Rita Black: This week as we honor Mother’s Day, I wanna talk about something that is very close to my heart and I believe essential to long-term weight mastery. Learning how to mother ourselves from the inside out. Now, I know Mother’s Day can bring up many different feelings. Some of us had loving mothers, some of us had complicated mothers.

Rita Black: Some of us had mothers who did their very best, but who also struggled with their own pain, judgment, fear, or lack of self love. So today. This isn’t about idealizing motherhood or blaming our mothers, it’s about creating within ourselves the powerful, nurturing wise part that can care for us. Guide us, protect us, feed us, move us, advocate for us, and help us stay connected to ourselves on our journey of weight mastery.

Rita Black: So 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.

Rita Black: 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.

Rita Black: 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: Sound good? Let’s get started. Hello? Hello? Hello. And come on in. How are you? Are you having a good week? Well, happy Mother’s Day, even if you aren’t a mother. Happy Self Mothering Day, and that goes out to all our friends in our global community. I know Mother’s Day occurs in most countries, but not all on the same day.

Rita Black: For instance, uh, my sister will be here this weekend for Mother’s Day. She’s visiting from England, and um, they already had their Mother’s Day. They call it Mothering Sunday, which I just love. Mothering Sunday, uh oh. Just leave it to the Brits, uh, and sending lots of love to all you Brits out there. Anyway, so yeah, we go for a big Mother’s Day hike.

Rita Black: Wake up early before the crack of dawn. Drive up into the Angels National Forest. We go on the same hike every year. I love it. And then we hike down and there’s this kind of log cabin place that makes very old fashioned food. You know, just the, uh. Uh, flipped eggs, bacon, toast, all of that stuff. Uh, and they put out a Mother’s Day spread.

Rita Black: And it’s just so fun. You sit on the porch, uh, and wait in line. So, uh, it’s a family tradition. So this week we honor the idea of mother, the inner nurturer, and I wanna talk about creating that powerful, nurturing part of ourselves. Depending on your relationship with your mother, mother’s Day can bring up all kinds of things.

Rita Black: And like I said earlier, some of us had amazing mothers. Some of us had complicated mothers. Some of us had mothers who loved us deeply, but struggled with loving themselves. And some of us had mothers who were doing the best they could with what they had, and sometimes what they had. Wasn’t enough. Now, I was lucky enough to have a very loving mother, but I also had a mother who struggled desperately with loving herself.

Rita Black: She could be judgmental and she could be cynical, and sometimes she said things that hurt my feelings or made me feel inadequate. But I always knew deep down that she never wanted to hurt me. She had had a. Hard childhood, and I think she wanted me to have a better life than she had. And for that I am deeply grateful.

Rita Black: So today, this isn’t about blaming our mothers or even putting them on a pedestal. This is about something more intimate and more powerful. This is about creating the mothering part within ourselves because when we struggle with weight, we often struggle with true self-care, right? We struggle with nurturing ourselves.

Rita Black: We definitely struggle with loving our bodies, meeting our own needs, feeding ourselves well, listening to ourselves, and staying connected to ourselves when life feels hard. Now, if you’ve been a student of mine or you’re going through this shift Weight Mastery process right now, you know, we work very deeply with this part of us called the Inner Coach.

Rita Black: The inner coach is that wise, grounded, powerful part of you that can guide you, championing you, challenge you, and help you create a new path forward towards a healthier life. But today, in honor of Mother’s Day, I want to invite you to experience your inner coach through a slightly different lens as your inner nurturer.

Rita Black: Your inner mother, the part of you that knows how to care for you from the inside out. And if you have never gone through the process of been a process in the weight mastery process, this is a beautiful time to begin to connect to that inner part of you. Now before we dive in, I want you to know that in honor of Mother’s Day and what I’m lovingly calling the mothering ourselves day, we are offering the shift weight mastery process at a very steep discount.

Rita Black: And I wanna say this clearly, we rarely, rarely discount the 30 day shift weight mastery process this much. This is our online hypnosis based self-study process that helps you begin shifting out of the weight struggle cycle and into a new relationship with your mind. Your body, your food, your exercise, and yourself.

