[00:00:00] Did you know that no matter their age, background, or lifestyle, people who successfully lose weight and keep it off long term have a lot more in common than you might think? Studies show that lasting weight mastery is not about luck or willpower. It comes down to developing key skill sets that make weight release sustainable.

[00:00:25] In today’s thin thinking podcast episode, we are diving into these. Three essential skill sets that weight masters use to break free from the struggle and create lasting success. If you’ve ever wondered what separates long term weight loss success from temporary results, you won’t want to miss this. So come on in.

[00:00:56] Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80 percent 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, best selling author, and the creator of the SHIFT weight mastery process.

[00:01:24] 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 [00:01:40] programs, I lost 40 pounds with the help of hypnosis. Yes. Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years.

[00:01:49] 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. Sound good? Let’s get started.

[00:02:14] Hello. Hello. Come on in and I hope you’re having a wonderful week. I think I might be coming down with something. I’ve got a little Tickle in my throat, unfortunately. Have you ever tried ginger tea? I’m going to try some of that. You cut up some ginger and put in some hot water.

[00:02:32] We had a, when my kids were in school, there was this woman who just swore by it and we started doing it and, oh my goodness, it worked! So I’m gonna record this video, podcast episode, and then I’m going to go get myself some ginger tea.

[00:02:48] So I want to thank all of you, the thinking audience, for keeping on tuning in and coming back for more. So many of you have been asking about the skill sets of weight mastery that are gleaned from long term success, both from myself and my students who have been at their ideal weight, some for getting close to 20 years but also that have been gleaned from studies of what are the best practices that long term weight releasers focus on for success.

[00:03:18] So I’m going to dive into those [00:03:20] today, but real quick, if you are listening to this as this drops this week we are offering a bit of a special on the shift weight mastery process. So this is March, the week of March 19th, I never know what date is 2025. So if you are around and are interested, we are having a, what we call three for one, it’s like a three for one special we, where you get our 30 day hypnosis based self study process you have for a year, get access that to that for a year.

[00:04:00] So you can go through the process once, twice, three times, as many times as you like. Because every time you go through it, you get something on a deeper level. And right now, when you enroll, you’ll also get our bonus pack of hypnosis sessions that include drinking less for weight loss, exercise, portion control.

[00:04:22] It’s great. It’s our top downloads and it’s called the Shift Weight Mastery Express Pack. And then you also, and this is what I think might be very exciting for some of you, if you’re excitable, is our live shift weight mastery process, our live online shift weight mastery process, which is led by yours truly is beginning April 30th with our prep.

[00:04:49] And then it’s a 30 day process starting on, Oh God, where’s my calendar? May 9th. I think it’s a Friday. We start on a Friday cause we don’t believe in [00:05:00] starting on Monday. But anyway so you get all of those for a very low price. And it’s running today through March 25th. So check out the link in the show notes.

[00:05:11] Okay. It’s a great deal. And there’s even more bonuses. So just go. to that link. It won’t hurt you. You can just scroll and check out all, what it’s about, how it works, all of that stuff. It’s a great time to be showing up for yourself, feeling lighter, getting back in control. Hypnosis helps in so many ways.

[00:05:31] So many of the deeper, more resistant layers that usually we struggle against when we’re trying to be consistent with weight release. So check it out.

[00:05:40] Okay. And. Let’s get going. So today’s episode, I am diving into the importance of approaching weight mastery with a thin thinking perspective of building skills of weight mastery versus being good on a diet.

[00:06:00] At the bottom line, weight mastery is about developing yourself and developing skills rather than hoping you’re going to be good, pulling it together and trying to be perfect, which is never going to happen. Sorry, but that is just the truth, even though the diet industry will have you think differently.

[00:06:21] So when you think about it, have you ever met anyone with long term weight loss who said to you, yes. I have been perfect on the XYZ diet for 20 years. Just been doing it perfectly every day. And [00:06:40] even people who maybe perhaps used a particular way of eating, like Atkins or vegetarianism, will say that they adapted that way of eating to themselves and their lifestyle.

[00:06:53] So it wasn’t like they followed along perfectly, but they adapted it and made them work for them, so they took ownership. They owned a way of eating for themselves from the inside out versus being good from the outside in, which is what we do when we’re trying to be good when we give the power to the diet or that way of eating clean or keto or whatever, rather than taking ownership for ourselves and developing ourselves from the inside out, which is what is truly essential for success.

[00:07:26] Long term success with weight is the same as anything else in our life that we have been successful with, think about the areas of your life that you’ve really mastered and are successful. You have developed yourself. You have learned you’ve done trial and error, it hasn’t come easily and you have built skills and probably are continuing to do so over time.

