Rita Black: What do I need to do that I am not doing? That is the question that most of us ask ourselves when trying to release weight. I need to exercise more. I need to drink more water. I need to eat more vegetables. Looking at these things is important. However, today, I would like to try a little of what I like to call inversion therapy with you and focus on the things that you might be doing that are keeping you struggling with your weight. The idea is when we present these things to our mind, often, the mind gets a different perspective, what we call a reframe. A new way of looking at something that gives us an aha moment. Hmm, I never thought of it like that before. And of course, I’m not gonna leave you hanging inverted upside down forever. You of course, are gonna get some mind hacks to shift things back around. So join me in the upside down world of weight mastery 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: Well, hello. Hello, hello. Come on in. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and if you are tuning in when this episode is dropping, we are closing the doors very soon on the enrollment for the Fall 2023 Live Shift Weight Mastery Process. Now, I love doing this process with everyone. This is a live process this time of year and it’s a great time of year because people are in that mood to refocus and make a difference with their lives as they head into the holidays and into the new year. And often this kind of change takes a willingness to step outside of what we know or what we have known to begin a journey forward of truly managing our weight from the inside out, truly shifting our mindset. So I love, love, love doing this process, this time of year. So if you are interested in learning more about the Shift Weight Mastery Process, please check it out.

Rita Black: The process is designed to be a transformational step-by-step journey from struggler to confidently releasing weight and leading yourself on your journey of weight mastery. I’m your guide, but you are becoming the leader of yourself. This is a hero’s journey. Now, the process is an online program and mobile app that gives you a 37-day immersion in the skillset and mindset of weight mastery and success. There is a week long prep, and in this time you get mentally prepared to be successful and to learn how to release weight at a rate you decide. And then there’s 30 days of daily hypnosis, meditation and coaching, and an immersion in what I call this powerful skillset of the nine skills of weight mastery and their mind skills. There are weight skills, environmental skills that have been gleaned from studies of people who have kept weight off long term.

Rita Black: We really follow the blueprint of success, and there are weekly online live coaching sessions with me where we work on things like night eating, emotional eating, and we do powerful workshops as well. One is called Carb Savvy, where we really dive into your relationship with food and feeling addicted to food and shifting out of that. And then there’s also a consistency workshop, and we’re also adding this time, which I’m really excited about, peer coaching sessions with successful shifters who will answer your questions and help you with what’s coming up for you and lots more. So please, if you’re interested and you haven’t signed up yet, the link is in the show notes.

Rita Black: Now, today, I wanna have some fun with this inversion therapy session focusing on what we might be doing to keep us stuck. One thing, when I am enrolling a course, I see a lot of people wanting to take the plunge, but then that resistant part of their mind will talk them out of it. And this isn’t just about the shift, but don’t we get inspired sometimes? Like we really wanna do something, we really wanna take a risk, and then our minds talk us out of it, right? Because the brain loves the familiar, even if the familiar is bad, and it makes us unhappy. You’ve probably seen this in your friends or loved ones, you know, isn’t it? Isn’t it so frustrating? You can make a suggestion to a friend, they’re so unhappy, I’m so unhappy, and you talk to them for hours. Yes, you can change your life for the better, and then they don’t take your advice and they just continue to stay the same. They talk themselves out of it. It’s just what the subconscious does.

Rita Black: So we’re gonna have fun and look at these eight things that keep you struggling to highlight if you wanna keep struggling, keep doing these things with the hopes that the subconscious mind hears something from a different angle and makes a shift. Kind of like using reverse psychology. So how do I keep struggling with my weight?

Rita Black: Number one, keep starting over tomorrow thinking you will finally be perfect forever, somehow. Sound familiar? So this is silly. It seems silly, but really honestly, we get very addicted into the perfectionistic all or nothing, good or bad, on or off cycle, don’t we? I mean, if you think about being perfect forever on anything, that theory just doesn’t hold up. But we get fooled every time trying to be good than getting seduced off track with the idea that we’ll be even more perfect tomorrow or Monday. And then consuming lots of food and empty calories in the name of it’s never gonna happen again. And I might as well live it up. So look, let’s look at how we get hooked in this cycle. Let’s look at this cycle, which all starts with the desire to go on a diet or go on sort of some regime, pull ourselves together and be good.

