do anything that I can't foresee myself doing for the rest of my life.

And that is what directly led to my decision to practice intermittent fasting six days a week and taking the day off every Sunday. And, you know, just walking, having that be my movement because I knew I could stick with that, you know, as long as I didn't become disabled, I could walk every day. And it led to, you know, the decision to let myself have coffee in the fasting window.

Those things were things I could see myself doing forever. That was like, yeah, that's easy. I can do that. And it was that plan that got the weight off my body and, you know, and has helped me throughout maintenance, which has been going on for years now. But that only happened because I had some really bad days. So right now, if you are, you know, just going through a hard time, you're just having a rough go of it.

Try your best. And I know it's hard. I know it's hard when things are not going well. It's hard to to really tell yourself and believe it that something good can come from this. But it can. You may not see it right off the bat, but I have found that if you really are intentional with saying something good will come from this and you really start looking for it, you'll see it sooner rather than later.

And I also want to highly recommend Jocko, which links speech is just called Good. It's just this short video where he talks about why when bad things happen, you should say good. It has helped me many a time when I am going through a rough time. I hope that this episode has helped you. Thank you for joining me 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, The Laid Back 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.