[00:07:51] I think about all the different things that I do in my life that I cherish and value, like being a parent. I. Certainly did not start out feeling confident as a parent. But over the years I have evolved and, I have to continue to evolve because what was required of me as a parent when my children were babies is certainly different than it is now while they’re young adults going out into the world creating chaos and using my credit card.[00:08:20]

[00:08:21] Talk about, a new skill set of what did you spend this month? Maybe you should get a job that pays a little more, skills like that, telling your children to earn a little more. But I just I don’t, but yeah, our evolution in anything, in your job, in your profession, think of a hobby that you’re good at. You became better and better at it as you went along. I have gotten into gardening over the years. And, I have killed a lot of plants in my time. But I didn’t take it personally. And I didn’t start over gardening again. No, I kept going and I kept evolving and I got better and better.

[00:09:00] And dahlias now. They’re really good. That doesn’t mean I am going to quit in, while I’m ahead. I have a lot to learn in the world of gardening because I still can’t seem to figure out which vegetables should be grown in the summer because I just don’t get that yet. But I, tomatoes turned out well, zucchini turned out well, but man, the green beans did not, and boy did the basil look sickly.

[00:09:27] It’s quite. There yet, but I’m evolving and I’m developing myself and I put my energy there. So when we struggle with weight, what happens is we just get stuck in this perpetual cycle of pulling it together and being good on Monday. We’re starting a diet or an exercise routine and hoping it’s going to last so that we can finally lose the weight.

[00:09:49] And then something goes off track and we say, Oh I blew it. Or, Oh I couldn’t do it right now. I’m going to focus later. And it’s back to square one. So frustrating. [00:10:00] And, I understand the struggle. And a lot of it is, the diet industry over the last. 3040 years has really created this idea of happily ever after, find the right diet and you’re going to live happily ever after.

[00:10:14] And it really is focused on you and you if you’re the right person, if you’re a good person, if you’re a disciplined person, you’ll be able to pull it together and lose the weight. And it’s all about being good. And it’s all about being clean or having, the perfect organic mix of this and that, or being super duper this and that.

[00:10:34] And it really doesn’t work like that but it, but that’s the culture that has been created. And then we develop our own perfectionistic inner critic, which has very high expectations of what we need to do in order to lose weight. And again, when we don’t live up to that, when we get off track, we get beaten up by that critic and told, You’re a lazy pig or you’re super undisciplined and better people than you have lost weight and why can’t you pull it together?

[00:11:03] And why is it such a struggle for you? And there’s some being must be something wrong with you and your body and there isn’t it’s just that we’re approaching it from a completely wackadoo mindset and way, and it’s not your fault that this is out there, but it is out there. And now it’s time to take charge and come at it from a different place.

[00:11:27] When I struggled up and down the scale for 20 years, I thought weight loss was about being good. Meaning adhering to the plan, or eating clean. And I struggled for years. Every time I failed. [00:11:40] Because of course, I was never going to follow a diet exactly for the rest of my life, or eat clean, or be perfect.

[00:11:46] So when I began my own shift, I started getting curious about long term success. Other people have been successful. What are they doing that I wasn’t? And it turns out, what I found was there are a lot of studies about people who have lost weight and kept it off long term. And the main distinction between masters and strugglers, masters developed skills that allowed them not only to lose weight, because they saw it as a skill building versus being good process.

[00:12:20] They took ownership of their development and they became apprentices. Now they might not have been consciously becoming apprentices, but they really started to look at this as I’m going to change my lifestyle and I am going to probably, learn in this lifestyle and make mistakes. And I’m going to learn how to, feed myself appropriately and.

[00:12:43] And learn how to release weight within that. I’m going to learn how to get myself to exercise consistently. And again, I don’t think everybody started out with that, I’m developing skills, but the mindset wasn’t about perfectionism. The mindset was about developing, going on this journey, changing their lifestyle.

[00:13:04] And coming at it from a self respecting standpoint rather than a self discipline and, I’ve got to be perfect standpoint. And so can you can start coming at it from a different standpoint just by [00:13:20] shifting your mindset and starting to look at this from a journey as a journey of development of skill building and and start to build The confidence and the ownership around that there are get the ownership that comes with getting confidence, just going back to parenting when my daughter was a little baby.

[00:13:46] Oh my God, I was a shit show. I, like I had read all these books, I’m organized. I’m a Virgo. I had fricking 16 books by my bedside while I was nursing my daughter about nursing and they all had these Different advice. I was a wreck. Oh my God. And this, and I had the charts and the graphs and the, you put the safety pin on one side, the breast, you just milk, gave your child milk from, and then you put it on the other side when, oh my God, I, and I was my husband was like, what is, I became this crazy woman, and I literally just.