Rita Black: And you can prepare when you want. You can do it in your own timeline. Uh, you can start your official 30 days when you want, so you can move through the process more than once and continue to strengthen the skills over time. Now, inside the process, you’ll use hypnosis, meditation, coaching, and the nine skills of weight mastery to build your inner coach.

Rita Black: Manage the inner critic and inner rebel and create a more masterful relationship with food and exercise, and begin moving forward from a place of self-respect rather than self-criticism. So if you have never been a student in the shift weight mastery process, this is an awesome time to begin. There’s a link in the show notes, or if you’d like, you may go to www.shiftweightmastery.com/offer.

Rita Black: That’s www.shiftweightmastery.com/offer to learn more. And now let’s talk about how we mother ourselves into weight mastery. And if you are not driving, I invite you to close your eyes for just a moment and let’s just do, uh, create our own self. Mother shall we? Or if you have an inner coach already, add to her a little more.

Rita Black: So just take a nice deep breath in and exhale and just let yourself arrive here. This isn’t fancy. This isn’t super deep. You don’t have to do it right. And you can’t do it wrong. I don’t want you to get self-conscious about it. Just allow your imagination to open the door a little, and if you’ve worked with me before, you might bring your mind to your inner coach.

Rita Black: And today, just allow that inner coach to take on a more maternal energy, not weak, not passive, not indulgent, but deeply nurturing wise. Protective and fully on your side. And if this is new to you, just imagine there is that part of you maybe quiet, maybe strong, maybe familiar, maybe just beginning to form that knows how to care for you.

Rita Black: This is the part of you that can feed your body with nourishing foods, the part of you that can cheerlead you because you have been the cheerleader for so many others. This is the part of you that can listen to the smallest, most vulnerable places inside you, the places that don’t shout, but whisper the part of you that can hear all of you.

Rita Black: The powerful part, the scared part. The hopeful part, the doubtful part, the part that wants to change, and the part that is afraid to believe. Again, this inner mother asks, what do you need? And then she helps you find a way to meet that need. She helps you learn. She helps you stretch. She helps you stay connected to yourself even when things feel uncomfortable.

Rita Black: She nurtures you when you feel wounded, sad, rejected, or hurt. And now just imagine this powerful inner nurturer coming towards you. Maybe she looks like you, maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she is just light, warmth, presence, or a feeling, and just imagine her placing her arms around you. Not to rescue you, not to fix you, but to remind you, I am here.

Rita Black: I am with you. We are not abandoning ourselves anymore. And now imagine that this powerful, nurturing part doesn’t stay outside of you. She begins to become one with you. Her wisdom becomes your wisdom. Her steadiness becomes your steadiness. Her compassion becomes your compassion. Her strength becomes your strength.

Rita Black: And take a breath in, and as you inhale bringing all of this within you, and as you exhale, just allow yourself to know. That this part of you is available, maybe not perfectly and maybe not at every moment, but she is there. And the more you call on her, the stronger she becomes. Now that we have this inner nurturing part of us, let’s bring her along on our weight mastery journey.

Rita Black: And she becomes very important on this journey because she is the part of us that can help us manage the more critical, perfectionistic bullish part of our mind. And we all have those parts. We all have that part that thinks if it just criticizes us enough, scares us enough, beats us up enough, shames us enough, or pushes us hard enough, we will finally get ourselves under control.

Rita Black: Right? Uh, I don’t think this part is bad. Uh, I think it just is misinformed and it was trying hard, but it just missed. It thinks it’s helping, but often it is using the very tools that keep us disconnected from ourselves. I. I, I wanna tell you a little story. So when I was in the second grade, my parents, my family moved from Portland to Seattle from one gray, rainy place to another, and it was right in the middle of school year.

Rita Black: It couldn’t have been worse. It was, we, we landed right smack dab in the middle of February. And apparently I had not learned things quite the same as the Seattle school system wanted me to learn them because I ended up in this classroom of a very perfectionistic teacher named Mrs. Pritchard. And she looked just like that.

Rita Black: She sounds, she had little rimmed specks and you know, she had a purse mouth, and Mrs. Pritchard made it quite clear. That I was not doing things correctly. She told me the way I wrote my letters was wrong. My Zs were wrong, my Y was wrong. I didn’t, I wasn’t allowed to do the curly tail on the Y. I had to do a straight one with a V.

Rita Black: Oh my gosh. And she called on me in class and I didn’t know the answer. And for the first time in my life, I remember feeling stupid. I just felt like a misfit. I felt like everyone else knew the rules and I had somehow missed the secret meeting. So every day I came home crying to my mother, and my mother was going through her own stuff.

Rita Black: Then, I mean, she had moved to Seattle away from her friends and support, and she was struggling with some depression. She was a stay at home mom. My dad was off at work and she was alone, but she still met me with a smile when I came home and she sat me down. Wiped away my tears, and she listened to me and she helped me get through.

Rita Black: She helped me with my homework. She helped me practice writing things out correctly, and then she went to talk with Mrs. Pritchard. Now, I don’t know exactly what my mother said in that parent teacher conference, but I imagine with something like Mrs. Pritchard. My daughter is trying. She wants to do well.

Rita Black: She came from a different school and a different way of learning. She’s seven years old. She needs patience. She needs support. She needs you to see that she is doing her best. And Mrs. Prichard was still Mrs. Pritchard with me. She didn’t turn into Mary Poppins overnight,

Rita Black: uh, far from it, but. She softened and that mattered. She came around and I think about that. Now when I think about our inner critic. We may not be able to get rid of our inner critic. Oh, no, no, no, no. Never completely. That part will still be a stickler and that part serves a purpose. It stay, it still may want the Zs written in a certain way, and it may still want the plan followed perfectly, and it still may want the scale to move on schedule and the calories to add up in a neat little math equation.

Rita Black: But our inner nurturer can step in and say, hold on, now she’s learning. She’s doing her best and she does not need to be humiliated into success. She needs guidance. She needs patience. She needs a realistic path forward. So back off that. Is self mothering. It is the ability to say to the critic, thank you.

Rita Black: I know you mean well, but you can go rest now. We are not gonna shame our way into weight mastery. We are gonna learn our way into it. Thank you very much. Because the inner critic often believes we need a harsh or restrictive path in order to release weight quickly enough to finally be lovable to rate.

Rita Black: But the inner nurturer knows something deeper. She knows we can love ourselves today and still move forward towards success. And she knows that we can be accountable without being cruel. And she knows we can be honest without being abusive. Uh, she knows we can create a sustainable path forward that we can actually own, not one that we have to be frightened into or whipped into following.

Rita Black: So our inner nurture. Can manage that inner critic. So I am also here to tell you today that that powerful inner nurture is also part of us that can manage the more rebellious, impulsive part of ourselves. And again, this part of us isn’t bad. It doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, how can I ruin our day today?

Rita Black: It is often trying to just get a need met in a very unskillful way. It wants freedom, it wants fun, it wants relief, and it wants pleasure. It wants not to feel controlled. And if we shame it, it usually just gets louder. So I wanna tell you another story about my mother. I’m having such a, a nice trip down memory lane of my mother.

Rita Black: So thanks for indulging me. So I grew up in a pretty straight laced household. My parents were religious and my dad was fairly strict. He was a great, great guy, but you know, he followed the rules and this was the seventies, uh, though, so parents were a little less, shall we say, uh, you know, holding onto the location tracking device about their children.

Rita Black: So even though they were strict. It. It was the seventies, so they were seventies strict, if you know what I mean. So I had a friend whose parents would sometimes go away for the weekend, and I would tell my parents I was going over to her house for a slumber party and they didn’t know her parents were gone.

Rita Black: So it was just the two of us girls in her parents’ house with no adult supervision. So my friend and I used to go at midnight. To the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the new art theater or new art cinema in the University District of Seattle, Washington. And those of you who are northwesterners, you know where and what I’m talking about.

Rita Black: And we would dress up, uh, and we sang the songs and we threw the rice at the screen and we had such a great time and it was very. I was a very much a Rocky Horror Picture Show fan. I, you know, I, I probably went 30 times. Um, damn it, Janet. Um. And one weekend, uh, when I was in the ninth grade, I started going, I think when I was in the ninth grade.

Rita Black: So this was at the beginning of my Rocky Horror Picture Show tenure. My friend and I, on one of those weekends where I went and spent at her house, we decided we were gonna get drunk. Now, we had never been drunk before. Um, I don’t think I really knew what being drunk meant, but it was something that grownups did.

Rita Black: Right? And her father had an amazing liquor cabinet. And we just decided, we picked up a bottle of gin and we said, well, how much alcohol do we need to get drunk? And uh, we each poured ourselves a huge water glass full of gin. Gin, yes, gin. Not a cocktail, not a sip of something. A water glass of gin. No ice, just gin.

Rita Black: And then we sat there and we drank it. Then I have never been so sick in my entire life. It wasn’t glamorous and or grown up or sophisticated. I was just, ugh, sick and um. Sick for, um, throwing up for, uh, all that night and into half of the next day. So when I got home, I was sure I wreaked of gin and I went upstairs to my bedroom hoping my parents wouldn’t know what I had been up to.

Rita Black: And my mother waited probably 45 minutes to an hour. She gave me a little time and then she came upstairs and she sat on my bed very quietly, very calm. Very cool. She said, have you been drinking this weekend? And I said, yeah, well, maybe a little. And she said, well, how did that feel? And I said, well, I didn’t like it very much.

Rita Black: I got sick and she didn’t shame me and she didn’t yell and or make me feel like I was a terrible person. She just said something like, yeah. Too much alcohol can make you feel really bad. And that is why you usually wait until you’re older. Your body is telling you something. And because she didn’t shame me, I could actually own it.

Rita Black: You know? Uh, I felt like she heard me and she understood. And a couple of weeks later when I was heading out again, my mother said, ah. I know you’re gonna have fun this weekend, but I want you to remember how it felt coming home that Sunday night. Remember how awful you felt. Remember that feeling. Let that help you make a better choice.

Rita Black: You can still have fun. You don’t have to go overboard, but respect yourself, respect your body, and think about feeling good this Sunday night. And I have thought about that so many times in relationship to food because how often do we overdo it with food or alcohol or whatever our thing is, and then immediately shame ourselves.

Rita Black: We disconnect from ourselves. We say, what’s wrong with me? I blew it. I have to be better next time. But we don’t actually learn anything and we don’t actually feel that feeling that we have in our body and own it. And remember that feeling. So we don’t embody that. We don’t pause and say, how did that feel in my body?

Rita Black: What was I really needing? What was the impulse? Underneath the impulse? What would’ve been enough? What would’ve felt like fun or freedom without making me sick or heavy or regretful or disconnected from myself? Myself? And that is where the inner nurturer comes in. She doesn’t shame the rebel. She listens underneath the rebel and she says, okay, sweetheart, you want fun, you want freedom, you want pleasure.

Rita Black: You don’t wanna feel controlled. I hear you. Let’s find a way to give you some of that without making your body pay the price. And that’s so completely different. Then you are bad. You are outta control. And tomorrow we’re locking this whole thing down because you and I both know how that goes. The stricter the inner critic becomes the louder the rebel gets.

Rita Black: But when the nurture is in charge, we can find the middle ground. We can have some of what we want. We can enjoy life and we can have pleasure, but we don’t have to eat until we’re sick and we don’t have to abandon ourselves in the name of freedom because true freedom is not. I can do whatever I want and ignore the consequences.

Rita Black: True freedom is I can listen to myself, respect my body, and still enjoy my life. And that brings me to another powerful way we can inner mother ourselves on our weight mastery journey. We can learn to truly feed ourselves, not restrict ourselves, not stuff ourselves, feed ourselves. There’s such a difference when we’re being run by that inner critic.

Rita Black: We often restrict way too much. We try to eat as little as possible. We try to release weight as quickly as possible. Uh, we turn food into a test. Of discipline and worthiness. And when we are being run by the inner rebel, we often disconnect from the body altogether. We eat way past enough. We graze, we nibble, and we say, I deserve this.

Rita Black: And we keep reaching for food. We get into that hyper eating mode, not because our body needs it, but because some part of us feels like there’s never enough. Not enough comfort, pleasure care, never enough for me. But when the inner nurturer is present, we can start to ask a different question, not what can I get away with?

Rita Black: Not how little can I eat, not what did I do wrong, but what would truly support me today? What does my body need? What would help me feel steady, nourished, and in the driver’s seat? What would help me feel cared for rather than controlled? I was fortunate enough to have a mother who made pretty healthy meals.

Rita Black: She was a former nutritionist, but I know many people didn’t have that. Some had mothers who didn’t know how to cook and some others were overwhelmed, and some had mothers who used food as. Comfort, reward, punishment, or control. And some grew up in homes where food was love or food was scarcity, or food was chaos.

Rita Black: And. Yeah, even though my mother wa could cook healthfully, she was significantly overweight and we had lots of carbs and baked goods around the house because she was a comfort eater. So many of us arrive. Adulthood without a clear nurturing relationship with feeding ourselves. And I would remember sitting there with my mother fork in hand.

Rita Black: Uh, she, we had this thing called evening the edges of the cake. Maybe you know that. Well, we always had a cake in our cake saver. My mother had an awesome aluminum, uh, cake saver, you know, that said cake on it. It was sort of Jetson style and it always. Always had a cake underneath it. And we were always, always sitting there after school, uh, just cleaning off the edges.

Rita Black: We would associate nurturing with feeding ourselves the refined or, uh, sweet or carby foods and we can learn to feed our bodies enough protein and enough vegetables and enough fruit and satisfying food. Enough pleasure and enough structure. We can learn that healthy food is not punishment and we can learn that treats aren’t crimes and we can learn that our bodies actually like, in fact, love feeling nourished and stabilized.

Rita Black: So many students are surprised when they really start tuning into their bodies and they realize that they really do enjoy healthy foods. And when they feed themselves healthy stabilizing foods, they can feel satisfied and full. They can enjoy feeling, uh, even keeled. Their blood sugar isn’t on a roller coaster and they enjoy having energy.

Rita Black: And they also realize that real world foods can be a part of their life without becoming the whole show. And that is self mothering. With food, it’s saying you’re, I’m not gonna starve you into success. And also I will not abandon you to every impulse. It is the loving middle. It is the place where we learn to nourish, enjoy, and discover and listen, not from judgment, but from a powerful relationship with ourself and our body.

Rita Black: Now another way we can inner mother ourselves is by learning to love and care for the body we are living in today and not the body we had 30 years ago. Uh, and not the body we think we should have by the summer. I mean our body, this body, the body here and now, the body that is carried us through every single day of our lives.

Rita Black: Uh, the body we may have criticized, ignored, compared, punished, or treated like the problem to solve. Um, you know, our inner critic says, I will love my body when it’s perfect. And the inner nurturer says, I will care for my body now, and that care will help it change. And that is a very different path because the body doesn’t thrive under hatred.

Rita Black: It may comply for a little while under pressure, but it doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t feel loved, it does not feel partnered with, and Weight mastery is a partnership with the body. It is saying, I am sorry I have spoken to you harshly. I am sorry. I have treated you like the enemy. I am learning to listen to you and to support you, and to move you and to feed you, and to hydrate you and dress you and care for you as someone precious.

Rita Black: It doesn’t mean you have to stand in front of the mirror and pretend you love everything you see. That’s sometimes too big of a leap. But maybe you can just begin with respect. Maybe you can begin with gratitude. Maybe you can begin with one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly and say, we are learning.

Rita Black: I am with you. I’m not leaving you behind. And that is inner mothering. That is where true weight mastery begins to feel less like a battle with yourself and more like coming home to yourself. And once we begin owning our bodies, once we begin respecting them, listening to them, caring for them, we can also thrive through exercise.

Rita Black: And I’m not talking about exercise as punishment. I am talking about movement as one of the most beautiful ways we can mother our bodies. Because our inner critic turns exercise into a sentence. You have to work out because you ate that. You have to burn this off. You have to make up for what you did.

Rita Black: But the inner nurturer sees movement differently. She says, let’s move because we are alive. Let’s move because we want to feel our heartbeat. Let’s move because we want to feel ourselves here in this body, in this life. There is such a different energy there when you are moving from the inner critic.

Rita Black: Exercise feels like punishment. When you’re moving from the inner nurturer. Exercise becomes a way of saying to your body, I love you. I want you to thrive. It can be walking outside and feeling the sun on your face. It can look so many different ways. It can be hiking in nature, hearing the birds, smelling the trees.

Rita Black: You’re not just a head full of thoughts, you’re a living, breathing body moving through the world. It can be dancing in your kitchen, swimming, stretching, lifting weights at the gym. It can be going to class, moving your body in rhythm with other people. It can be getting on an exercise bike and pedaling while watching the news or listening to a podcast, preferably mine.

Rita Black: No, I’m kidding. It can be five minutes, 50 minutes, modified, seated, slow. Joyful, imperfect. Uh, the point is to create that consistent relationship with movement that supports that amazing body of yours. And I want to especially say this, for those of you who have physical challenges, injuries, pain, mobility issues, or bodies that don’t move the way that they used to move, your body is still worthy of movement.

Rita Black: Your body’s still worthy of care. Of being worked with and not against your inner nurturer doesn’t say, well, if we can’t do it perfectly, forget it. She says, well, what can we do? What mobility do we have? What would help us feel more alive today? Because exercise is not just about calories, it’s about inhabiting your body, about enjoying the fact that you have a body.

Rita Black: It is about partnering with your body so it can carry you through the life you want to live. And that is a powerful form of self mothering. And another way we inter mother ourselves is by protecting our environment for success. And this is such a big one, when we had our first child. My husband and I were very worried about the welfare of our daughter.

Rita Black: By the time our son came along, we had loosened our grip a bit, and let’s be honest, we were probably too tired to care quite as much, but with my daughter, we literally padded an entire room with foam pads so she could run around without banging her head on a corner. And now looking back, I think we were a little excessive by the time our son came along.

Rita Black: We were more like, well. He can be falling down and get a bruise every once in a while. It builds character, but the instinct was a good one. We wanted to create an environment where our daughter could explore and move and learn without constantly being in danger, and that’s what we have to do for ourselves in weight mastery.

Rita Black: We don’t need to pad the entire kitchen with foam, although some of us may have cabinets that deserve a. Warning label, but we may need to look at our environment and ask, is this environment supporting the person I am becoming? Or is this environment booby trapped with foods, habits and situations that keep.

Rita Black: Me taking me off course. Now, in the Shift Weight mastery process, we work with environment skills because your environment is one of the most powerful leverage points for long-term success. And I don’t think we talk about this enough. So often when somebody gets off track, they immediately blame themselves.

Rita Black: I have no discipline. I blew it. I can’t be trusted. But one of the first questions I often ask is, what came into your environment? Because so often it isn’t some mysterious personal failing. It is that a trigger food came into the house or there was no plan, or the day got busy or someone brought something home, or you were going into a challenging situation and hadn’t thought it through.

Rita Black: And then the inner critic says, see, you failed. But the inner nurturer says, let’s look at the environment. And let’s learn. Let’s set ourselves up better next time. That is a very different approach. My mother was actually very good at helping me think things through. She helped me make sure I had my homework ready, my school supplies ready, my plans in place.

Rita Black: And when it was time to apply to colleges, she helped me strategize and think that through. She could be a great advocate for me and my future. And she also wanted me to be safe. I lived in Seattle during the time of Ted Bundy, and my mother was always reminding me, be safe. Don’t get into cars with anyone.

