Rita Black: Remember when you were a kid and you had to get your mom to sign a permission slip in order for you to go on a field trip, or when you were older and you had to get the okay from your boss to proceed with the project that you have been wanting to do? Or maybe you live in a neighborhood or a co-op where you had to get the permission to build a fence in your front yard or paint your house a particular color. So often in our life, it seems that we’re trying to get the go ahead signal from someone else to move forward with what we want to do. So did you ever consider that maybe on a subconscious level you might be waiting for permission from that deeper part of you that resists weight release that you can go ahead and go for it?

Rita Black: This week in my birthday celebration episode, I am going to be exploring the 10 fundamental self permissions that I had to grant myself, either consciously or subconsciously, to really finally release the 40 pounds I struggled with my whole life, and how getting aligned with these permissions allowed me to now have kept the weight off for over 28,yes, count them, 28 years. I know that you will get some insights into some very specific permissions that you may want to start granting yourself to really get alignment with long-term weight success. Not just on the scale, but deep inside your mind where it counts. So grab a few birthday candles for my cake, there needs to be a lot of them folks, and come on in!

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.

Rita Black: Hello. Hello. Welcome. Please, please come on in and thank you, thank you very much for joining me for my birthday episode. I love making my birthday episodes because each year I try to focus on the long-term journey that I started over now, 28 years ago, and to look at a particular aspect of what has allowed me to keep the weight off for so long. I mean, think about it, 28 years, my weight mastery is as old as a Gen Z-er, or is it a millennial? I’m never sure of the boundaries of those particular. I don’t even know if I’m a boomer or a Gen Z-er. I’m not ever, one day my daughter tells me I’m a boomer, and then the next day my son tells me I’m a Gen Z-er. So go figure. But whether I am a Gen Z-er or a boomer, this birthday show is being sponsored by my free upcoming live masterclass that I am super excited to be leading. I love leading these live masterclasses. In September and this year, the masterclass is called How to Break Through the Weight Struggle Cycle so that You Can Lose Weight Permanently. And we are going to, in this masterclass, take a deep dive into the fundamental ways that you can start shifting out of the subconscious beliefs that have kept you struggling. And we’re also going to be doing some weight loss hypnosis. So I will hope, hope, hope that you’ll join us. The links are in the show notes. Go sign up because the space is limited.

Rita Black: Anyhow, I started thinking, this year I’m gonna be 59, and what an interesting year. It is the gateway year into the sixties. Wow. Wow. I never thought I would be here, but I am. And it’s cool. It’s really cool. But it brings up a lot, it brings up the fact that I’m going to be an empty nester. What is my future gonna bring? Longevity? How do I get it? How I do I maintain my health? What do I wanna do and accomplish with my life? And I realized that it is all very scary and also exciting. So thinking about this journey into the sixties that is coming up, it got me thinking about how when fear and doubt comes up and my subconscious wants to diminish my dreams and goals, usually it’s because there is a subconscious part of me that hasn’t grounded me permission to be bold and big.

Rita Black: There is a part of me that says, this isn’t okay, or what would other people think or that isn’t done, you know what I mean? We diminish those big, bold visions that we have for ourself, and it seems to be subconscious. So self permission is a wonderful thing. You know? I’ll tell you a little secret. I didn’t have my first child until I was 38. And you know why permission? I didn’t think I would be a good mother in my late twenties and early pre-shift thirties. I had a lot to work through and I didn’t really feel ready even though I got married at 24. So I had been married for a long time and I remember my husband, who had his own reasons for not being quite ready to be a parent yet, we had a lot of fun and we had adventures both in England and here in Los Angeles.

Rita Black: But he finally decided he was ready to start around the age of 40. And he said, well, are you in? And I said, well, and he said, okay, what’s the hesitation? And I said, you know, I just really don’t think I’m gonna be a good mom. And he said, well, how about just being a good enough mom? And there was something in that that opened up a basement door in my subconscious mind that allowed this big permission slip within me to be signed. And it said, you can be a mother. And I felt aligned trying to get pregnant. Well, that’s gonna have to wait for another podcast because that’s a big saga as well. But if you think about it, miracles occur when we grant ourselves permission around the things we resist and fear. So I have been thinking about the permissions that I had to grant myself along the way of weight mastery.