[00:14:23] I, I had to throw out the books and I had to like, just take it one day at a time with my motherhood and I got there and I was stopped trying to be perfect and I just started to give my daughter what she needed and therefore, true skills were developed. And some days I was better at others.

[00:14:42] And then others at giving my daughter what she needed and then, by the time my son rolled around a few years later Oh my God, I was so much more lax and relaxed because I had those skills. I knew how to tune into a newborn. I knew it [00:15:00] wasn’t going to be a big deal if he spit up milk, like that he wasn’t dying or whatever.

[00:15:04] I, I knew that because I had developed those skills. I had that confidence. I had that ownership. When I lead a shift weight mastery process, I teach people the nine skills of weight mastery, which are basically all of those studies boiled down into, three skill sets and there are nine skills. But for our purposes today, I just want to, dive into the skill sets.

[00:15:29] I don’t want to dive into the skills specifically because we would be here forever. But I want to give you a gist of. What I feel like are the most important skill sets of weight mastery so that you can start to think about things from a little different perspective. Now once you make this shift from, being good or bad into developing skills, the main distinction I want you to take away from this is that You are using your mind way more effectively.

[00:15:59] It’s not Oh, Rita, you ha you’re being dogmatic and you have to build skills. It’s just no, I’m not trying to, if you want to continue to be good or bad, that’s totally fine. But you need to know that being good in your brain absolutely means nothing. No, no lessons are being learned when we are being good.

[00:16:17] We are, the opposite of good is bad. So we can either be good or we can be bad, but our brain isn’t really learning Lessons from that we either are failing or we’re succeeding and ultimately the brain doesn’t really operate like that. The brain really learns like likes to learn and likes to get curious [00:16:40] about what is working and what isn’t working.

[00:16:43] And so when we’re coming at it from the good, Oh I blew it. Let me go back to the beginning. There’s no learning happening. There’s only focus externally. on are we being good or bad. I hope I’m getting this across to you. What skill building becomes is this powerful self communication system.

[00:17:01] What did I learn? How can I improve? And it allows you to be curious and creative. I. e. engaging your deeper brain, your subconscious mind, and gives you ownership, which is, like I said, completely different from the struggle. So that is why the first set of weight skills are what I call the mind skills. And the mind skills, just to give you a brief overview, are, really learning to manage your inner critic, learning to manage your inner rebel, And really in developing your inner coach.

[00:17:32] So our critic and our rebel, obviously when we are struggling with our weight, run the show, our critic loves to beat us up and our rebel loves to say, Hey since you blew it, you might as well eat it all. And we’ll start again tomorrow and start again tomorrow. And we’ll start again tomorrow. So our critic and rebel are in a power play for our attention.

[00:17:52] And when we are struggling, our inner coach really doesn’t have a voice. The skills that we are developing as a weight master in our mind skills are really developing that voice within us, which is the nurturing, self respecting voice. And that voice is the inner parent, but it’s really the inner scientist too, getting really curious about when things go well, what happened, like what went well for us.

[00:18:19] Because it [00:18:20] isn’t about when we’re going, Oh it went well. Good. Again, the brain doesn’t understand good, but if it says, Oh, that went well because I planned ahead, I brought enough food so that I wasn’t, didn’t get too hungry. And that’s why I didn’t overeat when I went out to the restaurant.

[00:18:36] Now I learned something. Now I reinforce that. So that inner coach within me starts to point things out and starts to reinforce Oh, yeah, we won here because this or when things don’t go well, it’s not Oh, you blew it. You’re a loser. You’re never going to succeed. But Oh, that didn’t work for us.

[00:18:53] Because we didn’t plan ahead and look, you just got too hungry and that’s why you ended up eating all the bread or, eating three pieces of bread that you didn’t intend to eat. And overdoing it with dinner what can we do the next time that we go out that will allow us to win, allow us to go and eat a healthy dinner and enjoy ourselves.

[00:19:16] What can we do? And then guess what? The brain will start to think about it and we’ll start to come up with some solutions. And then you’ll go out the next time and you’ll get that win and you’ll go, my goodness, aren’t I not the most clever person in the world? And you’ll own that. And you’ll own that new skill that you developed of thinking ahead when you go out to eat and making sure that you don’t go in starving, but you developed that you didn’t do, you weren’t good, right?

[00:19:45] So that’s how we are in our coach becomes our. Inner guide on our journey of weight mastery. And developing this voice at the inner coach, I think is like the top skill because it is our [00:20:00] lifelong relationship that guides us through not just releasing weight, but keeping weight off.