Rita Black: Pay attention. Protect yourself. And that is what our inner nurturer does with our environment. She doesn’t say, just be stronger. She says, let’s be thoughtful. Let’s be prepared. Let’s protect the journey. So in shift we use a skill called stimulus control, which is really about setting up your environment so it supports you rather than constantly tests you.

Rita Black: That might mean not keeping your biggest trigger foods in front and center in the house, okay? Not because you are weak, but because you are wise. It might mean filling your kitchen with foods that support you. The nourishing, satisfying, easy foods, foods that help you feel steady and cared for, and also having treats that please you, but don’t trigger you into a food fog.

Rita Black: And it might mean planning before you go to a party, a restaurant, a vacation, or a family gathering. Not in a rigid joyless way, but in a loving way because your inner nurturer knows that future you deserve support and your environment is not just food. Your environment is also your schedule and your routine sleep, your support phone, your kitchen, walking shoes, your calendar, evening habits, morning habits, places where you feel strong, the places where you tend to drift.

Rita Black: All of it matters. And another environment skill we teach and shift is building your inner support team. This is another beautiful way to inner mother yourself. My mother knew I was a bit of a loner, and because she saw that she encouraged me to join things like the campfire girls and afterschool clubs.

Rita Black: And at the time I didn’t really appreciate it, but those things helped me develop social skills, friendships, confidence in the ability to be in the world with other people. And on the weight mastery journey, we need support too, not because we can’t do it ourselves. But because we are not meant to do everything alone, the inner critic isolates us.

Rita Black: The inner rebel sneaks around the inner nurturer says, let’s get support. Let’s find people who understand. Let’s be in the right room. Let’s stop trying to white knuckle this in secret. So I invite you to see that your inner nurturer can help you create an environment that is safe, supportive, nourishing, and aligned with your success, not just for the short term, but as a skill you build for the rest of your life.

Rita Black: And if you’re not yet a student of the Shift Weight Mastery process, I would love to invite you to consider joining us. This is exactly what we do inside shift. We don’t just hand you another plan and tell you to be good. We help you create a new relationship with yourself, with your mind, your inner coach, your inner critic, your inner rebel, your food, your body, your exercise, your environment, and your support.

Rita Black: And we help you move from the weight struggle into long term weight mastery. And this week in honor of Mother’s Day, we are offering that special Mother’s Day discount. On the Shift Weight Mastery process through May 12th, 2026. So if this episode spoke to you, if some part of you is ready to stop criticizing yourself, stop abandoning yourself and start learning how to truly care for yourself from the inside out.

Rita Black: Check the link in the show notes, or go to www do shift weight mastery.com/process and check out more information about the process. And now before we go, I. Let’s just take one final moment together. If you’re not driving, take a nice deep breath in and close your eyes and exhale and bring one hand to your heart if that feels right.

Rita Black: And just imagine that inner mother within you, the part of you that can nurture you, protect you, guide you, feed you, move you, listen to you. Stand up for you and help you keep going. Maybe silently say to yourself, I’m learning to care for myself. I am learning to listen to my body. I am learning to support my journey.

Rita Black: I’m learning to speak to myself with respect. I’m learning to come home to myself. And just imagine that nurturing part of you placing a hand on your shoulder and saying, I am here. We are doing this together. You do not have to shame yourself into change. You can love yourself forward and take one more deep breath in and exhale in this Mother’s Day.

Rita Black: Whether you’re celebrating your mother, missing your mother, grieving your mother, caring for your mother, or being celebrated as a mother, or simply moving through the day on your own way, I invite you to honor the mothering energy within you. The part of you that knows how to love the part of you that knows how to care, the part of you that knows how to help someone grow, and now let that someone be you.

Rita Black: And have a wonderful week. Take care of yourself. And remember the journey begins within and have a great week. And remember that the key and the probably the only key to unlocking the door, the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it, and I will be here with you again. Next week you wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long-term weight release.

Rita Black: Head on over to www shift weight mastery.com. That’s www shift weight mastery.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.