Rita Black: They didn’t always happen at once in my journey. I had to grant permission every step along my 28 year journey. And this is important to know because the journey to weight mastery is layered and subconscious stuff keeps coming up. It’s not just a linear line down the scale. We’re human beings. We have a lot, we’re very layered. So the weight mastery journey is going to be layered, and it helps to know this. And it helps to know that, oh, I’m kind of reaching some resistance here in my journey. Do I need to grant myself more permission for something that I haven’t granted myself permission for? So as we go through these, I’m gonna prod you to start granting these permissions to yourself as well. And we’re gonna do this with a deep breath in. We’re gonna grant the permission, bring it in. And on the outbreath, I’m gonna have you help me blow out the 59 candles on my birthday cake.

Rita Black: Okay. So, and my birthday cake, my birthday cake growing up, and I’ve carried on the tradition most years, last year I didn’t even have a birthday cake, but most years, and I don’t even know if I’m going to have one this year, but it has always been cherry chip. Now, they don’t really make that cherry chip cake mix anymore. And frankly, I’ve learned to make a really awesome very low sugar using almond flour, cherry chip cake, and low glycemic cherry chip cake. But I do use maraschino cherries because obviously I want that fake red, pink color. And I just love maraschino cherries. I do think they’re a trigger food, but mixed in with the cake, eh, it can be okay, but just, you know, I need a security guard around me and the frosting.

Rita Black: So anyway, let’s talk about permission number one. And this was a big one, and it was the first one for me. And this was actually the permission to be thin, okay? The permission to be thin. And that might sound vain or that might sound weird, but honestly, think about it, it’s pretty powerful. So, you know, after dieting and yo-yoing up and down the scale, for years, I realized that most of my weight dieting cycle was more of an attempt to escape being fat rather than a real loving permission slip to create a lifestyle that allowed me to be thin and healthy. So think about that, that’s offensive versus defensive. Mostly, we’re on the defensive. I don’t wanna be fat. Let me do whatever I can to not be fat, rather than I really wanna create this amazing life for myself and be that person who is slim and healthy.

Rita Black: That’s different, and that needs some permission. You know, I think about, I’m a child of the seventies TV era and Gilligan’s Island and Poor Gilligan and the professor of Marianne and Ginger, and the skipper, and the Howells, Thurston and Lovey, they were, every episode trying to escape that island. And it was, they’d almost get there every single episode, but then they’d not get off that island, right? And I kind of felt like that with my weight, you know, I’d be able to lose some weight, but then I never could quite keep it off. So being and focusing on this permission to be healthy, slim, and confident, and I realized that one thing that was really holding me back from giving myself this permission was that I thought of thin and healthy people in a negative way. Do you sometimes, you know, sometimes it’s easy to think of thin or slim people as vain.

Rita Black: Come on, let’s face it. Oh, they’re so vain. They’re so focused on themselves and what they look like. You know? We have an attitude, and if you really want to dive deep into my take on this and how to get through it, I have a whole episode called Skinny People Envy, that you can dive deep into this about. But the main point I’m trying to make is that, ah, gosh, I’m thinking of being slim and healthy, and it’s not always positive. So I also thought of people as like a health nut. You know, like, oh, they’re so healthy and they wanna know what ingredients are in the salad dressing. And they wanted be, you know, persnickety and picky. And, you know, I had a bit of an attitude, if you think about it. So I had to reframe. I saw thin and healthy, and I was able to make that shift in my mind because when I saw myself as slim and healthy, it meant confident and it meant powerful.

Rita Black: And it meant standing up for myself and what I need and believe in. So, having the identity of someone who holds health and a healthy lifestyle as a standard deeply, deeply, that has nothing to do with vanity, that has nothing to do with having to be a particular size to be loved, it was nothing to be ashamed of. And if there’s a voice in your head shaming you for wanting to be healthy or slimmer or more confident, like you don’t deserve it, maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s a voice outside of you, but are you willing to let it go along with all of your thoughts and negative preconceptions of a thin, healthy lifestyle?

Rita Black: And also to really own the fact that I really did wanna be lighter and healthier and more confident that was truly important to me. You know? Sometimes I think it was like, oh, no, it’s not really that important, or, oh gosh, you know, people should love me for who I am, but I wanted to feel lighter and healthier. I didn’t want my joints to ache. And at the age of the early thirties, I didn’t wanna know what it was gonna feel like 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. So after years of struggling, I finally gave myself that permission, and it was like a huge door opened. So, how about you? Come on. Can you grant yourself permission to be thin? Just take a nice deep breath in and pull that permission in, hold it, grant it, and blow out some of the many candles on my birthday cake. Thank you.

Rita Black: Okay, now, permission number two, or self permission number two starting the journey of weight mastery. So after 20 years, up and down the scale, hundreds of diets, there was a morning where I got on the scale, and some of you guys know this story. This is the pivotal, what I call the turning point in my life. And I got off, this up on the scale, and I was actually down. I was, my day weight was down, so it wasn’t, my weight was up, but I had been on a diet. But there was something heartbreaking about it for me, because I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to keep the weight off for very long because I was so stuck in this start over struggle cycle and this weight struggle cycle. So in that heartbreaking moment where I cried and literally sat on my scale for a couple of hours and just let it all out, I made a promise never to diet again.

Rita Black: I didn’t know what I was going to do. I did not have a clue, but I knew one thing, and it was like, I’m never gonna diet again. So, cut to a few months later, and I was doing hypnosis and meditation, and really just learning to feed my body without dieting and really seeking answers, researching long-term permanent weight management, getting mentored along the way. And I realized that what I was doing, what this thing was, this quest that I was on was a journey. It wasn’t like this rush down the scale. It wasn’t a, you know, have to have this now, but it was step by step, a journey I was on with myself. And there were many twists and turns in the journey, and sometimes were, there were hills I had to climb. And sometimes it was easy, and sometimes there were plateaus, but it was a journey.

Rita Black: And six months later I still was on that journey and I was lighter. I was almost at my ideal weight, but I hit a plateau. So again, I had to dig deeper into that journey and commit even more deeply to that journey that I had begun. And then as I got to my ideal weight, I was like, aha. So I see that this journey doesn’t end like I thought it would, you think in this world of dieting, okay, the diet ends and I can just go back to doing whatever I wanted, but now I’m a skinny person and I’m healed, and it’s all good, rather than the fact that I was still me, I was a lighter version of me, but I had still feelings and emotions. I still had to deal with food and social events and my life. So I realized I see that I am lighter and more masterful, but I am continuing this journey and still having to be me on this journey, still learning lessons along the way.

Rita Black: And then as time went on, I had children and my parents passed and I started my business. And all these very big life things came down my path of life as I was on my journey. And I had to pivot and adjust every step along the way. And sometimes it was harder, sometimes it was easier. Sometimes it felt dark and heavy and sometimes it felt light. But I maintained my weight within, you know, a five pound range. And most people who have maintenance know that there’s like a five pound range that, you know, with a top edge and a bottom edge that you kind of allow and float between as you go through your life. And, you know, maybe you’re sitting there thinking, oh my God, this journey continues. What are you telling me, Rita, that this is not good news?

Rita Black: But look, you know, the, that journey continued for me. I look, I hit menopause, and I had to pivot and change and learn and grow and develop. And then I hit 52, which was kind of a turning point year for me physically, because my body really started to change and I had to adjust and get more focused on different parts of my body and mobility and balance. And then 57 hit, and I don’t know what it was about 57, but man, things then really started to shift. And I was like, woo hoo. We’re, you know, in this now this whole aging thing, and this is serious business, and I need to focus more on immunity. I need to focus more on mobility and agility, and I’m spending more time doing that, and as a whole mindset shift. So it isn’t, I think we get into this very rigid idea of weight loss is, or rigid idea of what weight management is.

Rita Black: But weight management is incredibly fluid and ever growing and ever changing and ever evolving. And actually, if you’re sitting there going, oh my God, this sounds like a horror show. I wanna assure you, it’s not, it’s invigorating and it’s challenging and it stretches you, but it gives you this sense of mastery like you have never had in any other part of your life before. And I know as I continue into my sixties and seventies and eighties with the grace of the universe and, you know, willingness from the universe, God willing, who everybody willing as my continue my life through my eighties, nineties, one hundreds, so I can, you know, be alive to see my son turn 60 and have his retirement. I’d love to see that and dance at his 60th birthday in my red dress, as some of you know you know, as I head into these next chapters of my life at, in an aging body and maintaining my weight I’m really excited.

Rita Black: You know? I went through a few moments this year of like, oh my gosh, you know, it is confronting. But when I granted myself permission to just age gracefully, believing in my ability to manage my weight, and to continue this powerful journey I’ve been on for 28 years, I got really moved. I was like, wow, I’m so blessed. And it’s been such a great gift this journey. So are you ready to give yourself permission? Maybe you’re already on your journey. Maybe you wanna start a journey maybe you’ve got sidetracked off the journey to, into the ditch or into the field, and is is one of our shift coaches says over the ditch through the field and into the next town when he got off track. You know? But to get back on that journey, and it’s not that you ever left the journey, but just to refocus and start continuing your journey forward.

Rita Black: So are you ready to give yourself some permission here? So, okay, so let’s do it. So go ahead and take a nice deep breath in and bring that permission to start or be on or continue or really commit to that journey and hold that in. And as you let it go, blow out a few more candles on my birthday cake. Will you? Okay. Thank you.

Rita Black: Okay, self permission number three, permission to love and accept yourself as you are. So this was a hard permission, but one that is very powerful and very hard for people to do because I really talk about in the Shift Weight Mastery Process. And you know, in my membership this month I mean, sorry, last month, we were working on body love and vulnerability and really, you know, really loving ourselves as we are right now down the scale. And as I talked about before, you know, we are thrown to wanna run away from the pain of being overweight, right? There’s a lot of pain, there’s a lot of self-criticism, there’s a lot of, this is not okay, and I’m not okay as I am. And so we spend a lot of time focusing on trying not to be fat or not to be overweight. But we don’t tend to accept ourselves in our bodies as we are. And our body is the only thing you know, this is it. This isn’t the practice body. This is the body you have, and you gotta give it some love and accept it regardless of its size or shape or what your opinion of what beauty or what a sexy and hot looking body is. Because accepting your body as it is now will begin to connect you to yourself and to accept yourself words and all, and maybe, you know, limiting habits and beliefs and all.

Rita Black: So not just your body, but yourself, who you are, where you are right now in your journey. It will help you connect yourself authentically, and it will actually help you make for yourself. You are worth fighting for, you are worth advocating for yourself. You are worth respecting. You know? Cognitive studies have seen, like, see, I know people are like, well, if I love myself as I am, then I’m gonna be complacent. I’m not gonna care. I’m just gonna stay as I am and ha as I am. It’s not acceptable. So I’m just not gonna do it. I’m gonna keep beating myself up and telling me this isn’t good enough. You’ve gotta do better and you’ve gotta lose that weight and yada, you know, with a really critical negative tone. But when we are compassionate and love ourself, actually cognitive studies have shown that people are much more compliant, much more willing to follow through on plans that they set for themselves.

Rita Black: Isn’t that interesting? So if we’re just blindly losing weight in order to accept ourselves and love ourselves as that thinner version of ourselves we still don’t love ourselves. And then we don’t know how to love ourselves even when we get the weight off, because all we’ve been doing is just trying to get thin, but not really creating a self-respecting respe relationship with ourself or a way of living that allows us to live at our ideal weight. We’ve been so focused on weight loss, but we’ve really never learned from the inside out how to be that person that we respect at our ideal weight. So what happens is we lose the weight, but then we get imposter syndrome. We don’t know who we are, it feels weird we’re scared, we don’t think we can keep the weight off. And guess what? We start gaining the weight back and then hating ourselves, and then even deepening that self-hatred wound. So, do me a favor for my birthday, grant yourself permission to love the you here and now loving and caring for yourself, that beautiful you, him or her here and now. And you’ll see the whole new relationship forming with yourself. Okay? You ready? So take that nice deep breath in. Bring in that permission to love and accept yourself as you are. I know it might be hard, stretch through that feeling and blow out a few more candles on the cake.

Rita Black: All right, now we’re gonna move on to number four. And this is one that is a little interesting and some of you, if this is hard for you to hear or it makes you feel triggered, then you may wanna move on to the next one. I’m just telling you this upfront because this one is number four, is self permission to feel safe and seen in our slimmer body to let go of the buffer. And so if you want to move on, if that triggers you in any way, it may not, so you can stay with me. But I just wanna let you know because sometimes weight is our buddy subconsciously, you know, for a lot of us, I know it was for me. You know, there’s a number of ways that it’s our buddy. First of all, it makes us invisible in a way, or at least we feel like we’re hiding.

Rita Black: Maybe we’re not, we’re certainly not hiding from ourselves. But I was so terribly shy. I was so shy. And I can be still, I know you might find that really hard to believe, but I do have some social anxiety. And I can feel awkward and weird and insecure. But in the fourth grade it was paralyzing. And in fact in the fourth grade, I almost held back a year. Not because I didn’t excel in my studies, but because I hardly spoke in class and I hid, and that there were other things that contributed to me wanting to hide. And weight became something that even though I hated it, there was a payoff. You know, I was scared of attention from boys. I didn’t know what to do. Again, super awkward girl, nerdy, weird, you know, you know, and weight took me off the shelf in a way.

Rita Black: It allowed me to hide from others and also kind of for myself, even though I didn’t hide very well. I’m gonna get to more of that in a moment. So, how else is weight our buddy subconsciously? Well, it acts as protection. Many of my clients had childhoods for whatever reason, they felt unsafe or underwent some trauma or both, and weight became a buffer or an armor. And so for many when they release weight, major fear comes up feeling very vulnerable and small like they were when they were a child. And it is the thing, it’s important to understand now. And you know, this does take a process. It doesn’t happen all the way right away, especially if you’ve had trauma or the things that happened where you felt unsafe. But there’s that little girl or little boy within you that is feeling that they’re still there, right?

Rita Black: Then they are still there. But now you are the older adult. You are the adult who can love them, protect them, and you as an adult have boundaries and a voice. And here’s the thing, for me, I had to grant myself permission that I wasn’t that scared little fourth grade girl anymore. I was still scared, but I had a voice and I could, you know, I could use it. And I did things that helped me feel more skilled. I took self-defense. I took self-improvement classes. I took an improv class so I could talk more genuinely and off the cuff. And that was so scary. But I challenged myself. I talked to that scared little girl inside of me and I said, Hey, I’ve got you, and we can take care of ourselves.

Rita Black: So if that might be you, you might begin to ask yourself, you know, how can I make that little child within me feel more safe as I let go of the buffer? And how do I create more powerful boundaries for myself? And there are ways to do that. But you just have to start by asking yourself that question and acknowledging that there is some permission that needs to be granted to begin to do that. And then also weight acts as a procrastination tool. You know, a lot of us say, Hey, when I get thin, that’s when I’m gonna travel the world, or when I’m gonna get into a relationship, or I’m going to ask for a better job, or go find a better job. And then getting to our healthy ideal weight becomes so weighted with this like, I’m gonna have to do this thing.

Rita Black: I mean, maybe traveling the world is scary. Maybe getting in a relationship is really confronting, maybe asking for a better job. So I always encourage people to give themselves permission to start living their lives now. You know, start engaging in those things now and stretching into that now so that you’re not giving, getting thin so much pressure. It’s, it’s challenging enough, you know, to continue on your weight mastery journey. Why wait it with all these other expectations? That’s just too much. So here’s the main permission is to grant yourself permission to feel safe and seen within that lighter body. Can you give yourself that permission or at least be open to the idea, okay, come with me and let’s take that breath, bringing it in. It might feel a little scary. Just be open to the idea and blow out a few more candles.

Rita Black: Okay, now my numbers got a little wonky here. So that was three, that was four. Sorry, that was five. I renumbered these, so I’m, you know, I’m just, and I’m reading them off obviously. Okay, so here’s a quick one. Permission to set realistic goals. I find that people wildly create huge unattainable goals and then meet themselves up because they don’t attain them. A lot of people when they set their goals in the beginning of the shift set really too big of weight, really skull. And, and I get it, like again, we’re really thrown in this diet culture and and I’ve seen it over the years in my practice, people are like, exercise goals are, you know, I’m gonna work out an hour and a half a day when they haven’t worked out in years or with food goals.

Rita Black: Like, I’m not ever going to eat sugar ever again. Or, you know, I’m going to eat, you know, so much. I’m only going to eat fruits and vegetables and lean proteins. And, you know, like we, we’d set these goals that are really hard to start off with. So one thing that I had to make my goals really doable because I fell into the same trap. I, you know, I wanna lose weight fast. I wanted to think that I could work out, you know, a ton and I wanted to be, you know, super amazing and clean in my eating, you know, but that wasn’t realistic. And I had to be real about me and where I was and to set goals that were loving. And the more I made my goals doable, I was able to attain them. And then it made me feel confident and that confidence built and I set more goals and I attained those and it built more confidence and I set more guilt.

Rita Black: So, can you see how that builds upon itself? So can we just all grant ourselves permission really quick just to set doable goals? Alright? So take a nice deep breath in, doable goals and let that out. Okay? That was an easy one.

Rita Black: Okay? Number six, permission to make mistakes. Because I see this all the time too. I am a huge, I’m a Virgo, people. I’m a perfectionist, but I have learned to let it go. And I am not that much of a perfectionist in some areas of my life. The ones that I probably need a little more perfection, but you know, I have standards and a lot of us who struggle with weight have perfection, addiction and we do something right? And we get a dopamine hit. And losing weight is like the prize. We play a game, you know, it’s like a game.

Rita Black: We play on our phone and we get this rush, like I’m on the diet perfectly and I’m losing weight. And it’s like playing a video game. And then we make a mistake and we lose and we have to go back and start over. You ever watch a teenager gaming and just getting up to the top level and then they lose and they kicked out? It’s not a pretty sight, right? It’s the same as getting on the scale and having it be up. It’s just like, oh no. And you know, after having been doing so well, and then we get off track and the alarms go off in our head and our head is like, failure, failure failure hit eject and we hit eject, and then we just start all over again when we can be perfect, right? But, you know, here’s the thing, and here’s permission to make mistakes and permission is really necessary here because you are not going to achieve long-term permanent weight management being perfect.

Rita Black: You never are. You are have in the areas of your life where you have excelled. You have made mistakes and learned from your mistakes. And how can you expect to have weight mastery if you don’t allow yourself to make mistakes and learn from them? There is absolutely no way you can do that. None. The brain learns from making mistake. Ai put in front of a chess game, didn’t know chess at all. It made mistake after mistake. And, but very quickly it was, it had mastered the game. But you have to master the game by making mistakes. That’s how AI learns. That’s how our brain learns. That’s how you attain weight mastery is allowing yourself to make the mistakes and not beating yourself up over the mistakes, but saying, aha, I made a mistake. Well, opportunity to learn. You wanna think like you know, use your brain like a computer and self-correct, rather than starting the whole computer program over again.

Rita Black: You are self-correcting along the way, getting better and better, just like ai. So when my journey things didn’t look so good, plateaus doing good, but then bad habits would come back that I had to retrain. I messed up. It was a mess. You know, there was really a lot of messy mess, mess, messes on my journey of weight mastery. A lot of the times it didn’t look good and I hated that. But I also hated the idea of not being on my journey. And I stretched through those moments knowing that I would get to the other side and I would feel better and I would’ve learned something. And if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So look messy. Learn to love the mess. Learn to stretch through that feeling of like, I gotta be perfect. No, you don’t, you, I want you to make mistakes.

Rita Black: I want you to learn from them. Yay. When you make, you know, when you get off track, awesome. Because the key to long-term consistency is getting back on track and building that muscle of getting back on track. It ain’t starting over. So that is what happened. You know, when I started allowing myself to learn from my mistakes, that’s when I got traction. That’s when I got the success. That’s when my weight mastery really began. So let’s do it. It made feel weird at first, perfectionist, but stretch through it. Take that deep breath in, permission to make mistakes and let it go.

Rita Black: Okay, now, see, this is where I’m not perfect. So now it’s number seven, permission to prioritize self-care. So how many of you really make yourself a priority? Alright, it’s crickets out there. I don’t hear very many of you at all. If you said, no, I really feel for you. And if you said yes, come on. I doubt that you really, really make yourself a priority. And if you do, good for you. But we really find it hard. You know, our kids, our partners, our pets, our community group work, coworkers, we put their needs way before our own. And what, let me ask you, subconscious expectation drove that answer. You know the answer to say yes, that you put your kids or your partner or your coworkers ahead of you, and better yet, who created the expectation? Because I bet it wasn’t you, it was your mama or your society or your culture, it was like, oh no, a good person doesn’t let their children sit at home while you go and exercise. A good person takes care of their children, is always there for them, right?

Rita Black: We learned that putting ourselves first is selfish and then we’re made to feel guilty when we have the guts to do it. You know, Brene Brown, those of you who know her, she’s the the woman who coined the term shame resistant. A we wanna become guilt resistant. Guilt is one of the most fattening emotions. So come on team, let’s get guilt resistant. Taking care of your physical and mental wellbeing is crucial for sustainable weight loss. And it requires you being an advocate for yourself inside your head. Listen to that part of you that says you shouldn’t exercise because that time should go to your kid. Listen to the part of you that makes you wanna make the unhealthier dinner because you know it will please your husband that he doesn’t want to eat healthy food. But does it really please you or listen to the part of your head that wants you to stay at work at lunchtime instead of taking a mental break at lunch?

Rita Black: Because when you don’t take that mental break, it causes you to overeat later. Face it. Ignoring yourself and taking care of other people first, not only wears you down, but also makes you resentful. Which by the way, folks, is the second most fattening emotion. Yep. Resentful, your kids, your partner, your colleagues will be glad that you’re taking care of yourself first, because the quality of your attention when you do give them time, will be so much better and more authentic and loving. This is a big ask, but I’m gonna ask you to put your needs at the top of the list and you will be glad you did. So, alright, everybody, take that nice deep self permission breath in for that prioritizing self-care. And a few more candles. I can see the smoke rising.

Rita Black: Alright, number eight, permission to create your own functional and loving relationship with food. All righty. So long-term permanent weight release isn’t about restriction or deprivation. We have to grant ourselves permission to create our own way of eating that works for us. And this can be scary and hard. We don’t trust ourselves. We don’t feel safe outside the boundaries of a food plan or a diet that somebody else has created. But we have to start creating a more flexible idea of our life long path of feeding ourselves. You probably know a fair amount of what works for you and doesn’t right now you do. You have a lot of knowledge in you because you’ve done a lot of diets and you’ve seen what works and what doesn’t. You’ve fed yourself a lot of times and you know what works and what doesn’t. And a lot of our learning has to come from tuning into our bodies and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

Rita Black: Not looking out our side of ourselves to some diet or diet plan or cutting out some macronutrient group. Our bodies are highly individual and we need to learn to feed them in a way that makes us feel nourished, stabilized and aligned. Everybody is different. You know, there was a study in the National Weight Registry, which is a study of long-term permanent weight management. And, and the study showed that most people or or a lot of the people who achieved long-term permanent weight mastery had done a number of diets in their lifetime. And that their ultimate like long-term plan was cobbled together ideas of maybe some different plans that had worked for them or they had been on one plan like Weight Watchers or you know, Atkins or whatever, but then they had flexibly adjusted that plan and take, take an ownership of that for themselves.

Rita Black: Does that make sense? So the point I’m making is there’s a lot of diets out there and I’m sure you’ve been on a lot. You know a lot about what works for you and what doesn’t, what hooks you, what doesn’t. And so your long-term plan isn’t gonna look like a perfect diet outside of you that’s all neat and tidy. It is gonna look like you creating a way of eating, a structure of eating times of eating, ways of feeding yourself that honor you and it that takes some love, that takes some tuning in and that’s takes some self permission to grant yourself permission to say, I know enough now to start, you know, figuring this out for myself. You don’t need to read another book. You don’t need to go on another plan. You probably have all the answers pretty much inside of you if you grant yourself permission to start to be an expert on you and feeding yourself.

Rita Black: So just give yourself permission to trust that you can do this. Just take the baby steps knowing that the answer is within you and not outside of you. Let’s just start here. So take a nice deep breath in and very good. Alright, so I am looking through here and I apologize. I’ve got a few more permissions left and I have a feeling you guys are gonna get an extra permission. ’cause I said that was 8, 9, 10. Oh no, that’s, oh yeah, 10, I think we’re doing nine, but anyway, now we’re doing 10. Okay, yeah, there’s a bonus one.

Rita Black: Okay, so number nine is permission to be resilient, patient, stretch, flexible, and celebrate small victories. So we rarely celebrate those small victories on our way of weight mastery. And way how we get resilient is by celebrating and looking at what’s going well for ourselves. Our brain is negativity biased, and what that means is that we’re always on the alert for the next bad thing or scary thing or thing that is gonna put us in danger. So haven’t you ever noticed that you can’t wait to achieve something or experience something? And the moment that you do, the moment that you get the raise or the moment that you win the award or the moment that that amazing thing happens, your mind immediately moves on to the next thing and worrying about something else, you know, you win the lotto and it’s like, oh shoot, I’m gonna have to pay taxes. Oh, I wonder if my neighbor’s gonna find out and want money from me. You know, like there’s never that moment of really sitting and being present with how amazing that thing is. We don’t stop and really celebrate or gives ourselves credit.

Rita Black: And now how does this take away from our weight mastery? Well, you probably do a lot of things well, but you don’t look at that. You’re only looking at the negative stuff. In my membership meetings, we celebrate not just weight release, but all the little breakthroughs that go along the way on the weight journey. For instance, like I ordered french fries and I just ate 10 and I didn’t even want anymore. Or I told my husband to start buying more vegetables and he did. And I got up and I wrote gratitude in my journal. So those little things along the way matter, but we don’t acknowledge them and when we do, we start to build more confidence and trust in ourself. So, okay, are we going to notice the small stuff along the way and celebrate it? Because if we don’t we’re just gonna keep looking for that next negative thing and give up the next time we get off track and start over.

Rita Black: Rather than going, what did I learn? Oh, but look at what I did well there and this is how learning happens. So take that nice deep breath in, self permission to notice the small victories and, okay, last but not least, okay, permission my friends, to be a maverick to reject societal standards both for your body image but also for your social group if they are unhealthy. You don’t have to live by anyone’s rules. You are a leader if you grant yourself permission to be. And you know, of all the permissions before this one, I hope that they all add up to this, that leading yourself on this journey and opening the permission doors to your weight journey is a self-leadership journey. And when I say that you are creating your life and you are creating your reality, you are not the victim of your life and you are not the victim of your weight struggle or reality, you are creating your weight mastery reality.

Rita Black: You create it, it begins in your mind and you are the maverick visualizing it first and living into it. You create your own norms of what is beautiful, what you want to have in your life, what you wanna have in your environment. You give yourself permission to reject the narrow societal standards of beauty and recognize that everyone’s body is unique and you can challenge the unrealistic expectations set aside by media and the social pressures, by celebrating your diverse body size and shape and your abilities. And you are also leading others around you into healthier lives because they’re gonna be inspired by you, especially if you take on that leadership role. You know, I had a client, a dear client who I was on a Zoom meeting with and she was going away for the weekend and she was concerned that she, her two friends were kind of like overeaters over drinkers and she was like, Ugh, you know, I feel like I’m gonna fall into that trap and I’m gonna have one of these weekends and I don’t really wanna do it and I don’t wanna overindulge.

Rita Black: And you know, we kind of talked through it and this is somebody who has released a lot of weight and had a lot of experience. And I said to her, and it was kind of a self permission moment where I said, well, you know what? They might really appreciate you leading them through a healthy weekend. You know, who says you have to drink and eat? Because they do. Can’t you go into that situation and say, you know what would be a really great, I would love it if we could be, you know, make it a healthy weekend, but have a fun weekend as well. I mean, we don’t have to not drink, but maybe we’ll just have a little bit to drink, but we can do these other fun things and we can make healthy meals. We can go to the farmer’s market, we can challenge ourselves, right?

Rita Black: And she ended up doing it and having an amazing time. And actually her friends were really happy to have her do that. So we don’t have to settle for others’ beliefs about food or what they find acceptable to put in their bodies. Be a powerful leader of yourself, be a powerful leader of yourself, a maverick. Create the future you want to live in your mind and then lean into it offensive versus defensive living. Okay, I hope this served you and that you had a breakthrough in the area of self permission and I wanna thank you for blowing out all the, oh, wait a minute. We didn’t do the breath for self permission. Hold on just a minute.

Rita Black: Okay. Last deep breath in taking in all those self permissions that we’ve taken in. One last deep breath in and let’s finish blowing out the candles on the birthday cake. Wonderful. Okay. Thank you so much for joining me for my 59th birthday. I hope, hope, hope that this self permission session has helped you, it has been inspiring to you. I hope you start to think of all the self permissions you can start to grant yourself along the way. Now remember, this birthday show is being sponsored by my free upcoming live masterclass that I am super excited to be leading, How to Break Through the Weight Struggle Cycle so that you Can Lose Weight Permanently. We’re gonna take a deep dive into the fundamental ways you can start shifting out of the subconscious beliefs that keep you struggling, get some weight loss hypnosis. So I hope you will join us. The links are in the show notes. And hey, start being a leader by sharing this link with others. They will thank you and have an amazing week. And remember that the key and probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it. I will see you next week.

Rita Black: If 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.