[00:20:05] And if you heard my birthday show, which where I talked about maintaining my weight for 26 years, you will know or if you go back and listen to it that really reinforces. The idea of having a powerful relationship with your inner coach. So the next skill set is what I would call the weight skills.

[00:20:23] And these are the skills of basically the physics of weight release. Really how are we leveraging energy, meaning energy in an energy. out. Staying within the boundaries of our body’s needs for weight release and then maintenance. And, our bodies do burn a certain amount of energy.

[00:20:41] And when we really learn to live our lives and this is the, one of the skills is like living your life not depriving your life, but living your life within your. It’s a different focus than dieting or being good on a diet because you’re really learning to feed yourself in a way that and so the skills are really about the weight, the laws of physics and releasing weight, but also about learning about what foods work for you and what foods, maybe don’t work for you so much like in balancing that out, like the me who released 40 pounds and kept that off.

[00:21:18] That was a developmental journey of learning, and a relationship changing my relationship with food. One about the quantity. Of what I was eating, the quality of what I was eating, the amount that my body needed, I would release a certain amount of weight and then I was like, Oh, okay, I need to release more what, so obviously I need to kind of change [00:21:40] of the maybe I’m upping the amounts of light foods and decreasing the amounts of densely caloric foods, but in a way that I’m not feeling deprived, that I’m enjoying it, again, that you really need an inner coach.

[00:21:53] As you are developing this way because you are developing a way of eating that you are going to sustain in the long term. This isn’t a short term fix. So you want to respect yourself. And I think a lot of people try to lose weight really quickly because we don’t I call it loving ourselves down the scale.

[00:22:12] I think the more quickly we try to lose weight. The less we learn the lessons of really truly learning a way of feeding ourselves that we can sustain. And research shows that people who release weight more slowly, actually are able to adapt to that lifestyle of eating in a way that allows them to support their weight release, rather than, a quick fix total deprivation diet where we are, white knuckling it, but losing weight fast, but then we can’t sustain it. So really look at this. The weight release piece too is and the exercise piece, it isn’t just about exercising your buns off for a short period of time, the skills of.

[00:22:53] Weight mastery and the weight skills are really about not just what it takes to release weight, but what it takes to motivate yourself to stay with it, to keep exercising even when you don’t want to exercise. to inspire yourself when the food might seem to be, getting a little boring. And then, as we talked about boring in a different episode, it’s not really boring, but [00:23:20] it’s our interpretation, but to keep ourselves in the game by, really learning which foods we can make quickly when we don’t have time and really learning how to prepare things ahead of time.

[00:23:31] And all of that is developing. Of weight mastery. So the weight skills encompass not just weight loss but all the skills that support the food piece, the exercise piece the self care piece of that. And the last piece, which the last skill set, which I consider. The most fascinating because most of us don’t really think about it too much when it comes to weight Mastery are the environmental skills because if you think about it, here’s the thing you have a brain, and that brain Is running your body.

[00:24:09] And you’ve need to manage your mindset You need to manage your weight. You learn, need to learn how to manage your weight release. But we rarely think about the environments that we live in and how those also need to be aligned to help us on our weight journey and our weight maintenance.

[00:24:29] So some of the skills of the environment are really one. Learning to use like measure things and make sure that the amount of food that you’re eating is what you think you’re eating. Why measuring and keeping data like weighing yourself and even tracking what you’re eating becomes really helpful, especially in, and this is again, supported by, Lots of studies who have looked at long [00:25:00] term permanent weight management tracking, measuring, weighing, as much as a lot of us might have limiting beliefs and negative mindsets about that, why it can be so supportive of.

[00:25:13] Is it allows your inner coach the data it needs to speak powerfully with us when the scale is, sometimes is up or it’s down. We have that data to look to, to stay out of cognitive distortion. When we are just relying upon our emotions, when we are just running our weight mastery from how do I feel today?

[00:25:33] Do I feel light? Do I feel not? It’s not. going to be a long term recipe for success. If we’re just focusing on eating clean or eating in a particular way and hoping that is going to allow us, that might get us so far on the weight loss journey, but I’ve met with tons of clients who, like I’ve was on keto or I was eating clean or I was doing this and I was.

[00:25:56] I lost 20 pounds, but it stopped and now I don’t know, like what’s going on. I think I’m eating healthy. I’m still eating keto. Why am I not losing weight? And it’s usually because of, it usually goes back to the data. It’s you are still consuming too much food for, to continue your weight release.

[00:26:15] So even though you might be eating super clean food. It is too much for your body now at what your body weighs, and we need to readjust your expectations. We need to readjust the way that you’re feeding yourself. And that’s not a negative thing. Most people are like relieved when they’re like, Oh, okay, I get it.