Rita Black: This is the beginning of the cycle. I wanna release weight, I wanna lose weight. I need to be good. I’m pulling myself together. I’m going on a diet, chicken and broccoli. So let’s look at why this is desirable other than just the weight loss part. You know, that’s the obvious conscious mind thing. But from a subconscious level, this decision is really an action to get out of the chaos and pain. You know, we are in a lot of chaos and pain when we are struggling with our weight and often we feel very unstructured. So diets offer that promise of structure to pull ourselves in to reign ourselves in that inner critic part of us, you know, we have within us. If you’ve been listening to my podcast, and if you haven’t, there is that critical voice I like to call the inner critic, which is like, you know, pull yourself together, go on a diet, lose some weight, you’re not okay as you are.

Rita Black: So that’s that energy of going into it is this idea that we’re gonna pull ourselves together and the self identity, which is very important. So when we have this self-identity that we are chaotic, that we can’t be trusted, that we’re a failure, we get out of that identity and into this identity of, you know, being structured, being on a diet, being good, and that kind of gives us a little dopamine high. We see ourselves as being good, and that’s a good identity, right? And then as we go along on our regime, we see some weight coming off and maybe our clothes are fitting us better and we start to feel better. Okay? So we’ve been in this, okay, going to be good and we’ve been being good. But over time, whether it’s a week or two weeks or a month or two months, that high wears off and usually it wears off because the pain that we were in, well, that gave us that kickstart to go on a diet, that pain goes away because we’ve released some weight.

Rita Black: Not all the weight we wanna release usually, but just some. And our clothes are fitting, it’s better and the scale is down. And that food, now that we’ve been eating that restricted plan we’ve been on, starts to be boring, and we start to feel restricted and hemmed in, and we get into a different part of the cycle. And the focus is waning. And sometimes we get into what I call this competent incompetence where, you know, part of our mind’s like, I’ve got this, I’ve got this, you know, I’ve got this diet down. I’ve got it. And we feel like we know what we’re doing. We are becoming the expert, which is fine. I’m all for you owning and becoming the expert, but we get into this false sense of I got this diet down. And what happens?

Rita Black: Like, I’ll give you a different example. Like my son when he started driving, you know, a couple of years ago, and for those of you who have listened to my podcast, you went through that whole trauma with me. But now he can drive, he can drive. Now he has competence. But in the beginning it was so annoying because he learned how to drive. Maybe he had a couple of lessons you know, we were on the road and he was like, I’ve got this. But he hadn’t really gotten this. Like he hadn’t been in enough situations. He hadn’t been on the freeway. He hadn’t been in a situation where somebody, you know, pulled in front of him. So he wasn’t really that experienced, but he had that false sense. I see this all the time with smokers, people who will say, oh yeah, I quit smoking and, you know, I got a couple months in, I was feeling really good.

Rita Black: And I felt like, okay, well I’ve got this down now I can smoke a cigarette without really realizing that if they smoked one cigarette the game was over, that part of their brain got engaged. And you know, but they got into this sort of, oh, well, I’ve got this now mental attitude. And that can be a very undermining. So either this happens or life happens, we get off track because we go away or something really stressful happens in our lives, or you know, just go out or we get bored or something happens and we get off track. And this in and of itself is a very stressful moment or very stressful time. And this is, so we’ve been in this, you know, feeling good, feeling structured, feeling great, and then it’s like that bond has been broken, and all of a sudden the alarm bells go off in our mind that inner critic starts to yell at us.

Rita Black: You blew it. You’re a failure again. You, you, you know that you’re gonna gain weight. And and that old self-identity of being a failure comes flooding back. All the bad feelings start to bubble up within us. We don’t like to feel bad, right? And the human brain doesn’t like feeling in between things either. You know, these are two absolute states being good and being bad. The brain knows these very well. If we’ve been struggling, it doesn’t know the in-between land. So what happens is, what I like to call our inner rebel will really come in and get us off the hook of this bad feeling of guilt and feeling like a failure. And this pull is so seductive and, you know, we have all this chaos going in our mind. We feel bad, and this rebel knows all the right things to say.

Rita Black: And it’s like, oh, well, you know, you can start again tomorrow. Yeah, you know, you can be perfect tomorrow. So what happens is we make this promise for future action, which means we promise to be good tomorrow. And do you know that research has shown that the more we promise to be good tomorrow, like with procrastinating or gambling, you know, with procrastinating, oh, I’ll finish that paper tomorrow. Or with gambling, you know, I’ll, I’m gonna finish this and then I’m never gonna gamble again. I’ll stop smoking tomorrow. The more we promise to be good in the future, the more it grants us permission to be bad in the moment. So we just aren’t going off track with one thing. It usually is then an opening of the door. It’s a gateway to really overeating. So you know, already in our mind we’ve been bad, so we might as really, really be bad.

Rita Black: And this is a huge release in our mind because if you think about it, we’ve been in this restriction mindset and then all of a sudden we’re given permission and it’s this pleasurable release because the bad feelings all of a sudden go away. And now we have an open door invitation to eating all the carby food that we want. This hedonic food, it’s is hedonistic we consume, and all the ding ding dings go off in our mind, those dopamine dings. Our pleasure center is like completely going through a drug-like experience. And the mind sees this and thinks, wow, this is kind of great. Let’s keep this going. Let’s keep repeating this. And this is kind of fun and it really works for us because dopamine is dumb. It’s short-lived. It doesn’t get it, it doesn’t see the pain you’re gonna be in tomorrow or two hours from now when you’re in a, you know, carb coma.

Rita Black: It’s not gonna see and feel how mad you are at yourself. It is just invested in that pleasure moment. It only sees the pleasure and release. Like smokers. The draught of smoke is so powerful. But after they take the first couple of puffs, they’re like, why am I doing this? This is gross, it’s smelly. Why am I standing outside and all my friends are inside? There’s a lot of, you know, that moment is really what the brain is focusing on. It doesn’t care about the moments after. So in the shift process, we really work on this moment of breaking out of this cycle because learning to override the seductive cycle and stay with yourself in these gone off track moments and keeping on going is frankly the key to long-term success. Sure, there are many other factors, but can’t you see how important it is to stop starting over?

Rita Black: We need to be able to stay with ourself in that moment, even though the brain feels really weird sometimes, like, I don’t know, this feels so weird. I know how to be in this moment in the in-between world, but we learn and cultivate this powerful voice of our inner coach that can allow us to stay in the moment and not just stay in the moment, but to know what to do, how to communicate with ourselves powerfully to get us from being off track, to getting immediately back on track. And in the shift process with the daily meditations, hypnosis the coaching, we’re really cultivating this inner communication system with this rational inner coach learning to turn down the volume on that critic and rebel instead of starting over. You learn to stay consistent in these moments and pull yourself back on track learning and improving from what didn’t work out.

Rita Black: That’s how we learn, that’s how we improve, that’s how we achieve mastery and build that confidence and that consistency that we need to create long-term success. When you stop starting over, miracles occur and you start believing in yourself, and you start getting true traction, and you start sticking with yourself in those moments that you used to give on, up on yourself and abandon yourself. And it’s the difference between self-abuse and self-advocacy and self-mastery, which now brings me to number two.

Rita Black: The second thing, the second top thing that keeps us struggling with our weight. How do I keep struggling with my weight? Well do number two. Keep believing that you are a failure and cannot be trusted and will never be successful because you haven’t been successful to this point. Okay, that was a mouthful. So let’s break this down. So I wanna go back to that idea of our inner critic. You know, we speak to ourselves more cruelly than we speak to anybody else, especially in this area of weight. We’re beating ourselves up constantly. We don’t trust ourselves, we don’t respect ourselves, and we believe that we are a failure. And when people enroll in the Shift Weight Mastery Process, in the beginning, they’re given a questionnaire. And this questionnaire is really designed for them to really start the process, to start thinking about things differently from a different perspective. And one of the questions I ask is like, what is your biggest challenge? What is your biggest challenge? And, you know, people will talk about a lot of different things that are challenges for them. Exercise. Maybe they have physical issues or autoimmune disease, or some things that are just really clear challenges. But the main answer I get to this is me. I am the problem.

Rita Black: I cannot be trusted. I have to pull myself together. I am a failure, I give up on myself. And that is why in the beginning of the shift Weight mastery process, we do a process where we start to forgive these subconscious resentments that you have against yourself. Now, if you don’t think you have subconscious resentments, think again. You know, if I asked you, what are you angry at your body for, for example, well, you know, what are you angry at your body for? Just take a moment and let whatever those thoughts are come up. You know, I hear all the time, my legs are short, my stomach’s too big, the rolls are gross, my neck is ugly. You know, if we really said, you know, how are you angry with your body? Or how does your body not add up for you? You probably have a bit of a laundry list if you’re like the rest of us, right?

Rita Black: Or what about yourself? You know, what resentments might you have about yourself and your, your ability to release weight? You know? And you might have like, I have no willpower. I’m a failure. I’m a lush, I’m a sugar addict. You know, and a and the laundry list goes on. Or what about your weight? Well, I can’t move forward in my life because of my weight. I’m not intimate with my husband because I’m ashamed of my body. My weight keeps me in pain. I have arthritis, my knees, my joints. There’s a lot of resentment down there that is all evidence against you, your body and your being successful. So that resentment needs to be cleared away. So how do we do this? How do we start from a new belief system so that we can believe in ourselves? A hundred percent, you know, because if you start a journey with that much resentment underneath in your subconscious, think about how quickly you give up on yourself.

Rita Black: You know, you are already beginning a journey, a diet or whatever. Think about this. You go on the diet, you really already don’t believe in yourself and your ability to be successful. So do you really think that you are gonna be successful? You know, you’re working against a huge subconscious tide of disbelief, and that disbelief will wear down, wear you down, and it it will be very easy for you to give up on yourself. And that’s why people say, I give up on myself. I give up on myself, I give up on myself. And it really isn’t about you that, you know, giving up on yourself, but there’s all this subconscious disbelief and resentment going on, and that really you need to come from a different place of belief and connection to yourself. So the forgiveness piece is profound and moving. When we sit and we truly forgive ourselves for being overweight, think of how that would lighten the load in your heart and connect you to yourself in a way where you can begin to appreciate and believe in yourself again and in and believe in your ability to be successful.

Rita Black: You know? So in one of the first things we do, like I said, is this forgiveness exercise. And then of course, when I introduce this concept to people, they’re like, well, I don’t, how is a forgiveness exercise gonna help me? Because if I forgive myself, then I’m just going to give myself free reign to do whatever I want and overeat because I love myself so much. And the interesting thing is, that’s not true actually. When you are connected to yourself, they, again, research has shown that when people have self-compassion, show themselves incredible self-compassion their ability to do what they said they’re gonna do, their ability to move forward and take care of themselves. Because think about it, you, if you were, if this were your best friend, or this was your child and you wanted the best for them, you would go out of your way to show up for them to give them what they needed and to follow through.

Rita Black: Now, if it were your enemy, you probably wouldn’t do that. And don’t you kind of treat yourself like you’re an enemy rather than your best friend. So you would go out of your way to show up for yourself if you truly believed in yourself and, and truly came with a, a pure heart with your ability to really move forward and be successful. So I want you to think about being out there in the future just for a moment. As a successful weight master, at your ideal weight or out in your future being healthy, feeling strong, you’ve released weight. And I want you to then from that vantage point, look back at all the diets that you had been on that you considered failures. And from that vantage point, those diets and those experiences that you went through with regards to weight release actually weren’t failures, but they were stepping stones on your successful story.

Rita Black: You know, you might have listened to success stories here on my podcast. When people present their story they might say, okay, well, you know, I, this happened and then that happened, and then I achieved the success. You’re not seeing all those points along the way as failures as much as you’re seeing them as part of this successful story. So I want you to start to look back and look at the way you communicate with yourself about your past experiences with weight management, not as failures, but as training, as part of the training for your future success. Because you’ve probably gleaned a lot of information from your past experiences, but your shifting them around and making them appear to you as failures. So how can you see how just shifting things around in your mind can just make a world of difference? And this all goes back to our inner communication is the key to unlocking the weight struggle.

Rita Black: Your inner coach is the guide on your path. And in the shift we work on creating 100% belief through hypnosis and other cognitive exercises so that you can have that bold faith in yourself that you can succeed, and success breeds success. Alright, now, how do I keep struggling with my weight, Rita?

Rita Black: Well, number three, believe that you need to wait until you’re thin to love and appreciate yourself and start living your life. And this all, can you see how this all one thing builds upon the other? I’m gonna go back to that questionnaire I give people. I see what people want to do when they feel healthy. You know, I ask like, when you’ve achieved your ideal weight, like, well, what are the things that you wanna do out in your life and that you might not have achieved yet, or that you wanna do, or that your weight’s keeping you from doing?

Rita Black: And people have the most amazing goals in their life that they are not allowing themselves to pursue. You know, people wanna travel the world, they wanna start a family, they wanna start a coaching career or just start a new business. They wanna go back to school. They want to get on the ground and play with their grandchildren. They wanna keep up with their kids. They they want to learn how to kayak or you know, all these amazing things that always makes, you know, moves my heart. And that’s amazing. But then we start to talk about why they haven’t started to do that. And you know, the thing is, is that when we struggle with our weight, we refuse to love and accept ourselves as we are right now today. Because often the thinking is, if I love myself today, I’m not gonna take action.

Rita Black: I am just gonna be too complacent. I’m just gonna love myself and be okay with how I am. And as we’ve talked about in that the last number two, that’s absolutely not true. But when we are struggling with our weight we are very, very vulnerable to finding that quick fix, to get the weight off as soon as possible, right? So, so I’m not okay as I am. I’m overweight. I hate this weight. It feels uncomfortable, I look gross, and I just wanna get it off as quickly as possible, and I’m willing to do pretty much anything. And so what happens is this attitude keeps you looking outside of yourself for the next diet, the next drug, the next gym, the next membership or device. And when you have that powerful, loving, nurturing inner coach in you instead of a critic what happens is that you can become more fearless and a risk taker.

Rita Black: So when you start loving yourself as you are today, when you start cultivating that powerful inner voice you become fearless. And I am always saying to people, start going for your dreams today. One of the reasons is, is that when we make releasing weight and getting to our ideal weight, when we’re gonna love ourselves, and when we’re gonna start living our lives and doing all of those amazing things, it makes getting thin too potent. It makes it too overwhelming, it makes it scary seeming. ’cause it’s like, oh, then I’m gonna have to show up, then I’m gonna have to do what I say I’m gonna do. Then I’m gonna have to, and maybe some of those things are scary. But if you start looking at the voice that you use within yourself, not just for loving and accepting yourself as you are today, so you can start to love yourself down the scale, that’s a term we use in the shift.

Rita Black: Because when you start loving yourself and accepting yourself as you are today, as we have already talked about, you start to connect with yourself more powerfully, you become more willing to take action, steady and consistent action, and you start to become open to taking risks and start living your life today before you achieve your ideal weight. You know, think about your inner critic and those opinions you used to beat yourself up and beat yourself down when you try to do anything in your life. You know, why did you do that? That was stupid. You are stupid. This fear, and we fear being foolish or stupid or incompetent to ourselves. You know, we might fear, we might think, oh, well I’m, I don’t want look silly to my family, or I don’t want it look silly to my friends. But really, ultimately it’s, we don’t wanna look foolish to ourselves because we have this very potent voice within us, that inner critic that is just sitting there looking at us and saying, no, if you do that, you are not gonna be successful.

Rita Black: It’s not gonna work out. Or if you do do it and fail, you failed. Why did you think you could do that? Right? and there’s so much fear there that inner critic is really full of fear. And and it’s really keeping us from living our lives and loving ourselves as we are right now. Being with people, being our best selves. That fearful inner critic robs us of life. Now, think instead, if you knew no matter what you did in life, and no matter what anybody else said to you, that you had this amazing inner voice that said, wow, look at what you did. You took a big chance and look at what you learned. And maybe even if it doesn’t go great, you say, well, you know, you did it, and next time we can make changes and get further along. But be proud of yourself, kid.

Rita Black: You were bold, you were courageous, you went for it. Just think what that inner communication would be like with this inner coach cheering you on, believing in you, not just with weight, but with life. Because this just isn’t about shifting your weight. You shift this inner voice, you shift your life. And before you reach your ideal weight, let me tell you, you know, I’ve had students of the shift develop this inner coach and not only see a difference in their weight, but they start feeling more confident, they feel more bold, and they take action even before reaching their ideal weight. I’ve had students move to China to teach English at the age of 64, find their love of their lives in their forties, their fifties, their sixties, their seventies. I’ve had clients ask for raises and go back to school in their fifties and sixties.

Rita Black: Start a second career even seventies. They go back to school. Some become life coaches, health coaches start their own businesses. I had a client become a ballroom dancing champion, and I had a client write a novel at the age of 80 that they always wanted to write just from turning down the volume on this inner critic and turning up that inner believer, that inner nurturer and advocate to advocate for your dreams, advocate for yourself, achieving them, making them a reality. Loving yourself now, believing in yourself now, not waiting till you’re thin to love you, not waiting till you’re thin to start living your life, but really turning that spark on right now with that inner coach.

Rita Black: Okay? Now how do I keep struggling, Rita? Number four, well keep looking for that thing outside of you to be the answer to an inside job, like a diet, a regime, an exercise, or a guru to be the magic bullet. Okay? So no one is in your head 24/7 except you. And that voice needs to be a coach, not a critic. Would you agree? No matter what system or plan or guru weight masters at some point had to own their journey and believe in themselves? Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. No one is going to save you. And I repeat that. No one is going to save you, but the good news is you have the magic bullet. You are the magic bullet, not me, not some diet outside of you, not some pill outside of you. You and your mind are the bullet. And I can tell you something that is nothing but good news. This is very, very good news for you that nobody is gonna save you. I think you can start to see why your journey to weight mastery is an inside job.

Rita Black: And it’s not about the food on your plate, it’s not about the gym. It starts with your thoughts that are created by beliefs that create the habits that lead to success or keep you struggling. So start with your mind and committing to your inner communication. You know how to release weight, you’ve done it before, but what brought it back were thoughts, conscious or subconscious that led to actions that led to the outcome of staying in the weight struggle. Look, most diets work if you stick with them, but here’s the thing. I don’t know anyone who has been on a long-term weight loss journey, you know, on a diet for 10 years that has been perfect on a diet for 10 years or 20 years or 30 years. But studies show that 65% of people who have long-term permanent weight release started with something like a diet or a plan, but then they made it their own, they owned it, they became flexible with it, they had authority over it.

Rita Black: There is no right or wrong or perfect cookie cutter way to achieve weight success. Each master has created their own way forward. In our weight mastery membership, we have all types of people creating all types of way of eating and exercising that work for them. And only them they have ownership and not one of their ways that they’re doing this look alike with each one. You know, we have people who are vegan, we have people who are low carb, we have people who are hardcore exercisers, and those who just do the minimum exercise movement. We have those who have very allergies and very specific ways of eating for their health. And we have those who eat super clean. We have those who are cancer survivors who eat in a particular way, those who still eat a little fast food every week. We have people who have done bariatric surgery and every type of person, every type of journey.

Rita Black: They all have made their own path successfully. And in the shift we understand that you being on your own hero’s journey is the key. We are the guide for you stepping into your own powerful journey, helping you shift from the inside out, not just with food and exercise, but with decision making strategies, inner communications and sticking with it when things get tough, this is the core of any mastery journey. You can become your own weight mastery guru. Stop looking outside of you. Stop thinking the answer is outside or is gonna come into your path, onto the path of your life. You are the path. And when you start making this your journey and develop that inner voice of your coach to guide you along the way, you can make this shift.

Rita Black: Now you might be thinking, well, how do I create my own way of eating, Rita? Well, let’s look at that with number five. Rita, how do I keep struggling with my weight? Well, five, keep believing that focusing on out on the outside food solution and not paying attention to how certain foods make you feel after you’ve eaten them. So keep focusing on the diet, but not on how you feel when you eat certain foods. So let’s dive a little deeper into that. So many of my students and clients, after years of focusing outside of themselves on the diet, off the diet or plan, aren’t even in touch with their body. It’s kind of like we’re disconnected in our own for virtual reality in our heads and our bodies are just these things that exist below us. They’re not in touch with their true hunger signals, let alone what foods they really and truly like, and more importantly, what their body likes.

Rita Black: We just know that the role, you know, when we struggle, we just know the world of good food and bad food. Being on a diet, being off a diet. Now you know this as well as I do. What is the definition of insanity? Repeat after me. You know, this as well as I do, is doing the same thing, expecting different results. So we know this, and yet how many of us release weight, feel great, and then think we’re cured and started eating the same foods that triggered our mind and our body causing us to feel hungrier and eat more and think about food more. I have learned from both working with smokers and with people who struggle with weight, we tend to have a genetic and emotional propensity for certain foods that get wired into our mind hardwired. And once wired, those trigger foods, if eaten, will require our neural networks again, and we will go back to the same habits around them.

Rita Black: I hope this makes sense to you because it’s not willpower around these foods that you need. It’s surrender. I had achieved my ideal weight 28 years ago. I’ve already said that. And I’ve kept it off, but don’t think I didn’t test out being able to eat my trigger foods. Oh, oh yes I did. And occasionally I still do. And I have to laugh because, you know, I have been brought to my knees so many times by my trigger foods that you could see the knees, the knee marks in my kitchen floor. I’m just kidding. But you know, honestly, I should have had like knee pads sewn into my knees or something like that. So here’s me, it’s been a few years since I ate candy corn, which is one of my trigger foods. And I think to myself, oh, it’s been a few years, surely I can eat candy corn.

Rita Black: So I go and buy a bag of candy corn, or you know, I see it at Target and I grab it and I bring it home with, you know, a bunch of other stuff and I started eating a couple of candy corns and sure enough, I finished that bag of candy corns or cake with frosting just ending up on the bed with a big sugar coma. Well, nope, guess that’s still my trigger food. You see, we all have trigger foods and they’re all different learning which ones are yours and respecting them and keeping them out of your home to the degree you can or out of your environment. And surrendering to the fact that you will always be the to them. I mean, I’m sorry and pardon my French, but getting that really on a deep level. Like, oh, if I eat that food, I will be the of that food.

Rita Black: Just like a pack a day smoker will never just be a party smoker no matter how long they stop smoking for. Their brain has those wires. And even though they aren’t active, the moment that you engage with nicotine or that particular food, it really lights up the neural network. Same for alcohol. So with food it is a little more subtle because of course we need to continue to eat food. We don’t need to continue having nicotine or alcohol. But here’s the thing. There are a lot of foods that I can eat that have sugar and carbs that don’t trigger me and I can have a relationship with them. But I’ve learned, and so many of my students that those trigger foods that you have are your trigger foods. And once you really get that, once you really surrender to that and put them behind you you don’t miss them.

Rita Black: I look at my trigger foods now and I think slavery, you know, I think being owned I think about that carb zombie taking over my head and owning me. We have a whole workshop called carb savvy and the shift process where we deep dive into this very interesting, massively understood relationship that we have with sugar and carbs where it really is not our fault, but we have to really look at a lot of different factors that drive our behavior around these foods. Almost like there are drugs, but I’m telling you that there are foods that give you freedom and foods that take your power away. And it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at your ideal weight, your trigger foods will typically always take your power away. It. And is that a bummer? Well, yes, I’m sorry, but, but what isn’t a bummer is having respect for yourself and your freedom and your peace of mind and being able to live your life at a healthy weight in a body and mind that allows you to thrive.

Rita Black: And that my friend tastes better than any trigger food does. So get those trigger foods out, break up with them like they’re the boyfriend who used to be hot but now just sits on the couch and asks you for a beer and then tells you you need him more than he needs you. I swear I spent over 20 years of my life in a food fog wondering what I was going to eat next, how I was gonna get it or how I was gonna diet and restrict it from me. And I swear to you, it’s kind of sad for me because still to this day, friends and family will ask me about events that happened in that span of my life that 20 years and many times I have no memory of them. I mean, I may have pictures that can remind me of those times, but honestly, that time in my life was a bit murky.

Rita Black: It was like I was a drug addict. I was, you know, can remember once they remind me. But I look back and I just at that time span, I just see my struggle and pain and chasing after the next food high. So if you can relate, kick that trigger food out to the curb, take back your mental and physical freedom and self-esteem and never look back. Good riddance. Bye-Bye Ariva ducci. In the shift we get clear about stimulus control, meaning your environment, something many of us are not taught to give much thought to. Did you know that stimulus control is really 60% of weight management? How you manage your environment, what comes in and out? Believe it or not, this is a skill you can get better and better at and you can master. Alright? We either let people, places and things onus in life, or we take control and choose what we put in our bodies.

Rita Black: We put our precious focus on and we put our and dedicate our time to. So choosing to go on my weight journey, building my relationship with my inner coach and leaving behind my abusive slave like relationship to foods that owned me, freed me up to truly start living a life that was mine. And I know you can do the same and you don’t wanna, you will, I swear you will not miss those foods one bit compared to what you get in return.

Rita Black: Which brings me to how do I keep struggling with my weight? Rita? Number seven, keep buying into limiting beliefs that others who have succeeded with weight are better than you and that they have something that you don’t. Now it is easy to look around and think that everyone has the answers and that you don’t. You see the shining faces of the people and the before and after photos. You hear the stories of people who’ve been successful in the long term and it’s easy to believe that these people are special, that they worked harder, that they have more discipline, that they were luckier, that they had more money or they had more support. None of that is true. I have seen hundreds and hundreds of successful weight release journeys and the only thing that truly separates the successful from the struggling is they’re taking 100% responsibility for themselves and their journey of weight mastery and committing to it with every fiber of their being. Now think about the times in your life when you went all in on something and you were just sitting in 100% commitment, 100% belief, and all the excuses that popped up in your mind. Oh, it’s too hard. Oh, it’s too scary. What will other people think? Ugh, they’re just trying to sabotage me.

Rita Black: None of those excuses that were fear-based could stop you because your vision of what you wanted, your determination that you were gonna have it, the belief that you could succeed were so overpowering of any fear or anyone else trying to get in your way and you achieved your goal. When we take 100% responsibility for our outcome, we let go of being a victim of other people, other places, and other ideas in the shift. We start our journey by signing a contract with ourselves to take responsibility and to give it a hundred percent and create a vision so powerful that your subconscious mind gets engaged at the deepest level. This is when you get the power and drive and you are fully committed and fully responsible and have a vision of where you’re going. So amazing that nothing can stop you. Your success is already within you. You just need to unlock it. Stop looking at others and wishing to be like them. That gives your power away. Unlock your mind, the power within you. And that is when you get the outcome, you create, you desire and you commit to.

Rita Black: Alright, last but not least, Rita, how do I keep struggling with my weight? Well believe that there is gonna be a magical time in the future when you will be ready and conditions will be perfect. How often do you think timing will be better to really start showing up for yourself and your weight journey? Here’s something that I found to be true. There is never gonna be that future day or week or month or year that is gonna be the perfect time for you to show up for yourself and begin your weight journey. I spent 20 years waiting and it never happened. There is a holiday in every month of the year. There is always a birthday, there’s always a party. There’s always bad days and good days and vacations, people coming to visit and there’s never a more perfect time than now to begin showing up for yourself one step at a time instead of thinking when is the best time in the future to take action.

Rita Black: Sometimes it helps to think inversion therapy wise, as we have been doing here today. What is life going to be like a year from now if I keep doing what I’m doing right now and not taking action? That thought helped me to finally wake up to the fact that what I was doing and what I was believing was keeping me on the same broken path in the same painful struggle. Indeed, it needed a shift and it all began in my mind.

Rita Black: So if you’re ready to commit to yourself in a more powerful future of weight mastery, the Shift Weight Mastery Process is now enrolling for our fall 2023 version that begins September 28th with our week long preparation process. And starting October 6th, we embark upon day one of our 30 day process with hypnosis, meditation, coaching every day e every day. It just takes about 30 minutes out of your day, a little in the morning, a little during your day, and in the evening, people work it seamlessly into their lives.

Rita Black: And it’s 30 minutes when you think about how much time we spend on social media and things that really don’t add value to our life. It is an amazing value add. We also have those weekly coaching workshops, which you can if you can’t make them. We are recording them and the bonus workshops like carb savvy and our consistency course where we set you up and send you off into your future ready to be consistent after your 30 days. We believe that in order to truly break free, our minds need a rocket blast outta the old beliefs that keep us stuck and into our powerful future where you can create a way of living that allows you to live your life at your ideal weight. I only do this process life twice a year because I really give it my all and I love guiding people through getting them started on their heroic weight mastery journey.

Rita Black: Here are some things that former Weight Mastery process participants have said. Tanya said, Rita’s program helped me to change a lifetime of poor eating habits. As of day one, I came to understand why willpower alone was doomed to fail. As I listened every day to the meditations and hypnosis sessions, I built up images of myself with a strong inner coach with good eating habits, never grazing or eating distractedly. The whole program felt easy to me, which I never would’ve imagined. I lost 10 pounds in 30 days and expect to keep releasing. And she has as I continue listening to the hypnosis and meditation every day going forward. Thank you for this incredible gift, Rita and everyone with a shift weight mastery. So Tanya is gonna be a coach this coming shift and she’s made such an amazing transformation.

Rita Black: So here’s Libby who said it was transformative for me. I’ve been on every diet, taken weight loss classes and have tried many other programs online. None of them were able to do for me what Rita and Shift have done. I felt like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. It’s the first time that I’ve been on a diet and haven’t felt like I was white knuckling through the process. Rita’s ability to make the connection from the first masterclass was what drove me to shift. I feel like I have the tools to make it happen and enjoy the process instead of racing to the finish line. Thank you Rita.

Rita Black: Here’s Sandy who had released 14.3 pounds in 30 days. A life-changing experience, which I do not regret. This new approach to releasing kilos without the strict barriers of being and yet another diet is wonderful. The learning of how the mind affects so much of our weight problems slowly and logically unfolds in the 30 days until you become stronger, slimmer and sensitive to so many things that ultimately put you on the path to success, happiness, and positivity.

Rita Black: Carmen released 15 pounds on 30 days. My overall experience with the process was excellent. I love the meditations and the hypnosis sessions, the amazing coaching and the whole program in general. I found this program very authentic and I felt cared about Throughout the process. Norma released 11 pounds on 30 days. I just finished my 30 day shift program. I feel amazing for the first time in my life, I feel like I’m on the right path. I released a total of 11 pounds and looking forward to the rest of my life because I choose to take charge. I love it.

Rita Black: Well, I could keep going, but what I am now doing is inviting you to join me on the other side. So if you are interested, go ahead and go into the show notes. Click the link. There’s so much more information for you there about the rest of the process the dates you know, and, and all the different bonuses that come along with it.

Rita Black: ‘Cause There are quite a few bonuses that come along with it. And I just, like I said, I can’t tell you how much I love guiding people through this process. So the doors are closing though so soon. So act now if you’re listening and it’s after the date, you can sign up for the next live shift also in the show notes or consider our successful self-study process. So check those things out in the show notes. Okay? And I hope that our inversion therapy session was helpful for you today. And I look forward to being here with you next week. So thank you for being here. And remember that the key and probably the only key of unlocking the door to your weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it. I will see you here next week.

Rita Black: Do 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.