[00:26:34] That makes sense to me. I was just so frustrated. It’s a lot more frustrating not to know [00:26:40] than to know. So data. And interacting with data and the things like measuring, like even measuring when I, the scale goes up for me, what do I do? I measure stuff because I think I’m pretty smart, right?

[00:26:54] Like I think I’ve managed my weight for 26 years. Of course I’m super cool, right? No, wrong. My eyes are human eyes and my perception of what is two or three ounces of chicken or a cup of fruit, or, like I’m pretty good at eyeballing stuff, but what happens is my eyeballs will adjust and they’ll get a little blousy.

[00:27:18] And what I think is three ounces, then become six ounces. And, that might not seem like that big of a deal, but when you’re a 57 year old woman. And believe me, I’ve measured the metabolisms of a lot of women over the age of 40 and we aren’t burning a lot of energy, ladies, and we are burning energy for sure but the difference between 300 calories and 400 calories a day of food, if we’re mindlessly overeating it, even though it’s super clean avocado or healthy nuts or even if it’s, a bunch of vegetables and fruit if we’re eating too much and going over that we’re dipping into that deficit that is necessary to release the weight.

[00:28:04] And so we might be thinking man, I’m eating clean and I’m giving up because like I’m eating clean and nothing’s happening getting clear on the data will really help you Be able to be in the driver’s seat of how much you’re releasing when you’re [00:28:20] releasing my clients like again Students, believe me, people all fight back when I say, we need to collect data and they’re like, why?

[00:28:27] And most of the people like that I interview who are, successful students, they’ll say, when you told me that I was so pissed off, but oh my God, it was the biggest eye opener. And I realized why I hadn’t been losing weight. Yeah. So the environment piece, part of that is data.

[00:28:43] Part of it is having support in your life. People live in your life, whether you like it or not, you have family or parents or coworkers or, people you interact with and if they aren’t on board with your. Wait. Mastery. Then things might get challenging. So we need to create what I call our support team and and it also helps to have people in your life who are on the same journey with you because you learn from them.

[00:29:10] I’m in business courses because I’m developing my business. And, I learned the most from other business owners because they’re in the same boat as me and their mistakes become my mistakes. And I, I learned from that. Get support, get get data. And then the third the other part of the environment piece is really, If it’s in your environment and it’s not working for you, that’s an issue, stimulus control.

[00:29:37] It’s controlling what’s in your environment and what’s out of your environment. Think about it. You have a brain and your brain has a reward center and that reward center has been primed for particular foods that you like to eat. So even if that food is in your deepest reaches of your cupboard, your brain And it will keep bugging [00:30:00] you to go and get it until it’s gone, unless you have some superior like relationship with it or whatever, you freeze it or do something and you’re cool with it.

[00:30:09] Okay, great. Then that’s not a problem. But if it’s in a problem, then don’t have it in your environment. Why would even if you’re like, your kids want cookies. Okay, great. I’m sure there’s some cookies that you don’t like that you can have in your environment that aren’t going to be an issue for you.

[00:30:26] But, and to the opposite effect, get those foods in your environment that support you, that you can reach for, that don’t trigger you. That stimulus control, believe it or not, is 60 to 80 percent of the name of the game. And people don’t believe me, but, think about it, anytime you’ve probably gone gotten off track is probably because something was in your environment that tempted you and, caused you to get off track.

[00:30:52] We gain food with the same place that we gain weight with the same food, the same places at the same times. So it, stimulus control. There you go. Those are the three skill sets the mind. And those are skills that you can start to really develop and you will start to see really be on your journey of weight mastery and really start to reap the rewards of being on that powerful journey and developing that inner coach.

[00:31:21] I definitely believe the shift from, being good, being bad to developing yourself is going to give you a whole new way of communicating and confidence. I hope that served you and just the door to reminder we [00:31:40] are offering that three for one. Low price, you get the live online shift, you get the bonus express pack with amazing hypnosis sessions, and you get the 30 day self study shift weight mastery process, which has helped so many people master their weight and release weight for the last time.

[00:32:04] So while using their minds more effectively and really learning how to take control and get long term success. So send the show notes, check it out, and that’s it. All right, have a great week and remember that the key and probably the only key to unlocking the door of the weight struggle is inside you.

[00:32:30] So keep listening and find it. I will see you here next week.

[00:32:42] Thanks for listening to the Thin Thinking Podcast. Did that episode go by way too fast for you? If so, and you want to 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, [00:33:20] Unlock Your Mind for Permanent Weight Loss, and to learn how to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode.